Stormwatching

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

Retreat/Reveal

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

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

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is crawling with boys in handlebar mustaches and girls in skinny jeans and big, ugly glasses that sneer at the outdated.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

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

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

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

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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. 
6. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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.