Creativity, the Internet, and the Lost Art of Being Wrong in the Right Way

Can I be honest here?  I’m horrible at everything. According to the internet, I’m doing absolutely everything wrong. Yesterday I read an article about how I have been cutting fruit incorrectly all my life. My method of cutting an apple in half, then slicing the core out, is not only wasteful, it’s bordering on Neanderthal. I’ve also been drinking from a straw with inefficient technique, and spending too much time on slicing cherry tomatoes one by one.

Life hacks let me know about all sorts of things I’ve been failing at during my lifetime. Helpful internet articles seem to fill a basic human need for their authors: To be right. Sticky sweet self-righteousness.

One of the things I’m trying to work on this year is to be ok with being wrong. Because I am wrong a lot.

When I was a kid, I did everything wrong and it was delightful! I tried to glue ice together once. That didn't work, but it wasn't a failure of learning. I was allowed to be wrong. As an adult, I should know better.

Scrolling through newsfeeds just makes me feel like a huge disappointment to the world. I am once again in my seventh grade classroom where we were discussing the spread of Christianity, hand proudly raised at the question: “Who here isn’t Christian?” I said I was Protestant. I wasn’t even Protestant. I don’t know why I said it. Maybe I wanted to be the only hand raised in the room? Was I just winging it to see what would happen? The teacher sighed and put his head in his hands when I answered, and it is an indelible memory.

Oh the tyranny of finding yourself in a place where you are so afraid of saying the wrong thing you say nothing at all! I am right there when I spend too much time on the internet, on Facebook specifically. I try to make it a more creative conversation by asking thoughtful questions, or creating projects, sharing memories, bits of poetry.

My art suffers for reading online because I silence myself. I question as I create. I wonder if every pose, each turn, each word, even if my own voice is genuine or borrowed. I wonder if the message I am sending is ok to express. Am I the only hand raised in the classroom again? Is this right in its wrongness, or is it just offensive? Worse, is it just bad art?

In improv, I can say or do anything and it becomes an accepted reality. What's wrong suddenly becomes right, and not only right, but everyone on the team plays along and adds to the world. There are rules, sure, but it's a playground of inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness. Sometimes it turns into bad art, but it’s fun art because there’s freedom in it.

And I guess that's what I am getting at by writing this. I see too much exclusivity online (and off), too much of a desire to prove that being a introvert is the best way to be, or that you must be constantly moving in order to call yourself a dancer, or if you screw up even once with your possessives in an essay you’re not a real writer. That’s not freedom. It’s restriction. It’s a desire to be right all the time.

It's exhausting. It's a tiresome, uncreative space. It's a place where I feel trapped and unable to spark, like I'm trying to light a match in a swimming pool. It makes me want to shut it all off, get a landline, and start using my typewriter again.

I'm just going to keep making mistakes in 2015 and beyond, and try to quiet the Greek Chorus that is telling me everything I do is horrible. A complete relief. Now pardon me while I go peel an apple with a butter knife.

Night Script for the Gifted Dead

The gifted dead send up a hot air balloon from the graveyard,
long since erased from education’s sparse picnic of projects
for the curious, grateful for the tests to finally be over, no more
prickly graphs of progress. Free to experiment with choice, to just
rock back and forth in a damp tire swing, no longer pinned to a board
as an exotic, the geisha of the classroom, the magnolia. Not special.
Normal, but dead. That’s ok, progress even, in its oddness, to join
the rank and file of root and earth in a voiceless thunder, to be surprised
by the leisure of the soul. So eager to haunt, so hospitable.

A Woman Sits Down to Write an Essay. What Happens Next Will *Look over there! An Elephant Dancing With a Ribbon!*

My mind wanders.  I wish it would walk around the little red house on the lake. Instead, as a result of my phone, it wonders why someone named hairypoppins started following me on Instagram, or if I should make a Facebook post about the new private sessions I’ll be teaching in the coming year. I wish my mind would go pet the calico cat I named Poem, or untangle the dreamemoir I’m writing. How it used to love the diptych of the sun and moon, the peak of garage peering through green trees, anagrams. Now it loves the promise of whatever is happening elsewhere. It’s better over there, whatever and wherever that is.

There are a few open documents on my computer, a result of all this scattered brain activity, which is a result of all the glowing apps around me. Not one essay or idea is complete.

The first is an outline for a workshop idea I had - a revelation - that ended with me researching whether or not my bit of genius had been produced elsewhere. Sure enough it had, by another woman with more credentials than I have (older than me, thank the gods), and a really fascinating artistic style. I researched my way out of finishing my idea. My outline ends with the following sentence fragment: “We will cull phrases from our writing that speak to us directly and on a visceral level, and use those to”

Do something. Anything. On a visceral level. God, I hate that phrase. Either everything is visceral, or nothing is.  We will do something, and it will be revelatory, life changing, and will make everything we’ve done previously seem like pure drek. At least that’s the way it is up in my head, because it’s not down on paper yet. I’ve left the whole idea up there in its perfect little cloud of heaving emotional connection. Until I take action, I will continue to sit on the sofa every night drinking mint tea and flicking through an endless scroll of other people’s cat photos.

An essay I began on the train on my way to Philadelphia remains a morass of anecdotal experiences. I really enjoyed the private office space of the train car though. The quiet business everyone attended to on morning trips made me feel like I was part of some sort of evolutionary office space, as if at any moment I’d be asked to be patched into a conference call with the rest of the passengers, and I’d finally be in in the know. Life’s big secret revealed on the Keystone line! So I began taking my iPad each week, with the thought I could definitely get some writing done with the trees and graffiti blurring beside me, and I did. Sort of. I got a few paragraphs out about wrongfulness, the idea that no matter what you say or do, you will always be wrong. Bleak, I know, but I’m angry with the internet and all the sisterly advice videos and articles showing me I’ve been cutting fruit the wrong way forever.

It didn’t help that the place where I stood to wait for the train each week was near a pole that had this nugget of graffiti scrawled on it: “Don’t Think.” My essay on wrongfulness was doomed from the start.

The last open document on my computer starts with this sentence: “It only takes about a day to be completely erased.” I was thinking about the compost heap of social media when I wrote that, I remember. I was probably also multitasking a browse through a friend’s photo album of her post-performance selfies, and a read of a Wikipedia article on the magazine Weird Tales, while simultaneously printing out a copy of a Pear & Gorgonzola Salad recipe I’d never make. Because, let’s face it, everyone knows I don’t peel pears the right way. Thanks to the internet, I’ve learned I’ve been butchering pears all my life, and now I don’t eat them anymore for fear of being judged.

The more I read online, the more I become frozen. All of the articles keep me from taking action. They keep me on the sofa, they keep me in my place. They keep me from getting to the heart of things. They keep me from being truthful.  They keep me from listening. They keep me from making a choice, from starting, and they keep me from finishing. Fuck those articles, every single one of them. Yes, especially the one about fruit.

It will only take about an hour for this post to be completely erased from the feed. That’s not so bad. I'll take my mind for a walk around the red house on the lake.

Orgasm

Don’t think. Great advice, Release. Forget. Just be.
The garden is just over there, filled with a thousand million flowers
and it has a locked gate, but remember, don’t think. Your body
will know what to do. Say yes, take an arms out leap. Smile —
a word that activates all the parts of your brain,
lights up your facial muscles, spreads the deepest reds
throughout the system. Words control the body. No, the body
controls the words. Don’t think.
A kick or a smile. You pick.

But don’t think, just do. Or be. Whatever.
Make a choice. It’s easier on your partner,
relieved when you say yes, and yes again,
oh yes and the gate swings open, the flowers
not quite what you had planned, but ok,
you can work with dandelions all gone to seed,
multiplying on the air.

You collect them all with a bunch of rabbits
that hop way ahead of you. The seeds
are bubbles you chase after, the rabbits
so happy, do they smile? Your breath heavy,
each bubble pops as you hold them to your mouth
to feel nothingness, to mirror the shape. O.

Old Maid

In this house we play it so:
you hold the last queen, you lose.
Shirts and ties to the thrift store,
and one side of your bed empty.

You become the wise buzzard
on the cover, and there’s more
empty time, Jack, than you imagined.
Your children made pairs of your free

hands, and won, for the time being.
You remember when old
wasn’t you or him, the sun
heated sand, his skin, the sea.

In this house we play it so:
his shirts, his ties, they have to go.

Practicality

You haven’t talked to anyone for days
since being asked, “What have you done
in your life that is practical?”

You wear your best bone jewelry,
and last week’s bruises.
Those from years ago resurface in their
mossiness and bluish purples, the colors
of pigeons and oil spills —
a laugh that hurt your brother in law,
and your carelessness with a best friend
in college while out on a date you thought
mattered. It didn’t. The jerk. Remember?

We get little perspective outside
of ourselves. Your heartbeat is practical.
This breath, and the next one.
All of your cells conspire toward
the art of being and doing,
and original as sin, your spirit slipped in.

Maybe you like to make lists
and check each item off, perhaps
you leave the coffeepot on until
it sings a diesel fuel fire.

We grow old under scrutiny,
wizened looks and questions
about just what in the hell
we think we’re doing. Decades
of being asked and having
no answer. No answer beyond
your life. Your lucky daffodil life.
Love buries itself in you.
You release it like fireworks.

Poem Fragment

One day you say,
Well, I guess I don’t need this anymore,
and you let go of the bracelets,
umbrellas, songs, the bright argument
of family and friends.

Your clothes hang, an idea,
an outline of the body you wore
and now shed — the ultimate
simplification! Subtraction.

Nylon stockings still hold
the shape of your legs.
From the fragranced drawer
they whisper,
All her steps were forward,
even her last.
--
I was writing to a friend recently about how my brain has been on some sort of extended summer vacation. Body has taken over and Brain just rides the Tilt-a-Whirl and Scrambler endlessly, shouting and whooping nonsense into the air. Brain likes all the swirly rides, and avoids anything with an extreme drop because it scares Heart. Brain has a crush on Heart. Heart keeps Brain at a safe distance because she thinks he's being a total rube. Body thinks she can think for herself. She trips a lot and skins her knees. Brain laughs a hearty boy laugh. Heart rolls her eyes.

Spring and summer were a blur of performances, a promotion to Mentor Artist through the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the completion of training with the Center for Creative Aging, a play produced, a father-in-law moved to a new home, some teaching of hoop and poetry. The fall offers a list of work in writing, some stage performances, hoop classes.  These jobs pay some bills. A few jobs are solidified, and others not - they are just up in the air. It's frustrating.

I have a collection of books with titles like "Wishcraft" and "344 Questions - the Creative Person's DIY Guide to Insight, Survival, and Artistic Fulfillment." The pages have folded corners and margin scribblings. Tucked into them are receipts for a wig or something frivolous for Body with a note written on the back of it. They offer comfort when I need time to focus. Which is now. Fall is a good time for answering a question like, "What is your Best Case Scenario?" and then pulling the lever on the Tilt-a-Whirl of summer so you can better hear what you really need.

What do I look for as a reader, and what do I expect from myself as a writer?

When I read, I look for language that engages, that is verb-rich, and image-driven. I like humor and wordplay, but I also seek the metaphoric, and when I really enjoy writing the most it is when there is contrast, and an underlying message, a hidden key that my mind needs to find to unlock the meaning. I seek this in fiction, poetry, memoir, and plays. Meaning. It doesn’t have to be obvious, and I prefer when it isn’t. I like it when a writer trusts me as a reader to understand or make meaning. Tone can be humorous, obstreperous, sardonic, joyous. I expect sincerity in tone. Please don’t fake me out. Be genuine. Honest. I want to learn from what I’m reading. It can be a new word, or a way of folding a shirt, or a new perspective or opinion. Short, clear sentences engage me more than long rambly ones, and if a writer ends a sentence on the word “thereof” I am going to check out. The fragmentary intrigues me because I get to fill in the blanks. I love it when I read something and I think, “I could never do that!” because it challenges and inspires me as a writer. I know I’ve read a good book when I cry at the end – not for the content – but for the fact that I will never read the book the same way again.

When I write,  I want to connect with the reader, and I do my best to make that connection through clearly written observations. It isn’t always easy to be honest, writing the truth in memoir or poetry or a play, my truth, is difficult but it is the part of writing that I seek as a reader, so I expect it in myself. I expect to learn something when I write – about myself, about the world, about the way words click together or fall apart. I love it when I’m writing and something that wasn’t clear to me as I was writing suddenly surfaces, and it takes hold of the writing and states “I’m the theme.” Or, “Hey, metaphor here.” Surprise, surprise! I expect myself to be able to write to the point where that happens, to not give up, to be willing to let go for awhile and come back to it later to work on the craft of the language. I expect myself to work. Writing well is work. It’s excavation. If I’m only scratching the surface, I won’t discover any of what lies underneath, and neither will my readers. I expect to earn the understanding of my readers.

There's a Unicorn in Here. It's Why I Perform.

It's 6 a.m. Glasses are necessary for me to see this thin line of eyelash glue. I tick off items on my mental checklist after I remove my specs and press a lash onto a crepey lid:

• stuffed frog
• lion
• fox
• dance ribbon
• amp
• 20 hoops
• swivel chair
• striped socks
• sequin armbands
• toy instruments
• water bottle

It's all packed in my bag, and what doesn't fit will be lugged then tucked into the back of my VW Beetle. When I leave the apartment, I'm wearing butterfly leggings, cowboy boots, and the top half of a costume that was handmade by someone who can actually sew. As I drive to the school, I feel the familiar cloud of pre-show nerves that turn to half-hearted daydreams of having a job that doesn't include stuffed animals and hula hoops. I probably just need to hydrate a little more. I swig some water.

After I haul all my props to the gym and answer questions about my eyelashes to a lash-curious secretary, I get set up. The floor of the gym is my stage today. Three  hundred kids will sit behind the blue dashed line that marks the performance area. I rearrange the curtains that hide the stacks of gym mats and a large hockey goal cage, then set my props out. A parent volunteer introduces herself and her four year old son, who starts to climb all over the swivel chair. "Sorry, you can't play with that. I'm really sorry. I know it's tempting." I say. "Here buddy, take the Kindle," his mother says, and the boy parks himself against the wall with his digital dreampad. The stuffed frog and fox stare out at him with stitched on looks of "Are you flipping kidding us?"

I hate to admit it, especially to my impatient self, that I've been rehearsing the act I will perform at this school for a little over a month. Act development takes me forever. I love it, but I need time, and a lot of time, to create. Space. Plenty of room for screw-ups, flubs, bruises, popped off puffballs, getting stuck in hoop tangles, and complaining to my poor husband. Hours of videoing myself working the act. I share the rehearsal videos with my sister who I know I can trust for critical, honest, and very useful feedback. A sister will tell you when something isn't working. I develop the character, a little girl who has been banished to her room with her imagination, and create a 12 minute soundtrack. I polish the hoop choreography until my skeleton could dance it if my skin and muscles took off on a last minute vacation to Hawaii.

The boy with the Kindle is talking to it now. "I have gone to the most beautiful place! There's a unicorn in here!" His mother brings him over to the side of the stage where the amp sits. I've asked her to push play when I give her a nod from backstage. Kids file in from the hallway and sit by grade, the Kindergarteners in front. A few have spotted me waiting for my cue in the wings by the stack of gym mats and hockey goal cage.  The principal makes a few announcements, I give my nod, the soundtrack starts, and I'm on. They laugh and clap at the swimming on the swivel stool, the stuffed animals growling at my neck after I step on them too much, and during the hooping their "holy moly!" "this is so crazy!" and "ooooooohs!" push me further.

Two little girls break the ranks of dismissal after the show to say hello to me. "Hi! My name is Anna! This is Tristan! We love what you did with all of those hoops!" Their faces are so full of everything I remember about being eight years old. Total wonder. They look at me as if I'm a rockstar, and not some middle aged woman with a penchant for 70s sitcoms and chocolate chips. There is nothing like making other people happy. I've made 300 people happier this morning. Maybe even inspired a few. I have gone to the most beautiful place. There's a unicorn in here. That's why I do this.

Orion

You’re sure if you squinted at the stars enough

heaven might notice the trowels, spoons,

tiny coins left in the dirt where you once

buried the ashes of the family dog. Daffodils

and grape hyacinths sent up their

green apostrophes the following spring,

and you once found a ring in a gardening glove,

sure it was sent by your dead father.

Now you do everything with your father’s

shield and sword in your hands, as if he bequeathed

them to you and you hadn’t really just stolen them

from a hope chest to remember the quest

of his imagination. You are still so far from guessing

the true meaning, but can point at the constellations

and rename them all: Falstaff’s Wrinkle, Circular Bear,

Skeezix and Threnody. You have something

to get you home safe and sound. You have

a belt full of tools at your hip as you stand  

in the center of your triangle of fire.

Disaster

I know a lousy handshake

when I receive one, half-meant.

The unfocussed gaze. Not listening.

Or the hug that is so light I can feel

the chalk outline behind it.

It’s difficult to keep from falling

into the big black hole that hides

under all those metal plates

you see on the streets. To be swallowed

whole, to disappear, to drown

or be blown away by a gale-force

windbag you met at a university.

Unfair. Creating meaning requires

a good amount of just staring into the air. Time.

I like to build an act or a house of words

to walk through, a series of rooms

outfitted with damask and china,

then let neglect kill off all the plants.

Creak out empty nails from the walls where family

photos once hung. The windows were blown out

with buckshot that burst constellations of glass

on the floor, left shards and shadow.

An umbra that howls at night

so much it makes your knees jerk.

I think you have to add a lot first

in order to subtract.  Unless

you want to be a totally charming

but bad star in the field of creation.

Ask me when I am 90 what I loved most.

First I will tell you it was being held,

second, the slip of buttons through fingers,

then I will get lost in a spin of all there is to love,

a rambly multiverse that makes you wish for silence.

Ask and you'll receive a hug so hard you’ll feel

my whole life ahead.

Why It Isn't Spring Yet

Because we will it so. Because the song of traffic thrums

against the wrestle of city gristle and grime, disguised

and then revealed by March's greyed lens. Because we will it so.

There is a mansion of snow for the carnival players

who burn their scripts to improvise longing. Because we will it so.

Because a rose stampedes its red into the eye. Because paper,

when offered up for an autograph, deserves one, but not right away.

There is a pause. A breath. The absence glitters.

Because we will it so.

We Always Have Things To Do

for Maggie Estep

“I would not think to touch

the sky with two arms”

                                    - Sappho

Oh no, not like this, not yet, with prophetic weathermen

singing their dirges of ice. Winter’s closed off attitude –

blank space. The erasure of entire fields, faces lost to scarves,

elegant thoughts to scientific sacrifice.

I’m not sure if this is right,

or even if the thoughts were

that eloquent, and what’s wrong

with a little Bill Nye, some blood

in what feels like a bloodless art?

I’m not sure if this is any good.

I’m not sure. Here. What can you tell me?

I am sure that snow drifts,

and other people’s memories float

between my own: a Lego lodges

in my throat, I skate across the pond,

I once sang in an opera, added graffiti

to the dome of a courthouse.

I forget myself, windblown

in the stories of others. No,

I remake myself. No, that’s bullshit.

I re-forget myself by turning the page,

by hating what I love, all of it. The words

that pile up at my door, shivering,

and the ones that sit at the end of the bed, waiting

for me to line them up into meaning. Their eyes glow.

They snarl. Their teeth are lovely, see?

Tell me a story and tell it now,

the story of a journey, a transformation,

a bit of dust in a storm.

Make the dust want something big,

to have arms to touch the sky with,

to think and breathe. Yes, make it breathe.

Please. Before my heart stops,

and before yours does too,

tell it.

Birds of North America

for Mom on her birthday

The only stretch of pavement for a mile around was our driveway. It was a capital U that sloped from the dirt road above our house to the garage. In the negative space of all that asphalt, my mother planted a few boxwoods along the perimeter, daffodils and crocus to bloom in spring, and a variety of perennials that exploded like fireworks throughout the summer and fall. A tulip tree dropped wooden flowers that looked like closed umbrellas. Patches of violets were a short walk down the road to the left, just past the blackberry bushes and sweetfern. They were actually in someone else's yard, and I snitched them often to bring them home for my mother to put in whatever lilliputian vase she could find.

What really ruled our home was not flowers and plants, but birds. We were visited by them at a schedule more regular than that of a train station. My father built a tray feeder that stretched along the length of the two kitchen windows. In the spring, the windows were cranked open to let in the scent of thaw and warmer air. A dogwood tree sprawled in a gnarly bloom of levels just beyond the kitchen and it was a safe perch for finches, chickadees, sparrows, titmouses, and the occasional cowbird that my mother admonished for its bad habits. Woodpeckers drilled the oak that supported our treehouse. Goldfinches flashed their sunny band uniforms, and a family of them lived in the little red birdhouse Mom put out one year.  Bluejays deviled the little birds with their bold markings and beaks, and called out like soldiers. The cardinals seemed built for cheering up winter, and hallmarking Valentine's Day.

Inside, our kitchen was golden and checkered. Baskets hung on the wall like nests. A sign that read "Virtue" hung above the kitchen table. On a spring morning, as my sister and I gulped a thick vanilla Carnation Instant Breakfast or wolfed a piece of toast, I shared "a really weird dream I had," as Mom gazed out at the feeder. She'd spot the first robin of the season, ask if Kristen had recorded last year's sighting in her journal, and claim that it seemed "awfully early this year." One morning Mom sang off key at the kitchen sink, and we wailed about how horrible it was, how out of tune and off key.  We asked to turn on the dishwasher. I felt immediately like I'd choked a swan. We squelched the song and ignored the beauty of our mother because she was the safest place for us to test out cruelty, but this didn't make us any less rotten. Cowbirds.

The front of our house had large windows that perplexed the birds of our woods. There were many afternoons where I'd arrive home after school to a small box on the porch with a bewildered bird inside it, all hunched down with its tiny eyes clamped shut in a dazed meditation. As sad as it made her that her birds dashed their brains into dizziness, my mother loved every instance she got to hold a patient inside her cupped hand - to feel the varied textures of its feathers, the light quick huffs of breath, and the wiry legs. She'd tell me all about the discovery of the bird on the porch, how close our cat Pyewacket came to finding it first, and the wonder of holding it in her hands. I listened, or didn't, lost in thought about how I'd started to dissect a cat in biology that day, the scent of formaldehyde still lurking in my pores, the word fascia caught in my mind.

My mother's birds never stayed long. I always thought we might keep one as a pet, but in an hour or two, the box would be vacant, the slow bird revived again. I'd hear Mom retell the story to Dad at the kitchen table when he returned from work.

My sister and I have twin graduation photos, taken three years apart. We stand at the lower curve of the driveway, flanked by our parents. We both wear the gold drapery of a gown, the sleeves like wings ready for takeoff. Not long after those photos were taken Mom watched us, a little bewildered ourselves, drive up the slope of that driveway and off into anywhere, anywhere else. She knew just how to catch, how to hold, and when to release.

Ultrasound

Listen, we are human beings.

We are given to love

and there is no other war

quite like it. We fail,

and flail and fall, and will,

with a life lived well,

with every organ speared.

Inside you are continents

that pulse. They don’t need

your help too much. They dance

as you sleep, in the chilled out rhythms

of a lava lamp. During an ultrasound,

belly gelled, you may not even recognize

the liver, the pancreas, your own aorta,

the same way you aren’t sure

if Myanmar is near Thailand or India.

It all looks like the Aleutian islands to you,

all coral reefs and volcanic ranges,

borders unguarded. You could use

the comedy of a sea otter, but imagine

eruptions only.

The tactics are to fend off any attack,

to win, always to win, or at least get out

with only the loss of some vision.

Your health consultant for today

has set her sights on this dark region

over on the left, which could be a lake,

or the tar pits. Please take a deep breath in

and hold it, she says and you can think

of nothing but exhalation, the explosion

of air released from the lungs.

Hold and release.

Retreat and advance. 

You belong to a clan 

but someday a foreigner

may ask to carry you from one land

into your next. Let them.

Annette Funicelo is Cast in Your New Year’s Poem

The bar of each year of your life is set like a game of Limbo

to wriggle or shimmy under, or just barely slip through that period

of the film where what you sought was not what you got.

You didn’t plan for the letter you sent to be returned to sender,

the grain of your own handwriting on the envelope covered

in the high court of post office codes. You wanted to keep in touch.

This year you tried to reach out, connect, bend toward the light

backwards. Look at you! Trying! The revelers at your beach

didn’t get the file on the quiet you needed. They all danced,

played their ukuleles in the key of too loud.

You fell into their barbecue pit.

Well now, it’s time to walk on fire, match the accident

with an event of your own making, strike a note

of such volume the string vibrates its highest and resonates

for nothing but the greater good. You meant it, see? Springy

footsteps are the answer. Bounce the inflated ball into the air

but don’t expect to know where it will land since seals have a way

of popping their charmed noses up. You can’t decide on a deck

or a basement when it comes to levels for this year, but the cast

holds the rope anyway. You choose how to pass under it,

trip on a brick, sail through the air, land on a flowered towel

or in the surf. It’s all finesse, seeds of foam at the shore’s edge

as the audience gets a wink of a mermaid’s tail. Credits. Song.

The Woman Who Set Herself on Fire Lives in the Library

Libraries are home to so many lives, real and imagined, and those made real through imagination. There aren't many places in our society that can claim to hold so many spirits aloft, bouyed by words and the scent of acid-nibbled papers, and the promise of a few minutes (or hours) of escape. A case can be made for the theatre, but you have to pay an admission there. The library is free to everyone.

When we moved from New Jersey to Northeastern Pennsylvania in 1975, my mother was disheartened by the offerings sprinkled along the strip-mined landscape. There were bars, "adult shoppes,"(adding the extra "pe" made the porn seem classier?) and more bars, but where was the library? She was relieved to find it on the main street of the town nearest to the woods where our house was being built. It was over a bar, if my child's mind remembers correctly, but it was there.

Alice was the name of the librarian, and she became a family friend. She was a large woman with twinkling eyes and a chuckly laugh. Summer reading clubs were big in the 1970's and my sister and I racked up shiny stars on the charts as we bookwormed our way through Blume and Drew, Wilder and Baum (I know I sneaked a few lower level Seusses into my list to keep up with my sister). If I were able to enter that second story library today, I could walk you right to the shelves where the Steven King books were in the adult fiction, and the place where that mystery whose title eludes me now sat among the young adult books, or the spot under the eaves where Alice stored encyclopedias and other book sets that were donated. I helped her to organize that space one summer. It was dusty and hot, but I really felt like I was doing some good, and the fact that she let me made me feel more like an adult. There were Christmas parties, Girl Scout puppet shows, and time after school as Mom chatted with Alice. As I grew up in my hometown library, I lounged in the corner and flipped through the Seventeen magazines, or got lost in a girl's sixteen different personalities in the well-worn copy of Sybil.

Today my local library is just around the corner and up the street. It's an easy walk, and a pleasant one. In front of the building is a sculpture of a poem by Emily Dickinson that is incised into a piece of metal so the reader can see through every word to what is behind it. What is behind it? The Lancaster Public Library. The first words of the poem are an invitation: I dwell in Possibility --

I tend to hang out in the basement of this library. The lack of light and noise makes for a cave-like feel and it helps me to focus. It's a place where anything is possible, yes, but here is where I will make one thing happen. It's a good place to write and read, because it is far from the bank of computers that are filled with internet browsers, and the scent of the books in the basement is just right. At any given time during my reading and research I can be sitting next to a teenage girl seeking information on platelets for a report, or a homeless man finding some rest at the table. The librarians try their best to hush cellphone use, but I've heard plenty of one-sided conversations. The upstairs rooms are for children and teens, and there are some multi-purpose rooms I haven't been in yet but hope to someday visit through a program. The Juliana bookstore has plenty of gently used books for sale, the proceeds of which support the library.

My husband and I were married in one of my favorite libraries - the Osterhout Free Library on Franklin Street in Wilkes-Barre. Built in 1849, it was once the First Presbyterian Church. Melvil Dewey, creator of the Dewey decimal system, was asked to act as an advisor to the library board. He  suggested that the board buy the First Presbyterian Church, and use it for ten years until permanent arrangements could be made. This was in 1887. It is still a library today, and a magnificent one. I immediately fell in love with the glass floors of the second floor space that overlooks the main room, and the extensive poetry collection, and the reading room with its common lights and orderly newspaper rack. I wrote a family cookbook here, and attended poetry readings. I arranged for a poet to come in and give a workshop and reading through the ALA, I ran a few workshops and writing circles there myself. I spent hours pouring over the microfiche searching for a baseball team from the early part of the 20th century that a hospice patient played in when he was a kid. I read a newspaper article about a woman who set herself on fire in a cemetery, and wrote a horrible formal poem about it. There are so many spirits there in six point type on microfiche film, letterpressed into thick paper in the city directories, or forever dancing at the holiday feast, asking to be read.

We were married in this library because I wanted all those witnesses - the woman who set herself on fire, the Line who fell in love with a Dot, Walter Mitty, the Velveteen Rabbit. There are times when I'm in a library and I think that there will never be the same configuration of people again - the real ones checking out their books, and the fictional ones on shelves or resting behind the eyelids of the dreamer. I wonder if the books that sit next to each other day by day, week by week, year to year, ever tire of what each one has to say. Sometimes I slip one in the wrong slot just so it will have a new neighbor to talk to, and then change the configuration of the spirits in the place. It's not necessary, and it probably irritates the librarians to no end, but it adds to my sense of wonderment about libraries and words, and the flickers of lives we brush up against in our lifetime. Some barely glow at the hem of our skirts and cuffs of our shirts, while others blaze and consume us.

Self-Portrait in a 2002 VW Beetle

The Bronski Beat sings

run  away/turn away/run away

as I shift into fifth gear,

push through fog that shrouds

the tops of trees. Sometimes

I want to pass my destination

and step on the first train to anywhere,

watch the landscape and backyards

from a passenger’s point of view.

Once I passed a cop on a motorcycle.

Unwise. “You want to tell me why you think

it’s a good idea to pass me?” he asked.

The shadow of his hat darkened my door.

“I’m in love,” I answered as if it were

a universal excuse, then said,

 “Not with you, of course.” Also unwise.

My mind clutches the scrap of an idea

while I’m on the road, and the white noise

of the pavement under my tires sings

that thought into an entire musical,

complete with sets and homemade props.

With the sunroof open, all my thoughts

go to seed like a dandelion in a gust of summer.
My hair imitates.

I scrawled POETRY across an old political

bumper sticker, then added one that says

“Reading is Sexy,” another that claims “I like this,”

and a pink circle with “I love the hoop” written

in the center. I believe it’s possible

to have too many bumper stickers.

In the little plastic vase on the dashboard

I keep a pair of chopsticks and two pens.

The glovebox is a morass of papers

that prove the car is registered and insured.

In dreams my car is an anchor that drags

me into the mazy haze of underwater

swimminess, a lake that wants to swallow

my life. I spin off an empty highway

and land in my own madness.

The other night, I dreamed my middle name

was Joule – a unit of energy in my center of being.

I think of myself as Joule inside this red bubble.

I wave to the crossing guard,

tap my fingers on the steering wheel to the Bangles’

Going Down to Liverpool to Do Nothing,

and unroll the window to feel the air

howl its big, empty questions in my ears.

In Invitation to Participate in Something Real

I'm working on a multimedia piece that explores the idea of self-image and the internet. This piece is part of a whole larger work that is a collaboration with my husband, Dan Waber. The seeds of my idea come from some disillusionment with social media. I'd love your help with my plan, which will be part writing, part movement, part image. If you're intrigued, read on for the seeds that are sprouting to form the project, and the specifics for participation.

The Seeds

Seed One: A couple of years ago I was on a television show. It was a really great life experience, but nothing I continued to pursue. I now get casting calls for a variety of projects, including what are called web promos. A web promotional is a video created to go viral. Many of them are the heart-tugging or "this is so totally amazing OMG!" videos everyone is sharing because they are so "true." They aren't. Most of them are stealthily (or not so stealthily) disguised advertisements. What's so insidious about this type of advertising is that no one wants to admit that they've been kanoodled into sharing an ad. You shared it to your wall, and all your friends have liked it and commented on how touched they were, or how brilliant it is, or any number of comments that make you feel satisfied for having shared it. A great example of a web promo are the Dove Campaign For Real Beauty videos. It's a more obvious campaign - Dove is a company that produces a line of beauty products - we all know that so they aren't hiding anything. What I find creepy about it is that they create videos (which likely had casting calls, btw) that encourage self-esteem while selling you products that promise to erase lines, firm skin, and give you super shiny hair. I'm going to just call that campaign out for the bullshit that it is. There are many others, and they get shared as if they are truth. They are propaganda.

I once got a casting notice looking for "soccer mom types" to be interviewed on a news program about a current event. It was a rush call. It wasn't a testimonial for a product - they were casting people to look like they are "on the scene" to ask them questions about what was going on. The people who actually were on the scene either didn't look good enough or couldn't speak coherently I guess. Whatever the reason, they needed to gloss the news up a bit.

Seed Two: Last week I downloaded an app for my phone called Perfect 365 after reading about it: "Perfect 365 is a one-of-a-kind portrait app that allows anyone to easily select trendy makeover styles or fine-tune every detail of their face to get perfect portraits. It's fun. It's easy. You'll want to enhance all your party photos and share them with everyone!" That fueled my curiousity about what makes us feel like we have to be perfect all the time, or somehow better/younger/faster/smarter than we are. It also dredged up some thoughts on my own self-image issues and what I share online. Fun times.

I took a couple of photos and pushed them through the Perfect 365 app, and this is what I got. The top photos are the originals. The bottom photos are the "fun and easy perfect portraits!" Sorry about the nightmares you are about to have (I'm referring to the "perfected" photos that erase all personality from my face).

Perfect 365 can make my nose thinner. I can also slenderize my face, eliminate blemishes, soften skin, add foundation, change my eye color. You can do all sorts of "perfecting" manipulations with this app.

Seed Three: A friend shared some stories about Ok Cupid and Tinder. Tinder (another smartphone app) culls your Facebook profile photos and location, and matches you with people in your area. From there, a person can "like" you based on your photo alone. If you "like" them back you can contact them. My friend said that she puts Tinder on her phone for awhile, waits to get a "like" or two so she feels good, and then she never contacts anyone and deletes the app.

Seed Four: Seed Four is just a stew of all these things - research into the McCarthy era for an upcoming poetry residency, the emails I get for casting calls seeking women 25-40 years old who are "pretty, elegant, and charming but approachable with a down-to-earth quality," (what does that even mean?) the advertising I see shared through social media as if it were real, the reality show casting calls, fashion magazines, my own weirdo desires to be beautiful. The perfect storm for creativity, and for exploring what is real and true.

With the ability to easily change how you look, what is real on social media? What do you believe is true? What do you think about how you look? I've got a lot of questions churning after erasing all of my neck wrinkles.

Participation

If you want to participate, you'll be asked to do the following:

Answer a few questions about self-image, self-esteem, and the internet.

Email me a photo of yourself for a Perfect 365 manipulation. You'll get to approve or deny the use of the photo in the finished piece.

If this seems like a women-only project, it's not. I would love to hear from men, too. If you are interested in participating, please Email me.

Will You Perform/Read/Teach for The Angry Divorced Fathers Club?

No, thanks. I do a few events each year for free, but entirely at my own discretion.  This list of reasons goes for the writing portions of my life, as well. When you ask an artist to perform for free, you are essentially asking them to add value to your event for nothing in return but the promise of “good exposure.” My husband and I once had an event coordinator at a bookstore read us a memo from corporate headquarters about how they needed to provide free events to bring traffic into the store. This was just after she asked us to run a writing workshop for free. This was not going to be good exposure for us. It was just taking advantage.

The performer or artist you want at your event still paid out of pocket to be there for you through her education, insurance, and rent, among many other things. Not to mention her time. Please factor these things in when you ask anyone to perform or teach at no cost. (These are my reasons for not doing everything for free - other artists likely have their own set.)

I pay for classes to get good enough to be able to perform and teach.

            I’ve learned from some incredible artists. I paid to learn from them because they worked hard to get good enough to teach and perform. I still take classes and workshops from writers, hoopers, actors, and dancers whose work I like because I want to learn more and get better at what I do. It’s professional development. Hours and hours of it.  What I do is not just “for fun.” Well, it IS fun, but it’s not “just for fun.” It’s hard work, and it costs real money, to get better at what you love.

I pay for rehearsal space to get good enough to perform.

            Hoop practice can’t happen in my apartment, and good rehearsal space isn’t cheap. It adds up. Someday, I hope to have my own space to teach and rehearse and share with others. That will cost money too.  I know, because I once had a space for writers and artists to share their work.

I practice every single day, so I’m good enough to perform and teach.

            Good writing doesn’t happen because I slack off and don’t write for several weeks. It’s not like I put on my fancy eyelashes and costume, and ta-da! I can hoop! It all takes work. I’m not perfect. There are days when my body is really very sore. There are days when I feel like everything I do just sucks, but then I continue to work at it.  Why? Because I want to be the best I can be when someone hires me. I want to give a meaningful performance. I want to write a really great poem.  Go read a greeting card and then read something by Fleur Adcock. You’ll notice the difference.

I have insurance so I can perform and teach.

            What? Yes. I pay each year for separate insurances – one for instruction – and the other for performance.  There is insurance out there for performing poets, too. Google it, poet friends, then carefully consider whether or not you should continue to get up on the table to shout your poetry over the audience without it.

Making costumes takes time, talent, and money.

            This doesn’t come up so much in the writing part of my life. Yet. I’ve had to learn how to sew better, and I hate to sew. Fringe isn’t cheap either, let me tell you.

I love what I do, and because I love it, I want to honor the other artists who are involved in learning their craft so they can succeed. Do I care about the Angry Divorced Father’s Club? If they seek to become less angry, then yes. Will I perform for them for free? No. You just can’t continue to make your art well if you don’t get paid. Eventually your checkbook says 0, and it’s not long before the checkbook of your spirit has a negative balance as well.

Let's Hoop Camp in the Forensics Lab

On the first day, a spell of yellow caution tape

and fake blood seeds the girl’s imaginations.

I hang a banner of light cotton pennants,

peel the fake footprint pattern off the floor.

The room is huge, perfect for the investigation

of movement and ecstatic dance. Death was here

once, ok, but we can rise above that bar.

My suitcase with the word “Happy”

spelled out in bright duct tape letters

shares space near a glass-fronted cabinet

that holds a dummy in a grey suit. He leans

as if he’s been clubbed in the head. He has, the girls

decide, because look, I’ll bet he was coming up

from the basement when she hit him with the brick.

We whirl all week, spin outside ourselves,

bond into the Hoop Unit. Girls, circle up, I say,

and they hoop to the center of the room, or I sing,

Hoop, Hoop! and they respond with a Hooray!

so voluminous the glass in the cabinets rattles.

Every day I’m witness to their methods

of friendship. The peels from shared oranges

curl in the corner on a paper plate. Decks of hoop

tricks decorated, circumferences calculated,

personal boundaries stretched, they twirl and laugh,

secure the scene.

I hide the film of storyboards set up by the CSI class

in a grainy drawer, close the lids on footprint foam.

Happiness sometimes has no key and so has to pick

the lock, or spend hours filing down metal

until she can spring herself and her partner, Joy,

who are the perfect match. They court Trouble

on occasion, but their work songs are so full,

sealed with the physical evidence of a life well-lived.

Homemade Cheese Crackers

We're trying to eat better around here. I've got an app on my phone for it. Really. I'm a total thrill at the grocery store where I scan items and the app shows me what is in the so-called food I've just scanned. We don't buy much at the grocery, but my husband likes Cheez-Its. They are not food. Honestly, I liked them too, but when I found out they have TBHQ (tertiary butylhydroquinone - a chemical linked to causing ringing in the ears), I threw them out of the pantry and looked for a good cheese cracker recipe. I found one at inthekitchewithkath.com (and she found hers from smittenkitchen.com), and modified it ever-so-slightly to use wheat flour instead of white. I also doubled the ingredients because I knew we'd want more.

There are a couple of things you gain by making your own crackers: the delicious smell of them baking, and the satisfaction of knowing what's in your crackers because you made them. You just don't get that experience by sliding a box of pre-made crackers from a shelf. These would be really fun to make with kids. Very easy.


3 cups (12 oz.) grate extra sharp cheddar cheese
8 tbsp. (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened and cut into pieces
1 1/4 c. whole wheat flour, plus more for dusting
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
2-3 tbsp. milk

1. Preheat oven to 350.

2. Put everything except the milk into a food processor. Pulse the processor, 5 seconds at a time for 5 or 6 times until the dough is in coarse crumbs.

3. Add the milk and process until the dough gathers together in a ball. 

4. Roll the dough out on a floured board with a rolling pin that has been floured. Roll until the dough is about 1/8" thick.

5. Cut the dough into 1 inch squares. Or, you can do what I did and break out some of your smaller, cuter cookie cutters for some sassy shapes. If you want the Cheez-It style hole in the center of each cracker, poke a hole with the flat end of a wooden skewer. Don't use your purple pen.

6. PLace the crackers at least 1/4 inch apart on parchment paper on a baking sheet.

7. Bake for 12-15 mins. until the edges are just starting to brown.

Rondel Supreme of Unbeing for Hoopers

Close your eyes and spin.

The swimminess of poetry,

letters loosed, swallowed with glee,

dissolve with each turn. Unpin

thought and let it go. The din

of the daily erases with velocity.

Close your eyes and spin

the swimminess of poetry.

Pop and static, you’re the song in

heavy rotation, a dark ocean of free

forgotten foreverness. You can’t un-be?

Oh, here you can. Ha, ha! A win

to close your eyes and spin

the swimminess of poetry.

Sonnet for a Sad Dream

There’s a way to pack the chandelier

that no longer fits in with the rest

of your furniture’s bleak and blear.

Each crystal dangled undressed

except for its prisms, twisted on wires

of twilight metal. Use tissue paper.

No. Toss them in a glass box, amplifier

of their song. Unsayable stars, capable

of anything, ask them about the basement.

They will tell you how broodiness

and longing can build a monument

to the wrought scrollwork of sadness,

how once taut links will ease to the floor,

relaxed. Inside each teardrop, the salt of furor.