muse, muse, where did you go?

Last night I went to hear one of my favorite performing authors, Anne Lamott. She’s touring the third in her spiritual path trilogy. This one is called Grace (Eventually). She was good. Low-energy due to a cold and probably the whole exhausting tour thing, but she showed up, did what was expected, and pleased her SRO crowd with predictable Bush-Bashing.

Still, I’m finding that my usual enthusiasm for readings is waning of late. As is my passion for the page generally, be it reading, writing or musing. I’m thinking that this little passion hiatus is reflective of a reverse sort of midlife sub-crisis. Instead of wildly pursuing an art form and acting out generally, I’m engaging in calm, warm, sensible activities replete with sanity.

After a tumultuous year which included divorce, philosophical overhaul and a bit more acting out than necessary, I find myself seeking the road more traveled. Normalcy, I guess. And because my brand of muse has typically come packed with angst, co-dependency and obsession, I’m not exactly sure how, these days, to approach my work. Here I have a garage full of works-in-progress, and I stand over them, hands on hips, head nodding before turning out the light and slipping inside for a cup of tea. Let’s not call this Writer’s Block, ‘k?

I prefer to think of this as a plateau in my creative pursuits. I’m not exactly subverting the paradigm, more like tipping it on its side, see what’s crawling underneath.

I think I do have to write more though. And I think I’ll revisit this muse thing shortly. Cheers.

future tense

I’m writing a short story in future tense. Here are some built-in problems with the tense choice: wrinkled chronology (i.e. inserting back-story and not losing the reader is tricky); authority (is it all a dream, or did this really happen?); intimacy (distance in tense = distance between reader and writer).

At workshop last night I got some great ideas on how to minimize the above issues. For instance, attend subjunctive mood with clarity of purpose, and treat back-story with overt syntactic decisions e.g. make it clear if the character is speculating by using words like “perhaps” or “maybe,” and be careful how I use “will” vs “would.”

Here’s the current opening sentence: Mid-morning, Pedersen will fish the Razr out of toilet with the full scoop of his hand.

The camera hovers, but at an ironic distance. Playing with tense, pov and the shifting camera, just to inform the level of intimacy I’m attempting, I could write:

Yesterday, Pedersen fished the Razr out of the toilet with the full scoop of his hand. Boring and flat.

How about: I fished the Razr out of the toilet with the full scoop of my hand. Problematic. Immediately by choosing first person, I realize I have to make the sentence less self-conscious and foreground the object. Maybe: The Razr’s slimy silver case felt like a bar of nearly-spent soap in my hand as I pulled it from the toilet.

Intimacy attained! And there’s enough of a hook for the reader to lightly wonder about the phone in the toilet. But, still, pretty typical.

So, what does future tense buy me? Suspense? And more than that, perhaps the invitation to suspend disbelief? In order for that to pay off, I have to figure out a way to close the gap between Pedersen and the reader. Here’s where Chuck had a great suggestion. Why didn’t I up the ante? Show Pedersen in some sort of moral dilemma using the phone, and what’s on the phone, as a costly conundrum that might cause the reader to ask: What would I do in this situation?

I know this means nothing, since I haven’t revealed the plot…. Perhaps I will at a later post.

me and lucinda in the dugout

Back at the dugout. Back to corporate com. Back to croutons and non-dairy creamers and online professional management tools, oh my!

I’ve got the new lucinda williams cd blaring out my laptop speakers trying to ream out a low-grade headache. I’m wandering around my to-do list, resisting 100% attention to anything in particular. In short, I’m fucking off.

More and more I find my capacity for long-stretch deep-thinking waning. Perhaps I have a blooming work ethic crisis? Perhaps I should delete this right now because I’ll forget I’m posting it and should I ever be Googled by a potential client, there I’ll be in all my slackerness.

I know what it is. It’s how I used to get after a summer of partying and fun and late nights. How I’d find myself back at a desk in a room listening to a teacher hammer abstract concepts into the wall of my brain case when I’d rather be fishing. (Except I gave up fishing at 14. It’s a metaphor.)

Lucinda is singing about not wanting to talk to anyone. So apropos.

So, I’m having a stoopid day. A day of half-assed non-attempts to engage. Should I just indulge it? Too bad the sun’s no longer shining. Spring drizzle doesn’t quite beckon the same way a blue sky does.

I should be in 19th century Vienna with Sisi and Ida. Or I should be working on my short story in progress, “To Open: Break Tamper Evident Seal Here.” Or I should be revisiting Unkiss Me.

Lucinda just sang: “You can’t light my fire so fuck off.” Hm.

These days of creative vacillation. These late mornings of driftiness. Writers can be so passive aggressive with themselves.

AWP update

There were over 300 seminars, lectures, readings and receptions to choose from at AWP this year. I attended ten, and they were pretty much the same ten. In a candy store the size of Disneyworld, I reached for my favorite confection again and again and again. And I say this without remorse or regret. No shrugged shoulders. Not one smack of palm to forehead.

It’s been confirmed (once more) that the possibilities, the vagaries, the enormously generous plain of consciousness—as opposed to the words and ideas themselves—is why I do this thing. This writing thing.

I therefore cannot report on the AWP at large, for I wasn’t present at the cross-section of poets, prose writers, teachers and lit critics. Not one homage did I attend. Not one Writing Program hullabaloo. Oh sure, I had them circled in my program, but when it came time to sit in a banquet chair in front of a panel of experts, I found myself crawling back for more genre-bending, literary nonfiction-loving, lyric essay-lauding Geek Speak.

The electric passion of a writer who explores his subject and material without allegiance to normative literary boundaries is a drug to me. David Shields, Nick Flynn, Steven Church, Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Judith Kitchen—these are my heroes. Their common refrain approaches the anti-brand in its commitment to artistic integrity.

Shields went as far as to define the function of art as an attempt to bridge the gap between separate consciousnesses. He expressed that literary nonfiction is a framing device to foreground thought, producing clear thinking about mixed feelings. Lucid deconstruction which results in nurturing active reading.

As a writer who often has a hard time locating my own writing on the genre wheel, I appreciated the emphasis on loyalty to serious and unflinching exploration of material above pedantic allegiance to facts and formalized story-telling.

Borrowing from poetry, the idea of enjambment—of juxtaposing one thing with another in a way that’s unique to a particular consciousness—as an invitation to the reader’s deeper thought patterns and sensibilities encourages, in my humble opinion, a fundamentally intimate connection with the audience.

So with a 6:35 flight tomorrow, I’m tucking myself in early—all done with AWP Atlanta, and happily sated with my version of bliss. I’m counting on some vivid electric dreams tonight.

atlanta

In the interest of balance I played hooky from AWP for three hours and walked uptown to Piedmont and the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Blue skies, 70 degree temps and all that Southern architecture between the hotel and the garden.

When I asked the concierge if it was possible to walk there, she sort of squished up her face in surprise. “I mean, are there sidewalks all the way?” I said.

“um, yes. But it’s a little, um, far.”

“Two-and-a-half miles?”

“Yes ma’am.”

Cake. It completely escaped me to ask if the walk was safe—for a woman alone in broad daylight, how could it not be? It never occurs to me, actually, to consider the discomfort, danger or lack of wisdom—beyond being nailed by a vehicle—in walking anywhere. Living in Portland, where I have always felt 100% safe on foot, walking anywhere in the city is a usually only accompanied by the question: to bring an umbrella, or to not bring an umbrella?

Walking the first mile or so from the hotel gave me pause though. Not because it was any more or less dangerous than Portland, but because, in my geo-centric arrogance, I forgot that when Dorothy’s not in Kansas, things look different. She doesn’t necessarily blend into the culture and the story and the archetype. Dorothy, in her yoga pants and tailored jacket and pale, freckled skin was the oddball-on-the-street.

And—the initial dozen or so blocks I encountered zero women walking alone. There were several pairs of women, and a few groups of women, but no solo female venturers. I started to feel really self-conscious. I started to notice my whiteness, too. There were no white people on foot. Not one. That shouldn’t matter, right? Is it racist to be so self-conscious about one’s whiteness? Especially as I walked toward a boisterous group of African American men. I averted my eyes in nervousness. In racist nervousness. Then I thought, “No, I’m not going to keep looking at the ground, because I’m being rude and projecting all this discomfort and, y’know, fuck it. I’m just going to smile, like I would smile at anyone I passed in Portland. I’m going to give that group of African American males my biggest Portland smile.” Which I did. And they smiled back. There were six of them, and five of those guys smiled benignly. Just one of them did a lude thing with his tongue, but maybe (I told myself) he had something in his mouth he was trying to get rid of.

It seems sort of shameful to be this uptight and reflective about walking in a city where my color and probably my standard of living is anomalous. Especially on the heels of having attended a seminar where one of the panelists talked about the profound grace of connecting to the consciousness of another human. I don’t always want that connection, after all. Sure, when I’m reading a book and someone’s spilling it, yeah, that’s nice. But not when I’m walking down the street. Walking down the street I tend to fear confronting the consciousness of my fellow man. Particularly when I’m sucked up into my own flawed consciousness.

Okay, so I had to confront my flagrant racist, narcissistic self, and, once in the Garden, yet another flaw unfolded—my Philistine-like indifference to one of nature’s most cherished flowers. The Atlanta Botanical Garden boasts a world-renowned orchid collection and the current exhibit in the exalted greenhouse has combined this with an internationally acclaimed artist’s delicate, detailed glass orchid sculptures. The script calls for oohs and aahs when you enter the greenhouse—the perfect white blooms, the magenta ones, all set against tropical plants and mist and humidity and all that’s missing is a Phillip Glass score.

Instead, I found myself drawn to the gnarled tree trunks and hanging willowy tendrils of foliage. The humming tropical insects and chirping birds and overwhelming fecundity—so sensual and Southern and succulent. The collections of glass and real orchids set out like my Grandmother’s crystal under display cases or peeking from behind signs that, in faux whimsy, begged the viewer not to touch by deliberately crossing out those verbs of tactile invitation, well, I trotted right by ‘em. Too much perfection for this gal. Makes me nervous.

So—where does that leave me? If I’m too nervous to sidle up next to Southern humanity, and too unappreciative to be awed by exotic spectacle, am I a lost cause? Am I a faker in an authentic land? Am I just an old gal immune to new tricks?

That said, I completely get that Georgia is a ripe peach. There’s so much life, so much history, so many stories. I hate to think I’m getting in the way of channeling the stories. That’s why I came, after all. For the stories.

we interrupt the AWP conference

..for shameless self-promotion. My golfing article is on-line (and in the print version of) The Northwest Women's Journal.

Yup, I golfed. And I plan to again. I think. But not today. Today I’m going to absorb more AWP and, if I stick to plan, go explore Atlanta a bit, ‘cause it’s a sunny day—the tornadoes and thunderstorms of yesterday are long gone, and I could use a good walk.

AWP day one part two

I am with my people. Yay! The stew of language lovers, wordsmiths, intellectuals and freaks. AWP has ‘em all.

So. Attended an interesting seminar this afternoon with the catchy title: Losing the Linebreaks. It was a forum of poets dealing with their guilt at having written (and been paid for writing) nonfiction. Scandalous!

I’ve attended the inverse of this seminar many times. It’s called “How to steal from poets and approach the lyric register” or “How to put soul into your prosaic prose.” Nonfiction writers huddled above the magic lamp, looking for their turn to rub it and witness the Genie of Verse. O, the enjambment! The cadence! The obtuse-yet-profound!

Genre-bending from the poet’s perspective is a lot more sober. (As one would expect.) The seminar took on a bit of a support group tone with panelists wringing their hands in Faustian angst: “How to we deal with the guilt of it all—writing accessibly?”

The through-line was, of course, Baby needs a new pair of shoes. Similar sentiment bespake in my earlier post, yes? And then, heavens, what if you actually enjoy it? Writing for the mediocre reader? What then?

I found the seminar amusing, and, in turn, delightful. One panelist in particular, Jennifer Hecht, summed up the quantitative nature of writing time thus: “You’d make more money if you gave that afternoon of poetry-writing to prose.”

Ay.

(And, as a side note, she also, as a devout atheist, had the most interesting pro-religion statement ever: “Its value is in being the repository for behaviors that allow people to transcend.” Okay, okay, maybe she was my favorite because she’s a scientist-historian sorta empiricist and I’ve got this fabulous science teacher boyfriend and I’m totally prejudiced in favor of the scientific explanation for everything all of a sudden. Whatever.)

At one point during the seminar a disgruntled audience member stood up and begged to differ after a panelist seemingly dissed the personal essay as “easily replicated” and therefore never under consideration for publication in the small press she edits. That’s when it got fun.

You got the purists standing up: “make sacrifices in other ways, stay pure with your writing. Don’t sully the well with normative drivel.” And then, in response, the few non-poets: “What makes you think writing poetry is harder than writing prose?” Food fight at AWP! Can’t wait ‘til tomorrow!

AWP day one

I’ve been at the AWP conference for, like, 24 hours so far and half that time I’ve been “working.” Such a dilemma this when-to-illuminate-the-off-duty-sign question.

I’m here to immerse and absorb and ponder, but am pre-occupied, as always, with paid client work. As a project-oriented independent contractor with hourly billing, every time I illuminate the don’t-flag-me-down sign I’m just saying no to my ever-increasing mortgage payment!

Apropos to this, one of the two, count ‘em two, seminars I’ve attended thus far included a “balancing your writing against other concerns” component. One of the panelists—the token purist—said, “There’s always going to be the need to make money, that’s a given. If you’re really a writer, you make time to write.” Period.

A few years back my friend Monica Drake and I pitched our “Fueled by Distraction” workshop to AWP. They declined. But they shouldn’t have. I think I need to revisit some of the materials we used to demonstrate how to use the distractions presented by every day concerns as fuel (as opposed to barriers) to satisfying creative work.

Paramount to the success of this method, as I recall, is how to mine nuggets of possibility from quotidian detritus. I’m talking how to turn a library overdo notice into a short essay. Or how you can, say, leverage negotiating tactics employed when aligning the needs of a client with the aesthetic concerns of a graphic designer into lovely, conflict-ridden dialogue! Maybe the workshop should be renamed: How to step out of your busy life and become God. Hm.

More later…I have to go absorb.

embroidery, embellishment and maybe a little arrogance?

Friday I attended a robust seminar on the opportunities and pitfalls of literary nonfiction. I’ve visited these rooms before: my graduate degree is in creative nonfiction. The “contract with the reader” spiel is deeply ingrained in my personal protocol.

The presenters: Lauren Kessler, Mary Roach, Erik Larson and Ted Conover, were stalwart practitioners of the conscious and deliberate choice to keep the “f word” at bay. And by “f” word, of course I mean fiction. The dark side. The lie that tells the truth truer.

Oppositional to this stance is the “in service of the emotional truth” argument, where embroidery and embellishment, as well as the construct of composite characters and wrinkled chronology in the design of creative nonfiction serve to build the story-telling arc, duping the reader into a more absolute truth than he might get by following the real trail of breadcrumbs. But then, that’s why God invented fiction, right? Let’s discuss.

Fiction writers have a history of being suspicious of memoirists, biographers and creative nonfiction writers who fondle the truth with the tools of fictional story-telling. Especially since it’s long been acknowledged that nonfiction sells quicker than does literary fiction. My two years at Antioch LA were replete with incendiary debate about this:

CNF writer: Okay, so I didn’t exactly have a sink full of dirty dishes on the day in which the scene is set, I did the next day…so what’s the big deal?

F writer: The big deal is that you’re lazy. You have a point to make, and you bend the truth to make it. Work a little harder to make that point and stay on the side of truth, or make a different point.

As a person who’s written plenty of both types of prose, I can say that I’ve straddled the fence on this for years. Reason being, both types of writing rely heavily on narrative fashioning. I’m not talking about straight journalism or biography here, I mean the more blurry-edged land of literary nonfiction: memoir, essay, and immersion journalism. Because the lens we use is flawed with our own sensibilities, we remember dialogue, scene and events through a multi-textured filter. It’s impossible, as human beings, not to have at least a modicum of an agenda as we process our lives. So we take this flawed raw material, and then put it in the narrative machine to make it into a story. And that’s the point at which we have to develop a serious bullshit meter for solipsism.

But it ain’t that easy. Part of the addictive magic inherent in writing is getting these little peeks at God. Or what you think is God at the moment of the witnessing. This process often leads the creative nonfiction writer away from “what about” to “what if.” The dark side. Staying firmly fixed in “what about” demands an enormous amount of discipline. It can be a huge buzz kill. “What if” is the sexy idea that comes a calling, and in fact, is one of the reasons most of us do what we do. It’s the line of flight—the sweet spot, the muse.

The night before this seminar, I went to Arts and Lectures where Suzan-Lori Parks regaled us with her personal journey to “entertaining all of her far out ideas.” Turns out, she was derailed as a high school student. Dissuaded from literary pursuits because she was a crappy speller. Now, I’m not taking anything away from this woman’s delightful performance—she had the audience in her palm, but, she drifted into a somewhat (I believe) unconsciously dismissive stance as she submerged into the “we writers are freaks, God bless us” space. I know that space, and I’ve been playing that card for years. We are often at odds with the normative world when we try and squeeze some juice from society’s value machine. It becomes a compensatory thing, this alignment against the corporations, the man, the rules of the road. But part of her back-story was that she briefly turned to science as a “fall back.” Her anecdote was embroidered with the vision of her (she’s a dread-locked, free-spirited, hand-gesturing speaker) having to suffer through chemistry lab: the white jacket, the goggles, etc… The audience at this point was supposed to be appalled at how an off-the-mark, insensitive comment from a high school teacher nearly caused her to live a life completely opposite of the creative, fabulous literary one she eventually pursued.

Just so happens that I had a companion at this event. My new squeeze: a chemist. A man who chose to be a scientist and a teacher (another profession Parks briefly dissed during Q & A), and is in no way the embodiment of the “type” she was setting up as the antithesis of everything fabulous.

I really don’t know if I would have been uncomfortable had it not been for the fact that I’d dragged the unsuspecting boyfriend to this event only to have him glimpse a little bit at the underside of my world. Would I have even acknowledged that slip into solipsistic lip service if I didn’t have him as a filter?

Words are powerful. Stories are powerful. Wordsmithing carries a certain amount of accountability. We are treated to, and like to think that we offer, occasionally, those peeks at God. But sometimes we’re merely offering peeks at our own untended, unmitigated and unevolved dark sides. Fictional or not.

wedding expansiveness to minimalism

My second love, after writing, is anthropology. The cultural kind, not the digging for bones kind. I remember taking a class once on indigenous tribes, and I wrote a paper comparing the warring aspects of these tribes to modern day football games. I was trying on objectivity, divorcing myself from editorial content, staying with the facts, only the facts.

I like this sort of dispassioned writing: analyzing trends, customs, practices and norms from a sort of scientific perspective. Keeping emotion and judgment out of it. I explored this type of writing through the lens of fiction when I practiced minimalism. "Recording angel," was the way we put it in Tom Spanbauer's class. Get as small as you can. Search for God via a trail of inquiry that propels itself by observation, not subjective discernment.

My day job, conversely, is all about agenda. It's an overt attempt to connect emotionally with the customer by massaging the senses. There is a much more brash and expansive approach to this writing, psychologically. You want to be where the action is. Finger on the pulse. Resonance and Zeitgeist.

The process by which I create "successful" ad copy refutes everything I strive for in my art. It's goal-driven and chirpy. It asks something of the audience. The relationship this sort of copy has with objects is inverse to the relationship objects have with minimalism. Simply presenting objects is the way into the subconscious in minimalistic fiction. In ad copy, the subconscious is played as a way to gain perceived value for a particular object.

On the subject of popular culture's relationship with advertising, The Oregonian's TV columnist Peter Ames Carlin had a spot-on harangue on the hype and crusade displayed by Sunday's Super Bowl extravaganza.

Advertising is an amazing reflection of culture. An anthropological study without parallel. Art, if you follow this hypothesis, could be viewed as study of the anti-culture. A response to the emotional whacking we sign up for just by getting out of bed each morning.

My own personal belief is that to be a healthy member of this world, you need a firm foot in both camps. You need to understand, and, yes, immerse yourself in, to a certain extent, the normative playground. But you also have to know how and when to pull yourself out of the frenzy. Become an anthropologist. Think for yourself. In order to do that, it's become increasingly essential for people to read fiction and poetry, see plays, go to the galleries, and, especially, pursue some sort of creative engagement of their own.

committing to a romance

I have a manuscript to write. And here I am, blogging instead of writing it. Yeah, yeah, I know.

Here’s the thing: I have the emotional infrastructure to pull off commitment to a project, but the attention span of a hummingbird. Bright colors? Fragrant interjections? I’m the queen of short ‘n sweet. Which is why I have such a patchwork career life, I ‘spose.

This temperament (or dysfunction) works well for me on one level with the historical romance project, in that there is this dovetail relationship between research and narrative development. I can’t seem to go more than two sentences without having to look up something, or make sure this building or that monument existed in the landscape upon which I’ve built the scene. But the “romance” element of this project requires digging in my heels and staying in one place until I’ve generated some sort of resonance. And I tend to run away from resonance, damn it!

Ugh. It's one of those art-and-life conundrums!

freelancing and the dangers of deadline joie de vivre

The life of a freelancer can be a little Beat the Clock at times—particularly at COB on deadline day. It’s a little like preparing a Thanksgiving meal: you gather, prep and cook, everything motoring along, until you realize that all the side dishes are ready, but the thermometer in the turkey leg reads 125º. Or you forgot cranberry sauce. Or, oops, you just dropped the dang apple pie. There it is, on the floor in smooshy clumps.

That’s when you reach into your back pocket for two things: experience and faith. Experience: you bring out more crackers, cheese and wine until your turkey’s cooked. And, because you always have extra pies, one less is no big deal—or decide on plan B: canned fruit for dessert! (Everyone’s so full after the meal it doesn’t matter anyway—especially if you’ve kept the wine glass full.) Joining experience is that little voice that cries out, it’s all good! (i.e. faith), despite evidence to the contrary.

And so it is with deadline day. One thing experience tells you is that the clock ain’t gonna stop, and last minute crises will occur, necessitating the Murphy’s Law-esque formula: divide the time you think you have by two, and subtract 25 minutes from that. Then, you call in favors from your muse. The lightning bolt of insight or the Good Transitions Fairy.

I now have several monthly writing gigs, each with its own indelible deadline. The last half of any given month is a crazy juggling act, and the first half is crash-and-burn time. And like many freelancers, I’ve developed a bit of an addiction to the chemicals that arise from frantic, last minute ace-in-the-hole-seeking. Trouble is, the excitement raises the bar on joie de vivre expectation, and makes the quotidian workhorse of slowly tapping out a novel almost insufferable.

I guess what I’m admitting to here is that unless I mitigate the mania with a little bootstrap discipline, those novels are going to grow cobwebs in my hard drive. I've got to start pulling meat off the carcass and make some turkey soup. Or something.

on being a grasshopper

This week I learned how to Hoop. I learned that Hooping is a verb, that HoopShine is a business and that I have an Inner HoopGirl. It was refreshing to learn that I have an Inner HoopGirl, but it led me to analyze, a bit, my capacity for fun. And also, question what exactly “fun” is, and whether or not I actively seek it, or just receive it when it comes my way.

One thing I did know about myself before going to Hoop class is that I’m a grasshopper (as opposed to an ant). My grasshopperliness manifests in work-avoidance, impulsiveness and spacing out when I should be paying attention. That’s on the con side. On the pro side, being a grasshopper means I’ve kept wrinkles and migraines and alcoholism at bay better than many gals my age. Being a grasshopper also, I believe, has served to fuel an overwhelmingly optimistic outlook and a faith that there’s more shinola than shit in the world.

Now, this might sound like a contradiction to my last entry where I blathered on about hating New Age platitudes that feed complacency, and gosh, I guess it is. Sort of. You see, I wasn’t born a control freak. (Nobody is.) When I look at childhood photos of myself I realize that I was a daydreamy girl from the word go. A spacier expression you will not find. I was born a grasshopper! Drawn to hedonistic, sensual practices: horseback riding, rolling around in the grass. Napping under the sun. Playing guitar, reading books, painting, inventing, writing…such a happy grasshopper was I.

Somewhere along the line though I realized that my grasshopperly ways had to be mitigated with industry. With adolescence came a bolus of diminished self-worth, and very, very gradually, I started to become an ant. I became, in young adulthood, a very proficient little ant. I filled my days with hard work and made list after list after list. I got pretty dang tense, too. One day I looked around and suddenly I was in a colony of ants! Yuck! Just like that, I started being a grasshopper again.

This idea more than anything explains my role in relationships. When I start feeling too ant-like, I crave the company of grasshoppers, and once the grasshoppers overwhelm me with their Peter Pan spritely sloth and selfishness, I revert back to my ant shell, marching once again toward that anthill of industry—and self-hatred.

Now I’m not suggesting that ants are bad, Good Heavens! We’d all be swallowed up or bashed apart in the entropy of it all but for the ants. No judgment. But, I never will be an easy ant, and I have a hard time accepting that I’m a grasshopper. Which is why I need to continue explore my Inner HoopGirl.

I’m at the beach right now, after a couple hours of playing in the sand, watching my son and his friend recreate an abandoned driftwood fort I’m back in the house with my tool of industry. I brought my new Hoop, though, so maybe I should put this thing away and search for that HoopGirl.

alignment

Everything’s connected. Law of Attraction. Manifest your destiny. I’ve always hated that crap. That New Age babble. The reason I’m averse has to do with my wholesale impatience with limited accountability and anti-intellectualism. My thinly veiled intellectual elitism not-with-standing, self-helpy, NewAgey platitudes reek of laziness to me. Complacency. And, under certain circumstances, nobody demonstrates laziness and complacency more than moi—so yes, I’m responding to my shadow in a very j’accuse sorta way, too.

But there’s another side to all that, and it has to do with control. I’m just going to say it: Hello, my name is Suzy, and I’m a control freak. The very idea of “let go and let God” makes me want to smack someone. I’m a great believer in life being about puzzle solving. Or not solving, per se, but working toward solving. The “going” as one of my writing teachers once put it. In making connections that invite light through the cracks, one must engage, on a bunch of different levels—and I’m just now beginning to get that many of those levels aren’t visible, or readily accessible. Ergo, God.

Some beautiful choreography this last week demonstrated this for me. The various hap-hazard writing projects in which I’m immersed held hands for a brief glimmer. Yoga folks play this out in Kundalini, a way to tap into connectedness through stillness. Catholics solemnly shuffle up to Communion. Quakers take turns talking in the context of resonant association. In astronomy, they call this sysygy. For me, my articles and stories presented to one another, drawing from a communal bath of some sort. History, fitness, love, dance, horseback riding, community. These themes begged, built and borrowed from one another, often creating time in the zone. The muse of it all. A very productive week.

And, none of it felt controlled. I had three whole days of not wanting to smack anyone, even!

who tells the story?

Had a very helpful workshop last night—a brainstorming session regarding the narrator of my historical tale. Turned out Chuck (Palahniuk) was the only person able to make shop, so the two of us put our heads together. I read the opening chapter, first person, Elisabeth, set in Bad Ischl the morning after Elisabeth turns the Emperor’s head, and dashes her older sister’s plans to marry the guy.

I thought the opening was pretty expository, but in keeping with the genre in terms of voice and tension. Chuck, I think, found it too expository and self-conscious, and suggested immediately that I choose someone else to tell Elisabeth’s story. A lady-in-waiting or a boot-polisher. Someone of lowly status. I, of course, resisted this. Initially. When I outlined the book a year-and-a-half ago, I thought Sisi’s loyal lady-in-waiting, the Countess Marie Festetics, would be the perfect narrator, but then it became problematic because she didn’t come on the scene until the Empress was well into the marriage, and she doesn’t really have an obviously compelling story in her own right. How to tell all that romantic, tumultuous engagement/wedding stuff? With Elisabeth a mere 15 years of age when betrothed, there was a real opportunity to set an arc point if I told that part of the story through her naïve point-of-view.

But, said Chuck, remember how successful Amadeus was because it was told through Salieri’s pov? Naturally, he’d bring up the success of one of my favorite movies!

In Amadeus, the story of Mozart is compelling because it is told through the vengeful voice of his nemesis, who, confined to a loony bin, offers a filter with its own tensions and arc.

Then there’s the very successful “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” wherein Vermeer’s model tells the painter’s story, and her part in it.

Yes, yes, Chuck is absolutely right. Damn it! I have to tell the story from an alternate pov, through someone with her own story and risks and agenda.

That person, it turns out, is Ida Ferenczy, Elisabeth’s Hungarian “reader” and best friend. Ida comes on the scene in 1864, a very politically auspicious time for the Austrian empire. And Ida, who is a Hungarian woman just up a notch from peasantry, turns out to be the liaison between Hungary’s political aspirations and the Hapsburgs’ ultimate role in the creation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ida is taken into Elisabeth’s confidence, and becomes her inseparable girlfriend, as well as instrument of clout.

The trick will be to pace the backstory in without glaring seam, as Ida isn’t around for the first ten years of the Imperial marriage. I have a few ideas about this, but I think I need to begin with an obvious opening scene, Ida and Elisabeth upon their first meeting, when Elisabeth is still completely iconic and “at the height of her beauty.”

the empress

I’ve been pondering, ruminating and scratching my head as how to spend my passion lately. Passion for the page, that is. I have two novels in the works, and seem to have stalled out on both of them. And I’ve just now discovered the reason why I’ve lost momentum for my current projects. In a word: plot.

Though I have little problem diving into scene, character and dialogue, the idea of weaving a satisfying story out of these elements has always left me at a loss.

Conversely, when the story already exists, as in journalism or a creative nonfiction piece, I seem to be more successful teasing the strands into coherency. Ergo—dilemma du jour.

Years ago, on a month-long stay in Prague, I revisited my birth city, Vienna, and strode down a vague and foggy memory lane. The summer before last I followed it up with a more detailed and strategic visit. This visit included a tour of Hofburg which stimulated an interest in the life of Empress Elisabeth, a controversial figure in late 19th century and fin de siècle Vienna, when the Hapsburgs were going tits up.

While there, I outlined an historic novel based on the Empress's unhappy to marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph, which included one of the most tempestuous mother-daughter-in-law relationships ever. It’s the Princess Di story a hundred years earlier, back when monarchy were more than mere figureheads.

Empress Elisabeth (called Sisi by her family and beloved subjects) was known as “The People’s Princess” (sound familiar?) and was scorned by Viennese uppercrust and revered by peasants—particularly those in Hungary, a country she favored above Austria and its stifling court-prescribed routines. Her husband, the emperor, held her in high esteem, but that didn’t stop him from indulging openly in myriad infidelities. Meanwhile, Sisi became obsessive, anorexic and crippled by vanity, turning her back on most things “royal” in favor of unpopular charity events, rest cures in spa towns, and horseback riding. And, to give the only fitting ending to a story chock full of scandal, war and family dysfunction, Sisi was assassinated. (by a precursor to the paparazzi, perhaps?)

Anyway, this is, you must admit, a plot to die for. I’ve unearthed my notes and research materials, and the project is well underway. I’m channeling Elisabeth, and I’m telling this Bohemian Empress’s story through the lens of fiction, using all the goodies I’ve amassed lo these 15 years of studying the craft. I know that you all wish me luck!

sweating in the cold, cold city

Beautiful blue skies here in Portland today! A dusting of snow and happy home-from-school kids, so intstead of burying myself in client work, I'm engaging in bits and pieces. Blog-writing being one.

I am quite pleased with the inaugural Sweat in the City column, which will appear monthly in the Northwest Women's Journal. It should be online soon, but meanwhile, I took the liberty of testing our new scanner and reproducing the hard-copy herein.


Here's the essay, featuring me in my pj's, reading Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.

Lazy, phlegmatic and happy enough...but, what has plagued me most of my life is the way low energy encourages more of the same. Though sipping wine and sinking into a good book while a fire (particularly a fire produced by igniting a fake log) glows sleepily in the background is comforting and inviting, it tends to encourage flacidity as opposed to vibrant, energized spark.

I'm happiest when I'm producing. In particular, I'm happiest when I'm producing something I didn't set out to produce. In order to reach the point where the muse takes over, or the zone, or whatever you wish to call it, endorphins must be part of the mix. Those byproducts of sweat, elevated heart rate, and neurology that's been bolstered by physical engagement.

Take the other day. My head pounding with the endpoint of free-floating anxiety, I was dying to nap. Instead, I went to Pilates. It was sooooooo hard to not talk myself out of going. A Nike moment for sure, where I made myself not think about it. Five minutes into the Reformer (after the dreaded 100s and before the knee stretches), my headache dissolved. I left the studio an hour later refreshed and invigorated and full of enough energy to actually follow up on client business that I'd been dreading. And I did so with a smile in my voice instead of the bitchy tone I would have had had I not worked out.

So, enough proselytizing. Happy writing, and happy moving.

aonther one bites the dust

Today a good friend of mine stopped by my office unexpectedly to deliver the devastating news that his partner of 14 years is unhappy in their relationship and wants to move out.

“All around me,” he said, “long-term couples are splitting up. Just never thought it would happen to us!” And then, because the guy still had an ounce of irony in him (but just an ounce), he said, “Why couldn’t it be something simple, like cancer. Something that would bring us closer!”

I hate when my friends split up. It’s a more intense version of the oh dear! I feel when I notice that a restaurant or shop is closing its doors. Even though I was born in a German-speaking country, I don’t think I cotton to the Schadenfreude too easily. I tend to take the failures of others personally. Evidence that the world is one big rug waiting to be slipped from underneath, sending victim after victim ass-over-teakettle.

I asked my friend (who’s a successful, published writer) if he was unable to write during this crisis. He looked at me as though I just asked him if he’d bought a 357 yet, with which to blow his brains out.

What he answered would have been exactly my answer a year ago when I left my long-term relationship. “It’s the only way I know how to be with this. I’m writing like crazy, but fictionalizing the situation. Exploring all of this through fictional characters is the only way I know how to get through it.”

And, it must be said, this sort of writing is not journaling, exactly. One doesn’t write what he knows, or write feelings down and attempt to parse them and parse them until an epiphany leaps up and grabs the jugular. No. It’s about inching through the morass in the dark, following a mostly-hidden depth of inquiry, and banishing anything anything that presents as an epiphany. What you’re looking for is the thing that scares the shit out of you. You’re blindly whipping your stick back and forth to arrive at the monster. Shame, basically. An epiphany subverted. Something you’ll turn away from at first.

Writing fiction is the only way I know to court clarity. It’s the lonely heart’s version of 12-Stepping—giving your story up to a power greater than yourself. A character who you keep following through that dank chasm until the walls spread a bit, and granules of light mix with the pitch.

unkiss me: the edited excerpt

Here is the edited excerpt of unkiss me.

As previously discussed, I've decided that the momentum of the novel rests in its unflinching dissection of the characters' preoccupations with sex and worthiness, their capacity for finding love despite this, and a peek at how, as voyeurs, we've developed new media for legitimizing our obsessions.

some leonard cohen lyrics

"Anthem"
By the Genius, Leonard Cohen

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government --
signs for all to see.

I can't run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring ...

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.

silence

Ah, the first day of a new year. All the possibilities: redemption, promises, optimism, fresh starts. All the salads I’ll eat. All the crunches I’ll struggle through. All the pages I’ll write.

The pages I’ll write. Yeah.

Yesterday, I capped off a month of pure indulgence with more of the same. Starting at dawn after a night of far too much fun, I delivered some friends (complete with a vomiting child) to the airport, then—off to my daughter’s pet sitting job (she’d trundled off to the beach for New Year’s leaving her responsibilities to her co-dependent mama) to walk two tugging Jack Russells (it took them far too long to do their collective businesses), followed by some preparation for a photo shoot involving a golf club and many, many golf balls I could only sometimes hit, and mostly badly, to a 3 ½ hour hike with my best pal, followed by dinner that was far too delicious, and then back to those tugging Jack Russells and their reluctance to shit (I think they figured out that once the diaper-genie smelling poop bag comes out, it’s back to the utility room in the townhouse).

That was yesterday. What a fabulous day. I crawled into bed around 11, and once the fireworks started—reds and whites and blues exploding out my bedroom window—I dozed off, blissfully alone. Got that? Blissfully alone. Truly.

So. Today. I staved off the impulse to give into my desire for Twinkies, and their dark cousin, the Ring Ding, in favor of several English muffins liberally spread with cream cheese. Topped off with a pot of French roast. I curled up with The Road in an easy chair and four hours went by in a flash.

I took in an afternoon film, The Painted Veil, which was a terrific redemption movie. I wandered around downtown Portland with no destination in mind. I did the laundry and answered a few e-mails. But, aside from when walking the constipated Jack Russells (during which I let out a few audible f-words as they twined their leashes around me repeatedly), and phone calls to each of my children, I spoke with nobody the whole day. Almost a monk-like experience.

The best part about not talking is that I had more time for listening. Terry Gross reran her interview with one of my favorite songwriters, Leonard Cohen, who is unflinchingly honest and articulate about passion, yearning and regret. And I could almost hear Cormac uttering some of the breathtaking gems in his book, such as “This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man’s brains out of his hair. That is my job.”

It’ll be great if I can commit to writing more consistently satisfying prose, but, who the hell knows, right? I’ll take what I can get. And today it was the space and time to treat myself to the words of other artists.

confessions of a book slut

Before Google became the Kleenex of research, there was the library. I logged many a happy, lost weekend at the library, over the years. Scavenger-hunting and blazing trails spiked with non-sequiturs.

The tactile practice of coveting books and periodicals chock full of ideas and passion, and then carrying those lovely tomes in a stack, under my arm or, when the bulk grew too cumbersome, cradling the books with both arms, was a type of gluttony I rarely felt guilty about.

But, alas, like so many other writers, I rarely venture into those hallowed halls these days, now that most magazines and facts are so easily accessed via Internet without leaving my easy chair.

Recently, I had a retro afternoon. A reunion with the 3rd floor (north) of the Central Library. I ventured into the stacks for books on a specific activity, and much to my pleasure, was treated to two-and-a-half shelves of material on the subject. Giddy with finder’s glee, I investigated material for another project, and found several books on the second floor, in the art stacks.

I left the library with an armload of meaty books—some of the coffee table variety, even! I took them all to bed with me, too. Such indulgence! I pored over one after the other until I dozed off, finally, after midnight.

I love waking up with a reading hangover!

out with the old...

You just have to love a Christmas tree that fits inside a yard debris bag, right? Damn, I’m so happy to have all this behind me. My oldest son (who turned 20 yesterday), just zoomed off to his University town, and that means the holidays are officially over.

Today my writing group broke with tradition, and we met in the morning. It was a lovely way to start the day—centered around story, craft. On the heels of our group, I tinkered some with Unkiss Me, which was rather unsettling, because I’m working on a chapter that focuses on unpacking a particular aspect of male anatomy. You know which aspect I’m talking about, I trust.

In revving up the sex, I’m getting pretty concrete. Read: there are no throbbing members and heaving bodices. No wink-wink innuendos. Rather, I’m exploring sexuality under a microscope, from a variety of perspectives.

I have a great resource for this, too. The Joy of Writing Sex by Elizabeth Benedict. For the remainder of my “downtime,” before regular life resumes on January 2nd, I’m going to set up my laboratory and get busy. Namaste.

the day after

Christmas was a long, slow ride through hell. Beginning, even, with the goddamn eggs Benedict (completely forgot the Canadian bacon). What is that Bukowski line? “It’s not the big things that send a man to the mad house...”

Navigating the chasm teeming with loneliness and failure was exhausting and heartbreaking. I now get why people kill themselves during the holidays.

And yet, there was no way around it. My seven-year-old was 300 miles away, out scrambling cliffs and celebrating Christmas with his father and his father’s friends. And trying to orchestrate reunion, just like those twins in Parent Trap. He called me a couple of times, finishing his conversation with: “Papa really wants to talk to you!” And meanwhile, my ex-husband had carefully removed himself for the duration of the phone call but was told: “Mama really wants to talk to you!”

And then there was: “Are you going to come out here? I miss you so, so much.” And his litany of parting shots: “Miss you, love you, miss you, love you…” OCD runs in the family, so I’m trying to figure out if my little boy is blurting this mantra with quantifying rules, worried that if he misses a ‘love you’ I will die.

That my ex-husband continues to hope that our divorce is a temporary condition was problematic as well. His sentimental, beseeching voice. The sweet talk. The memories. Fifteen years of tumultuously loving this man, and writing about that love: I didn’t just divorce a husband, I banished a muse.

My guilt and self-hatred was in full swing all day. Not only was I questioning my marital dissolution, but many of my recent coping mechanisms, also. The solace-seeking, diversional, semi self-destructive impulses I’ve employed to get me out of hell—even if just for an hour or two. But everything’s closed on Christmas.

Except the movie house.

I went to see the French thriller Bridesmaid, and I was the only person there. My usual sure-fire antidote for torturous self-slaying failed me, and I sat in the cavernous theater aware mostly of the empty seats around me. Earlier, I’d taken a walk through the park and happened by great clots of families healthily striding, their cohesive chit-chat settled on my ears like wind chimes. It was pleasant, until it started competing with the abnegating voice in my head.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t have options. I turned down offers of companionship throughout the day mainly because, even though I wanted to jump off a bridge, I sensed that getting through this Christmas alone might lead to a cure.

Where it brought me in the short run, was to poetry. I pulled one of the poison spears from my chest and fashioned it into a bad poem. Concretizing free-floating self-loathing by thrusting it into form actually was a great exercise. And probably healthier than the two hours I spent on the phone with my ex-husband as Christmas turned into the day after Christmas.

tradition

A decade or so ago, my father was married to a crazy woman who left him for someone she met in a chat room. I think the chat room concerned lhasa apsos, but it could have been mastiffs. Anyway, she got a bunch of his dough and most of his retirement, and we lost a colorful, brilliant and somewhat diabolical relative.

As evil as she was, she was the best gift-giver ever. Her ability to crawl inside someone’s soul was part of how she undid people, but the talent, when she didn’t use it for treachery, supplied us with presents that still, ten, fifteen years later, hit the highest of marks for form and function, both.

Case in point, my Joy of Cooking, which I consult on every single holiday and dinner party I host. Tomorrow is Christmas, and that means page 55, via page 130—hollandaise sauce and eggs Benedict, respectively.

The eggs Benedict thing involves all sorts of filial connective tissue. The ritual began on the morning of August 1^st, 1987, which was the last birthday of my first husband’s short life. He was 25, and my mother came to visit and prepared the dish, along with mimosas, and we indulged in our brunch while watching our little baby, Sam, crawl around the living room.

Over the years, the dish somehow jumped tracks and aligned with Christmas morning instead of birthdays, but I never could get that hollandaise to taste right without my mother’s help—that is until my dad’s crazy wife bestowed that cooking tome upon me.

The fabric of my family is somewhat tapestry-like (as opposed to, say, a sweater of Merino wool). Our rituals are abstract and accidental (like right now, my daughter has departed for a candlelight service with a friend, and my son and I have opted for the comforts of home, high-speed Internet and the fireplace), but tomorrow morning, by God, we’ll get out the blender, the butter, the eggs. A little lemon juice, pepper sauce, and a stained and dog-eared copy of Joy of Cooking, because some things you just can’t wing.

conundrum of the day

More trees today. More trails. I worked on a paragraph. Over and over I recast it, refined it. I am editing my novel and I am editing my life and I am trying to go against my whapping-paint-against-the-wall nature and take my time.

Practice impulse control.

Untangle, rest, check it out from a different angle.

All this flies in the face of my other objective, which is to have more fun. Lighten up. How can one go deep and lighten up at the same time?

Helmut and Erna and their legacy

The thought snuck up on me today, on this, yet another “shortest day of the year,” that I am only 20 years younger than my grandfather was when he died on the table during open heart surgery. I am 20 winter solstices away from that age. Sobering, but oddly, not in a bad way.

Meanwhile his wife, my grandmother, rots slowly in a nursing home. She is 94.

I think about them more and more, those two— my Oma and Opa. I think about them especially, having recently closed the book on an 11-year marriage.

When my sister and I were children, we spent many summers with our grandparents. They were Austrian immigrants, and their house (where my sister and her family now reside) was appointed with all manner of Viennese Bourgeois mixed with Tyrolean kitsch. The cut crystal. The gleaming Steinway. Shelf upon shelf of Hummels. The kitchen smelled of sour cherry jam spread on warm toast, and that smell mingled with oil paints and turpentine from my Oma’s back porch studio adjoining the kitchen. Separating a formal dining room from that studio stood a built-in, floor-to-ceiling teacup display case. On every conceivable occasion, it was my grandfather’s habit to present to his wife a fancy teacup and saucer.

My grandfather’s office was separated from the house by a garage, and at the noon hour you could hear the series of doors opening and closing as he made his way over for lunch. My grandmother would serve him a frankfurter, some brown bread. A little cucumber salad. Opa wolfed this down before striding over to the piano in the parlor, where he spent the remainder of his break time playing mostly original music. Stuff he’d spent decades composing, erasing, composing.

My grandfather was a physician by trade, but his artistic nature burst cholerically from every cell. He sketched, he wrote poetry. He built my sister and me a lavish, multi-story dollhouse with every miniature refinement found in their own home: little Victorian chairs, cabinets festooned with bric-a-brac. When my father, their only child, was a boy, the result of Opa’s obsessive handiwork was a railroad masterpiece spanning half the cellar. Not wanting to leave anything out, Opa fashioned forests and mountains. A village bisected by a paper mache creek. The railroad sat in grave disrepair during my childhood, finally becoming permanently disassembled by my sister and her husband just last year.

My grandmother was a temperamental hausfrau, ruled and defined by the degree to which she felt uncherished. Her sole creative outlet, painting pictures that became more and more abstract as she aged, was not embarked upon until she reached 50. Compelled by duty to engross herself in quotidian tasks she abhorred, she became as brittle as her teacup collection, over the years. And yet. And yet. At 94, she somehow continues to supply the necessary trickle of blood to her wounded heart.

That my grandparents had a horrible marriage intrudes vaguely on my recollections of them. (Much like the ever-present tinge of turpentine still permeates their house.) The sharp bickering between them, cast in German aspersions, is far less defining to me than their strong personalities. My grandfather clearly could not bear to spend time in the same room with his difficult wife—a woman who has outlived him by over 30 years, keeping the same middle-aged likeness of him in a gilt-frame within arm’s reach of her bedside. But still, I continue to think of them as a pair of bookends—Oma riding shotgun and Opa trying to escape.

So here, on yet another winter solstice day, I have more humanness than I can easily contain. I am feeling deeply part of a tribe, and less alone, actually, than usual. I feel weirdly connected to my dead grandfather, a man whose heart gave out from over-use. I feel, in turn, playful, adventurous, contemplative and, well, I’m just going to say it—sexy. It’s part unfettered liberation (hard won and playing, always, with guilt), and part flagrant gratitude. In short, I guess I just I’m just having a good day—even us dark, over-thinkers can have those now and again.

Addendum: On a solstice walk through Forest Park this afternoon, my grandfather's presence loomed even closer. That he would have loved the park, that he died decades before I moved to Portland, and that my grandmother, upon hearing that I'd moved to Oregon muttered only, "But Washington is so much more beautiful!" all seemed a harmonious and fitting alignment to my solo trudge. Oddly, a freshly fallen monolithic fir (the last storm sent this puppy crashing down over the path, to rest atop a tree that had fallen in a storm a couple of years ago) gave me pause. As did a brand new bench, memorializing someone young. The epitaph from RW Emerson read: "The measure of a life is not in its length, but in its depth."

the mighty winds

A storm blew through Portland the other day. Eighty-mile-an-hour gusts uprooted trees and splintered massive branches. Thousands of families lost power for days—hundreds in my neighborhood alone. For 24 hours, the Willamette Valley was cut off from points east and west by hurricane and then blizzard conditions in the Cascades and Coast Range.

Typically, winter in the Pacific Northwest is a long, slow, damp affair. One gray, soppy day after another, with the occasional sanguine burst of sun. Much the same as our population, come to think of it. We mellow, flannel-clad fern-dwellers, we like our microbrews and our bitter, dark coffee and our moss-flecked roofs. But every once in a while, we crack open and wreak havoc with the status quo. Unfortunately, much of our press has to do with scandal and misfortune—Tonya Harding, Bob Packwood, Neil Goldschmidt, hypothermic hikers. (My father loves to forward me e-mails linking to yet another Oregonian in disgrace, letting me know, I guess, that he’s keeping an eye out for me—or on me, perhaps?)

As a culture, we’re pretty young out here in the upper left. I’d like to think we’re still mulching our art. Building up compost to sustain generations of artistic fertility. We’re not as angst-ridden or intellectually nimble as our eastern counterparts; instead, we’re rather cautious and particular. Kinder, perhaps? Less convinced of our momentary authority?

I watch people a lot. Lately, I’ve been spying on families. Couples and their body language. Their roles as they march through town. Here’s what I’m noticing; the women are getting more frantic, and the men are becoming phlegmatic. Okay, okay, maybe I’m projecting. I’ll allow that that may be the case. But. Time after time, day after day, I see a little family embarking on, say, a bakery. The dad is carrying one of the children in his arms, while the mom is multi-tasking to beat the band. She orders, then explains to the whining kids why she ordered as she did. She procures the cutlery, the napkins. She hunts and gathers extra chairs from nearby tables. She flies around the room, leaping up from the table for cups of water or bar towels to mop up spills. Meanwhile, dad is trying to extract the kid from a front pack, or take off its parka, or keep the kid from tearing open yet another creamer. Dad looks war-weary. Exhausted. Okay, I’ll say it—downright catatonic.

Here’s a couple I witnessed on an elevator yesterday. It was one of those security elevators, where you have to insert your room card into a slot before the elevator will move. The woman was explaining all this to her clueless partner. He asked her if she had the room card. He’d forgotten his. He asked her if she remembered their room number, he did not. He asked her if she’d made reservations for dinner, and when. She attended each query with clear, measured answers, as though guiding a feeble-minded octogenarian.

My own son, on vacation from college, fell asleep with an empty saucepan of macaroni-and-cheese by his bed the other night. When he awoke, at noon, I offered a moderate amount of opprobrium, and asked him what his girlfriend thinks of his slacker behavior. I asked him what was up with these over-achieving women and their lackadaisical sweethearts. (His gf, by the way, is an 'A’ student, pre-med, speaks three languages fluently, and busies herself with all manner of domestic tasks—like cooking my son dinner and baking him pies—betwixt bouts of studying.)

“What’s the attraction?” I asked my son, with no rhetorical intent.

“I guess it helps them feel better about themselves,” my son mused, in all seriousness. He cited several examples—his Halo-playing poker pals seem to have found themselves in similarly fortunate circumstances.

But then again, I know my boy has come through in certain ways for his young woman. He is gentle, sweet and caring. Those dimples in his cheeks, that inability to be anything other than what he is. His overwhelming comfort with himself. All that calm-in-the-storm that exudes from his conservative push toward grace.

So therein lies my attraction to Portland, maybe? You can’t help but find balance here. The city is awash with mitigation. That, and tree debris.

eavesdrop of the day

Young woman talking to young man while waiting for an elevator:

Woman: I don't really get that expression 'bite me.'
Man: You don't?
Woman: Yeah, like when I'm really pissed off at someone, I'd like to bite them...not have them bite me.

it's coming on christmas

…they’re cuttin’ down trees.

In creating traditions which might, at some point, become my children’s oral history, I’m feeling my way, Braille-like, around the edges of common culture. Being agnostic, I have the pleasure of embracing it all, or none of it. Different years I’ve dipped into our Catholic heritage for music, incense and nativity. Sometimes the holiday finds us at the local progressive and predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Church (one year one of my kids had a role in a Christmas play there). We go to Chanukah parties. We attend holiday theatre. Occasionally we careen around all of it and opt for Christmas Day blockbusters, like Titanic.

This year, I’m all for minimalism. The excesses of the season just feel plain wrong to me. The other day my friend David invited me to a preview of a local Christmas production, Mars on Life: Susannah Mars. At intermission we sort of shrugged our collective shoulders eyeing each other for context. The show was okay, but somehow fell flat at inspiring any sort of emotion or resonance for either of us. David asked if I’d noticed a dearth of Christmas spirit about. Until that moment, I hadn’t thought of it that way. The usual lights were lit along the West Hills. The infamous martini glass, strands of colored baubles, lots of bare branches festooned in white twinkle.

But it was David’s feeling that there might be ennui, a down-spirit this year, and that this feeling might be tied to the protracted war and the global mess we can no longer be blind to.

Gulp.

I have to admit to a sense of things coming unraveled. Not just for me personally (though, that’s certainly been true of this past year), but for humanity, generally. Greed, fear, hate. It all abounds. Like three-year-old children, many of us begin to cling to the familiar, and embrace destructive patterns that keep the raw chaos of it all at bay. Perhaps we go on buying sprees, taking pleasure in holding a new jewel or piece of cashmere for just that period of time before new fades into repertoire.

But others search for meaning within their passions. This is potentially a great time for art. Art that is difficult to embrace, in particular, because it drives us to look at what we should be looking at, with a part of our humanity that feels somewhat dangerous. Now is the time, more than ever, to open our eyes, our hearts, our spirits. Eschew the predictable and well-trod for the unblazed.

My friend Rachel and I took our two little boys into the woods Friday, in search of Christmas trees. We trekked about the forest, climbed some hills, found a bit of snow to sled down and eventually sawed through a couple of spindly trunks. Mine, fittingly a hemlock, is now supported with chopsticks so it stands straight in its Rubbermaid bin in a corner of my living room. Two strands of light, a clip-on bird and a few glass balls is all the decorating I’m doing this year. My kids are appalled, even the one who helped fell the tree. But they’ve chalked it up to an acceptable eccentricity, and are willing to embrace my need to follow spirit instead of conjure it. We’ll see how they feel about a Christmas Eve dinner of sushi and miso soup.

chuck lit to die for

This past weekend, I had the great privilege of looking over a typeset copy of Rant, Chuck Palahniuk’s forthcoming book. I was perusing said book for typos and such—a proofreading job. But. I have to say, I think this book is among his finest. Even as compared with Fight Club.

For one thing, the book is unapologetically complex. There is wrinkled chronology that actually works, there are metaphoric parallels to renowned social and political “race and resettlement” horrors. Then there’s the whole liminality motif. The guy’s a genius, and that’s enough said about that!

If you don’t want to wait until the release of Rant (sometime in 2007), for new stuff from Palahniuk, grab a copy of Monica Drake’s Clown Girl, out in January by Hawthorne Books. Palahniuk wrote the intro. That, and Monica’s book is terrific. You can read more about it here.

eavesdrop of the day

In a women's clothing store--one perplexed woman to the salesperson:

"I know that cows stand in the rain, I just don't buy the concept of washable suede."

sweat in the city

After a couple of years doing the marionette thing, happily bending words behind the curtain, I’ve again been seduced by the allure of the byline. Along with Community News features, beginning in January, I’ll be writing a column for the regional magazine, The Northwest Women’s Journal.

The premise for the column concerns my quest for balance. Mitigating the hours and hours I spend kneading language into conceit. So, in desperation and because a business opportunity presented itself, I began Pilates classes, hating every minute for a solid month. Who knew I was that crooked, that weak, that flabby?

Because I have to grope every experience I have into philosophical bullet points, I naturally began to write about my frustration at being so completely out of touch with my body. A month into the classes, though, something shifted. A body memory thing that had nothing to do with my noggin. I have begun to understand that illusive aphorism about “listening to your body.” Even though I’ve been writing a yoga studio’s newsletter for a year, that crap always sounded like New Age gobbledy-gook. I never absorbed it, scoffing instead: Bodies don’t talk! That’s a fallacy!

Surprise! Yes, Virginia, your body does talk! It’s just that my brain has been bossing my body around so long, I was unable to hear it. So now I listen, and I hear these lovely quotidian whispers which translate into tiny actions: Instinctively sitting up straighter when my shoulders start to burn from too much writing. Being aware of slouching, standing crooked and leaning on my hip to indulge my slight scoliosis.

So I’m going to be writing a column, and the column will most likely be called Sweat in the City. It’ll have that Keep Portland Weird regional flavor, of course. Each month I’ll investigate movement opportunities, Pacific Northwest versions of exercise—stuff we all have in access to in this fecund, young, and somewhat outré metropolitan region.

Look for the column starting in January. Better yet, pick up a copy when the December issue of The Northwest Women's Journal hits the stands. It’s available free at most public libraries and various outlets around town.

money money money money

There is the faintest dusting of snow this morning. A skin of white on the roof of my garage. Branches are bare. Gray is the pervading color all around. The smarter of the squirrels have foraged and now sit fatly wherever it is squirrels hole up in these parts. The dumber of the squirrels check their bank accounts hourly online, hoping that their supply of acorns will last through the week.

And so it goes.

I’m a dumb squirrel this winter. Juggling various accounts, hoping to avoid major credit card debt. My income comes from a pastiche of sources. The only dependable part just barely covers my myriad mortgages. Everything else trickles in here and there like faucets turned to drip during a cold snap. An editing job here, a writing job there. Occasional project management. The journalism I do pays roughly seven cents a word. Translated to an hourly wage parking meters make more money than I do.

Strangely though, (and I’ve heard this from many starving yet tenacious artist types) just when I’m down to husks, a check or an opportunity arrives. A fat editing job or a grant. Hardly a windfall, but miraculous, none-the-less.

And at 3 a.m. money woes seem to loop ever more prominently. You wake up for no apparent reason, and before you can sink back into your dreams, the black tape of hell binds you, jerking you into cul de sacs of doom: the what-if machine with lead boots and empty pockets. You slip down the hierarchy into Maslow’s inferno. No longer reaching for that crag wherein lies self-actualization, no, it’s down to the basics. Food, shelter and so on.

Luckily the doom loop sleeps during daylight hours. (Like a vampire.) Financial strategies present themselves. Belt-tightening that looked tortuous in the middle of the night morph into obvious solutions.

As a writer, I’ll never be wealthy. And as a dumb squirrel, I’ll tend toward modest piles of acorns. But most important is the gift to see money for what it really is: abstraction once removed from a thing in and of itself. I know how to find it if I have to. I know how to work. I like the view from the high branch though. Especially now that the flurries have picked up.

thanksgiving in whoville

One of my favorite holiday programs is the Grinch. I know I’m not alone in this. Seuss’s redemption of that miserly, lonely, avarice-ridden hill-dweller is everything you need from a parable. Holidays offer a glimpse at the measure of a heart. They can act as electron microscopes and cosmic telescopes, both.

As in musical composition, capacity for crescendo is informed by emotional and artistic preparation. And by artistic preparation, I guess I’m edging into the territory of one’s particular talent for reality.

The better one’s talent for reality, the better able one is to mitigate the mundane with nuance, joie de vivre, what-have-you. And the more able one is to put oneself into the provincial task of daily living, the less likely that person will be to dive off the board during a party, or leave one feeling bereft.

I’m not a naturally social person. I have more than one quality in common with the mean old Grinch on the mountain. It’s not that I begrudge, it’s more like I expect disaster. I anticipate failure. This often leads me to a brand of inertia that looks like misanthropy. I have often worried that I might pass this tentativeness onto my children.

That’s why I invited a bunch of people over for Thanksgiving dinner. With Sam and Maggie now living elsewhere, the stakes are higher. I can either claim them during these sorts of occasions, or risk losing them to households with better socially functioning people.

Now past the initial post-divorced months, I’ve been experiencing a heightened sense of reality. I am finding myself, as they say. Rediscovering a capacity for fun, for imperfection, for texture.

I’m a sap, by the way. I save weird stuff: pregnancy sticks that culminated in the birth of my kids, reconnaissance maps from childhood spy games, my college ID. I have my two degree-announcing graduation tassels obscuring a small snapshot of my first wedding—a Catholic affair complete with a crucified Christ as backdrop—sitting just above my line of vision as I type this. My environment is replete with stock. That I love, have loved, will continue to love is three-dimensionally manifest.

So, the sentimental mommy puts it all out there for a big, old-fashioned secular bash, jams the house full of people. Beloved people. And the energy is rich, textural, human. My children are engaged, all three of them, in being with people, eating hearty fair, being grateful, in their way.

What I’m getting at is this. I now have overwhelming evidence to suggest that my children are healthy, reasonably happy, and not given to addiction born of deprivation. They are comfortable in their skins. Thanksgiving helped me see this, and for that, I am deeply grateful.

But more to the point, I am comfortably moving into my life as a single woman, a mother, a writer, a hostess—whatever. So, bring on the holidays. Get me some mistletoe.

eavesdrop of the day

Overheard at Pioneer Square. Dreadlocked young man with several buddies:
“I have a policy not to date anyone with the same name as my sister.”

Laughter from compatriots

“And it sucks, because, like, I have a lot of sisters.”

epistemological roulette

Seems that everything I’m reading these days, and all the films I’m viewing, have chaos as their subtext. Of course, if you’ve been following the posts on this blog, you’ll note that chaos has been a recurring theme for yours truly as well.

On Friday I eagerly ventured downtown for the first showing of “Little Children,” the Todd Fields movie based on the novel of the same title by Tom Perrotta. Much of what resonated for me in this film had to do with the notion of desire and boundaries. Not just sexually, either.

When I think about moving forward, whether in romantic conquests or professional ones, there is always this foggy middle ground where projection, myth, presumption and fear reside. So many of our obstacles are visible only to us. We tell ourselves stories to keep from falling off the ledge.

Last weekend I found myself at an impromptu party: small space, lots of warm bodies, free-flowing wine. Set up for moral depravity, if ever there was one. The collective of folks in attendance were all, seemingly, at huge crossroads, considering personal epistemologies. Out of nowhere a snippet of George Eliot found its way into my hands. A Xeroxed copy of a passage from The Mill on the Floss. Something about “the great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty.” Going after what you want, versus remaining duty-bound to that which you have pledged.

At the party, truth looked like, “Who I am is someone who lives life on her own terms, in defiance of maxims and in defiance of the common script.” But by Sunday (always the Sabbath we review and regret) small tendrils formed and reinstalled the framework. The cast of characters returned: projection courting fear building to resignation. Life on one’s own terms is fine, long as the kids have their cereal, and the leaves are raked into piles, and all the recycling is out at the curb by garbage day.

when worlds collide

Here’s a stunning example of genre-bending, and the surrounding conversation. This Portland writer I know, Yuvi Zalkow, submitted a first-person prose piece to an online journal with an other-than fiction focus. The reason he did so was that the piece read like nonfiction, in that it was filled with declarations and facts that touched on the subject at hand. That, and he's an admitted submission slut! Seriously, though, he thought the journal's audience would give him a good read. His gamble paid off.

The comments on his piece touched off a spirited discussion of craft vs information. Most commenters made reference to the trial of the protagonist (who was female) and critiqued the form in which Yuvi (who is male) chose to present the story. If you have a few minutes, read the piece and meander through these postings. One caveat, the subject matter is, er, sensitive.

the numbers

Number of cities I’ve lived in 10
Number of dwellings I’ve lived in 24
Jobs I’ve had where I’ve received a regular payroll check 9
Pounds of manuscripts in my basement right now 28
Novels I’ve written at least two drafts of 3
Novels I’ve published 0
Short stories I’ve written 38
Short stories I’ve published 11
Degrees I have 2
Money I’ve made in my whole life from writing (in $) 91,528
Money I’ve made in my whole life from non-writing (in $) 58,263
Money I’ve spent on my education and writing-related endeavors (in $) 101,600

the d word and the e word

To continue in the solipsistic vein I seem to have established, I need to visit a quality that’s always eluded me. Ever since I was a pixie-haired youngster, I’ve dodged discipline in favor of the sly sprint.

With writing, I’ve often abandoned the page for weeks, only to hole up, spending a weekend in obsessive wordsmithing. Which would be fine, I think, if it weren’t accompanied by grandiose plans—calendarized promises: if I keep up this pace, I’ll have a manuscript by Christmas!

A month ago I popped one of my daughter’s abandoned Ritalins, thinking maybe the chemical imperative therein would keep me on task. The resulting effect was several hours of meth-like monkey mind, plunging with great resolve into the mundanist of chores. It was counter to creativity, but I did, finally, vacuum out the minivan!

My ex-husband (and yes, I know he’s reading this) perpetually accuses me of fickleness and erratic mood swings. Like anyone confronted with labels that tend to invite dismissiveness (e.g. since I’m erratic he’s not accountable for his behavior because no matter what he does my response will be dictated by biochemistry) I balk. True, he often got the worst of me (much like a parent gets to absorb their child’s tantrums while the teacher sees only an earnest, well-behaved kid), but I’ve come to conclude that my lack of resolve has merely become more transparent due to that good old Second Law of Thermodynamics. That’s the one about dissipated potential--you know, entropy.

Pardon my lapse into empiricism—it’s a symptom of my affliction—but entropy accurately describes the tendency of matter to achieve chaos. In other words, it gets harder and harder to pull off the successful sprint when 90% of the time I’m going with the flow in my bumbling, make-it-up-as-I-go-along way.

This morning, for instance, as I poured a packet of instant oatmeal into my son’s bowl, I wondered about all the people I know who would read the directions on the packet and employ a measuring cup for the exact amount of boiling water to add to the mix. I could only really confirm one person (the sister-in-law of my first marriage, a military wife), but it got me thinking about the fact that last month I billed 20 hours to a company who hired me to project manage the inclusion of how-to-make-instant-stuffing videos on their website.

Not only do I not measure water into oatmeal, I’ve never measured coffee, soup ingredients, laundry detergent or oil when I’ve had the occasion to dump some into my engine. Me, who holds a Bachelor’s in Food Science, prefers to wing it with muffins, pancakes, enchiladas and the Thanksgiving turkey. I suppose that’s why I’m only sometimes a good cook. Like when Mercury isn’t in retrograde or during some other metaphysically favorable condition.

So now, at age 45, I’m inviting intention into my life. No, not inviting. That would be the old Suzy Vitello. I’m painfully choosing (not always, but often) routines that fight entropy. I, the most phlegmatic chick on the planet, have engaged in twice-weekly Pilates sessions for two solid months. And they’re hard! And now, I actually look, well not forward to them, but toward them; my body has developed Pavlovian expectations that must be fulfilled. That, and I’m eating salads every day and miniscule portions of a variety of saltless foods. I’ve lost ten pounds, and that’s good; high blood pressure runs in my family (more evidence of the second Law).

And what about writing? What about writing and not answering email and not doing billable hours writing, and not allowing my mind to wander into the stinky cage of the monkey mind? I know the answer to that, and it’s even harder than Pilates.

the uncrackable code

The first thing I remember writing, ever, was a prosaic poem in the third grade. It was a sing-song one-off tribute to spring, something I popped out like an after-supper burp. Actually, I don’t remember the actual writing of it. What I do remember was the critique and the attention. The critique came from my mother, who was in the midst of acquiring a low-residency Goddard degree, and therefore attuned to the vagaries of art.

She was accurately disappointed with my poem, pointing out the dangers of cliché and received text. Only where I attempted a little onomatopoeia [tip-tap of raindrops] did my mother issue a nod. “Explore this direction a bit more,” I think is what she told me.

Conversely, my teacher Mrs. Engle (or was it Angle?) read my banal verse in front of the class, showered me with praise, and crowned me poetess of the year. Go figure.

Thus began my acknowledgement of the range of subjective consideration of the written word. And still, three decades later, I’m wrestling with notions of “good” and “popular” when it comes to production.

I hesitate to write the next thing here, which might come off sounding a tad sour-grapey. If I express it in its raw form it would come out something like: “Yeah, I can write crap people will eat up, I just choose not to.” Considering this a bit more thoroughly, I realize it’s not true. I have come to a point in my life where I simply can’t tap into the expectations of the normative world. I am at a loss to understand, for instance, the popularity of inane television shows like “Grey’s Anatomy.” The wholesale white-washing of emotional complexity, reduced to tired, predictable tropes. That’s what America craves, apparently.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve delved back into writing community news. I need to consider audience more than I have been. I must face my arrogant notions of art every time I tap my keyboard. And, acknowledge that if I was as deft at my craft as I need to be, I would have an audience, but, alas, I do not. It’s sobering. Very sobering.