down the rabbit hole

February

2012-02-03T11:50:00.000-05:00

Little Dorrit, Little House, Tolkien's letters, two of Dillard.

In addition this year, I laid out for myself the - challenge? Responsibility? Limitation? - opportunity to read two, only two, and specifically two magazines via subscription. I couldn't have picked better: Ruminate Magazine and Kinfolk, each brimful of slow reading and thoughtful art. They last, like good books you don't mind taking your time on.

The Guardian newspaper's book club is doing Bleak House this month. I wish I had time for a reread.

The baby babbles happily downstairs. I'll have to go rescue her in a moment or two. She's always woken up happy; I find that lately she pops more alert and talkative - and patient - when there's a book waiting in her crib. This is a habit I'm happy to foster.

It's almost lunchtime, now. Reading down. Onward.

Ready to Go

2012-02-01T12:40:00.002-05:00

"There was a great tree - a huge poplar with vast limbs - visible through my window even as I lay in bed. I loved it, and was anxious about it. It had been savagely mutilated some years before, but had gallantly grown new limbs - though of course not with the unblemished grace of its former natural self; and now a foolish neighbour was agitating to have it felled." ~J.R.R. Tolkien

The big front yard maple finally came down today. All the branches had been taken off last November, and, in absence of anyone who could manage the trunk with a mere chain saw, the tree men returned today and took that away, too.

Ella and I watched through the gable window as the two fellows alternated at the base: chain saw, axe, toss the wedge of wood aside, chain saw, axe, toss. I expected this to go on all around the perimeter of the tree for the next hour, slow but sure. But just as Ella was losing interest in favor of the cord pull on the window blind, the unexpected happened. The entire enormous ten-foot thing creaked and groaned, gave a sharp crack, and fell into the road with a shuddering thump that set Pilot a-barking.

Last fall, I'd mourned as the branches came down: no more green leaves dancing at the upstairs window; that lovely play of sunlight and shadow shifting across the downstairs living room - gone. Not to mention the temperature protection during our unairconditioned summers. This loss felt inordinately tragic, both physical and emotional. But I thought all my sorrow had gone with the limbs. The remaining body in the yard was only a sad reminder, not to mention an eyesore. I was more than ready for it to go.

Imagine my surprise at the tears that sprang up this morning as the tree trunk fell - so suddenly, so heavily - down. It seemed so, so . . . irreverent. So wrong. Bottom-up, with all its striated glory - blossoming circles amassed over a 72 year life - exposed for the world to see. Suddenly, the grey bark running in stripes and curves and ending in contrast against that tan-white flesh was a surpassing beauty. The tree men seemed not to notice. They swung their axes and tossed the bits and pieces into the back of their flatbed. They took a break and lit cigarettes. For them, this was any day, any tree, any job.

Tolkien once wrote, "I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals." This morning, as the tree pitched over, I could hear the clanging and banging of Saruman's machinery, as it was so explicitly interpreted in the movies, and the ground-shaking thud at each felled tree. The neighbor who made a wide berth around the the equipment on her daily dog walk seemed to frown Tolkien's - or was it Treebeard's? - disappointment at me. "Those trees were my friends!" Darn that movie.

Still, I knew it was just a tree. I know it is just a tree. And it was dying, after all. These Norwegian Maples were planted when our three neighborhood streets were first developed, and none of them are going to last much longer. Each house got two, in fact, and a good third of them have gone down already. More than half of the ones left are dying. Windblown and ice-laden limbs fall into the streets where cars park and children on bikes race by. The resident tree expert says that, actually, there's only one healthy one left, back in a corner lot. He speculates about environmental incompatibility. Others have suggested bugs or disease. Whatever the root cause, the tree was sick and it was time to go.

But there's something to be said for putting in a three quarter century's work toward such a strong and quiet beauty. It doesn't seem like something that should go as easily - or, at least, as quickly - as fifteen minutes of sawing and chopping can do. It seemed, for a moment, that the tree should get something more than a cigarette smoke in tribute.

But really, for the tree, there is nothing that needs be done, or that could be done, save what we did. It is only a tree. But I know what I will do. I resolved this morning to plant another in its place. We'll do our research this time. We've been told something called the Black Oak does well in these parts. I also have a particular soft spot for Dogwoods. We'll start another in its place, and make our own contribution to this small patch of land and its future, and to the neighborhood it sits in. And then we'll get on with our day. With all respect to Tolkien and his master ent, it was only a tree, after all. It was ready to go.

ed. Humphrey Carpenter, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. p. 321, 220,

Top Books of 2011

2012-01-28T09:11:00.007-05:00

I never was afraid to talk about books. Well, okay, maybeonce. When I was thirteen and there was a boy involved. A teacher, perhaps fora Homeroom assignment, had tasked the class with composing daily schedules,and for one short week of my life, I operated like clockwork. It was amazing. Icame home, I ate a snack, I mushed through homework: Math, Science,English, History. The end goal was the library book waiting on the side table, and eachday was a success. All my work done and hours till bedtime, I curled upon the sofa to plunge back into the book. It was a revelation: organizing myhours, making efficiency work for pleasure! More time to read!

But it was the seventh grade, and I had the misfortune toswing my three-ring binder open just as one of the class hooligans passed by onthe cool, snooty way to his desk. “Is that your schedule? You don’t really dothat, do you?” No, of course I didn’t. Or wouldn’t, ever again. The bubble wasburst as quickly as it was constructed.

My path to organizational greatness may have died that day.Fortunately, my obsession with good stories did not.

I had a baby a few short weeks (and long nights) before theclock ticked its way into the new year of 2011. Did that stop me from readingincessantly? Of course not. What I find in hindsight is that my 2011 readingarranges itself pretty neatly into two categories: imaginative fantasy fiction and landscapeprose (largely nonfiction). This comes as no surprise. 2011 saw me deeplyengaged in writing my fantasy novel, and also largely focused on writing nonfiction essays. The correlation between reading and writing is noaccident.

Here are the books that grew my imagination most whileElla grew through her first year:

Landscape Prose and other Nonfiction

~ Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, for stunning, lyricalprose and deep human sympathy; the only full-on fiction in this category. (Ialso recommend: Home.)

~ Blue Highways by William Least-Heat Moon, for well-paced,well-told travel tales.

~ "The Long-Legged House," an essay by WendellBerry, for a strong sense of place, belonging, and purpose. And a view to thesmall town farming life. (I also recommend: Best Person Rural by Noel Perrin.)

~ All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot, forskillfully weaving fact into fiction. It's about country veterinary work, forgoodness sake, and I enjoyed it! A storytelling feat.

~ Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin, December's requisitebiography. As always, Tomalin gives a balanced account with plenty ofwell-considered detail. (If you're looking for Dickens's fiction instead, Irecommend: Bleak House, and, of course, A Christmas Carol.)

(Mostly) Fantastical Fiction

~ The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, six books by Dianna Wynne Jones, for their sheer imagination and well-wrought resolutions. (Start with: The Nine Lives of Christopher Chant and Conrad’s Fate. Then theother four Chronicles. Then Howl's Moving Castle and House of Many Ways. If children's fantasy is at all up your alley, youwon't regret it. And you'll catch more than a glimpse of Harry Potter's literary ancestry.)

~ Divergent by Veronica Roth, for excellent pacing and a new author who promisescreative, if particularly dark, contribution to the Young Adult dystopia genre.

~ State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, for lyrical prose,surprising turns of event, and thought-provoking scenarios, as always. (I alsostrongly recommend: Bel Canto.)

Honorable Mentions

~ The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan (What is sometimes-shabby indelivery is nearly made up for in wild imagination.)

~ Redwall by Brian Jacques (C.S. Lewis distinguishes between fantasy involving talking beasts - think Narnia - and realism using animals who could just as easily be people - think Animal Farm. This story is the latter, but I still enjoyed the discovery.)

~ Matched by Ally Condie (Do we really need another dystopianstory with a female protagonist? I won't complain.)

Last year - 2011 - was an anomaly as years go. I won’tever get one like it, especially not the early months when it was just merecuperating and a quiet baby sleeping her days away. There wasn’t any schedule needed, because there wasn’t anything to do except hold thesmall, sweet, sleeping thing - and read. I’ll never pick up MarilynneRobinson’s Housekeeping again without smelling that sweet-sour breath againstmy face. The discovery of Dianna Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci series and BrianJacques’s Redwall tumbles through memory with the distinct feel of a smallfeather-weight snuffling and snoozing in my arms. Sweet winter days. It’suncertain whether I was changed more by the stories I read or by the sleeperI held. They’re too twined up together; I’ll never know. I don’t need to.

Top Books 2010 are here.

Top Books 2009 are here.

There Is a House

2012-01-27T10:45:00.000-05:00

There is a book, The Napping House. I knew nothing of it, but my mother-in-law recognized it instantly on Skype: a beloved classic. I confess I only chose it at the library because its big board pages were large enough to lay open on the floor as Ella flipped through. The pictures did nothing for me on first glance, and I didn't even read the story. Happy accident.

A week later, I could recite it to you blindfold. It is one of those woman-who-ate-a-fly tales, though here, the culprit is a flea that bites. "A wakeful flea, who bites the cat, who scares the dog, who wakes the child . . . " Before that, the pages add up: first a sleeping grandma on a cozy bed. (Why that didn't hook me first thing, I cannot say.) Then a sleeping child on a snoring grandma. Then a snoozing dog on a sleeping child on a snoring grandma . . . You get the picture. Once the flea bites, though, they all unstack one by one. The scared mouse! The clawed cat! The flailing child! Each gets his own startled page.

I had read the book through to Ella several times already when we flipped to the part with the cat in the air, eyes bulging, paws extended, fur electrified. All of a sudden, Ella put up her arms and shrieked! Now it's her new thing. She waits patiently as the characters stack themselves in sleep, and then the flea bites - and the arms go up and the shrieking ensues. We have moved into the realm of parroting, and we don't just copy Mom and Dad in this house. No, no. There is a house (a napping house!) where children copy books. I'm so happy to live in it.

Ella's asleep now, and I am, as usual this time of year, cozied up with my (dying) laptop under the guest bed covers. The floorboard heater vibrates and clicks. The desktop on the chillier end of the room makes intermittent scritchy noises as it, too, falls asleep. But here and now I'll wake up to my own happy imagination, with the helps of books, yes, and chai tea. I love this part of the day. I'd lift up my hands and shriek, but I don't want to wake the baby.

In the book, the images start dim and blue-grey, and then they lighten, first imperceptibly, then yellower and bolder as each character is roused. by the final, wakeful pages - child, dog, cat, grandmother flying happily through the air - the light streaming through the bedroom window is sunny as can be. Today, on this second in a string of rainy, disappointingly warmish winter days, Ella flipped to those end pages, and right at that moment - I swear - the sun shone through our attic room windows. She shrieked, the room lightened. Quite the moment.

Now, writing under a duvet, a bedspread, a blanket, and sheets, the sky outside is grey again, the wind buffets, and the temperature drops. It's one of those days with a downward arrow on the weather channel icon. I can't complain. I won't. The sunny morning was for Ella. This chilly grey hour is for me, and for words, and for looking into books with my own quiet, melancholy kind of happiness. I do a delighted little shriek inside.

(And, of course, I recommend The Napping House, by Audrey Wood. Even if you don't have children, there's sheer joy bouncing around the room on the second to last page that can't be beat.)

Open Communications

2012-01-21T16:29:00.000-05:00

(a Winter Theme post: Comfort)

I sit in the driver's seat and shuffle the thin stack of papers while Ella complains at her too-tight straps in the back. She's growing out of her carseat already. I'm only now readying myself to read about the days when she was too small to fit in it, bolstered by pads and blankets in her loose newborn clothes. I make it through two and a half pages and then hastily lay them on the passenger's side for later, or never. I throw the car in reverse. We'll go somewhere else, instead. Anywhere but the hospital parking lot.

It's a common assumption against the current medical climate that doctors these days push for C-sections. "They want you out of there as fast as possible," the rhetoric goes. But I contend that wasn't my case. As informed as one can be when waves of outrageous pain are crashing down, it was a good decision. That is one of the very few things I know about Ella's awful delivery. We hastily signed the papers and went for it. But from there on, I am adrift in uncertainties. There were complications that got resolved in further procedures, there was more pain, and there was an awful lot of aloneness in silent rooms for a day that would otherwise have been a time for togetherness. And then we just kept going, forward-looking, carried along in the current of caring for a baby night and day. That was the good part.

Less good were the equivocal doctors with sardonic responses and evasive answers. Questions and frustrations mounted one upon the other. But the weather warmed and my body healed accordingly, and our very own wee small being came into a personality of her own. There were better, higher, lovelier things to think about, and so the events surrounding her birth got hung in a back closet alongside the frustration, not least at God, and the winter clothes that wouldn't come out again till the end of next fall. Next fall, of course, arrived, and the uncertainties were still patiently hanging there, alongside some rather rumpled but very real emotions. And questions.

Where does one go when answers are needed? To the Health Information Management office, they tell me, so that's where I start. After days of shifting the trip to the next day on the calendar, putting off a trek into the unknown, I drive down to the hospital, baby in tow. I walk out a surprisingly simple ten minutes later with an envelope of printed sheets dotted with disturbing phrases like, "significant blood loss" and "extravasation of dye."

I hold the surgery notes in my hands, but the results, as they say, are inconclusive. Somewhere between "IVP needed to be performed" and "The patient tolerated the procedure well," something got lost. I look closer and see it is me, crying in a dark and empty x-ray room, my post-operation pain killer waiting too long on the pharmacy counter one floor below. I never knew "alone" until the moment a slapdash x-ray tech asked unfeelingly if I'd had a hysterectomy (I hadn't), while his stone-faced colleague jolted me on the steely table, up, down, and around to get all the right pictures. My baby was in a far off bedroom with my husband, and I was in this dark room, forgotten, with techs who didn't have all the information. I was too sorely alone to give them any answers. The nurse ran in apologetically with the forgotten painkillers. I merely cried. This is not in the doctors' notes.

I wonder again, where does one go when answers are needed? One of our chief communities is church, and lots of friends prayed before this baby came: healthy delivery, safe arrival. One friend even prayed for green lights between our home and the hospital. I have no recollection of the traffic signals between here and there in the snowy dark of that December 4:00 a.m. But I recall a January letter from a friend who'd given birth decades before under similar circumstances, and she voiced a frustration that hadn't surfaced for me yet: "But we asked God for better than this!" Did he not hear our requests? Were our prayers ineffective? These are the deeper questions that run alongside the the uncertainties of what happened on the surgery table.

There are straight - though not easy - answers to the deeper questions, and I know what book to find them in. But most of them ring either hollow or harsh in my ears. I find I've suffered a loss without losing anything, save, perhaps, my faith in medicine to give conclusive answers, my faith in doctors to always care, my trust that things will generally make sense. It's a loss of understanding and thus a loss of control. A corner of my brain reminds me softly that this can be a good thing. I find myself listening to lots of Gillian Welch and mournful old spirituals.

And in these cold, grey days that hearken my thought to the winter past, I start asking. My approach to God is most often akin to my approach to the Health Information office. I put Him off till the next day, and then put Him off again. My faith is utterly small, the tiniest known yet to be recognized as such, I'd wager. But it knows at least what hallway to walk down, and which door the answers lie behind. Now that the asking has begun, I will keep knocking here, even after the doctors have told me all they can (or can't), insistent as a widow that's lost her last coin.

Meantime, in a section of the papers, there is one kind of answer. The doctor had told me over and over that the bits and pieces of me that suffered extra damage had to do with Ella's head getting stuck somehow. "But isn't that often the case in a C-section?" I kept wondering. Now I read and see what tricks the little girl was already pulling. It turns out she wasn't too keen on giving up her restful spot. And so, as the doctor and nurses pulled, she rolled. I can picture it now. I go in to get her in the mornings as she whimpers herself awake, and she rolls away from me, every time. "Not just yet, Mommy," she tells me by the thumb in her mouth, as she pretends sleep for a few moments longer. She's my slow-waking apple, lying awfully close to the tree from which she fell. I get that. "Not just yet," she tried to tell the doctors, as she rolled over in her nine-month sleep spot. And so they tugged her out feet-first, like a heavily sleeping teenaged boy. It took some extra work, and my body took a beating. She was just being Ella, reaching for her pillow, as it were. It's a sweet thought amidst the pain.

In memory, I find that the hardest part to bear of that pain was the aloneness. It still is. Surprisingly, if there is any comfort, it also lies therein. There remains a deep, chilly loneliness in the remembrance of an experience that is only fully known by me - and by One Other. And so I keep open communications, if only to hear there is still no answer except that I am, actually, not alone.

Outside, It's a Rain

2012-01-21T09:39:00.000-05:00

The walls are orange and there are white lights that have fallen into a charming mess over the wide street-front windows. Has Mill Mountain always hung lights? I can't remember.

I hear the man behind me monotone into his smartphone as though dictating, "It's a rain, it's a cold, cold rain . . . " Inside, it's warm and toasty. The espresso machine and pastry cases sound a loud, quieting hum. My six-year-old laptop flickers from charge to battery to charge again. I'll have to buy a new one soon. A college student arrives to a boisterous reception from a friend: "You braved the rain!"

The blaring pop tunes overhead change to an Alison Krauss station, and I sink deeper into my table corner against the back wall. Brett Dennen assures that he loves me, "by and by." I picture my husband and baby cozy at home and feel a tug in that direction, but they won't truly miss me for another hour. For now, I will write.

"Rest": A Poem for the Road

2012-01-18T10:25:00.000-05:00

Or for anywhere. And for parenthood:

(by Richard Jones, excerpts)

"Everything's fine.
The trucks are all together, sleeping
on the gravel shoulders of exit ramps,
and the crowded rest stop I'm driving by
is a perfect oasis in the moonlight.
The way I see it, I've got a second wind
and on the radio an all-night country station.
Nothing for me to do on this road
but drive and give thanks:
I'll be home by dawn."

Read the entire poem here.

"This was before
I had children of my own,
and had felt the sharp edge of love
and anxiety whenever I tiptoed
into darkened rooms of sleep
to study the small, peaceful faces
of my beloved darlings. Now,
the fatherly feelings are so strong
the snoring truckers are lucky
I'm not standing on the running board,
tapping on the window,
asking, Is everything okay?"

Yes. Yes, that is how it is.

*"Rest." by Richard Jones, from The Correct Spelling and Exact Meaning. © Copper Canyon Press, 2010.

Artful Words

2012-01-17T10:41:00.001-05:00

Anne Patchett is quite the styler of words. In The Magician's Assistant, there is this moment:

"We were very close," Sabine said. Her voice was quiet. The bar seemed to press forward; the bartender pushed his upper body across the polished wood, pretending to reach for a bowl of salted nuts.

Sabine is on the edge of divulging, and everyone in the room, including the smooth polished bar itself, leans in to hear. It's a brief half-paragraph of held breath and then it's gone, a pregnant pause if ever there was one. And then Sabine continues talking, her secrets about to spill.

C.S. Lewis talks about mythopoiec moments in literature - cruxes in the narrative where time stands still and some imminent numinous comes crashing in. I don't think I'd tax Patchett's writing with the burden of myth-bearing, but she sure approaches that stand-still moment from time to time. In this particular scene, her words morph into what I first perceived as cinematic. Can't you envision the bartender on screen, leaning in on beefy arms as the lens bends out? But on second read, and third, and fourth, I saw what Patchett had actually done in a mere two sentences.

These are words made art. She throws down language and it comes out as paint before the imagination's eye, a brief moment, loud with sudden silence. The plot stands still, and the bartender - and the bar itself - moves in off the page. As time bending as Dali, as real as Ralph Goings. The reader is caught out of the flow of narrative into something grander, something with a movement of its own. The bartender leans forward across the smooth, shiny, bending counter in all the bold strokes of rich oil on canvas. Patchett doesn't say so, but it's clear to me that he turns his ear in, rag hand forgotten. He wants to hear, as we all do. His motion echoes the reader's desire. It's a brilliant moment before the tide of (also artfully-crafted) plot carries on and we're soon privy to the conversation that we've paused so eagerly to listen in on.

The Magician's Assistant is the third Patchett novel I've read. It's my least favorite so far - though I shouldn't pass judgement till I've finished it - and I still find it lovely. Which means I highly recommend my first two forays: foremost, the stunning Bel Canto. Second, State of Wonder, from which I'm still mildly reeling. If mythopoeic moment isn't Patchett's consistent strength (and I'm by no means suggesting it should be), deft characterization and turn of beautifully-styled phrase is. Is it too much to say Patchett succeeds at what Mary Doria Russell attempts? Please don't hate me. And don't get me wrong: Russell wrote one of my all-time favorites, Children of God - not to be read before reading The Sparrow first, of course.

All to say, get ye to a bookstore (or better - a library!) and check out Bel Canto. And if you like that, try State of Wonder. Heck, throw The Sparrow in your bag, too. And while you're at it, pull Children of God down off the shelf, because you're not going to want to stop at the end of Russell's first sci-fi tale of (truly) space traveling Jesuit priests. There aren't space ships - or Jesuits, for that matter - in Patchett yet. But her language and characters are transporting enough. For the love of all things artful in the ever-morphing literary world, I'm grateful.

At the Intersection of Engineering and Art

2012-01-14T21:11:00.003-05:00

Our small family lives here on a short neighborhood road at the intersection of engineering and art. Kenton organizes numbers and plans schedules; I read books and craft words and stitch images. So, say, we're the intersection of math and creativity. The two are not necessarily at odds. And they come to a point in the person of our thirteen-month-old daughter.

In line at the grocery store the other day, I unloaded the cart while Ella did her best to charm the elderly woman behind us. She succeeded. The woman descended from her baby-talking raptures long enough to assure me my daughter is positively artistic. Or else mathematical. "Look at how she fingers the cart handle!" I don't know where that inclination figures into things, but I won't be surprised if the overall assessment is dead on. This girl is sensory enough to notice all fine detail in a two-foot radius. But she's also got door pulls, box clasps, block stacking, and puzzle fittings figured out pretty good. I'd say she's a right combination of her dad and mom.

Engineering and creativity. Math and art.

Our Vermont Christmas trip is still on my mind, and while we were there, I paid two visits to an art gallery in Hanover, New Hampshire. Down on an up-and-coming corner of the growing college town, there is the League of N.H. Craftsmen Gallery. You can enter at the front from Lebanon street, and find yourself in an open, sunny space with gorgeous local art on careful display. Or you can come in at the back, as I always have, climbing steps from the parking deck past the downstairs studio where some bearded man cradles fast-spinning clay in his spackled grey hands. Art in motion.

The back door opens onto display cases filled with jewelry, shelves of blown glass and finished pottery, walls of framed art, and - the jackpot for me, this trip - stacks of matted prints and originals, waiting to be flipped through and fallen in love with. Because that's what it's about, isn't it? We can talk local and we can talk art and quality craftsmanship and we can talk about the grand meeting of the two, but in the end, the value is in the personal connection. The value, really, is in the individual.

On an earlier December trip that involved a flight to Houston, I pulled the copy of GO: Airtran Inflight Magazine from the seat back and read an article on art collecting, "The Artistic Process." The writer, on her own venture to identify quality art and, ultimately, choose a piece of her own, realizes the best choice and the highest value comes down to the painting - or sculpture or carving - that speaks to you personally. We're all different, you know. Our perceptions and pasts and particular "isness" (as Madeline L'Engle would say) converge to make meaning out of surprisingly different items (pictures, songs, books, experiences, memories) from person to person.

The piece that connected with me in this particular gallery was - is - a whimsical serigraph. Entering the back door, I flipped through a stack topped by a stylized depiction of a creek bed, right up Kenton's alley, I thought, though somehow not to my taste. I wondered if there would be a piece to satisfy us both. There was: a small, 3 x 7 inch view through a birch forest to a hilltop cluster of pines, with a winding moonbeam - or is it a whitened snow path? - lighting the way. I loved the spareness of the rendering. It felt faintly magical. And I was immediately reminded of a scene from L.M. Montgomery's lesser-known Emily of New Moon, wherein the title character, Montgomery-ish heroine as she is (I can stomach only so much of her heroines naming every nature item in sight), names her front yard trees and makes friends of them. Appropriately, the painting was titled "Meeting Old Friends." I carried it around the gallery with me. I brought Kenton back for a second opinion. I deemed it well worth the price. I walked out the door, art in-hand.

Like the Airtran article said, it's about the personal connection with the crafted item. But doesn't that leave things a little fuzzy and grey? How, then, can value be determined? And not just regarding art, but in the matter of people, too. If everyone is so different - artist here, engineer there - how can we be figured out, known, understood? How can we know ourselves when isness is so variable?

Before our flurry of holiday travels, Kenton and I went on a birthday date to see Hugo at the movies. He was excited about the 3D; I anticipated the glimpses of beauty hinted at in the online trailer. (Those impossible, gorgeous stacks of books!) Our expectations did not go unmet. From the winding of the gears to the unfolding of the plot, from the artful acting to the 3D visual direction, we were both entirely satisfied. And we were most struck by the larger theme: everyone is unique, and everyone has a purpose. In fact, the best team in the movie is the boy who repairs clocks and the girl he befriends who writes stories. It felt familiar.

There is a telling scene toward the climax, a key moment in the life of young protagonist Hugo Cabret, orphan, secret train-station resident, silent clock-winder. He looks down from his perch in one of the impossibly high and lovely clocks it is his self-appointed business to keep running. He sees Monsieur Labisse, the station's bookstore owner, hand a book to a customer. Watching, Hugo realizes something about the bookseller, and about the workings of society, and about himself. He ruminates (I paraphrase here), "We are all made to do something, aren't we? Monsieur Labisse's job is to connect people with the right books." To his young friend Isabelle, he declares with confidence, "Your job is to write. What is my purpose?" He knows he must have one. He suspects something about that. "Maybe my purpose is to fix things."

The two friends are a team, and their individual purposes, their individual selves, work together for the good of many - and for the endurance of art, at that. She writes; he fixes. She descends from artists, he from engineers of the clock making sort. Engineering and art. Quite the pair.

Admittedly, real life and real people are more complex. Kenton's got an eye for design and I can add numbers in my head at a frighteningly quick rate for someone who can't do much else with them. And, of course, we go much deeper and broader still.

Still. Engineering and art. If it were possible to Googlemap the two, you'd be directed to a small, grey 1940's Cape Cod, five driveways up from a quiet dead-end. Inside, there would be us: me with a book, or laptop, or vague gaze out the window; Kenton with book, or budget, or project that involves measuring and cutting; Ella serving make-believe food to her stuffed bear, and then turning on a dime to stack blocks with impressive thirteen-month-old precision.

Madeline L'Engle talks about individual identity, implying there's a certain glory in being precisely who we are, each person as unique as the piece of art I brought home with me. She calls it "isness." And when that individuality is paired? She says of her relationship with her husband: "we are willing to let each other be; as we are; two diametrically opposite human beings in many ways, which has often led to storminess. But I think we are both learning not to chafe at the other's particular isness."*

Perhaps I am a fool, but I am hopeful. I look forward and suspect our little family will be quite the team. In the end, at the New Hampshire gallery, Kenton approved my art choice; I know him, and he knows me. In the end, Hugo Cabret and his friend Isabelle were each stronger and safer for their friendship. In the end, the mysteries of individuality and of relationship - the intersection of our isnesses - remain a surpassing beauty. It's been said "a threefold cord is not quickly broken." That's generally interpreted to include God as one strand amongst the three. But I also think that, here at the intersection of many things, we three individuals do and will augment each other. . . . Yes, quite the team.

* L'Engle, Madeline. A Circle of Quiet. HarperCollins: New York, 1972. p. 110

** Ecclesiastes 4:12, English Standard Version

Writers for a Winter Landscape

2012-01-06T11:12:00.000-05:00

During a brief, clearminded moment in my couch-sleeping foggyheadedness yesterday afternoon, it dawned on me I could probably open a window. "Take the air," as it were. (I really need to get away from reading Dickens for awhile.) It was 61 degrees out, and even though I'm not done enjoying winter yet, the birdsong that wafted in on the spring-like breeze did my heart some good. And, as always in springtime weather, my mind turned toward landscape writing. Thankfully, winter and landscape prose aren't entirely at odds. A few writers bridge the gap nicely:

Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is an April-time favorite. We always seem to take the road from Blacksburg to Charlottesville in the spring, zooming straight up past Tinker Mountain. But this nature (and many-other-types-of) writer is no stranger to the chillier seasons.

"It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting.

Outside, everything has opened up. Winter clear-cuts and reseeds the easy way. Everywhere paths unclog; . . . The woods are acres of sticks; I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall the striptease is over; things stand mute and revealed. Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open. . . . The mountains' bones poke through, all shoulder and knob and shin. All that summer conceals, winter reveals." ~ from Pilgrim

It gets better. This time four years ago, I was almost engaged to a man from Vermont, and his mother sent me home from my first Christmas visit with Best Person Rural by Noel Perrin. I spent the early January mornings of 2008 at my little Chapel Hill kitchen table, eating fried eggs off Starglow salad plates and reading essays about the small New England town my husband grew up in. So some Januarys, the dark Victorian lit gets set aside and Perrin gets pulled down from the shelf. My goodness, I love him. This is good preparation for the Wendell Berry reading that will creep up insistently whenever the trees start popping out buds come early April. And it's a good way to feel, for a moment, like my Thetford Christmas visit hasn't ended just yet. I know that covered bridge . . .

"Wooden bridge with great curving timbers, old-fashioned sap buckets on the nearby maples (March and April only), well-fenced pasture - this part of the farm has an enormous quaintness quotient. And people often do stop and take pictures. I have nothing against quaintness. In fact I rather like it, as long as it's unselfconscious. But it's not what I love the place for. I love the place we sometimes call Two of Everything farm for about twenty reasons, maybe twenty-five. For example, I dote on the old brick farmhouse - and it's a three-way dote. First, I love the look and feel of the old bricks. They're softer than new bricks, and have a better color. Second, I like it that they are a local product, made in Thetford some time around 1810. Most of all I like it that the house has style. It's a rural adaptation of the urban architecture known as Federal, and it's a delight. My heart does a little skip every time I come in." ~ from "Farewell to a Thetford Farm"

And while it's too soon yet for me to give last January's discovery of cold, Midwestern-mountain-steeped Housekeeping a second reading, I sit in this springish winter weather and look forward to Marilynne Robinson's upcoming essay collection. When I Was a Child I Read Books, to be published round about March of this year. It sounds almost too good to be true. Meanwhile, Robinson does landscape personified. A little bit of Housekeeping's chilly Fingerbone Lake goes a long, wintery way:

"The terrain on which the town itself is built is relatively level, having once belonged to the lake. It seems there was a time when the dimensions of things modified themselves, leaving a number of puzzling margins, as between the mountains as they must have been and the mountains as they are now, or between the lake as it once was and the lake as it is now. Sometimes in the spring the old lake will return. One will open a cellar door to wading boots floating tallowy soles up and planks and buckets bumping at the threshold, the stairway gone from sight after the second step." ~ from Housekeeping

Friday Curios

2012-01-02T14:25:00.003-05:00

C.S. Lewis wished he could always be convalescing from some minor illness, to permit restful days spent with a good book. I don't know if my head cold, worse by the day, is of the permissive sort; it feels more dictatorial. I am commanded, by body and by husband, to remain on the sofa, if not in bed. Here I sit, surprisingly unfrustrated. There's freedom in forced rest. I (and everyone else on the internet) have a Top Reads of 2011 coming down the line. But today is for getting better, so instead of the book review I've been working on, I'll share some recent internet curios. I hope this weekend provides you a few moments (or more) in a cozy spot - without the head cold!

#1: On literature, European history, and (happy old word) the Walkman
Lewis also said a grasp of history is essential to understanding what's happening now. Here's an interview with writer and critic George Steiner. It's a dense piece, but eye-opening. Work through it (sans iPod) if you've got the time. If time is short, skip to the question on new technologies:

"Young people are afraid of silence. What will become of serious and difficult reading? Is it possible to read Plato while wearing a Walkman? I find this very worrying."

I also find myself explained:

"Books are great bulwark for private life."

#2: Permission to skip when reading for pleasure
On note of the impulse to skip, be encouraged that you're not alone. Here is permission, albeit equivocal. When I was in grad school, I sought a professor's help getting through the weekly stacks of essays, articles, and books. "You can't read it all!" she advised. More freedom.

"Maugham contends that "the aim of art is to please" – and of course, if that's its aim, then when it fails to please, it can be ignored, or skipped."

#3: A Poem: "Winter Thanks"
But at its heart, my today is a little less heady. I'm bending my thought toward unexpected gratitudes: the kindnesses of Cold. I'm still wrapping up that Dickens biography, which I'm off to finish now. His actual life may have run a bit off the rails, but his fictional tea-kettles steep up visions of comfort and home that are medicine for my mind. They sing "all is well" with every boiling whistle, which goes a long way toward getting well myself. Books and convalescence: perhaps C.S. Lewis really was onto something.

"and praise the kettle whistle,

imitating an important train,

delivering us

these steam-brimmed sips of tea."

In Limbo

2012-01-02T11:25:00.001-05:00

(a Winter Theme post: Comfort)

I sit and I wait for snow. This is an unobliging winter. Earlier in the week, we waited to see if snow would fall in Vermont, where it was more likely. There were flurries on Christmas morning, and then big, fat falling flakes as we pulled out of the drive five days later, the right kind of send off. I stood in the warm kitchen looking out at the whitened trees and said I didn't want to leave; this is what I came for. Kenton's mom told me this is the best way to go - when you don't want to.

The little Honda Fit didn't do any sliding, much to our relief, and by the time we were thirty miles south, the roads were dry and the risk was gone. On our way out of town, the thin, slippery sheets of snow still covered the road. We stopped in at Isabell's Cafe for the raspberry chocolate chip muffins we'd been promised and a fill-'er-up of diner coffee. The man sweeping snow off the stoop grinned at me like a Southerner and said, "It looks like one of those balls you shake up, doesn't it?" Indeed it did.

On the days between Christmas and leaving, I didn't go out of the house much. I never do up there, especially in winter. Especially when there isn't enough snow cover to snowshoe through the woods and up the river. There were a few breakfasts and a dinner in Hanover, a quick twenty minute drive. At the house, there were lots of kids and family milling around. There was a day all by myself: a sofa by the wood stove, a biography to read, and a nap to take. (If ever a room was built for comfort, it was that one.) There was hope of snow, even though I knew the forecast said otherwise. So I kept telling myself, "When we get home."

Winter isn't over yet, and, mild as it's been so far, Blacksburg could still see a good snowfall. Monday - today - is a free day, a short, quiet stretch of leftover vacation before Kenton goes back to work, before I must get over this head cold and do some work myself and care for the baby. Starting tomorrow, it'll be just me and her again, on our own for the chilly length of the day. So today, I rest and look out the window and gaze and gaze until I tell myself I think I saw something white float by. Though perhaps it was a feather, or maybe a flick of a tree branch in the breeze. No! There, again! I swear I saw it. Kenton calls over from the big computer that the thirty percent chance has been reduced to flurries, but I won't believe it.

Our little car pulled up to our house last night packed with presents. The head cold coming on full-force wasn't intended to be one of the things we brought back, but I'll weather it. Eyes red, nose itching, throat raw, toes covered, sweater warm, I'll sit by the window while the baby sleeps. I'll continue to wait and see. There!

"see how the snow drifts down, look how happy

I am."*

* from "Manna" by Joseph Stroud, from Of This World. © Copper Canyon Press, 2009.

Christmas in Narnia

2011-12-25T21:52:00.001-05:00

In my version, the snow doesn't melt when Father Christmas shows up. It just gets prettier. There is a river outside the bedroom window, and probably beavers, and maybe even a lamppost. My soul will sing itself to sleep tonight in an antique bunkbed, while the kids keep playing downstairs with their new-gotten toys. I can hear them now. I hope your Christmas has been just as happy and as full.

Cozy Kind of Comfort

2011-12-23T07:20:00.000-05:00

My latest in The Curator is up here. Everyone's jumping on the Dickens bicentenary bandwagon, and I'm not one to be left out. Dickens, Irving, and chimneys: timely - if somewhat dark and grimy - Christmastime reading.

Doubtless A Christmas Carol is Dickens's best known holiday book, but The Cricket on the Hearth is a truly enchanting fairy story. Here are Dickensian tensions and Christmas spirits enough, but Want stays out on the fringes this tale around, and even the ugliest soul can change. I'd call it "A Christmas Carol Light," if not for the deepened themes of family and home, wherein lie the writer's hope for strength and redemption. As the title suggests, the fireside plays a chief role, and also the cricket, whose intermittent song is hope itself. "To have a Cricket on theHearth, is the luckiest thing in all the world!" Comfort and home.

The first time Kenton came home with me for Christmas was four years ago. We were not yet married, and it was not actually my home. My parents had recently retired up into Georgia's Blue Ridge mountains, and it was to their new, cozy little house that I took my then-boyfriend. Everyone was there, and it was in the days before children - a small gathering of six grownups. We ate breakfast casseroles, watched A Christmas Carol, opened gifts, and played games.

There was one game in particular. It had to do with guessing what each person would be if, say, he were a shoe (sneaker? heel? sandal?), or if she were part of a fictional family (the Brady Bunch? The Simpsons?). Social analysis meets wacky imagination: count me in. I'm pretty sure I could have kept going long after everyone else was weary of playing. In a particularly heightened moment, though, I nearly lost it - or rather, the game nearly lost me.

My turn was up, and the card, as I recall, imagined what kind of item I would be: a valuable piece of jewelry, perhaps, or a lamp. Or maybe a pair of house slippers. I didn't care who identified me as what; I was sure my beloved would recognize me for the valuable jewel I am, and I confidently watched as he laid down his card . . . on "house slipper." "I am a house shoe to you?!?" My brother, suppressing laughter, handed me the bottle of whiskey that had been gifted with the game. (My family remains exceedingly true to its merrily-imbibing German roots.) "You need some of this to calm you down?" In fact, I did not. Especially after Kenton explained himself. "I know you like to be comfortable!!"

Ah. Indeed I do. And how well the man knew me already, even then. If I have aspirations, they are small and most often homely. Today, listening to a good, old-fashioned Christmas tune in a warm, baby-quieted attic room, reading against the clank of the floorboard heater, I realized with a rush of gratitude that many of my aspirations are met right here, in this moment, this very morning: beauty, peace, comfort.

Another realization is that this blog needs order, and it shall have it. A Winter Theme. Now and into the first couple months of the new year, look for a weekly post on the topic of Comfort, fleshed out or imaged or essayed or sung in one way or another. Because Comfort gets dressed in varied garb according to the season. In this morning's weather, I find it homebodied and cozy.

In keeping, for the inaugural Winter Theme post, here's a list of items I'd call cozy, a snug fit for a mid-winter day spent this side of the frosted window. Comfort may dress a little differently this time next week, but at this Midwinter moment, I wish you words and images of comfort, with snazzy Christmas tunes to back them up. Or, in the spirit of Dickens, I wish you a blazing hearth, and may the cricket upon it never stop chirping.

1. A Very She & Him Christmas: It sounds like the holiday stuff I grew up on. Can't get better than that. (Would you like some nostalgia with your cozy?)

2. Posie Gets Cozy: If you haven't stumbled upon this woman's corner of the blogosphere, do. Her gorgeous home-and-town images deliver on the title's promise. Also, she's a fan of my third cozy item:

3. Kinfolk: There's a blog and - hallelujah - a real, true, gorgeous print magazine. "Kinfolk is the marriage of our appreciation for art and design and our love for spending time with family and friends." That's the spirit. I think there are crickets on this hearth aplenty.

Winter on the Internet

2011-12-15T10:41:00.002-05:00

It's December 15th today, and the high in our corner of Virginia is an annoying 66 degrees. To drum up some Christmas spirit against the unseasonably warm, rainy weather, here:

A Brit's reverent take on winter and Christmas in America's Little House books.

A teaser and a trailer for an upcoming BBC nature series. Don't miss the teaser, which features Attenborough reading the lyrics to "What a Wonderful World" against some really fantastic animal kingdom visuals. Though if you're looking for inspiration in a more chilly-weather vein, watch the trailer. Frozen Planet! I shiver deliciously at the thought. I've always had a thing for icebergs and whales.

Images of Christmas via food, tree ornaments, and - my favorite (also below) - cinnamon crisp winter leaves. I don't bake in this woman's style, so I rarely read her prose or recipes. But my goodness! Her photography. Christmas spirit, indeed. In addition, the deliciously foggy images over on this gorgeous blog (of felt ornament fame) today.

And what is a December without hand-crafted wood items and books? Everything in these pictures makes me happy. All of it wants to find a home in my house.

Perhaps most inspiring and lovely of all, Kirsten Dierking's poem "Shoveling Snow" on today's Writer's Almanac. Read it slowly in a hushed moment. "how radiant snow is a dream / like leaving behind the body / and rising into that luminous place / where sometimes you meet / the people you've lost."

Happy mid-December morning to you all!

"How

silver branches scrawl their names

in tangled script against the white"

~ Kirsten Dierking, "Shoveling Snow"

Crafty Back Patting

2011-12-13T12:54:00.004-05:00

Hand-embroidered ornament number two is made and gifted. (Number one was gratuitously mentioned here.) Our bags were out the door and in the car before I remembered to grab a photo of my lovely little ice skate on the tree in its new Waleska, Georgia home. Isn't it lovely?

I get better each time. On to stitch a gingerbread girl for Ella's second Christmas. My foodie (and all-around very cool) friend Katy Carter tells me embroidery might possibly fall under the category of Bad Crafts. Is it true? I'll tell you what definitely falls clean in that category: Book Art. And, related, book crafts. Check out the book I got for Christmas last weekend: (Three cheers for early Christmas celebrations!)

Book-crafted envelopes, postcards, mobiles, and maybe even a handbag to come. More self congratulation will ensue. In conclusion, a gratuitous ice skate ornament photo with crisp stitch detail. ("Ooooh . . . aaaaah.") Back sufficiently patted.

Memory Serves

2011-12-06T15:31:00.001-05:00

Once upon a December's day - what? This very day, one year ago? You don't say. Once upon this very December's day, I sat in this same chair, at this same window, and I anticipated. I also wrote. It is inspiring to remember the kinds of anticipation that swirled around my mind in the days before everything came to a point. At the time I wrote this, I had four of them. Four days. Memory tells me they were good ones.

This time around, as I enter the flurry of the holiday season and as the cold weather works, as always, its imaginative magic upon me - two things ever at odds - I have new memories to ponder. Ella's coming last winter was as wild and unpredictable as it could have been. It was also more difficult and painful than I ever could have thought, but those particular memories are for working through on my own, in the quiet moments I hope to find amidst this month's chaos. For the moment, I look back again at a morning four days before she came:

In a Flurry

December 7, 2010

It is winter, finally, again, and I am here and there, then and now. Both today and last winter (with its new novel ideas) and the one before (in Charlottesville, with gingersnap tea and characters fresh on the page) and the one before that (in Vermont, two feet underfoot of this fallen white stuff and snow shoes and those magic, pre-engagement days with Kenton) and on, and on: David Gray in Asheville five years ago and the birth of a seed of an idea for a book; here, today, in Blacksburg, and the book as it has been created thus far and lived and grown - now readying itself for a first-time winter season on the shelf, as another, newer life takes precedence. Here and there, back then and now.

What is it about this weather, more than any other, that inspires new thoughts and connects old ones? That fosters such fertile ground for the advent of living things? It is a mystery to me, this: every year, the death from off the leafless, brackened limbs proves a weak one; willingly or no, the stark-fingered trees perform but the gloried task of bearing up this lively winter magic, the lovely soft and cold pallets of white nestled so beautifully in the crooks of their black boughs and branches. I look out my window and I see it. There is something alive in this season of seeming death, and it quickens my mind, every year, every time.

This year, I am grateful for the early snowfall and winter-come, thankful it has arrived while I still have a few hours, days, perhaps weeks - but only, at the most, that - to accept this manna of imagination, this inspiration to create, as it comes. To hold it in the grasp of my thought for as long as it's gifted to me, till it melts away for a time into the next gift, another kind of life that will come to us in a flurry of unpredictability, to be held just as light-weightily, just as gratefully, as I must hold this moment of creative inspiration.

Earlier in the week - last week, actually - this poem on The Writer's Almanac:

Everywhere, everywhere, snow sifting down,

a world becoming white, no more sounds,

no longer possible to find the heart of the day,

the sun is gone, the sky is nowhere, and of all

I wanted in life - so be it - whatever it is

that brought me here, chance, fortune, whatever

blessing each flake of snow is the hint of, I am

grateful, I bear witness, I hold out my arms,

palms up, I know it is impossible to hold

for long what we love of the world . . .

It is winter, and I can - must - again create. What does that mean when a little being of nine months gestation, having been so kindly created inside me since the end of last year's winter, is about to be born out into the world? She gives a heave and tickles my tummy to remind me that she's on her way. I look out the window and think how the blessings that fall and bound about me seem, in this moment, happily, far too many. I'll spend this morning in the grasp of but one of them, in the hold of imagination, creating. I'll spend this day sinking my mind into the spirit of an imaginative abundance that flurries forth new thoughts and words, in the spirit of winters past. And then, soon, I'll spend the coming weeks holding a new winter's gift: that which seems impossible to grasp at the moment, a new life of a different sort.

The snow falls, the writerly ideas flurry, the baby girl pends. And "whatever blessing each flake of snow is the hint of, I am grateful, I bear witness, I hold out my arms, palms up." I am happy.

. . . I know it is impossible to hold

for long what we love of the world, but look

at me, is it foolish, shameful, arrogant to say this,

see how the snow drifts down, look how happy

I am. *

*"Manna" by Joseph Stroud, from Of This World. © Copper Canyon Press, 2009.

I Don't Intend to, Either.

2011-11-29T15:17:00.001-05:00

Should it embarrass me to confess thatsometimes I think of Mark Twain and Charles Dickens as the sameperson? I am, in fact, clear on who eachone is, distinct in his own fancifully-dark,hyperbolically-insightful, nationally-steeped way. Twain is soAmerican and Dickens is so English. And yet there issomething Twainish about Dickens, and something somewhat Dickensian about Twain, don't you think? And besides:

I mean, really.*

What's doing an even finer job ofconflating the two is the fact that today is Twain's birthday. (Adate I've long been aware of because it is also my mother's birthday, and atsome point in my childhood, that little piece of trivia popped up andlodged in my memory. Happy birthday, Mom!) And this upcoming year, annum 2012,is the much-celebrated 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth. The Writer's Almanac, today's Google doodle,and plenty of culture blogs are chiming in today with a multitude of Clemens bio curiosities**, while just yesterday,The New York Times's Book Bench was telling me about various bicentenary Dickens celebrations. As if thatweren't enough, here, on Twain Day 2011, sits a brand new biography,crisp and fresh off some November's printing press run: CharlesDickens: A Life, by Claire Tomalin. It was delivered to me yesterdayby the obliging folks at Amazon.com.

It is all too much to keep an already-confused head straight. And I'll tell youwhat's more. Not two hours ago, the public librarian handed me not just one but two books across the hold desk, and they are newly-published doozies: Mary DoriaRussell's historical fiction piece, Doc (Doc Holliday, that is)and Neal Stephenson's speculative thriller Reamde. Not a page under400. (Okay, fine, Doc actually pulls in at 394. Artisticlicense.) What this spells for me is three big books. What it spellsis December's reading list, set in bold black type. What it spellsis please, no one loan or recommend or give me any more books for theduration of the month. My nose will not remove itself from these pages tillthe last tome's cover is closed. And which one will be opened first? TheDickens, of course. (Not Twain. Dickens.)

Several years ago, I began readingDickens in earnest, set in motion by Bleak House, c. Winter2009. Most of you probably know all about that by now and wish I'd stop talking about how appropriate Dickens is to Winter Reading. But what I maynot (yet) have gone on about ad nauseam is how I startedreading biographies to begin with. Interestingly, it started withClaire Tomalin, the very biographer of this new Dickens book. InJanuary of 2010, now almost two years ago, some question popped upabout Jane Austen, and I got me to a library (the hard-copy kind -not Google! Thank you very much) to find out the answer. I chose oneof the several Austen biographies that were on the shelf, fully expecting to read an earlychapter or two, skim the rest of the first half, renew several timeswith good intentions, and then return. It was Tomalin's book I chose. Shockingly, I finished it in its entirety. I even read it before bedtime! Who was I, Rebecca Martin,lover of fiction only fiction alwaysfictionallthetime, becoming? Areader of biographies, apparently.

More recently, this past summer, Ipicked up an edited collection of Virginia Woolf's letters and foundI was not alone: " . . . I've had the habit of getting full ofsome biography and wanting to build up my imaginary figure of theperson with every scrap of news I could find about him," shesaid. Further, "During the passion, the name of Cowper or Byronor whoever it might be, seemed to start up in the most unlikelypages." Exactly! Writer's Almanac, the latest Guardian bookreview, the news, for goodness sake. I get sucked in. Literary voyeurism. Today, it's SamuelClemens. This month, Charles Dickens – and this time not just a seasonal novelread, but a full-on 527-page biography. I'm going to know all abouthim. And, with all my love to the libraries and used bookstores around theglobe, it'll be in new-book form. My own book! The smell of the pressbarely cooled off the page. (My goodness, it smells so good. It smells like . . . what was that store's name? . . . Right. Borders. I loved that store. I'm not ashamed.)

Yes, confessed antiquarian though I am, sometimes it is downrightnice to own a new book. Having been born five days before – and 141 years after – Mark Twain, it was at this time last year that I received a birthday package in themail. The package was from a distant friend, and the contentsincluded a book – a new book! Lucy Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt. Oh, the forgotten delight of a smooth new hardback, allslick-covered and crisp-paged, straight from the shelves of Barnes & Noble or the bankrupted like. I sat down savoringly, days ina row, steeped in the nonfiction world of Lucy Duff Gordon. Who? Ididn't know either before cracking the covers. It's not reallyrelevant, except that there I was, nine months pregnant and not to beinterrupted for breakfast, dinner, bathroom break, or anything . . .for a biography. A shiny new one. And I don't even like Egypt. Interestingly, Charles Dickenswas a visitor in Lucy Duff Gordon's literary Victorian home. And so we come almostfull circle.

Dickens and Twain. Twain on Dickens. Alittle Google searching (though the library could probably tell memore) informs me they probably never met, though they were alive at thesame time (Twain the significantly younger of the two), and Twainhimself wrote a report of the Dickens reading he attended in 1868. Hiswrite-up of Dickens the Public Figure was more complimentary than his description ofDickens the Public Reader, though neither are glowing reviews. That'sTwain for you: never dull, never unhumorous, and never anything butstraightforward. But he still leaves you with the impression he mighthave liked Dickens the Man. Or perhaps that's just my imaginationrunning away with me.

The real question my conflating brain poses isthis: What if Twain had written Dickens? Or, conversely, what ifDickens had written Twain? Now that's something to get yourimaginations chugging. Those writers twain (get it??) run fathomsdeep, and more than two fathoms, at that. But as Twain did not write Dickens,I'll sound the depths with Tomalin for the time being.

The above-mentioned Book Bench article makesthe wry observation that "a century and three quarters after hisfirst visit here, we Americans still won’t leave Charles Dickensalone." Twain didn't, and, in my best imitation ofVirginia-Woof-as-literary-stalker, I don't intend to, either. I've got my cupof coffee. The baby's asleep. Here next to the desk lie my threebrand new December tomes, Dickens on top. It's time to crackle open thatsatisfyingly new and stiff cover and dive in for awhile.

*Does anyone else see a little Woody Harrelson in this shot of Twain?
**A possible favorite of which is thegenesis of Samuel Clemens's pen name, “Mark Twain,” meaning twofathoms deep in riverboat talk. And really, "twain" is just a downright satisfying word to say out loud. Try it. In a stentorian voice: "Mark twain!" as though you were on back of a ship. No one will ever know.

And You Don't Have to Pay a Thing

2011-11-28T10:34:00.001-05:00

It's Cyber Monday, but I won't sell you anything. Instead, I'll point you in the direction of some wicked cool free things online you ought to see - or hear. In fact, start with listening:

The Q Magazine Achtung Baby Tribute album, AHK-toong BAY-bi Covered, sets a fine tone for any morning's web browsing. If you love U2, that is. And if you're in your right mind, you do. (Fun fact: any time I work on my fiction, which is most every morning, I jump start the creative juices with this very U2 album. I've done that for six years and counting. For the rest of my life, I'll hear Zoo Station's opening bass riffs and hop to action, looking for the nearest laptop.) Here's the release write-up on the cover album.

Now that your ears are happy, check out how Ben Kacyra has digitally captured ancient wonders of the world in three dimensions. We're already in the future with digital archiving. Where does 3D take us? Somewhere amazing, that's for sure.

Meanwhile, here's an expansive vision of the recent past: one year of the sky was filmed and edited by artist Ken Murphy, and you can watch it all go by - sunny days, cloudy days, rainy days, and everything between - from sunrise to sunset in this inspiring time-lapse video: a mosaic History of the Sky.

Finally, today is the day you can watch Lisa Simpson throw down her best mocking impression of what I do. Suffice to say, she doesn't miss the mark by much. Even better, watch Neil Gaiman confess he can't read. The Book Job episode. It's all too much . . . in a good way. There's an insightful write-up here.

And now I'm four-and-a-half tracks beyond my usual morning start-time. I'd better get writing before I get seduced by a web ad and buy something on sale that I don't need.

Happy Monday to all!

Wishing Away

2011-11-22T10:25:00.001-05:00

This is the time of year I miss England the most. Which is strange, because I've never actually been in England at this time of year. But nevermind that.

I have a distinct memory, one amongst many, of sitting on a riverside patio on a hazy late-summer day. Was it mid-morning? Was it mid-afternoon? The detail haze is due in part to a bout of merry imbibing the night before, a farewell evening with friends before returning home. Three of us drank tea together that next day on the back porch of a pub overlooking - what? The Thames? The Cherwell? What details I can't recall are substituted by a clear mental image of teabags and friends, bittersweet headache and sublime river view. It's not one of those bright, shining Oxford memories, those ones that have to do with tower climbing and bells ringing and benches overlooking a mass of stone and green and floral beauty. But it's a real one. I was sad to leave at the end of that study abroad summer.

I think that's why fall is such a poignant England-time for me. It was during the following autumn back in Athens that I had to culture shock myself through leaving such a lovely place behind. I read lots of Tolkien and Lewis (not least because the Lord of the Rings movies were in production at the time). Their books, so deeply steeped in the British Isles, helped me get through. So at this time of year, I always crave a taste of Surprised by Joy, and sometimes That Hideous Strength.

A few other folks this side of the Pond have hailed England lovingly on the internet lately. I direct you to them:

Tell Me a Story by Jennifer Strange, and
a recent post at the Lanier's Books blog.

And of course, any time I need a hit of Oxford in my day, Inspector Lewis never fails to come through. Foggy memory tells me the Trout Inn wasn't the pub of patio tea sipping that particular August afternoon, but Lewis and Hathaway's Thames-side drinking scenes do a satisfactory job of reminding me. Wouldn't you like to join them there? Sans dead bodies, of course. And at this chilly time of year, a fireside pub table sounds just as nice.

In Character

2011-11-21T10:29:00.001-05:00

It is essential that you (yes, you!) watch last night's Simpsons episode. I know, I know. You don't usually watch The Simpsons. You just don't think it's funny. Maybe you're even offended by it sometimes. But I, Rebecca Martin, say, "Watch it." There is more-than-a-cameo by uber-creative writer Neil Gaiman (whose praises I've sung here), as well as a plot on tween lit novel writing (and writing in general) that's a little too incisive to be parody. (Not to mention one of my favorite Simpsons lines yet. Lisa: "I got the idea from every movie ever made.")

Meanwhile, I won't mention how my own middle grades book involves an orphan who discovers she has magical powers. There's no castle, but there is a suspiciously large house . . . Hey. Neil and Lisa only wanted to get their pictures on the back of a dust jacket. I'm just trying to do the same, right? (Kidding. Kidding!)

So go on with you, now, before I confess to truly horrible things. Hop on over to Hulu* and click "Play." If you've got any interest in YA lit, I don't think you'll regret it.

*Next week, that is. Dang Hulu Plus.

Watching Flight

2011-11-18T10:56:00.001-05:00

I talked about the sacredness of home things here several weeks back. My expanded thoughts are up at The Curator this week.

Today is Friday, praise be, so I'm giving myself the weekly break from writing and am curled up by my favorite attic window, the one that in summertime overlooks clusters of green-leaved trees, and in fall gives out on brilliant colors. Yesterday, it snowed. Today, the leaves are fully down, and I have a clear, chilly view to Blacksburg's small local airport. Planes are coming and going this morning, leftover travelers from last night's big football game.

This is Kenton's favorite view from the house. When he touts the blessings of our current home, small and old as it is, he never fails to list the nearby airport. "Who would have thought I could ever watch planes take off and land from my own home?" Not everyone would be so happy. I actually don't mind the noise - these little turbo props aren't often loud. It's just that I prefer a wall of leaves to a glass-fronted building returning my stare.

But on this out-of-the-ordinary, post-game Friday, I have to admit it's pretty cool to watch each plane zip by and lift off just before passing out of my line of vision. Truly, who gets to see something like this from the pajama'ed, tea-drinking interior of a cozy, late fall Friday morning? In years to come, we'll look back with nostalgia on this home and talk about the House by the Airport. Chances are most of the stuff in this house will end up with us in whatever next place we live, but we'll have to leave the planes behind.

So today I make an agreement with myself that I won't complain this winter that my favorite window view gives out onto an airport building for the duration of the season. But I'll be even happier when there's a light level of snow laying across its roof and nestling amongst the cold, patient trees. Don't tell autumn, but I may love winter even better. And now that the leaves are down and there's no fall to be faithful to, I sit inside my window, watch the intermittent miracle of human flight, and say: Let it snow.

In Memory

2011-11-16T11:26:00.001-05:00

I won't pretend Salvador Dali doesn't creep me out more than a little. But these 1969 Alice illustrations, recently digitized, are too apropos not to share. (Click the image for more of Dali in Wonderland.) There's a little bit of "Yeesh!" in there, right? Dali has quite the creative eye toward interpreting the universe of Alice.

Alice herself, along with her Wonderland, sometimes does a fine job weirding me out, as well. So why the blog title? There's a storied explanation here. But the phrase "down the rabbit hole" carries many a connotation, some of the hallucinogenic variety, which I certainly never intended. I've actually thought about changing the name in recent years, but I've been stopped every time. I'm stopped by a memory. A memory of Margaret.

I began this blog back in spring of '05, sitting at a desk in Athens, Georgia. I was figuring out how to keep in touch with friends who'd recently left and friends whom I'd soon be leaving. In those not-so-long-ago days, blogs were the thing. Facebook and Twitter were glimmers in somebody's eye, but I'd yet to see them cross my computer screen. So we wrote to each other on our blogs, my friends and I. We wrote posts like glorified emails, ordinary tales out of new days, and we refreshed and read and responded. In the midst of that small social net, one that worked just as well in-person as it did online, I moved to Asheville, North Carolina. There I met more folks and my new days took on a rather extraordinary color, as they can only do in that particular city. It was as though a kaleidoscope, one on a grand scale, had lent its prismed view to my life. And it was here, on this tiny corner of the internet, that I pieced out some of the lovelier, stranger, more meaningful refractions. There were many stories to tell.

Early-on, I worked at an advertising agency in the heart of downtown, in the heart of the bizarre. The business was on North Lexington Avenue, which had color enough of its own - no kaleidoscope needed. And I shared office space with a coworker and a fast friend who contributed her own vibrant outlook to the city, to me. There was so much life in Margaret. I recall a day when she came through the glass front door in a wild white pantsuit, something with a suede texture and fur - lots of fur. I think there was a matching hat that barely tamed that mass of feathery hair. She knew her getup was wild, and she relished every rascally minute.

For Margaret, life was a wonderland. And her friendship lent wonder to mine. She was always wide-eyed and ready for the next thing, big or small, crazy or serious. And that's where her wonderfulness was truly seated: in friendship. She was a true friend. Her wild stabs at fun were never self-focused or overly-introspective. Her vibrance moved outward, and her heart was not actually directed by how she looked or what she did; it was set toward other people with a wide-open welcome. Many a time did she listen to my homesick talk. She'd invite me over or meet me for coffee and hear whatever I, so self-absorbed in all the newness of that time, had to say. She'd drive me to the car repair shop, too, when I needed it. She treasured others, and she was a treasure.

And she is gone now. Margaret is gone. She had a year and maybe a month on me, and I have now lived beyond the number of years she made it on this earth. I lost track of her in the end. My days eventually got spent in different towns and cities and my time got devoted to the things in front of me. More changes - job, city, family. And in the meantime, she faced changes, too. Cancer reared its nasty head. I did not get to say goodbye. I didn't know there was any reason to, until it was too late. I kept confident I'd drop in on her on some Asheville visit, and we'd reestablish our friendship, wild and fun and easy and real as always. Maybe if we had connected on Facebook, I would have known, and then I would have made that trip back home to her fast.

So I don't know how Margaret ended her days. I don't know if she maintained that colorful outlook, her vibrant spirit. But she remains crisp and clear in my mind. Margaret, taking me to get my broken-down car fixed. (She'd be so delighted to know I'm still rambling around in that same old Honda.) Margaret, making sure I dove right into the local music scene. Margaret, showing me her Alice in Wonderland collection up in her attic bedroom that I suspect was no stranger to rabbit hole trips of the shroomy sort. Margaret, who lay on the floor of the Orange Peel theater with me on one crazy event evening that involved some sort of "journey through the stars" video. We laid our heads down on that sticky floor, not pausing to wonder what had spilled there beforehand, and watched the universe close in and expand. We were teenaged and goofy for the ten, twenty minutes of that galaxy video, and I wouldn't trade the memory.

One morning at the office, talking across the space between our computers, I shared with her the way my life was moving in fast motion, the way it always does when big changes - city, job, friends - are afoot. She nodded her rosy, round-cheeked nod, wispy brown hair a-flying, and said, "Yes. You are Alice. You've fallen down the rabbit hole." Her eyes glinted.

What a wide universe we live in. What a slim chance it would seem that I'd cross paths with Margaret. I know better, though. I know it was no chance. She was a gift. She made me a friend with an expansive welcome, and she - beautifully vibrant - helped make my world at that time a home. I didn't know how much I would miss her. I didn't know I'd have to.

"Down the rabbit hole." She nodded at me across the office. "That's what you should call your blog." And so it was.

And so it is.

The Dali illustrations? I don't know what Margaret thought of Dali, but I wouldn't be surprised if she'd seen these before, in all their weirdness and wildness and depth and color. I'd be surprised if she didn't love them.

In the Mood

2011-11-15T09:55:00.001-05:00

It's a tricksy day out. The house holds tight to the overnight chill, while the thermostat reads an actual 59 degrees outside. With the floorboard heater on upstairs, I expect to hear icy drops clicking against the panes. But the window tells a lie; it's a warm November Rain.

Other things tell the truth as I settle back into productive routine after several days off: a birthday gift of Amish quilted coasters from my mother-in-law, topped by another gift, a new mug that keeps me on track. And a stack of books waiting inspirationally in the wings. Whatever the temperature says, winter is pending, and the time for books (and books and books) draws nigh.

That time, for me, starts on the second of January, drives full-tilt (as full-tilt as one can be leaned back in an armchair) through drear February, and on into March or even April - whenever spring decides to peek her head through the clouds again. (At which time you'll find me tapping my fingers till this sequel comes out, while waiting in line for Hunger Games tickets.) But I am getting far ahead of myself. I don't intend to rush things. Autumn is best; there isn't a doubt in my mind. But after the cinnamon leaves get hidden beneath a blanket of snow and the holidays burn themselves down, you'll find me snug and happy, living up the bleak season as best it can be done.

What's waiting on the shelf for this winter's go-round? Some new:

Mixed Magics (a Diana Wynne Jones collection of Chrestomanci short stories);
Charles Dickens: A Life (the latest Dickens bio; did I never tell you winter is for biographies?);
and Mary Doria Russell's latest historical fiction piece, Doc.
I'll also start a Dickens novel just after Thanksgiving, as-yet unchosen. Any recommendations?

Then some rereads. I was reminded this morning that

Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising is best at this time of year; I think I'll pull it down from the living room bookcase.
And of course Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell will get a flip-through, if not an entire read.

This puts me in mind that my annual Top Books post is forthcoming. 2011 has introduced some great reads that I look forward to sharing. I'll get to work on writing that up. And then I'll find a morning in January to pull myself out of the cozy armchair and post it here.

Till then, winter is on its way. What covers will you be cracking?

In Stitches

2011-11-04T09:19:00.000-04:00

Once upon a jobless time, back in Athens, Georgia, I did some temp work for a medical records business. My daily task, 8-5, was to sit in front of a computer screen (the big box monitor type) and enter file after file into one of those old-school frames. You know the type: black background, blinking green square, tab, tab, tab. Once I got the hang of that particular system, boy howdy, was I fast. I started doing the job with a half a mind toward anything else I could get my hands on, generally music and lectures and sermons - on an old-school CD walkman, of course. Spongy headphones and all. Monotonous tasks, they are for me.

More recently, in a Bible study group, we were asked to share the times we feel most like ourselves. There was talk of nature hikes and moments sitting on mountain tops, peaceful and ruminative. There was talk of afternoons spent cooking and then sharing meals. Me? I shared about staring out the window for long stretches of minutes, letting my imagination fly. Blank stares. I got blank stares.

Don't get me wrong; I can savor a long hike and a mountaintop vista, especially in fall. But I have to be me. And if you're asking when I'm most that "me," the answer is seated deep in imagination. And my imagination runs its best riot when there's a book in my hand and a window handy. Also when watching a creatively-told movie. Also, when my hands are occupied with something quiet, steady, and completely unrelated. Like this:

Embroidery. This is a completely new discovery. I don't know why it took me so long. In elementary school, I used to do cross-stitches obsessively. (See mention above of me and monotonous tasks.) I remember my first little kit, a very saccharine 5x7 of a cat sleeping on a sleeping dog and something about love being a warm blanket. I didn't really like animals at the time. Nevermind. The business of folding and counting and poking that needle through the hole: punch up, punch down, pull through. Repeat. My brain got to go on holiday, and it felt so good.

See? I'm even odder than you thought. My dad didn't like it, either, and he tried to send me outside to bounce a basketball or something. That obviously didn't take, as the closest thing I've bounced to a basketball in recent years was a tennis ball, maybe for a P.E. class back in college. (Does college count as recent years?) I still do the odd cross-stitch here and there, especially in winter when inside a window is the place to be. But the problem is that I don't like the outcome. Which is to say, I love the process of a picture coming together, line after line of color slowly becoming much more than each individual stitch: a whole image. But once the image is whole, it's not really my kind of thing. The cross-stitch aesthetic doesn't jive with my decor, so I find myself giving them away.

Till now. Now, cross-stitch may be done forever. Because I have discovered embroidery. And now I have lost the rest of you, who were okay with my being weird but now you see my dork-meter ringing off the chart. But I warned you in the beginning, so I don't care. It all began because I'm in the market for new dishes. (Don't worry, Carrie Allen! I'm not selling the old ones.) A Google image search for "dinnerware" led me to an image of these guys (a serious consideration), which led me to this woman's blog post about them, which led me to read her delightful blog and to the discovery that she's quite the crafty one. She designs and sews lots of things, and she also makes these Christmas ornament kits. A new kit every year. Felt ornaments, just like the ones from my 1970's childhood (some of which still hang, only a little stained and banged, on my tree). Not knowing what I was getting into, I ordered a kit.

What I was getting into is something new, something insanely domestic, something deliciously monotonous to near-obsess over. Kenton and Ella watch with expressions of mild confusion as I repeatedly trace, cut, trace, stitch. Stitch, stitch, stitch, stitch. Stitch. Stuff. Stitch. Then I carry the ornament around the house with me and hang it on various items in each room, so I can admire my work. The best part of this newest discovery? I like the way it looks. Cross-stitch is so 1983. Embroidery is now.

It's no wonder I got blank stares from the Bible study group. I can feel the incredulous expressions coming through the computer screen at this moment. Ah, well. Like I said, I have to be me. Here's hoping I don't leave spare needles lying around, or that Ella doesn't find herself in therapy twenty years hence: "My mom was always getting excited about something called 'french knots.'"

I make no apology. I've been trying to master the french knot since that fifth grade cross-stitch.

Fierce Divergence

2011-11-01T11:14:00.002-04:00

"It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us."

~ G.K. Chesterton

"On Certain Modern Writers and the Institutionof the Family." Brave New Family. Ignatius Press, San Francisco: 1990. p.37-38

Turned to Gold

2011-10-29T11:30:00.005-04:00

There've been a number of thoughtful, striking pieces on autumn floating around the internet. Here are a few of them:

"October," by Rebecca Reynolds at The Rabbit Room

"On Becoming," by Allison Gaskins on the Art House America blog

And, especially, today's Writer's Almanac poem:

Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself,
like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

"Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself," by Barbara Crooker, from Radiance. © Word Press, 2005.

All That You Can't Leave Behind

2011-10-28T10:33:00.001-04:00

Kenton will come home and ask, "Did you blog about your latest Curator essay?" So I don't have to endure his meaning stare, now I have.

Serendipitously, the other essayist in today's Curator three touches on the very thing I intended to consider in this morning's new writing. In "A Trail of Belongings," Rebecca Tirrell Talbot acknowledges "Of course I am more than what I own. Of course one day what I own will be irrelevant." But she also concedes that "we are body as well as spirit, and a body likes a couch." She considers the way in which home-guests can know her better by the personal pieces in her home, and the way she feels comfortable in the home of a friend, surrounded by the familiar furniture, kitchenware, and decor of an oft-visited place.

I've been thinking recently about possessions, about the things I own and the meanings they hold. What does it mean that my dishes are mismatched? That some of our furniture was crafted by skilled Mennonite hands decades ago, and some of it comes from Grands Home Furnishing? That I take an insane delight in our bookshelves being Kenton-made? What does it mean that I enjoy peering up from the computer, or book, or baby, to appreciate the arrangement of my belongings around me? Conversely, what does it mean when I get all agitated that the bathroom wall is still a bumpy mess, waiting now for a year and a half to be sanded and repainted?

There is a culture these days of serious nesting. There are blogs, books, and television shows dedicated to perfecting the home environment. There is an implicit suggestion, a confidence in this DIY home renovation culture, that the home environment might achieve perfection, might be everlasting. Another Curator writer touched on this several months ago. It resonated with me: "The emerging idea that is caught amongst many young women is that modern American womanhood– a life lauded for our opportunity for independence– is yet contrarily bound by expectations to be completely nested at a very young age."

Too true. Nesting, home-making, should be a process. We acquire these items here, are given those there. Some break, some are replaced by better, some are old and shabby and yet so full of meaning I hope never to lose them till the end, when I lose all things. It is an accepted concept in Christian circles: you can't take it with you. This, also, is true.

I am - relatively - young. I am a life in-process. I hope my home, in reflecting who I am right now, reflects that. I look at my dinner table: a compilation of wedding gift dishes, discount ceramics bought at the grocery store, and, most sentimental, retro 1960's plates bought from an antiquer friend in my Asheville days. Those Starglow dishes were designed for a different time. (They were born, interestingly, out of a mindset of progressive thinking that saw women less and less in the kitchen - and perhaps less and less nested.) I look further: Our book cases were built by my husband. The books on them are favorites - his and mine - from childhood, from college, from recent years, ongoingly added to and culled. Our wine glasses, half-broken, half-mismatched from vineyard wine tastings, may someday or may never be replaced by a full, nice set. The bathroom, desperately in need of a facelift, may get repainted before we leave this house - or it may not. Here we are, right now, in this place, amongst things that mean something to us. Also, amongst people who (should) mean much more.

That some of our items carry an unintended message - the retro dishes from the era of American progression saving the future - is merely interesting to me. That they came by way of dear friends means much more. They'll stay. That so many of our items are infused with memories of events, of each other, and of people in other places and people long-gone, makes me wonder if perhaps in some way we do take these things with us when we go.

Perhaps there is something of lasting, meaningful substance to belongings, after all. Perhaps in the end, meaning and memory will be all that we can't leave behind, along with our very souls.

Thievery

2011-10-15T10:04:00.001-04:00

I am a thief. The dwarves should have come and hired me instead of a certain hobbit, because my burglary is just as unintentional, and just as thorough. The telling scratch-marks might as well have been on my own white, square front door; the evidence lies in my kitchen drawer: two one-quarter measuring cups. One red, one black. Both plastic. There they lie, silently pointing the finger, when they're not in scooping service.

In the months of August and September, in a three-week span, I stayed in as many vacation houses. (Don't I live the life of leisure and decadence?!) I came away with as many items (the third a green hand towel; boring, though I suspect the friends who own the Chesapeake River House wouldn't mind having it back). The measuring cups came by way of my granola, innocent scoops thoughtlessly zipped and sealed up in the remainder of the weeks' cereal we brought home.

I'm not going to lie: extra quarter-cup measuring utensils won't go unused in my cooking space. Perhaps I should have already mailed them back. The thought of a measuring set without a quarter cup is bleak. And yet, they remain happily at home rotating between my drawer and dishwasher. The answer, surely, is to return next year to a certain South Carolina lake house with a group of very fun girls - and then, of course, to a certain lovely Eastern Shore Victorian home - granola and measuring cups in hand. Yes, that is it. It will be a trial, but I'll have to go back. Perhaps next time, I'll bring along my own scoop, too. But then again, I'd probably leave it. Accidental thievery is far more convenient than unintentional gifting.

But the real answer is clearer. I will consult Tolkien. My book club will surely be glad if I actually finish one of our upcoming reads. And perhaps my conscience will be assuaged by commonality with the inimitable (except in this circumstance) Bilbo. Don't you think there were probably some stray kitchen items under Smaug's belly? Say, a golden measuring cup or two? At the very least, I know better than to pretend they were birthday presents. Because that is never the right answer.

The Intersection of Blacksburg and Eternity

2011-10-08T09:51:00.000-04:00

Here, now. Mill Mountain. I raced out the door so hurriedly I forgot to brush my teeth. Hopefully no one here is reading this, and all will be alright. At least this time I have my glasses on.

It was difficult to leave. Ella was happy, and snugglier than usual. The house was quiet, save for Kenton grinding coffee. I spent longer in bed than I should have reading my favorite section of Fellowship. This is what Saturday mornings in fall are for.

This, here, out by myself, is what fall Saturdays are, too. There was a weekend in Asheville five years ago; the family was out of town. I didn't leave the house for three days. On the way home from work that Friday evening, I had picked up some kind of dinner and ice cream and wine, and those served me the weekend through. I wrote and wrote and wrote, went into Beth's kitchen for coffee refills, and wrote and wrote some more. I remember taking an afternoon walk around the house because I felt like I should see sky for a moment, at least. Then back inside and writing, holed up on my bed in the blue room. My soul was so cozy that weekend.

It felt that way this morning, too. But now I'm to it. Work must be done. I retain a little bit of that deep rest, though, even here, which is all a-football-game-bustle. An hour and a half holed up at a back corner table, then home and off again for an afternoon hike. The first round of trees are peaking. We mustn't miss them.

This is the best time of year.

Minding Business

2011-09-28T11:37:00.013-04:00

I have frittered away much of my morning writing time today - and it's been downright fun. I've got essay topic stacked on essay topic to be paid attention to. They'll wait till tomorrow. When I do attend to the notes I compiled on our vacation two weeks back, I'll be giving some thought to Marsh Periwinkles.

What, you don't know what a Marsh Periwinkle is? Right. Neither did I. In fact, I saw a bunch of them before I knew their proper name, and believe me - I would have called them something quite different. I first sighted them from the vantage of a canoe, in a small cove around the watery bend from the river house we vacationed in. Kenton was skillfully rowing while I less-than-successfully tried to keep Ella happy in the bottom of the boat. But even her cries of boredom couldn't detract from the delight of sailing around our quiet, lake-ish corner of river. How I love being on the water. We first rowed east to a broader section, found the space too exposed and the sun too hot there, and came back around westward for the shade and quiet of this little cove. It was home to many things, including some folks with a lovely, unobtrusive, Japanese-inspired house, complete with walking bridge. And clusters of Marsh Periwinkles.

They were tiny; they were delightful. They remained entirely calm as the breeze swept our bark dangerously near their reedy home-spot. I could have reached out and plucked many times-tens of them. I wouldn't have, though. That would have been mean, but even if it hadn't, I respected their silent request for privacy. They were so content, so purposeful in their smallness, so confident in their staking out of several grassy inches apiece.

A couple days later, in an alone morning-moment out on the boat dock, I read a Wendell Berry poem. “XIV,” from his Sabbath Poems:

God, how I hate the names

of the body's chemicals and anatomy,

the frore and glum department

of its parts, each alone in the scattering

of the experts of Babel.

The body

is a single creature, whole,

its life is one, never less than one, or more,

so is its world, and so

are two bodies in their love for one another

one. In ignorance of this

we talk ourselves to death.

There is a knowingness, a peace, and a solace in being who we were intended to be, without talk, without unnecessary dissection. It seems the Marsh Periwinkles have got that figured out pretty good.

In the canoe, Kenton pulled a couple strong row-strokes at the last moment, and we did not, after all, sail over the stiff, tall stalks of river cordgrass. We did not smush or dislodge any Marsh Periwinkles. Phew. But even if we had, I have a feeling those little guys would have been just fine. There was a tenacity in their posture.

Marsh? Yes. We saw them again later in the week in the marshlands off Fisherman's Island, where they were truly at home. Periwinkle? Perhaps this is their trick. They appear so small and whimsical, a swirl of shell stuck on a stick. But it is obvious there's more to them than that. An all-sufficient home, borne strongly upon a small back, kept high and safe from the Chesapeake fish and crabs below. These guys stared down a canoe, I tell you. No, they didn't even stare. We weren't threat enough to break their calm stillness, as they waited out the quiet hours of their day, sticky feet tacked confidently to their blades, each doing his life's work of staking out a home.

Modern Western culture moves swiftly in a different direction - in many directions - but I've always taken heart in the Bible verse that instructs about aspiring to live quietly, minding our own affairs, working with our hands.*

The Marsh Periwinkle.

* "and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you," ~ 1 Thessalonians 4:11

An Auspicious Season

2011-09-26T10:33:00.000-04:00

Kenton says I must be sure to share my latest Curator essay with the blogosphere, so here it is. If I had been on-the-ball last Friday when it came out and told you then, I would have been able to say, Happy First Day of Fall! Here's a fitting one for the season! Or I might have noted that this essay serendipitously set out for readership on the very same day Frodo and Sam left with a ring, the day after Frodo's birthday.

Frodo's birthday. I've always wanted to host a regular dinner party on September 22nd. Bilbo's big bash was that day, and there's something appealing about a tent in the backyard with white lights strung, pumpkins laying about, and beer sloshing happily down grass and chins and throats. But I'm also always touched when I read Tolkien's scene of the small dinner party Frodo holds for himself and the closest of friends on the night before he departs. It's a melancholy moment, the group of five gathered around a dinner table in the dark and packed-up hobbit hole, but it's also touchingly intimate. One day I'll get on the ball with that plan, too (and endeavor to avoid being sick, like I was on this particular weekend), and a dinner gathering - maybe small, maybe big - will be held at our place of a late September evening.

Till then, I'll satisfy myself with unshelving Fellowship sometime this week and giving my favorite section a happy, autumn-time read. What do you like to read in fall-time?

Paint Me a Thousand

2011-08-30T10:45:00.002-04:00

I've got nothing new this morning, and I think that's okay. I've got a revise that I want to send off, so that's work enough for the hour I have left at Mill Mountain. Where, consequently, I am seated next to an Owen Wilson clone. Except he's a business man. And serious. He's on some kind of interview. How that voice does carry! I can't be too annoyed. (Hopefully I'll restrain myself from asking for an impression when he's on his way out.)

I would write better, though, in silence. Frederick Buechner, lyrical writer, has eloquent things to say about silence. He says that silence is necessary, that it's the needed thing before truth can be gotten at. "Out of the silence let the only real news come." And, "Before the Gospel is a word, it is silence."*

I was reminded the other day of a painting I've loved. Actually, I was reminded of an evening at The High in Atlanta, viewing a collection that was largely Van Gogh, but that included this piece, as well:

The Bride, by Johan Thorn Prikker

May I add a few words to these thousand? I recall the evening museum visit with Ross and Margaret Anne. It was my birthday. We arrived in the basement parking deck and raced for the elevator through the crisp chill of late November, and walked out into the bright warmth of the museum, into the excitement of its dramatic high open space and the inviting spiral steps. We climbed the stairs and wandered through several rooms of art on white walls, nice things but not what I was there for. I was hunting. After several long rooms of early Impressionism and Pointillism, I turned a sudden corner and was stopped in my tracks. There it was, arresting. The Bride hung on its own narrow wall, in its own viewing-space, between-rooms. It was so much bigger than I had expected, so much taller. I can't remember how long I stood staring. Ross and MA peeled off each-by-each to move on toward Starry Night and Cafe Terrace and others. I remained. At the end of the exhibit, before leaving, I walked back for another draught. One for the road, as it were.

It had all begun months beforehand on a visit to a friend, a weekend spent in a cozy Atlanta home getting over some break-up with a silly boy. I was silly, too, and so I sat on the friend's back porch and thought sad thoughts and we talked and analyzed more than we probably needed to. But the friend is an artist herself, and so the weekend was also filled with beauty, with images and ideas and the challenge to create. (I came away with the book Art and Fear to add to my shelves.) We watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (still a favorite of both of ours, unless she's seen something better since that she hasn't told me about) with its jarring snapshots of juxtaposed imaginings that crash in on each other. What a discovery. And then another discovery on a leaflet that came to her in the mail that weekend: an upcoming exhibit at The High Museum of Art, paintings on loan from the Kroller-Muller Museum in the Netherlands: lots of Van Goghs, some Seurat, some Mondriaan, some others, with pictures to entice. One of them was of The Bride.

She and I held the glossy flier and looked and looked at the image, not much larger than a thumbnail. We analyzed - the colors, the lines, the ideas. But what was that going on in the upper-right side? Those aggressive, troubling black lines that enwrap and trap the bride, all otherwise mystically beautiful. We puzzled and thought, and looked, and looked again. Then, the Aha! We saw what was there, and suddenly the ideas in the work laid themselves out plainer and deeper, wave upon wave of recognition and realization. We were stunned. I'll leave it to you to see if you are the same.

When, several months later, I stood before the actual piece several floors up in the museum, there was more. Not just the colors and the texture that could never come through in a tiny reproduction, or the stained-glass quality I hadn't noted before, but another detail: the irises. They are skulls, and only then, in-person, did I see it. Another wave of recognition and realization.

I still hate the black lines floating around the central figure. They are menacing and ugly on a landscape of beauty. And those flowers in the veil have a menace of their own, though they retain a frightening loveliness. But it is all true, I realize. I realized it then and affirm it even more now. This picture does not lie; it shows things as they are. No other piece moves me in the same way or to the same extent. The menace, the entrapment, the shared thorns and the sheer beauty. Those black lines, that "grace now like a fetter." And the figure that can be seen if we have eyes for it.

Buechner, I think, would have things to say in response. Perhaps something about the "words and images that help make the surface of our lives transparent to the truth that lies deep within them, which is the wordless truth of who we are and who God is and the Gospel of our meeting."* Or perhaps he would say nothing at all. He knows, after all, the silence that must come before a true word is spoken. And so I stood silently at the museum, staring, listening, and the silent thousand words and more crashed down upon me. I drank, a deep and satisfying draught. That was seven years ago. I am changed still.

*Buechner, Frederick. Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. p.23,24

Exposure

2011-08-30T10:22:00.000-04:00

I once had a boss who said she'd found herself thinking in the vocabulary of Facebook. She'd be at a stop light, and, without Blackberry or iPhone, merely to herself, she would say, "Rebecca is tired of sitting in traffic." (Yes, her name, too, was Rebecca.) Sometimes Facebook says it best. (Or maybe it just hijacks our brain cells.)

Rebecca Martin is avoiding.

Rebecca Martin is in denial.

Rebecca Martin is living on the dangerous side of procrastination. That's the side where the baby might wake up any minute, and there goes another morning's writing opportunity, down the drain. A lot like yesterday.

It's been a fantastic summer of writing - a gift, really. Discipline has never been better. But a trilogy of events has conspired against my three-month run of get-to-it-ness: travel, visits, and exposure. A long-week's trip out of town and upcoming ones, too, interspersed with family and friends coming to town, have done the deed of dividing summer from fall (the crisp bite in the morning weather contributes), and so my mind has done that mental shift it's been trained to do since Kindergarten-age: something must change. The transition from August to September can never be fluid. Too bad for my writing. The essay-a-week trend I'd been keeping pace with has spun off cycle.

But the worst culprit is even more a mental roadblock than that. I gave a few essays to a friend to read, and she has helpfully and committedly responded with full-on edits. I am sure they are helpful edits. I don't know, because I haven't yet read them. There sits the stack on my desk, red pen marks throughout the pages. Two days, and I haven't even looked. Not because of what I fear she might have said (though there is some of that), but because, well, it's out there, now. Said and done. Someone else has seen my words, and the magic feels to have gone out of them. I know that's hogwash, but it's the way my brain works. If you notice what I'm doing, I stop. If you read what I've written, I bury my head in the sand. (That worked real well round-about thesis time in grad school, let me tell you.)

This is something that needs to be gotten over. And today, Ella-permitting, I will endeavor to schlupp my head up out of the muck and see what there is to be seen added between the lines of these essays. I don't write only for myself, after all. So I'd better stop acting like I do. Here goes.

Oh, Atlanta

2011-08-16T15:53:00.002-04:00

I am on low-dose caffeine today and the last few mornings, here at my parents' house with their particular brew of coffee, not as strong or dark as I didn't realize I've been making mine. No wonder I'm a bundle of nerves at home, racing through my naptime writing hour each morning. But my brain's gotten used to it, and now, one hour into the baby's morning nap, I'm a little foggy here. I sit on my parents' guest bed and watch golf carts go by out the window. I resist the strong urge to curl up under the covers. This is the time for making words; there might not be another.

Yesterday was the exception in this week away from my French press. Kenton had to pick up a car down in the suburbs, so I drove him forty minutes into the outer reaches of the city. (Atlanta's got quite the excessive geographical stretch.) At the Honda dealership where the Hertz desk takes up a little corner, I left Kenton with the slow-moving associate and headed across the street: "I'll be right back with a couple coffees." How quickly I forget what it means to drive in the suburbs. Woodstock, Georgia sure ain't Blacksburg, and there were at least eight lanes of morning traffic between me and Caribou Coffee. (The Caribou Coffee itself should have tipped me off that I wasn't in Southwest Virginia anymore.) Shockingly, I made it. And by the time I was back, four dollars poorer with two smalls, one light, one dark, Kenton was waiting outside with the keys to his one-day Toyota Corolla rental.

There was a teary goodbye because I hate to be away from him and it will be a week. (What was I thinking when I planned this trip?) I sent him on his northward way. But the coffee in my hand was the dark one, and as I crept back up Interstate 75, hugging the right lane in the big family Camry, I came more awake. By the time I was back on back roads winding into Georgia's soft foothills, I'd found NPR on the radio. The 'burbs were behind, quiet two-lane stretches ahead, and caffeine flowing through my veins. The anxiety of getting through traffic, across lanes, to the rental place on time, diffused. The sadness of temporary apartness found a comfortable spot to sit for the week, down near my ribs, I think, quiet and unobtrusive. I started to write a new essay in my mind.

And so it's true: you can take the city out of the girl. And you can't easily put it back in, either, it would seem. Which is fine by me. Here's hoping I won't ever have to try. And here's looking forward to another good, strong cup of coffee on the road home in another couple days.

A Broad Margin, an Internal Life

2011-08-09T10:49:00.006-04:00

When Kenton and I first met, it was at the home of friends in Asheville, North Carolina, for an after-church lunch gathering. I'd been given the tip that I'd like him; he was nice enough but dating someone else. After a rousing, comic-jousting time over the meal - there was quite the slew of personalities present, I recall - I found a home-spot on a second floor rocker. The group of friends, including Kenton, were off on a hike. I declined. It was Sunday afternoon, after all, time for collecting my thoughts. Several years later, Kenton confessed he thought, "She must not be very fun."

Lovers of the internal life, that's the risk we take. It didn't cost me much, in the end, as I have my Kenton now and I think he finds me interesting. And though I don't remember the rest of the afternoon, I'm sure I enjoyed it. I do recall that rocking chair being comfy. But I didn't know I was in such good company:

"If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me."
~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Wouldn't we all love to have a broad margin to our lives? Kenton would be on the move; I'd spend much of mine gazing out doorways, growing my mind. It's not reality to stay on the rocking chair for hours on end, or probably very healthy, even, but that kind of life being readily available to Thoreau, I won't fault him too much for taking it.

"I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in these seasons like corn in the night."
~ from today's Writer's Almanac

Even on the some-odd-Sunday rocking chair, it may happen that I might grow like corn in the night. Those moments come fewer and fewer these days. I'll take them when I can get them.

Taking Note

2011-08-06T11:01:00.003-04:00

Virginia Woolf kept a good diary, which is good for people like me who like to (obsessively?) read all things of and about (certain) writers. There was lots she wrote about. But one topic in particular was what - and who - she was reading at the time. This resonates with me, as I've scribbled up quite a collection this summer on the topics of reading and writing, what books appeal to me and to others and when and why they do.

Her posthumously-published Virginia Wolf: A Writer's Diary was painstakingly edited by her loving and understanding husband, Leonard, and he made some decisions, one of them being to keep all that pertains to her own reading and writing. Fun for me! (Though I wouldn't mind seeing her notes on the price of eggs, too.) Her published diary begins with a short response to Katherine Mansfield (scathing: "her mind is a very thin soil") and then a delightful reading of the character of none other than the inimitable George Gordon, Lord Byron. The 36-year-old Woolf declares, charmingly, that "I am ready, after a century, to fall in love with him":

"I'm amused to find how easily I can imagine the effect he had upon women - especially upon rather stupid or uneducated women, unable to stand up to him . . . In his character, I'm often reminded a little of Rupert Brooke, though this is to Rupert's disadvantage. At any rate Byron had superb force; his letters prove it. He had in many ways a very fine nature too; though as no one laughed him out of his affectations he became more like Horace Cole than one could wish. He could only be laughed at by a woman, and they worshipped instead. I haven't yet come to Lady Byron, but I suppose, instead of laughing, she merely disapproved. And so he became Byronic."

Poor Byron! So much potential, too much charisma. May we all be laughed at a little when our character most needs it. Though of course, it would seem, according to the incisive Woolf, that immortality lies in the other way.

Woolf responsibly questions whether or not it's valid that she discerns a writer's character from what he or she has written: "is it absurd to read all this criticism of her personally into a story?" . . . But aren't we glad she did?!

Mountain Road Song

2011-07-31T11:04:00.004-04:00

I've got an article up here. I hope you enjoy it!

An interesting thing about this essay is that I've long been wanting to write a hindsight piece about my 2005 move from Athens to Asheville. Unintentionally, I think this is it. As it turns out, it didn't need much more than a paragraph. Perhaps there will be more to say later.

Take me where them rolling hills
Can gather up and cure my ills.
Let me smell that long-leaf pine.
Here I come clear off a space,
Just don't forget my name or face
Before I get back down to Caroline.

Oh, oh, Carolina.
Over greener hills.
Beside bluer waters,
Carolina, I love you still.

~ Jason Harrod, "Carolina"

Root Room (or, Song of an Introvert)

2011-07-28T10:42:00.003-04:00

When given the opportunity, I run out of the house a la Bilbo Baggins. No hat, no money, no pocket kerchiefs. No eyeglasses, no change for the meter.

This morning, Kenton's mother, visiting from Vermont, virtually pushed me out the door. Fortunately, I swiped my glasses off the piano before hitting the sidewalk. (Many a Saturday morning has been spent at a coffee shop, squinting uncomfortably at the screen.)

The hour flew, but my brain needed the respite, even a small one, and the room for creativity. And then Karen called, and - oh blessed! - the baby still slept. More minutes, now stolen. I love my baby, and I love my family, immediate and extended, but I have a brain that needs some quiet space to keep ticking reliably through the day.

He's talking of making it through deeper, darker times, but Gerard Manley Hopkins, as always, speaks to my chattering heart this morning, my heart that was riding high on the stress of over-stimulation before heading out the door:

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise

You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile

Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what;

Leave comfort root-room. Alright. Here, now, is a little extra space.

If only I had a Gandalf to come by and bring me what I left behind. Not, perhaps, pipe leaf, but some extra meter change, say. (Policeman, stay away!) And my glasses when I need them. On second thought, that's not really what I need at all.

I call off thoughts awhile elsewhere. I find that the intersection of the timeless moment is here and now, and comfort finds space for calm. The day will be better for it.

My Own Heart

Gerard Manley Hopkins

My own heart let me more have pity on; let

Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,

Charitable; not live this tormented mind

With this tormented mind tormenting yet.

I cast for comfort I can no more get

By groping round my comfortless, than blind

Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find

Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise

You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile

Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile

's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies

Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.

Neighborly Behavior

2011-07-20T09:17:00.000-04:00

I'm at work on a piece about what it means to be a neighbor, to be neighborly, to live well in a community. It was first intended to be something different - a simple piece, a short article I could send off to a local publication, something to highlight the beauties and quirks and value of our little three-street neighborhood, which offers a taste of friendly bohemia in a more typically-Southern mountain town. What this thing has turned into is a long and thoughtful essay that digs into deeper questions about our responsibilities to each other and my personal, puny responses to opportunities that present themselves. (For example, the time I crankily sent neighborhood children away from my yard, fiercely guarding my ripe raspberries rather than cultivating a generous nature. Or the time I seriously considered digging up my next-door neighbor's hosta and appropriating it for my own front yard.)

I remember a conversation with my brother a number of years ago. Actually, I don't remember the conversation at all, the topic or the setting. But I recall a moment when, having probably discussed our inherited (must love Ritters) propensity to analyze at every turn, he burst out with, "If I could just stop thinking!!"

And therein lies the difficulty. To write a piece that showcases our neighborhood, that edifies who we three streets of homeowners are by shedding just a little journalistic light for those on the outside - wouldn't that be nice? Unfortunately, I cannot stop thinking. I shed light into every nook and cranny that comes my cerebral way. I fear this essay is no longer fit for Blue Ridge Outdoors. (Not least because it's really clear where this neighborhood of which I speak is and, worse, who some of the people are. What do I do about that??)

I'll have to train the flashlight on further thoughts at some point: In all my writing, do I follow my proclivity and analyze, analyze, analyze? And collect up a little niche of like-essays? Or do I stretch myself here and there to do something different? Perhaps practice reigning myself in? Some of both, probably.

If I haven't bored you yet by overthinking my overthinking, here's a prize: a gem from the great community-thinker Wendell Berry. It, of course, is in the essay:

"Farms, families, and communities are forms of art just as are poems, paintings, and symphonies. None of these things would exist if we did not make them. We can make them well or poorly; this choice is another thing that we make."

~ Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: an Essay Against Modern Superstition

Pull up a Canyon and Set Awhile

2011-07-16T17:30:00.004-04:00

Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)

~ T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Market Square Park is bustling this morning in Blacksburg. Much more than usual, even for a Saturday morning, and despite an unseasonable chilly mist; it’s one of several days a year they do this great thing where the vendors pitch in food and some of them cook it up and breakfast is served on long tables under a big tent. I looked across at Kenton over my pumpkin bread and fresh peach slices and blueberries and said it seemed like a church potluck, except where you don’t know anyone. All week I'd known this was something I wanted to get us to - a rare occasion that felt worth the morning-time effort of getting us, all three, together out the door.

Ella held up swimmingly, albeit with a few lazy eye-rubs. I, it turns out, was the one who was edgy and clock-watching as we ate under-tent and then squeezed our way through the extra hoard (who wouldn't be a little irritable?) of local Blacksburgians out for the extra-special market day. I bought mixed greens and peaches. And, spontaneously at Kenton's urging, a vintage-looking market poster. All the while, the cover wore thinner on my barely-suppressed agitation, Ella’s yawns grew more excessive, and Kenton took her on home.

I'm now down the street for my stolen few moments, squeezing a writing hour between the market breakfast and a baby shower brunch. Am I crazy? Perhaps. What I am not is willing to give up even one Saturday's writing time, even if it's shorter than usual. I'm here at Bollo’s, where I was greeted as I am each Saturday with: “All alone today, are you?” Indeed. I sent them, My Two People, away hurriedly, in my hurry to get to this very moment, where I feel hurried in the need to get something down to show for this weekend's blip of writing time. After hurrying them through breakfast, through the vendor stalls, down the street, away they went. And now I wish they hadn't gone.

A friend of ours is biking across the states: "Bike the U.S. for M.S." He passed this way a few weeks back, Blacksburg being just off the 785 through-route - locally known as Catawba Road, one of our family's favorite afternoon drives - on this TransAmerica Bike Trail thing people do. Kenton popped down to Market Square Park in the middle of a workday for a welcome and captured the great look of surprise on our friend’s face as he (literally) rolled into town with his twenty-some-odd pack of cyclists.

Now I will be the first to admit that there isn’t an athletic bone in my body. Or if there is, it is very small and located in some inconsequential spot, behind my ear or something. So I hear about ventures like our friend's, and my reaction, so completely opposite from my husband's, is something along the lines of, "Dear lord, why??" But I do like to be outside. I like trees and birds, a good breeze and cicadas. And I like a good, long stretch of meditative moment. So when the cycling friend sat down with us over dinner that evening and described how it was biking rather than driving these winding Virginia roads, and the sense of actually being in the woods he was passing by, hearing their sounds and thinking the slow and quiet sort of thoughts they inspire . . . Well, it is only a very little exaggeration to suggest that I considered that I might actually, sometime, in some way, think about going on a long bike ride. I mean, if that's the sort of standstill moment you get out of such a thing, count me in. Maybe.

Our friend is a long month gone down the road, now. We follow his blog, and he was most recently passing craggy mountaintops and heading in and out of canyons. He’d just spent a rare day off the road, atop a canyon, bike at rest. He says he was still that day, no additional adventuring. He considered the landscape and he pondered the long years God had spent wearing it down into the shape we know the Western canyons to be. He meditated the time it took to get it that way and concluded: “God is in no hurry.”

My days these days are, in a way, simple. We most often stay home, Ella and I. She wakes, she eats, she naps. I write, I cook, I make halfhearted efforts at approaching cleaning. We pop out for one-stop errands: the grocery, the library, a walk. Rarely do we get out for an event like today's. For Ella, I imagine, time flows slowly, easily, from one thing into the next. She gets hungry, she eats. She gets droopy, she pulls at her ear and I lay her down. And yet I find myself - on mornings like this one, and on other, easier mornings, too - speeding her along as she eats too slowly, mentally adding up the minutes she might have left to stay awake (or asleep) for whatever task I might next undertake. I find myself straining inside; I urge the minutes forward, as if I could. Something in me is wired to do that (reason #62 I should not have too much caffeine, but that's another story for another day, about self-discipline, anxiety, and a gluttonously consuming coffee-addiction). I am an anticipatory planning type, and I want to make sure the next thing happens, that everything will happen, that it will all be okay in my day and in the days to come.

So I strain against the clock, and so often, in my hurry to get on to the next thing, I miss the moment. This one right here. I forget to be very happy that my husband and daughter are, for once, at the market with me. I fail to enjoy watching the interesting non-student faces of Blacksburg that only come out in summer, at just such a time as now. I forget to consider that semi-spontaneous stolen family time is probably sweeter, even, than the stolen minutes of a Saturday morning's writing hour. I forget how much the meditative moment - the chance to rest in the now - is something I'm constructed for, too, just as much as it's in my nature to strain against time and want to move on to the next thing. I am all this and that, yes and no.

Would that I would say "yes" to this moment. I do not have a canyon convenient to pull up and sit at for awhile to slow myself out of hurry and adjust my thought. I do have some nearby country roads. And more, I've got the potential to enjoy some really quiet days, would I only slow up and stay in the moment as we, Ella and I, slowly roll through them.

I think of our friend's blog post, and his meditation on the canyon-side. Nope, God is certainly in no hurry. I - today, other days, most moments - am.

Methinks that here, right now, today, is the intersection of that timeless moment T.S. Eliot talks about. Methinks I need to find a way to pull up a canyon and set awhile.

Books and Place: A Question for Y'all

2011-07-14T10:22:00.001-04:00

Below is the start of the essay I'm working on this week. It talks about what's allowed when writing an authentic story. Should a writer be able to tell a story about a place she's not from? Or should she stick with what she knows?

Tell me what you think. I'd like to know!

“I just don’t see how someone who didn’t live there could write about it,” said a friend about an American author who places her books in Britain. “It seems like it wouldn’t be authentic.”

My foundations were shaken. As a reader, I am mighty particular about the sense of place my favorite books give. Whether based in reality or fantastically-conceived, I want to see the moors of Charlotte Bronte's Thornfield in my mind’s eye, feel the breeze shaking the gnome trees in George MacDonald’s forests, sense that Diana Wynne Jones’s town of Ulverscote is a real place I could put my foot down in, should I only be able to chant the name “Chrestomanci” three times to get there.

That’s as a reader. As a writer, I commit the crime aforementioned. Born and raised in the American South, living near the Blue Ridge mountains – hills that are rife and haunted with story enough of their own – my imagination is instead wild with renderings of rambling English houses and dark Welsh woods. I’m not a total fraud, if one at all; I’ve been to these places that impress upon my current fiction story as it develops. But so had the author of which my friend spoke. Her American-told, British-placed tales are nothing if not oft-visited and well-researched, meticulous in (I trust) accurate detail.

But the matter of origin versus interest cannot be told otherwise: she is from here, her stories are set there. As with mine.

What this is, really, is a question of place. Place and permission. Do I, as a writer, have permission to craft tales of places - real though they may be, much as they might get under my skin - that don’t run in the real history of my veins? Were I a travel writer, the answer would be easy. The uncertainty lies in the crafting of fiction, and so the question, more specifically, asks whether a writer can legitimately model a crafted landscape after a place in which she has not been much more than a visitor. Can she?

Foggy

2011-07-09T12:49:00.002-04:00

It's the writing hour, and I'm out and away. Without, of course my glasses. And with a little bug. So I squint at the screen and think through a hazy fog. My brain is telling my body it should be in bed. I am telling my brain to get over that for just these couple hours and get to it. But I'll go easy, and we'll (Me and my brain? This is getting a little weird.) do a revision. Fortunately, one awaits: Books and Place, begun last Saturday. In the interim, I cranked out quick essay on our Monday drive through West Virginia (Songs and Appalachia) and got it accepted: look for it end-of-month in The Curator. I'll plaster that everywhere big and loud when it's published, don't worry.

So yesterday, I took a serendipitous slow, quiet, and pajama-ed reading day. (Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks - fun stuff for anyone who's interested in how on earth she put together that many - eighty! - detective novels.) Good rest for a getting-sick body. Today, revise. Next weekend, though, something new. Hold me to that, would you?

Before I proceed, though, I'd like to give a shout-out to the aforementioned screen, the one on which I type, fuzzy only due to lack of eyesight apparatus. My darling iBook G4. It joined me in my writing ventures just shy of five and a half years ago, and it goes on and on . . . knock on marble. A moment ago, it took an extra few moments to wake up, despite my persistent pushing. I thought it might have been, finally, a gonner. But it's got some life in it yet! Dear old machine. It's not too much to say that all I want is you.

Mountain Roads, Sing Me Home

2011-07-05T14:31:00.000-04:00

No new blogging today, as the morning's essay was particularly (and happily) insistent. Instead, a list of listens that come out of today's writing. The theme? You tell me.

Here and There

2011-07-02T12:09:00.002-04:00

Here I sit in Bollo's, the usual routine. They know me now. I'm growing accustomed to writing against the backdrop of NPR talk on Saturday mornings.

Today is not as it was supposed to be. I would have visited Bollo's, yea, and the market, and maybe even the library (as I already have, Virginia Woolf's essays and Agatha Christie's new-published writing notes stowed in my bag) - but it should have been with a friend in tow. That friend remains in Texas today, airlines and holiday travel having failed us at the last. She is the one who had to leave the airport disappointed and unpack an unused suitcase-full back at home again. I merely fielded the surprising phone call about cancelled and full flights.

So against the disappointment of a postponed visit, I'm finding comfort in routine and glad work. I hope she is doing the same in her own neighborhood spot. It's likely.

This morning for me, it'll be a little Woolf, a little Vanauken, and the start of an essay on Reading and Place. I in my place and she in hers, I where I was going to be, but she decidedly not, both of us where we, it would seem, are meant to be for the weekend, all powers pointing to that fact - the theme seems apt.

"Quick now, here, now, always—" . . . I enter the domain of a new blank page.

*T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Rifting into the Secret of Things

2011-06-29T09:48:00.003-04:00

I couldn't move any slower toward getting started this morning if I tried, so this'll be a quick warm-up, and then back to my essay-in-progress.

Lots of people have given explanation to the writing process: what it means to be a writer, what it's like to be compelled to write, what good writing should do for the reader. On another morning, I'll say more on that. For the moment, a teaser, and more Thoreau.

He goes on, after his fishing-in-the-sky-of-eternity bit, to talk about how some people are made to work with their hands and feet, to turn the earth, to explore. He is made to contemplate, think, perceive. He goes forth with the hands and feet of his mind, and pours out his discoveries on the page. It's an apt metaphor, burrowing down this time, rather than casting up, to "rift his way into the secret of things." I can't help but hear the track of U2's Elevation playing in the back of my mind. ("A mole, digging in a hole . . . ") For Thoreau, it's a writerly type of excavation:

My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

~ Thoreau, from Walden

Onward, now - my own assay at striking that richest vein. I will continue to mine this morning, and perhaps I'll find it, or at least get a little closer.

Pebbly with Stars

2011-06-28T10:05:00.002-04:00

I've never read Thoreau's Walden. Lately, I've been trying to get into it, but am having difficulties, likely to do with that it's on my Kindle. Where I want to flip through, see chapter headings, read an introduction, get a sense for what he's doing here in this book, I can't. Perhaps I should just access the public library, and easy-free-book-on-Kindle be darned.

But as for Thoreau. The little I know of him tells me he was an oddball and a strange kind of snob. True? Maybe I'd know if there were an introduction to read. And maybe, if I ever get through Walden, I'll decide still more that the man was a bit snooty (or worse) toward the working classes. But, whatever the man, it can't be denied that prose like this is lovely. Lovely and inspiring:

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.

Size is Relative

2011-06-27T10:05:00.004-04:00

It's close up on ten o' clock. The baby has been asleep now for more than half an hour, and I have done everything I can possibly think of doing before sitting down to write. Except for cleaning the house, which I'm trying desperately hard not to think about doing. I will not leave this chair till the little girl stirs, and may that not happen for another good hour, at least.

On note of the little girl, she's started sticking out her tongue. Big stuff, I know! I think it has to do with eating solid foods lately. (She's on a steady diet of avocado; who wouldn't do grand new things on a steady diet of avocado?) This is all inspired by the doctor who indicted "Too small!" at the dipping growth curve on her six-month chart. Too small!! What does he know? (My first response.) Maybe I am starving my child! (Response the second.)

Solid food it is, then, though I'm slow to pull it together. Some days she gets more, some days less. She seems fine. She is still the tiny squirt that somehow expands to fill up most of my day. I do not think she is too small, no, not in many ways. And last night, overnight, she actually grew bigger and now does not merely grin at me in the morning - she sticks out her tongue. Really, seriously far. Like she wants to get a good look at it, or show it off, or do a few little tongue-stretches for her first go at morning bananas (it's not really all avocado around here).

Melt my heart. My child has discovered her tongue. She is so clever and strong. And big. Definitely big.

Tales from the Front Pages

2011-06-25T10:52:00.004-04:00

. . . The blank pages, as it were.

Thoreau went to the woods to drink deeply. (Or was that only in Dead Poets Society?) I come to the coffee shop to write, which is its own form of drinking deep. (Literally, too: the Golden Pecan at Bollo's is brewed up good this morning.) It's Saturday, and my agreed-upon two morning hours of Ella-free-ness (not that I don't love her) commence now.

It's a good deal: Kenton, ever the early riser, takes the first half of Saturday morning to do projects (today, painting rail posts, staining wood for the bookshelf his wife requested, moving a wood pile so his wife can access the ripe raspberry bushes). I tend the baby. Then, 10-ish, I hand her over and gleefully peel out of the drive on my way to being - what? Quiet, alone, thinking. Me. Without that percentage of my brain that always, edgily, listens to hear the end of the nap. Me in full. Drinking deep of all those thoughts that get interrupted during the week.

On Saturday morning, it's my job to turn that deep-thought-drinking into an essay of sorts. The rest of the week is for revising and editing, minus that mental fifteen percent that's ever listening in at Ella's door. Today is the day for full-on attending, and for creation.

So now is the time. Carpe Diem. A refresher of coffee, Facebook and email down, phone alarm set.

Commence.

Self, Be Inspired.

2011-06-24T13:55:00.000-04:00

Well, hello.

Here I am, thirty minutes (already??) into what promises to be a one-hour nap. The baby, not me. (If I could figure how to write in my sleep, whoa-diggedy, it'd get a whole lot more interesting around here!) The dog's been out and back in, and the granola has another 40 to go in the oven. There's time to write, but I don't have anything in the pile worth a mere thirty minutes of my time.

But oh, that pile.

Madeline L'Engle, whom I have always found enormously inspiring, both in terms of imagination and in a "get to work" kind of way, talks about pots. She says that she's always got these ideas mulling around in her mind, and more coming in unexpectedly, and they won't all go together in one essay or one story. So, as they come, she throws the ideas in separate pots - some together (basil, tomato), some separate (beets, say) - and lets them simmer. When a pot gets full enough, she pulls it off the stove and gets to work on it. (Not to take an analogy too far or anything.)

Right now, I've got lots of pots. They've built up over the past foggy-headed year, and are quietly stewing in groupings of desktop folders and handwritten (truly, yes!) lists. But the writing muscle in my brain, it is a little flabby (Does anyone else hate that word?) from spotty use and those long phases of fogginess. The ideas, the ingredients in my various pots, they are grand (if I may be permitted to opine so), but I'm not as quick at pulling together something smooth, sharp, thoughtful, as I was awhile back.

I figure the answer to the problem is that I have absolutely got to start exercising my writerly brain, my typing, sketching fingers again. Daily.

Alright, then. Let it begin. Again.

Looking for the Seams

2011-04-29T09:32:00.001-04:00

I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams. In a way that's impossible to explain, we break the book down to its essential parts and then put it back together after we understand the mysteries of its personal clockwork.

~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez, on reading his master, Hemingway in the July 26, 1981 N.Y. Times article "Gabriel Garcia Marquez Meets Ernest Hemingway"

Quiche Done Again, and Better

2011-04-28T11:32:00.007-04:00

I know summer is pending when the kitchen gets unbearably hot over suppertime cooking. Summer again, already?! When the temperature's this hot in April, I cringe at what's to come and wonder how I'll weather another muggy season without air conditioning. At least I'm not pregnant this time around.

On the bright side of summer's advent, there's the green stuff showing up at the market and the CSA bags promising to be filled and waiting for me a mere two weeks away. And, invariably, vegetable quiche gets on my mind. It's perhaps not the most common sensical turn of heat-involved culinary events in my home, but for this dish, even in 80-degree weather, I am willing to turn the oven on, yea, and also the gas range, to bake up a quiche-y bed for a good seasonal sautee.

Today's quiche was redone according to new health demands - fewer grains. And it included the current queen of the farmer's market, asparagus. Also roasted red pepper, but let's just let that out-of-season bugger slide by, eh? Pretend I roasted them up after last year's harvest and kept them in the freezer, a la Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. No need to mention last week's visit to Kroger or anything.

This time last year saw me sick and on the sofa with a little Ella inside me and a host of cracker and ginger ale options on the coffee table; no quiche. So this update to my old standby recipe has been waiting in the wings for two years. It performed par excellence tonight, so share I will. (And don't think the real motivation here isn't getting the recipe down where I know I'll be able to find it again.)

Crustless Veggie Quiche
Adapted, then readapted, from Recipes from America's Small Farms, with a little input from Simply in Season

Serves 4 as a dinner entree

- 4 bacon slices, cut into 1/2-inch pieces

- 1 cup chopped onions: tonight, 1 small white onion plus several chopped green onion whites

- 2-3 cups prepared vegetables: tonight, 2 c. asparagus (one thin-stalked bundle) cut into 1-2 inch pieces and 1/4 c. roasted red peppers (about 1/2 a bell pepper), plus the green parts of the green onions

- 3 T all-purp flour

- ½ t salt

- 1/8 t dried thyme, scant

- 1/8 t freshly milled black pepper

- 3 large eggs

- 1 cup whole milk

- 1 cup grated Swiss and 1/2 cup grated Parmesan

Preheat oven to 375. Butter a 9 or 10-inch pie dish.

Place Swiss along bottom of pie dish.

Sautee the bacon in a medium skillet over medium heat until cooked but not crisp; remove to paper towels to drain. Reserve 2+ T of drippings in the skillet. Add the onions and asparagus and sauté until transparent, about 5 minutes. Stir in prepared onion greens and roasted red peppers. Stir in flour, salt, thyme, and pepper. Layer veggie mixture on top of Swiss in pie dish. Layer Parmesan on top of veggie mixture and bacon on top of Parmesan.

Beat eggs in medium bowl until frothy. Beat milk into the eggs. Pour the cream mixture over all in pie dish.

Bake for about 30 minutes, until center appears set when pie plate is gently tapped. Set aside for 5 minutes before cutting.

Note on Vegetable Mixture from cookbook: "Almost any vegetable or mixture of veggies can be used. Slice or julienne larger veggies. If using asparagus, broccoli, celery, eggplant, fresh corn, bell peppers, summer squash, mushrooms, or zucchini, they should be added to the skillet raw, and sautéed with the onions. Carrots, green or yellow beans, fresh peas, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and winter squash should be parboiled and drained thoroughly before adding. Greens such as arugula, beet greens, collards, kale, mustard, spinach, swiss chard, and turnip greens should be steamed, simmered, or stir-fried until wilted, thoroughly drained, and coarsely chopped before adding."

2011-02-06T13:08:00.000-05:00

"Every worthwhile book contains many faults, and every worthwhile writer commits them."

~ Eric Partridge

Kindred Spirits

2011-01-22T11:24:00.001-05:00

. . . it's always nice to find one.

"I tend to have two speeds when it comes to writing: All The Time; and Not At All." . . . "Months pass in which I don't work at all. But when I am writing, that's all I do. I hardly sleep, hardly eat, hardly have any contact with the outside world. I stop answering my phone, I don't respond to emails, I forget to pay my bills. This is neither terribly healthy nor terribly good for my social life, but I try to remind myself that Emily Dickinson lived in an attic, which makes me feel well adjusted by comparison."

~ Aryn Kyle, author of The God of Animals, from today's Writer's Almanac

All These Mornings

2011-01-05T18:13:00.003-05:00

All these mornings, I have woken up. Mornings for the last year and a half, nearly two now, I have woken up and pulled myself together - breakfast, coffee, book - and made that short commute to work, first across an upstairs landing from bedroom to green-writing-room, later and more recently up the stairs to a then-blue-now-green-attic-room, computer charged, notes and drafts opened, bookshelf patiently holding its morning offering of inspiration. I have turned on my most writerly music - most often an expansive mix of U2 - and have proceeded with the task set before me (by me, and by Kenton) when we first moved here to Blacksburg.

Some of these mornings have been more successful than others, meaning some of them saw new words on the page, or at least decently-done revisions. Others of them produced less, though often, in round-about ways, something got done. A book read, a blog perused, something learned, something gained. Some mornings - hello, first trimester - saw nothing more than immediate concession to sloth and marathon watchings of Masterpiece Mystery. But all of these mornings had one thing in common: They were quiet. They were mine. I was alone.

This morning, I woke up, grumpy and grouchy, back aching from all the rocking and holding and swaddling and changings of the night. I woke up to little whimpers threatening to increase in volume to a piercing shriek if I, grumpy and grouchy and sore, did not make it out of bed and across the hallway in time. I made it. In fact, I made it in more-than-time, in time to see calm eyes closed, tiny noises abated.

This morning, family visitors gone, I woke up in the house alone for the first time in two and a half weeks. Almost alone, that is, Kenton endeavoring to speed his way out the door, stopping for a moment to comfort me in the kitchen, a moment in which I cried and covered the top corner of his work shirt in snot. He pretended not to mind and left for work. And then I was alone. Alone, but not alone. I listened for further whimpers, determined that they had, in fact, subsided back into tenuous, early-morning sleep, and proceeded to begin this morning. I laid out towels and soap for a baby bath long-overdue. I made notes for doctors to call and friends to follow up with in the day. I reminded myself to (Happy Christmas to me!) order a Kindle and to take the latest Netflix out to the mailbox. The morning normalized. And then it culminated in something oh-so-ordinary: I listened again, determined extra minutes still were mine, and ground a half-cup worth of coffee beans! I poured them into the French press! I put water on to boil!

It was show-stopping. It was magic. It was as if a flip switched, a page turned, and someone wrote into the plot of my morning a moment of reclaimed selfhood. I was making coffee. I was human. The water on the stove boiled, the French press simmered. . . . And the long-pending cries rang out loud, clear, demanding, from the front bedroom.

But everything had become suddenly, beautifully, same-but-different. There I sat again in my nursing chair, as I had three-and-a-half hours before in the dark of middle-night. There on my lap was the seven-pound dictator of new moments. There by my cheek was the belch of sour-sweet milk breath. And yet. And yet. The night's frustration and exhaustion, the impatience of longing to just get back to bed, all three of us, was dissipated. The room was light, the coffee was brewing, the face pressed up against mine soft and sweet. I was not alone, and the difference, so different from the previous night's deep hours of frustrated exhaustion, so very different from the last year-and-a-half of quiet, writerly mornings, was as pervasive as the coffee smells wafting, waiting, from the kitchen.

I sip my coffee in the new nap-time quiet and think of all the mornings to come. The prospect is utterly different than I had thought. Alone-but-not-alone. The prospect is good.

Umberto Eco on . . .

2011-01-05T12:00:00.001-05:00

. . . what a friend of mine once declared a "great way to harness the imagination":

"There is a lot of space between atom and atom and electron and electron, and if we reduced the matter of the universe by eliminating all the space in between, the entire universe would be compressed into a ball. Our lives are full of interstices. This morning you rang, but then you had to wait for the elevator, and several seconds elapsed before you showed up at the door. During those seconds, waiting for you, I was thinking of this new piece I'm writing. I can work in the water closet, in the train. While swimming I produce a lot of things, especially in the sea. Less so in the bathtub, but there too."

"Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating."

The Reading Life: Top Books of 2010

2011-01-02T12:48:00.015-05:00

It's been a reading kind of life the last two-and-a-half years. Starting with my move to Charlottesville in Summer 2008, I transitioned away from full-time work, a conscious decision on both our parts to scale down on my office time and open up schedule space for the kitchen and, more importantly, for the pen. And then after Kenton's work moved our lives down to Blacksburg, we agreed I should leave the office entirely behind, and see where the writing life might take me.

Oh, the places I have gone! One being into the interior of books - book after book after book - reading in new ways, with fresh, writerly eyes. At the end of last year, my brother asked what books had influenced my writing the most, and it was easy to produce a list of the 2009 top ten, ten books in the span of one year that had provided ideas, insight, courage, and affirmation as I set about my own work in fiction. These were not stories to emulate; each is its own work, and my work is my own. But there's a sharedness, a comaraderie of idea, feel, character, pace, that I've discovered amongst some pages (and not in others) that has helped me move ahead in my own way. That was last year's reading.

This year: another reading kind of annum. Just as full of late-night page flipping. Just as many trips down Preston Street to the library. Not as rich in inspiration. It was a year of starting and stopping, picking up and putting down, enjoying often lightly but not deeply. Thus, my 2010 top reads list boasts a scanter seven, though there are a few gems - some surprising, even to me.

Marcelo in the Real World
by Francisco X. Stork (read early January 2010)
The magic and the realism with which this story is infused, the voice in which it is told, the subject matter: bestill my sleep. I could not put it down this time last winter. This book left me changed in very good ways. . . . And now I'm thinking it's about time for a reread. More specific thoughts here.

Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston (read February 2010)

   I audited a creative writing class last spring; this was one of the books on the list. I'm glad because it's out of my usual genre, not a read I would have gone to on my own. Lyrically stunning, I'd recommend it for the language alone. But also for its landscapes, which are at once mythical and earthy, and most of all for its characters. The characters are the thing, and one in particular, whom Hurston handles with particular skill and an insight that I'd like to learn from.
   There is a moment toward the end of the story in which this particular character behaves unforgivably, and the reader must decide whether or not to forgive him. This was my first foray into understanding that one mark of a good writer is not only understanding of her created people, but also empathy toward them in such a way that she can reveal their dirtiest depths and still elicit from the reader sympathy for them. I cannot claim credit for this insight; it was the result of class discussion, in which the professor pointed out that to become good writers, we must have this perspective with actual people, too, must maintain a gracious and merciful empathy in our own lives, so that that empathy flows from our true appreciation of others into the "others" we create on the page. It's a moral matter, and Hurston masters it. She knew people and she cared about them, and it shows on the page.
   Further, did I mention the lyricism, the downright syntactic beauty in this story's telling? Stunning work, Ms. Hurston. Stunning.

A Place on Earth
by Wendell Berry (read March 2010)

Ah. Wendell Berry, thank you. I'd read a novel or two of his before, as well as some nonfiction essays on community and on food and agriculture. But this - this book is fuller and richer yet than his other fiction, in a gloriously slow-moving kind of way. This is not a book to read quickly; it is one to quietly revel in. And it, also, is outside my chosen writing genre. Its setting might as well be just down the road (from us here in Southwest Virginia, at least); its events are raw and real.
What I appreciated most here was the broad scope of community life masterfully interwoven with the deep, individual, personal experiences of various town members. Also, the handling of tragedy. There is deep, deep tragedy in this tale (tales, rather, as this book is a conglomeration of numerous characters' stories), especially as the narrative goes on. Berry somehow shows it in a way that is at once as weighty as the events warrant, but without leaving the reader completely crushed - though he comes close. At the close of the book, I had been there, in the town of Port William. I had known these people. I had rejoiced and sorrowed with them. And the experience, in the end, was beautiful, and it rendered me healthily sober, for a good couple days, at least.

The Graveyard Book
by Neil Gaiman (read June 2010)
   Happy surprise! My first foray into Neil Gaiman, and it did not disappoint. This fantastical story gets closer in some ways to elements of my own fiction writing, and I was inspired and nearly entirely intimidated by the creative skill this man wields on the page. From the whimsy with which dark and disturbing events are told to the spectrum of unique characters, to the very subtle incorporation of folk and fairy tale elements, to the manner in which seemingly-unconnected occurances rush together at the end in a whirlwind of Harry Potter-esque "so this is what has been going on all along" adventure-resolution (In the end, I, pregnant, read two hours past the call of the bathroom in order to get to the end of the book.), to the sheer creative concept behind the whole tale: a living boy raised by ghosts, in a graveyard. My only complaint is that I am desperate to know what Bod has done out in the wide world now that he's left his graveyard home. But I don't sense a sequel, which is probably as it should be.

The Hunger Games series
by Susan Collins (read November 2010)
   Happier surprise: I'd been eyeing this trilogy at the library for nearly a year, but something kept me from going for it. Once I did, there was no turning back. I read a review in which these books were labeled "plot-driven," and they are. But I return to the suggestion above, regarding Hurston, that there is something supremely skillful about an empathetic author. In this case, Collins works out a tenuous moral position in her protagonist, Katniss, allowing her to be be believably - sometimes unlikeably - flawed, and yet also demonstrates growth in her empathy toward others. There are scenes in which the people Katniss could easily hate have become so real to her that she changes her mind - and heart - about them. (Harry Potter could take a lesson regarding his cousin Dudley at the beginning of Deathly Hallows.)
   And if the story is chiefly plot-driven, what of it? This is a supremely creative plot (though I'm an admitted sucker for YA distopian lit) that drives reading from compelling start of The Hunger Games to breathless finish of Mockingjay. I would argue, however, that Collins's characters are as strong as her plot. And though I'm not interested in writing in the distopian vein myself, I am challenged by the imaginatively futuristic setting and by the interplay between the characters that kept me frantically reading to the very last page. (What was going to happen to Peeta???)

A Passage to Egypt
by Katherine Frank (read November 2010)
   A lovely, fresh hardback copy of this biography arrived in my mailbox at Thanksgiving-time, a timely birthday gift of an early-holiday, pre-baby read to savor over a long weekend in front of the tree. Thanksgiving Day came; I opened my gift (relishing in the shiny, crisp newness of the book, a rarity for this library-user!); I began it that very evening and finished it by the following Monday.
   One of the biggest bookish surprises of my year has been the discovery that I - avowed fiction-only reader - really enjoy a good biography. Particularly of the writerly focus: last winter's read of Jane Austen: A Life got me started, and this book closed out my reading year by bringing me back to the genre. (I'm now on to a Dickens bio, and next on the docket is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.) There's a way of retelling the stories of people's lives in an engaging, fact-packed-but-not-overly-packed manner that this biographer nails. I'd like to learn her secrets. And someday, I'd like to experiment with a project that merges biography and fiction. I dare you to guess who the subject might be.

A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens (read December 2010)
This one makes it in just under the wire. Pending holidays and snowy weather tend to turn my thoughts to specific past-reads: Jane Eyre, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Dickens in general. But, very shocking!, I had never actually read A Christmas Carol, despite my family's traditional rewatch of the movie (George C. Scott version and never any other) every Christmas Eve. This was a delicious way to experience Dickens - all the language, the whimsy, the leap-off-the-page characters of his longer works without the complication of a large cast or intricate plot.
I'm now on to read the rest of the Christmas tales in the volume, and am enjoying them just as much. The comaraderie with which Dickens conspires to share his tale with you, yes you, his reader-in-cahoots, charms me every time; the insight with which he develops characters, their actions and responses - I would sit longer at the feet of this master. I only wish his language would go over as well today in a current piece. Kudos to Susannah Clarke, another master, for making that happen.

Honorable Mentions:

The Small Rain and A Severed Wasp
by Madeline L'Engle (read June 2010)

I'll give these two a quick write-up, as I spent an unexpectedly-engrossed first trimester week reading from one and then the other, back-to-back. These are both pure Madeline L'Engle, from beginning to end. One element I appreciate is that the first was written early-on, in her young days of both authoring and acting. The sequel was written decades later, toward the end of L'Engle's writing life. The growth in her writing between the two books is interesting to note and appreciate, but what I appreciate best is the idea of, across two novels, showing the scope of a character's life without telling all (here, leaving out a good fifty "middle" years between Rain and Wasp). The protagonist tracks closely with L'Engle's age: in the first volume, a young woman, in the second, old. The second book, in particular, is beautifully-developed, especially as the life events that took place in the gap between books must be filled in retrospectively, creatively. L'Engle's handling of such story telling is near-artful here.

And now, baby-in-hand, I give a long, longing glance at the growing books stack on our living room desk. The prospects for 2011 look good: that Dickens biography, then the one on Conan Doyle, Dinty Moore's Crafting the Personal Essay, Robinson's Housekeeping (already lovely in the first twenty pages), The Red Pyramid (already solidly-established as nursing-time reading), several Harry Potter analyses, the rest of Great with Child (lovely letters on motherhood), Chesterton's Brave New Family. It's an auspicious start. And there will be more to add. What remains to be seen is how much reading and writing gets worked in around Ella, who is her own supreme creative work, and the priority of the moments and years to come.

In a Flurry

2010-12-07T10:45:00.014-05:00

The weather forecast tells me it is nineteen degrees outside. By my calculation, it is the seventh day of flakes flurrying - or more - in the air. (The "or more" seems over for this round of storm, only remnants still covering this bit of Southwest Virginia ground.) The sounds emanating from my iTunes come straight down the line from this-time-five-years-ago, David Gray at his "Life in Slow Motion" wintry best. I have a snowy, upstairs view to the neighborhood, to the treetops, to the little nearby airport, and, of course, to the flakes that seem never actually to fall, but that swoop and dip and remain up here, in the sky, by my window, quickening my mind with excitable, swirly thoughts of imagination and possibilities.

It is winter, finally, again, and I am here and there, then and now. Both today and last winter (with its new novel ideas) and the one before (in Charlottesville, with gingersnap tea and characters fresh on the page) and the one before that (in Vermont, two feet underfoot of this fallen white stuff and snow shoes and those magic, pre-engagement days with Kenton) and on, and on: David Gray in Asheville five years ago and the birth of a seed of an idea for a book; here, today, in Blacksburg, and the book as it has been created thus far and lived and grown - now readying itself for a first-time winter season on the shelf, as another, newer life takes precedence. Here and there, back then and now.

What is it about this weather, more than any other, that inspires new thoughts and connects old ones? That fosters such fertile ground for the advent of living things? It is a mystery to me, this: every year, the death from off the leafless, brackened limbs proves a weak one; willingly or no, the stark-fingered trees perform but the gloried task of bearing up this lively winter magic, the lovely soft and cold pallets of white nestled so beautifully in the crooks of their black boughs and branches. I look out my window and I see it. There is something alive in this season of seeming death, and it quickens my mind, every year, every time.

This year, I am grateful for the early snowfall and winter-come, thankful it has arrived while I still have a few hours, days, perhaps weeks - but only, at the most, that - to accept this manna of imagination, this inspiration to create, as it comes. To hold it in the grasp of my thought for as long as it's gifted to me, till it melts away for a time into the next gift, another kind of life that will come to us in a flurry of unpredictability, to be held just as light-weightily, just as gratefully, as I must hold this moment of creative inspiration.

Earlier in the week - last week, actually - this poem on The Writer's Almanac:

Everywhere, everywhere, snow sifting down,
a world becoming white, no more sounds,
no longer possible to find the heart of the day,
the sun is gone, the sky is nowhere, and of all
I wanted in life - so be it - whatever it is
that brought me here, chance, fortune, whatever
blessing each flake of snow is the hint of, I am
grateful, I bear witness, I hold out my arms,
palms up, I know it is impossible to hold
for long what we love of the world . . .

It is winter, and I can - must - again create. What does that mean when a little being of nine months gestation, having been so kindly created inside me since the end of last year's winter, is about to be born out into the world? She gives a heave and tickles my tummy to remind me that she's on her way. I look out the window and think how the blessings that fall and bound about me seem, in this moment, happily, far too many. I'll spend this morning in the grasp of but one of them, in the hold of imagination, creating. I'll spend this day sinking my mind into the spirit of an imaginative abundance that flurries forth new thoughts and words, in the spirit of winters past. And then, soon, I'll spend the coming weeks holding a new winter's gift: that which seems impossible to grasp at the moment, a new life of a different sort.

The snow falls, the writerly ideas flurry, the baby girl pends. And "whatever blessing each flake of snow is the hint of, I am grateful, I bear witness, I hold out my arms, palms up." I am happy.

. . . I know it is impossible to hold
for long what we love of the world, but look
at me, is it foolish, shameful, arrogant to say this,
see how the snow drifts down, look how happy
I am. *

*"Manna" by Joseph Stroud, from Of This World. © Copper Canyon Press, 2009.

Why Fantasy?

2010-10-04T14:31:00.000-04:00

. . . any narrator begins by believing that he has something marvellous to tell. An appetite for the marvellous comes with the first childish comprehensions, as a mode of acclimatization to the marvel of being alive.

~ John Updike, in the Preface to The Mabinogian (trans. Jones, 2000 Everyman edition)

A Matter of Correspondences

2010-09-30T09:56:00.001-04:00

Writing is something I know little about; less at some times than at others. I think, though, that so far as it is poetry it is a matter of correspondences: one glimpses them, pieces of an order, or thinks one does, and tries to convey the sense of what one has seen to those to whom it may matter, including, if possible, one's self.

~ W.S. Merwin

A Metaphor in Brain Cells and Book Pages (and All Sorts of Other Dreadfully-Mixed Things)

2010-07-30T10:57:00.003-04:00

After a hiatus, internally-imposed, from the writing of novel and essay, this day I return. I return on this unexpectedly cool late-July morning; I return with a freshly-painted writing desk, itself returned to its old-new, now-deliciously-green attic writing habitat. I return with no small amount of trepidation.

If my writing brain were a book (and which one, at that? Great Expectations? I Capture the Castle? . . . Mountains beyond Mountains?), I would pinch my nose, close my eyes, take a deep breath, and blow the dust off the top. I’d gray my fingertips with the wiped-off smudge of collected months, rubbed against the spine’s complaining creak and crack as I lifted the cover. I would pause for a moment, mid-lift, wondering if perhaps I’d left the book unread, unused, too long, and now the protecting boards might break to bits under my fingers and the pages crumble within. I’d gaze out the window on this thought for ten minutes, maybe more. When I finally reigned my mind back in, I’d give a surprised start: Oh, the old book! Yes, that is what I was working on. I would then consider taking a break for coffee; surely I had done enough for one day. More staring out the window. Then, with little forethought, with quick movement as though to catch my own self by surprise, I would fly the cover open, and there it would be, dusty on the inside, but still-whole, and promising: my creative thought.

That creative thought, the accumulated, unwritten ideas of four tired months, the cumulative work of a year and a half, stretches its sleepy limbs and creaks weary bones around my mind once more, readying itself to wake once again onto the page. I harbor no illusions: I’m rusty. The brain is dust-covered and the imagination is peeping out from under the covers, begging to remain snug and quiet. But I am a writer, and the time to return to work has come.

So I blow the dust off the pages, drag the thoughts out of their somnolent comfort. I open the laptop. I give a new Word document a go. And I write.

2010-07-23T13:20:00.000-04:00

"I think it's very true when you're a writer and you sometimes you have to spend time poking at part of yourself that normal, sane people leave alone."

~ Vikram Chandra

On Book Stores (and England)

2010-04-16T09:21:00.003-04:00

“Since I became a writer—quite apart from my existence as a reader—I’ve developed a strange ambivalence about bookstores. I look at the piles and the crowded shelves and the specials and the staff favorites, and—some days—I wonder what it’s all for. Why write another book to add to the subdued melee of bookselling? Who buys all these books? Who has time to read them all? Other days, the same store seems rich with wonders, and I remember why I’ve been reading all my life.”

~ Verlyn Klinkenborg, author*

Be you a book lover, a bookstore junkie? Give the article "Book Lover's London" (under a different title online) a read. Me? I'm now inspired to hop the pond, desired-books list and check card in hand, and take a bookshop tour of England. (Not that it takes much to make me want to up and go to England.)

I'm also reassured that I'm not the only one. Somehow, becoming a fiction writer shifts the lens I once looked through when I was simply a fiction reader: My brain is on fire for storytelling (and hopeful success in the endeavor), but it's also less able to relax into the pure enjoyment of being with books. I am more critical; I ask more questions. But books are still books, and, sometimes - happy, dustily exhilarating times - I still find it possible to relish the magic and free imagination of just being with a bunch of them.

*from the April 2010 issue of Travel and Leisure magazine, p. 46

Did you know?

2010-04-08T11:17:00.002-04:00

Barbara Kingsolver studied Biology and wrote a Masters thesis to do with termite behavior.

Here's what she, via today's Writer's Almanac, has to say about studying the sciences and writerlyness: (Fictioning really is an exercise in research!)

When someone asked [Kingsolver] what her background in science has given her, she said: "A passion for research. The best research gets your fingers dusty and your shoes dirty, especially because a novel is made of details. I had to translate places through my senses into the senses of my readers. I had to know what a place smelled like, what it sounded like [...] There's no substitute for that. I've been steeped in evidence-based truth."

In Lieu of an Original Post,

2010-04-07T14:06:00.002-04:00

here are a couple recent, insightful blog posts to do with fiction-writing. (Do I even have any readers who are fiction writers? Or are you all my dear friends who support my fiction writing? No matter.)

I'm pretty much all the way behind what these say, and am encouraged by them.

On not being a big, famous "Genius Writer," but instead a normal every-day working writer, and so writing traditional stories and doing traditional storytelling, and being okay with that:

Genius at Work vs. Working Writer (at Kidlit dot com)

On writing simply, for everyone, not complicatedly for the elite (and/or your ego), and being okay with that:

The Case for Writing Poorly, or Using Straightforward Prose (at ILBNH)

Images, Icons, and the Immortal

2010-04-03T14:34:00.007-04:00

It's an unusual Easter for us this year. The second in our marriage, the first neither of us has had a real sit-down, family-style lunch feast planned. The holiday snuck up on me after three weeks out of town and last week away from church. I found myself several days ago wondering how (and if! - Kenton and I are notoriously uncelebratory when it comes to the expected, usually-celebrated things) we would observe this year's Easter Sunday.

I still don't have an answer. But as a result, I've been pondering the possibilities. What does a couple, sans children, do for the day? We have local friends who are potlucking at a park for the afternoon - a fun event, but very unlike the formal dining experience I grew up doing after the morning's service. And there is all sorts of hullaballoo surrounding eggs and baskets and sweets and such. A Saturday afternoon gathering at our end-of-the-street community garden. Kenton suggests an afternoon's drive and picnic, just us and The Pilot. And I will admit that, having arrived at the Day Before, I do wish there was something pastel about the house (not counting the unintentionally lemon-yellow walls). An Easter egg tree, say, on the dining room table.

Something niggled at the back of my memory when that thought ran through my mind. I called my Mom. "Do you remember a childhood book? Something to do with Easter? A rooster on the front?" She did, but couldn't find it. (An unfortunate casualty, it would seem, of her most recent move.) I Googled, and there it was: The Egg Tree. I can't review or even comment on the book here, because I don't remember the actual story. But I do remember the illustrations, and I remember distinctly the feeling of dwelling deep down in my readings of this book. What is left over for me is the image and the emotion.

In Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, Madeleine L'Engle talks about icons. She talks about them in some ways I get, and in some ways that I don't. But when I laid eyes again, yesterday, on the image of this book, I remembered something she said:

"Stories, no matter how simple, can be vehicles of truth; can be, in fact, icons. . . . Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos."

And, icons are

"an open door into the realm of the numinous."

Too much to say about a children's book about egg trees and roosters? Perhaps. As I've said, I don't recall the text. But, if my child-identity wasn't wrapped up in the story - and I'm not saying it wasn't, just that I don't remember well enough to be sure - there was at least some connection, through the story, certainly through the images, between myself and the un-chaotic cosmos that L'Engle touches on. As a child, the book somehow took me out of myself and to a place of loveliness and peace. As an adult, the image alone of the book cover recalls a host of imaginative experience that I don't hesitate to say had something to do with a kind of high beauty that connects with truth.

So in my thoughts on what Easter celebration for me might look like, how all the appreciating, observing, and remembrancing surrounding the day might be expressed in our right-now family, what form its trappings might take, I take a deep delight in the fact that one of the keyest images that's taken deep root in me . . . is a book. And not just a book, or a memory of a book, but an emoted memory of being in the experience of reading the book: beauty, mystery, newness, curiosity, delight.

I think I may have just found one of my most appropriate ways to celebrate the holy day.

Then there's my friend Elizabeth, who, this week, shared on her blog the poem that, for her, best enables connection into what Easter is, and she asks her readers to share the same. So here I will, a snippet of another "icon of the true" that removes me from myself and raises me, for a few brief, reading moments, to get a better vantage:

(And isn't it just apropos to my melancholic nature to consider a poem about a drowning shipwreck as gloriously Eastery? But isn't it really very like God to Be just that: our life in the midst of death?)

I admire thee, master of the tides,
Of the Yore-flood, of the year's fall;
. . . past all
Grasp God, throned behind
Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides;

With a mercy that outrides
The all of water, an ark
For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides
Lower than death and the dark;
A vein for the visiting of the past-payer, pent in prison
The-last-breath penitent spirits - the uttermost mark
Our passion-plunged giant risen,
The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides.

Now burn, new born to the world,
Double-natured name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fire hard-hurled.

. . .
Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us,
be a crimson-cresseted east,
. . .
Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,
Our hearts' charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's Lord.

~ from The Wreck of the Deutschland, Gerard Manley Hopkins

Mystery at Heart

2010-03-30T18:36:00.001-04:00

" . . . almost all stories – or rather, almost all good stories – are mysteries, regardless of their genre."

~ from blog post Reading: What Makes a Book Satisfying?
(An altogether thoughtful analysis of story.)

Preach it.

2010-03-26T10:04:00.001-04:00

"Good literature continually read for pleasure must, let us hope, do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions."

~ A.E. Housman

On Art, and Creating

2010-03-24T09:14:00.003-04:00

"We must work every day, whether we feel like it or not; otherwise when it comes time to get out of the way and listen to the work, we will not be able to heed it."

~ Madeleine L'Engle

L'Engle, Madeleine. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. Waterbrook Press: Colorado Springs, 1998 (p.24-5).

Don't Stop Now.

2010-03-23T13:29:00.003-04:00

Even if I could, I wouldn't. I won't.

My Story took me across an unexpected boundary of sorts last Friday, the kind from which I'm pretty sure there's no turning back. I didn't know those existed in writing fiction, but (in the language of fairy tales), I crossed the threshold, entered the woods, and the world is different now than it was before.

What really happened is that a new character stepped in. She's what I've been waiting for. And she kindly carried with her the solution to a particularly difficult crux - and also a new problem of her own, a problem my protagonist had been begging for. (We all need problems, right? Otherwise we people would be very boring.)

So Friday. I took my new character (and the old, and the many drafts and notes in my ragged blue folder) to the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, where one of the sessions on my schedule was accepting page one of manuscripts for general critique. Eek! I made myself do it, meaning I sat down the day before with Character the New and worked out her entrance, which is, as it turns out, in the beginning. I brainstormed, created, exulted, agonized, lost sleep, and then woke up Saturday morning to print the first (new) 250 words of The Story as I dashed out the door. Handed in the page on my way into a very full room, and listened (and learned), as twenty (out of, say 120, to be fair to myself) other pages were read and responded to . . . but not mine.

Disappointing, yes, but knowing I had to go back to my friends' dinner table and report on the day, I figured I had to give them more than disappointment in the telling. Which put me in mind of the fact of the matter, which was that the important work had been done on Friday, the day before. When I'd reconsidered The Story's beginning, and where various potential beginnings (because this story can only have one beginning, first-off) fit in later. And The Story obligingly rearranged itself in a way that fairly shimmered with new life and the magical potential for better plot development. I'm all for that.

And now, this day Tuesday, as I've sat down to Day Two of returning intensively to my fictive work (after a necessary month-plus hiatus), I'm still excited to work at it, though fear of failure creeps in: What if I've misunderstood, and it really doesn't come together? What if this tale isn't really worth the telling, as it so seemed five days ago?

On Saturday, as I found my seat in the First-Page Critique session, I struck up a conversation with the same-ish age woman sitting next to me. She's working out a memoir, and said she'd already completed a full first draft. Hiding my envy and plunging sense of writerly self-esteem, I congratulated her. She responded, "Oh, well - it's not very good. I just got it all out at once, as quickly as I could, and now I need to go back in and reshape it. But at least I've got the story down. There has to be something there to work with."

A novel concept: pushing through. A concept reinforced this morning upon reading this post on a writer blog I've recently begun following. This woman tells of her own fiction-crafting process:

"I finished a first draft of my Work In Progress this morning. . . . Now I get to my favorite part of this process: revision! This is what always makes me feel like a real writer. I have something tangible in my hands, and now I can get down to the bones of craft."

. . . And I know then that I can do it, too. Push through. Get this first draft out of my brain (and wherever else it comes from) and onto paper (er, into a Word document). I won't go so far as to say "so the real work can begin," because I can attest that there is real work going on in imagining and constructing the nuts and bolts of a new story's world. But that's just the beginning of the magic. I've always loved - meaning I've been most able to comfortably plunge into - the culling process that's taken place in multiple after-drafts of the critical pieces I've done. And now there's the hope that I get to do that with this unwieldy bit of growing fiction, too. That is something I can work toward.

And the no-turning-back? I say that simply from sense; I could be wrong. But up until Character the New introduced herself several weeks back, I think I could've set the story down at any point and, with a sigh of relief, even, chalked it up to a good-but-failed attempt (and then dealt with some serious subsequent self-loathing). Now? I've entered the woods, and they've got me all enchanted. I wouldn't turn back, even if they let me go (but I don't think they will). I must see where they lead.

A Poem for Summer, and for Happiness

2010-03-18T09:50:00.002-04:00

The Name of a Fish
by Faith Shearin

If winter is a house then summer is a window
in the bedroom of that house. Sorrow is a river
behind the house and happiness is the name

of a fish who swims downstream. The unborn child
who plays the fragrant garden is named Mavis:
her red hair is made of future and her sleek feet

are wet with dreams. The cat who naps
in the bedroom has his paws in the sun of summer
and his tail in the moonlight of change. You and I

spend years walking up and down the dusty stairs
of the house. Sometimes we stand in the bedroom
and the cat walks towards us like a message.

Sometimes we pick dandelions from the garden
and watch the white heads blow open
in our hands. We are learning to fish in the river

of sorrow; we are undressing for a swim.

~ Writer's Almanac, March 18, 2010
"The Name of a Fish" by Faith Shearin, from The Owl Question. © Utah State University Press, 2002.

Summer's Honey Breath

2010-03-16T09:03:00.008-04:00

It’s four p.m. - an advance on yesterday’s three - so I imagine myself entitled to a pre-evening glass of red. A rum-and-something would be a better accompaniment, but beggars can’t be choosers, and this beggar’s present outlook is more than might be asked: the sliding glass door behind the computer table opens to a wide porch, a winter-bare tree trunk strung in colored bulbs a-glow the only interruption, minor, between porch and water. We’re at the Chesapeake Bay for the weekend. More precise, on a river inlet, directly. But who needs precision when the outlook is this good?

The morning was bright and blue and occupied by leisure upon hourly leisure. Now, late afternoon, we’ve roused ourselves, showering in turn, and are greeting the lingering day with a bold face, just as the day boldly asserts itself before us with an intermittent rumble, a periodic breeze, a lowering of purplish cloud, rain-heavy. Bring it to us! We say. We want it. We’ll wake up to the drama; the day calls for a little electricity yet. (Ask us if we feel the same once driven out to the point for a view.)

But if we miss it by minutes, even, we’ll head backwards into land and do a bridge-crossing to the seafood restaurant that’s been waiting the end of our vacation weekend. We’re told it’s Jimmy-Buffet style. Being mountain-preferring folk in general, we don’t know what that means. But we dub it Cheeseburger in Paradise, and decide if that’s the worst it can offer, we’ll take it. (Surely a rum drink awaits me there, at least.) And then what?

The effect of a Sunday evening away smarts even stronger than that of one at home; springing ahead aside, it seems like Friday evening came and went just an hour or two ago. How to grab ahold, describe, absorb, relax more completely into the charm of this evening, this entire weekend, as the hours tick it steadily past us? There is no way. It must go. But the imaginative work of it has already begun - perhaps even been done, if I may so confidently say so. Books have been read, thoughts have been thunk, scenery has been gazed upon, internalized, memorized, and stored away alongside other such images that - reassuringly, in this moment that threatens to get frantic in its scramble to keep ahold - have never left me: other boathouses, other waters slapping noisily up against rock and wood, other 4p.m. holiday thunderstorms, other moments of vivacious rest.

This one is its own, but being itself, it somehow brings the others back to life; I find myself eight, eleven, sixteen again, at lakeshores past, but also thirty-three, now. Memories of past being inform this moment, and this one enriches the rest. I understand more, and my imagination does what it’s long been trained to do against the medicine of rest and long hours of melancholically-inspired thought: it runs. Away. To good places I’d been too distracted to find in normal life. I find it runs even deeper and higher and more connectively than it had at sixteen, eleven, eight, and it ties all those and other moments in to the new realizations, the characters and plot lines (for that is my particular, personal line of creativity), and I open a new door to find all of the old material (from sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one) there waiting, renewed, energized, and begging for life on a page.

I take it down. And what I can’t get down, I trust will remain in wait for the next such moment, or will pop up without needing my conscious thought as the new scene develops back at home, back at work next week.

Madeleine L’Engle says that we must always be, at each age, every person at every age we’ve been before: “. . . we must never forget any part of ourselves. . . . I am not an isolated, chronological numerical statistic. I am sixty-one, and I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-three, and thirty-one, and forty-five, and . . . and . . . and . . . If we lose any part of ourselves, we are thereby diminished. If I cannot be thirteen and sixty-one simultaneously, part of me has been taken away.”* C.S. Lewis fictively imagines a world in which one supreme experience is all that’s needed for a lifetime; the moment lives on in the memory, as real - no, more real - than it was in the actual moment of action.

Memory is like that in the creative mind, I find. This boathouse floating below me now is all of them, but more. This thunderstorm is each of them, but better. This moment is me, letting my imagination run, same as before, in a fantastically new way. So if the weekend must end - and it must - it must. I’ll take it back with me - what’s needed of it, anyway - and recreate the renewed vision on the waiting page. It's what I was made for.

[Sunday, March 14, 2010]
* L'Engle, Madeleine. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. Waterbrook Press: Colorado Springs, 1998 (p.83-4).

Humanity behind the Words

2010-03-12T09:59:00.000-05:00

Ever wonder about those word verification requests that pop up when you endeavor a comment on a blog? My writerly friend Elizabeth did some groundwork and has emerged a fantastic explanation, all true, on her own blog. Check it out, and don't forget to consider all the implications of being human rather than computer when it comes to language.

A Writerly Mind at Work

2010-03-10T15:25:00.003-05:00

. . . An entertaining view of one man's working out the beginnings of a scene.

Writing fiction: it's just one word after another

Some of my favorite bits are in the pre-writeup:

". . . I'm overdue for another chat with the novel. A new section is rattling about and needs to be expressed."

Exactly how I feel. Back-to-the-Novel-ho! it is, next week.

"But, before I start, I thought I'd look at the process of putting one word after another – the process that no one but the author really sees – the process that is difficult to examine properly, even in one-to-one sessions with students."

Ah, yes. There is something that is very personal and private to the writer, inexplicable even to her(or him)self, about writing. Not mystical, no, but very interior and dim in its muted existence of voicing itself. I like that: the idea that though this writing is ultimately hoped and intended for others, there is something deeply me going on with it at the moment.

". . . having written, we can scrabble around and see what the words suggest in the way of playmates they might need, and paths they might want to follow. With or without preparation, the picking and grinding and staring which will now ensue is inevitable – prior knowledge would simply make it more informed."

And that is it, the very work of the writer. The picking and grinding and staring work I need to get back to after a too-significant break from The Story. Next week's the back-to-normal week, and the draft is on my upstairs desk, a-waiting. Come Tuesday morning, I'll sit down and scrabble around. The characters sit on the edge of their seats - and so do I.

Moment-Catching

2010-03-09T09:07:00.001-05:00

"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?"

~ Vita Sackville-West

Watch those adjectives

2010-03-06T09:07:00.002-05:00

in fiction-writing. Paint the picture, instead:

" . . . Adjectives which are a direct command to the reader to feel a certain emotion are no use. In vain do we tell him that a thing was horrible, beautiful, or mysterious. We must so present it that he exclaims horrible! beautiful! or mysterious!"

~ C.S. Lewis, letter to Roger Lancelyn Green, July 10th 1953

Real History

2010-03-04T09:58:00.001-05:00

Excerpt from a letter to poet, Virginian, Catholic convert, and correspondent Mary Willis Shelburne:

"A letter from Cuba with no mention of the revolution is rather suprising at first sight. But it might not even be due to caution. I am often struck in reading the records of the past (e.g. letters written during our Civil War in the 17th Century) how unimportant the things the historians make so much of seem to have been to ordinary people who were alive at the time. Does not what we call 'history' in fact leave out nearly the whole of real life?"

~ C.S. Lewis, Jan 26th 59

Way to tell a story

2010-03-03T17:04:00.002-05:00

This is right up my alley, or seems to be so. There's no telling, cause it ain't out in America - yet.

Seriously, though: ancient manuscripts, deep roots of history, foundations we've lost memory of. And impressively, gorgeously, if I may say, done by hand. There's good tradition in that.

I can't wait till it comes out in theaters - if it does in the U.S. . . . I'm hopin' for it.

Morning

2010-03-03T10:07:00.001-05:00

"This is the starting place. From here a lot can be imagined and hoped for."

~ Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth

I Heart Wales

2010-03-01T08:53:00.001-05:00

Any country that uses a leek in the lapel as military strategy has all my respect. And little did I know I was eating (a fantastic!) Leek-Potato Soup last night in honor.

". . . Today is St. David's Day. It's a national holiday in Wales, where St. David is the country's patron saint. Many Welsh persons are today wearing leeks in their lapels. The leek is a nationalistic Welsh symbol going back to when the Welsh resistance fighters were battling the Anglo-Norman invaders in medieval times. Welsh troops stuck leeks on their uniforms to so they could tell each other and themselves apart from the English troops, whose uniforms looked otherwise pretty much the same.

There are parades throughout many towns in Wales today; the biggest are in Cardiff and Swansea. And today, Welsh schoolchildren all over the country are competing in poetry recitations and music competitions, performances entirely in the Welsh language. It's part of a tradition that goes back nearly a thousand years, called the "eisteddfod," from the Welsh words for "to sit" and "to be." The competitions are judged by esteemed elders or important people; historically, the winner is awarded a seat at the Lord's table at a castle. In schools across the country, it's more likely to be an honorary seat at the school principal's lunch table."

~ from today's Writer's Almanac

Imagining a Remembrance, well-described

2010-02-24T16:28:00.002-05:00

"Easily she stepped into the told story that lay before her eyes on the path she followed away from the window." ~ Toni Morrison

. . . Without effort, Morrison's character - Denver - remembers an experience her mother had and and told her about, an event that had taken place in this very place she is now standing, on this path before the house. Beautifully said: remembering, envisioning a tale she's been told, she steps into the told story that lays before her imagining eyes.

A Return

2010-02-23T13:20:00.014-05:00

Something about a book, an old book, a book you've read before. It confused you because you were only in high school, but the teacher did a top-notch job of opening up meanings and exposing the beauty of the mysteries within, and then you were rattled - maybe for the first time. By a book.

I was, at least. Beloved, Toni Morrison. Senior year A.P. English; I sat on the beige-carpeted stair of our house, four or five up, in the light of the foyer reading about ghosts and plantations and cruelty and family and history inescapable, history being escaped - all in the first five pages.

I sat on a couch fourteen years later, this morning, the sofa that used to be in the living room that adjoined that foyer, and opened the book. Ghosts and plantations and cruelty and family and that history again. And "124 was spiteful" and full of venom and Paul D. and Sethe and all. In no time I was back again on the sunlit stairs, being rocked by words I barely understood, people I had forgotten till now.

So it was a bit of a homecoming, the beginning of this reread. Not one of comfort, because this book could never be that (and now I begin to remember why). But a return of sorts, for a reading-through of a different sort, more as a writer than a reader. The words already strike deep, deeper, and the reader/writer in me is nearly undone.

Rattled and rocked again. This is what books are for.

"The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of a person we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation - a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us."
~ Franz Kafka

Chaim Potok, Thank You

2010-02-17T09:45:00.004-05:00

Below, a biographical tidbit off today's Writer's Almanac. Potok is secure on the top-list of favorite and influential writers of mine. (Davita's Harp, please? And Asher Lev. Yes.) Now I'm put in mind to read more about him than of him. . . . And the next writer-biographical read materializes. (As well as the final impetus I needed to actually get down and read Brideshead Revisited.)

If you have never, ever read Chaim Potok, please do. Start with My Name is Asher Lev. You won't regret it. But if you do, please come back here and tell me why; I'll be curious. I'll be curious to know your reaction, either way. Why is Potok so . . . so . . . the way he is? Powerful in precision. Strong in subtlety. Dear God, that man's books.

"It's the birthday of Chaim Potok, (books by this author) born in the Bronx (1929). His parents were immigrants from Poland, and he grew up in a strict Orthodox Jewish culture. When he was about 14 years old, he happened to pick up a copy of Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, and it changed his life. He said, "I lived more deeply inside the world in that book than I lived inside my own world." And over the years, he read as much as he could, and he moved away from his parents' strict beliefs. But when he started to write fiction, he went back to his childhood, and he wrote The Chosen (1967), a best-selling novel about two boys growing up together in Brooklyn in the 1940s. One of the boys, Danny, is expected to become a Hasidic rabbi like his father, but he is more interested in Freud and psychology. The other, Reuven, is more integrated into mainstream society. Potok continued their story in The Promise (1969), and wrote about similar conflicts between religious and secular communities in many more novels, including My Name is Asher Lev (1972), The Book of Lights (1981), and a group of three related novellas, Old Men at Midnight (2001)."

Get To It.

2010-02-16T18:05:00.003-05:00

"The biggest challenge in making something - anything - is getting started. It’s typically not that we’re lazy. Rather, it’s that the funnel is so wide open that there are too many options before us. There are too many places we could go. We’re afraid of messing up. We’re editing before we have any content."

. . . Read the rest for a good, inspirative kick in the pants at blog post Start in the Middle, by Accidental Creative.

Splintering

2010-02-08T10:40:00.003-05:00

The icicles hang frozen and sharp, thick on the next-door eaves through the window. It would appear that water really can freeze Vermontishly down here in Southwest Virginia. But the sky this morning is at odds, a lightening blue, and the tree shadows cast clearly across snow-clad roofs of neighborhood houses, diminishing the whitening effect of the last three days' insular, dulling glow. I liked it better that way. Today, the snowy ground is smaller, the sky is bigger, and the light fractures in a way that discomforts my eyes and disallows a continued rest.

I can get over it. Perhaps the jarring light, now too-reflected, is purposed to awake me to work, since it is a Monday morning, after all. No more snuggling up against an outside world that agrees the need for a blanket, too. Now is awake-time, and books must become work rather than play, if I'm to feel any sense of satisfaction within myself today.

I'll set to work: Chaucer, language, footnotes, Lewis. Introductory lines and paragraphs. On to Hemingway, Carver. Two mini presentations to prepare, analysis along the lines of plot and tone. But first (and all the while) my mind pulls back to stories that grace the imagination, that are food for the ease of grand thinking: the latest Wendell Berry, that Jane Austen biography, a favorite Lewis re-read. But the open-eyed sky disallows the weekend's sleepy reading, and so I'll heed (sluggish at first), open my mind to engage a focused work, sharp as I can get it in a direction that pulls in the fly-away thoughts, transformed, arduous, to words on paper.

But wait - one more moment to spare for the luxurious resonance of a superb characterization, sharp to the point, in yesterday afternoon's Berry book (How the actions and the analogy so effectively sketch the inner landscapes of his created people!); a final flight of inspiration before I reign my brain in. Also, a longer-looking encouragement to use words to such precise effect, would that I could. Apropos, this: a comfortably dim and imaginative winter's day reading striking upon the pointed purpose of the next day's real work. (And to be formed to one's work in such a way, the icicle, the splintery man - the ecstasy of right-fitting the moment, joy-in-work the highest of hopes.)

Uncle Stanley's life takes its shape, has taken its shape for years, around his Sundays. On Sunday mornings he goes across town to the church and rings the bell, long and loud, while the clapperstrokes penetrate luxuriously into his deafness. His little splintery body dangles ecstatically on the end of the pull rope, the bell lifting him. And then he goes out to sit on the step, while the congregation assembles and silence issues from the church door, waiting for the meeting to be over, to go in and straighten up.

Berry, Wendell. A Place on Earth. Counterpoint, Washington, D.C.: 1983. p.32

Rich Season

2010-02-04T16:00:00.009-05:00

Today I arrive at the end of a four-day string of migraine headache. Ouch. But also "aaaah." How is that possible, you ask?

It goes back to this trouble I have with always needing to feel I'm doing something worthwhile, something productive, worthy - the Right Thing. Whatever that is, wherein lies the problem. Who can say from moment to moment what the right thing to be doing is? Granted, sometimes it's clear: at your 8-5, probably the top-priority item on the list, rather than checking Gmail; in your family day, probably attending to your children's needs, rather than regularly employing t.v.-as-babysitter so as to read the latest fun book in the back room*. In my current life? The question gets a little more vague. Do I spend an afternoon cooking in prep for the day-slash-week? Do I clean (deep or otherwise)? Do I organize recipes, comb through the budget, spend an hour or two in fellowship with friends to develop new community for us in our (relatively still) new home, write letters to away-friends who need encouragement? Sit down for a morning to write on the novel or the latest C.S. Lewis article that might reap actual, helpful financial benefits in the future and employ my chief skill, for goodness sake?

I've yet to cull out the elements of my childhood, personality, and what-not other influencing factors that bring me to the heightened tizzy of prohibitive paranoia that hinders me at any given point from confidently moving forward in any one productive direction, leading to oft-times sadly unproductive days. But, whatever the reason, this is how it is: I am always concerned, my stomach is nearly always clenched over the worry of what I should be doing - mystery that it is - in opposition to whatever I actually am doing at the moment, even be that a disciplined-ly, downright good thing to do. (Am I cleaning the bathroom floor**? I should probably be working on The Story. Writing up a new scene? Surely I should be cooking up food for this evening and the next, and perhaps cleaning the kitchen so as to make the cooking process more efficient - and less germy.)

Don't you all wish you were me? No, really. I know you do. In reality, I've got friends (many of you reading, actually), who don't suffer the malaise of guilt-ridden unproductivity induced by The Uncertainty of The Shoulds. Blessed, fortunate you.

But here I sit, telling myself (and believing it, this time, actually) that it's okay to be blogging - largely because it's good practice in writing, of any kind. But also because - well, because of the "aaaaah"-inducing migraine. This, this feeling of freedom to blog and to enjoy it, is a breath of fresh air, a sigh of relief. And that because of the headache that was a forced stop, a slow-down that disallowed apology. What did I do this Monday through Wednesday last? Everything Jane Austen within my video and online-archived power. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, . . . Sense and Sensibility of another make. Miss Austen Regrets. Many of the stories I most love to read and (reading being head-throbbingly out of the question) watch, and I loved (almost***) every minute. I couch-sat. I cross-stitched (till the head said "no more"). And I watched. I let my mind relax and my imagination go, and it was so . . . healing. Not that the migraines lessened any - that came only yesterday afternoon, after the doctor (good woman) handed me four lovely little packets o' big pink pills. But the point remains: a forced rest was a rest for real and for good, and for that I am thankful.

It's obvious at this point in the post that words aren't demonizing my eyeballs any longer, and for that, I am exceedingly thankful. But I return to the placement of word to page with a restfulness, an enjoyment, that I didn't feel in weeks past, and which perhaps my body knew I needed that physical recovery time, that healing of the conscience as well as the brain to get on with my work - the many works of these present days - with the presence of a restful spirit that frees me to do those works well, from a sense of purpose, but also from a place of calm assurance - and with a real freedom of enjoyment.

And with that, I returned to the kitchen this morning with the quick task (in the midst of others: multi-tasking! It's back! A double-Hurrah! to that.) of throwing together a batch of granola, as Kenton's reserves had earlier been emptied. (That man: a blessed hard worker without any of my propensity to navel-gazing complaints of paranoid conscience, but also not one to improvise on breakfast, and so we must keep him fed for the money-making, no?) A home-task for true, and it felt so good - and relievedly unconflicted - to be back to it, back at work, in that (grimy, I'll admit, but you didn't see it stopping me) kitchen. And a Facebook request for the results, so here it is, the - I exaggerate not - best granola I've made, to-date.

While I'm at it, I'll throw in the belated explanation for the below-linked Eat Me, Drink Me page, my intended food site, created last fall with the idea of uncluttering what I hoped to develop into a more writerly, more book- and authorial-focused site, here where you read. But what I've realized over these winter months is that, with the division of blogs, I'm far less likely to pay any attention to the food posts. What I decided in the last day or two (the Austenian convalescence involving some recipe-organizing moments) is that my recipes - my cooking, my baking, my candle-stick mak . . . no wait, that's taking it too far; I get my candlesticks (and soaps and lip balms) here - are a real part of my days (Should-ified or otherwise), and are thus a big part not only of the purposed ordering of my home-life, but also of my thinking, of the creative life of my mind. So back to this blog the recipes come, but hopefully with the idea that writing - this called-to task and office-ish occupation of mine, if one I do have - should play a part in the reintroduction of my kitchen to down the rabbit hole.

And thus you have it, there I have it, a task I can conscientiously get behind: writing and cooking, and both (sometimes) together. An accurate expression of the facts of my current life, anyhow, and the product of two of my most clear purposes in these present moments of this quiet home life of mine. Aaaaah. Yes. The Right Thing? Who knows. But a good thing to do? Aye. My soul (and brain, and stomach) concur.

So with no further ado, I present to you Granola de Martin, minorly adjusted from previously-posted cereal of the same name. I've recently been put onto molasses as a nutrient-rich sweetener. And that, plus a desire to save what amount of (pricey, tasty, preferred) local honey I can for such important morning treats as tea and coffee, gave me the idea of swapping out the nectar of the bees and bears for a near-equal portion of the molasses wasting away in my fridge (for want of Christmas-time cookies, no longer called-for)****. The results? Fantastic. This is the tastiest granola yet to be roasted in the Virginia Martins' kitchen. I can't wait for Kenton to get a taste this evening; I'm certainly going in for a late-afternoon snack. If you try it, do tell what you think. And if you've got an even better molasses-sweetened granola recipe, do share!

Granola de Martin

In large pot (5 quart +), warm over low heat, stirring periodically, till thin (without bringing to a boil):

1/2 c. light cooking oil (My current preference is canola or safflower.)

1/3 c. real maple syrup

1/3 c. mild molasses (Blackstrap is more nutrient dense, so that'll be added to my pantry for the next granola go-round.)

Meanwhile, mix together in large bowl:

~ 7 c. (generally 1/2 a large-sized oatmeal container) old-fashioned rolled oats (I find that buying oats in bulk from my local whole foods store is more economical - and provides an affordable organic option.)

1 c. wheat germ (Optional. i.e. When I have on-hand. I did not have any today.)

1 1/2 c. flaked unsweetened coconut

2 c. nuts roughly chopped or crushed (Whatever your preference! mine: pecan first, then walnut)

Spices, generous (allspice, cinnamon) (Also consider nutmeg (in small doses), ground ginger, and cocoa.)

When oil-and-molasses/syrup mix is thinned and blended together, before it bubbles, remove pot from heat and stir in:

1 T. vanilla

Then add:

Dry mixture, above

Stir until dry mixture is well-coated. (I like to add about 1/4 the mixture at a time to ensure the best coating.) Line two medium-large baking sheets with aluminum foil and divide and spread granola mixture evenly across both sheets. Bake on low oven heat (200 - 250, depending on how "roasted" you'd like the results to be).

After the first 30 minutes, remove baking sheets and stir mixture, adding in (if desired):

1 c. dried fruit (My favorites being currants; close seconds: raisins, cranberries, blueberries)

1/4 c. crystalized ginger (Also a likely and inexpensive whole foods store find.)

Return sheets to oven and bake for 30 more minutes, or until granola reaches your preferred browned-ness. Remove granola from the cookie sheets to cool on the foil. Once cool, stir to break up larger pieces and roll the foil sides together to create a funnel for pouring the granola into an airtight container.

Makes: about 10 cups

Keeps: two weeks + in an airtight container

Optional adjustments:

try this granola with more molasses and/or syrup (or equal part honey) to result in a gooier, clumpier cereal;
leave out the nuts, or leave nuts whole (or halved) for a crunchier granola;
experiment with your favorite spices to larger and lesser extents (my favorite is a generous, several-Tablespoon inclusion of allspice);
if you're short on the supplementary ingredients (fruits, nuts, coconut), bump up the spices (e.g. I've made a satisfactory granola before sans nuts or fruits. To make it more interesting, I included all the spices generally used in gingersnaps: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, ground ginger, and cocoa.).

* Remind me I said this was a bad idea if ever I have children. And laugh, if appropriate.
** Probably not.
*** I am guilt-ridden, paranoid me, after all.

**** In the original recipe, I generally used a heaping 1/4 c. honey and 1/4 c. maple syrup for a lightly-sweetened mix. With the switch to mild molasses, I used 1/3 c. each of molasses and maple syrup. Perhaps that added sweetness accounts for the delectableness; I may do an experiment in reduction the next time around.

An Odd Way

2010-02-03T09:36:00.002-05:00

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life — sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist — except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

~ Paul Auster, novelist

Dangerous Business, Revisited

2010-01-26T07:08:00.002-05:00

Four years ago, I almost had my eye poked out by a bow-wielding eight-year-old. Violin bow, that is. Fiddle bow. In Asheville, where my soul grew and my self was. Now, in Blacksburg (eye still intact), my own violin bow has lain silent long, but the lesson of that fiddle-ful evening came back afresh to me last night, as I stepped, awkward and unsure, out my door to join a class full of Writers. Dared I count myself amongst them? I did. I do. And later, back home, in that transformation of soul's purpose into confident self that follows such a daring and dangerous step out of comfort, I was reminded of this piece from the Asheville Fiddle Class days. No need to reframe anew; a little edit-tweaking, and the same held true last night as it did four and a half years back:

A Dangerous Business
September 26, 2006

Tonight, I up and took myself and the pretty bit of wood that's sat silently at the foot of my bed for far too long, and went to Fiddle Class. Now, I realize that Fiddle Class is not necessarily the best way to become a truly good and authentic fiddler; that might be better achieved at Thursday night bluegrass jam at Jack of the Wood. But long before I can drum up anything close to the amount of confidence needed for bluegrass jam, I've gotta practice. And going to Fiddle Class will make me do that. At least, I hope it will.

So I went. Against all misgivings that 29 is too far along the road in life to get good, and arguments of how it didn't stick the first time sixteen years ago, so why would it now? But my misgivings and I continued on together and followed the directions to - I'm not making this up - a log cabin. A log cabin off not much more than a beaten path, in the middle of twilit wooded country. Warmly lit and wood-slat door open to the various sounds of mandolins within, winding down from the class before. The mandolins departed and the fiddle-hopefuls arrived, and there were many types. There were retired people picking up fiddle as a hobby. There was even the token child-prodigy violinist with tiny instrument who wants to make it sound like oldtime.

We, the hopeful-fiddlers, chose our chairs and then were informed they were permanent, assigned seats for the next month and a half. Which should be interesting, as I've placed myself next to the second kid in the room, and he's (I'm sorry to say) a little spacey. Which means that in non-fiddle playing moments, he wields his bow with reckless abandon, and dangerously near my eyes. He also gets distracted mid-playing, and so it appears the instructor will be spending lots of time in our area of the room telling the poor kid, "You need to be ready. You don't look ready! Why isn't your bow up and ready?" Which takes me back to sixth grade orchestra all over again.

And the instructor, he's the best part - on the upper end of middle-aged, and when he plays, it is so good. Of course, in comparison with everyone else, just about anything would sound so good, but still - he's the real thing. But he's also a little socially awkward. So when one of the older women just couldn't figure out how to hold the bow correctly (it's tricky, I'll admit, and uncomfortable if you do it wrong), he got mighty entertaining: picture Woody Allen standing over an equally feisty old lady, firing off, "It hurts? It shouldn't hurt. Why does it hurt? It can't hurt. Why does it hurt?" [Lady: "Well, I..."] "It hurts? It can't hurt! How does it hurt? It hurts? No, it can't hurt it doesn't hurt."

He won my six-week-long devotion, though, when he checked my instrument last of all for tuning. (And yes, I tuned it at home before I came. Nothing like an utter beginner's class to make you feel like you actually know something.) He picked it up - and it's a rough-looking item, if you compare it to the sleek, (overly, I say) shiny other instruments in the room - and he deemed: "This is a good violin." He hardly even looked at it; he plucked a little, listened a little, and could just tell.

And it's true: My beloved fiddle, which I barely play, but dear to my heart. It's over 200 years old, and it, also, is the real thing. It's been through it, too - punched through on the side and less-than-smoothly repaired (ouch), fitted with metal pegs around 1901 that would fall out in cold weather (what the - ?), eventually hung on a wall for looks (you've got to be kidding me). But it's in good shape now, and when I first picked it up myself six years ago, I knew it was mine. There were some other instruments in the running, but this one's sound was lovelier, and it fits me like it was made specific for the awkward crook of my now-sore arm and bruised chin.

Anyway. I digress. It was nice for someone else to look at one of my dearest possessions, and say, "Yes, you're right. It is good." And then I had the beginning of all these thoughts on how the outside doesn't matter, nicks and scratches and long-gone varnish playing their part, telling parts of the story that's there. The story that isn't there with the perfect, the smooth, the outwardly pristine. Insightful, lovely, inspired thoughts. And then we started playing, and all I could think was, how the heck am I not going to get worse with all the insanity of cacophany that happens when retirees decide to pick up and play "Ida Red"? I couldn't hear myself think, let alone put my fingers in the right places. I mean, they might have been in the right places, but no way I could have heard to tell.

Oh well. Like I said, it'll all be good for making myself practice, which is most important. And I have a goal: at the end of next month, Havilah, middle child to friends Jason (of kilt fame several posts below) and Kelly, is turning four. And at her birthday party will be a kiddie contradance (believe it), and at the kiddie contradance will be me, fiddling (or squeaking, however you want to look at it) out some kiddie contradance tunes. Hopefully Woody Allen'll get me there, if the kid to my left doesn't poke my eye out first. It's dangerous, I tell you, this fiddle business.

Which reminds me of something. I'll share it. But prepare yourself so you don't get cheesed out . . . Here is where the post takes a turn for the serious. This whole evening experience of preparing for and convincing myself to and finally attending Fiddle Class has, of course, made me think things like, Why didn't I do this earlier? And What kind of phase of life am I in that I do so many new things (fiddling, writing, wedding directing amongst them), am so much more brave and explorative than before? It's been great, the last year or so has, for all that. And it makes me regret the grownup years preceding, where I think I lost time being so worried about doing the "right" thing and not the "wrong" thing that I had no courage to try anything new.

And then I moved; I exited my comfort-zone; I essentially stepped out my front door, and we all know what J.R.R. Tolkien, via the ever-silly, ever-wise Bilbo, has to say about that:

"It's a dangerous business . . . going out your front door," he used to say. "You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to."

Being swept off, so far, has been nothing but Good. I highly recommend it, the dangerous business of going out your front door. Just be careful not to get your eye poked out by an eight-year-old with a wild violin bow in the process.

On Your Own Writing

2010-01-25T09:46:00.005-05:00

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.

~ Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One's Own

About Where It Comes From

2010-01-13T11:42:00.016-05:00

I found myself a-ride on a bus out of town this Tuesday morning last. The sky was a purple shade of pre-morning. A light snowfall. My Kenton and I had zombied ourselves out the front door to the chilly truck, he dropping me at the main campus bus stop on his way in to work. Me grumpy and tired, overrun with the mental detritus of travel preparations, uncertain that I was even getting on the proper bus to take me to the nearest city's airport where I'd pick up a rental car and drive the rest of the day away. Which I wasn't happy about, either, let me tell you.

Arriving distressingly just-in-time, I made my way down the bus aisle (of large, plush, and roomy Greyhound variety). I found my seat and took up two (a good two-thirds the way back, safely out of bus driver view, all the better for drinking prohibited morning tea from my gold Starbucks travel mug). I carefully selected the row with the longest-windowed view for the upcoming hour in-transit. And as the bus pulled off, purple-skied snowflakes and downtown building holiday lights zipping by - there was magic. There really was.

In all the mundanity and annoyability of a harried travel morning, there, in the rumbling bus, descended upon me, unexpectedly, as always, one of those moments where we transcend ourselves, when the mind is charged, when thoughts come together in new and creative ways with a good dose of hope that they'll lead somewhere, that life is leading somewhere, that my life is purposed for work, for real creative work, and I just might do it and I want to do it and I will. Ideas, plans, connections, beautiful phrases and newly-turned words danced through my mind. I had forgotten how it felt.

In a Bible study meeting a little less than a year ago, the first meeting of this particular group of great and supportive friends-to-be, the eight of us were to go around the room and each share what - what activities or non-activities, what places or experiences - made us feel most alive. There was a lot of talk of hiking, of scenic views, of moments of transcendant solitude. Me? It had never dawned upon me until that moment, but most alive do I feel when, alone, inside, my creative mind gets to churning in a way that feels, well, like something - or Someone - outside myself is at work, as though the concepts and ideas in my mind, the recent conversations and perhaps passages of read books, watched movies, heard songs, all intersect with a meaning and a purpose that connects and charges them into a grand idea, a potential story . . . a beautiful sentence, at the least. Something bursts to be created into understanding, and I long to be the one to give it habitation in the written word. I feel alive. I felt it on the bus ride.

I know what you likely think. You think, "Oh, that sentimental girl." And you may be right. But this is how I operate when I operate well. Or should I say, these are the creatively-inspired moments that I live for in a work-world that is comprised of one, that - much as I enjoy solid doses of solitude - is driven so often by a force of will I can barely muster (those are the days - like, ahem, today - when I give up before getting going and cross-stitch to back-episodes of the Office hours for on end), let alone a vision to the height of the beautiful significant, the meaningfulness of so many bits and pieces of life and reality that, when they intersect with each other before my mind's eye, leave me with a drive to create that I didn't have to muster. I can operate otherwise, less inspiredly, and in recent months, I've had to. Perhaps it's the distraction of the holidays? So many plans for traversing space and time and the numerous bits of mundanity (I must not forget to pack my toothbrush! Did you remember to print the boarding passes?) that mindfulness must encompass to see all the holiday-time details done. Or perhaps it's being at home . . . all the time. How else will I write, but if I have the time, alone, at home? But if I am always at work at home, where can I go to stoke the fires of sublime connections and exciting ideas?

On a bus ride, it would appear. As we (I and the six or seven other passengers on that warm and cozy bus, a community in solitude, a crowd in common and singular movement) trundled along at that middle-speed that only large transit vehicles can confidently maintain, past houses, past business, over on-ramps, through deep mountain cuts and alongside snowy mountain skylines, I woke up with the morning and my creative brain, too, awoke with a deeper deepness and higher height of synthesis than it had known for many months before. It was exhilarating. I had grand plans. I would bring all these ideas together. I would understand deep things and communicate them in beautiful words. I would spend an early hour every morning of my family visit investing in my story, that story that would surely come together, soon and brilliantly, because it's what I've been put on this earth to do. I would write an insightful and witty blog-post at Panera on my Maryland lunch-stop to let everyone know.

An hour, an exuberant hour passed by - me (scarf, sweater, book, iPod) cozy and warm within, the mountain views without, the chai from home surreptitiously sipped and Patty Griffin (who better?) singing in my ears: we were going somewhere and it was beautiful.

And then we got there. I entered the great glass front of the Roanoke airport (still magical, still exhilarating). Approached the Budget desk (exciting, at least, purposeful). Got my rental car. Loaded my luggage within (enter minor frustration). I hit the road. And - and.

And. Life again. The unapologetic glow of a fully-wakened mid-morning sun. A stack of tunes and recorded tales to get me through the drive, leftover chai milk souring in the chilly gold mug and the long road ahead. At Panera, I checked emails.

I, as a writer, as someone who wants to create story and compose word together with word to the top capacity of my being - I was disappointed. Frustrated in the blur-driving realness of the ordinary day, the lone, long drive. I would like to live each morning on a bus. (I quickly calculate how feasible it would be to ride to Roanoke and back each day.) I would like to compose each day, arrange each moment, in such a way that inspiration is attained, maintained, constraining my imagination in only the most ecstatic and productive of ways.

But this is not possible. This is not real life. And it is not, actually the stuff from whence the weightily-creative, the deeply-insightful springs. Real life is me at home, ceding myself into the honor and responsibility of getting to be there, driving my lone self up the stairs to the desk - the same desk as the day before and who knows how many days after - showing up and doing my work until the work gets done, until the story is told, good or bad, inspired or mundane, be it what it be, whatever it is that I am ultimately, at my own, ordinary-day best, able to do.

It was - is - hard, in and especially just after such a bus-ride moment of such great inspired heights, not to anxiously grasp at the connections that come, try to memorize the thoughts and ideas, the strings of lovely and shocking and weighty words. It is hard not to fear that the moment will never come again. That the best, my best, has come this once and may soon be - yes, now is - lost. How to be a writer, an artist, a creative, and live with that sense of lost-attainment, of awareness that something of great potential and dormant beauty lies within, waiting for such moments to be released, needing only a constant and completely impossible readiness to be caught to the page for safe preservation in all it's glory? How to not despair and go get an eight-to-five as some secretary*, all tasks defined and doable, instead?

Perhaps the problem is the "within."

Friend and fellow writer Elizabeth** posted on her own blog a video*** that I've linked several posts below, a talk given by a different Elizabeth: Elizabeth Gilbert, author, most recently, of the books Eat, Pray, Love and Committed. I haven't read Gilbert's books, but I'll read or hear just about anything the Elizabeth-who-is-my-friend recommends, so I gave this one a listen. The insight! Particularly, for me, in Gilbert's idea that we all seem to think, as creatives, that we must have and maintain this genius within, an inspiration that comes from us, which we are responsible for controlling, for tapping into, for creating out of - and shame on us as failures if we do not, if I do not retain all the ideas of Tuesday morning a week ago and work them into something lovely days later after who knows how many minutes and hours of life, real life have come in between? Instead, in answer, Gilbert has an idea about how that great burden of felt-responsibility to create so well, so inspired-ly, so sublimely, might be tempered so that it does not overwhelm and thus inhibit. (A crappy Panera post might have been better than no post, eh?) She talks about the need for the artist to have some space between herself and her inspiration. She suggests that inspiration might come from outside ourselves . . . And that lessens the responsibility for us writers, creators, artists to perpetuate and keep hold of those moments of inspiration, those bus-ride "Aha's!" that can't be predicted, forced, or maintained day-to-day.

In explanation of "the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process, she tells this whimsically witty and deeply insightful tale, an account by Tom Waits of a potentially creative, inspired moment, a moment in which he was speeding along a freeway and was suddenly in mind of a beautiful phrase of tune, something he longed to attain, a thing of musical beauty that could really appreciate and work with. His response to creative inspiration from the inconvenient steering wheel? "Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother someone else today!" Hilarity, yes, and a moment in which the (as Gilbert so aptly puts it) "internalized torment" of feeling responsible for all creative impulses, for attaining high and perfect artistry every time was held at bay.

Gilbert herself gives account of working in the face of what feels like disastrous writing, story-telling that's just not coming together, not inspired-feeling. Which is more often my experience than that missed interstate moment, the bus-ride inspiration that, by nature of the moment, I wasn't in place to grasp, make my own and work with. She explains - in another hilarious moment - her responsibility being seriousness about getting to work herself, about "showing up" for the work and putting pen to page, doing what she is, and all that any of us are, capable of doing: what we can, on any ordinary day, be it what it may. If inspiration comes, it will come - and this is the important bit - from without, from Who it is that is purposing us to be writers, creators, or whatever it is that we are. If that height of glorious, connective, high-productive inspiration does not come . . . we have still shown up. We have done our best. We have done what we were put on this earth to do - one of those things, at least. Gilbert speaks to this outside source of inspiration: "I am putting everything I have into this. I don't have any more than this . . . I'm going to keep writing, anyway, because that's my job, and I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job."

Gilbert culminates these thoughts of inspiration coming from without, being from the Divine, as I'm tending to think about them, with the comforting and - yes - inspiring conclusion (brackets mine): "This [fear that your best work is already done and behind you, or that inspiration won't come again or won't show up when you need it] is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. But maybe it doesn’t have to be quite so full of anguish. If you never happened to believe in the first place that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you, but maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life . . .”

I'm not sure I tag into all the spiritual implications wrapped up in her words, and I'm pretty sure that what she perceives as the Outward Source of muse-driven creativity is different than my idea of the Divine that Inspires. But I do recall there being ideas that jive with this concept of hers, something in the book I most believe about being a jar of clay intended to hold out-of-this-world things, and then something else about being created for a purpose, created for specific good works that have been planned out for me, specifically me. And there's something in there about my having been made well, too, by a master crafter, a Divine Creator. And so the concept that there are extraordinary aspects of my being that have been gifted to me, that there are things I might do in life, but that they don't come from within me and that their end ultimately isn't me, but that they go out to bless others and also, perhaps, return to the one who gave them to me. Wow. That disentangles me from the anguish of catching hold of the tail end of every higgledy-piggledy moment of creative inspiration so I can just show up for work in the morning. Put in my hours. Do my part. And let the sentences fall where they may.

I am sorry to say that the Panera blog post did not get written. It would have been great - at least, that's what I seem to remember. But perhaps it couldn't have been. The moment of high-flying, bus-riding inspiration passed, and this, instead, is the leftover, the lower-level reasoning of a post-inspirational, long-after-visionary moment.

And this is real. This is me, Rebecca Martin the would-be writer, the working creative woman, who, if she would write anything of any consequence at all, must not wait for intermittent bus rides or otherwise-unexpected moments of inspiration. Instead, I will show up for work tomorrow morning at that lone desk upstairs for a long day of word-crafting. But, being the hopeful, somewhat-sentimental person I am, I will also keep a lookout, a ready eye askance to the inspirational moments of grand idea that do come along - at some times in life less often than in others, but they do come. I'll hope to catch another of those bus rides again more than once in this writing life, and next time, I'll hope it's a moment when I've got my laptop open and my eye ready to the page.

Till then: Let the record show! Here I am, at the desk, before the computer, on an any-day of any-week, and I'm ready to go.

*I am proud to have been a secretary numerous times in the past, and probably will be again. It's a little-acknowledged fact that secretaries, administrative assistants, office support staff, and the like keep the modern world turning in the cohesion we Westerners have all come to expect. Everything everywhere falls into place for us and it seems like the-way-things-are, or perhaps like magic. But really, it's the secretaries.
**Friend Elizabeth's web site.
***Elizabeth Gilbert's talk.

Can't Pass It Up

2010-01-12T11:37:00.004-05:00

. . . the opportunity to read an L.M. Montgomery. Actually, in all honesty (and contrary to the spirit of the contest), it's not so much LMM whom I love, but her dark and stormy young creation in Emily of New Moon. Never a fan of Anne, Emily (and, for awhile back in high school, Jane - of Lantern Hill) is the one who stole my heart. She's not quite so bright and cheerful as the Green Gables girl, who is just a bit too much for me. I'm a melancholy; Emily's a melancholy. Her world is a bit more real, heavy, true - though still fantastically lovely in Montgomery's typically-imagined way. It was already in my plans to give this one a re-read soon, and then I came across this blog and this challenge:

. . . and Emily of New Moon was promptly added to the bedside table for the month of January.

Inspiration for the Writer

2010-01-11T21:24:00.001-05:00

This, for a creative of any sort, I'd say, is definitely worth the watch. Well worth the listen.

(Thank you for posting, Elizabeth!)

Marcelo in the Real World

2010-01-11T13:21:00.064-05:00

Last night was one of those characterized by far-too-late night wakefulness in the name of absorbing the last hundred or so pages of a compelling book. "Almost there! Just a few more minutes!" I thought . . . every ten minutes or so between 10:00p.m. and 12:06 (not to put too precise a time on it) in the a.m. The delusional denial of prolonged reading was a rather selfish and significantly thoughtless indulgence, as Kenton gave a periodic shuffle about his side of the bed, announcing his perpetuated annoyance in half-waking grunts and the dramatic casting of arm across face. And I did paid for it this morning, the late-night story-obsessing, in my own over-tired annoyance at the day, a day otherwise-intended to begin with diligent writing over a reasonably-early morning coffee on the downtown mall - this being one of those brief Charlottesville stays, Kenton putting in a day's work in the main office and me soaking up a morning of refreshed writing opportunity. Which was not how it panned out this particular day.

Why do I do this to myself? Why do I do it to my beloved? That one who plugs away so devotedly day-to-day so I can stay home and indulge the reading/writing itch. Without entirely side-stepping my own short-coming issues (ahem, lack of self control), let me, er, side-step them for the moment. There was indeed a reason, an impetus, a cause connected to the grumpy morning effect: Story. Solid, smooth, straightfoward, spell-binding story. This one, to be precise:

Being in-process of developing my own fiction piece, I can't say how delighted (inspired, challenged, and reassured) I am when my word-grubbing eyes scan their way across something current that is also Good. And this 300-page read is Good. Good writing, good humor, good insight, good compassion . . . good story. Anyone who read and appreciated 2003's witty, smart, and surprising The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime should be able to pick up Stork's 2009 novel and dive delightedly into Marcelo's voice as he narrates the reader through his perceptions - and his perceptions of his perceptions - as a boy entering manhood on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum.

Marcelo is a young adult protagonist, so yes, there are the usual themes: development of responsibility in the larger world, budding romance, sexual self-awakening, a right-versus-wrong crux decision to be made. But Marcelo's story, as he tells it, packs such a stronger punch than usual, as he articulates to himself, analyzes, and chooses whether or not to act on those emotions that most of us either let ourselves be driven by or let pass us by with barely a nod of the mind toward inner self-recognition or consideration of what might be informing our actions and decisions. But Marcelo? He must overtly internalize those moments outside - and even within - himself, and so, especially as he confronts changes in his life (namely, being exposed to what his father calls "the real world," working in the family law firm for his last high school summer and developing relationships with, well, normal people) he provides a shockingly clear, enjoyably creative lens on the world that gives a new, thoughtful view to the things most of us so often pass by. Or, when we do consider them, we tend to make approach with a mindset of already-understanding, when really, do we think about such mundane and extraordinary matters as love, of God, of sin and forgiveness? Really think about them? Marcelo does, and so the conclusions he draws and the changes effected within him resonate all the more movingly.

I left this book (the red 12:06 glowing guiltily from The Beloved's bedside hotel tabletop) with a sense of assurance that the things that Are in the world are themselves for the better with a full, beautiful, and self-changing kind of power. And I left it happy for Marcelo, happy in the hope that perhaps - just perhaps - the young men and women in the world who share some of his modes of processing might also find their own way of being in the world in a manner not only that "works" for them, but, even more, that challenges, grows, blesses those with whom their lives intersect. But if that's too much to extract, too much real-world hoping derived from a mere work of fiction, this much is, in fact, the case: Stork, in the inner-life of this one fictional boy, has challenged, grown, and blessed me, a real-world person.

And that's the mark of a book that will live the rest of my days (when it's not being re-read) on my all-time-favorites shelf. (Yes, I do have one, a line of books that grows across my work desk, convenient to comfort and inspire as-needed.) I'm glad books like this are out there - are newly out there - and am honored to contribute my own writing to the world of fiction this tale inhabits.

My only complaint is the sleep-stealing nature of such a work. Perhaps, though, if I'm looking for soporific, I shouldn't pick up the Good in writing at such a late hour. Also, perhaps, on behalf of the reality within the world of my own soul, I should ponder some of Marcelo's words and have some better understanding of myself in light of yester-evening: "Everyone has ugly parts." Mine? Thoughtless, indulgent abandon into the worlds of Good story, even at the price of my so-giving husband's much-needed rest. That, though, was always there within me, and it's my own responsibility to deal with. That Marcelo both revealed it and defined it? Like I've said, that's Good story. Damn Good story. A good, high-caliber world of fiction that I will surely return to again and again - only next time, hopefully in the brighter, more reasonable hours of the day.