Twilight Spy

My happy mess

2011-01-11T09:02:00.000-08:00

Ten days in already? The minor frenzy continues in my life, despite a blissful trip to a sunny beachfront retreat and another beach trip on the books a couple weeks out. The writing time has been crammed in here and there in a very unsatisfying way. And yet... I seem to have written a pretty decent personal essay. How'd that happen?

I arrived at my writing group a bit nervous to share the piece that had been cobbled together from old and new writing in a rush the day before. The essay felt chaotic and flittery to me as if I were jumping from subject to subject without ever getting down to business. But they felt it was solid, nearly ready to be sent out into the world.

I was reminded of the rare occasion during my MFA program when I would hand in a story that had a similar air of chaos about it. The chaos was almost always good for the story. I needed to lose control while creating to get at the truth. And while I'm a fairly easy-going person in all other aspects of my life, the control freak in me often rears her ugly head when I sit down to write.

Here is where I fall in love with the personal essay. The truth is already there. I don't have to hide it in the dialogue of a twenty-five year old waitress or the longings of a middle-aged executive. The truth is what actually happened (or at least my version of what happened). That frees me up to follow ideas and images and the language itself without worrying about whether it's true to the character I've built from my imagination. Chaos can reign and yet I don't have to worry about losing myself entirely. I am here. I can always come back to me.

This post is kind of out of control itself. A bit of a mess. But I won't try to correct it. I'm going to ride this out and see where it goes.

A reason to celebrate

2010-12-23T09:01:00.000-08:00

A frenzy has descended on me these last few weeks. I'm not even celebrating X-mas this year, not really, and yet I seem to have caught everyone else's insanity like a bad cold. My poor multi-tasking skills have been put to the test. The results of that test? One big "F."

I thought a little trip to Powell's would calm my rattled nerves. I love looping around the remainder shelves and the employee pic shelves and seeing what catches my eye. Middle of the week, middle of the day, the place was swarming. In among the bookshelves, the energy felt celebratory instead of crazy-making, at least to me. Then, to my delight, I found myself in a long line that ran down the full length of the "E through O" fiction aisle. I will always celebrate a long line at the bookstore.

I'm liking my new bedside book tower. Sometimes a Great Notion from my own "been meaning to read" shelf, a collection of essays from the library, Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet(my Powell's purchases) and Philip Lopate's selection of personal essays that I've been digging through for a while now.

I can't wait to hang the "closed" sign on my office door, curl up under a blanket with a nice glass of wine and slow everything down to the deliciously slow pace of words on the page.

Ready to roll

2010-12-07T21:32:00.000-08:00

Okay, so by "signing on" to the whole life reflection thing I mentioned in my last post, I really meant "fleetingly interested." I've been getting the prompts every day but very quickly I realized that so much reflection felt stifling right now. As I said, this whole year has felt like a pause. There's been plenty of time in there for endless mulling. I'm all mulled out. The inertia has fallen away and the last thing I want to do is dwell on what I've been doing these last twelve months.

Now that the earth is soft from all the rain, it's time to stretch out on top of the grassy hill and roll, with messy, reckless wonder, until something brings me to a stop.

Reverb 10

2010-12-02T16:06:00.000-08:00

Okay, for some reason, I've signed on for a month-long series of reflections prompted by the site Reverb 10. I doubt I'll write every day on their suggested topic, but we'll see what happens. Yesterday's prompt was to sum up the year in one word and reflect on what that word might be at this time in 2011.

For me, 2010 was one big PAUSE. There was a pause in my writing life where I finished one project but struggled for much of the year towards something new. There was a pause in my professional life, not outwardly, but internally as I wondered about how to keep my massage work interesting and viable long into the future. Pausing is different than being stuck, though. Pausing leaves time to absorb and replenish. Now I feel ready. In 2011 I can push PLAY.

Today's prompt asks "What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?" I blame the sun when it's sunny (gotta get it while you can). I blame the rain when it's rainy (who can work when it's so dark and cold?). I blame my perpetually messy house and my piles of laundry, my slow computer, my random schedule, my sore elbow and tired eyes. All this blame takes time and effort. With so much finger wagging to do, I barely have time to work on my writing.

So can I stop blaming the outside world for luring me away from my words? I've already started to find a way to get past this. My schedule now goes up on my computer desktop. Writing time gets blocked off like any other kind of work. If it feels uninviting, then so be it. Going to the bank, grocery store and dentist are on the schedule too and I have no choice but to follow through. My schedule says "Work on essay" for this hour, so off I go...

Belated but not belabored thanks

2010-11-30T16:17:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the Italian blood in my family that turns each large gathering into a loud, passionate and loving brawl.
Thanks to the little evil geniuses, princesses and brats (both of the world and of my clan) for not being mine.
Thanks to the elders and the elders' elders for showing us one way and letting us wander off in another.
Thanks to the quiet, rainy home to which I will always return.

Woo-Woo versus Screw You

2010-11-15T11:20:00.000-08:00

I recently spent four days in a certification program in massage that serves the elderly, ill and dying. Compared to the detailed techniques of angle, pressure and position I've acquired in other workshops, this work is much more about being focused on the moment, learning to communicate and being open to unpredictability. It's about facing the fears most of us have about our own mortality and the kind of lives we may lead in our old age. In other words, this workshop was a wonderful, difficult doozy of an experience.

I don't, in general, do well with any activity or language that veers toward the spiritual and in particular, the wide and varied realm of new age beliefs. I don't like the packaging of these rituals, the blurry language and blurry thought. I don't like how it simplifies the world into bullet points or spirit cards or mantras. It in no way enhances my life or deepens my experience of the world. It's just doesn't work for me.

At this workshop we started every 10 hour day "in circle." As soon as I heard that term, a little cold steel cage went up around all my more vulnerable spots: my brain, my heart. At the end of every day we did a variety of activities to enhance our personal growth. I felt the bitterness snake through my body. But here's the thing – it's really, really hard to stay hardened against a group of people willing to work with this population. It's really, really hard to do this kind of massage work with any kind of judgment distracting you from the person you're with. And so I had to find a way to move through my resistance and get what I could from it without cynicism or hate.

What finally worked was this: On my last day in the health center where we were visiting and working with the patients, I had the opportunity to work with a woman I'll called May. I don't know May's diagnosis but the first time I worked with her during the Level One training, she was almost entirely non-verbal and very stiff. This time, she exhibited a series of repetitive motions and was very talkative, though she had aphasia so her words were jumbled or non-sensical for the most part. As I tried to enter her world on her terms, I became fascinated by the way she used language. A white sweater she asked me for became a "white water fall" in which she wanted me to hide my hands. Her verbal tics were playful and fun: "choosy, cheesy, chintzy," she said.

I suddenly realized that it wasn't that I had no interest in enhancing my life or deepening my experience of the world. I simply already had a way of doing this that worked for me: Language and story. In this case it was the unexpected language May shared with me, but it's also this story that I can tell and all the other stories that I'm still working on telling. All the stories out there to hear.

I will never fully embrace the woo-woo or completely abandon the screw you, but I'm beginning to see a way to balance the two.

Politics sucks but the leaves sure are pretty.

2010-11-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

As if nature understood that we needed a balm for our political headaches, we are offered this: one last sip of summer, windows knocked open and the streets alive with the applause of bright leaves. None of this is enough to make me forget the gains of the willfully ignorant and blatantly deceitful in this latest election, but it is a reminder that beauty can be blind to politics and a note of gentleness can ease the pain of change.

Stormwatching

2010-10-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

Abstract oceanviews from a stormy weekend at the Ester Lee Motel in Lincoln City, OR.

Retreat/Reveal

2010-10-23T09:32:00.000-07:00

It must be that time of year again. The gray and gorgeous Oregon coast gets more than it's fair share of posted photos as I long for some salt water rhythms. Another day of work and then I'm off to a mini two day retreat of writing and writing and writing. Honestly, I wasn't sure I'd ever say that again. I wondered if the idea of myself as "DL" or "Dead Lazy" as I was occasionally called by my father, would settle in so thoroughly to my bones that it would be impossible to ever lift them again.

Laziness is just a subset of fear. Do nothing and never fail. But finally the fail better ethic of my beloved Beckett has set in. I have joined a new critique group and yesterday was awed by the talent on display. Sometimes, it takes this kind of force-fed brilliance to kick my sluggish competitive genes into gear. If my fellow writers can show up with such a delicious, meaty feast then I better get cooking. OK, not cooking. That lame metaphor only makes me panic. "But the only thing I can make is cereal!"

All I need to do is hole up in a quiet room, ocean before me, and crank out some bright failures.

Hugs all around

2010-10-16T21:58:00.000-07:00

There are dozens of ideas roaming dumbly around my head these days. More than a few of them are about the physical distance we keep from one another and the rare moments when that distance disappears. I've got my own observations on the subject whispering in my ears to become some kind of essay (and by essay I mean scribbles in a notebook pleading to be turned into fiction and not dropped on the page all naked and vulnerable), but for now I simply offer a few articles on the power of a little skin on skin:

For some scientific backup for my profession as a massage therapist click here.
For a broader article on the power of a pat on the back click here.

Booty from the land of book nerds

2010-10-10T19:06:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, I stop and wonder why I'm still so devoted to Portland. My neighborhood is crawling with boys in handlebar mustaches and girls in skinny jeans and big, ugly glasses that sneer at the outdated. I can't walk to the store or the bank without being aggressively smiled at and cajoled by some poor wage slave promoting the ACLU, HRC, or Greenpeace. The traffic is ridiculous for a town this size. The housing costs are still overinflated. Our summer is six weeks long and at night the screams of a thousand drunks filter through my windows.

BUT THEN...Wordstock comes around. Every year this festival brings together a dizzying mix of author readings, workshops and panels scattered among rows of vendors hawking books, journals, and other ephemera. Even though the convention center setting makes me feel like I'm in a miserable hybrid of multi-ring circus and strip mall, I never fail to thrill at being surrounded by masses of other book nerds. If nothing else, Portland is a city of readers.

For me, this isn't just the source of a few cute facts like Portland's libraries being among the busiest in the nation or that Powell's buys 3,000 used books over their counters every day. It means I'm part of a huge, wildly diverse tribe of residents who value the written word. This is no small thing.

I caught the last bit of Anthony Doerr's question and answer period at Wordstock and he said, more or less, that novels are one of the most essential ways we have of getting into another person's head. The empathy we get from fiction (and nonfiction for that matter) makes us better people. It's nice to know that, even though we may fail to retain the lessons learned from all those pages, we are at least trying.

Lake Quinault: A trip report

2010-10-05T22:51:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's a sign of a deep acceptance of myself as a Pacific Northwesterner that, for my birthday, I chose to take a trip to the Quinault Rain Forest on the Olympic Peninsula. It could also be a sign that I couldn't afford a week in the Caribbean.

We stayed at the Lake Quinault Lodge which was built in about 3 months for $90,000 in 1926. The property sits directly on the lake and from the grounds there are several easy hikes either along the lake or into the forest that seems to be trying its hardest at every given moment to repossess the land carved out of it by humans.

Whereas Portland receives a little over 3 feet of rain per year, this area of the world gets about 12 feet. When we arrived at the front desk of the lodge I heard the receptionist saying into the phone, "There's no guarantee. It rains even in August. It's the rain forest." While she remained pleasant, I could tell that she said this many times a day to people hoping to find a patch of sun in this wet, moss-rich landscape.

We were lucky, lucky folk that the most rain we saw was on I-5 on our way there. The clouds parted right around sunset and stayed away for the rest of our trip.

An inviting dock pulled promises from us to return in the summer. Of course, we knew that in August the dock would be full of screaming children, all the sweet solitude of it crowded beneath dozens of slapping feet.

We watched for cougars. We saw none. We didn't watch for foxes, but were briefly blessed with one crossing the main road. One fox, half a dozen blue jays, and dozens of strutting crows.

The best place we found for a good thick coating of moss was the Maple Glade trail on the North shore of the lake. Past the field of elk, we stepped into the creepy, quiet and boggy glade.

There's a partially restored homestead on the trail and it was interesting to imagine a family settling there in what felt like the middle of nowhere in 2010. Is there any way these monstrous, fuzzy trees seemed less frightening at the turn of the century? How many months of cool, gloomy days would it take before you surrendered to the moss?

I don't know what those homesteaders thought, but all I could think about was how the whole place was simultaneously strange, beautiful and a good place to hide a dead body.

Back at the Lodge, a good dose of fire-warmed couches and sturdy wood beams cleared my head of most of its morbid thoughts. . .

That is until I looked up at the stencils of teeth-bearing indians and stalking wolves painted onto each of the large pillars.

Better to stay focused on the beauty outside: the lake, the dew drying slowly from the lawn and the Adirondacks, coupled and waiting for company.

The Day After

2010-10-01T10:44:00.000-07:00

In 1983 ABC broadcast "The Day After" about nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. I was in 8th grade and still remember how, by the end of the movie, I had decided that when the attack came (and it was coming at some point without doubt) I wanted to be among the glowing skeletons, evaporated in an instant. Surviving the cruel halls and danceless crepe-papered cafeterias of junior high were difficult enough. As much as I hated my boring little town, there was no way I was going to survive its destruction and my own radiation poisoning.

Of course, instead of a nuclear winter, I eventually wandered into the black and gray folds of a teenage depression. Accompanied by a persuasive goth and indie soundtrack I started to believe it was loneliness and/or boredom that was going to kill me and not some angry Russian. My own bitter brain was a far more real enemy than any of the blatant bullies or cold-shouldered whisperers I'd actually encountered.

By the time I was sunk deep in the disappointments of a poorly chosen and disastrously executed college career, I was pretty sure that I'd not see the ripe old age of 40. In my early twenties, I was so sure of this that I took on the persona of a cranky old lady. It was as if I had to make sure to get in all that unfettered complaining about annoying people and their stupid ideas before it was too late.

And now, here I am, the day after my 40th birthday. Not only did I make it, but with the help of my beloved city of Portland, a surprisingly appropriate career and a small but brilliant cadre of friends, the bitterness has diminished and what remains of my old lady persona is finally age-appropriate. My beau now joins me as we shake our fists at the drunk fuckwads shouting outside our house at 2am. Get off our lawn! Don't you know people around here are trying to sleep?!

Oh yeah, that's the stuff. Here's to 40 and long beyond...

Late bloomers

2010-09-23T11:18:00.000-07:00

This is the first year I've planted dahlias. I can see how the man I bought my bulbs from got obsessed. His whole property is devoted to this prolific late bloomer. I only got one of mine to mature, but every day there's a new bud unfolding its crazy pink petals. It doesn't care that today is the first day of fall and that the Japanese Maple in the front yard is sending out its red warning signal – Danger! Danger! Winter approaching! The dahlia exists in a state of denial that I can fully embrace: Fuck that chilly breeze. Fuck that sagging dresser drawer loaded down with sweaters. It's summer, dammit...look at me shine!

My affinity for this late blooming beauty makes sense in another way too. In one week I turn 40 and I'm surprised to find that it feels like cause for celebration rather than despair. I just slipped into a pair of jeans I haven't been able to fit into in several years. The various body aches and pains that plagued me for the same amount of time are gone. The chaos that consumed my psyche in my teens and twenties and the hurdles thrown at me in my thirties have grown smooth and calm.

At 40 my mother had a 9 and 11-year old and was preparing to take us on a tour of Europe. As V.P. of a candy company my father traveled weekly between Chicago and New York. My life is very different, but I have no complaints. Being on a different schedule than the rest of the garden flowers can be a pretty good thing.

Summer spent

2010-09-06T11:41:00.000-07:00

My disappearance from this blog all summer is not necessarily an indicator of a season full of activity, too busy and brimming with heat to bother slumping down in front of the computer to post a thought or too. Our six short weeks of tepid, cloudless balm were sweet but largely uninspired. Nonetheless, here are 6 highlights.

In search of warmer weather we drove south to camp in the Willamette National Forest in a new spot with a frigid but beautiful swimming hole. Standing on a narrow bridge over the Santiam River, we looked into the clear night sky and saw the milky way. No pictures. Forgot my camera.
I took a workshop in massage for the frail elderly. I rubbed lotion into the thin map of skin on the hands of women in a skilled nursing facility, some of them able to offer nothing but a vague grin, some of them responding by returning the favor and rubbing my hands. As I said to the instructor, this work is going to force me to be a better person.
At 30 I bought my beau a gorilla suit, a massive contraption of fur and rubber. This summer, when he turned 40, we went to Men's Warehouse and I bought him a monkey suit. There is something very sexy about a man in a tailored suit holding a guitar.
I coaxed from the earth a towering sungold tomato plant, a plodding zucchini, a handful of strawberries and a single dahlia plant that looks like a pom-pom from Dr. Seuss.
I entertained my entire immediate family for nearly two weeks straight with only the briefest of less-than-generous behavior. Six of us packed into a giant air-conditioned SUV, shunning the flash of hot weather, and drove to the coast, the gorge, the valley.
I sat in the dappled afternoon light of my living room and read The Odyssey and Lia Purpura's magnificent essays, On Looking and Gregoire Bouillier's funny, crazy wonderful book The Mystery Guest. I thought a great deal about writing, about why I started writing and why I should continue, both here and elsewhere. I haven't come up with the answer yet, though I feel a slow but powerful shift beneath me, aiming me in a slightly different, more challenging direction.

Cannon Beach

Mt. Hood

Kale grown for the sole purpose of making kale chips

Spider playground.

My view for the last hot day of the year, August 30th.

Rescue

2010-07-21T15:37:00.000-07:00

In the summer, there are three things I need to accomplish to feel that all is as it should be:

1. Berry picking at Sauvie Island Farms. Despite getting the first bee sting I've had since I was 5, the day was gorgeous, the berries plentiful and I was surprisingly tickled with the new added feature of a wagon ride out to the fields and back. It was driven by this young lad with what has to be one of the sweeter summer jobs for a teenager–driving a tractor around and around while listening to your ipod.

2. Half an hour in from the coast sits my favorite camping spot. Last year we got shut out and had to settle for a day trip to the swimming hole, but this year there was plenty of space. The water wasn't too cold, though the chilly breeze let us dip no deeper than our waists. Instead we watched salamanders crawl among the seaweed, watched hawks circle the sky. We admired the giant evergreens, and lush, mossy campsites kept in tidy order by an inmate with what has to be one of the sweeter prisoner work gigs - a shovel for ash, a pair of clippers to trim back the foliage creeping onto the paths and the tall, bright forest all around you.

3. Tin House runs a week-long workshop every July and every July I hop on my bike and savor what becomes a well-worn path out to Reed College to sit in on lectures and readings. This year, my favorite bit of advice came from Steve Almond's lecture about the particular torture that is the life of a writer. It is this: If you can find some more efficient form of rescue, I recommend you do so.

Hello summer

2010-07-09T17:24:00.000-07:00

Finally, it's hot. Say what you will about leaping from 55 to 95 or how it makes you lethargic or how you have to rush from one air conditioned container to the next...I love it. I'm in love with it. I'm lovin' all up on it. After so many months of cool wetness, this all-encompassing, full bore blaze is like a long hot kiss.

I love the long days and the way the heat builds across the hours. This is the brief time of year when direct sunlight actually flirts with my bedroom, licking the window sill and curtains just before it drifts behind the neighbor's house. The view is less than stellar–a wobbly red fence, the meeting point of two garage roofs and beyond the giant swaying trees–but for a few minutes, the curtain glows and billows like a jellyfish. The breeze stirs the heat without distilling it, like in a hot bath made hotter by the sway of a knee.

Love it, I say. It won't be here long.

Kelly, Lime and Forest

2010-06-29T23:12:00.000-07:00

Mud green. Moss green. Fresh-from-the-seed green. Pine, pond and sea-foam. Three hikes in one week: Angel's Rest, Tryon State Park and Falcon Cove. I feel like a forest creature, slicked in mud and swallowed in leaves. Eyes made of wet emeralds. Blood made of bark dust. The clouds float through me and I drink.

Good glowing fruit

2010-06-20T17:54:00.000-07:00

I can't deny that the relentless wet of May and the cool, damp of June have left me less celebratory than I usually would be this time of year. But then I remembered the strawberries I planted for the first time this spring and suddenly the tiny harvest is beginning to pay off. It's 55 and misty but I just ate this luscious fruit grown in my backyard. Behold the perfect palate cleanser: Bitterness removed. Sweetness restored.

Poetry x 12: Belonging

2010-06-10T11:01:00.000-07:00

I'm late on reporting on the Poetry x 12 challenge for May. But late for what and for whom? I'm pretty convinced that the vast majority of the hits on this blog are from Japanese pornography spammers (now there's a term I couldn't have imagined using ten years ago.) Oh well. Whose to say Japanese pornographers don't like Iranian poetry.

May's challenge was to read a poetry collection from another part of the world. This was a perfect opportunity to read my former classmate's translation of poetry written by Iranians in exile. Belonging is a beautiful book that offers Niloufar Talebi's translations of three different generations of Iranians all of whom left their country because of the 1979 revolution.

This collection was appealing, in part, because I'm drawn to literature that either evokes a strong sense of place or explores place as a theme. What does it mean to have a home you will never see again? One of the more well-known poets included in the collection, Nader Naderpour, writes in his poem "Conversation in the Dark":

World of swarming crowds,
And of all that avails on the endless horizon,
If we have a destiny, it is our loneliness.

I love Mina Assadi's simple, evocative expression of longing in "Yearning for Saari 1" where she addresses the wet weeds of her homeland:

tell the breeze
that so lovingly passes through you,
someone on this side
of the world is also enamored
of the scent of your bodies!

Loneliness is not the only subject here, but it is the one I was most drawn to. There is actually great diversity of style and subject in this sampling and I was continually impressed with Niloufar's translation abilities. Despite the fact that the original poems accompany each of the translations, it was easy to forget that these were not written in English. This is a great introduction to a world of voices of which we've heard far too little. For more info on contemporary Iranian literature and the other interesting work that Niloufar is doing, check out The Translation Project.

This month's challenge: The classic poetry collection you always meant to read but never have. Coincidentally, I purchased a copy of The Odyssey a week or so ago and have dug in. This is not only in keeping with the Poetry x 12 challenge, but in keeping with my habit of reading large dense books during the summer. I swear, I don't do it on purpose, but clearly my subconscious is in rebellion against the breezy beach book. But more on that another time...

The green fuse drives the flower

2010-06-07T22:10:00.000-07:00

More nothing. Just a bit of documentation. Garden as of the first week of June. Now all we need is a respite from the rain for a little while so I can sit out here and watch the crows watch me and watch the squash unfurl oh. . . so. . . slowly from the earth. Green strawberries. Baby, slug-nibbled lettuce. Ugly little Dahlia shoots struggling up into the light.

Excuses

2010-05-25T21:16:00.000-07:00

I've had so little to say because:

I've been rubbing butts (and backs and achilles tendons)
The lengthy case of tendonitis I've been nursing has had me contemplating the end of my career and/or the beginning of my ability to predict the weather with my joints.
The Internet is pretty and shiny.
The Megavolcano in Yosemite Park explodes approximately every 600,000 years. The last time it went off was 640,000 years ago.
For ages, we've contemplated the end of our oil supply and now we will suffocate in the stuff because they can't make it stop.
I was given my very first car by some very generous friends and now I must confront all the reasons I never bought one (see above). The amount of space it takes up in my brain is appalling.
Writing is hard and researching agents is exhausting.
Matt Debenham's The Book of Right and Wrong, Lydia Davis' Varieties of Disturbance and Belonging, Nilofar Talebi's translations of Iranian poetry.
Rain in the form of sweet spring, wild & tempestuous, sunshower, two-minute downpour and when will it ever fucking stop.
Weeds needed pulling, branches needed lopping and just look at the inky spill off the tongue of that iris.

Spring break

2010-05-15T20:23:00.000-07:00

I've been away. Out in the world. In shorts and t-shirts and sandals. In the sun. In the park. Not caring much about writing because I can walk in the woods with my beau in mid May then come home and eat pudding and watch Irish movies with the subtitles on. Just like my beau, this city knows how to soothe me and swoon me and sweep me off my feet.

Poetry x 12 where I delve into Shel

2010-05-03T08:53:00.000-07:00

April disintegrated in my hands. Already gone and I never chimed in on the Poetry x 12 Challenge for the month which was to read a favorite collection from childhood. For me, there was really only one shining star of verse in my youth and that was Shel Silverstein. I still have my copies of Where the Sidewalk Ends and Light in the Attic. I devoured these as a kid. Returning to them now, I was reminded of how dark and sad some of these poems are. I mean, look at the author photo. Good god. My mother must not have turned the book over before buying it. Either that, or she understood that this would appeal to her rather broody child.

As an adult, what appealed to me most was the juxtaposition of the sing-song rhymes and the slightly sinister tone. For example, "Me-Stew" ends with this: So bring out your stew bowls/You gobblers and snackers/ Farewell – and I hope you enjoy me with crackers! That "Farewell" kind of kills me. As does poor "Hector the Collector" who calls over "all the silly sightless people" to share his treasure box of bricks, vases, buckles, etc. and they call it junk. Heartbreaking, really. Brilliant really.

Joseph Harker, the man managing the Poetry x 12 challenge has more to say about Shel over at Naming Constellations.

And next on the list for May is the challenge to read poetry from a foreign country. A perfect opportunity to read more of my fellow Bennington-ites efforts. I'll be reading Nilofar Talebi's translation of Iranian poetry, Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World.

A package (or four) in the mail

2010-04-22T19:27:00.000-07:00

All four of these volumes came in the mail today: Matt Debenham's The Book of Right and Wrong, Hayden Saunier's Tips for Domestic Travel, Damian Rogers' Paper Radio and the latest issue of Blue Mesa Review. The fact that I pulled this mighty stack of literature from my mailbox all at once made me nervous at first. It seemed likely that all these beautifully bound words were going to fill me with petty jealousy or at least tug me deeper into the shallow but stinky pit of crankiness I've been sitting in lately. Here was a trio of books written by people who were at the Bennington Writing Seminars at the same time I was and alongside them, a lit journal I received for losing a fiction contest.

I sat on my porch, undoing the books from their wrappings and waited for the sick trickle of envy. Instead, I found my mood shifting. As I opened each book and read the first page, the first poems, I was genuinely moved. It wasn't because my friends had been published, but because the words were so good. No shit, I'm not just saying that. These are some talented people and how can I not be soothed and cheered by a bit of fine writing? A big thank you to them all.

OMG Tinkers won the Pulitzer!

2010-04-13T11:03:00.000-07:00

I'm so thrilled that Paul Harding's Tinkers has won the Pulitzer Prize. It gives me hope that a debut novel from a small, specialized independent press (Bellevue Literary Press) can get this kind of attention. At a time when the records of our lives are regularly trimmed to a 140 characters or less and the "like" button is all we have to hit to feel like we've connected, Tinkers offers an alternative of long, luscious sentences and a beautifully odd structure. I highly recommend it as a cure for too many self-involved status updates.

"He thought, Buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband's boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein, sliding down into the black, silty bottom of the lake, where you would see nothing, would perhaps feel only the stir of some somnolent fish in the murk as the plunge of you in your wool dress and the big boots disturbed it from its sluggish winter dreams of ancient seas."

Done

2010-04-06T11:12:00.000-07:00

I'm done. The book is done. The file is saved in a dozen different places. The words are fixed. It feels less strange than I thought it would. As the end neared, I procrastinated a bit, not wanting to seal this world up for good. Not wanting to resign my characters once and for all to the fates I'd chosen for them. But overall, it was anticlimactic.

I've written this book half a dozen times, at least. With each earlier draft, I felt great joy and relief for my accomplishments. This time, I simply feel done. The cement has dried. It feels less like an accomplishment and more like a simple fact. I'm 5'10", have brown hair, and wrote a novel.

The state of publishing today is daunting to say the least. The long, hard trial of trying to find a place in the world for my story brings a sickening swell to my stomach. I can't imagine NOT trying, but I'm also weighing how much of my life I'll allow to be consumed by the process. It's a good story. I've worked very very hard at it. All I can do is hope for a little luck.

With that, I close my eyes and start dreaming into my next project.

Sharing

2010-03-30T17:17:00.000-07:00

I breath, not a sigh, but a giant exhalation of relief. For the last ten days we've been hosting a guest who has now left. My house is returned to me, with all its dusty corners and sweet, forgotten surprises, like this bouquet of euphorbia that's been sitting ignored in my front window. Now I can take photos of it without being questioned about my photography habits or my gardening habits. I no longer have to share my thoughts or my space.

I've been reminding myself repeatedly throughout our guest's stay, just how lucky we are. Ten days with an old acquaintance should be considered a gift, a chance to learn something new. We have plenty of room to share. We have plenty of food. But what about people who have to take in refugee relatives? What about people who have never known a couple square feet of private space?

I wonder if my love of solitude is something I was born with or if it's at least partially a product of having grown up with my own bedroom, a wide backyard and a sister who was equally uninterested in my company as I was with hers. Is there anyone in the insanely crowded cities of India or China who have the same hermetic longings but are forced to always share, to be perpetually in the presence of others? There are ways to adapt, I suppose. I'm just thankful that I don't need to find out what those are. Not yet, at least.

2010-03-22T20:25:00.000-07:00

I'd been wanting to see Jane Campion's movie Bright Star, so when I realized this month's Poetry x 12 challenge was to read a poetry collection by a poet featured in a movie, it seemed like the obvious, if not downright lazy choice. All I knew about Bright Star was that it was by Campion, who's made some truly great movies, and that it was a love story about a poet. For some reason I thought it was about W.B. Yeats and Maude Gonne. Of course, in an instant of turning on the movie, I realized these were not Irish Nationalists at the turn of the century. This was Keats and Fanny Brawne. Oh dear.

I've never been a fan of the Romantics. I distinctly missed out on studying with the best English Prof. at my college because he taught Shelly and Byron and Keats. I couldn't stomach it. But that was twenty years ago. Maybe Keats and I could come to better terms via the silver screen.

It is a beautifully filmed movie. And in this case, the beauty of each and every shot, is not just a bit of tasty frosting, but what the movie is about. I can still feel the breeze rolling in through that window, fluttering across her skirt. Aaaaah.

Scrawny, sickly Keats (who could easily have been plucked out of a Portland bar, stripped of his ironic t-shirt and made to memorize the lines) says this to Fanny when she first feigns an interest in poetry: "A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it's to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."

Good advice in general, and in particular with the Romantics. When I pulled out my giant, tattered copy of Norton's English Literature and flipped through the thin pages to the section on Keats I tried to keep this advice in mind, but still, I failed. I could barely get through a single Ode. It wasn't until I looked up some very oddly animated videos of Keats poetry that I was able to begin luxuriating (with my eyes closed...the videos creeped me out). Without trying to follow the meaning or understand the philosophy I fell into the rhythms of the language, soothed by them like a lullaby. Of course, lullabies are really good at putting me to sleep.

So much for this month's challenge. Now who's going to make that Yeats movie? That I really want to see.

Camera Supplies. Myrtlewood. Souvenirs.

2010-03-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

Last week, I took the train to Seattle. As wary as I was of this notoriously tardy stretch of Amtrak, it was hard for me to pass up a few hours of swaying through the scenery. I love the faded glory of the old train stations. I love the graffiti-slashed walls nobody's supposed to see. I love the brambled woods that open onto a brilliant stretch of dark blue harbor. As long as the train is moving, I feel as though I could sit forever and watch the world pass this way. Something about the train rhythm and the train view syncs perfectly with my brain's rhythms and thoughts: Not dwelling, but seeing and smiling and moving on. Over and over and over.

The Other Grandmother

2010-03-08T12:54:00.000-08:00

Last week I received a short video my sister made for her students who were doing a digital storytelling project. The subject was my paternal grandmother, a strong, bright mystery of a woman. As my sister explains in the video, my grandmother was her role model, the woman she most longed to be. My sister became an archeologist just like my grandmother, traveling the world to dig around in small plots of strange dirt.

I'm sure I've pulled out the same grandmother myself in more than one school essay. She was the easy one to spotlight as wild and unique. She had impossibly long dark hair that she secreted up into a bun every morning. She married and divorced the same man twice. She lived in Saudi Arabia for 20 years and rose above the ranks of the "pot pickers" to become a published archeologist.

But what about the other grandmother? She was the American born daughter of two Italian immigrants. She lived in the Bay Area for 95 years, worked in a ketchup factory, married young and raised three daughters. At the age of 55 she moved into a retirement community and made us biscotti every Christmas. Instead of ancient desert treasures, she collected crystal figurines. Instead of escaping to exotic landscapes she traveled almost exclusively to bask in the warmth of her family.

I've never really had one person, or even a series of people, that filled me with awe and ambition. My influences have always been subtle and largely undefined. But in light of my sister's project, I need to give my maternal grandmother a hardy nod. She was the person who defended me against my mother's temper, the one who, at 96, continues to love her late husband claiming (over and over) that she was happy to have him for 40 good years. Not a great intellectual, but a great lover of family and friends. The one who kept my photo on top of her TV and never fails to show her love to those who deserve it.

Dioramas and so much more

2010-03-01T14:22:00.000-08:00

The February challenge for Poetry x 12 (now being administered by Joseph Harker) was to read a collection recommended by somebody else. I took up Amy Gerstler's Dearest Creature recommended by Deb at Stoney Moss. I forgot about writing something up for this challenge and have now returned the book to the library, but here are a few random thoughts:

This was such a different experience from the A.R. Ammons collection I read the month before. Reading this collection felt like hanging out with the cool kid, not the pretty popular girl, but the one who's really smart and sexy and just a little devious. Funny because the first poem is a letter to a young girl welcoming her into the ranks of the nerds. Well, if that's the case then Gerstler's my kind of nerd.

Fun and funny and poignant, I really enjoyed these poems. I didn't swoon with the language the way I did with a few of Ammons' pieces, but they delivered their punch. Plus there's a diorama on the cover and every good nerd knows how cool dioramas are!

Why I Love Portland: A brief list

2010-02-25T19:05:00.000-08:00

Because this was what the sky offered me at 6:20 last night.
Because my neighbors seems to own no curtains though they do own chickens that are housed in their front yard.
Because this is February and rather than being crushed by the weight of winter, I'm tripping on the sidewalk while looking up at the spring blooms.

February 21st

2010-02-21T15:07:00.000-08:00

Sweet air. I stand beneath these early blooms and inhale and inhale. If I take enough of that gentle scent into my lungs, maybe some of the heaviness there will dissipate. The hard, bitter ball of winter starts to soften. In the afternoon, my cat uses a tuft of ornamental grass as a pillow. I dig into the soft bed of dirt beside her, uncovering worms and the earth's cool breath. Gloom sulks along the sidelines under this kind of blue, under this kind of persistence. Here I am again...SPRING... Spring...spring.

Routine vs. Ritual

2010-02-14T16:10:00.000-08:00

This is the feast of a hundred take-out containers, otherwise known as our friend's Chinese New Year party. 2010 is the Year of the Tiger, a year predicted (by who? the stars? the tigers?) to be full of change and upheaval. That doesn't mean we had to go and mess with tradition straight out of the gate. Instead, we did what we always do: pick up a little take out from the Thai/Vietnamese/Chinese restaurant of our choice and head on over for some serious snacking, imbibing and firework displays.

I know I've missed a couple of these parties over the years, but compared to all the other traditions in my life, this is probably the most consistent. Christmas varies wildly from year to year depending on where I am. Thanksgiving suffers from the same randomness. Today's Valentine's Day but I honestly don't give a flying fuck. What else is there? Sean used to cook breakfast for a large gathering of friends every year on his birthday, until he realized how much work this was. Then he switched to watching movies in the backyard but that tradition's been thrown off course too. We never celebrate anniversaries, solstices, St. Patrick's Day or any of the days of the lord (or any other deities for that matter).

My father used to insist that we all NEED traditions either ones that are handed down or ones we create ourselves. He thought regular celebration was an important way to mark time and take note of our lives. In many ways, this makes sense to me and yet anytime I participate in a tradition part of me feels a little odd. There's no way to remove the inherent sense of obligation. Even in the most benign, most loving celebrations, I'm aware of the coercion as much as the comfort.

Maybe this is a result of being forced to go to church for much of my youth. Or it could be a lingering remnant of my teenage personae that reveled in opposition. Maybe I just want to believe that small daily celebrations can be enough. Every morning, Sean makes breakfast while I make coffee. Almost every day I walk within the 10 square blocks surrounding my house to go to the library, the bank, the grocery store (for a loaf of bread, a container of milk and a stick of butter). We regularly take time to confuse the cat and then, at night, we sit on the couch and eat dinner. These are routines, but to me they're as beautiful as any ritual.

Go. Outside. Now.

2010-02-07T10:17:00.000-08:00

Here we are in the first week of February and we are lucky enough in this little damp patch of the world to be experiencing the first shy signals of an early spring. A gorgeous park full of lush greenery and sweeping views sits 10 blocks to the east of me. There's no reason I'm not up there every day. There's no reason why, after 16+ years in this drizzly climate that a little rain spittle or a dash of cool air should stop me from getting the hell out of my house (except for the fact that I still don't own a proper raincoat or a working umbrella at the moment...how could this be?).

Last week I had a client bemoaning the passing of her 25th birthday. I barely stifled a laugh. I try to remember that someday I'll be wishing I was 40. Every time I head out into the world to run errands or enjoy the sweet mossy goodness of our little city I remember to take note of the swing of my arms and the slap of my feet. Take note of the ease of it. Don't squander the seemingly simple ability to walk down the street and carry home your groceries.

Poetry x 12: A.R. Ammons

2010-01-30T09:45:00.000-08:00

As part of Dana Guthrie Martin's Poetry x 12 challenge for January, I read A.R. Ammons' Uplands, published in 1970. My poetry knowledge is sparse, so comparing this book to those of its day and with what is being written today isn't something I can really do. I picked the book from the list on Wikipedia. Some heavy hitters were publishing that year: Ashbery, Brooks, Strand, Merwin, to name just a few that I recognized. Why Ammons then? Well, it was available at my library and I'd never read anything by him. And so I dug in:

Semicolons. Lots and lots of semicolons. Apparently, this was Ammons' signature piece of punctuation. They don't dominate every poem in this collection, but they play a strong role in giving the work a sense of continuous flow. My nature is to follow punctuation rules, as if my grade school teacher were looming over me with a ruler ready to swat my knuckles. It's always a pleasure then, to read a writer who has taken control of the punctuation and made it work for him. Prose so rarely lends itself to this kind of manipulation and so, again, another pleasure.

Nature is everywhere in these poems. Not a static description of it, but rather a dynamic view where change is inevitable.With a few exceptions, they felt very contemporary and I continually forgot that these were written 40 years ago. This is what I read on the Poetry Foundation's page on Ammons which perfectly sums up what I liked about his work:

"Ammons rehearses a marginal, a transitional experience[;] he is a literalist [sic] of the imagination because the shore, the beach, or the coastal creek is not a place but an event, a transaction where land and water create and destroy each other, where life and death are exchanged, where shape and chaos are won and lost." -Richard Howard.

Here are a few of my favorite lines, the final stanzas of "Conserving the Magnitude of Uselessness"

for the inexcusable (the worthless abundant) the
merely tiresome, the obviously unimprovable,
to these and for these and for their undiminishment
the poets will yelp and hoot forever

probably,
rank as weeks themselves and just as abandoned:
nothing useful is of lasting value:
dry wind only is still talking among the oldest stones.

Reprieve

2010-01-27T12:59:00.000-08:00

The sun is out in full force, pulling the first daphne from bud to bloom. I have a couple days of beach time under my belt. The state passed two important tax measures that should help keep us all afloat, clinging to our little soap-sliver of hope. Apparently the Abyss allows day trips to slightly brighter locales.

The abyss is lovely, come on in!

2010-01-21T16:23:00.000-08:00

If ever I look back on the entries in this blog let it be known that January 2010 was when the last shred of hope I had for this country was torn in two. I still have a shred, but it's half the size. I barely even feel it there beneath my first rib.

First came the 7.0 earthquake in Haiti. Every morning there were new pictures of the dead being lifted unceremoniously into dumptrucks, the desperate sleeping amongst the rubble. Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh exceeded my expectations for how hateful and cruel people could be while pretending to be concerned.

Then Ted Kennedy's senate seat went to a Republican who pretended to be "for the people" and talked a lot about his old truck. Slick as shit and stinky as shit too. The next day, Obama was talking about slowing down the push for health care. The stink wafted over and continues to linger.

This morning the Supreme Court ruled to allow corporations the ability to donate freely and widely to political campaigns. I can barely allow myself to think about this or I might scream.

Next Tuesday, Oregon votes on whether to raise the minimum corporate tax (so that companies like Portland General Electric pay more than their current $10) and raise income tax on individuals making more than $125,000. I fear disaster and my ratty shred of hope won't do much good when I go to sop up all my tears.

Damn. Bad week.

At least the sun came out today. I opened the front window a crack and sat squinting in the light as I wrote.

The imaginary poet thugs try to take me down.

2010-01-16T17:25:00.000-08:00

I couldn't, for the life of me, get this photo to post in the correct direction. But maybe that's appropriate to what I want to say today. As part of my haphazard exploration of poetry, I've been listening to the Poetry Foundation's podcasts while I zone out and play mahjong online. It's true. This is what I do sometimes to wind down at the end of the day. That and have a glass of whiskey. I used to watch the evening news, maybe a little Simpsons, an occasional round of Jeapordy! but the TV is for DVDs only now. So instead I listen to things like Matthew Zapruder and producer Curtis Fox talk about John Ashbery's poem "How to Continue."

What I like about this short podcast is Zapruder's willingness to read a poem and sit in confusion afterwards, to dwell in feeling rather than thought. In fact he goes even further and says that after first reading the poem "I didn't know what I felt and that didn't bother me." He goes on to say that "you have to be ready to not know everything right away" and that you should resist the urge to think every poem is a metaphor. Thank you, Matthew Zapruder. That's just what I needed to hear.

Reading poems makes people feel stupid too often. I feel stupid much of the time even when I'm all alone reading a poem in bed. I want that to stop. Zapruder had a worthwhile technique that I think will work with at least some of my stumbling blocks. Simply read it again. And again. And again. Of course, the emotional tug has to be there first. Something has to grab me to want to spend that much time with a poem, but there's no need to abandon hope simply because I "don't get it."

If I never "get it" it still has to be okay to just like the sound of the words. Feel the thrum of joy or sadness without knowing why. Thrum without any kind of emotional label at all. Maybe this is basic stuff, but I think most people, if they ever think about poetry, think it's impenetrable. If you don't walk away enlightened then you're dumb and the pursuit of understanding is pointless. Avoid poetry at all costs.

I will admit that I have an irrationally strong fear of looking stupid. Even as I wrote the above paragraphs I thought how some poet friend is going to read this and say no, no, no...that's not how you go about reading poetry at all. Nice try, dumbass. Or they'll say, No shit Sherlock. I can't believe you're just figuring this out. (This is how the poet thugs talk in my brain) The imaginary poet thugs will then present a detailed and articulate argument for why I'm wrong. Such are my neuroses.

If I give in to this fear, however, no poetry will get read. So I'm going to buck up and read Ammons' book. One poem, "The Unifying Principle" that I was struggling with last night ends with the phrase "the small wraths of ease." Explain that to me if you'd like, but it doesn't matter. I'll like it regardless.

2010-01-11T10:48:00.000-08:00

More poetry, more poetry. I've taken up the poetry x 12 challenge offered by Dana Guthrie Martin. This month the challenge is to read a collection that was published in the year you were born. I'm still waiting for my copy of A.R. Ammons' Uplands to come in at the library as well as Mona Van Duyn's To See, To Take.

I love the focus this kind of challenge offers, not too narrow, but a useful tool in beginning my navigation through some wide wide water. My further challenge will be to actually understand some of the work. I suspect a superficial yeah or nay may be all I'm capable of at first. What is the poem trying to do? I don't know. What is the poem about? I don't know. Do I like the words and rhythms? Yes, I hope so. Yes.

As an example, here's one by Ammons that I love for its language though I'm highly uncertain what it's about.

The City Limits

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

Writing in Bed.

2010-01-05T12:24:00.000-08:00

For the last three years, the spare bedroom in my house has been my retreat as well as my office, workout space and closet. At the end of the year I had to deconstruct the space and recreate it in my own bedroom. Time for a new roommate.

New roommate is great. We love him. New office is strange. Sitting at the computer doesn't feel quite right yet. Looking at the wall or my own reflection in the mirror instead of the window and my neighbor's patio is a change, not good or bad. But I'm not drawn to the space yet.

Instead, I've discovered that I really like writing in bed. We keep the heat at around 60 degrees in our house during the winter. More than a few minutes at my desk and my hands are ice, my feet are chilled. I looked over my shoulder on one of my first days at my new desk space and there was the fake fur comforter, the electric blanket, the cat.

I grabbed the laptop, slipped beneath the covers and found that being warm does wonders for my creative flow. I'll be in good company too. Twain, Proust, Wharton, Percy, these are a few of the writers who propped up their pillows, blanketed their knees and broke out the pen and paper. I figure, if dreaming is as close as I can get to pure imagination, then why not settle in the spot where dreams happen and hope that a few of them cling to the covers and climb back into my brain.

See ya later, sucker!

2009-12-31T14:59:00.000-08:00

Here are a few photos from the two days I actually left the house this month. Once for a walk on Mt. Tabor on Christmas Day, one on an evening adventure for pie and Peacock Lane, the insane street near my house that draws hundreds of gawkers, wreaks havoc with local traffic and made something in the pit of my stomach twist and vibrate in nauseating turns. The last photo is from our one day of snow so far, a mere inch or so that caused 4-5 hour delays on the highways. Days like that, I'm thankful for my housebound life.

Now...let's get on with it. Bring on 2010. A new decade, a new chance to fight off the flypaper stick of inertia with pen and paper, keyboard and shutter snap.

Poetry vs. Ohio State

2009-12-22T20:26:00.000-08:00

My book group for writers met at my house last night. Not only did it compel me to give the slanty shanty a good scrub behind the ears, but it gave me the opportunity to dwell in poetry for a good portion of the day. That's a good place to be. One I'd forgotten about for a while.

Most of the year our group reads novels and stories and essays, but in December we read poetry to each other, not for critique or for any in-depth discussion, but simply because we love it. At least, some of us do. What a great thing, to have friends in my house with stacks of poetry books by their side, reading and re-reading.

I laugh. My neighbor brings his friends together every weekend to watch college football on a TV tucked into the corner of his tiny patio. They drink and cheer and thrill over it. I bring my friends together and we sip wine and tea, nibble at cookies and scones and read Wallace Stevens and Mary Szybist. I will never love football. They will never love poetry. Sad for both of us, in some ways.

It's not that I'm a rampant consumer of poetry. I wish I read more widely and understood more deeply. But I try. A poetry book gets into my hands once every few months. It should be every day. I've tried a poetry new year's resolution but it was something vague, without any kind of daily dedication. Maybe I will try again. A poem a day. I'll start with the Poetry Foundation's daily poetry offerings in audio. Why don't you join me? Maybe then we can gather some weekend and drink and cheer and thrill over what we find.

Joy to the world?

2009-12-14T09:48:00.000-08:00

Being busy has always been a virtue in my family. "Are you keeping busy?" is one of the only questions my 96 year old grandmother consistently still asks me. It's the same question my parents both ask me when they hand the phone back and forth on a Sunday call.

My schedule as a massage therapist has been full to the brim lately . My work as a writer has been giving me a good nightly excuse to avoid the bitter cold that recently gripped our usually mild city. This makes my family very happy and in these times of rampant unemployment, I certainly won't complain about it.

I will, however, note that being busy has never been the most important point. I guess I'd prefer that the question was "Have you been enjoying yourself?" The answer is the same. Yes. A modicum of joy comes with feeling secure and successful in my work. But more of it comes from watching the cat absorb the tiniest square of sunlight that penetrates my chilly living room in the afternoon. More of it comes from pulling the warm covers over my head for ten more minutes of sleep and eating homemade bread for breakfast with my beaux.

These are considerations for the privileged, certainly. And certainly most privileged people would agree that joy is in these small things, not in simply having a full schedule. While a vast majority of the world is simply trying to survive to the next day, here in a land buried in plastic lead-filled crap, and dotted with abandoned 8,000 square foot homes, asking a different question wouldn't be a bad idea.

Light Bright

2009-12-05T18:47:00.000-08:00

This year, our neighbor hung blue holiday lights. They make for a dim and melancholy trip to our bathroom. They glow vaguely through the frosted plastic covering the bottom half of our constantly weeping windows. In the mirror, the streetlight burns a lurid and lonely orange. Though it surprises me every time I open the door, I still like it. Christmas lights and fireflies, stars seen from the middle of the forest and tiny midwest towns seen from a red-eye flight. I've always been a sucker for a dash of bright in the middle of the dark.

2009-11-28T17:58:00.000-08:00

I've lost my fictional way again while lying under the weather for the last week, while trying on Ohio for a few thank-filled days. I will find it. As I round the corner of the month I plan to pick a path, probably a new one and see where it goes. My 50,000 words for Nanowrimo will not be met but that's okay. It was a good experience to get to about 35,000 and feel the momentum of language building on a daily basis. I'm back at home, my head is clearing and I'm ready to do it all over again.

Artistic Voyeuristic

2009-11-12T09:19:00.000-08:00

Other than a year-long stint in Boston, I've never lived in a dense urban environment. In Boston, I lived in a tiny dorm room on the top floor of a brownstone. From the single bay window, I looked out at the buildings of M.I.T., the Charles River, and the rush of traffic on Storrow Drive. While the view was brilliant, it was an unpeopled landscape, not a portrait. All the windows were too far away, the cars too quick.

Moving to Portland, I fell in love with a different kind of city living, one that made space for porches and gardens and wide sprawling parks. Out my office window now, I get a much more mundane view of my neighbor's patio with its card table, TV and left over football party beer cans. While washing dishes in my kitchen, I see the retired longshoreman in the house next door washing his dishes or watching TV and paying his bills. From my porch, I watch a girl with tattooed arms on the steps of her porch, smoking and watching me.

A certain amount of voyeurism seems commonplace in any urban setting, whether your view is of twenty floors of brick and glass or a single well-lit bungalow. For some reason, the curtains remain open. The lives remain on view. And who am I to turn away?

I was excited to see that a real photographer has gone out and done the project I've always imagined doing. Gail Albert Halaban has created Out My Window, NYC. They are luscious, lonely and yet comforting photos of New Yorkers and their views. Yesterday, the New York Times wrote about her and other Window Watchers. While I'll always prefer my Portland view, it made me long for all the well-lit windows New Yorkers get in a single glance.

Katahdin, not just a big mountain.

2009-11-10T16:10:00.000-08:00

This is the bear from the movie Prophecy, our Halloween movie pic. She had the misfortune of being mutated by toxins from a paper mill in upstate Maine. Now imagine being a young boy of about 8 who lives in upstate Maine. Your rather clueless father takes you to the drive in and there she is, the slimy mutant bear who leaps from the woods and tears her victims to pieces. Funny, those woods look an awful lot like the woods along the road you live on. The next day, you decide to stay home and not bike to your friend's house down the street. You may never bike down your street again.

I will now blame Katahdin, the bear's name (and also Maine's highest peak) for, well, everything. I blame her for everything. She doesn't look very happy about that, but I live in Oregon and there are no paper mills here, right?

Six hours and 3,466 words later

2009-11-02T10:05:00.000-08:00

I wouldn't call my first day of Nanowrimo full of flow unless it was a flow of sticky honey. Still, I took the free hours and made a good show of it, pushing through to my first pile of words. I flailed around in the first paragraph for way too long and then eventually found a way in. The way in wasn't this photo, but when I found this photo on my computer this morning, I see that it will be today's portal.

So already, I find lesson one, which of course is a lesson I already know: Be open. Be receptive to the world's bright and brassy cues, as well as to its rhythms and subconscious ripples. I'd lost touch with this kind of openness with the work on my first novel, the plodding and plodding and plotting and plotting. The fun part is looking (but not looking) for connections and patterns in my life and my character's lives. The grind I'd made of my writing life simply wore out anything loose and ephemeral. Now I have a chance to get that back. Eyes open, but slightly lowered. Brain alert, but slightly dreamy.

All happiness depends on courage and work, or so says Balzac

2009-10-25T11:00:00.000-07:00

All art demands imagination. All art is imagination. But how do we learn to trust the fantastic beauty and grim monsters of our minds? How do we learn to listen? How do we leap from the well-defined lines of our daily lives up into the ether?

It feels like my own imagination is ossifying. What was once flexible and willing is now stiff as bone. It makes no sense to write fiction in this kind of state. But I want to write fiction. I don't know what else to do with the world.

In the next week, before I begin my novel-writing escapade, I need to find that crazy, magic potion that will reverse the effects of too many years of over-editing. Too many days given over to drudgery and easy numbness.

On some level, I worry that I will lose my sense of balance. I wonder if it's possible for me to write a worthwhile story without abandoning that balance altogether. So add to that magic potion something for my courage. Or maybe that's the whole of it. Courage and more courage. Gotta go get me some of that.

2009-10-17T16:48:00.000-07:00

I'm signed up for Nanowrimo. The goal is to write a novel (or 50,000 words) in one month. My personal goal will be to prevent a nasty ear-biting bar brawl with my own psyche. I like to edit and fuss. I like to stop and savor the three lovely sentences I've written then pat myself on the back for a hard day's work. Keeping that instinct at bay is going to be hard. Very hard.

The last few months of writing have been painfully slow. If I'm going to tap into the flow of swift and heavily flawed prose, then I'm going to have to get in shape, grab a few books and do some arm curls. Jack LaLane, show me the way.

Fire Cupping

2009-10-09T19:28:00.000-07:00

This isn't torture or magic or performance art. This is a little glass globe fixed to my arm with the power of suction. This is ancient medicine, as old as the instinct to suck your finger after you've knocked it against something. No pain is involved. In fact, it feels good, the way stretching feels good.

I wouldn't have thought this odd, sometimes brutal looking technique would appeal to me. The tissue pulls up into the cup and can turn pink, red, dark purple. Sometimes this coloring stays as a mark on the skin where matter once trapped in the tissues is drawn to the surface. Not a painful bruise, just a mark.

I wouldn't have thought that I'd want to fuss with the accoutrements of this technique. Cups, cotton, forceps, alcohol, water, oil. Oh, and fire. A big wad of fire to create the vacuum inside the cup.

But I love cupping. I love how it feels as a practitioner. I've spent my whole career pressing down into muscles. This lets me lift. And as a recipient of cupping I also feel lifted, as if all the stuck layers were slowly peeling apart, the detritus of my tissue finally tossed to the curb.

Now the hard part: Convincing my clients to let me use this technique on them. Medieval torture comes to their minds or they look longingly, beyond the row of cups, toward the dark, polished stones heating to a perfectly toasty temperature in their crockpot. I don't want to resort to telling them cupping helps the appearance of cellulite. While that might be alluring for certain clientele, I refuse to be the woman who sticks glass cups to people's butts.

2009-10-02T23:18:00.000-07:00

Mimosa. Mi. Mo. Sa. Flowers like fans. Leaves like feathers. A scent like an old girlfriend's perfume: Faded and potent, dazzling and elusive. Mimosa, mimosa, mimosa.

2009-09-30T10:58:00.000-07:00

I spent the weekend in Bend, OR attending a workshop on massage cupping (more on that in a post to come). While only three hours away, I'd never been. A funny little city, dotted with new condos and office buildings and crisp green parks. A certain Disney-esque feel permeated the downtown area where I spent most of my time. Even the beautiful trail along the Deschutes River that runs through town felt suspiciously manicured, the vacation homes on the ridge above the trail only half-hidden. It was all very...nice.

To be fair, however, the dry climate this area offers has never been my favorite. Even as I snapped away, photo after photo, of the amazing blue-green water and the crisp candy sky, I remained largely unmoved. Not that I didn't long to take a dip in the river or scrabble along the rocks, but I never felt that soothing rush I get when I step onto the beach or into a damp green forest. As I left the desert behind on my way home and entered the Mt. Hood National Forest I may have actually sighed.

It's good to see new landscapes if only to confirm that you've chosen the right one.

2009-09-20T19:09:00.000-07:00

Because my beloved cat is gravely ill and because I have had to tend to her like a child–feeding her then wiping the food spilled from her clumsy mouth, carrying her to comfortable spots and whispering sweet wishes into her fur–I want pictures of dahlias instead.

Because I had to go to my client's house after she returned from a serious hospital emergency and sit at her bedside and try to make the noise behind her eyes quiet to something reasonable, I want dahlias.

Because my beaux is on the other side of the country trying to survive the survivors of his family– their indifference sticking to the tar-filled air– I want giant pink flowers the size of plates and multicolored pom-poms bursting out at the edge of Fall in one last hurrah.

Hurrah. It's good to be on this side of the dirt.

2009-09-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

Spell to Be Said UponDeparture
by Jane Hirshfield
What had come here to do
having finished,
shelves of the water lie flat.
Copper the leaves of the doorsill,
yellow and falling.
Scarlet the bird that is singing.
Vanished the labor, here walls are.
Completed the asking.
Loosing the birds there is water.
Having eaten the pears.
Having eaten
the black figs, the white figs. Eaten the apples.
Table be strewn.
Table be strewn with stems,
table with peelings of grapefruit and pleasure.
Table be strewn with pleasure,
what was here to be done having finished.

The Dining Room Debate

2009-09-04T15:07:00.000-07:00

I won't idealize dinnertime with my family when I was growing up, but this is what it was: Mom, Dad, sister, and me all in our places around the dining room table in our high back chairs with the classical radio station playing in the background. Almost every night I begged to have dinner in front of the TV. 90% of the time I was denied. Most of my time around that table was spent shoveling my well-balanced meal into my mouth as quickly as possible and trying to make a quick retreat. My parents usually talked about their work which I didn't understand or their friends who I didn't know. My sister and I would have to talk about what we did in school. I was often bored.

But then there were nights, more and more of them as I got older, when questions were asked and not a single quick answer came back. Instead, we debated. We talked about religion and god. We talked about charity. We talked about human rights and animal rights. We talked about war. I remember being frustrated because I often felt like I lost these debates. My father and I would inevitably line up on opposite sides and my position would suffer horribly under my young, naive hands. Sometimes I got really mad and my mother would swoop in and join my cause whether she agreed with me or not.

I think back on those nights now and remember them (in my usual hazy way) as key moments in learning how to be a good person. More than any lecture from a teacher or chapter in a textbook, those debates truly educated me. The subjects were big and important, but the truly essential part of these evenings was how I learned to listen and think. Not to listen to the sound of my own wonderful voice, but to the ideas and possibilities of another person's mind. Not to think like my father but to think on my own.

These days, with all the screaming on the radio and cable TV, all the knee-jerk fear and thoughtless anger, I find myself longing for civility. I want the whole country to have to sit down with my father every night for a few weeks and learn how to question their own beliefs and then defend them through polite conversation. My mother can be at the table too. She'll tell everyone to stop slouching and to slow down and take a goddamn breath.

2009-09-02T19:55:00.000-07:00

While on vacation with my folks, I shared the following thought: I wouldn't mind retiring and living in a trailer, preferably working as the host of some sweet little campground in the summer and parked on some warm patch of land in the winter.

My parents thought this was hysterical and from then on I couldn't get them to stop pointing at RVs and trailer parks and saying "How 'bout that one?"

They think I'm joking in the way that I used to joke in high school about getting married in full disco regalia at a HoJos off some random interstate. They were 95% sure I would never do it. At the time, I was only 75% sure myself. I didn't want to get married and thought if for some reason I had to, I'd want to make it perfectly silly. They thought I'd grow out of this, but I'm still pretty sure that if I had to have a wedding everyone would be in gorilla suits.

I'm also pretty sure that if I needed a cheap place to live in my old age, I'd be happy living in a trailer. I'm feeling about 50/50 on it, to be honest. I like the idea of incorporating the landscape more thoroughly into my living space. I like the idea of small. And let's face it, Airstream trailers are just really fucking cool, particularly the one above that they made in conjunction with Design Within Reach. Of course, I'd have to buy a car to haul it and that kind of sucks.

I hope to get up to Seaview, WA soon to do a little retreat at the Trailer Classics Hodgepodge (or TCH!-TCH!) to test out my trailer mettle. I'll be sure to report back.

2009-08-28T20:34:00.000-07:00

Twilight seduced me. The warm crowded air of the living room took a nice long breath out on the porch. The sky turned a lurid blue. And now, on the edge of September, the moon came out and the lights went on at an hour when I'm not already settled and sleepy. I took my camera and slipped out to spy on the silhouettes and shadows, the blare of orange streetlamps and the steady domestic glow of kitchen windows. I would do this for hours if only twilight would linger.

Happy endings

2009-08-23T13:17:00.000-07:00

What's wrong with a happy ending? And by that I mean, a happy ending in fiction, not in life or on the massage table. Is the idea of lasting love just too damn boring? Is it perceived as a falsehood? Is it inherently dissatisfying to leave the reader on a positive, untainted note? Okay...so maybe the protagonist learns something about life or sets off in a better direction or treasures that old standby of it being better to have loved and lost blah blah blah. Regardless, the good relationship almost never survives. Pride and Prejudice is the only example in the realm of literary fiction that I can think of that offers a straight up happy ending. Maybe there are others, but I don't know them.

I've come to accept that I love love stories. Most of my favorite contemporary novels have a love story as a prominent component: The Giant's House, Feast of Love, Bel Canto, The Transit of Venus, Mrs. Dalloway. None of these have happy endings.

What do you think? Can love only be lost? Does love found have to be wrapped in the conceits of romance fiction, chick lit and swoony teenage vampire chronicles?

2009-08-18T10:01:00.000-07:00

Five hours south of Portland is the little town of Bandon. The coastline there was dotted with dunes and interesting rock formations and even on a beautiful weekend the wide expanse of beach never had more than ten people on it. The town itself was a couple blocks long and strained at every corner to feel festive despite the lack of visitors and the closed-down shops. The poverty of the place ran smack up against the exorbitant wealth. You could see the disappointment loosened across the landscape and tucked into the tired smiles of the retailers.

It rubbed off on me and by the end of four days, I was cranky and ready to get home. I always miss the ocean when I'm not near it, but for now, it's good to be back in a more lively urban swing.

2009-08-12T17:16:00.000-07:00

This has been a backyard summer. I haven't gone camping. I've done one hike, a couple swims, a couple bike rides. I know in years past this would have driven me mad. The need to be out in the woods, in the green and shimmering world, would have itched under my skin. But this year, for some reason, I'm content. I have my forest of sunflowers. I have my basket of tomatoes. I have a breeze and a book and a can of beer. The city breaths beneath a fresh, warm rain. A masterpiece of clouds and jet trails ends each day.

Tomorrow I head to the southern Oregon coast with my folks. This is my father's annual "golf somewhere famous" trip. Apparently, there's some hot shot "Scottish" course down there. Mom and I will watch the ocean. Read. Drink cocktails.

How could I not be content with all that?

2009-08-05T20:01:00.000-07:00

I used to want to be a photographer. I even went to Boston University for a year thinking I'd go into photojournalism (a year in which I learned about the history of journalism and how to write an obituary and ran the classifieds section of the student paper but never saw a darkroom...hmm.) I realized somewhere during that year that I was essentially gutless and surprisingly proper and therefore highly unlikely to be good at pushing myself into the necessary places required of a photojournalist.

What I liked about photography was hiding behind a camera and in a dark room and, in the end, having something appealing to show for it. It sounds a lot like my reasons for writing: enjoyment of the solitude and the process and in the end having something worth sharing.

So I went out and got a nice camera. Not a true professional-grade camera. That would just be silly. But a nice camera. A Nikon D40. I love it love it love it. I love it so much I'm waiting for someone to ask me why I don't marry it. It's going to take a while before I figure out how to use it properly and it will take even longer for me to refresh my old photography knowledge and learn a whole host more.

If I slip into photo mode here for a while, you'll understand. If I ignore this blog altogether while I play with buttons and dials, f-stops and shutter speeds, you now know why. Weeee!

Oh...and the pic is of Oneonta Gorge on one of our 100+ days.

What I did on my summer vacation

2009-07-26T22:35:00.000-07:00

For the first time in as long as I can remember (which, let's be honest, could be as recently as last year) I took a week off of work without packing my bags and hopping on a plane to visit family or friends or tropical beaches. My nails grew long. Hours and hours were drowned in heavy summer heat and along highways as I drove my broken-footed friend to work or my birthday boyfriend to water. Even more hours were spent trying to sleep off an exhaustion that never quite left me and watering a garden and watching a cat. My little, uncomplicated life.

Looks perfect, right? This is Benson Lake which sits RIGHT off of highway 84 in the Columbia Gorge. The water was about as warm as you're going to find in these parts, but shallow and muddy-bottomed and accented by the roar of passing trucks. Not bad for a desperate dip, but not generally recommended.
After drying off and heating up, we set out for The Treefrogs show at the Laurelthirst which was being recorded for posterity. The air conditioner was broken and nobody could open their mouths without commenting on the steamy heat of the place, but I liked it. I felt like I was in New Orleans, sweating cheap beer and loud music.
The next night, Sean's Afroknot bandmate treated us to a birthday dinner at Urban Farmer, one of the hippest spots in town where her boyfriend works. Sean and I loved the deserts most of all. I'm particularly pleased to be associated with people who are willing to pose for a corny phallic photo in the middle of a swanky meal.
After one camping trip at the beginning of my break got canceled due to unforseen emergencies I was banking on the camping trip at the end of my break. When I went to rent a car, I discovered every single car was spoken for. We borrowed a truck from the above super-generous bandmate and headed out as early as we could manage. My favorite camping spot proved to be everyone elses as well. Not a spot to be had without some sort of fist fight. "I knew it," Sean said and it was true. He was convinced of our curse which has ruined about 50% of our camping attempts. The saving grace of our day was a shallower and therefore warmer swimming hole than in years past. I stayed in the water. Stayed and swam against the current and stayed and floated on my back for the first time ever in Oregon waters. We loved it and went home happy with our little difficulties.

Writing Advice

2009-07-20T08:44:00.000-07:00

Last week was the Tin House Workshop held at Reed College. Every year I hop on my bike at least once a day and pedal through the summer heat to the auditorium or the amphitheater to I sit in on lectures and a few readings without paying the thousands of dollars to actually participate in the workshops. Sometimes the bike ride is barely worth it. Sometimes I walk away with a few gems. This year one of my favorite panel discussions was on Beginnings with Karen Shepard, Walter Kirn and Dorothy Allison.

Dorothy Allison listed the three top motivators in fiction as Fear, Lust and Curiosity. "If you can get someone scared, horny and uncertain you've got a franchise."

Walter Kirn spoke eloquently about how beginnings are about closing down your options, and letting the reader know, with confidence, how to read your story. "Beginnings are shadows that are cast across the whole of the story."

Karen Shepard gave perhaps the most useful nugget of advice and that was the simple idea of policing your sentences. "Interrogate them. What are they telling you?"

New Tattoo

2009-07-14T19:36:00.000-07:00

A lady on a book? The man getting a tattoo next to me wanted to know what it meant. What did his tattoo of a skeleton riding a pig with an apple in his mouth mean? I didn't ask, fearing the answer. Make up an explanation if you need one. I guarantee it will be more interesting than my own.

Profusion

2009-07-12T17:44:00.000-07:00

The garden has tipped over into wildness. The spinach and arugula bolted a week or so ago. The volunteer tomatoes are bowling over the wildflowers while the sunflowers bully the tomatoes. The nasturtium flow like water from their inch of soil. The bamboo seeks the sky.

Now if only I could hide the way the cat does, nestling into a spot between the flowers that smell like Good n' Plenty and the silver-blue grass. Nobody can see me. Nobody knows I'm here. Just watching and waiting and napping.

Eagle Creek

2009-07-04T23:22:00.000-07:00

I'm waiting out the neighborhood fireworks tonight. I thought some calm green photos from my hike up the Eagle Creek Trail a few days ago would help distract me from the explosions. Icy water to cool my tired feet, the endless rush of Punchbowl Falls and the sweet cure of dappled light. Aaah, that's better...

2009-07-02T11:02:00.000-07:00

Mao grows bored with an article in BOMB magazine about "Nights of Horror" - the sado-masochistic cartoons made by the creator of Superman.

2009-06-28T18:42:00.000-07:00

I love that this house is being swallowed by plants, the sidewalk barely passable. I hope that when I'm old and arthritic that my house and garden will succumb to a similar fate. Actually, I wish I could make this happen to my yard right now. I wish I could make everything in my life overflow this way, in wild beautiful bursts. One thing tangled in another. All of it sweet.

Community, Hope and Pyromania

2009-06-22T11:20:00.000-07:00

Twice a year at every solstice my friends build and burn a wooden figure along with the wishes of the witnesses. This isn't related in any way with Burning Man (capital B, capital M) and the oddly false, strained and irritating people I generally associate with that drug pit in the desert. I prefer our low key event, one that celebrates a true sense of community, hope and pyromania. Here's to summer!

Suffering under the So What Factor

2009-06-18T15:18:00.001-07:00

The symbols of hope have deflated back into normal politicians. The big, nearly ungraspable problems of the world have pulled free and become truly ungraspable. People are buying bread instead of books, booze instead of bread. To all this I say SO WHAT? The days speed and the gray hairs grow and the kids outside take longer and longer to GET OFF MY LAWN.

In the end, the world doesn't care if I write a good book. Even my friends, who will certainly support my efforts to keep writing, to keep striving won't love me less if I fail to do so. In the back of my head I hear half a dozen different writing teachers saying "What's at stake here?" The truth is, not much. This fact alternates between feeling liberating and terrifying depending on how well I slept the night before. The drunkards were out full force last night and I was awake for hours so I apologize if I sound too bleak.

In truth, it's too beautiful outside and my life is too sweet and easy to feel any real depression over this. I don't even know what "this" is other than a pang of existential angst. Maybe I'll head out into the yard, soak up some sun and try to shake it off. And if you have any suggestions, short of having a child or finding god, I'm all ears.

2009-06-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

Summer is not quite officially here but it's busting out all over nonetheless. We pick salads out of the back yard and eat them on the patio while we watch the cat stalk the bamboo. We go down the street on our feet or on our bikes, happy to have the warm wind around us, the sun on our shoulders. I think about how different my life would be if I had to hop in the car to get anywhere and feel endlessly grateful for all the years I've been able to stroll the neighborhood. How different would my vision of the world be if my experience of it arrived as isolated points rather than continuous paths. I can't recommend it enough: Take a walk, ride a bike and watch the world slow down.

2009-06-08T20:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I witnessed a man sleeping on the grass in the South Park Blocks being harassed by a trio of jock assholes. Sean and I approached the scene as it was playing it out; the jocks throwing something small at the man, maybe a rock, then throwing a sandwich at him when his response was less than the jocks had hoped for. Sean and I both wish we'd moved faster and with less hesitation, fast enough to warn the sleeping man or discourage the dumb mob mentality of this pitiful crew of douchebags. We did not. The only reward was that another witness chased them down for several blocks. The jocks tried to play it cool, but two of them ended up running off. The third broke off from his clan, turned the corner and was hunted down beyond our sight.

As a person who was harrassed a'plenty in my youth, I feel a particular kind of outrage and sadness at this kind of behavior. Sure, you can rise above it and dismiss the asswipes, but for me at least, it confirms a dreary belief. I maintain my faith in individual humans as being basically good. That good may be solid and thorough or it may be irretrievably buried under a mountain of bad. Still, I believe it exists in each isolated person. The problem is we don't live isolated from one another and the crap that I witnessed confirms that people collectively are a miserable, sheepish lot as often as they are a supportive, uplifting mass.

None of us are immune. I've had my own cruel moments, my own sheepish nods. Sean too. All we could do was shake our heads in unison with the harassed man then wander back into our day. But today all I've been able to think of is that sweet bland thing called kindness and how we should all dig a little deeper for it.

2009-06-01T22:50:00.000-07:00

This week I get the short stick and become the one that stays. You, the one that goes. In your absence, the hours flatten into uncurled ribbon, long and smooth. I gain a wealth of wasted time. I go to sleep beneath a day both unmarked and unremarkable. Not useless without you, but simply not as good.

Go figgy go...

2009-05-26T20:45:00.000-07:00

Stretch bamboo stretch...

Though I got me some garden last year, largely with the help of my friend, Rob, this year I've decided to shed as much of my hesitation and doubt as possible and plunge recklessly into it. I've spent hours in the dirt lining our gravel walkways and building tiny walls with bits of kung-fu-cracked brick. I've planted and watered and weeded. I've gone to the store for groceries and returned with my basket full of fescue and poppies.

At first, I saw the task of laying the bricks as a nuisance, once I was out there with my shovel and trowel and my nails full of dirt, I was struck by an old memory. When my sister and I were wee lasses we would go down to the creek behind our house and build bowls and sculptures and walls from the clay soil on the banks. Perfection was in the process not the product. And so it is now. Joy in the digging and in the daily measure of the season growing to its fullest.

Not everything is thriving in part because my "good enough" philosophy doesn't bode well for sensitive plants, but that comes with the territory. I dislike the notion that "if you can't do it right, don't do it at all." I say if you can't do it right, do it half-assed and enjoy yourself along the way.

2009-05-20T20:56:00.000-07:00

I know it's not even June yet and that the heat will come on in my house at least once more before the Fourth of July, but let it be known that the toes are silvered up and strapped into their new red shoes. The veggies are planted. The first official camping trip is on the books. How lucky I am to live this.

2009-05-15T20:08:00.000-07:00

It's the end of the day and we dip into the early, pale end of twilight. The only clouds in the sky are like sweet exhalations; the breath of a woman napping in the park. I open my mouth. I swallow.

Ecola State Park

2009-05-11T16:49:00.000-07:00

I took an overnight trip to say hello to the ocean and to see what nice spring clothes the forest trails picked up this season. A dozen different greens, a layering of mud and a mottled sky. Back in the urban noise for no more than an hour, I already miss the racket of waves and wind and want to run back, lash myself down to one of those mammoth driftwood logs or hide under the canopy of infant leaves and refuse to go. I always want more ocean, more bright air, more chartreuse, celadon and sap.

2009-05-05T13:30:00.000-07:00

We are in the midst of Lilac Stealing Month here in Portland. Every year for fifteen years, Sean has shown up in late April and early May with lavender, white and plum bouquets snatched from any large prolific lilac plant drooping over the sidewalk. Blooms in varying stages of decay are now scattered around the house. Someday, I will plant my own lilac bush, I promise. I'll put it right out front and applaud any man who stops to break off a branch or two.

2009-04-29T20:10:00.000-07:00

Tenderness trips me up. Lately, an unexpected emotion has washed across my eyes and hands and heart as I work. I've gotten through almost thirteen years of doing massage by keeping a thin, hard layer across all my exposed surfaces, all my tricky synapses. For the last few weeks, however, I've fallen into an unexpected kindness. A tremor of empathy runs through me for the exhausted, aching people who lie naked on my table beneath a thin sheet and soft blanket.

I've never been a cookie cutter therapist, but I've always let my hands be my dominant guide, working on an instinct that seemed to largely circumvent both highly technical routines and overly emotional responses. That same instinct remains intact, but now something else has seeped into my sessions.

My cynical mind remains cynical. The collapse of the Great American Dream continues full force. The destruction of the planet grows loud and real. Religion blinds us, money corrupts us, etc., etc., etc. Nothing new there. But as I sit at the head of the table with a person's head in my cupped hands, my fingers pressed along the edges of their vertebrae and my palms wrapping their tired shoulders little wishes for them run through me. Wishes for kindness and joy, wonder and health.

As one of my favorite William Meredith poems says: "But whether from brute need/ Or divine energy / At last mind eye and ear/ And the great sloth heart will move."

Go figure...

2009-04-25T14:35:00.000-07:00

I stacked my youth into a pale blue bin: letters from a boy in upstate New York once scoured for hidden signals, journals smeared with the misery of being seventeen, and eighteen and nineteen, good photos of people whose names I forget and bad photos of people I still love.

I read a couple letters and smiled. I showed some of the photos to some of my friends. I read some of my words, decades old and showed them to no one. And then I went to sleep.

There I met my high school boyfriend. We were both soft and lined and smartly dressed and despite our long absence from each other, still together and still the same. He sang obscure songs at me and wouldn't tell me what they were. I moped at his side and answered every question with "I don't know." We stared at each other and I confused pangs of anxiety with pangs of love. I woke up annoyed, as if our dream selves should have learned more in all these years. Am I doomed to repeat history, even in my sleep?

The blue plastic bin is heavy. I will need Sean to help me lug it to the basement. In another twenty years I will pick at the detritus there and let it trickle through the sluggish coils of my brain. And when my dream self again meets an old beaux or enemy, a lost friend or lost chance, maybe she'll take the opportunity that dreams offer and try it a different way.

Euphorbia. Euphoria.

2009-04-19T18:25:00.000-07:00

The sun comes softened by a breeze but still makes its mark on the new leaves, the sloth-rich soil, my frightened winter skin. Now, with a fresh blush burned into sternum, nose and arms, I am Italian again. I am the tomato-grower. The protector of young basil. Despite the dip of light, evening will not start for hours. We are busy playing music and writing poems. We are sun drunk and in love with our drinking buddies.

2009-04-14T15:28:00.000-07:00

On the radio this morning, I heard a worldwide call-in talk show focused on the topic of slowing down. More than half the people were happy with the quick pace of their lives and thought that to slow down would mean failure. A few people advocated for reading poetry in the sun or taking the time to cook a really good, really healthy meal, but most of them liked their quick paced lives, their busy schedules. For them, staying busy was equal to staying both happy and productive.

In my head, I argued that being productive doesn't have to be the key to happiness. And productive in what capacity? If I take the time to read a book, am I not being productive, albeit on a cerebral level? Isn't taking a walk and admiring the spring flowers productive for your health and well-being? I think so.

But here's the catch... I've been in such a funk lately because I haven't produced nearly enough writing. Despite what I said in my last post, I've been struggling to get the words down, though I've been trying. At every step I meet a hurdle if I'm lucky, an electric barbed wire fence if I'm not. This sticky, gummed-up story is driving me mad.

So maybe those people were right. I may not need to produce reports, resolutions or widgets but I need to produce something to feel my best, to feel like I'm something other than a receptacle for youtube videos and Netflix DVDs. My only solution is to ratchet down the expectations to an even slower pace and try to learn how to savor the drip...drip...drip onto the page.

2009-04-07T22:57:00.000-07:00

I've written it in pen, right there on the calendar, not only for Wed. 8th but on all the days of the following week. I've swallowed too many misspent hours and feel a bit nauseous, a bit deceitful. My life feels funny without a solid writing project in front of me. The new project is unformed, unweildy, un-everything. It has things to teach that I'm reluctant to learn. For one, have some goddamn fun. Furthermore, make millions of mistakes.

At first I wanted to think and dawdle and dwell on the shape and character of this new book and I've done a bunch of that. But now it wants me to write it out fast. It wants to be long and shitty. It wants to make so many wrong turns I get lost somewhere kind of cool.

If only I had a montage. Enter the button-down recluse whose worn down all the erasers in the house. Exit the footloose free spirit who tosses off pages without a second glance. All set to some jangly folk-pop song by Feist. A magical transformation.

2009-04-06T20:42:00.000-07:00

We, as a city, exhaled fully these last few days, dropping our cramped shoulders down from our ears. The sun came and cured us of most of our bad moods, our tedious confinement and our frighteningly luminous flesh. Someone told me there were 25 days of rain in Portland this March. It felt like it. But now, I'm sitting in a tank top and shorts writing this beneath a picture of this year's first flowers, carried home in my bike basket. If it didn't interfere with my cargo capacity I would carry potted flowers around on my bike all the time. You should know this about me...for a misanthropic hermit, I am inordinately delighted and soothed by the presence of brightly colored petals. I am also notoriously bad with plants. More on this conundrum to come...

2009-04-03T15:59:00.000-07:00

Almost all of my friends live a decent but nonetheless check-to-check existence and always have. This craptastic economy has tightened our well-cinched belts, but ultimately hasn't changed much in our daily lives. Except for this: We used to joke when we talked about a grand European vacation or saw a perfect piece of perfectly spendy art or walked by a gorgeous 5 bedroom house that we would go ahead and buy it. "I've got $5 bucks in my pocket. That should be enough right?"

Well, now it is. In Detroit, at least. I know, it's Detroit but still...When I heard about the crazy market there I googled Detroit Real Estate, entered a value between $100 and $1000 and came up with 156 results. The above 6 bedroom multi-unit building is going for $600.

I'm not sure why, but I'm totally fascinated by this phenomenon. Maybe it's just the strangeness of watching a city decay, first in increments and then in leaps and bounds. Maybe it's the dash of entrepreneurial spirit inherited from my father that makes me think somebody should be taking advantage of this, not in a greedy, lecherous way but in a way that does something daring and grand for these neighborhoods.

I'll go crazy and throw in $20. Who else wants in on the American dream of home ownership?

2009-03-30T13:53:00.000-07:00

Somehow, I've ended up with a number of jewelry designer friends. Some are of the fine metalsmith artisan variety. Some are of the cute, affordable and fun variety. Cute, affordable and fun sounds pretty good right around now... This piece is made by Sisteria Designs. They use reclaimed game tiles and fine Japanese papers and make these pretty pendants. They just got their online store up and running so now you can order them directly. http://sisteriadesigns.com/index.html
Definitely a cool gift and if you and your friends collect enough of them, you can turn them over and play dominoes with them too.
This purty birdy is from Twicksie Jewels. I got it at Christmas, then immediately lost it as is my way. To my delight, I discovered it a few weeks ago when I pulled out my luggage again and found it in a forgotten pocket. Twicksie's lovely baubles are for sale here: http://twicksie.com/

2009-03-27T18:23:00.000-07:00

I walked a maze of pink and white trees in search of the faint scent of spring, but even this fresh blush has failed to alleviate the cool gray gloom. Almost everyone I come across is weighed down by it. No surprise, I guess.

What I am surprised by is how thoroughly I've abandoned my own writing over the last few weeks. I'm reading a lot. I'm thinking about my stories a lot. I'm thinking about story, in general, a lot. But all I have to offer is this paltry handful of words. The good thing about this is that it feels calm here. There's no worry that the words won't come back. I'm in a lull and think lull is a lovely word.

2009-03-21T11:53:00.000-07:00

My brief time with my family in California left me with a few thoughts:

Nothing has broken my heart more quickly than the sight of my grandmother sobbing. I've never even seen the woman shed a tear, so to witness her red-faced and weeping, caught in a steady loop of lament and despair was overwhelming. I wanted to believe that a certain hardness or world-weary resignation developed with age, but grief is such a powerful thing that years alone are not enough to stop it.

That said, it was heartening to note just how well my grandmother raised her family. At a memorial full of hundreds of relatives and my aunt's friends and coworkers, I suddenly realized how few divorces there were among us. My grandmother was married for at least forty years before her husband died and each of her three daughters followed in her footsteps. Distant cousins I hadn't seen in years appeared with their spouses and grown children and more recently married relatives showed no signs of trouble. In a time when one parent households and multiple marriages are so common, I feel blessed to be a part of this clan that has learned how to hold on through the rough spots and find a solid source of love.

In that same room of hundreds, I became keenly aware of my sister, father and I as the tall, geeky ones being antisocial in the corner, the ones who left California and settled in New England. On top of that, I had to field an exhausting number of questions about being a writer. Being able to announce the title and publisher of my book among such a crowd is probably the number two reason I want to be published. Then there would be no reason for people to tell me about their neighbor's mother-in-law who works in publishing (though they do mostly science textbooks) or their friend who has a son in Hollywood who could turn my novel into a movie or how they don't really read anything but mysteries but they're sure my story is great. I don't want to deny my identity as a writer, but there are certainly benefits to leaving that portion out.

Of course, I will probably never see most of these people again. That was the final revelation of my visit. As the immediate family sat in my aunt's house in the hills of El Cerrito I realized how unlikely it is that I will ever be in that house again, or even in California again. Regular holiday visits there have been a part of my life from the time I was a baby. Now, with my grandmother moved out and my aunt gone, there is little reason to be there. Though my love for my uncle and cousins remains true, we have never had a connection independent of my aunt. While I used to be certain that I would live in California as an adult, I now leave it behind. An unexpected and entirely reluctant goodbye.

2009-03-14T17:07:00.000-07:00

Less than a year ago, my Aunt Maureen was diagnosed with cancer. Last Saturday she finally succumbed. Now I fear that a few others will follow, her gregarious spirit unwilling to go out alone. Maybe her mother, my grandmother, will loosen the last few knots holding her here. Maybe her husband, whose heart was already tied together and tricked into working again, will find himself undone. He will have to find a way to sleep without her kicking feet, her slightly sour breath, her faint heat pulsing toward him.

Off I go to Oakland to be with the rest of Maureen's family and her wide blanket of friends to stumble through what we can. To say we will miss her is not enough.

2009-03-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

Back from the woods and the tiny town of Shelton, WA. Elspeth Pope and the Hypatia-in-the-Woods organization gave me my week in the beautiful house Elspeth's late husband Jim built. The house is not just surrounded by trees, but seems to have grown right out of them. They were my constant companions. The top photo is the view out the bedroom window. Every morning I got up and felt like I was in a Grimm's Fairy Tale. Every day I sat looking out the dining room window at the trees in the bottom picture, a chaos of greenery. At night, I listened to the owls moan and sobbed over any small thing offered up in the movies I watched on my computer.

I thought long thoughts. I wrote words and barely erased anything at all. I bathed in silence. And by the end of the week my longing for home grew piercing. This is my way, my stubbornly middle path. I like the idea of falling full force into a piece of fiction, into language itself, but I can't obsess that way. It's rare that I pick up a book and can't put it down, no matter how much I love it. And when given all the time and space needed to dig deep into my own imaginary worlds, I only have so much breath. Good things happen down there below the surface, but I need to come up for air. I need to talk to my family and friends and walk down a busy street. I need to watch The Simpsons and rant about some bullshit on the news.

I'm thankful for my week away and equally thankful to be home.

2009-03-04T13:39:00.000-08:00

Okay...I couldn't resist. No, that's not true. I could easily have resisted. However, I chose not to. I drove into thriving downtown Shelton, WA. Sat myself down at the libaray computer and pulled up my blog. And as I sit here I realize how little I miss it. After a walk, I will return to my little house in the woods. I will watch the cedar branches lay very still on top of other cedar branches. I will listen to the water drain from the dirt. I will follow my thoughts from ocean to desert. I will luxuriate in the solitude. The tiny ache. The wide, slow sweep.

Not banished, but hiding.

2009-02-27T20:29:00.000-08:00

Last year at this time the first pink trees were fully blushed. This year we struggle towards the season, taking gusts of cold wind with our sunshine and frost in our morning hours. The forecast has my week away at my writing retreat full of cartoon clouds and cartoon rain and chill all around...Well good.

I will hole up as best I can. I will try to subdue the rainy day child in me that finds satisfaction in nothing, each option dismissed with a cranky whine. Who will hear me even if I do? Might as well cozy up to the stove with a nice pen and a smooth white sheet of paper. Or find stories in the good green damp.

The house has no internet connection. No TV. No phone. This is not a punishment but a prize. I head out (and head in) to meet my imagination. I'll see you on the other side.

2009-02-22T14:11:00.000-08:00

I never understood the full extent of my pet peeve against holiday and other seasonal flags until I saw this one. This is the flag that proves how silly all the other ones are. It was hard to get a good photo of it unfurled, but this is a homemade flag saluting mac and cheese. "Since 1990." It's brilliant and ridiculous and I love it.

If I were more crafty, I would make my own flag. Maybe an I heart Snooze flag. Or maybe a Celebrate Near Miss Day (March 23rd...the day in 1989 when the earth came within 500,000 of a mountain sized asteroid). The possibilities are endless...

2009-02-16T14:25:00.000-08:00

In my grandmother's square of concrete and begonias we made pools out of buckets and restaurants out of old iron patio furniture. Surrounded by stucco walls and overhanging oaks we made ourselves into rich artists and elegant athletes. We stepped into the only patch of sun my grandmother's house offered and found a bubble of privacy and fantasy interrupted only by the demands of my mother – What are you doing out there?

We were playing. We were at Grammy's house celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving and birthdays and anniversaries. We were celebrating our own young selves.

In her 95th year my grandmother has finally moved from that square of concrete patio, the circle of pale blue furniture, the dim lace-lined bedrooms of the only home I ever knew her in. She has left the eucalyptus scented streets of her retirement community in Walnut Creek. She has left the circle of East Bay cities and towns that held her for her entire life. And now she's on her way to Columbus, Ohio to start new in an assisted living apartment near to where my aunt lives. I can only imagine being forced out of my home by my own clumsy feet and my own weary mind. I can only imagine leaving behind a daughter, terminally ill with cancer, because I fall and forget and grow exhausted with loneliness.

My grandmother cried for days and I may too.

Valentine's Day is stupid but Love isn't

2009-02-14T12:54:00.000-08:00

I'm guessing most of the people reading this will have already signed the petition at The Courage Campaign but if you haven't, watch this video and sign on. It made me cry even though I couldn't care less about the institute of marriage for myself. It makes me insanely mad that people are so scared, misinformed, hateful...whatever.

I will now spend the afternoon in a swirl of creative revenge fantasies against Ken Starr.

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

Shirley Hazzard is my hero

2009-02-09T09:41:00.000-08:00

Though it feels like I've been wild about her for years, I haven't raved about Shirley Hazzard enough, not here at least. Back in grad school, I resisted her despite a trusted source insisting she was worth the struggle. But the struggle presented by Transit of Venus was too much. I put it down after a handful of pages.

Years later, after easing my way in to Hazzard's world via her early novel Bay of Noon then falling in love with her most recent, The Great Fire, I returned to the difficult middle and found reward. She is not an easy read. Her sentences are dense, her structure complex and the characters are hers to control not ours to relate to. But I have never been so in awe of a book, sentence by sentence, for the precision of its observations. There isn't a single lazy word here.

So read it slowly. Read it twice. She is truly a master.

Here is a description, early in the book, of Ted Tice who has just arrived as a guest in this home and is awaiting the host:

In the fireplace, below the vacant grate, there was a row of aligned fragments, five or six of them, of toasted bread smeared with a dark paste and dusted with ashes.

He was used to the cold and sat as much at his ease as if the room had been warm. He could not physically show such unconcern in the presence of others because the full-grown version of his body was not quite familiar to him; but was easy in his mind, swift and unhurried. From all indications, his body had expected some other inhabitant. He supposed the two would be reconciled in time–as he would know, in time, that the smeared toast was there to poison mice and that Tom was the cat.

2009-02-02T17:55:00.000-08:00

February used to be the most dreaded of months. Back in New England it usually meant that the snow was either continuing its seemingly endless descent or it was lingering along the sides of the roads getting black, crunchy and utterly detestable. You were sick to the core of all the winter bullshit. If you had to wear that stupid red sweater one more time you were going to cry. If you had to lunge over yet another puddle of slush you might lock yourself inside for the rest of the season. Glasses still fogged any time you walked in from the cold. Elevators, mass transit and small crowded shops all smelled of wet wool and trapped sweat.

Now, in my beloved Portland, February means the start of spring. Today was full of brilliant sun and temps that allowed coat zippers to stray south. The daffodils are starting to come up and I saw some actual pink blossoms busting loose on a tree down the street. Many a cool gray day lies ahead of us, but it's Groundhog's Day and I say spring is here.