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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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?

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

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

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?"