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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

Throwback Poetry

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 8, 2014| 4 Comments »

I recently discovered a website called “Letters of Note.” http://www.lettersofnote.com Whoever thought of digging up old letters from famous, and not so famous, writers was genius. It all started with an obit that EB White wrote for his dog Daisy, who happened to be sniffing the flowers in front of a shop when a carriage careened into her. Most of us know White because of his spider named Charlotte; he is masterful at writing for children. I always thought that a good children’s writer had to have never really left childhood behind. There had to be a Peter Pan quality to him when he wrote about Daisy; that she was born, “an unqualified surprise to her mother.”

My Cardigan Welsh Corgi, Tootsie Roll, was extremely surprised when she delivered her brood in the corner of the living room, on the good rug, and NOT in the whelping box I had so carefully arranged in the family room. And as most doggie people know, each and every one of her puppies had a personality all its own. One was sweet and cuddly, one was aggressive and always first to dine. One loved to explore and one was always hiding. Blaze, the one we kept, was the alpha male. He seemed to know he was in charge of his siblings from the moment he opened his eyes. I was writing for the newspaper back then, but now how I wish I’d put pen to paper about the pups.

I am thinking of writing some small poems about our dog Buddha for the Love Bug. I’ve already asked my artistic sister Kay to illustrate a story or two. Buddha came from the SPCA at the Jersey Shore and looked a little like a polar bear – he was a hundred pounds of white fluffy Samoyed-mixed love! So tell me what you think of my first attempt at a beginning?

Buddha Springs into Action

Buddha awoke and stretched himself

Gently into downward dog

Looking up, he thanked the tree

Shimmering in the morning fog

The tree was full of birds

Singing sweetly, flapping wings

Dancing in her branches

A Blue Heron was the King

“Good Morning Buddha Bear,” he said

“Happy day to one and all”

The big white dog sat down at once

To hear the sea wind call

Buddha Bear in the Blue Ridge

Buddha Bear in the Blue Ridge

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Nobel Pursuits

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2013| 2 Comments »

It’s that time of year again. No, not carving pumpkins time and trying to find or create a family-friendly Halloween costume. It’s the Nobel Prize announcement time; time to try and figure out just what the Higgs boson particle really is and how it’s responsible for the secrets of life and our universe, and I am not speaking biblically.

But try to find the 2013 recipient of the prize in physics, Peter Higgs, and you’d be out of luck. The elderly Edinburgh scientist left his cell phone behind and like Garbo, would like to be left alone.  Of course, once that Large Hadron Collider at Cern proved that his theory about the “god particle” was correct, Higgs was considered a shoe-in for the Nobel in Physics.

So maybe we’re closer to knowing “how” we got here, two other winners this year help us understand the “why.” A man whose mission is to heal won the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology. Since I have a few healers in the family, I was interested in this article I found courtesy of my musical great niece: http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2013/10/nobel-medicine-winner-says-i-owe-is-all-to-my-bassoon-teacher.html  Dr Thomas Sudhof credits his music teacher with imparting a sense of discipline that helped to forge his “…powers of analysis and concentration.”

I always try to understand everything I encounter—not only in science, but also historical and political events and music and movies—get to grips with the content, meaning, and process. This is immense fun, as strange as that may sound.
Who was your most influential teacher, and why?
My bassoon teacher, Herbert Tauscher, who taught me that the only way to do something right is to practice and listen and practice and listen, hours, and hours, and hours.
Science and art, the interconnections are endless. Next is a woman whose elegantly sparse prose helps us to understand the human condition, along with the roles we all play; an artist who is also part of the faculty here at UVA. Congratulations to Alice Munro, recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature! This 82 year old Canadian writer had her first book of short stories published when she was 37…take heed all you late bloomers! She has only taught the occasional writing class in Mr Jefferson’s Academical Village, and was unavailable when I was studying fiction as a community scholar, unfortunately for me.  She is Queen of the Short Story, and has recently published Dear Life.   
Rumor is she will stop writing now, but I find that hard to believe. Here is what Munro, America’s Chekhov, had to say about her attempt at writing a novel, and I feel her pain:“It didn’t feel right to me, and I thought I would have to abandon it,” she said. “I was very depressed. Then it came to me that what I had to do was pull it apart and put it in story form. Then I could handle it. That’s when I learned I was never going to write a real novel because I could not think that way.”imagesSo that’s my problem. Too many years writing 300-500 word newspaper columns. Thank you Ms Munro, for sharing your knowledge and sense of possibility with us.

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Friendship 101

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on May 27, 2013| 2 Comments »

“There are people who make an art form out of not being intense. They can remain on an amusing yet completely repetitive level. I can’t operate that way.”

Do you remember when I said I wanted to join a writer’s forum, and the only way to log in was with a twitter account, so I joined the Twit-o-Sphere? Well, it’s through that writer’s website, “Medium,” that I found myself reading an important essay this morning on friendship: “The Games Women Play: Part 2” By Lauren Mechling (author, editor and saint).

The author interviews another author, Susanna Sonnenberg. about the ebb and flow of friendship.  She Matters, is a memoir  of Sonnenberg’s twenty most important female friendships done as a chapter-per-friend. They talk about neediness and intimacy, about expectations and loss. https://medium.com/the-lauren-papers/a30ac0d4b1d0

Sonnenberg asks, “What do you want out of a friend?” Mechling says she wants somebody she can call on the phone any hour of the day or night. Which means she wants her friend to answer her calls, and be there if she

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needs her. I had a different take on that question, although maybe it’s in the same general category.

I want a friend who knows where the spoons are in my kitchen.

For me it’s about the comfort of showing up and listening. My BFF Lee from MA showed up at the Rocker’s bris with armloads of flowers from her garden. No one asked her, she just knew what I needed and she always knew the right thing to say, to bring me back to myself. To help me see my best self, and even coax me toward grace when I was listing away. Here is Lee to the left at the Bride’s wedding; and the Bride’s Duke roomie Sally on the right, who just had a baby last week!

Obviously, no one person can fulfill every longing we may have for a friend or a mate for that matter. Is she intellectually curious; fun to be around; supportive in a good way; adventurous? We all know the sunny-day vs rainy-day friends paradigm. It’s a rare and wonderful thing when that type combines – it’s the lottery of friendship! And yes, things do change once our identity shifts into motherhood. There can be rifts, and ruptures, not all friends can stand the ebb and flow, the test of time.

Like a good marriage, a good friend will still love you with all your faults. “If I show you this, will you still love me? If I show you this, will you still be with me?”

Honesty and loyalty, pretty much says it all. Like the authors, I need to have a certain intensity in order to fuel a friendship, we need to go deep sometimes, soul-baringly deep. I feel lucky to have found a few good friends at this stage of my life, in my empty nest. ps The spoons are to the left of the kitchen sink.

County Fair 008FB

 

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Poetic Vision

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on April 30, 2013| Leave a Comment »

On my long drive home this past weekend, I listened on and off, between mountain ranges shrouded in fog, to an interview on NPR with New York’s Poet Laureate, Marie Howe. It turns out April is Poetry month and this was a repeat of Terry Gross’ Fresh Air program from last year. Somehow I knew she was a kindred spirit. Howe grew up in a large Irish Catholic family, and attended the Convent of the Sacred of the Heart. As my BFF Lee from the Berkshires likes to say, we went to different schools together.

“Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we’re going to die,” says Howe. “The most mysterious aspect of being alive might be that — and poetry knows that.”

Howe has written 3 books of poetry: What the Living Do, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time and The Good Thief. She talked about teaching poetry, about describing the way water looks in a glass that has filtered sunlight streaming through it. About getting her students to bring their focus into the world of everyday things without using metaphor. Saving metaphor for much later, like a gift left under the Christmas tree. Yes, I realize I didn’t wait.

Howe’s father was an alcoholic, which she states as if this is the most common thing for a family, which of course it is. How many fathers in the 50s functioned fine enough by day, only to return home to drink and brutalize their family? There is, “A sense of retroactive dread…so many of us are afflicted with addictions,” she says. One of her brothers, Johnny, died of AIDs in the late 80s, and she memorialized him with this poem:
What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do.

Johnny, who ran away from his father but found his own demons, finally found AA and used to tell her that, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice.” She loved him dearly and said sometimes he would just stand in the middle of her kitchen and say, “This is it.” And she would say, “What?” He would just raise his arms, look around with a smile, and say, “This.” I was reminded of my brother Michael, who died last year. Every time I would see him, he would smile and tell me, “This is the good life.”

The Flapper would read poems aloud to my brothers and sisters from an old anthology, “101 Famous Poems.” First written in 1929, I remember its well worn blue binding, and managed to find a revised edition from 1958. Shirley, Brian, Kay, Michael, and Jimmy heard about the sea, and a cautionary tale about a spider and a fly while doing household chores. Poetry was the music that accompanied everyday life while the Flapper could only sit and read, her legs broken in so many places. As Marie Howe said, art allows the heart to break open.
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/13/150495862/poet-marie-howe-reflects-on-the-living-after-loss
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“Life is a Luminous Halo”

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , on April 7, 2013| 2 Comments »

I love it when writers write about writing. I want to hear where they write, and when; is it first thing in the morning with a cup of coffee, or deep into the night with a glass of wine? Once i even bought a calendar that featured the desks of famous writers. I would scrutinize the still life each month like it was a new moon. After all, if Eudora Welty could create amid chaos, I should certainly find my muse on a white oak built-in…

And it was this morbid curiosity that led me to join the twitter-sphere. Yes, I know i said i’d never do it. Feeling like the queen of 500 words or less, what could I possibly say in 140 characters or less, including spaces? Exactly. I had an aversion that seemed nonsensical. Wasn’t I the friend who taught my friends to text so they could communicate with their newly departed college-bound children? Didn’t I have to teach my teaching peers how to incorporate technology into their lesson plans? 

Still tweeting was a non sequitur to me. I admit I wondered at the value, and not wanting anymore emails popping up in my inbox. Who would I follow, or worse yet, who would want to follow me? I heard about the American kid who was arrested in Tahir Square, and because he tweeted in real time about being stuffed into a van his family was able to free him. A tweet can transform itself into a gps-driven life raft! But that wasn’t the reason I gave in and joined.

I wanted to sign up to a writing site called “Medium.” https://medium.com Its subtext is : “Sharing ideas and experiences moves humanity forward.” So there you have it…the only way to sign up was with a twitter account, pragmatism wins in the end. The Writer House in my town was offering a class this weekend on using twitter effectively, as a writer, and I thought to myself – what writer can’t craft 140 characters? Then I thought it’s like surgery, sending out a tweet is distilling your innermost thoughts in some rational and possibly humorous way. Something that might catch someone’s attention, might make you stop amid all the noise of day to day existence, and think.

Virginia Woolf said: “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel…Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

ImageOur minds are permeable, some more than others. Bob and I had the pleasure of witnessing 2 young children experience a Cirque du Soleil performance for the first time, and I marveled at how their imagination was captured by aerialists in silk ribbons. The purity of music and motion, without words of any kind. IF I had downloaded the twitter App to my phone, I might have said: ” Quidam makes magic reel” because a part of the show uses mime and audience members to produce a silent film. And seeing the look of wonder in the eyes of children at a circus is magical. Even digital native children!
 
And so I follow writers – here is one of my favs:

Chilling words: “If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.”

 

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Art in Place

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on March 5, 2013| 2 Comments »

Two things happened to collide in my first week home. One was our overabundance – how big America is, how wide our roads, how many choices we have for cereal. And “B” (it’s a family joke) was a New Yorker article I was reading at the gym about Walmart art. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/02/walmart-art.html#ixzz2MfZBirVd

Artist Brendan O’Connell worked for the Winn Dixie as a teenager when he had the brilliant idea that he wanted to paint the patterns and colors of store shelves. He saw beauty in the endless void of our material world, someone called him the Warhol of this generation. But he didn’t actually start painting until he started to photograph shoppers and shelves in Walmart. Imagine, Cheeto bags inspired passion; well actually he hasn’t painted a Cheeto bag, yet…

Now, his is the only art hung in Walmart’s corporate headquarters in Arkansas, and Alec Baldwin is a collector. “A company executive said, (O’Connell is) capturing ‘the art in the Wonderbread; the art in the Jif.'”

I like to think that’s about how I write. Something ordinary, or maybe newsworthy, might catch my eye and off I’ll run with words. Seeing something extraordinary in everyday things. The Flapper and my beautiful sister Kay were the artists in my family, so drawing was out of the question for me, but painting a picture with words and metaphor seemed doable. Still, I can appreciate art when I see it.

Like the lovely Art in Place project that has sculpture and murals popping up all over Cville. http://www.artinplace.org I am consistently  delighted to see ever-changing roadscapes while I drive around town.The fin of a giant whale, a zipper being unzipped, a harried commuter with his tie flying in the wind, or even a butterfly made out of stone by Philip Kyle Hathcock hathcock  

Since I don’t go to Walmarts, here is my photo montage of O’Connell-like shelves I found intriguing after getting through customs, my dignity somewhat intact and my avocat lotion not confiscated:
A still life of 100 calorie snack packs at a Harris Teeter grocery store. The French do not have a word for “snack.” photo copy
The Starbucks mermaid.photo copy 3
A favorite chip for teens in Target photo copy
And a woman looking for beauty products photo copy 3

What is art, what is beauty? Discuss.

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Mopey Moods

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on October 11, 2012| 3 Comments »

What do you do when you’re confronted with a mopey mood? Maybe you didn’t sleep that well because there is a new little human being in the house trying to tell the difference between night and day. Or maybe it’s just a dreary, rainy sort of morning and you woke up to find you were out of milk for your coffee. You might even be anticipating a lackluster VP debate? Well if you were Peter Rabbit, you’d decide you need a change of scene! http://www.npr.org/2012/10/11/161708397/emma-thompson-revives-anarchist-peter-rabbit

This wonderful little character, who first debuted in 1902 just a few years before the Flapper was born, is being brought back to life by the Oscar winning actress Emma Thompson. She is the first person to be authorized to continue the story of the little bunny since 1930, after Beatrix Potter’s death. I didn’t know that she writes too, but Thompson says that she loves the Victorian language. For instance, where we might say we found a cheese sandwich in our lunch bag, Thompson says, “…inside wrapped in brown paper were some excellent sandwiches of cheese and pickle.”

I agree with Thompson when she says, “I think the first words that enter you when you’re very small have a hugely powerful, potent impact on your relationship with language. And to have had Potter as a child did me — not to make her sound like spinach or anything — a lot of good because she’s such a brilliant writer.” And of course Peter Rabbit is a bit of an anarchist, like a little rebellious child who wants to do the exact opposite of what his parent’s think are good for her or him.

So today, in honor of Peter Rabbit, why not do something slightly dangerous? Break a rule, go on an adventure. “Action and adventure” I used to call those mopey days with small children. After all, even a trip to the park can be like going to the circus for a small child. Maybe in my next life, I’ll come back as a children’s literature author? I have a wonderful idea for a book about a big white dog named Buddha. He loves his life by the beach where he sits under a magical huckleberry tree. Or maybe I should just write it for the Love Bug?

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