Musings from Around the Block

Well-Nourished: Another Lament on Aging

2012-01-14T13:07:00.000-08:00

The year is 2012. I can remember when, in my 20’s, I used a calculator to figure how old I would be when the millennium ended and a new one began. The answer: 46. Both the new millennium and that age bracket seemed like science fiction to me then. Now I view them with nostalgia.

I have done all right at aging. My hair remains healthy—so healthy I need to have it thinned every six months—and has only just begun to grey. Through flurries of exercise (walking, yoga, and swimming, if I’m really serious), I’ve maintained what my primary physician deems a healthy body weight, though I’d like to be 15-20 pounds lighter. On behalf of honesty, I admit I took a peek at what another doctor, an orthopedic specialist treating a blown-out shoulder, wrote about me in his file: “Patient is a well-nourished, white female…” This read like a euphemistic personals ad, and tainted my attitude toward the otherwise gifted physician who cured the shoulder without surgery. I treat my healed shoulder with deference because I don’t want to go to his office anytime soon and revisit that file.

I’m vain, I can’t help it, and vanity keeps me from aging gracefully. As a young writer, I took an extension course from an LA Times journalist who, I thought, would teach the craft of human interest stories, but who rather used the class as a venue to perform, with guitar, her “Songs of Age and Rage.” Imagine the Lili Taylor of Say Anything only in her late 60’s, hair chopped off in a strangely-cowlicked pixie, shouting tuneless vitriol at age instead of her ex-boyfriend Joe. I thought the Times writer needed to get over herself. The presumption I’d care about her woes over the wreckage of time rankled me, and I quit the weekend seminar at lunch on Saturday without asking for my money back.

I invoke her memory whenever I look at my hands and see liver spots too numerous to bother counting, and when I’m soaping up in the shower and my hand passes over a raised, rough patch of skin the dermatologist calls a “barnacle.” Barnacle? What am I, an atoll? A humpback whale? I ask the doc to remove said barnacles, and he replies, “Why? They just come back again.” I hear furious guitar strumming when I ready myself for work and see jowls as I apply makeup, and am forced to gingerly zip my pants because of the dreaded belly fat. How did this happen to me? I never had a perfect body even at its optimal weight, but always a flat stomach. I’ve even given up a decades-long addiction to diet soda yet still sport my own personal adipose pouch, navel included, no extra charge.

I know I am supposed to love my aging body, that each wrinkle and scar and bulge and imperfection signifies a life fully lived. I know women of a certain, um, level of experience should be above taking inventory of superficial human flaws, their own and those belonging to others. I know these wise and worldly things, but vanity prevents me from accepting them.

And every time I think of that old raging broad with the bad haircut, I get my money’s worth of empathy.

Oh, Rocky

2012-01-03T14:54:00.000-08:00

Jekyll Island is part small town and part wildlife reserve. People here know each other, if not by name than at least by sight. Even visitors to this Georgia State Park seem more familiar than not. Here the deer and raccoon are so accustomed to sharing their island, they stroll through yards and flower beds unperturbed. Alligators bask on the golf courses. The most skittish creatures are likely the feral cats, which are fed and tended to by the locals.

Of course there are exceptions.

When I ask the waitress at the Sand Bar about her holidays, she says they were good. "I had raccoon for the first time," she adds.

"Raccoon?"

"My friend made it." She pauses with her tray on her hip and nods. "It wasn't bad, but I couldn't get past the fact it was raccoon."

"Raccoon?"

"She boils it first and then bakes it in a sauce."

"Like spaghetti sauce?"

"Brown sauce. It was real tender, but I kept thinking of furry animals and couldn't eat more than a bite." She moves away to retrieve our order from the kitchen.

Around the Block in Dublin!

2011-09-20T12:45:00.000-07:00

Come join us March 25-31, 2012

for a whirlwind of writing, touring, and sociability

in Ireland's vibrant historic and literary capital!

We will stay in the heart of Dublin at The Charles Stewart Guesthouse on Parnell Square. Named for Patriot Charles Stewart Parnell, this Georgian house was the birthplace of the poet Oliver St.John Gogarty, pal of James Joyce.

The Garden of Remembrance is across the street.

The Dublin Writers Museum is around the Square.

Our Summer Writing Classes

2011-05-22T16:00:00.000-07:00

Lake Chautauqua from the porch of Hotel Lenhart

Here in Richmond, VA, the temperature hit 90 today, and the air is filled with the scent of honeysuckle. It's been a lovely May, a great pre-cursor to Summer.

Once again, Liz, Tracy, and I will return to Chautauqua County in July for a week of writing workshops. Although every Around the Block Writing Workshop is an adventure for us, this year we are adding more new elements. This year our classes will meet July 18 - 22 in the historic Hotel Lenhart Dining Room at Bemus Point, New York.

It does take some coordination to pull our classes together from our three different parts of the country, but we're happy with our results! Here they are:

Monday, July 18 -- Out of the Nest: The Free Fall of Writing by Tracy
Many of us like to feel we are in control, but good writing requires that we let go and allow the words to take control of us, especially in the drafting stages. In this class, we will revel in the joy of stepping out of inspiration’s way.

Tuesday, July 19 -- So To Speak: From the Poet’s Toy Box by Liz
Whether crafting a poem, writing a prose vignette or describing a fictional character or place—even when we’re just excitedly relating a story to a friend—we all use figurative language to enliven our narrative voice. Come play with various toys usually stowed in the poet’s toy box—a few figures of speech and devices to amplify sound and rhythm—and see how these can be used to enhance your poems, proems or poetic prose pieces.

Wednesday, July 20 -- Hero Worship by Sara
Whether writing memoirs or creating sympathetic characters, we sometimes depict humans as being a little too good to be true. Today’s class will study real life “heroes” to guide us in writing about people who are both flawed and likeable.

Thursday, July 21 -- Wooing the Muse, Part One
Our tempting menu for this class of tricks to inspire ideas good enough to write: “Literary Mad Libs,” “Food, Glorious Food,” and “Monologue: When One Voice Is Better than Two.”

Friday, July 22 -- Wooing the Muse, Part Two
Another day, a brand new menu of idea inspiration: “Putting Gossip To Good Use,” “What’s the Attraction?” and “Recipe for Baking a Poem.” Get ‘em while they’re hot!

Once again we look forward to seeing our writing friends and to meeting new writers. We anticipate our time together and our time with friends in the Creative Energy Workshops at Morning Glory Inn in Bemus Point. (Email us at info@writearoundtheblock.org for details.)

In short, we look forward to Summer, and wish the same for you.

Up Next

2011-03-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

Come Join Us July 18-22!

Around the Block returns to Chautauqua County for a week of writing workshops in the lovely Hotel Lenhart at Bemus Point, New York. We will meet every afternoon from 1 to 3 p.m. for sessions in poetry, memoir, and fiction. ($25/day or $110/five-day week.)

Details on specific classes and activities to be announced soon.

Day 6: Andy Sachar on The Arts/ Jamaica

2011-02-26T20:56:00.000-08:00

The view from Calabash House looking toward the road by Sherwood Brown

Art generally pops into being on its own in Treasure Beach. Flowering trees are currently showing red, orange, blue, white, yellow and pink. The sea is all turquoise blues and beach glass greens. And so on.

The women's cooperative down the road and off to the right sells carvings, clothing and other crafts from local artists, and hosts art classes for the community. Over by the market, a pair of teenage drummers perform an incredible duet, all smiles and pride. Calabash House itself is awash with its mosaics and paintings.

And then there's Sherwood Brown. While the rest of us are up on the veranda writing and laughing and making sounds of awe in class, Sherwood grabs his hat, walks outside with his paint brushes, paper, and the big enamel pan he uses as a water color palette, and comes back every day with a painting.

The view from the hammocks at Calabash House by Sherwood Brown

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Day 5: Kathleen Worrell's Ode to Calabash Dining

2011-02-25T19:24:00.000-08:00

What about the food? Has anyone talked about the food? That stunning bouquet of colors that Suzett arranges on our breakfast table: purple of star apples, pale pineapple, rose colored watermelon, the coral and orange of papaya and mango, creamy bananas. The richness of ackee scrambled with onions and peppers (ackee is a Jamaican fruit that is a buttery yellow with a large purple-black seed when opened. And you never eat it when unopened, or it will be your last meal). There is the exotic design of dinner: white meaty king fish with rice cooked in coconut milk and thyme, glistening jerked pork and rice and beans, peppery beef that falls apart on the tongue, the local green, callaloo, luscious salads of crisp green lettuce and rosy beetroot. And we still have two more days to go.

Day 4 in Photos

2011-02-24T19:22:00.000-08:00

Our Breakfast

Our Painters and Writers

Our Shoppers

Our Flora and Fauna

Day 3: Gayle Marano-Brown's "Sunset Haven"

2011-02-23T18:50:00.000-08:00

As the brilliant warm day gives way to dusk, we watch with rapt wonder the soulful Jamaican sunsets -- each glorious, all encompassing, and beyond awe. The azure Caribbean Sea is lit with gold, orange, yellow, and pink, while cloud formations appear to paint the sky. Doesn't this beauty abound all over the globe, you might ask.

Yah, mon, but Jamaica's got the edge on Soul. Especially at the Calabash House.

by Gayle Marano-Brown

Day 2: Up the Black River

2011-02-22T18:27:00.000-08:00

Flora

This is such a wonderful experience! Challenging writing workshops in the mornings and wonderful adventures in the afternoons. Our group is so energizing because everyone brings such rich personal histories with them and as we share with each other, I find myself inspired to dig deeper and to write better. Then, the fun and laughter of our excursions --- walking down the road to the little shop for sodas, boating across the seas to the Black River with crocodiles and egrets to admire along the way --- dinners around the long table on the back veranda with the sound of the waves washing the shores behind us --- my senses are full and I feel myself letting go of all the tensions of work and responsibility. Watching Flora, our companion dog this afternoon in the launch as we cruised the Black River, her nose high and ears forward, eagerly searching the banks for crocodiles, made me realize how much I need to live more in the moment, how we all must relish every second that we have on this earth. And it's only Tuesday! I can't wait to see what Wednesday brings! Thank you Tracy, Liz, and Sara. You said it would be great and it really, truly, is.

--Nancy Shumaker

Day 1 at Calabash House, Treasure Beach by Liz Abrams-Morley

2011-02-21T14:22:00.001-08:00

Our View

Our Writers

This morning, after a sumptuous traditional Jamaican breakfast and the best coffee in the world, we all gathered on the porch overlooking the sea for our first workshop meeting. Those who traveled here from Virginia and Texas, Georgia, California were joined by two who are lucky enough to live here while Tracy led us all through writing prompts which focused on the value, the craft, the art and joy of asking questions.

Late afternoon now. Suzette, our lovely cook, sings as she prepares dinner in the kitchen. We sit and write, paint or just stare out at our host, Elizabeth’s bright hued gardens, watch butterflies and listen to the waves lap the sand. Questions that settle in my mind at this end of the day are simple: Why would anyone ever want to leave this place? How am I going to manage to leave when the time comes? What further adventures, inspirations, moments of awe are yet to come?

From the Grandiosa Hotel

2011-02-20T09:15:00.000-08:00

After a relaxing night in Montego Bay, today we head to Calabash House for a wonderful week of Writing, Writing, Writing.

It's All Good

2010-08-21T20:08:00.000-07:00

July ATB Reading at Wonderments Wine Shop, Findley Lake, NY.

I'm on Jekyll Island at the moment, and it is a mess. Heavy equipment zips across Beachview Drive to complete The Great Dunes Park in a timely manner. There is planting of palms and pines galore, and our very small shopping district is being torn down to make way for a newer, classier one. The entry onto the island is being re-routed in a semi-circular fashion, and the shops, businesses, and our local P.O. are being stuffed into mobile, metal housing for the duration of our progress. At least they face the ocean.

For as much grumbling as we may do, we all trust that every bit of improvement will be well worth the wait. It will live up to the new slogan for Jekyll's siege of construction: It's All Good.

Right now I'm feeling much the same way about Around the Block. The dust is flying around us, too, at the moment. Except for that brief wondrous week or weekend when we come together and meet up with real live students, Liz, Tracy, and I are always in three different places, doing three different things in three different ways. This fall Tracy has taken on a very special teaching assignment in California, and Liz and I will be doing our stints of Around the Block without her. Which requires a little shifting around, a little moving, a few more orange construction cones.

Here's the plan: Liz will have the month of September to work with you all, and I will have November. In October, Liz will spend the first two weeks with what she calls her Digging Deeper Project -- encouraging you to look at your work in a new way. In the last two weeks, I will encourage you to loosen up, to write in short, fast, bursts before we move onto to longer pieces of work. We think it will be fun.

We look forward to having Tracy back with ATB in the Spring, and --before then-- to spending a fabulous week in Jamaica with you, our real live students. Just take a look at these happy faces from our July Reading in Findley Lake and tell us it's not ALL good. We dare you.

A Week in July

2010-05-11T19:30:00.000-07:00

Here's our daily schedule for Around the Block in Findley Lake:

Please note: The following classes meet at Hazen Manor from 1 to 3 p.m.

Monday, July 19th with Tracy Robert
Confession: Creating Drama in Your Narrative

We’ve all committed crimes of a greater or lesser nature. (Oh, come on. You know you’ve at least contemplated them.) Learn how confession makes for compelling characters and narrative tension, and don’t worry. What happens at Hazen Manor stays at Hazen Manor.

Tuesday, July 20th with Sara Kay Rupnik
The Natural Approach: Using Nature in Memoir and Fiction

As readers, we expect memoir and fiction to include a visual world of trees and flowers and maybe a birdsong or two, but as writers we struggle to decide when the description of nature is too much or simply not enough. What bearing might an old elm tree, for example, have on the story you are sharing with your reader? Today we will discuss nature writing before slipping touches of nature into your own narratives.

Wednesday, July 21st with Liz Abrams-Morley
Honing the Image: The Process of Discovery

Many terrific poems and stories begin with a moment or picture that haunts us as writers and as human beings. We learn what we are thinking and feeling about that picture when we write it down, write from it, and see where it leads us. We'll work today from image to awareness, practicing a process which will help us to stay loose, to let the work unfold and to subvert the tendency we all have to cut off possibilities by over-controlling the movement of a poem or story.

Thursday, July 22nd with Tracy, Sara, Liz
Wooing the Muse, Part I

Do you have trouble getting started or being inspired?
Learn how Ad Copy, Words of Wonderment, and Writing What You Don’t Know can lead you into the composing mode. You may attend one or both of the “muse” classes (see below).

Friday, July 23 with Tracy, Sara, Liz
Wooing the Muse, Part II

Inspiration is tough; you need all the tools at your disposal.
Tools like Books of Questions, Epigraphs, and Greeting Cards are surprisingly complementary to the writing process. You may attend this class in addition
to Part I (see above) or exclusive of it.

In Defense of Keepsakes

2010-03-27T20:49:00.000-07:00

Watching A&E’s reality show, “Hoarders,” is precisely like watching the proverbial train wreck. It is gruesome and gory and filled with pathos, but I cannot turn it off. The premise is always the same: we hear the traumatic history of the homeowner as we tour the house, every room crammed to the ceiling with incidental, useless articles of furniture, clothing, printed materials, outdated food, odd bits of machinery, and an occasional dead animal. Often there are collections such as imported beer cans or Peanuts comic strips, and, in some of the more unsavory habitats, garbage is strewn everywhere. With no passageways through the mess, the hoarders climb like mountain goats to venture from kitchen to bedroom. The one cleared seat is invariably in front of the television, and the bathrooms are universally appalling. Then the therapists and the clean-up crews arrive, and the real drama begins.

What turns the tale and rivets me to this program is the revelation that hoarders are generally well-educated professionals, men and women who are successful and intelligent and yet have the compulsion to save every iota from their lives. To save what they have and also buy more to add to their stash. I myself am a saver, the keeper of my family’s past, and I relate totally to those tearful individuals who cannot part with a greeting card or a teddy bear or an article of clothing because it is associated with a particular memory. “But you have the memory,” the therapist always says to the hoarder clinging to her grandmother’s quilt or her daughter’s first baby shoes. “You don’t need to keep this.”

I’m not so sure. What has become of the notion of preserving memories through items passed on to us from our ancestors: the lock of hair or the pressed flower or the letters of a loved one? As a writer, I worry that we are becoming too easily dismissive of the very things that spark our senses, our imagination, our wonder about people who lived in different times and different places. And what of the next generation of writers, bereft of tactile prompts like hand woven fabrics or handwritten letters or even so much as an email to hold in their hands? What will they have to say about us?

I admit that “Hoarders” has made me a more cautious saver, and while I feel virtuous with every bag of old things I haul off to Goodwill, I have also begun to consider the merit of labeling what I keep. By recording the name of the quilter and the year of her creation or the significance of the people and the place in the 1942 photo, I will be saving an artifact rather than a mere piece of trash. I will be leaving a legacy for tomorrow’s storytellers.

Sick of Winter

2010-02-28T16:34:00.000-08:00

It has been a long, cold, wet season, and Tracy, Liz, and I are looking forward to summer. Thanks to little help from our friends Jennnifer TeWinkle, Jennifer Mills, and Barb Coryea,
here is an enticing little package to welcome you to summer in Chautauqua County.

COUNTRY RETREAT FOR WRITERS

JULY 18-23, 2010 in beautiful Findley Lake, NY

Includes:
• 5 multi-genre writing workshops to amuse your muse with 3 well- published, highly experienced writers/teachers, Liz Abrams-Morley, Tracy Robert, and Sara Kay Rupnik
• Lodging, breakfast and lunch daily, plus one dinner with entertainment from the Good for Nuthin’ String Band at lovely Hazen Manor
• Tai Chi and energy alignment classes, & a lake cruise also included
• Acres of rolling tranquility in which to write & a renewing week in the company of other writers
• Package price only $560 inclusive.
• Writing Workshop only rates are $90/week or $20 per individual class.

Winter Writing Retreat in Jamaica

2010-01-18T19:25:00.000-08:00

I traveled to Jamaica over Christmas break to investigate a guesthouse as the potential venue for a warm-in-winter writing workshop. I expected the location of Treasure Beach to be picturesque, and Calabash House to be the same. I did not, however, expect to fall in love with the place.

We landed in Montego Bay several hours late because of air travel delays, and the rental car dealer warned, “I do not advise you to make the journey to Treasure Beach at night. It is dark, very dark, and winding.” We booked a hotel with a surprisingly good restaurant and bar, ate curry, drank rum punch, and motored to the south of the island in the morning.

Waiting turned out to be wise: the drive, even in daylight, was treacherous, but the scenery exquisite. Photo ops rewarded hairpin turns and stomach-lurching ledges. When we arrived at Calabash House, our cook, the lovely Suzette, and her assistant Euonie, fixed us sandwiches, even though lunch had not been part of our two-meal-a-day agreement. Elizabeth Seltzer, the owner and host, made sure we were taken care of, though by no means pestered or hovered over.

The town of Treasure Beach has much to be enjoyed and explored: a reggae club, a stylish spa, shops (including Elizabeth’s wonderful on-site Mermaid Art Gallery) and restaurants. It is not a shopping mecca, mind you, but it has commerce and nightlife. Our first evening there we walked down the road to the club, South Jammin’, and bounced to a band featuring drummer Joe Isaacs, who played with the legendary Jackie Mittoo way back at the dawn of reggae. On New Year’s Eve, a concert at Jack Sprat’s required the mediation of traffic police. Glowing miniature hot air balloons, close to a hundred of them, were released gracefully into the sky to usher in 2010.

The grounds of Calabash House are not grand, but are sweet and impeccable, groomed daily by staff member, Michael. Anyone lucky enough to stay there walks the twenty or so steps to the shore amid a delightful array of butterflies and flowers. I did not have sphygmomanometer handy, but would bet my blood pressure lowered by significant degrees every time I took the garden path. There’s a hammock to inhabit at the beach’s edge, in case a body becomes too relaxed.

And then there’s the water. Our group had at least three reluctant ocean swimmers who were nonetheless coerced by the bathing pleasures of Treasure Beach. The sea is calm and clear, varying shades of blue-green, and a temperature neither too warm nor too cold. Jusssst right. It refreshes you from the 80-85 degree heat; I swam and was renewed by my dips into the ocean a minimum of 2 hours a day.

The rooms at Calabash House are large and artful, graced by themed wall mosaics created by the owner herself. I wanted to lurk through the house and photograph each one, but refrained. At some point I realized the journey to Treasure Beach was about being there, not simply photographing it, and subsequently decided this was a wonderful place to conduct a writing workshop, a place to be.

Anyone interested? We would build into the workshop package 7 nights of lodging, van transportation to and from the airport so you wouldn’t have to make that wild drive, 12-14 meals, a nightly literary salon for those who are so inclined, and a boat excursion up the Black River and to the Pelican Bar. (The bar is pictured in the photo, and is only boat accessible.)

We are thinking about Presidents Week 2011, Feb. 19-26, or an earlier week in January. If you relish the thought of a writing retreat in the warm embrace of the Caribbean, let’s talk.

Solstice: In Praise of Hibernation

2009-12-20T14:00:00.000-08:00

Winter solstice. Tomorrow we in the northern hemisphere will experience our shortest day, or longest night. Yesterday, last night, into early this morning, a record-breaking snow storm ripped up the east coast and dropped nearly two feet of snow on Philadelphia, grounding planes, chasing last minute Christmas shoppers indoors. The city was hushed. Walkers took to streets where few cars rolled. My husband's planned trek to Cape Cod-- a "guys weekend" with a close friend-- was canceled. My courtyard neighbors, all of whom have plans to scatter for the holiday, postponed their travels for a day or two. Today as the skies cleared and the sun sparkled the snow banks, all of us came out in mismatched layers, boots, mittens--warm and dry trumps fashion on a day like today--and we chatted as we shoveled, catching up with each other's lives in small flakes of conversation, stopping, each of us, frequently, to marvel at the beauty of trees or to grin at the sight of children sledding down usually busy Third Street.

I have been thinking this week of hibernation, of all the ways that these days of shortened light and increased cold signal me as a mammal that it's time to rest, restore and listen to the stillness. Last Thursday, the sidewalks still bone dry, my yoga teacher told the class that the winter solstice is a good time to get quiet. Only when we get quiet, she reminded us, will we find solutions to problems, will our creativity be able to bubble to our surfaces. She was talking, as a yogi, about finding my "true self," but I thought immediately of my writing process, about how when I am too busily engaged in my "mental manager," I rarely get a creative piece going, but sometimes, often, on a quiet walk or when I'm soaking in a hot tub, an idea, a line, maybe just an image or a word or two, will float into my head. "Let go of the question," the yogis say, "and the answer will follow."

When my children were little, I let go control and learned humility. It didn't happen all at once; the idea wasn't native to me or consistent with my upbringing at all. But bit by bit, I began, at least occasionally, to operate according to the dictates of what I referred to as my "snow day theory of life." To wit: The day you plan to get done all those errands you've been avoiding, or want to edit that story or need to return a dozen phone calls, it snows, schools are closed, kids are home, bored and needy, and your plans are shot to hell. Slow down. Give up on snapping through the to do list. It was my "turn lemons into lemonade" moment the first time I thought "I'm not just ripping my hair out one strand at a time. I'm becoming flexible." The snow day theory blanketed all sorts of frustrations-- sick days, flat tires, phone lines down.

I woke yesterday and found both cats stretched out at the foot of the bed, sleeping the sleep of the redeemed. No cat nap edginess; I stomped around and they did not move. I hovered over each of them to assure myself their breath was still making their bellies-- ever so gently-- rise and fall. Usually they are rammy first thing in the morning, in search of food and attention, still wired from their nocturnal house explorations. Outside, the snow fell in fat, steady flakes and the wind blew drifts sideways. Whatever we had planned, we were going to have to unplan. "What the hell," I thought, "mammals that we are, we should all be out cold," and I crawled back in beside them and, in the stillness, my mind happily wandered.

Helicopters, Santa, and Family

2009-12-12T12:30:00.000-08:00

I work at a school where Santa arrives in a helicopter on the soccer field at this time of year. The children shriek and wave, Santa and Mrs. Claus throw broken candy canes, and the hullabaloo is more confounding than exhilarating.

But I’m not going to write another piece on being miffed about the commercialism and pageantry of Christmas. I want to recognize what one of my young students said this week, which just might get me through the season.

During an assignment that had not much to do with the holidays but was about community, I asked a group of bright second graders to describe a place in their neighborhood that is very important to them. Most of their answers zeroed in on favorite restaurants, parks where sports were played, and the school itself. The last child to volunteer said that his family was the most important place in the community. The rest of us paused, blinked, and tried to digest his answer.

“Without my family,” the boy said, undeterred by our silence, “I would wander around the streets with no place to go. I wouldn’t even have a name.”

The teacher in me had to breathe and reconsider my urge to say, “But a family is not a place.” And I am so glad I had the presence of mind to keep my mouth shut and think for a moment.

Because family is a place. It is where we go to be completely known, in all our goodness and failing. It is the comfort zone in which to erupt with laughter, or weep because there’s nothing else that can be done. It is where we break down, and where we find the strength and shelter to put ourselves together again. A family may not be one of origin: it is often what we build through years of friendship and association. But it is always where we go to be ourselves.

The child pictured above is not the boy whose remark made my classroom pause this week. This child is my brother. He’s a middle-aged man now, experiencing a rough patch, and I hope he knows that he is a place to me, a reason why I belong, and proof we are not nameless. Look closely at the picture and you’ll see in him the bewilderment Christmas produces in both of us. It must be a family trait.

May you all be in the place you call family this holiday season.

Her Voice

2009-11-11T08:35:00.001-08:00

When I was fifteen, I was a child in a woman’s body.

This thought scrolls through my brain, a truth that seems suddenly terrible since I heard the news about a gang rape in Richmond, California, my home state. The rape occurred over a span of two and a half hours, on a high school campus at night after a homecoming game, with bystanders clutching their cell phones, texting friends to come watch the show.

She’d apparently drunk a lot of alcohol, which was the go-ahead signal for a gathering of young men to beat and use her like a dehumanized doll for hours, and for the rest of the crowd to enjoy and promote it like live theatre. I suppose it was live theatre, but not the variety I envisioned for the world in which I hope to grow old.

When I was fifteen, it was 1968, and I was a child in a woman’s body. I know I was, and so were girls who were more sexually advanced. They were simply children in bodies more experienced than mine. We grew up in the days of sexual revolution; that’s what we called it when a girl could choose to have sex before marriage without being branded a harlot for possessing the same urges boys had. It was the first time in our country’s Puritanical history a young woman could do so and discuss it freely with her peers without being publicly derided if word leaked out. I remember having such discussions, the sheer heady rapture of them, even if I wasn’t sure I wanted to participate in the game. Having that choice was the purview of an individual female in my generation, and rape was something cavemen chose, in theory, at least. In practice? Rape did not disappear. Rape has never disappeared, despite our hard won steps toward enlightenment and equality.

There are cavemen still among us, but it’s difficult to fathom why or how. So much has transpired since the dawn of our kind: language, literature, art, music, science, medicine, hygiene, philosophy, psychology, civil rights and equal opportunity legislation. Why would young men act so flagrantly against the cultural and intellectual advances of our species? What would drive them to violate bodies that are the bearers of human life?

I asked the smartest man I know, respect and love, and he thinks the internet, its bottomless grab-bag of pornography, revitalized the myth my generation sought to eradicate, of women as objects for the taking, and sex as something procured. The net has supplied a lightning bolt for the prostrate monster of misogyny. It was almost on its way out, folks, but now, it’s alive! Alive with sadism, masochism, bondage, domination, rough sex, violent sex, snuff videos, bored and belligerent spouses looking for more excitement than marriage provides, singles staying that way because the fantasies are limitless, teenagers writhing in parochial school uniforms, and, lest we forget, bestiality is there, too. Those animals don’t have the brainpower we supposedly do, and I am loath to imagine them victimized, without having intelligible voices to raise against savages.

The victim of the crime in Richmond was fifteen years old, a child in a woman’s body. I wonder what she will say when she finds her voice, when she finally recovers—and I pray that she does—from the savagery visited upon her.

And what about those of us horrified at the image of young men huddled over cell phones, feverishly texting news and photographs of a gang rape in progress, and not one of them calling for help? What shall we say with our voices?

Writing Prompts

2009-10-30T14:36:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween from my
younger, sweeter self.

Photographs are my favorite prompts for writing students. Look closely, I always instruct. Consider not only the occasion for this photo, but the interaction of people, both the obvious subjects and those caught in the background. Look for those small details that hint at a time and a place. Speculate on their lives, their moods, their expectations.

When I came across two loose Halloween photos in a stack of old files the other day, I decided to practice what I preach. There I am as a witch, sitting with Paul and Michelle in their authentic garb from India. Paul wears a turban and Michelle looks impossibly young. The other photo is of Ray and Sondra, dressed in silk kimonos and playing one of my guessing games – also involving photos. Ray holds a lit cigarette in one hand and a lit candle in the other. Sondra holds pen and paper. Both of them smile for the camera.

This Halloween Party is at the Roundhouse, our very first house, and the exposed brick wall behind Ray and Sondra is the result of long, hard, hours of Tom’s labor. The Irish travel booklet in my lap has to be from 1970, and the slogan on my chest (“I’m Hecate, Fly Me”) mocks an airline’s ad slogan of the time. My costume consists of black leotard and tights, a hat made of black construction paper, and crepe paper streamers for my witchy hair. I have a lipsticked heart on my cheek, and I, too, hold a burning candle.

I could be satisfied with what little I see here, but because I wonder where my children are, and because I am a librarian at heart, I search for the album that once held these photos. This is what I discover: the party, for teachers from Tom’s school, was in October 1974. Our daughter has yet to be born. Our son is sleeping in his nursery. And this is what I know: in less than two years, that little country school will be tied up in a long string of misery that includes illness, divorce, widowhood, and murder.

None of those are the stories I want to write, so here is what I will tell you about the folks in the two photos. We have lived reasonably happy lives. We have all stayed married and raised our children. Paul and Michelle are grandparents. Sondra is now blonde, and Ray quit smoking ages ago. We remain fast friends, and our times together are filled with laughter, not remorse. Despite all we have learned of life in the last thirty-five years, we live with the same hopeful yearning once so evident on our sweet, young faces. Our story continues, and that is a prompt in itself.

Working on a Dream

2009-10-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

Late in my fifties, I have become a groupie. The past two Tuesdays, I went to see Springsteen at the Spectrum, a Philadelphia venue Bruce has played 51 times, each time to a sold out crowd. The arena will be demolished at the end of the month. As a farewell to the old place, Springsteen and the E Street Band performed in their entirety three of his earliest albums on four different concert nights. Though Springsteen was the cover boy of AARP Magazine, having turned 60 this past September, his fans span generations. The twenty-somethings in front of us,far younger than the album, Born to Run, knew every word of every song. Philadelphia, the city of Rocky and cheese steaks only a cast iron stomach could digest, the city whose sports teams, until last year, were perennial also rans,loves Springsteen. We love the way he comes on stage energetic and doesn't stop moving or engaging us for close to four hours. No curtain warmers. No intermissions. A working man. You take your seat and he takes the stage. In a few minutes you and everyone else is out of your seat. Whatever sorrow you brought into the Spectrum, is ushered out the door. Even when he's singing what the critics the next morning will dub his "downer" songs, you are feeling whole and lifted.

The first Tuesday was planned months ago by my friend, Jeanne, the Springsteen addict who turned me on to his concerts, and included our husbands. As we walked out of the arena, singing and giggling in the colder than usual night, Jeanne told me she had heard there were still a few seats left for the last of the four concerts, a week away. "Want to try to get a couple?" She had a rough weekend of family crisis coming up; I've been in a blue funk. "It would be totally crazy," I answered. We decided "totally crazy" was just what we needed.

Jeanne's crisis weekend was harder than she anticipated. Mine was more blah. The seats we assumed would be terrible ("behind the stage" we were told, but really they were to the side, right where you could see every sweat bead and smile and crease mark in Bruce's jeans) were great. The audience bonded even before the band took the stage that second Tuesday. The night before, our Phillies (World Champions the year before but still the Rodney Dangerfield of sports teams, assumed to be a fluke winner) had hung in and come from behind to win a pennant-run up game against the Dodgers with 2 outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. If you made that game up for a poem or story, you would be told it needed to be made more subtle to be believable. We were in the Spectrum, everyone talking Phillies, when a security detail was spotted accompanying a VIP to his seat near us: Joe Torre, manager of our rival Dodgers. Instantly the crowd began to chant "Beat L.A." Torre was good natured about it all, understood that when fans are passionate, sports teams and performers are lucky, because passion is communicable. Torre waved and signed autographs on Phillies ticket stubs and then Bruce and the band came out and kept us all moving ("Born in the USA" that night)and for four hours we were all one. The next night our Phillies won another game, clinched their division title and secured a return trip to the World Series this year. Last year, their win came after a dry spell of nearly three decades. I thought fans would be blase this year, having come to see ourselves finally as winners, but we in Philadelphia are again delirious. Phillies red is on everyone. Total strangers chat in store lines about the moves of each player.

But this isn't a story about sports. This could be about writing. After decades of success, Springsteen's entitled the album and concert tour of his sixtieth year, "Working on a Dream." He's still working, though he can't need the money and would pack audiences into his concerts if he gave them half as much. He's still dreaming. For nearly four hours last Tuesday, he had thousands of people dreaming with him. Thousands of fists in the air, thousands of voices belting "tramps like us, baby we were born to run." I thought about the Phillies and those come from behind two runs. I thought about the friend beside me who had traveled and worked to help family members navigate the shoals of crisis though she wanted to hide from the pain. I thought about the story I've been stalled on for weeks and how I had been avoiding writing and feeling miserable, and I resolved to start back to it the next morning. It felt good to get back to work. Baby, we were born with passion; we were born to hang in.

Those Other Girls

2009-10-14T17:58:00.000-07:00

In the past week, I reunited with two old and dear friends. One was a friend from high school, the other a roommate from college; one I hadn’t seen for over 30 years, the other for almost 40.

We all grew up in safe suburban neighborhoods and modest but lovely homes. Our parents drove us to music and art and dance lessons. We did not color our hair, except for an occasional lemon juice rinse, nor did we wear excessive makeup. We were raised to be “nice girls,” which meant the opposite of trampy. You know, those girls with ratted hair and raccoon eyeliner and skirts up to there. The girls who smoked in the school bathroom, snapped chewing gum, and went with boys who drove vans and station wagons that had curtains around the back windows.

Decades ago, I was jealous of one of these dear friends I recently met with because she had huge green eyes and attended every Beatles concert held at the Hollywood Bowl, and of the other because she was lithe and had a cute little candy apple red Fiat.

We went out into the world expecting it to treat us with the deference and care that our parents, in all good faith, led us to believe was our lot. We opened ourselves to love like corsage flowers.

Decades later, there are six divorces between us. We held on in our marriages until we saw we would die, either literally or metaphorically, if we stayed. We were lied to, bullied and betrayed in ways we could never have predicted back when we felt a young man breathing in our scent as though it were a blessing. Back when we believed it possible for him always to be charmed by the way we wobbled in high heels, or misplaced our keys, or smiled when we were actually upset.

There are daughters, sons, stepdaughters and stepsons, and we wish them well as they go out into the world. But we can’t protect them from the disappointments and cruelties of love any more than our parents could protect us, once we left their homes in search of our own.

I look at my friends in their fifties, and I want to weep because I still see the girls they were, the litheness heavier, the large eyes droopier. But beauty was never fully present till now—before it was merely freshness mistaken for beauty. We are beautiful today because we have been shattered, and we’ve repaired ourselves, like those other girls emerging from the curtained station wagons, smoothing their disheveled hair, opening their compacts to survey the damage.

As Time Goes By

2009-10-06T12:16:00.000-07:00

Who knew there were varieties of azaleas that bloom twice each year? I grew up thinking of azaleas as a spring blossom, reliable sign of May in central New Jersey. Pink, white, salmon, purple: their hues varied but never their timing. The azaleas in my front yard, the shrubs dotting the university campus that was my personal park across the street, these flowered each year right around my early May birthday. They bloomed the same weeks as the magnolias--a whole grove of them a few blocks from home. I inherited boxes of photos snapped by my father each spring, my sisters and I dressed in party wear, faces forward, pink and white magnolia petals a curtain behind us. How many Mother's Day albums did these fill?

And here I sit: October in Philadelphia, white flowers feathering an azalea bush next to my bench. My daughter was a Philadelphia October baby, born into a season of gold maple leaves and red apples, crimson asters and bold orange mums. Last Sunday she turned thirty and I spiraled into a wash of memory; I have been pondering the texture of time. Some months and even years of her life have been viscous, slow moving, even gloppy or sticky at times. Now it seems whole decades have flowed rapidly around bends I never saw from the banks on which I stood as a new mother.

Thirty years ago minus a week or two, my mother wheeled her first grandchild, me walking beside the two women I'd become sandwiched between. We strolled around my block in sharp fall light, through crunching oak leaf piles, each of us lost in reverie. Suddenly, she looked at me, confused, startled. "I was just trying to figure out who you are," she said. "I just realized I've been thinking the baby is you." She giggled sheepishly when she added, "I just realized I'm not thirty years old any more." I retorted with something sarcastic, something that indicated that I thought maybe she should look in the mirror once in a while, as if her dislocation had anything to do with her salt and pepper hair and a few deeply etched laugh lines around her mouth. Someone once said we are all, always, every age we've ever been. I wish I could remember who said it.

My mother has been gone almost 12 years now. When she died, my baby sister planted a magnolia tree in her own yard up in Massachusetts. Each year, for a decade, my sister called or wrote saying "Mom's magnolia blossomed for her birthday again!" We decided the flowers, appearing on a spring bloomer in mid-September in New England, had to be some sort of benevolent sign. My mother's grandchildren ranged in age from eight to eighteen the year their grandmother died. This year the youngest is almost twenty. From Massachusetts, my sister writes me that a horticulturist friend has clued her in: it seems there is a species of magnolia that blooms twice a year. Who knew? I need to tell her about my azaleas. We will laugh at our naivete. We will laugh sheepishly, and then secretly long for our former ignorance. We will long for a time when the off-season appearance of a few fragrant petals could feel like a miracle.

The National Book Festival

2009-09-29T17:48:00.000-07:00

So there I was, standing with my friend Barbara amidst the crush of people on the National Mall. All of us straining to squeeze out of the rain and into the tents so we could hear authors speak of their craft, read from their work, and inspire with their words. Despite the rain, a light, straight-down kind of rain, and the long lines for food, toilets, and book sales, the National Book Festival of 2009 was a grand event.

The authors, too many to possibly see, represented every genre. We overheard snippets from Judy Blume, Lois Lowry, Walter Mosley, and Nicholas Sparks as we wove among the book-reading masses. We were charmed by Jeannette Walls’ claim that she wrote her book imagining how a rich kid would someday read it and understand her life. We were inspired by Julia Alvarez’s fight to keep a Virginia school from banning her book and moved by Azar Nafisi's passion for becoming an American citizen. But being writers, and therefore observers of life, we were often distracted by the antics of those around us.

Having dodged elbows and umbrellas to make it to the first row of SRO at the John Irving presentation, we found ourselves directly behind two women breastfeeding their tiny infants. Given that Irving was discussing fatherhood, perhaps it was appropriate, but the people coughing down our necks only made me think of one thing: swine flu. Why would any mother bring a new baby into such a crowd? She was desperate to hear good writing? Or she was desperate to get out of the house?

We found seats before Marilynne Robinson began to read, but it was hard to concentrate when the couple in front of us was entwined into a single, two headed creature. His head nestled against her neck, her mouth scoured his face, and they whispered incessantly. By the time Tim O’Brien began to read, I figured they would slink away. But no, suddenly they raised their heads, rapt, as O’Brien read his essay. The girl wept at every word, and the boyfriend offered comfort by kissing her shoulder.

I wondered about that weeping girl then, and I wonder about her now. Was she the child of an aging father, which was the subject of the essay? Had her father died? I guess I’ll never know. But I do know what I witnessed. The absolute power of writers to sweep us worshipful readers away. And I say Amen.

Having a Hallmark Moment

2009-09-09T15:21:00.000-07:00

I'm a sucker for Hallmark Cards and Kodak moments. It's not a great trait in a woman who teaches courses entitled "Strategies for Subverting Sentimentality When Writing Poetry of Everyday Life." I tear up when I read the human interest stories in the "B" section of my paper. Maybe it's autumn, the beginning of the end of another year. Maybe it's the upcoming Jewish holy days, the beginning of a brand new year in the Jewish calendar. It is a time set aside to reflect back, recognize and acknowledge what went awry, a time to munch apples with honey in hopes for a sweet new year. I think, though, that this jag I've been on started with Ted Kennedy.

"He was the man who read with me. I didn't know he was famous." That was some child in Washington, D.C. I was on Cape Cod the week Ted Kennedy died, was glued to every bit of the coverage. The Cape Cod Times was filled with stories of Kennedy's life in Hyannis. "He waited for his turn in line." The man at the bakery. "He helped us when we were at risk of losing our house to the bank." A couple nearing retirement. "He remembered to call my family every September 11, ever since my boy died in the towers." A Massachusetts constituent. "He was father to 11 extra kids after our father and Uncle John died." One of the late Robert Kennedy's sons.

I was glued to the news coverage of Kennedy's funeral-- newspapers, television, radio. A child of the Sixties, I bathed in nostalgia. Outside, Hurricane Danny whipped the National Seashore lands the Kennedy family had fought to preserve. Two days before the senator was eulogized and buried, the sun had shone on Cape Cod, and people-- natives, wash ashores and first time visitors-- had lined the roadways, stood on the bridge to the mainland with placards. They waited for hours to see the entourage carrying his casket, his family, for a few seconds. They stood in the sun with children on their shoulders, with elderly and disabled relatives in wheelchairs, thousands of "regular people" wanting to bid a last farewell to a man from a family that the press dubbed "American royalty." At night, the senator laid in-state in the Kennedy Library in Boston, I followed his journey off Cape to pick my husband, Steve, up at the airport. Along all roads, construction signs were lit and read "From the People of Massachusetts: Thanks, Ted."

I arrived at the airport red-eyed and full of Kennedy stories to share, but when my husband jumped in the car, the first thing he told me was that he'd started the morning comforting our neighbor, Sue. Sue was pretty distraught, had to put her beloved cat, Sammy, down the night before. When Steve got to work, he stopped in the coffee shop next door to his office for his morning coffee, and saw his usual waitress weeping over the dog she'd lost the day before. "It was a day for comforting people, I guess," he said.

"He accomplished so much in his lifetime," my husband says as he reads the litany of legislation for which Ted Kennedy is given credit. "I'll never do what he did in his lifetime." I thought about all those kids who will remember the old guy who came to their school and read with them when no press corps was taking notes, the Ted Kennedy I've been mourning. I thought of those bereaved pet owners comforted by my busy lawyer husband who has always meant to change the world. "Sure you will," I say.

Feel Young Again

2009-09-03T19:21:00.000-07:00

I did something good for myself the other day. I stood up for a cause. I am not going to extol the firmness of my belief in the cause. This is not a political forum.

But I almost didn’t go through with it. I saw the opposition, gathered with their signs and sneers, on the corner opposite the one I was headed for. I saw police. A woman of the opposition goaded me. “Are you honestly going to hold that sign up in public?” I told her I was. And then she told me she remembered the days when… You can flesh out the ellipsis. She held a sign that had a plastic bunch of bananas attached to it and said something disparaging about our President.

I heard someone yell, “Who bussed you people in? There can’t be that many of you.” But there were that many of us. We outnumbered our opponents 3 to 1. I marched on and took my place with the other members of the rally. I stayed out in the hot sun for two hours embracing my right to gather peaceably with likeminded countrywomen and men.

I recommend that you go out and rally for what you believe in. It could be in support of a candidate or of a traffic light at a problematic intersection. It could be in protest of a proposition or a news channel. It could be anything at all you feel must be brought to light and set right.

I felt like I was twenty again. You will, too.

Remembering Hurricane Bill

2009-08-23T16:05:00.000-07:00

"Bill's Effects on the Jersey Shore: Lots of Churning, but no disasters." I knew when I picked up the Philadelphia paper that the headline referred to Hurricane Bill, which thankfully did not slam into the coast of New Jersey as vacationers were enjoying the last of summer. This week, fleeing the sticky weather inland, scores of us braved long waits at toll plazas and near accidents in New Jersey's infamous traffic circles, seeking ocean breezes and one last romp in salt spray.

Yes, I knew that menacing wave heights and rip tides under the frothy surface of a seemingly perfect Jersey beach day were evidence of a serious storm out to sea, a storm that has taken lives, a storm that is no laughing matter. Still, as I read news accounts this morning, I couldn't help but chuckle, and I wondered briefly whether my sisters and I had unintentionally stirred up the Atlantic. From four states across the country, my three sisters and I gathered this week. We met up on Long Beach Island, NJ, a place where we spent much of our collective childhood, and we brought a Bill we all knew could certainly make waves when he wanted to. We came to scatter the ashes of our father, Bill, in a place that always brought him joy and a kind of peace he didn't evidence in many other parts of his life. Under a perfect canopy of bright white stars, we four sisters shared memories of our mutual parents and of those always barefoot summers. One recited a prayer, all of us said goodbye, and there was a lot of laughter punctuated liberally by one refrain: "No,no, that's not the way it happened. This is what happened. . ."

As a writer and a teacher, as a person, I've become increasingly fascinated by how fuzzy and indefinable that line can be between memoir and fiction. "Any story told twice," the late poet/writer Grace Paley once said to an interviewer, "is fiction." As soon as we have an experience, we start to frame in our own minds "the story" of what just occurred. We choose, like all good story tellers do, the details to include. We illuminate the feelings we want to convey. I suspect we leave out details and feelings that either didn't register with us, or which don't enhance the tale we've already begun to craft in our minds of the experience. And then we retell the tale and it changes in the retelling. What we remember, where we focus our attention from the first, the details we share, are all colored by our temperment, our age or life stage, our past experience, our moods of the moment.

We stood on soft cool sand on a hot summer night, all of us in our fifties and sixties, and each of us remembered our own Long Beach Island. None of us was sure who was right about what year was the year when-- and who was actually on the beach the year that-- hundreds of starfish washed ashore and we gathered them in buckets and brought them home to a distressed, or delighted, depending on which of us you ask, mother. We all remembered that she made us grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches. We couldn't agree on whether the way our father hauled us past our fears into sometimes churlish waters, how he made sure we all learned to swim, was an act of kindness or harshness, though we were all glad we'd become confident swimmers.

And then we let him go, and the man who taught us all to duck under the biggest breakers and back float over the calm rolling waves became part of the Atlantic Ocean we all knew he'd loved.

Nodding Panda

2009-08-23T13:54:00.000-07:00

I confess to liking—perhaps more than I should—doodads, gimcracks, and tchotchkes. I even like the words themselves for being so felicitous. Sometimes, though, I attribute unreasonable powers to these objects of my unreasonable affection, and they become charms.

Consider the case of Nodding Panda. I bought him at Mitsuwa, our local Japanese market, ostensibly because I thought my students would enjoy watching the light-activated toy nod away on my desk. And, indeed, they were amused by him all school year long, at which point I brought him home to spend the summer on the desk in my study.

Now that school is starting again, I have a problem. For two months, Nodding Panda has kept me company while I wrote, mused, emailed, drafted, planned, fumed, doubted, despaired, deleted, and recovered. I often looked to his dependably nodding countenance for the wherewithal to continue when what I was doing seemed pointless. His little mechanical head kept telling me Yes, or Keep going, or That was pretty damn good, wasn’t it? He was quiet, encouraging company, and I no longer want to share him in my public workplace.

But, I will share him with you. When you find yourself doubting the enterprise of writing or your ability to carry on with it, conjure up the image of Nodding Panda. He is telling you to finish that paragraph or page, before you go to the refrigerator. He is saying, Good things come of hard work. He is cheering you on, and any kind of light keeps him going, even fluorescent.

Red Leaf Warning

2009-08-17T12:03:00.000-07:00

When I lived in Western Pennsylvania, finding my first red maple leaf in mid-August always sent me into despair. Oh no. Summer was coming to an end. The days were growing shorter and the mornings were growing darker. Soon school would start and I would be beset by routines and schedules and commitments. I would lose the lovely sense of freedom and light-heartedness that was synonymous with summer.

Last week I read that optimistic women live longer, healthier lives than pessimistic ones. Optimistic women are less likely to develop heart disease while women with “cynical hostility” are at a higher risk for heart disease and for dying in general. This worries me. Not that I’m hostile. Or even particularly negative. I could likely scrounge up a handful of witnesses to testify than I am a positive person, someone good about dusting herself off and moving forward. But optimistic?

Optimistic people are morning people, aren’t they? Not someone like me, who when roused, prays oh, please God, don’t let it be morning yet. Someone who despairs over a red leaf. Hardly optimistic. Optimistic women are the ones you see in commercials. The ones smiling over their first cup of coffee, smiling before they’ve taken one single sip. The ones doing yoga on the patio as the sun rises. The ones running with their dogs as mist wisps from the meadows. The ones stretching and sighing and gazing out their bedroom window like . . . Well, like they are in a television commercial. The only time I smile in the morning is when I realize I can stay in bed a while longer.

This weekend, back in Pennsylvania for a family event, little red maple leaves littered our campsite. “Oh, look, fall is coming,” I said as I gathered up a leaf. “What a pretty shade of red.”

Perhaps there is hope for me after all.

Wedding on the Ohio River

2009-08-05T18:08:00.000-07:00

Marietta, Ohio, is a town filled with history. Named after Marie Antoinette in 1788, it was the first settlement of the Northwest Territory, and its many historical markers honor early forts, shipbuilders, steamboats, and the first white woman to set foot in the place. It is small town of broad streets, lovely old houses, and expansive lawns. The perfect place for a wedding.

The wedding guests drove hours to get here. The ones from Pennsylvania wove their way south and west through Ohio mill towns and farmland, while we drove west and north over at least three mountain ranges. Blue Ridge. Shenandoah. Allegheny. Deep green forests with mist rising from the treetops into the gray, rainy skies. It was a long, wet journey, but one we all happily make when old friends marry off a child.

Fortunately, the day of the wedding was cloudless and warm, and St. Mary Catholic Church, stunning in its size and Old World grandeur, was air-conditioned. The ceremony was so flawless no one could have guessed the behind-the-scenes drama: the bridesmaid’s dress that landed in Vermont instead of West Virginia and the bee that attacked the bride’s mother. It had turned into a perfect day, and we were proud, because this child, this young, beautiful bride, was the youngest of our collective children, the baby we all watched grow up. We had to be there.

Findley Lake

2009-07-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

“It’s going to be a nice day,” Tracy says, “because mist is rising from the pond.”

We have yet to see many misty mornings here on the outskirts of Findley Lake, but we remain hopeful. It has been a cool, rainy summer for all of New York State, and in this far western edge of Chautauqua County, when the sun comes out, we all rush outdoors. Yesterday, Liz and I sat on the porch of the Main Street Café simply because we could. It was an uneventful afternoon in the village and yet people were about. Strolling, bicycling, boating. Across the street from the café is Findley Lake itself, formed from two ponds in 1815 when Alexander Findley built a dam to power his sawmill.

Driving around the lake – Sunnyside Road runs along the eastern border and Shadyside Road along the west – it’s easy to get a sense of those two original ponds. The road curls easily, dipping in and out around two sections of calm, welcoming water, each centered with a dot of island. At first glance, Findley Lake is a typical tiny summer resort: one short stretch of shops and eateries and lakeside properties that range from one-room cottages to gingerbread Victorians. The locals will tell you stories, however, of how they were drawn to this place, how there is some small magical element to the lay of the land and the lore of its inhabitants that held them here when they thought they were only passing through.

We, too, are charmed, and when the sun goes behind the clouds and we take a last glance at the water, we notice two boys and their boat, one rowing the rippled surface and one swimming alongside. They are Every Boys, spirits from a century ago and today. The very essence of a summer afternoon.

On Pedicures and Peeves

2009-07-04T11:01:00.000-07:00

While some folks seek only to beautify their feet and toes with soaking, exfoliating, trimming, filing and painting, I have a philosophical commitment to pedicures. I acknowledge that we depend on our feet to support us our entire lives, no matter how much we weigh. There are whole humans who can’t or won’t fulfill that need for us, though we expect these boney little platforms to do so. You have to admit, it’s a lot to ask of a body feature that probably comprises about 3 percent of our total bulk. If we were buildings, we would collapse once we reached puberty.

And yet, we don’t. Our feet carry us on our way, wherever that may lead us. So I’ve promised my feet that I will take care of them, and that means a monthly pedicure at RoseyToes Mani/Pedi Lounge. It’s pricier than other cattle-call, pick-color-you-pay-me-now salons. What you get in this loft of pampering is much like a facial for your feet. Plus, they use stainless steel tubs, which they scrub and sterilize after each use. My favorite part of the process is the ten-minute foot and calf massage, followed by a hot towel wrap. Oh, sweetness. The gallons of angst that wash away down the drain of that place.

So you will understand my dismay when, on my last visit, the customer sitting next to me answered her clamoring cell phone, right in the midst of my massage. The ring was the first couple bars of Rod Stewart, singing “Maggie May”: Wake up, Maggie, I think I got something to say to you… I used to enjoy this song, but it’s ruined forever for me, because a squinchy-faced, ultra-apologetic woman (“Sorry, I have to take this, I’m buying a new computer.”) held forth 20 minutes with techno chatter, including an argument with her teenage son, to whom she wished to give the old, restored computer, but the son was having none of it. He wanted a new one, just like the machine she was purchasing. I don’t know if I was angrier with the woman or with myself because I was too polite to suggest she save her business for later.

But now I’m using our blog for that very purpose: Wake up, lady, and all other cell phone zealots, I think I got something to say to you. Unless there’s an emergency, you don’t HAVE to take a cell phone call. You don’t HAVE to make the dribs and drabs of your personal life public. All of it can WAIT an hour until you are home or hermetically sealed in your car. Here’s another tip: a bathroom stall doesn’t qualify, nor does a booth in a restaurant.

I have a pedicure next Wednesday. I pray that I can care for my deserving feet in peace, and that you will do your part to protect sacred American spaces from the yammering national compulsion of cell phones.

Happy 4th of July, everyone!

Nesting and Empty Nesting

2009-07-04T04:08:00.000-07:00

We live in Philadelphia, in what my mother would have dubbed an "old fashioned neighborhood." As I walk up to yoga class early in the morning, John and Julie pull out of the garage they added to their row house and wave proudly and Fred calls "Youse guys have a good day!" The man who sports a helmet with Viking horns rides his old three speed bike around. We're not sure where he sleeps but local merchants give him odd jobs sweeping stoops and cleaning windows so we all know he eats when he's hungry. The past few days the residents of the four attached houses that face our tiny garden courtyard off busy Third Street, have all bonded over a pair of cardinals we've noticed day after day in the Japanese maple just outside my front door. One of my neighbors, Brian, finally found the nest we all suspected they were guarding when they'd flit from window ledge to rooftop to maple tree branch, calling and waking us, early in the morning, drawing the attention of six cats who sit in a variety of windows in the houses, fixed on the birds' every movement.

The nest of course, is in the other tree in our courtyard, a lacy bowl of twigs that looks as if it would blow over in a single rain. When my neighbor, Sue, points it out to me (Brian showed Stan and Reena, Reena showed her,) the parent birds become agitated. It's in the nature of all good parents to protect, maybe even at times overprotect, their young. Still the little guys have to leave the nest sometime, often awkwardly, and we all know not all of the baby birds will make it. So our fifth family in the courtyard, our feathered family, has become the talk of the community.

Yesterday, two round, brown fluffy baby cardinals were trying out their wings and ended up hopping around in the hosta and impatiens in the postage stamp size flower beds beneath their tree. Sue and I were out with our cameras and our visitors. Her brother and his family are in from a small town in Massachusetts. My son and his wife are visiting for the weekend and will leave their cat, Rishi, with us for the summer as they head down to DC, to internship work and a summer sublet which, unlike their apartment building in the heart of Chicago, doesn't allow pets. Our two cats, Ukee and Chloe, are staking territory with the interloper and the fur is literally flying. The semi-orderly quiet of the urban empty nest my husband and I have set up has been tossed, probably for the duration of summer. The grown kids will come and go and the third cat will stay and stalk our two, loudly inviting them to play or fight.

When my daughter was little, she spent a half hour a day at least in Mr. Rogers' neighborhood which was populated by hand puppets, a small wooden train and a gentle postman who appeared and disappeared with a cheery "speedy delivery!" This was a place of pure safety where grown ups spoke kindly to children at all times. We lived in a very near in suburb of Philadelphia, an old suburb with sidewalks and a branch of the township library within easy walking distance, houses not large but detached and suburban none-the-less. I thought I would give all that up when I moved into the heart of Center City Philadelphia, that noise and anonymity would be the costs of our empty nesting change in our lives. How wrong, how wrong.

"How do the birds get back into the nest when they've hopped out?" Little Taylor, Sue's visiting nephew asks her now. "They don't want to, honey," she answers and though he's way too young to get what this means, he just nods as if he does, and returns to playing his drums.

Omagh

2009-07-01T11:13:00.000-07:00

In County Tyrone, we stayed in Fivemiletown, home of the ancestors who emigrated from Ireland too long ago to have left a mark. I wanted a feel for the place. A sense of the village and the lay of the land surrounding it. It was pretty much unspectacular: one ordinary little street surrounded by lovely green fields. Reason enough for Timothy Dumars and his children to move on maybe.

We drove to Derry on the wide River Foyle, where our tourguide talked openly of the city’s history with The Troubles and pointed out the memorials to Bloody Sunday. At the Ulster Folk Park outside Omagh, exhibits portrayed the Irish farmers and weavers who sailed to America when faced with eviction, hunger, or religious and political persecution. Many, like my own ancestors, went to Pennsylvania.

Then we went into Omagh city center. I knew about the Real IRA car bombing that killed 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins, in 1998 – well after the start of the peace process -- and I expected to see memorials similar to ones in Derry. The town map from the visitor centor listed a memorial garden, but I remembered the explosion as being in the middle of a busy shopping area. On Market Street I did find a tall blue pillar with a heart etched at its top, but there was no hint of its significance.

I went into a bookstore and, finding no books on the local tragedy, asked for a local newspaper. The shopkeeper shuffled through various stacks of papers before offering me one. “This is local,” she said, “and it presents both sides of the community.”

It set me back a bit to think that in a town of that size there might be a newspaper that only Catholics read and another strictly for Protestants. Rather like Americans reading only Republican or Democratic papers. And it made me wonder if the shopkeeper had hestiated in choosing a newspaper for me because she feared handing me the wrong one.

Back in Fivemiletown, I fell into conversation with the Methodist minister, a woman who spoke proudly of the new church windows. “The old windows were destroyed in a bomb blast. Not a bomb in the church, of course, but in the village.”
“Why here?” I glanced over my shoulder at the usual shops and pubs and houses.
She shrugged. “It happens.”

No where are we safe from violence. Or paranoia. I understand that. But I have difficulty imagining car bombs in the small American towns where I lived most of my life. Nor in Richmond, Virginia, where I live now. And while I try to avoid offending my Republican friends, I don’t live in fear that they will have me killed. All of which brings me to a toast:

Cheers to my Irish ancestors for choosing their new country well, and Happy Independence Day to us all.

Summer Television

2009-06-19T20:11:00.000-07:00

Back when TV was free:

Every summer my husband spends interminable lengths of time watching the list of television programs crawl over the screen. “There’s nothing on,” he says of our hundreds of available channels. “I’m thinking of canceling our cable.”

“Remember when television was free?” I ask, recalling the days when the antenna mounted our roof pulled in the three major networks and one weak signal for PBS.

“We could go back to that,” he says.

I wonder. Our neighbor, who has no cable and an older model television, set herself up for the big changeover from analog to digital by installing a converter box. She received five good, clear, channels in those few minutes before her screen went blank. A technician came out today. He pushed a button and told her all was well with the equipment, but that the local stations were having trouble with their signals. Thousands of people, including my neighbor, are apparently surviving quite nicely without television. Of course there has been an upswing in local crime lately.

And when I think back to the “free” television of my youth, I can also remember rabbit ears festooned with aluminum foil. My father running outside to turn the antenna. This way for Youngstown stations. The opposite way for Pittsburgh stations. My mother lamenting that we would once again have to call out Mr. Quinn, a humorless man who took off the back of the television set to fiddle with those mysterious glowing tubes. My father resorting to a resounding smack of his palm against the cabinet when the vertical/horizontal buttons failed us.

“That’s all you pay for cable?” our daughter asks her father. “That’s a bargain.”

Oh.

Somewhere between free television and mega-cable channels, there must be a happy medium, but we have yet to discover it. Besides, how can my husband possibly find contentment with only five channels to surf?

The Merriest Month

2009-06-03T14:26:00.000-07:00

West Cork Cows

When I was a young mother, my friends and I would meet once a month to talk about raising children or to hear a speaker or take a class: our one night escape from the routine of mothering. But we never met in May. Besides our customary family activities on Mother’s Day and Memorial Day, we were overcome by a wave of dance recitals, band and choral concerts, school field trips, and soccer and soft ball games that required plenty of practice sessions. May was the busiest month of the year.

Today, when I look at the calendar and realize it is June, I appreciate that May is still the busiest month for Liz, Tracy, and me. In between trips to New York and Cape Cod, Liz is readying her latest book of poetry for its publication deadline. It may be a labor of love, but it is time-consuming. Tracy, freshly returned from Italy and her encounter with the toad, also went to Ithaca, New York, for Cornell’s graduation ceremonies in May. She is working on short stories.

As for me, I spent most of the month in Ireland observing how the Irish are similarly frenetic during this time of the year. The farmers are watching the skies and worrying about having their fields cut and their cows out to pasture. Parents are carting their children to Gaelic football practices and matches, preparing them for first communions, and cheering them through the school year’s final exams. There are also weddings and commencement parties aplenty. Everyone is looking forward to the summer holidays.

Tracy, Liz, and I are also looking forward to our summer holidays, especially our July week in Findley Lake, New York. In addition to teaching our week-long writing workshop and eagerly greeting our writer friends and meeting new ones, the three of us will have a chance to catch up on stories from each other’s lives. The stories too long to put into a single email, stories that meander and require postscripts and speculation, stories that will make us laugh from the joy of being together again.

And we will continue to have stories to share with you as our summer rolls on.

Toad Ode

2009-04-20T10:19:00.000-07:00

I submit this with my already-given apologies to Liz, our poet of note. Italy does strange things to people. It made me write a poem. About a toad.

Ode on an Umbrian Toad

O beige spotted rock
Whose skin gives to the touch,
Alligator shoe without laces,
Purse that blinks and bears no money,
There you rest in a grassy hole
Hiding in full view,
Startling those who mistake you
For dirt or anything other
Than what you are.

We, the lumbering tourists, stare down
From our height and fuss over you
So that our landlord Aldo
Comes with fireplace tools
To spare us the unsightliness,
Which is actually what we love
In all that expanse of photogenic countryside,
You with the toxic sweat,
You with the warts.

Disclaimer: No toads were harmed as a result of our tourism.

Secondhand Lion: Part 3 of Our Cat Trilogy

2009-04-05T10:34:00.000-07:00

As a kitten on my Aunt Mid’s farm, Kit slept on the enclosed porch, but spent his days chasing after anything that moved. Birds. Butterflies. Falling leaves. When my aunt died and we inherited Kit, we turned him into a neutered, indoor cat. Not that he complained. He had a cat door to the upstairs deck, where he continued to chase after flying, falling things, and he was well-pampered. When our move from Pennsylvania to Virginia became a long, slow process involving several mini-moves, we gave Kit to our son, Nathan, for safekeeping, and Nathan did not care to give him back.

Now, having lived with Nathan in Georgia for several years, Kit is aging and sickly. He is to the point where many folks would consider euthanasia, but not us. How can we put down a bright-eyed, always purring cat? Instead, we decided to put him outside. “You might as well kill him,” our daughter Megan said as she ordered him a supply of special diet cat food.

“It’s the Secondhand Lion approach,” my husband said, referring to the film of two robust older men who set loose an aging lion on their Texas farm the same summer they take in a great-nephew.

Like the Texas farm men and the secondhand lion and most of the senior citizens who come to this part of Coastal Georgia for the remainder of their lives, Kit is behaving as if he is years younger. He is active and alert and eating heartily. Perhaps he is senile and imagines himself back on the farm of his youth as he chases after palmetto bugs and live oak leaves. Or perhaps, like the rest of us, he knows his time is short and he wants to enjoy every moment.

2009-03-27T09:44:00.001-07:00

My cats are jealous of Rocko's new fame. My husband is jealous that Tracy has a cat that behaves like a cat. "Don't you know cats are supposed to be aloof?" he yelled again this morning as the two of them followed us from room to room practically wagging their tails. I refer to them both as "dog-like cats" which should not be construed to imply that they are trainable the way dogs are. (One of my favorite tee shirts says "Dogs Come When Called. Cats take a message and get back to you." But I digress.) They're dog-like in their devotion to their people and in their demands for interaction with their people as well. But then, my friend, Jeanne has a dog who jumps up on furniture and settles into sun patches in their kitchen.

I'm probably focusing on these overlaps between different animals because as a writer I've been thinking a lot about blurred lines between "species" of writers--about poets who write prose poems and narratives, about the story arc in a script, about the poetic moves some fiction writers make. I've been writing and publishing primarily poetry for a couple of decades now, but lately I've been drawn to prose, both fictional and memoir. Recently I had the thrill of having a story I wrote accepted for performance in a program through InterAct Theatre Company in Philadelphia. InterAct hires actors to do readings/performances of stories submitted by fiction writers. So my story, written by a "mostly a poet" writer, will become a theater piece and will be read on April 27. (If you're anywhere near Philadelphia, do come!)

At the end of January, WXPN, a local NPR affiliate at University of Pennsylvania previewed the performance on "Live From Kelly Writers' House," a show recorded before a live audience at Kelly Writers' House also on Penn's campus. Before "my actor," Lillian Rozin, read an excerpt of my story, I was asked one question by the radio host. To paraphrase: You're a poet. What are you doing writing fiction? To paraphrase my answer: I've always written fiction, but not, I think, too well until I let the poet in me inform my prose writing process.

WXPN and the Kelly Writer's House at Penn just provided me with a link to the story that was broadcast back in February. If you go to this link http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/calendar/0109.php#26 and then scroll down to January 26 you can listen to the show. (The first two pieces cover my story-- Michaela's introduction which goes into her bitty interview with me and then Lillian Rozin reads the story excerpt. ) The story's not too linear, and I do head off into descriptive/philosophical reverie at times. I guess that's the poet in me, or perhaps as writers we each write whatever it is we write in our own distinctive voices and our voices are the voices of story tellers and poets, playwrights and performers or pundits depending on the tale we feel compelled to tell.

Rocko's Sphere

2009-03-24T17:26:00.000-07:00

I am not a cat lover. Ever since high school when I babysat a kitten for a friend and awoke to the adorable fuzzball ripping the curlers brutishly from my head, strands of hair included, I kept a respectful distance from the feline species. They are stealth warriors.

But when I moved in with Andy, Rocko was part of the deal. Andy adopted the cat after our friend Sarah found him as a kitten, trapped under boulders outlying a slough. She’d been exercising to a workout tape in her condo, and heard what she believed to be a baby crying outside, louder than the video’s volume; she searched out the cries, reached into the rocks to fetch him, whereupon he hissed and bared his teeth. I think she finally wrapped a sweatshirt around her hands to complete the job, and rushed the emaciated brown kitty to the vet. It turned out Rocko was white with grey patches, and that Sarah’s husband, Manuel, was allergic, but the rescue was so compelling Andy volunteered to keep the intrepid youngster.

He was full-grown by the time I appeared in Rocko’s sphere, and we successfully ignored each other for months. Then one night as I lay reading in bed, the cat hopped up and sidled over, head-butting my hand, demanding, it seemed, that I pet him. I obliged so I could continue my reading, and after a while realized the cat was drooling a lake onto the bedspread. Drooling uncontrollably, and I called downstairs, “Andy, this cat is sick! He’s drooling all over the place.” Andy explained some cats drool as a sign of affection and contentment. From that evening on, Rocko arrived, peering over my book like the head of a snowy owl, a meowing snowy owl, ready for our quality time.

This is not quite a love story. Rocko is not entirely domesticated. His feral youth abides and he won’t ever be a housecat. When the house is sleeping, he leaps out our window to the roof of the neighbor’s garage then down to the alley, and combs the vicinity for vermin. Occasionally, he hauls his prey home, leaving them atop the bedspread he drools on. So far there have been two baby opossums and a smelt probably scavenged from a night fisherman at the bay. One of the opossums was still alive. I am certain he brings the creatures to me as presents, and remind myself he is not unlike some men who, though otherwise faultless in their affections, have lapses in judgment when selecting gifts for their ladies.

Tuesday When Everyone Was Irish

2009-03-17T07:13:00.000-07:00

I was thinking of my most Irish friend, Darin Kelly, who named his sons Eamon for Eamon de Valera and Eoin, because that's the truly Irish spelling of Owen. (Darin always refers to St. Patrick's Day as Amateurs Hour and claims it's when the real Irish-Americans stay home and watch all the pretenders go out and get sick on green beer.) Darin's charming cynic's eye aside, St. Patrick's Day really is quite the eye-opening festival in Philadelphia. Near where I live, folks sporting Mardi Gras style beads, funny hats and clothing of all types but all the requisite bright green, fill the sidewalks. Some amble from Irish bar to Irish bar listening to music and sampling brews on Philadelphia's version of a pub crawl. They begin the crawl at 11 a.m.

Tuesday I watched as a band of bagpipers went from pub to pub serenading diners catching a corned beef and cabbage special at lunch time. Along the way they entertained those who were simply doing what I was doing--wandering for an hour to see how my neighborhood transforms itself and becomes, for one day, some place foreign. My writer self loves these opportunities to see my familiar spaces and routines recreated. They give me the chance to play tourist in my own life, to see my routine through a foreigner's sharpened gaze. That's the kind of gaze we'll sharpen and write from in my class this summer at Findley Lake, the kind that let's you stand outside your own "usual" and "be there", as if for the first time.

From the porch

2009-03-15T10:11:00.000-07:00

On Prince Street

Here in Brunswick, Georgia, it is porch season. At last, the azaleas and the redbud trees and the dogwood draped in Spanish moss are in bloom, and, unless the no-see-ums chase us inside, it is warm enough to sit on the porch. We have a south-facing porch here on Prince Street, so it is possible to follow the sun from one side to the other throughout the day.

Growing lazy in my own patch of sunlight, I watch two geckos come up the porch steps. First a nice-sized green one darts over the brick, and then a tiny brown one skitters past him. Up the steps, up and down the porch post, and then across the grass green floorboards to park himself inches from my feet. There he methodically laps up the silver-winged insects emerging from between the boards.

I am mesmerized by his effortless consumption. With quick jabs of his head, he picks the creatures off one by one, and while I know I should call for Tom at once, any sound, any movement, would scare the little brown gecko from his feast. In less than minute all of them – maybe twenty – are swallowed whole. Beyond the porch, against the sunlight, silver wings of a dozen or so escapees flutter away.

When I go into the house, I still don’t say the word out loud, but speak instead of silver wings and the gecko. My practical husband understands at once that he must crawl under the house to check the foundation, to capture a specimen or two in a plastic paint jug, to talk to our neighbors about the life cycle of termites. Later, when he witnesses whole multitudes taking wing from tree roots in other neighborhoods, he learns they came not from the house’s foundation, but from the ancient oaks in front of the house. Not that such knowledge consoles him.

I would like to offer some Annie Dillard-like wisdom from my observation of the termites and the gecko, but the best I have is that there is beauty in the bizarre and you might not have to go far to find it. Perhaps in my July class, “Confabulation,” we will capture these extremes in new and interesting ways.

Hot Fun in the Summertime

2009-03-12T18:04:00.000-07:00

Writers from workshops past are already asking about our summer offerings at Hazen Manor (www.hazenmanor.com) this July. For starters, and so you can save the dates, our kickoff reading will take place Sunday July 19th at Megan Collins-Hed’s bookstore, The Last Wordsmith Shoppe (www.lastwordsmith.com), in North East, PA. Our Findley Lake classes will begin Monday, July 20th and continue each day that week through Friday the 24th.

Liz, Sara, and I will conduct one class apiece, and the last two days of our week we’ll teach together. (We pretty much always do, anyway.) Those two collaborative classes will be called “Wooing the Muse,” and explore different tricks you can use to prod yourself into writing when you don’t have us to do it for you.

My class, “Feast of the Forgotten Senses,” was conceived in bewilderment a couple years ago during the holiday season—it seemed crazy to me that the only mode of celebration was food and drink. And more food and drink. And then more. But of course, there I was, gluttonizing with the rest of them. I did, however, resolve to create an antidote, and the result was the class I’ll give this summer.

Sara and Liz will follow shortly with posts about their classes. Check again soon.

Beach Glass

2009-03-07T11:45:00.000-08:00

Writing requires that you spend a lot of time in your head—the Coen Brothers called it “the life of the mind” in their funny, frightening movie, Barton Fink. Sometimes it gets a little stultifying in there, crawling through the narrow openings and smacking into the walls of my own thoughts, and I have to find ways to clear my head out. I walk a couple miles on the beach, I do 45 minutes of yoga, I stage a symbolic cleaning of other cluttered spaces, like my T-shirt drawer, shoe shelves, or linen closet. Lately, I’ve added a component to my walks along the Balboa Peninsula: collecting beach glass.

When I scan the deposits of rock and shell for a certain shade or telltale glint of glass, I have an extra diversion from thought. All that goes through my head is, “Is that a piece of glass? Is that? Is that?” I suppose it transforms into a mantra after a while, the whole act of hunting beach glass a meditation. There’s the clink of the shards in my sweatshirt pocket, the heft of them, like coins with no value except that I’ve found them.

Home from my walk, I rinse the varied specimens, and lay them out on a paper towel to dry. I tinker with them, arranging them like parts of an inexact puzzle. They are ordinary objects the sea has broken up, tumbled, spit out and turned into art.

I’m ready to write again.

Rose as Muse

2009-03-07T03:24:00.000-08:00

I think it was the socialist Emma Goldman who said she'd rather have roses on the table than diamonds to around her neck. I don't know if I'd go quite that far, but the roses I brought home from the Philadelphia Flower Show last Wednesday, placed on tables around my house, have been nourishing my creative self. Our banks of snow have been melting slowly and the area's dotted with that gray, ugly mush. The roses I chose out of the hundreds of bundles being sold in the market of the flower show are a buttery yellow that bleeds into orange and each blossom is rimmed with a deep red. I've never seen anything like them before.

The theme of the show this year is Bella Italia, so every display mimics a place in Italy--Rome, Venice, even a whimsical floral Atlantis complete with pieces from the mythology. My favorite was a smaller display, a created piece of Italian untamed parklands, lit low as if under a half moon. I forgot my camera, but I brought a notebook and tried to find some words for the scent of the varied narcissus blooms, the colors on the bougainvillea. I'd taken myself on what Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way) calls "an artist date"--deliberately went by myself so I could be with my own thoughts and senses. It's a great way to feed your muse, an artist's date. You can take yourself anywhere for just a couple of hours, and you don't have to spend a dime. Try browsing in a yarn shop with all its texture and color. This weekend I can go back to the flower show with my husband. He'll no doubt remember his camera and I'll experience the exhibits through a whole different lens.

Liz

Here in Philadelphia

2009-03-01T08:31:00.000-08:00

March has most definitely come in like a lion, and I'm staring out at what I hope will be the "last blast" snow storm of this season before spring arrives. Spring arrives to the city regardless of the weather in the form of the annual Philadelphia Flower Show at our convention center. I'm hoping to get over there later in the week and share the scents, sounds and sights. In the meantime, this past week has been rife with thoughts and memories of reading, first stirred up by the novelist/ journalist Anna Quindlen. She spoke last Monday.

Quindlen covered a lot of ground in her talk to a packed audience of several hundred in downtown Philadelphia, but she the place she started, and what she circled back to over and over, was her childhood love of books. When she mentioned that she was the kid whose mother had to shoo her outside to play or she'd spend even sunny days in a particular chair inside the pages of a favorite novel, I was reminded of the summer I spent reading and then rereading Little Women to the point that I could get myself crying over Beth's death about a chapter and a half ahead of her actual demise. If you're a writer, you probably have at least one tale of your own like that, a chair or a corner or a blanket on a beach that was your reading place.
What Quindlen said that really struck me, though, was that she believes her childhood reading taught her compassion for others, real empathy.

After a really crazed week of teaching, I ended the week as the same note was sounded in a different setting. A nonprofit in New Jersey concerned with preservation of waterways at wetlands, operating on the premise that the best way to sensitize the public to their mission is to say it with art, sponsored a photography exhibit and poetry reading Friday night. Check out the photographs if you get a chance (they make great writing prompts!) at http://www.drgreenway.org./ Twenty-five poems referred to waterways as places of refuge, of joy, of consolation, detailed plant, bird and animal life, brought back memories for all attending. The scientists present credited the artists with being true advocates. It was a new definition of a political poem to me; my poem's about gather crabs and starfish with my little sister and not caring that we had food stuck in our teeth.

As if to cap off a theme, I saw the movie The Reader last night-- great performance by Kate W for sure. I was less enamored of what the movie did with the book in some ways, but the notion, again, that being a reader means you enter a broader world than you have around you and therefore you can develop compassion-- well, there it was again. So I've been hit over the head all week with the importance and pleasure of both reading and writing. This week I'm carving out time to do both!

Liz

Armchair Traveler

2009-02-28T07:55:00.000-08:00

One of the best rewards of working with people from all over the country is hearing their stories. In my writing classes this winter there were stories from Texas cafes, a Mandarin Chinese classroom, and a Brunswick, Georgia, farm. There were accounts of Depression-era Iowa and wartime London. There were chronicles of Sixties war protestors at the University of Wisconsin and murders near Vassar. There were ancestral legends of long, arduous journeys from England and Ireland and Switzerland and Germany. And ribald tales from Canadian logging camps and South Georgia bars.

Today is officially my last day of the spring term with Around the Block students, and Thursday was my last day for my Jekyll Island students. My next teaching gigs are in April with the University of Richmond’s Continuing Studies and Chesterfield County’s Lifelong Learning Institute. So while I have the month of March to work on my own writing, I will miss the stories.

It was a grand journey, complete with lush scenery, charming dialects, and strong-minded characters, both real and imagined. I look forward to April.

Happy Fat Tuesday, Y'all

2009-02-24T11:32:00.000-08:00

When I was in college, my Catholic roommates always gave up something for Lent. Terri gave up smoking and then suffered through nicotine withdrawal until the moment she could light up immediately following communion on Holy Thursday. Pam gave up sweets, but never survived much longer than a week before she caved in to chocolate. I came from a frugal Protestant family who believed in saving rather than giving up anything, so the concept of sacrifice was lost on me. My church spent the time between Ash Wednesday and Easter holding Lenten Lunches, Soup Suppers, and a Maundy Thursday Pot Luck, followed by worship.

In recent times I notice there has been a movement among all Christians to focus on giving or sharing or helping someone out during Lent, rather than sacrificing something we enjoy. I like that notion very much.

Tonight Tom and I are going to a Mardi Gras party on Jekyll Island hosted by our friends, Jerry and Carolyn. Jerry and Carolyn are true born Southerners, while most of the rest of us are Northerners, Yankees soaking up some sun before we return to colder climates. There will be food and drink and conversation and lots and lots of beads. “No one is leaving here without taking their share of beads,” Carolyn says. “I’ve got way too many of them.”

So we will wear our beads and eat King Cake with the little plastic baby inside. We will drink and laugh. We will enjoy what Carolyn calls our “gracious plenty,” because by Easter most of us will be gone from this little island. Our time is short and we want to share it in good company.

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Hollywood's Big Night--81st Annual Academy Awards

2009-02-23T07:50:00.000-08:00

Hugh Jackman did a lovely job on the opening number, and it was refreshing to see the homemade stage props instead of the tech-stravaganzas we're generally treated to. But, alas, he flashed at the beginning, and by the time he did his song and dance with Beyonce, I was over him, and wishing for Jon Stewart.

Liz and I concur: we applaud the new touch of the old winners inducting nominees into the fold. De Niro was hilarious; it's nice to see him being a human who doesn't shoot people. Hard to imagine Sophia Loren, dressed like Scarlett O'Hara Italian-style, could be scarier than black-clad Shirley Maclaine in whatever life she's living at the moment. But Shirley seemed pretty down-to-earth compared to Sophia, who may be a few facelifts over the top.

As far as presenters go: I loved Will Smith's relaxed bearing, and how charmingly he handled himself when he misspoke. He is still the Fresh Prince of anywhere he stands. I give the Robert Raspberry to Ben Stiller, who made a fool of himself in his attempt to make a fool of Joaquin Phoenix, who doesn't need any help in that department, thank you. And even though Joaquin has renounced acting for the time being, he could always act figure eights around Stiller, who has the dramatic depth of sheet metal.

Oscar, either being inflated or deflated. I leave that judgment to you.

Lest I descend into utter nastiness, I'll stop now.

Welcome to Our Blog

2009-02-22T12:32:00.000-08:00

Because we are three different women living three different lives in three very different places, one of us is usually doing something of interest. Well, most of the time anyway. Wherever we are, we hope to share little bits of scenery, local color, and what we are doing.

Tracy is the California native. Liz lives in downtown Philadelphia. Sara is seeing out the winter in Coastal Georgia. We are writers and teachers. We love movies and a good glass of wine. We love travel and food. We love a good sale and good gossip.

(Left to right: Sara Kay Rupnik, Liz Abrams-Morley, Tracy Robert at Hazen Manor, Findley Lake, New York, in July 2008.)

We met at Vermont College's MFA in Writing Program in the Summer of 1989 and established Around the Block Writers Collaborative in 2003. We hold January Writing Workshops in Jekyll Island, Georgia, and July Writing Workshops in Findley Lake, New York. The chance of meeting at least one of us is good, so stay tuned as each of us shares thoughts on her writing life.