June Self Portrait Challenge: environment # 2

This place is big with words, with ideas, with art. The walls remember e.e. cummings and Stanley Kunitz; Grace Paley's voice and Mary Oliver's eye for noticing the profound in minute details. A fish weathervane tilts out my window. A long catwalk connects the studios; roses tumble wildly below. I stand in the mirror taking pictures to remember this, so that when everything else pushes in, I'll have snapshots with light flooding through big windows and the fan whirring. I'll have Pam Houston's voice and the laughter of other students sharing work. I'll have the images of Robert Yarboroughs paintings dancing like sunspots on the inside of my eyelids, and Wired Puppy coffee, and houses painted lavender and lemon and ocean blue. I'll have the memory of hours writing, quiet pooling up like water around me; and I'll have the seal's slick wet heads bobbing up out of the water to eye me sitting, sand flecking my calves, alone on the shore.

Bliss

Have I mentioned that I’m having a divine time? I sat for three hours and wrote this afternoon after receiving brilliant criticism on the piece I am working on. I went to the beach yesterday, with a picnic: spicy fried chicken, pot stickers, salad, grapefruit soda, and a coconut & chocolate chip cookie. Then I watched the sun set over the water. I heard Maxine Kumin read from her work, and oh, how my breath was lost somewhere as she read, like the flight of birds.

And I went to dinner with Pam and the class tonight. She is charismatic and analytical and forthright. She’s been in the Bronco’s locker room and interviewed Toni Morrison, and she can make a room of people laugh belly laughs repeatedly.

Here are a few things she's said so far this week that I really want to remember:

On why she writes: “Writing is the way I honor the physical world. I think of it as a kind of prayer.”

On craft: “Sink the story into the metaphor. The challenge is how to sidle up next to the big things without becoming lecturers and making total fools out of ourselves.”

“There is nothing worse than trying to say something. You’ll always fuck it up. Keep it concrete.”

“You don’t have to tell everything. Let the concrete specifics stand in for the general.”

You cannot communicate depth using emotion word. ”Just read your seventh grade journal to see that!”

On Revising: by the fourth draft, “take out the things you needed to say to know, but now they can be removed.”

On fiction versus nonfiction: “Everything I write comes out of my experience. I hardly imagine anything.”

Do you know how freeing that was for me to hear? Do you understand how those few sentences made lots of things possible for me with writing, that I hadn’t imagined possible?

On audience; “You must believe your reader is as smart as you are.”

Writing assignment # 2: an airplane story

The big rigs were matchboxes and the cars marbles and then it was over. On the way down, the salt flats were pale green and iridescent blue, and the mountains heaved up like bread rising in the oven. I chewed gum on the descent, for the first time I’d ever been allowed, and felt my seven-year-old body slam into the back of my seat as the wheels hit the tarmac and the wind flaps roared with engagement. I tried hard not to swallow my gum. The second time, two years taller, on a ranch outside Gunnison I was in the back seat next to my sister. She was always talking about being a pilot when she grew up. I decided I wanted to be one too, but the way she talked made me keep my dream to myself.

My dad sat in the front seat with a thermos of coffee and bread and butter sandwiches wrapped in cellophane next to Art Gilmond, who was sixty, and smelled of engine oil and sweat. He was balled and sunburned and he kept a ranch with mustang horses and fruit trees. We were staying the week.

I’d surprised him heading for the bathroom the night before, coming up the stairs just as he was passing in the hall.

“Boo!” I yelled.

His fist stopping just inches before my startled face.

“Damn it. Never do that again,” he said his face suddenly ashy. “Never surprise a Vet.”

I kept my distance.

The yellow and white propeller of the little four-seater wound up like a drunken bumble bee. This time the plane bucked down the runway and then lifted off, air slipping under and over its fat white wings like someone had tossed it aloft. We circled the canyons low enough to startle horses. The engine vibrated in every cell of my body. The sky seemed to be a brighter blue than on the ground, and everything looked miniature like in a painting or like a toy store village. We at bread and butter as we circled; flying to the edge of a canyon and then flying on, the land suddenly falling away below us. My ears popped, and I gulped air.

The third time I was seventeen, and alone in the front seat with the instructor. The long cable that connected the glider to the belly of the plane up ahead of us would pull us aloft, he told me. I was ready. By the fence my dad stood with his foot on the bottom rail, a thermos of coffee in his hand. I’d been reading. I knew about aerodynamics and the Wright Brothers. I also knew about Icarus.

I was ready for anything except for the way when the instructor retracted the metal cable after we’d climbed up, and up, circling with the tow plane until we were at gliding altitude, it was suddenly silent. No motor, just rushing wind. I could see gulls circling just below us, and the tiny speck of my dad.

Small unbelievable things

Walking knee-deep in the ocean. Picking up scallop shells for Bean. Uniterrupted reading time. Trying to kick fear in the ass, and the prospect of an entire night of uniterrupted sleep.

I'm somewhere else

I left at half past nine, and followed the sunshine south. Listened to Radio Lab. Did you know dolphins and ducks sleep with one half of their brain at a time? I was fascinated. Listened to a fiesty Niko Case play for a live audiance, and watched as the landscape flattened and the trees became stubby and gnarled. Now I'm here, feeling light headed and wonderous. Ready to take a walk to the beach, and maybe to scope out the local coffee shop before orientation starts in an hour.

I have work to share, but I'm terrified, still. DH read it dutifully and gave the best of advice: you have to start somewhere, and anywhere is good. Especially if you love words as much as I do. And besides, they're not going to eat me alive just because I signed up for advanced fiction when I've only written a handful of fiction pieces in my life. Right? We'll see. I'll be posting a lot this week (no two year old!) I'm interested to keep a record of my emotions as I jump into this. Something I'm drawn to and totally scared of in the same breath. Must be a little how moths feel, fluttering by the porch light.

Always last minute me

I woke up this morning with a sore throat. I always seem to do this: get sick right after I've made it through to the end of something stressful. I also always manage to leave everything for last minute: laundry, the rest of my fiction piece, packing. I hate leaving in a rush of packing and hapazardness, but I always seem to manage to find myself there.

An inefficient overachiever, and a sick one at that.

I'll leave in the morning tomorrow, and drive for six hours. Signing along with the radio, trying to get the directions right, and feeling like my stomach might fall out my mouth, but I'll try not to focus on that. (Have I mentioned how anxious I get right at the beginning of things--at that cusp of unknown? I have. I know. But I really hate it.) But with all my heart I'm excited to be going, and I have questions that I'm determined to ask of the lady whose prose makes me grin, or catch my breath. But I also want to know answers from you. If you write, or read, or dream of writing, I'd love to hear your thoughs.

* Where are the lines between life and fiction. How can pieces of life, stories, characters, annecdotes become the tapestry of fiction?

* How much is enough? I'm forever writing the long piece. The piece with backstory on the backstory. I want to learn to craft a shorter narritive. Something with just enough to let the reader do the rest. How do you know when to leave off, without saying everything?

* And audiance. I don't feel like I have a sophisticated enough sense of audiance yet. Kurt Vonnegut says "Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia." If you write, who is your one person? Who is yoru audiance. Maybe that's my problem, I can never think of just one person.

June self portrait challenge: environment

On the front lawn, with the half-doze little araucana chicks, soaking up sun. School's out. Summer's finally here.

More environment self portraits here.

Noticing colors, and a list

Tomorrow is my last day of school for the year! I'm so thrilled, I'll even go hobnob with my colleagues at the local watering hole, though that typically isn't my thing. I'm so ready for weeks on end of writing time and Bean time and garden time. I've been operating like a jigsaw puzzle, pieces tumbling about inside the cardboard box. I'm ready to fit things back together again.

Tonight a sunny cafe dinner with just Bean. Watching 'big rigs' and trucks drive by; slurping fresh tomato basil soup from a wide silver spoon. Then sharing an ice cream cone and watching him zip static-headed and grinning down the slide at the playground again and again.

Armloads of peonies. Such a heady, delicate scent. Pure decadance.

A stomach full of butterflies about the impending workshop; but also: a week of sleep and open beaches and new possibilities and time to write.

And I'm sorry I've become one of those bloggers--so irregular with my posts you barely want to stop by. I can hardly wait to come here regularly {I have a dozen GREAT posts all written in my head, I swear!} and share and rant and follow my whimsy.

At the inlaws

Navigating the bizarre, delightful terrain of family. The humidity is something. Bean rides his bike in gleeful circles on the drive. His grandad lets him steer the lawn tractor. His smile is impossibly wide. We eat outside, toasting with bubbly wine and watching the fireflies come out. There is so much about this family that is complicated, but so much that I adore. I have a stack of end-of-year reports to finish, and more fiction to write. Right now I am in desperate need of coffee. And shorts. I don't own any--except garden work worthy ones. I don't know how that happened really, except for the fact that I find it impossibly hard to find shorts that fit well. Do you have any favorites? Happy weekend everyone!

What sets you on fire?

How do you write? How do you sit down and break open the cracked clay that paints your heart like a mask? How do you say the things you need to say, or want to, all the while believing in a few unsure things (the threads of a story stringing out like a spider’s fragile gossamer?)

It has dawned on me that I have no idea how to write really. Some days I feel like words are pelting me. Other days everything comes out so boring and uninspired. Most of the time I have no idea what to expect when I sit down at the keyboard. My mind plays chicken with me. The two of us wobble about mostly, looking stupid.

I think my problem is that I can imagine big. I can imagine BIGGER than big. I get glimpses of the whole damn story, from every perspective, the way it all should be. Then I have to write it, and that totally sucks. You know what I mean? Then the sentences tangle. Do any of you write?

What do you believe in? Especially with fiction? What makes you believe you have something to say? Is it story, for story’s sake, or something else? I really need to know.

Part of the reason all of this has me off kilter tonight is that I’m going for a week long workshop with Pam Houston on the coast in ten days. I’m already feeling dry-mouthed and foolish. More than anything else I hate meeting people for the first time. After we’ve met, I’m okay, but I hate those first few moments of unknown: skating out on ice the color of a robin’s egg, wondering if it will hold. I hate parties for this reason; and talking on the phone. And of course, being a writing workshop and all, I’ll have to meet lots of people; and then read them my timorous attempts at fiction. Gasp. Why do I do this to myself?

I feel like I’m lingering in the doorway of an open jet plane: air rushing past it’s metal belly and below a wide topography of green and blue and a geometric jumble of urban shapes, and the outcome’s totally uncertain. You never really know.

Monday

In the studio smoke from the raku kiln drifts in through the open windows, where water runs in rivulets, like tiny tributaries or capillaries, trembling with early summer rain. It’s been raining softly off and on all day, and I kind of like the way it drenches things: scrubbing the sidewalks clean and soaking the tilled soil in my garden making it easier to turn over into raised beds.

Tonight I sit at the wheel and try new clay: porcelain. White and supple and so soft beneath my fingers, like milk. It takes so little effort to center, to pull up cylinder after cylinder, bowl after bowl. I make eleven pieces. More than I’ve ever made in a night. Four soup bowls, four tall mugs, two plates, and a vase. I can hardly stop myself. The clay slips with little effort in a circling center between my fingers, and the studio is full of banter. Marven Gaye is on for a while, then Beck. Conversations rises and falls like a flock of pigeons alighting for bread, then lifting off into the sky to settle on the ridgeline of a roof somewhere.

I love throwing pots in the studio while my guy loafs around, glazing pots in the opposite corner, making people laugh. My mind stays close to its center, at the wheel. I don’t veer into worry, or anxiety or tiredness; like gardening, the simple act of using my hands in a directed purposeful way fills my soul with a sense of even-keeled grace I easily loose track of as the day whips by me, all talk and clatter and eager kids.

I come home empty, in a grateful, open way. Ink and gesso on the pages of an old book; clay on my jeans; a bottle of massage oil on the bedside table. The day is done.

Countdown

Monday morning & rain, hard against the windows. EIGHT days left of school. An unbelievable amount of work to accomplish & saying goodbye to my beautiful friend who has been at my house all weekend & who is moving to California. Everything she owns is in her car & I adore the way she giggles and her courage. Mondays sometimes suck. Today I'm not sure which way it will go. Maybe coffee will help. How's you're Monday going? PS--If you post a comment--do so only once. There is something bizarre and whacky going on with my comments and I get like ninezillion of the same one because they don't show up for the commenter right away (I don't know why.)

New Arrivals

Fluffy, tiny tufts of dandilion fuzz now live in a box in my garage. I'm smitten.

Of course I jinxed it

By writing about the few great nights. Last night he was WIDE EYED, and entirely NOT asleep for over an hour at about 1:30 a.m.

Four paragraphs & four things beginning with "A"

A full day back at the classroom. They greet me with eager smiles and two-page weekend news letters in ever more confidant print. They use capitals and periods and I challenged them to write about what they felt, saw and said. One little boy wrote, I could feel the wind and I said to J, “Can you feel the wind?” and he said back to me, “Yes I can,” as we biked down the hill. Such sweeties they are, though they seek to wring every ounce of energy and attention from me. If they learned one thing this year, they learned to be kick-ass writers :)

A parent share tomorrow, to celebrate the kid’s final writing projects. Books they’ve planned from storyboard to final hard-cover hand sewn copy. Their smiles and their bright pictures and eccentric text placement is something I’ve been wanting to photograph for a while, so I’m bringing my camera! I miss mixing my life more: art and teaching and writing. I like when it overlaps.

At home, before dinner, we got the chicken coop floor framed out, Bean following after us with a hammer—using it with flawless form. The sun angled long, and for dinner we had flat bread pizza. It’s been the third night in a row Bean has gone to sleep super tired by 8, without much cajoling, and slept through the night in his bed until 6 in the morning, when he patters his way into our room. I cannot tell you how utterly thrilled I am about this. I don’t want to jinx it of course.

And a few more paragraphs tonight. Up to ten pages. The story seems to be fitting together in unexpected ways, as though all the jigsaw pieces are speckled with Rorschach prints. I’m just following along, seeing what I recognize and going with what feels right.

And four things I’m enjoying that start with A:

Azaleas blooming along the back wall of my house, unexpected. Antinori Vermentino wine: delish with sausages and crusty bread. Aching muscles from hard work. Animal, Vegitable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

can't help myself: a picture post

The garden, underway. Sore arms & DH has a sunburn. Bean played all afternoon with his tractor in the newly tilled dirt. A long way before raised beds and fence posts, but closer than we were. So good to be outside. So good to have a man who, because he know's my heart is set on having a garden, spends all day wrestling the brute of a tiller about. :)

I'm heady with delight. With fragrance. With blooming. Everything plunges into growth come the end of May. The short growing season makes everything feel even more astounding and vibrant and urgently beautiful. I cannot get enough.

(real, up-close pics are over at flickr.)

4 days off

have made all the difference. It always stuns me when I realize how entirely a lack of sleep and stress affect my life. How I feel completely altered, weaker, fragile at the center like a soft-boiled egg with days-on-end of stress and poor sleep; and then after a few days of extra naps and time spent in good company (family and friends, both) and suddenly I feel different. Whole. Laughter rises up easily and often like finches on the early summer wind. I remember how much I love making love in the afternoon with windows open for a nap, after. Family time suddenly feels precious and sustaining, not debilitating the way it can feel when I've given everything already and the dishes still need to be done.

This weekend has been full of frisbee tossing, and cutting grass. Renting a tiller to cut soil for our new garden. Listening to night rain, and having our hair tossed by afternoon winds. Getting the box ready for new chicks (coming this Thursday!) and taking Bean and his two-wheel bike + training wheels to the playground bikepath. Watching him fly by, all grins. Making pasta al dente with fresh red sauce and sausages, salad with new mustard greens and fresh corn off the cob. And writing: good solid pages of fiction. I cannot wait for summer.

Two weeks of school left (back tomorrow) and then off to the writing workshop with Pam Houston (! I know, I can't believe it either!) A week to myself on the coast writing and soaking up other writers, and then the wide swath of summer streatching out ahead, humid and lush, to linger, to sweat, to write, to grow a garden.

I have plans: many rows of corn, mounds for squash and pumpkins (DH's favorite), strawberries, peas and lettuce, green beans on poles making an archway for Bean to hid beneath, sunflowers, potatos, radishes, carrots, tall tomatos bursting in the sun. I know so little about gardening really, though I've always coaxed a patch of vegitables out of some corner of our urban yards. Now, it's nearly a quarter acer of soil we've set out to till. I've never composted, but want to learn. So much to be patient about--the eager part of me wants it all now: the tall rows of sweetcorn. The scarlet runner beans and holyhocks along the fence. The chickens feathered and scratching underfoot as we picnic outdoors like we did at lunch today.

I forget when I'm stressed to that teary weak point of nothing, how much I love to just ramble. To post about the cluttered mosaic of our days as a family. To make sketches in my flora notebook, or linger by the window watching the humming birds that are nesting in our lilac trees. And I miss all of you. Over the span of time I've had this blog, so many people have become bits of what make me whole, remind me of what I want, keep me inspired. What are you up to?

Tell me: five things you did today. :)

Trembling heart

Sometimes my heart feels like a starfish belly: outside me, devouring the things I love. Sometimes it feels like an urchin’s purple back: a hundred quills around its pliant center. Sometimes it’s like the soft belly of a cat: turning to the sunlight, thrumming with internal delight. Sometimes it’s hard to have a heart this tender, this wide open to other people’s grief.

At work we’re just finally now sorting through the relics of trauma that we’ve carried like splinters through the school year. I’m more okay than many others, in part, because I was new there, and also because I am young and resilient. The middle kid in my family. The peace maker. The relativist who can see both sides, while still seeing the cup half full. I wasn’t rooted, familiar with the way 'things always were.' The lives lost weren’t ones I knew.

And yet, oh and yet, it is so very hard for me to sit in a room with everyone’s emotions running high like floodwaters, just below the surface of their pale blue veins. So hard to see their faces hurt, to see the different sides, to see the grief and feel it all. I try to envision a protective shield to stop some of it from saturating, but the sorrow and loss and anger that fills the building, and eddies as two people pass in the halls, is so present, so tangible, I can’t shake it off. I am devastated, still. And then I read in the paper about the little girl in Portugal, abducted from her hotel room, or about sweet|salty’s beautiful tiny premie boys and my heart feels pulpy and fragile and broken open all over again, as if sorrow were a new ingredient in air.

I came home exhausted today. I think I’ve come home exhausted all year. I thought I was the only one, but in the past two days of meetings, everyone says they’ve been ungodly tired, sleepwalking through the days. Someone said it was like we were trying to fix four flats on a car with the car still moving. And it has really been like that, post trauma, moving full throttle forward because of the wide eyed kids who want to learn about the arctic and the desert and addition and how to spell the word miss-iss-ipp-i.

Then I stumbled on this: I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.

I choose to risk my significance, to live so that which came to me as seed goes on to the next as blossom, and so that which came to me as blossom goes on as fruit.

Dawna Markova

Day by day

Saturday: It hit me in the middle of the night, up again, one more time, because of the small inconsolable wailing and flailing of a sharp elbow having, night terror dreaming, teething Bean, that I was officially one step away from going insane.

I told DH as much, in a whimpering whisper, having already burst into tears at least once between the time I got home and the time I went to bed, and the next morning he let me sleep in. Until 10:40. When I woke up on my own accord, stretched a leisurely stretch, and basked in a hot shower.

At 7:30 he took Bean and went to breakfast and Home Depot and to the coffee shop for freshly roasted beans and the market for a list items we’d run out of, and he left me with the entire bed to myself, with all the covers and the pillows are fluffed just so and the slatted shades drawn so the room stayed wrapped in yummy semi dark but the window was open to let the sweet fragrance of spring waft in.

I was beaming all day.

Sunday: Some people probably (no, definitely) will think I am strange because I derive a great amount of joy from doing yardwork… But I really do. I’m always happy when I have the weedwacker in my hand, it’s loud whine drowning out any stray thoughts, so that I am simply there in the moment, watching the grass and leaves fall in swathes. I spent the morning doing this in the lower meadow, cutting a huge square where we plan to till for a garden, while above me, on the lawn, DH circled back and forth with the mower, Bean perched on his shoulders. Watching them together like that always makes me burst into smiles. Bean clutching two handfuls of DH’s summer-curly hair, both of them grinning wide as they make the turn nearest me, waving.

Then we started on the chicken coop, which, after several debates (not all were pretty, either) we concluded would best be made not in a new structure, but in our existing “barn” shed that once housed a horse before we came to own it. The floor is entirely being reclaimed by nature, but the walls are stick-built and sturdy (ha! knock on wood!) and the roof seems to still work in spite of the moss growing there (or perhaps because of it.) We spent several hours cleaning out all the left-over planks of flooring we’d tossed there hurriedly last spring around this time, when we were frantic to be finished with flooring and could not yet fathom living here.

It seems like it’s been such a long, long time since that time of nailing floor boards and longing, our days painted with worry and exhaustion. Here we are, a year later, and I’ve planted rose bushes along the front of the house and scattered native wildflower seeds down the bank and found purple trillium growing along the old stone wall at the edge of our land. A year, and everything is different.

Bean spent the evening zipping around the wide expanse of our kitchen and livingroom floor on his bike. A few weeks after we bought it, he can now steer and pedal like nobody’s business. He’s getting reckless in that little boy way: looking over at us and grinning while he steers in entirely the opposite direction. He rarely falls. It will be a different story on the packed dirt of our road, but inside, where the floor is smooth and the way unobstructed, there’s no stopping him.

Monday: Before 7 and the sky is gray and I’m huddled in my bathrobe smelling the heady scent of lilacs that my sister picked and brought to me before she left (I miss you!) and listening to the birds calling back and forth. We have a pair of Orioles. Bright orange and black brushstrokes fluttering across the canvass of green woods. The first time I saw them, I held my breath.

Nonstop

The kids stare longingly at the windows and look like second graders already. I watch them read now, and see they have hardly a ny memory of the time when the stragled in at the beginning of the year, wide eyed and tangled in short syllable words. Assessments are mid-way. It is gratifying: they're doing well. But also laborious and utterly one-dimensional. Tests only say so much about a person, and in my opinon that 'so much' is a rather small fraction of the whole.

I'm still burning the candle at both ends, as the saying goes. Can't quite get myself to settle down and go to bed early enough, and when 5:30 rolls around I'm stumbling and bleary eyed. The staccato of the keyboard and strong coffee gradually bring me to up to speed, but then I'm out the door.

Bean got a fever today, unexpectedly, after a weekend of visiting with my sister (whom he followed about and pesterd, a long-eyelashed grin ever ready to bat her way.) Now he's curled in our bed. Twenty seven months today. It dawned on me that I didn't write him a letter last month, and now there's almost too much to say. Tonight he feverishly pats the spot next to him on the bed and says, "Here mama, a cozy spot for you."

The spring rains are here too, torrenting down. Everything is finally lush and green and blooming. We have chickens arriving in two weeks. No physical arrangements for them yet--but that's a must-do this weekend, or they'll be in our bathtub. Five Aracuna day-olds. Bean talks about them as if they're already here.

I'm trying to find ways to wind down this week. I'm one of those people who needs big chunks of decompression time, and at the end of the day I find myself sighing as I try to bring awareness to snapping bean stems off and sauteeing them with butter, lemon and toasted almonds. What do you do to settle back into the quiter corners of your self? How do you unwind after a nonstop day?