Kristin Berkey-Abbott

"Smash": An Amusing Scarf of Stitched Cliches

2012-02-13T05:22:00.000-05:00

On Saturday on my way to spin class, I listened to the soundtrack of A Chorus Line. Later on Saturday, we watched Smash via Netflix. It usually airs on network television on Monday night. If I can avoid watching shows on regular broadcast, I do. I just can't stand the commercials. But I digress. Back to the show.

I was underwhelmed. I wanted to like it. I'm a theatre geek from way back. I was one of those weird kids who would watch the Tony awards. I memorized theatre stats the way that some teens memorized baseball stats. I wonder if kids memorize baseball stats these days. Or any sports stats . . . but I digress.

As a way to pass the time, this show isn't bad. I've watched worse T.V. shows and movies to be sure. It just didn't break boundaries, the way I hoped. It was, it must be said, a collection of cliches. I must agree with one of the commenters on the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast who said that he saw every cliche coming, that the show did not surprise at all.

I almost lost patience completely when the young actress (the brunette, the young inexperienced one from the midwest, who has a dream, and her parents, visiting the big city, just don't understand her dream) went to the apartment of the director who's casting a show and she's shocked--SHOCKED--when he's got something else in mind instead of talking about her acting.

Oh, puh-leaze!!!! Even I, as a young, inexperienced 18 year old, would not have gone to a man's apartment at 10:00 at night and been surprised when he wanted sex. Is anyone really this naive?

I love watching New York City on T.V. It's so clean and traffic-free. Everyone is polite, as they pass each other on the sidewalks. The kitchens are HUGE and all recently remodeled--at least on T.V. And it goes without saying, that in television New York City--unless it's a cop show--no one is murdered or raped.

One other thing I noticed is that every female on the show wore scarves, every day with every kind of outfit. We saw filmy scarves and scarves with interesting textures and fibers and scarves that looked like fishing nets.

In terms of the plot of the show, that aspect may be the one that makes me tune back in. I found it fascinating to watch a Broadway show being put together from the "wouldn't it be interesting if we did a musical based on ___________" stage. I'm almost always fascinated by the creative process.

I wish I liked the singing more. It was a little too American Idol for me. At one point I said, "A real test would be to see if any of these people could hold a note for more than 10 seconds." Everyone does that trilling, scatting singing that can sound more like warbling than belting out a showstopper.

But I'll probably watch it again. After all, even with its faults, it's still more well-constructed than many a show. And the faults are amusing too.

Gift Economies vs. Treasure Economies

2012-02-12T07:46:00.000-05:00

I have several friends who have already done their taxes. I planned to do that this week-end; I fully intended to enter the labyrinth and come out in a single afternoon.

But it took me more time than I anticipated just to organize all my receipts. Presenting my writing business to the IRS is much more complicated this year than any other year. I'm grateful for that, in a way. It's amusing to me, that when I dreamed of having more writing income to be offset by writing expenses, I didn't also anticipate the additional paperwork. Just adding up expenses made me need a cup of tea.

I've also been writing a short story this week-end. My friend and I took a pledge that we'd have a new story finished by this Thursday. I haven't written a short story since the summer of 2010, when I fell in love with Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, and I saw a way to revise some short stories that I'd written into a linked cycle. But I needed more. So, back then, I wrote one, but then my enthusiasm fizzled when my computer crashed. I still had notes for the story that I meant to write then--it was a story I'd been thinking about since the fall of 2001. Back then, I didn't write it back in 2001 because I was adjuncting and spending all my time driving.

So, I've been writing and been happy about how easy it is to fall back into a different kind of writing.

As I write, I like to catch up on NPR shows that I haven't had a chance to hear during the week. I listened to Meryl Streep on this Fresh Air episode, and I was happy to hear how much Barbra Streisand had inspired her, and later, she had a chance to tell Streisand and Streep says, "We can't know what we mean to each other as artists."

I started thinking of all the artists who have been important to me, and how they have no idea. And I like to think that some day, there will be a person out there who finds my work important, that my work might open a door to a new world.

Of course, there's danger in that. My short story that I'm writing revolves around a grad student who discovers that her favorite feminist writer isn't as ideal as she had believed.

I'm reminded of this Andy Warhol quote that Leslie Pietrzyk gives us in a recent post on her blog: "Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art."

I was also struck by this quote in Nadia Bolz-Weber's blog post: "That’s the thing with the kingdom of God, there is no personal treasure to be had…there are only gifts to be shared."

If you change the religious language to writing language, you'd end up with this: "That’s the thing with the Poetry World, there is no personal treasure to be had…there are only gifts to be shared."

Or: "That’s the thing with the Creative Life, there is no personal treasure to be had…there are only gifts to be shared."

How would our creative lives change if we really believed that? For one thing, we'd write/create what interests us, not what the market demanded. We wouldn't care about building a platform, beyond what would make it possible for seekers of our gifts to connect with us. Could we throw away our worry stones if we believed that the gift economy trumps the treasure economy?

The Memoir as Linked Short Stories or Blog Pieces

2012-02-11T07:49:00.001-05:00

In addition to slogging through Michener's The Source for my book club meeting in 6 days, I've also been reading Lauren F. Winner's Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. For a traditional review, see this post on my theology blog. In today's post here, I want to consider the memoir as linked short stories.

Let me first offer a disclaimer. I tend not to read widely in the genre of the modern memoir. I first became aware of them back in the 90's when every whiny 20-something seemed to be writing their life's story--and frankly, once you've read one memoir of addiction or first job crisis or break-up, there's not much point in reading them all. At first, I loved the idea that a memoirist could look at a smaller slice of life than someone writing autobiography. But I quickly became bored with the lives that most people discussed.

Maybe it goes back to my love of science fiction. Why stick to the world of reality when our imaginations offer so many other possibilities? But the sales of memoirs of all sorts remind me that my preference is a minority view right now.

There's one major exception to my memoir refusal: women writing about their spiritual experiences. The works of Kathleen Norris, Nora Gallagher, Anne Lamott, and Lauren F. Winner have won me over to the idea of a memoir. Through the works of those women and many others, I've found my life enriched in all sorts of ways. Lately I've noticed that memoirs being written have more in common with linked short stories than they do with a traditional narrative that travels from beginning to middle to end.

In my younger days, I'd have adopted a feminist explanation that revolved around wombs and circles. But in my tired midlife, I'm wondering about the circling narrative and what it says about our lives. I'm also wondering if others have seen this phenomena in other memoirs that they've been reading.

Let me explain what I mean, using Winner's latest work as an example. Her book explores the life of a woman who has made her living as a professional Christian of sorts who has a bit of a mid-faith crisis. You may remember Winner from her past books, most famously Girl Meets God, the story of her conversion to Judaism and then her conversion to Christianity, all before the age of 23, if my memory serves. Winner went on to write more books, to be a contributor to many Christian magazines, and to get a Ph.D. in History.

She also got married at the same time that her mother died and quickly felt unsettled in the marriage. She wrestled with Christian teachings on divorce. Perhaps more important, she began to feel a shift in her relationship with God. She had been a Christian who had a running discussion with God, and now she didn't feel like doing it anymore. This book chronicles her passage through this post-divorce, mid-faith time.

Instead of structuring her book in a traditional way, the book approaches the subject in a variety of ways. She discusses the idea of middle ground with an essay on the middle tense in several languages, none of them English. She talks about middle tints in painting. She talks about the middles in narrative.

She weaves these essays around other essays that talk about Christian seasons, primarily Lent, and a Jewish holiday or two. She has several short essays connected by their exploration of the Eucharist. She talks about pilgrimages to Emily Dickinson's house and to a bookshop.

All of these essays are linked together, some more loosely than others, by their connections to the theme of the book. Technically, they are stand-alone creations; the reader could dip in and out and read an essay from the back and then skip back to the front. But they're more rewarding when read as a whole.

Liked some linked short story collections, there's a central narrator throughout, along with secondary characters. Could a memoir work if the narrative voice shifted from character to character? Probably, but no memoirists who even attempt this feat come to mind.

Unlike many religious memoirs, Winner's story doesn't rigidly follow a calendar or liturgical year--like, say, Nora Gallagher's Things Seen and Unseen does. Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis does contain essays rooted in the calendar, liturgical, or academic year, but again, the book circles in and under and through them, instead of travelling in a straight line.

The book reminds me of the early works of Kathleen Norris. For example, her book The Cloister Walk loosely follows her time in a monastery, but it takes all sorts of interesting side trips and digressions and diversions.

I could argue that argue the books like The Cloister Walk and Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis read more like a collection of quality blog posts than traditional memoirs. To my knowledge, neither Norris nor Winner blog, but that shouldn't prevent those of us who do from thinking about our blog posts and how they fit together.

The very nature of a blog gives us a structure. Add to that structure the fact that many of us circle back to connected topics in a variety of ways, and I imagine that many of us have some very interesting book manuscripts lurking in our blogs.

I've thought of my blogs as a source for essays and a repository for a variety of future inspirations. It's only been lately that I've begun to think of my blogs as the rough draft of a book--or a variety of books!

Valentine to Fabric, Color, and Curves

2012-02-10T08:19:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I left my office world of flat screens and words to go to the Fashion Department's Tie Dye workshop. My department donated supplies. I took pictures.

I find the process of bunching up the cloth in rubber bands and applying the dye to be soothing in a strange way. Even taking pictures of others doing it was a balm:

I often wish I could do more with fabric and color in my daily life.

Some days, I wish I was paid to turn cloth into wonderful colors. I am probably paid more to administer a college department than I would be if I was paid to dye cloth.

I was struck by all the dress forms around the department.

But these forms are so tiny--where are the forms that show us the proportions of larger women? I'm not the only one who has noticed this. I loved this bit of resistance (if you can't read the words, someone wrote "Thick Gurls are way better" and "Big Giirl Sexy"--are the misspellings intentional? Let's say they are):

On my way out, I stopped to admire the window that the fashion students had put together. You may or may not be able to discern an Alice in Wonderland theme:

Then, last night, my spouse and I made valentines for my nephew, who has just discovered the U.S. Mail and who yearns for mail. I can completely relate!

My spouse made the more professional looking one:

I made a book with glue that oozed everywhere.

A final reminder:

Kairos Time for Writers and Other Artists

2012-02-09T08:09:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about time in general. On my theology blog this morning, I wrote this post that talked about the difference between Kairos time and Chronos time: "The world moves rather rigidly on Chronos time. We march forward to the incessant beat of the clock. Kairos time talks about the right or opportune time. It's often a more indeterminate time, an opening, a qualitative measure rather than the quantitative measure of Chronos time. In theological terms, we often use the idea of Kairos time when we talk about God's timetable rather than the timetable we create."

As you might expect, on my theology blog, I wrote about the theological implications of these two ways of viewing time. But these ideas of time have some implications for writers and other types of writers.

In my writing goals, I try to keep both a long view of time and a close up view. I try to write poems on a weekly basis, and I'm lucky to have writing assignments that come my way, and usually, those deadlines are within a month or two. I also have a longer view of time: what I hope to accomplish before I die.

In my professional life, I have some control over outcomes. I have projects with deadlines and assessment measures, and I meet them, or I don't. I'm lucky in that in my professional life I'm often working on projects that I can accomplish. And if a project is doomed, I usually know that from the start, and it's usually not my fault, and we all agree to move on. For example, I could create all sorts of fine programs to benefit students if money was in gushing supply. However, our budgets are tight right now, so I don't continue to bash my head against the budget wall by creating programs that will never get funded. I move along.

I have some control over my long-term writing projects, but not as much as I might like. I can create a manuscript, and I can send it out. If I want a publisher to accept it (as opposed to publishing something myself), that's where my control ends. There are many fine manuscripts circulating out there; I don't kid myself that my manuscript is more deserving. It's one amongst many deserving manuscripts, in a landscape of shrinking publishers.

But unlike in other professional areas of my life, I don't move on. I keep submitting. I want a book with a spine with my name on it. I want it to an object of beauty before the reader even gets to the actual writing. I want paper with enough heft and fiber to delight the fingers.

I've adopted a Kairos attitude when it comes to my publishing. It may sound a bit New Agey, but I believe there's a larger current than the one I can see, than the shallows where I swim. I send my work out, but it may not be the right time.

That doesn't excuse me from the work of writing or submitting. But it means I'm not going to beat myself up when I don't get the publishing prizes I would like. I'm going to wish the winners well. If they're decades younger than I am, well, great for them. My rewards will be sweeter if I must wait.

That last paragraph makes me sound so well-adjusted. Don't get me wrong. There are days when I gnash my teeth, days when I wonder if I'm deluding myself. But I've gotten enough encouragement that I keep going.

I'm also always trying to stay open to serendipity. Along the way, I've had this vision for what I wanted in terms of my writing: a best-selling novel, a book of poems with a spine, a monthly column that would pay me enough to live on and provide health insurance.

So far, I haven't gotten those. But I've gotten other things that I didn't even realize that I wanted enough to ask the universe to send them, like my blogging at the Living Lutheran website and my assignments writing prayers and bulletin inserts.

My hope is that all of these developments will work together and that as the years and decades go by, I'll look back and see patterns that I can't even discern now. And a book with a spine would be nice!

Literary Thrillers and Our Modern World

2012-02-08T05:03:00.000-05:00

Today is John Grisham's birthday. Today, he's fairly well-accepted as an American writer, and one of those wonderful kind of artists who does a lot for the community where he lives. I wonder if grad students today see him as a good writer. When I was in grad school in the late 80's and early 90's, he was one of the authors that MFA students liked to sneer at.

I think of an encounter I had with an MFA student years ago, when I was almost done with grad school. He learned that I had literary ambitions, and he asked, "Are you hoping to be good or are you hoping to sell a lot of novels, like John Grisham?"

At that time, I was the only person in America who hadn't read The Firm. I had been finishing my Ph.D. in British Literature, and I hadn't read any literature written by a non-Brit in almost two years. I thought the MFA student offered me a false choice. I asked, "Can't a book be both?"

He said no, and I have to admit that so far, it seems like the rare book that's both beautifully written and compelling to read in the way that sells lots of copies. I have since read several of Grisham's novels, and I think he pulls it off.

I think of that MFA student and the question he was really asking: would you accept boat loads of money for your writing? Of course I would; wouldn't we all?

I think of John Grisham reading Writer's Digest and seeing a formula for building suspense. He followed it--and he was a strong enough writer that he pulled it off. He made a book that people couldn't put down. Not many of us can say that. I think of him writing The Firm and A Time to Kill as he commuted to his law firm job. How many people have dreamed of writing their way out of their current job? And Grisham actually did it.

Thus, the jealousy targeted towards him.

I celebrate anyone who can write a book that lots of readers want to buy--hurrah for that. And if there are some literary elements, like with the books of John Grisham, so much the better.

Today is also the birthday of Kate Chopin, who wrote short stories that seem surprisingly modern for nineteenth century American fiction. I didn't read The Awakening until I taught an American Lit survey class. Even though I knew the ending, I found the book compelling and suspenseful in ways similar to modern thrillers: a woman held back at every turn--how will she escape her fate?

Chopin is seen as a feminist writer and she is--but she also explores race in a way that few other authors were doing. And she sees the issue of class in ways that few others wrote about at the time. Her short stories are amazing in their analysis of race, gender, and class--she does so much in just a few pages.

Another writer who propelled us towards the future that we're enjoying today was Elizabeth Bishop, who was also born today. Think about other poets, like T. S. Eliot, who were exploring big topics like how to exist in a world where World War I had changed the landscape both literally and figuratively. Think about Bishop's poems, how she explored daily life in such beautiful poems. Many of us are writing poems that are more aligned with Bishop's poetic world view--I might argue that more of us are writing poems that are similar to Bishop's "Sestina" than are writing poems along the lines of "The Waste Land."

You might mourn that development. You might say that the Grishams and Bishops of the world have ruined literature for the big questions which it should address. But I would argue that the literature world is big enough for both, that we don't have to choose. One day I'm writing a poem about the joy of tea and scones on a rainy day, and the next day I'm wrestling with what it means to live during the Holocene extinction. The world is big enough for both approaches, and everything in between.

Bleak Houses and Little Houses on the Prairie

2012-02-07T06:56:00.000-05:00

Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens, an author whom I have both loved and loathed. I first fell in love with A Christmas Carol, the pathway of many people into the work of Dickens. I wonder how Dickens would feel if he came to us today, and we told him of the popularity of that work. Would he say, "Great! I'm just happy someone is still reading my work. It was hard enough to get readers and keep them during my day." Maybe he would say, "Hey, I'm owed some royalties. But what else is new?" I've often wondered if he would say, "But I worked so much harder on works that I'd prefer you consider my masterpieces!"

I've read many of those masterpieces, but there are huge gaps in my Dickens reading. I've read Bleak House, but only after I tried to slog through it several times before the year I finally finished it. It's one of many classics where I can recognize the art and the mastery, while being exhausted by it.

I much prefer Hard Times. It seems like the perfect Dickens work to me, with its scathing criticism of industrialization, education, and the plight of the poor. I hated Great Expectations. I felt guilty about that, until I read this great article that explores myths about Dickens in the Sunday The Washington Post. The author says that "it has always seemed odd to me that teachers think Great Expectations is a good novel for young adults. Just when they are embarking on their adult lives, we give them this story that says: You will never fully comprehend the most important events in your life while they are happening. Any plans you make will not work out — and you may grow up to be a jerk. If you are lucky, however, a series of traumatic events will wake you up and show you how insufferable you have become."

I also love Oliver Twist. Sure, there's that unfortunate musical that makes it look like being an orphan boy in Victorian London would be a fun romp. But go back to read the book. Again, Dickens shows us the precariousness of life in Victorian London. And this book shows the plight of women, in some poignant ways.

Dickens is one of those authors whose personal life might impact our opinion of him. He had a wife, but he took up with an actress. He separated from his blameless wife who had borne him 10 children. I know that many academics would tell us that it's not fair to judge writers by modern standards or by our own morality, but I don't always agree.

If you want a celebration of Dickens, I loved this NPR piece this morning. The audio will be up shortly, but you can read the transcript now.

Today is also the birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the first author whom I loved completely. I have written about the impact of her Little House series before, so I won't belabor the biographical details or my own fascination with/yearning for homesteading.

The biographical piece of her life that jumped out at me this morning was that she didn't start writing until she was in her 60's. I felt this odd surge of hope. We're surrounded by stories of people who lose their jobs when they're in their late 40's or 50's, and we hear about how dim their chances are of ever getting full-time work again.

Yet there are plenty of alternate stories of people who make a profound switch at midlife or early old age. It's never too late to reinvent ourselves!

Or, as another British Victorian writer, George Eliot, would remind us, it's never too late to become the person you were meant to become.

Turning Points and the Roads Not Taken

2012-02-06T05:45:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, while the rest of the world got ready for its annual football extravaganza, we watched The Turning Point, which I hadn't seen since the late 70's.

How did I come to watch this movie? Someone asked me if I knew that Shirley MacLaine had been a dancer, and I thought about this movie. When I saw we could stream it on Netflix, that was that. We've spent a lot of time streaming old Westerns. It was time for a ballet movie.

For a movie released in 1977, it holds up well. The ballet scenes, of course, are timeless. Even the clothes, which are so 1970's, didn't distract. The shots of 1977 New York City fed a hunger I didn't even know I had: New York, back when it was really gritty! And look, the World Trade Center towers, just after they were built!

How strange to think how the world barely knew Barishnikov when the movie was released. As I watched him dance, I thought of his character in Sex and the City, and how he never really changes his look radically.

It's strange to watch this movie from this vantage point in my life. When I first watched it, I was the young drama student, taking dance classes, taking drama classes, dreaming of Broadway. I knew that I would never, NEVER, make choices I would regret later. I would never wonder about the roads not taken.

Ah, the certitude of youth. What vanity.

Now, of course, I know that I will always wonder about the roads not taken, even if I'm sure I made the right decisions or the decisions that were right for me at the time.

I wonder if people stop thinking about turning points in the roads of their lives as they get older. It would be a relief. Maybe it's similar to weight loss and body image. Through the years, it's become abundantly clear to me that to have the angular body I think that I want, I'd have to cut my calories to about 900 a day--and even then, I'd probably be a curvy kind of angular. I will never have the ballerina body I would like to have, and as the years have gone on, I've quit trying and quit yearning to have something so different than what I do have.

Maybe some day, it will be the same with careers. Maybe some day, I will quit thinking about career paths I didn't take.

I also found myself thinking about the more recent movie Black Swan, and how I just could not slog through it. Hmm.

And I thought about going to traditional ballets when I was in high school, how I found Swan Lake just so boring, but I knew I wasn't supposed to find it boring. Once a modern dance troupe came through town, and I found their dances electrifying. I felt like I was liking all the wrong things.

Of course, now, I realize that there are plenty of art forms for us all. How lucky I was to have had access to both traditional ballet and modern dance. And now, thanks to all sorts of cable and online resources--and of course, PBS--we have access to all sorts of art forms we would never have seen back in 1977.

Writing Prayers, Paying Taxes

2012-02-05T07:59:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about the fact that last year, I would have been at the AWP conference and loving every minute of it. I had planned to attend in Chicago this year, but I will not be there. Once the main conference hotel sold out before I had a chance to make reservations, I was less happy about going to Chicago in the winter and trekking back and forth between hotels. Then I realized that I had been thinking that the conference was on a different week-end, and the week-end that it was actually happening wasn't as convenient. As always, there is no travel money from my school; I should start looking for some travel money/grant money for next year, and I should start doing that now. And it's a lot of money, and I had hopes that I would be selling our condo, which would mean that next year, I may have some extra cash, but this year, I had to bring a chunk of money to closing.

I'm trying not to kick myself for missing all the great readings this year--and I could have been part of 2 of them, because of publications in the past year. Last year, no readings.

More importantly, I'm trying not to feel sad about the opportunities I will miss to meet people, especially people with whom I already have a connection because of my online life. I'm hoping that we're all young enough that we can look forward to future possibilities.

Yes, let me begin to plan ahead for AWP 2013 in Boston. I want to put together a panel presentation on women writers and how we use fairy tales; I want it to be accepted. I have no power over acceptance, but I can submit. By the end of February, I'll touch base with all the possible presenters. Hopefully, they won't say, "I thought she was going to do this last year. I'm not going to be part of this. That Berkey-Abbott has no follow-through."

I have a year ago on the brain too, because it was a year ago that I was asked to write prayers for a daily devotional book. I wrote this post about the serendipitous way that this assignment came about and about the AWP presenters would have told me not to write for such a tiny amount of money and why I thought they were wrong.

I wrote those prayers and loved the experience. I wrote about it here. It's continued to tug at me. I'd like to create a curriculum for seminarians to talk about spiritual writing beyond the sermons that they might write. I've noticed that many pastors either don't write prayers at all or miss opportunities in their prayer writing. I think that poetry has a lot to teach prayer writers.

I just got an offer to be part of this year's project, and I immediately wrote to say yes. The editor also told us that the 2011 edition of the devotion book has sold out. Wow.

Yesterday I got my contributor's copy of Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing, and Teaching, a book which likely will not sell out. It's a great collection of essays, but at $45, I wonder how many people will be able to afford it. Ah well. I enjoyed writing the essay that's in the book, and I'm happy to get a copy.

Again, I think of those people at the AWP panel who would tell me that I was ripped off, that someone is making money from this book, and it's not me. They would tell me that I need to stop writing for contributor's copies.

Of course, when I do my taxes next week-end, I may wish that I had been paid more in contributor's copies, less in dollars. When I do my taxes a year from now, the condo sale at a loss will help offset my writerly gains, such as they may be. This year, we shall see.

Don't get me wrong; I'm incredibly grateful to be paid in real cash for some of the writing I've been doing. That's relatively new for me in my writing life. I have hopes that money from my writing will continue to come in to my household. I should be a bit more intentional in my taxes and the business side of my writing life. That will be my goal for 2012, one of many goals.

Constructing Poems, Constructing Reading

2012-02-04T07:30:00.001-05:00

I finally got around to writing a poem about Jesus and the modern Lego set. You may or may not remember that I have lamented that modern Legos don't seem to snap together as easily as older sets, and you've got a wider variety of Lego shapes. What does Jesus have to do with this? My brain swirled with Jesus as stumped creator, Jesus being taught by children. As I wrote, I thought about my process and how the Internet has changed my process.

Some of the ways are obvious. When I couldn't remember the specific names of children's construction toys of earlier generations, I didn't have to wait until the library opened. For some poems, I've done Internet research in the middle of the poem composing, and the poem has gone in surprising directions that wouldn't have happened, if I hadn't stopped to research. Often, the pictures that I find spark something that I didn't have before.

Once, I thought I had to have the poem written in my head and that I had to sit and stare at a notebook and not get up until I had a finished draft.

Now, thanks largely to the Internet, I've realized that there are a wide variety of ways of composing. I've been fascinated by Sandy Longhorn's process (go here for an example). When she's stuck, she often turns to books of poems and creates word banks and goes in remarkable-sounding directions. And she starts composing before she sits down, largely by reminding herself the night before that she's got a writing appointment in the morning.

I've been noticing how much time I spend waiting for meetings to start. I should start jotting down ideas. I tend to like to write in the dark hours of the morning when I know I won't be disturbed. What might I create if I knew I only had a few minutes so that I had to make them count?

I've also been thinking about the ways that the Internet has changed reading. Dale Favier has a great post on the so-called death of the author. He points out that "mainstream publishing was never good for writers. It never employed even a sizable fraction of the good ones. It promoted an idea of the “author” – meaning always and only, someone who writes a new novel every year or two for decades – that is limited and deadening. And it was incredibly centralized: the whole system orbited around a close, interlinked coterie of the graduates of a few universities, who had moved on (or, usually, back) to live one of the three capitals of literary English."

He concludes by celebrating the brave new world that the Internet has wrought: "The fact that the dissemination of writing has become so cheap as to make it nearly free, that the classics are readily available, that the wealth of the literary world stands open to anyone who can afford an internet connection, is the most wonderful thing that has happened in my lifetime. It is a great good thing, and while I'm not surprised that the people who stood to profit by literary scarcity are complaining about it, I'm not about to join them. Today I will read some marvelous poems that a friend who lives off in the sticks of Kent sent me, and continue to review the manuscript of a terrific book on massage that another friend in Texas is preparing for publication. I wouldn't even know these people, if not for the internet. I would most likely never have seen the work of either of them, under the old dispensation. I'm willing to take the risk, in return, that I might miss Don DeLillo's 16th novel. I'll even forgo the $50,000 advance that Random House was poised to offer me to continue writing this blog."

I've noticed the appearance of several recent books that explore the issue of reading: how we read, what we read, how to get more joy out of reading. Lauren Winner, who revealed herself to be a voracious reader in her memoir Girl Meets God, reviews several of them in this essay which becomes more of a meditation on reading than a simple review.

For my next book club meeting, I've been slogging through James Michener's The Source, a book that clocks in at over 1000 pages. You might ask, "How did you come to choose a book that's over 1000 pages?"

Well, about 6 months ago, we were reminiscing about books that had influenced us, and we talked about reading The Source--at least two of us read it long ago, and we talked about learning about the Middle East by reading Michener. I innocently said, "I wonder if we'd still see it as so revelatory now."

In my younger days, back in high school before I could drive, I could have finished this book in a week. But now, I don't have those wide swaths of time. It's thrilling to be reading a really big book. I had forgotten.

Candlemas Inspirations and the Question of Being a "Religious Poet"

2012-02-03T04:35:00.078-05:00

So, the groundhog saw his shadow yesterday. Many of us are saying, "Six more weeks of winter? We haven't had much winter yet."

Still, this time of year can be difficult for many of us. The days are getting longer, but the shift is still barely perceptible. Most of us are still driving home from work at dusk. We're still months away from light-filled evenings.

If you need a boost, I'd recommend this post by Christine Valters Paintner. She reminds us: "In the northern hemisphere the time around February 1-2 is a potent time. On the Celtic wheel of the year it is Imbolc (meaning 'in the belly' and also refers to the lactation of the ewes), which is one of the cross-quarter days falling between the Solstice and the Equinox. Imbolc marks the first day of spring in Ireland, the time when the very beginning of earth's stirrings and awakenings from winter can be witnessed. As the days slowly lengthen and the sun makes her way higher in the sky, the ground beneath our feet begins to thaw. The earth's belly softens and the seeds deep below slowly rumble in the darkness. New life is getting ready to sprout forth."

She gives us some questions, along with a guided meditation, to help us discern what we might hope to germinate during this time.

I've been thinking of requiring a bit more of myself on the poem composition front. I've been doing a fairly good job at writing one poem a week and actually working with it until it is finished, at least for the time being. This post by Rachel Barenblat has made me think about doing more, with more discipline.

She writes about feedback she got as an MFA student: "One of my poetry teachers noted that my best poems were frequently the Jewish ones, and urged me to try writing psalms and prayers. At the time, I didn't know the psalms well enough to really engage with that task, and I wasn't entirely comfortable with my own prayer life (or lack thereof) so writing prayers seemed implausible. So I filed the suggestion away for another day. But I couldn't seem to shake the idea -- or the growing desire to figure out how and whether I could use poetry to engage with Judaism in my own way."

She eventually went on to become a rabbi, a move that might have surprised her MFA self. She writes about thinking of herself as a religious poet: "I quail a bit at the term, because it so immediately suggests to me someone who writes the kind of saccharine devotional verse one might find on a cheesy greeting card. And yet there's no arguing with the fact that I am both religious (by my own lights, anyway) and a poet, and that my poetry often arises out of or wrestles with my experience of religious life."

She also writes about writing a response to each week's Torah reading, a response which early on manifested itself as a poem. She has continued to write a poem a week in response to the Torah.

As a Lutheran, I'm part of a religious tradition that has a set of readings from the Bible each day and each week, a common lectionary used by many Christians. I've been writing a weekly meditation on the Gospel. It never occurred to me to write a poem.

Sure, I'd occasionally find inspiration from one of the readings and follow it where it led. But what will happen if I approach this process more intentionally?

The Gospel reading for this Sunday (Mark 1:29-39) has Jesus healing Simon Peter's mother-in-law, who immediately gets up from her sickbed to make a meal. There's plenty of inspiration there. One of the early disciples has a mother-in-law? Where is the wife who presupposes mother-in-law? And the sick woman gets up to make a meal? What's that about?

Some of you might say that it just shows that some things never change, that woman will get up from their sickbeds, even when they're burning with fever, to do things for the family, like cooking dinner or doing the laundry.

Some of us might aks "What's the story behind all that busyness?"

And some of us might write a poem!

And for those of you mourning the death of Wislawa Szymborska and/or needing to read some great poems of hers, I highly recommend this post by Beth Adams and this post by John Z. Guzlowski.

The Cost of College: The Next Bubble?

2012-02-02T07:06:00.000-05:00

Today is the birthday of James Joyce. I've written about him several times on this blog. My favorite post is here.

It's rather accidental that I have anything to say about Joyce at all. When I got to grad school and pored over the list of classes I could take, I discovered that most of them were full. As a new grad student, I was last to register. And so I found myself in Tom Rice's class on James Joyce. What a life-changing experience that was.

It never occurred to me to protest the fact that so few classes were available to me. Would I have felt differently if I had been paying rates similar to today's students? My grad school tuition was dirt cheap. I had a teaching assistantship, so I paid a few hundred dollars a year, could take all the classes I wanted, taught a few classes, and got a meager stipend. I graduated with no debt. Sure, I couldn't afford to use the air conditioner in the South Carolina summer months, but I graduated with no debt. My undergraduate education was more expensive, but I got scholarships and grants, so it never cost more than $1000 a year (in 1983-1987 dollars).

The situation for today's students has changed dramatically. In this article in The Washington Post, Matt Miller offers these statistics: "In 1980-81, tuition, room and board at public four-year institutions averaged about 12 percent of median family income; for private four-year colleges, the figure was 26 percent of family income (see the nearby table, developed by my colleague Steve Steigleder at the Center for American Progress). That’s a pretty serious affordability crunch three decades ago. By 2009-10, however, a year at public institutions consumed roughly a quarter of median family income, while at private colleges the figure had jumped to nearly 54 percent."

I've spent some time thinking about these kind of facts and wondering if Higher Education will be the next bubble to burst. We certainly seem to be headed in that direction. We are at the end of a baby boom of students, for one thing. Five to ten years from now, there simply won't be as many U.S. students who are traditional college-age.

Of course, there will be other students: traditional college-age adolescents from other countries, adults who need a degree. But the demand will have changed.

The larger issue, which few colleges and universities have started to address, is that the business model has changed to something unsustainable. When I was in undergraduate school, the shift from having states pay for post-high school education to having students pay for it had just begun. Now, three decades later, it's almost complete.

Students have relied increasingly on loans to fund increasingly expensive educations. That was sustainable during an age of easy credit. Now it is not possible for many students. Once upon a time, parents might have filled the gap. Now, with a housing implosion and several years of severe recession, that solution won't work either.

Maybe we are about to enter a golden age of innovation--that's a possible scenario of what might happen when the old ways quit working. My apocalyptic imagination often thinks of darker dramas.

I have a vested interest, of course. I work in higher ed, and it has occurred to me that it might be time to come up with a back-up plan, in case the whole bubble pops, and I can't even find adjunct work.

I have friends and colleagues who assure me that the future could never get that grim. Surely with my Ph.D. and years of teaching English classes of all sorts, I'll always be able to find some kind of work.

But longtime readers of this blog know that I'm haunted by Detroit automakers and newspaper journalists and all sorts of other workers who assumed they were part of American institutions that would not be allowed to fail--and then, they failed.

We hear a lot of politicians bellowing about saving the middle class. But I suspect that for most of us in the tenuous middle-class, it will simply be up to each of us as individuals to re-invent ourselves, perhaps several times.

I got a wondrous box of books yesterday. Among the haul: the latest books by Julia Cameron and Martha Beck. I'll report more in the coming weeks as I read them.

In the meantime, I have a short story to write. Two weeks ago, I made a pact with a writer friend of mine who's feeling a lack of focus. We said that by Feb. 16, we'd each have a rough draft of a short story. It has to be a new story, not a re-worked story.

I have a writer friend of a different sort (her tastes run to academic writing) who is thinking of blogs and e-books; she wants to know what I know. Perhaps I'll start to write it down; I think there's a market out there for people who need to come up to speed on social networking and electronic/technological opportunities, but who are easily spooked by it all.

Of course, some people (like Ewan Morrison in this article in The Guardian) would tell us that all this publishing by way of new technology is the next bubble which will pop at some future point.

Maybe I should just stop thinking about bubbles and what will pop next. Maybe I should just follow my loves and passions and trust that they'll lead me in interesting directions. Maybe I should resist my urge to overplan, to create not just one back-up plan, but 5 or 6. After all, it was a happy accident that couldn't have been forestalled by 10 back-up plans that led me to that fateful class (and eventual MA thesis) on James Joyce.

Maybe at midlife, I'll commit to serendipity.

Saint Brigid, Saint Langston, Saint Miss Jean Brodie, and Me

2012-02-01T05:38:00.000-05:00

Today is the feast day of St. Brigid, a patron saint of poets, one of those medieval women who was able to accomplish amazing things, despite the fact that she lived in a patriarchal culture that didn't have things upon which I rely, like running water and electricity. She seemed to have no trouble living a balanced, integrated life. Why do I find it so hard to achieve balance?

At this post on my theology blog, I wrote: "Of course, I know Brigid across a space of centuries, through the gauze of hagiography and legend. If Brigid could speak, what would she say? Would she tell us of the sleepless nights where she wondered how she was going to find enough food, enough contributions, to keep her religious orders afloat? Would she bemoan all her administrative duties, which sucked away so much energy, when all she really wanted to do was to illuminate manuscripts?"

Yesterday I went back to finish reading the David Bowie article in Rolling Stone that my administrative duties kept me from completing on Monday. Thank goodness I don't have many days like Monday!

I was struck by the ending of the article, where the writer claims that David Bowie did more to change rock music than anyone before or since. Hmm. He also claims that David Bowie did much to open up society, to make it easier for all of us outcasts to be who we authentically are. Intriguing.

I will leave aside the discussion of who did more to change rock music, but I will say that the author makes a good case for Bowie; I can't link to the article, alas--you'll have to read it the old-fashioned way, on paper, unless you already subscribe to the magazine.

I woke up this morning thinking about which poet had done the most to change poetry. I thought about Wordsworth and Whitman and all the 19th century poets who took giant leaps in terms of making the personal a suitable subject for poetry. I could make the case for numerous female poets. And of course, there are any number of African-American poets.

Today is the birthday of Langston Hughes, and he would certainly make the short list of poets who transformed the poetry landscape completely because he came along. You might read his work with no knowledge of his biography and assume that he was part of the Black Arts Movement that came along because of the Civil Rights Movement. Nope. He's older than that.

Along with other artists of the Harlem Renaissance in the 20's, he brought the lives of black Americans into poems. He also fused what would later be recognized as jazz rhythms into his work. He championed everyday people, and worked to make the lives of those everyday people better. He inspired many generations, of all colors, that would follow him.

Today is also the birthday of Muriel Spark, most famous for her slim novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. When I was in high school, PBS did a special multi-week drama of the book (like Downtown Abbey, but nowhere near as popular). My mom and I watched it every Sunday. We'd make ourselves a special dessert, usually involving ice cream, and we'd settle in for some of the happiest times I remember during that tumultuous period that was 10th grade.

It wasn't until later, in grad school, that I saw Miss Jean Brodie as the problematic character that she was, when I finally read the book for a 20th Century British Novel class. In my younger years, I saw her as a great teacher, inspiring, all the things I thought a teacher should be, all the things I thought my teachers weren't. As I got older, I was appalled by the ways she manipulated "her girls, the creme de la creme." And the betrayals in the book still shock me. I suspect that they were downplayed in the PBS series that we watched.

Of course, in high school, I wasn't the most discerning literary critic. I remember reading The Bell Jar, and thinking it was a hoot. It wasn't until later that I realized it was really a grim story of the downward mental spiral of Plath.

Miss Jean Brodie and Saint Brigid: perhaps I feel I'm not leading an integrated, authentic life because I have a habit of choosing impossible role models. Instead of thinking of the students and faculty whom I've helped as an administrator, I think of the religious orders I am not creating. Instead of feeling happy when I see an old student who tells me what a great teacher I was, I wonder if I should go back to teaching, if my life has gone off track. Instead of seeing myself as a woman who contains multitudes, each of those multitudes having gifts specific to time and place, each multitude who will take a turn on stage, I wonder why I can't do everything, all at once.

I will try to imagine Saint Brigid through a more realistic lens. I will write a poem where she tells me that she accomplished all sorts of things along the way, while all the time struggling to create her great illuminated work. I will imagine something that she did that we know nothing of. I will imagine that she will feel sad when she realizes that modern people don't even know of her great work, but instead of her institutions at Kildare and beyond.

I will think about a woman at midlife 1500 years from now, a woman who reads about my life. What will amaze her? How will she see the ways that I did, indeed, live an authentic life, even as I lost sight of that fact in the daily minutiae? If she blogged about me, what would seem important enough to include? How would she finish this sentence: In the last half of her life, Berkey-Abbott accomplished ______________ ?

All Eyes on Florida: Yeast, Egos, and Resurrection Strategies

2012-01-31T07:28:00.000-05:00

This morning, beside the wind-swept sea, I noticed a strong, yeasty smell. Was someone setting out their bread dough to rise? Brewing beer?

I thought about various horror movies and thought about what the sea might be gestating. I wondered if I was just smelling the salty air in an unusually intense way because of the wind.

I thought about today's Republican primary in Florida and wondered about yeast as a metaphor.

Will all eyes be on Florida today? Does the wider nation care about Republican primaries?

If you're tuned in, you'll probably hear a lot about the state, and you'll wonder how one state can contain such multitudes. It is a huge state--it takes 10 hours to go from north to south, and 8 or so hours to go from east to west if you go west from Jacksonville. At the northern parts of the state, it resembles the deep South, but with more expensive insurance rates. At the southern, pre-Keys part of the state, it resembles much of the Caribbean or Latin America. We've got more old people than much of the U.S., but oddly, we also have a lot of the youth that will be the face of tomorrow's U.S.: think Hispanic, think immigrant, think mixed in ways our grandparents never could have foreseen. This state has huge concentrations of wealth which are almost impossible to imagine. It also has deep poverty of various sorts: inner city, rural, suburban.

It's a state I both love and yearn to leave. Yesterday was one of those yearning to leave days. I was having one of those work days when I looked at an flier tacked to a bulletin board, and I said, "Bassist wanted for a punk band, eh? Wonder if I'd qualify?"

Of course not. I don't play bass. I'm a bit old to join a punk band that advertises its needs on a college bulletin board.

Instead, I went to the library, always one of my favorite places to hide. I read the latest Rolling Stone and took some comfort from realizing that even David Bowie wanted to escape his life when he was most successful and when he was spiralling downward. I took comfort from being surrounded by print sources of all kinds.

I both admire and abhor the political candidates and their certainty that they are exactly what the nation needs. How would that feel? I admire superstars like David Bowie who can say, "Whoa, my art and my life are off the rails here, and I'm in danger." I'm in awe of anyone who can realize the danger and figure out a resurrection strategy.

Resurrection strategies: now there's a good meditation prompt, a good writing prompt. Enjoy, as you stand in line to vote, as you watch the returns trickle back, as you face yeasty futures of various kinds.

For Your Monday Listening Pleasure

2012-01-30T05:22:00.000-05:00

I realize that Mondays are difficult for many of us. If you need comfort, I can't recommend yesterday's NPR On Being program highly enough. Krista Tippett interviewed the late poet and philosopher John O'Donohue. I heard the interview when it first aired years ago, and the rebroadcast reminded me of what a wonderful conversation it was. They talked about a wide range of topics, like the role of beauty and how creative practices and the arts nourish us and our need to be known for who we really are and language and landscape.

Here are some quotes to whet your appetite:

"That's why I find the aesthetic things like poetry, fiction, good film, theater, drama, dance, and music actually awaken that inside you, you know? And remind you that there is a huge interiority within you. Like, for instance when I came in to New York last Thursday evening and checked into the hotel, I found out that there was a Tchaikovsky concert on in Lincoln center. And I went over there and I got a ticket, like one of the last tickets, which was two rows in the front, and I'd never been so near an orchestra. And I said, 'My god, I'm too near.' Then I watched them, and all the rest of it. But I knew, why I was given the ticket then, at the end, because it was Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D, and Lorin Maazel came out to conduct it. And then this beautiful violinist, Janine Jansen, a Dutch violinist, it was her debut in New York. And she played this, it was just unbelievable. I cried. Like, after the first movement, people spontaneously stood up and went to give her a standing ovation, and she just held it. And we all went back again into our seats. And then at the end, people were just blown away, because an event, an aesthetic event had happened."

"I think that beauty is not a luxury, but I think that it ennobles the heart and reminds us of the infinity that is within us. I always loved what Mandela said when he came out, and I was actually in his cell in Robben Island, one time I was in South Africa. Even after 27 years in confinement for something he never — for wrong you never committed, he turned himself into a huge priest and come out with this sentence where he said, 'You know that what we are afraid of is not so much our limitations but the infinite within us.' And I think that that is in everybody. And I suppose the question that's at the heart of all we've been discussing really, which is a beautiful question, is the question of God, you know?"

"When I think of the word 'beauty,' some of the faces of those that I love come into my mind. When I think of beauty I also think of beautiful landscapes that I know. Then I think of acts of such lovely kindness that have been done to me, by people that cared for me, in bleak unsheltered times or when I needed to be loved and minded. I also think of those unknown people who are the real heroes for me, who you never hear about, who hold out on lines — on frontiers of awful want and awful situations and manage somehow to go beyond the given impoverishments and offer gifts of possibility and imagination and seeing. I also think — always when I think of beauty — because it's so beautiful for me — is I think of music. I love music. I think music is just it. I mean, I think that's — I love poetry as well, of course, and I think of beauty in poetry. But I always think that music is what language would love to be if it could, you know?"

"I mean, we spend over one-third of our lives actually in the workplace, and one of the loneliest things you can find is somebody who is in the wrong kind of work, who shouldn't be doing what they are doing but should be doing something else and haven't the courage to get up and leave it and make a new possibility for themselves. But it's lovely when you find someone at work who's doing exactly what they dreamed they should be doing and whose work is an expression of their inner gift. And in witnessing to that gift and in bringing it out they actually provide an incredible service to us all. And I think you see that the gifts that are given to us as individuals are not for us alone, or for our own self-improvement, but they are actually for the community and to be offered. And I think this is where leadership comes in at work. And that's why I think good, wise leadership will be attuned to the vitality of a true ethos and helping to establish it."

Through the magic of the Internet, you can hear the whole show or read the transcript here. That site will give you lots of other resources, including additional poems and a slideshow of the landscape described in the conversation.

On Stage with an Air Force Band

2012-01-29T08:22:00.000-05:00

Last night, we went to the ArtsPark in downtown Hollywood, Florida, about a mile from where we live. The park once was Young Circle Park, a simple place in the middle of a traffic circle, a park with several pathways across the circle and huge, beautiful trees.

About 7 or so years ago, the ArtsPark was created in the space. I mourned the loss of the trees, but I had to admit that the resulting park is a thing of beauty. And last night's concert reminded me again of what a great resource it is, as did the Band of the Air Force Reserve who played there.

It was supposed to be what would be a summer evening outing elsewhere, people gathered on the lawn under the sky to hear a military band. But it started to rain about 3 songs after the start of the concert.

Lots of people came to the space at the front of the stage, and when it started to rain much harder, the band leader invited us all to come up on the spacious stage. He said, "And if you've ever played one of the instruments that we're playing, feel free to come up and stand beside us." What an amazing act of generosity.

I watched children awash in wonder at getting to see a concert from closer than the front row. I watched one child spend song after after song doing her own conducting--and then sticking her fingers up her nose. I felt the music reverberating through my body in a marvelous way.

In this age when most of us make music by playing a recording of someone else playing, I had hopes that the love of an instrument might be kindled in some of the children. In an age where we don't want to pay for art, or anything else, with our taxes, I had hopes that we'd come away from a concert with a commitment to art, whether it be the art of park design and the programming that it offers, or the art that military bands create, or any other art form.

I understand that a major part of why the armed forces support these bands and send them on the road is to be ambassadors for the armed forces, to build good will and support. Last night's experience certainly did that.

It made me wonder how those of us who are practicing artists could similarly be ambassadors for the world of our art forms. I also wonder how we could interact with younger generations to make sure that our art forms don't die.

It used to be easier to do that. Now, in my part of the world, to visit a school requires all sorts of background checks, some of them expensive.

But I am probably thinking too small. There are other ways to interact with the young, after all. And even if I serve as an ambassador to older people, that work can filter down to other generations.

But maybe I'm making it sound too much like work. One of the advantages to watching a concert on the stage was to see the joys on the faces of the band members. I sometimes forget that making art is supposed to be fun and enrich our lives. Sometimes, I let my art making drop into the realms of drudgery and obligation.

Today, I'm going to do some art making, just for the fun of it. Maybe I'll doodle with markers. Maybe I'll assemble the collage with the pictures that I cut out last week. Maybe I'll write a poem. Maybe I'll cook a pot of soup for the week. If it's useful, does that count as fun? I say yes!

Raising Bees or Raising Visibility?

2012-01-28T07:42:00.000-05:00

You may notice the addition of share buttons at the bottom of posts now. I just added that feature, so we'll see if I notice the same kind of bump in blog traffic that Robert Lee Brewer mentions in this post about increasing your blog traffic. Even if you're not sure about share buttons, or if you've been using them for years, he's got 24 other tips that make a lot of sense.

I'd been thinking about adding buttons since I read his earlier post on it, but it sounded somewhat scary: going to a website, getting some code, inserting it. And then, yesterday, I thought, I bet this feature is already built into Blogger somehow.

Yes, it is, and it couldn't be easier: just go to the Design tab and hit the edit button on the bottom right corner of the big square that says Blog Posts! There are all sorts of things one could add.

I don't blame you if you say, "Oh, just leave me alone. I just want to blog, and if only 10 people read my post, I don't care."

In some ways, the recent fervor about building your brand as a writer and increasing traffic to your blog and trying to learn how to live in this brave new world of ours reminds me of issues the modern mainstream church in America has been facing. I woke up thinking about all the ways that the church struggles work as a metaphor for all sorts of struggling communities to which I belong: artists, higher ed, and the larger issue of workers in general. I've spent many a conversation in church, in groups of artists, in school meetings where we try to discover some secret to letting people know who we are and what we're doing and why they would like to join us.

I was already thinking of these ideas, and then, on The Writer's Almanac website, I find out that today is Rick Warren's birthday. He wrote The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? which has sold over 30 million copies. I have always wondered if people picked up that book without realizing its Christian focus and then were confused when what they thought would be a self-help book turned religious on them.

I have read that book, and while I didn't agree with all of its theology (it seems to discount free will in a way that makes me uncomfortable), I didn't find it egregious. I also read The Purpose-Driven Church. The tone of that book reminds me of the tone of many an increase-your-visibility books/articles/blog posts I keep reading today.

Here's one reason that I won't be casting away my stable job to become an entrepreneur: I am not a good salesperson. My model is much more monastic: I will quietly do my thing, and maybe people will discover it, and maybe not. I've talked before about Jane Hirshfield's Buddhist teahouse theory of work (see this post), and it fits for my writing/creative world too.

Of course, I want it to be easy for people to find my Buddhist teahouse, which is why I put the button feature on my blog.

It's a struggle for most modern folks, I think. Do we have the energy for self-promotion, which takes a lot of being plugged in, or do we really want to just run away and raise bees? It's not only Rick Warren's birthday, but it's also Sue Hubbell's birthday. In the 1970's, she and her husband bought 99 acres of land in the Ozarks where they raised bees. She's written several books about that experience. I vaguely remember reading them.

That vision of land in the country still speaks to me, and I'm not sure which part is most appealing. Part of it is having space to spread out, and in my daydream, my neighbors are far away and quiet. Part of it is the idea that I could be more self-sufficient, if necessary. Part of it is that I spent my formative years reading books about going back to the land, and that reading has permanently re-wired my brain.

If you spent your formative years reading books in the Foxfire series, check out this Slate article. It asks whether or not today's do-it-yourselfers are in the Foxfire mode.

My grandmother would scoff at it all. She actually lived on a farm, and she remembered how hard it could be. Sure, they didn't starve, but they worked hard for every calorie they ate.

So, wherever you are this Saturday, whether you're building your blog visibility or working on other do-it-yourself projects, whether you're plugged in or tuned out, I hope it's restorative for you.

Light, Language, Beach Glass, and Shells

2012-01-27T04:39:00.001-05:00

Are you experiencing a bleak January where you live? If so, you might enjoy my photo essay that celebrates color and light; it's on my theology blog. Has anyone written a theology of photography? The photo essay is less theology and more a celebration of different art forms and the way the light plays with them.

These are the days that drive people down to our shores on South Florida, and our weather has not been disappointing. It's been rain-free, breezy, and warm. The other night when we got ice cream cones on the beach, I marvelled at the variety of languages that surrounded us. I'm used to hearing Western European languages here, but lately I've been hearing a lot of Slavic syllables--most interestingly at an all-you-can-eat Sushi place, where a work crew ate and talked in what sounded like Russian.

Now we shall take a break and sing "It's a Small World After All."

If you're craving the beach, you might take a look at Dave Bonta's wonderful poem about beach glass.

His poem reminded me of an experience many, many years ago where we took a crew of visitors to Edisto Island, in South Carolina. Edisto has a reputation as the beach in South Carolina where you'll find the best shells, but that day all the shells seemed the same, like small communion wafers. Before I gave it a second thought, I popped one in my mouth. I loved the salty taste, the smoothness of the shell against my tongue.

I thought of communion wafers, which crumble or get sticky when mixed with saliva, and shells, which don't. There's a poem lurking there, but it's not the one I wrote.

Consecration

I stand at the best shell-finding beach in South Carolina,
but all the shells look the same:
bleached by sun and salt,
all their jagged edges sounded clean,
all worn into rounded disks.
A sea of communion wafers
stretches before me, and before
I even think about what I’m doing,
I kneel and select one, wipe
it with my calloused fingers,
and pop it in my mouth.
I slide my tongue across the smooth surface
that tastes of the sea’s mysteries.
I resist the urge to bite or swallow.
I suck it clean and choose another and another
until I have a pocket of shells
awaiting my mouth’s consecration.

Microcosm of the Real Estate Market in a Condo Sale

2012-01-26T07:55:00.002-05:00

As the 20th century turned into the 21st, my husband and I bought a small condo a mile away from us for his mom to live in. Yesterday, we sold that condo.

So much has happened in between. My mother-in-law moved into the condo in January 2000 and lived there until her death in 2005. Because she so enjoyed talking to the security guard downstairs, and because she didn't like not having to work as much as she thought she would, she got her license and became a security guard herself. That job led her to meet all sorts of interesting people who enriched her last years. I'm glad we were able to help make that possible.

We have been trying to sell that condo since her death in 2005, and in many ways, that journey has been a microcosm of the national housing market. We priced the condo very high in 2005--housing sales made us think it should be that price, and if we'd put it on the market in 2004, we'd have probably gotten that price or higher.

But the market in 2005 was beginning to implode, even though we didn't realize how bad it would be. The following years saw us chasing the market down, trying to come up with a price that would bring in buyers. We did some freshening up of the condo as we tried to make it more attractive. Some years, we just couldn't face the real estate market, and the condo sat empty.

You might ask, "Why didn't you rent the place?" Well, because the condo rules don't allow that. As an owner who lived there, I'd be happy about that rule. As an investor in the building who lives elsewhere, it got to be annoying.

Along the way from 2000 to 2012, we were able to tap into some equity, which we used to improve our primary residence: a bathroom remodel, a kitchen remodel, a new roof, a new AC unit. We were happy to have the condo when we lost power at our house for several weeks during the disastrous hurricane season of 2005. It hasn't been a total disaster.

Still, if you run the figures in stark black and white, what we put in and what we got out, it may end up being one of the bigger financial debacles of our life. We ended up selling the condo for exactly what we paid for it in 1999. Along the way, we've paid monthly maintenance fees, an assessment or two, taxes, insurance: money there's no way to get back. It could have been worse. I'm trying not to torture myself by thinking of all the ways it could be better.

At these times, I like to remind myself of a quote I found in Ann Lamott's Traveling Mercies; a friend of hers reminds us all that "if you have a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, you don't have a very interesting problem" (259).

As we drove to the closing, I said to my spouse, "This may be one of the last real estate transactions that we make." Not the last, but one of the last. At one point, between 1997 and 1999, we seemed to be buying and selling properties at a dizzying pace. Now, barring unforeseen life changes, it's hard to imagine that we'll buy or sell more than two or three more properties before we retire/die/run off to a sailboat.

I think of myself as a child playing Monopoly, buying and selling properties, formulating ideas about real estate that have often influenced me as a grown up. In the days to come, I may run a piece on how real estate these days is nothing like Monopoly.

As we drove home, I was surprised by my lack of emotions. I thought I'd feel relief and euphoria. Instead, I just felt very tired. It's been a long haul to this finish line. Careful readers of this blog may remember that I thought we were going to closing in September. That deal fell through, as did an offer in November. That one scared me a bit, as the owner offered our list price minus $1000 and couldn't secure financing. We couldn't have afforded to lower the price much more--was the market plunging yet again?

Happily, we had another offer from a buyer who had been searching for awhile. They had made at least one other offer on a different condo which had fallen through. I imagine they were happy when we said yes.

Again, we see a microcosm of the national market, with some Florida specializations. We've had a real estate market buffeted by foreclosures and tightening regulations. Now to buy a condo you have to have 20% of the price as a down payment. That knocks out a lot of buyers. And the foreclosures make it difficult to ascertain the what the true price of a condo should be.

I thought I might feel sad--I've been very fond of that little condo, and it's been part of our life for many years. But I didn't feel sorrow. I didn't feel much at all. We bought some steaks to grill and then we bought some ice cream cones at the beach. It was a quiet celebration.

I woke up very early remembering that I had forgotten to tell the power company that we had sold the place. I wondered if anyone had told the buyers how to get the electricity transferred to them. My spouse reminded me that I'm not responsible, that they're grown ups who will figure it out.

This morning, I feel relieved. When the next hurricane season comes, I won't have to worry about 2 properties. I'm done paying property taxes on a place that just sits empty. The next round of foreclosed properties can come on the market, as they are forecast to do in February, and I don't have to panic.

I will spend the morning thinking about tasks that need to be done: calling the power company, doing some grocery shopping, feeling gratitude that this phase of our real estate life has come to a close. I need to get back to my writing life too. It's amazing how much time it takes to sell a property. It will be good to get back to regular life, whatever that turns out to be.

"I'm Not Very Tech Savvy"

2012-01-25T05:26:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, I wrote this post, a review of Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers. By afternoon, a woman at Macmillan had written to me to ask if I wanted to add an audio file to my review. I said I'd try but that I wasn't very tech savvy.

Why would I say that? I'm much more tech savvy than most people.

The woman at Macmillan sent me a link to embed, which I did on the first try, and voila! Again, I thought, I am too tech savvy.

It reminds me of when Nic Sebastian launched her whale sound site, and I said to myself, "Well, I'm not really web-active."

Only when I read her definition did I realize that yes, I am a web-active poet. I don't hesitate to publish in online sites, I have two blog sites and a website, I'm on Facebook, I have posted videos . . . what more would I require of myself?

Well, I don't use Twitter and I don't have a smart phone. Even without a smart phone, I spend most of my day connected to the Internet in all kinds of ways.

When I said I wasn't tech savvy yesterday, I meant that I can no longer program a computer. Once, back in 1978, I was part of a group of 7th graders who learned to program in Basic (a very old computer language, for you young folks out there who don't know). I was the first one to write a program that worked that had the computer play Hangman.

I now only grasp the most basic aspects of coding. However, I know I could learn to code if I wanted. It would probably be simpler than many of the languages I'd like to learn.

Once I had friends who not only programmed their computers, but built them. I remember a college friend who took his computer apart and soldered bits to his motherboard so that it would behave the way he wanted. I was never that brave.

I have to stop saying that I'm not tech savvy. When I say that to strangers, they probably think of me as one of those cranky people who refuses to use e-mail and would never buy anything online. I am not that person.

I know that there are people out there (like a lot of the people I met/heard at the AWP conference last year) who would scold me for helping the Macmillan woman by putting a link to the audiobook in my post. They'd have wanted me to ask for reimbursement. And if I had a million people visiting my blogsite, maybe I'd feel more justified in doing that.

I did have a fantasy after my post yesterday on this blog that Arianna Huffington might contact me and say, "If you're so unhappy with our poetry reviews, I'll pay you $1000 a post to write about poets working today whom we should know." Yes, $1000 a post--she gets enough web traffic--she can afford that. It's a sweet fantasy, isn't it?

In the meantime, though, I'm happy to tell people about books that I've liked. I'm happy to help promote the work of authors big or small, if they've written something wonderful. I'm happy to be part of a conversation about books and ideas. It's the literary life I've always wanted, although not exactly in the shape that grad school trained me to expect.

When I was in grad school, you really did need computer skills above the norm to use the Internet. Now, how the world has changed! I'd argue it's for the better.

Writing/Righting the World

2012-01-24T08:16:00.001-05:00

Through a link that Susan Rich posted on Facebook, I got to this article, which would seem to claim to tell us what is wrong with poetry today (today being August 2011, when the article was published). Here's the opener: "The truth about American poetry is that it is in very bad shape. The professional poetry establishment has taken care to mark serious criticism coming its way as sour grapes, but the quality of poetry being produced by American poets regularly awarded the highest prizes in the land and recognized as the equals of past masters is not meant to last this pathetic moment of self-absorption and lassitude."

But if you read this article, you may find yourself wondering if you've fallen through a hole in time. I routinely thought, wait, is it 1982 in this article? Most of the work that Anis Shivani dissects comes from many decades ago.

He's most vituperative when discussing the work of Sharon Olds, and his criticisms won't be foreign to feminist scholars: oh, the body fluids, oh, the pregnancies, oh, the body parts. Icky, icky, icky! He claims that Jorie Graham is incomprehensible and Louise Gluck mired in childhood. He has a bit of praise for Philip Levine before launching into vitriol: "Unlike Olds, Graham, and Glück, Levine does possess some measure of genuine skill." If you read the following paragraphs, you'll find out that Shivani thinks that all that skill was used up in the early poems.

Again, I wonder where are the younger poets? I have no problems with discussing the work of poetry elders, but that's scarcely representative of poetry being published and discussed today. And certainly I would have had less problems with this essay, had it not purported to tell us what was wrong with the poetry world of 2012; it's an essay that explores some of the problems of the poetry world of the late 1970's and 1980's, although I could write a compelling case that those poems were written in response to some of the problems of previous poetry worlds. Sure, we got a lot of menstruation and childbirth poems, but to readers who had never seen those issues discussed in a poem before, it was thrilling before it got tiresome.

If your reading time is limited, don't waste it by reading this article. Instead, go to this interview with Nikky Finney, a poet whom Anis Shivani might have included in his discussion of "today's poetry world." He'd probably find reasons to hate her too, but I found much inspiration in this interview. For those of you who teach and who wonder if you make a difference, read this interview: the work you do as a teacher is vital and important!

Finney talks about her childhood and about her parents, who had good jobs, but who were willing to sacrifice if that would speed the pace of social justice and reform: "I understood very early in my life how important it was to do your day job, whether a plumber or lawyer or a teacher, and also get ready for your other job, that of being willing to put your comfort and safety on the line. There were kind, smart, incredibly loving people all around me who refused to sleep until they did something to try and change some of the strictures that were present in our community. If I ever became a writer I promised myself I would never forget this."

She's a political writer, no doubt, but she also understands the difference between polemic and art: "I am absolutely politically charged in my life, but I’m also trying to take those things that might be seen as rhetorical, as polemical, and send them through my body and my spirit, and my artistic net, so that when that particular idea comes out through the other side of me it has shape of something both beautiful and impactful, and the high imaginative notes of something, hopefully, you have never seen or heard before."

She provides an interesting antidote to people like Shivani, who seem to want to do nothing but tear down canonical and non-canonical writers alike: "I’m not writing to be included in the canon. I’m writing to save something precious. I’m writing to get my pencil dimensionally around my little idea and work it out. Waiting for somebody to invite me to belong to something or be included in something was never my idea of being a part of this thing amazing journey called life. I just want to continue being a creative thinker and doer. I want to keep saving things and making history more inclusive by way of my particular alphabets and word arrangements."

In short this interview with Finney reminded me of why I think poetry is important, why I think poetry can transform the world, why I still have hopes for art forms of all sorts. She made me want to return to my real work of writing/righting the world.

And this interview makes me so grateful for the Internet. In pre-Internet times, those of us living away from literary centers wouldn't have been likely to see this interview. But now, thanks to the ease of distribution, we can. And happily, we have bloggers like Saeed Jones to alert us to these interviews, the way he did in this post.

Of course, the reason that I know as much about what contemporary poets are doing as I do is also because of the Internet. I wonder how many web-active poets Anis Shivani follows? He'd have a window to a very different poetry world if he followed more of us. Granted, he might not like us any more than he likes the poets of an earlier generation, but his essay wouldn't feel quite as dated.

Jesus and Legos

2012-01-23T05:40:00.000-05:00

Have you played with Legos lately? Gone are the simple squares and rectangles of my youth. Actually, they are still there, but they've been joined by many other pieces. When I build things with my nephew, he's completed several structures while I'm still trying to figure out how some of the odder shapes fit together.

I thought of this yesterday in church when our pastor reminded us that Jesus talked about children as the Kingdom of God. I thought of the complicated Lego structures that children build, and I felt uneasy with this metaphor.

I thought back to my series of poems where Jesus moves about, in a physical body, in our modern world. I thought about a new poem, Jesus trying to create something with Legos.

I thought of the inspiration that we usually think about people getting in church--it's not likely we think of people coming away inspired to think of Jesus and Legos. I think of all those atheists who are outraged about church, but who likely haven't gone to church in many decades. They'd probably be surprised to realize I'm sitting there dreaming of poem ideas, not plotting ways to overtake the government and establish a Christian theocracy.

I can only speak for myself, of course. But I haven't met many Christians who dream of taking over the government. Like most of the nation, everyone I know thinks that taking over the government would mean taking on an impossible task.

I'll continue to think about this poem idea, Jesus and children and Legos, and hopefully, by the end of the week, I'll have a chance to write a new poem. The first part of this week is full of tasks and full schedules, the kind that makes me want to weep.

But at least I have a poem to mull away on now. That should make it easier to face my daily chore list.

Byron, Nostalgia, and Woody Allen

2012-01-22T08:29:00.000-05:00

Today is the birthday of one of the most popular of British Romantic writers, Lord Byron. If you came to this blog looking for a meditation inspired by his birthday, I'll refer you to last year's post.

If I could travel back to any literary time period, I'd go back to hang out with the British Romantics. I've daydreamed about hiking through the Lake country with Dorothy and William Wordsworth and Coleridge. I would have loved to be part of that household that issued the writing challenge that resulted in Frankenstein, along with several lesser works.

But then, my realistic self comes crashing in. Would I really like to time travel? No, not if I had to keep my current body. As a female, I wouldn't be safe in most time periods; in fact, inside a female body, I'm not terribly safe in most of the world in our current day. Would I really want to live in a world without the birth control pill? Would I really want to live in a world where almost everyone suffered a tooth ache or two or three, before having the teeth yanked out of their heads? Would I want to live in a world without antibiotics or anaesthesia? No, I would not.

And yes, I realize that my status as an inhabitant of the 21st century, developed world delivers these luxuries to me in a way that I wouldn't likely experience, had I been born in the developing world. I understand my phenomenal luck.

Yesterday, we watched a movie which warned against the seductive charm of nostalgia: Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. What a wonderful movie! I haven't liked a Woody Allen movie this much since Hannah and Her Sisters. I still like Hannah and Her Sisters best. But Midnight in Paris was just as wonderful as everyone told me it was.

For one thing, it's a real English majors' movie, with lots of appearances by famous writers and lots of allusions to their work. And I had just finished Paula McLain's The Paris Wife (see this post for a review), so it was a delight to travel back.

It was also a great twist in the story to realize that all the characters look back to a golden age. The ones living in the 20's wish they lived in the 1890's, when life was at its peak in Paris. I tend to do this both with literary ages and with my own life, often longing for time periods or places (like, say, grad school) that I didn't always enjoy whilst living them.

The movie itself is just beautiful, shot in golden, glowing light. If only we could all live, or at least linger, in that light. And of course, there's the backdrop of Paris, at least the lovely parts. My first view of Paris was on the Metro, headed away from the beautiful part as we left the airport--what a shock to realize that Paris didn't look like Woody Allen's view, the popular view. Of course, most of New York City doesn't look like the movies made by Woody Allen. But that's not to say we can't enjoy the visions of cities at their most beautiful.

The actors manage to say the lines almost naturally. So often, in a later Woody Allen movie, the lines sound stilted and odd (see this review of Vicky Christina Barcelona, for example). You almost hear characters from older movies who have been trapped by more recent actors trying to channel those characters. But with a few glaring exceptions, the dialogue and the acting worked.

The movie isn't a deep exploration of the dangers of nostalgia. It's light and comic and perhaps a bit too frothy at times. It doesn't attempt to explain how the characters travel through time. If you're looking for a physics lesson, this movie isn't for you.

But if you need a little trip to Paris by way of the magic of movies, spend some time with this one. You get gorgeous shots of Paris, lovely costumes, great music . . . there are worse ways to spend 90 minutes.

My Phone Call from Mitt Romney

2012-01-21T07:30:00.000-05:00

It's been a week of many strange phone calls. Yesterday I wrote a post about my phone calls that came about because someone used my credit card in unauthorized ways. Some day, maybe I'll write about all the phone calls that one must make when one hopes to sell a condo (hopefully we'll close on Wednesday, but I've learned not to pin my hopes on any one buyer).

On Thursday night, we were watching Parks and Rec, and the phone rang. We let the machine get it. We heard Mitt Romney, imploring us to vote in the primary on Saturday.

This phone call was surreal on so many levels. First of all, we're watching Parks and Rec, watching the characters plan a campaign commercial, and we get a phone call from a real life candidate. Life imitating art or art imitating life?

Then there's the fact that we live in Florida, and unless Mitt Romney would like me to commit voter fraud, we are not eligible to vote in the S.C. primary. Or was Mitt calling in advance for the Florida primary on Jan. 31? But that primary is not on a Saturday. And the Florida primary will only be open to registered Republicans, which we are not.

And to make this stranger, we once did live in South Carolina, and we lived there for many years. But we moved in 1998. How did Mitt get my number? With the recent credit card fraud and the real estate implosion still lingering, my brain immediately started to spin nightmare scenarios: you only think you sold those houses that you used to own when you lived in South Carolina; you still own them because someone filed the paper work wrong, and if you still own them, you're very delinquent on those loans. Since our credit has not been impaired, I managed to quiet my brain.

Still, it was weird. Mitt Romney thinks we still live in South Carolina, while my Florida friends and colleagues seem to forget that we ever lived there and that I still have family there.

Yesterday, I had had enough. When a colleague was winding up to spew about South Carolina bigots, I held up my hand and said, "When's the last time you were in South Carolina?"

She looked surprised. "Never."

I've written about South Carolina before, about how the state is more complicated than many people, who get their news from God knows where, believe. Most people's imaginations are stuck back in 1962, which I sort of understand, because South Carolina does have such an ugly history when it comes to race relations and those images are stark. But the situation has changed.

I worry about the fact that I've lived here since 1998. I worry that I will become one of those people who becomes narrower and narrower as they see and read about less and less of the world. I worry about the fact that more and more, I tend to meet people who are just like me.

Once, I knew a lot of conservatives, and so it's easier to understand their world outlook. I've moved among many different types of religious circles in my life, and so, I have some understanding of those populations that my liberal friends do not. I feel like I speak many different cultural languages, but I also fear that could change.

During our recent funeral trip that wound through the southeast, we stayed on military bases because we were travelling with my parents and that's one of the ways they travel. We talked about how few people anymore even know someone in the military. It's one of the cultures that seems very foreign to the people I know. But not so very long ago, it wouldn't have been.

When I drive from home to work and back, I go by a train station, and if the light is red, I look that way to see who's waiting, either for the Amtrak train or the local commuter train. The other night I saw a guy in full Army fatigues with a huge duffel bag, and I was struck by how seldom I see military people down here in South Florida.

Of course, South Florida is diverse in ways that South Carolina is not. South Florida is an intersection between North, Central, and South Americas.

And I probably romanticize my own past. I didn't really meet a huge diversity of people in my little liberal arts college where I earned my undergraduate degree. And even during our grad school years at the University of South Carolina, we met primarily people more like us than different. Sure there was the occasional Egyptian student who came to our sewing Saturdays (the first Muslim I ever knew) or the student from South Korea who called to congratulate me when I passed my Comps, but for the most part, students were white and middle to upper class from Protestant backgrounds.

You don't need me to tell you that the nation is becoming more polarized every day. I wish I had some snazzy solution, a neat way to end this blog post. But I do not. I used to think that our writing was a solution, that by writing the truth about our lives, we'd make the world more diverse, and everyone would become more tolerant. My idealistic self still believes that. My cynical self knows that people tend to read material that supports their world view, material written by people just like them.

I can't solve this, so I'll choose to go with my idealistic self. I'll write in the hopes that I'm changing the world, or at least leaving a record that will be important later. I'll continue to engage in conversation in the hopes that I can remind people of the humanity of us all, even if we have divergent religious beliefs or political beliefs or economic beliefs. I'll be seen as that strangely optimistic woman tucked away in an office that's full of poetry books with fiber art on the walls--that's not a bad mission in life at all!

Stealing Credit--with Writing Prompts for Free!

2012-01-20T04:44:00.000-05:00

The first time we ever had a credit card stolen, back in the mid-1990's, I was astonished at what the thief bought: stuff at T. J. Maxx, stuff at Home Depot, stuff at a few other discount stores. I thought, if you're going to steal my credit card, go ahead and shop at high-end stores. Why T. J. Maxx and not Saks?

Yesterday as I looked over the credit card statement, I noticed a charge at Best Buy, where we almost never shop because it's so noisy. The charge was for $50 even, which I thought was odd. It was made last Tuesday, and my spouse and I were positive that we'd purchased nothing from Best Buy last week. So, I called the toll free # for the merchant.

The woman said, "Oh, yes, you bought a digital download for your X-Box."

I said, "I don't have an X-Box."

"You don't? Could you have bought something from your X-Box?"

"I don't have an X-Box."

You can imagine the rest of the conversation: questions about my e-mail (the person who made the purchase was using an e-mail that's not mine), and then the information about police reports and the like.

So, I spent an hour or two wondering whether or not to cancel the credit card. After all, it had been one week, and there had only been one strange charge.

I hate cancelling the card, because I have some of my bill payments and charitable donations set up to charge to that card automatically. Cancelling the card results in hours of phone calls and updating.

But with the next phone call, I knew we had to cancel the card. My spouse took the call and asked me, "Did you charge a donation of $1500 to the March of Dimes?"

He was joking. I would like to eradicate birth defects as much as the next person, but I can't afford to make a donation that large.

Oddly, I feel less outraged about someone using my stolen information to make a charitable donation than to buy a video game. I feel more outraged about a video game than someone using my stolen credit card to go to Home Depot, where I imagine someone finally able to afford the materials to fix their plumbing.

Actually, I don't feel outrage at all. By the end of yesterday, I simply felt exhausted.

So, here's what I really want to know. Did the person who bought the video game also donate to the March of Dimes? And why the March of Dimes, and not, say, Oxfam or Habitat for Humanity?

As I have said before, some things must remain a mystery. And yet, if I was teaching a fiction writing class, I'd form this into a creative writing prompt. And if I was teaching a Composition class, I'd give them a writing prompt something like this: "You have a stolen credit card and one week to use it without any penalties. But you cannot buy anything for yourself, your friends, your family, or anyone you know. What do you do?" Or maybe I'd ask this: "You have unlimited funds, which you must donate to a worthy charity--only one. Which charity do you choose and why?" I'd have my students start by writing an opinion piece, and then I'd have them turn that piece into a research paper where they would research the charity of their choice.

Snow Day Diversions--and Aimee Nezhukumatathil reads in South Florida tonight!

2012-01-19T06:45:00.000-05:00

On this day, in 1977, snow fell in the Miami area; it hasn't happened since.

I say that snow fell, but really, some flakes drifted by. In many ways, that's the kind of snow I like best. I've spent almost all of my years in Southern places, where snow of any variety can shut down the place and falling limbs can cut electricity.

A snow day is no fun without electricity. Well, it's fun for the first hour, and then it gets chilly, dark, and perhaps smelly. And then, it gets cold.

I'm trying not to be jealous of the Pacific Northwest people who are enjoying a snow day today. After all, what would I do with a snow day? I'd probably watch old television series.

You may remember that during December, I watched all of season 1 of The Walking Dead (see this post for more). I'm eagerly awaiting season 2. On Sunday, after being surprised by seeing Bryan Cranston in the movie Larry Crowne, we cued up Breaking Bad. I'd heard so many good things about this show, and I was prepared to like it, even as I worried about the fact that the show has been on the air since 2008, and we don't really have that much free time.

Well, compelling as the first several episodes of the series are, I doubt we'll be watching many more. I can't tell which horrifies me more, the main character's descent into amorality or the depiction of his cancer treatments. Periodically, I had to walk away from the living room to remind myself that I am still on the lawful side, that I do not have cancer, that I am O.K.

When I was very young, I avoided reading books in the first person because I found them similarly intense. I would feel more and more anxious as I was reading until I had to put the book down. Now, books rarely have that effect on me, but filmed narratives still do.

Breaking Bad is a masterful work, don't get me wrong. It does amazing things with scenery and with symbolism. Bryan Cranston deserves every award there is for the way he inhabits this character and makes you forget about his performance in Malcolm in the Middle. But I know that the story, already dark, is going to get darker and the violence more brutal. Will there be even a breath of redemption? I doubt it.

Maybe it says something about me, that I need some hope or I walk away. I think about those literary theorists that I read in grad school, and I know that they would sneer at me and deem me a naive reader or hopelessly unsophisticated.

But real life can be pretty grim, and some days, I spend a lot of time wishing/praying/hoping that it doesn't get grimmer. I don't need complete escapism--for that, I would turn to something different. But I do need just a whisper of hope or a teaspoon of joy or something that explains to me why the characters don't just shoot themselves and get it over with.

So, if you're lucky enough to be enjoying a snow day, I wish you good reading, compelling viewing, and some ice cream made of snow.

If you're in the South Florida area, you might be in the mood for a poetry reading. Of course, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival is going on up, but if you want a free reading, head to Broward College, the South Campus (intersection of Pines Blvd. and 72nd in Pembroke Pines). At 7:30 tonight, Aimee Nezhukumatathil will read--and it's free. If you plan to buy books, remember to bring cash or your checkbook.

Life Lessons/Reminders, So Far, in January

2012-01-18T08:10:00.000-05:00

--Your healthy lifestyle practices are still there, awaiting your return. Your muscles haven't gotten as flabby as you fear. You can forsake cookies for breakfast--go back to smoothies or porridge! You'll remember how to like vegetables.

--Your creative practices wait for you too. Begin again. Write the stanza, write the sentence. Build.

--What you fear may not come to pass.

--Even if what you fear does come to pass, it likely won't be as bad as you imagined. You may have odd moments or whole days of comfort.

--If you ache with loss, a brief cry is a surprisingly refreshing way to deal with those emotions.

--The car is a fine and private place to have that brief cry.

--It's not a good idea to evaluate your life's progress when playing music from your wayward youth.

--Re-evaluating your life while putting away the Christmas decorations to music of your wayward youth poses particular hazards.

--Re-evaluating your life while putting away the Christmas ornaments while your spouse is playing old Air Supply songs is particularly deadly.

--Why is your spouse listening to horrible pop music from the 80's? Didn't you cement your relationship early on with your hatred of 80's pippy-poppy music?

--Some mysteries cannot be explained, and we must be content to leave them as mysteries.

--It is good to remember that life could be worse. You are not on a sinking cruise ship whose captain decided to take a different route. If your body parts are all working relatively well, you've got good fortune that many people cannot take for granted. If you've still got people you love on this side of the grave, then you are not alone and desolate.

Persona Poems at "Eye to the Telescope"

2012-01-17T07:22:00.000-05:00

If you like persona poems, you must go straight away to the current edition of Eye to the Telescope. The whole volume is devoted to persona poems and edited by Jeannine Hall Gailey.

Gailey gives us a great introduction to the persona poem, along with a link to a longer exploration of the form: "The definition of persona poetry is poetry that is told from the first-person perspective of a character who explicitly is not the poet; the word 'persona' is derived from the Latin for 'mask.' I like persona poetry because it allows poets to use a lot of the tools available to fiction writers; it gives poets the permission to use the imagination, to free themselves from the strictures of autobiography. Speculative poets already push the limits of imagination in their work, so this is a uniquely ambitious kind of project. I also like persona poetry because in it, you can choose to retell stories from a different perspective—often a perspective left out of the original story."

Gailey gives readers a wonderful variety of persona poems here. What a treat. You'll find poems by writers whom you likely already know, and you'll probably discover some new poets.

One of my poems appears, "The Gardener's Tale," which tells the story of the first Easter morning from the view of a gardener. It was inspired by the piece of the Easter story where Mary thinks that Jesus is the gardener, which made me think about the fact that there must have been a real gardener and made me wonder what he thought of all the commotion. Scroll all the way through the volume to get to my poem--and enjoy the poems along your way!

I've always wondered if one of the dangers of writing persona poems comes from the reader not knowing the original text to which the persona poem alludes. As I read my poem this morning, I wondered if people who knew nothing of the Easter story would still like my poem. I hope so.

Many of the poems in this volume of Eye to the Telescope allude to narratives unfamiliar to me. Will I do the research to discover the originating text? Honestly, probably not. But I still enjoyed what I read.

At least in this age of Google and other search engines, it should be easy to get more information, should a reader desire it. I'd still prefer a notes section, but I'm lazy that way.

What I'd really like is a section where poets talk about their writing process. How did they choose the approach they did? If they're writing about a minor character in a work, why that character instead of others?

I don't offer the two paragraphs above as criticism. I could come up with several valid reasons for excluding a notes section. I know that many writers and scholars would tell us that having writers explain risks having too much explanation. Plenty of people would tell us that the poems should stand on their own. And I know that having writers talk about their writing processes really takes us in a different direction.

This morning, as I was reading the poems, I got an idea for a different persona poem. What would Nellie Olsen say if she got a chance to remember Laura Ingalls Wilder and that time on the prairie as a grown up? I know that the woman who played the character on television has written a memoir, which I plan to read. But I think I'll write the poem first.

I love writing persona poetry especially if I'm ever tired or feeling like I have no ideas. When feeling that way, I'll often turn to it before I turn to any other type of poetry. I often feel like a huge part of the work is done, but my brain can still go in ways that surprise me.

I've found that my students often feel the same way. I've had great luck with teaching persona poems in classrooms of all sorts, from the poetry workshop to the Intro to Lit class to Composition classes. If Winter leaves you feeling uninspired as a teacher, see if a persona poem interlude might not recharge your classes.

And if you're in need of a boost, read through this wide-ranging variety of persona poems and let your mind play with possibilities of your own.

Marching with Martin

2012-01-16T08:03:00.000-05:00

Today we celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. By now, he's become a national hero; we often forget how radical he was, how long were the odds that he would succeed.

I've written about King in many places, in many contexts. Here's my favorite MLK blog post from this blog where I talk about my students who think I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King. Even when I explain I was born in 1965, they still don't understand--they don't know that in 1968, when King was killed, I was barely walking, much less marching. I tell myself that when I was young, I had gaps in my education too. But I read a lot, so I didn't have the kind of history gaps that many students do.

That post includes a chunk of poem yet to be written about marching with Martin Luther King in Sunday best clothes. We also forget how much the Civil Rights Movement knew how to use the new medium that was television. Some baby boomers like to brag about how they brought the Vietnam War to a close earlier than would have happened without their protests. I say that they'd have been even more effective if they hadn't looked so scruffy, so in need of a bath, when those nice, suburban people turned on their televisions. The Civil Rights marchers in their dresses, suits, and dress shoes--seeing those people attacked by vicious dogs and fire hoses prompted a much more sympathetic response.

I think we also forget how rooted the Civil Rights Movement was in the Christian tradition, especially the parts of that tradition that encourage us to resist evil. I've written about that aspect here for a post on the Living Lutheran website today. And here's a post from my theology blog that's full of quotes from MLK, and a link to a great interview where Tavis Smiley reminds us that King's life was about 3 things: "justice for everybody, service to others and love that liberates."

Here is my favorite Martin Luther King quote: "The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice." It inspired the following poem, written around 1996. It was first published in The Evening Reader, a small periodical based in Newberry, South Carolina.

Arcing Towards Justice

Martin Luther King said that the arc
of history is towards justice,
and I must arc
towards justice as well:
ignore the politicians who would leave
children to starve
and adults to rot in prisons.
Some days I slump towards despair;
I don’t believe I can even save
myself, much less others.

Like Harriet Tubman, I cannot tarry
long in the swamps of despair.
I must go back, stretch out my arms, ferry
others to safety:
teach them to write, to analyze,
to dream the world they would want to inhabit.
I must teach them not to suckle
on the hatred spewed
by scared, old, white men
who are losing power, and so spurt poison.

I can build an ark of activism
for the diaspora of the dispossessed,
a sanctuary where we wait
for the old, white men to choke
on their own vituperative, vindictive vitriol.

We won’t even have to remove the mantle
of authority from their cold corpses.
It has been ours all along, from the moment
we claimed it as our own,
decorated it with our own bright threads,
chose our own best ways to wear our multi-hued
mantles, beacons to gleam and glitter
in the dark days of exile,
like comets arcing through the skies,
lighting the way home,
as a legacy of hatred burns
into harmless, intergalactic dust.

Young Hemingways in Love and in Paris

2012-01-15T06:45:00.000-05:00

I've spent the last 10 days reading Paula McLain's The Paris Wife. My friend, our school's one remaining librarian, told me that it had gotten lots of good reviews and that readers across the nation really seemed to like it. The premise was interesting: the young Hemingways, before fame, in love and in Paris.

The story of Hadley Hemingway, Ernest's first wife, was interesting enough to keep me coming back to the book, but the book wasn't interesting enough that I couldn't put it down--thus the fact that it took me almost 10 days to finish this book that's not exactly dense and challenging. It's one of those kind of books that makes me glad to be alive during the first decades of the 21st century, instead of being a woman in the 1920's in Paris.

We may tend to view that time and place through a sentimental lens, but McLain deftly shows us the challenging--and difficult--aspects of actually living during that time. We see Hemingway writing his great works by candlelight--yes, candles! In one of the most wrenching (for me as a writer) moments of the book, Hadley loses a satchel that contains everything that Hemingway has ever written; she leaves it unguarded on the train, and someone steals it. And because he wrote it by hand, before we had copying machines and external hard drives and all the things that make it possible for us to have multiple back-ups, it was simply gone.

I also noticed that travel of any kind of distance was a grueling and time-consuming endeavor. I often forget what a miracle the airplane is; I tend to focus on the inconveniences, like taking off my shoes, which means I have to get to the airport much earlier.

Of course, some elements of being human haven't changed. McLain does a great job of describing the Hemingways in love in the early days, and the brutal emotions caused by the unravelling of that love. She describes Hemingway's ambitions in great detail, as well as his ugliness towards those early champions of his work. She also shows the mental instability at the root of Hemingway's ugliness to all those people who loved him. I came away feeling more sympathy for Ernest Hemingway than I expected to.

Hadley is the true hero of this novel, as you would expect. I adored her sturdy adaptability. I felt righteous indignation for the ways that she was treated. I wanted her to go out and find her own career, but of course, because it was the 1920's, she didn't have those opportunities.

Yes, it's good to be a writer in 2012. The publishing industry may be imploding in ways we can't control, but we have so many more options than Ernest Hemingway did. Think about how many more people are reading these days than in the 1920's. Think about how many more ways there are to get a book than in the 1920's. Think about the fact that I can get on a plane and be in Paris by the end of the day; in the 1920's, I would have been on an ocean liner for several weeks.

It was moderately enjoyable to spend time in Paris with the Hemingways, via this book, but in the end, I'm glad I'm not stuck there.

Poets at Midlife

2012-01-14T07:00:00.000-05:00

I love NPR for many reasons, but chief amongst them: their commitment to poetry. On their main page, I found this article which purports to talk about poetry volumes coming out in 2012, books being written by newer poets, poets who aren't your parents' poets, poets in their 30's, 40's, and 50's. You can have fun making your own list. I need more time to think. I was a bit annoyed, as I always am, to find mention of poets who are already famous, poets who probably don't need this boost. Much as I love Lucille Clifton and mourn her loss, in so many ways, she is my mom's poet in terms of her birth year and topics covered. And can anyone truly not have heard of Jorie Graham?

Let me stop here to admit that most people probably have not heard of Jorie Graham, especially readers who aren't part of the poetry world. But the poets on this list, by and large, seem firmly established in terms of reputation.

My complaint is minor. Overall, I'm happy to see such a fine group of poets with books coming out in 2012.

I've been thinking about the overall process of growing older, the strange part of the passage which is midlife. Two weeks ago, at my grandmother's funeral, I saw third cousins whom I hadn't seen since I was in my teens. How did we all get so much older?

One cousin--the child of my mother's cousin, which makes him my 3rd cousin, I think--I remember for having an Atari set. Atari--how cool! What a huge leap beyond Pong, which had been the only video game I had ever seen, until the Thanksgiving when my third cousin and I spent huge swaths of time playing Space Invaders (or was it Asteroids?). That same cousin later had a Honda Prelude, which we thought was the sportiest car possible, and I vaguely recall that he let me little sister drive it--my little sister, who hadn't had her driver's license very long.

And now these third cousins, frozen in adolescence forever in my brain, have children who are adolescents. How did this happen?

Ah, it happened the way it always happens, right? People get older and have children and those children get older and soon they're zooming away in fast cars, off to college or parenthood or jobs or jail. Of course, hopefully not jail, but I felt I had to throw that possibility in because if you look at any extended family, you'll see at least one or two members making stupid decisions and spending some time in jail.

I also have midlife on the brain because last night a group of us from work went to a local happy hour to celebrate the completion of a doctoral degree of our colleague. I spent the evening looking at the swarms of people and being intrigued by the diversity of the group. Plenty of midlife folks coming by for a drink after work. That guy with the dog with a bandana--local dude coming to a local bar or a poser? Lots of women in glitzy clothes--single women looking for action or women who work in a glitzier environment than mine? Lots of men talking with each other--a gay subscene or men waiting for women or courage?

I found myself interested in the bar itself, a bar that once was a wreck of a building in an abandoned cityscape across from a grim hospital. Now the hospital has had a lovely facelift (yes, it's the same hospital that has my lovely tiny gym attached to a wellness center). One of the abandoned factories has been transformed into an urban farm. And now, a bar that promotes "beer, bourbon, and burgers," and we all flock there, as if we've never tasted bourbon or burgers or beer before.

That experience made me feel young again, while at the same time making me feel unbearably old. It made me consider being an urban homesteader, which doesn't appeal to me as much as heading off to the country to reclaim an orchard. It made me wish I had investment capital so that I could transform a stretch of paved-over bleakness.

I remind myself that it would be a lot of work. What I really want: more time for writing projects.

I woke this morning with an expansive sense of well-being that comes with a three day week-end. What will I do with that extra day? Working on a writing project of some type, to be sure. Catching up with laundry, yes. Making a pot of broccoli cheddar cheese soup. Spending some time with friends. Maybe something different than usual, like collaging. Some time with a book or two. Insert sigh of contentment here.

Such are the joys of midlife.

Simplicity Practices for the Spiritual and Not-So-Spiritual

2012-01-13T04:56:00.000-05:00

Over the holiday break, I read Jan Johnson's Abundant Simplicity: Discovering the Unhurried Rhythms of Grace. Like almost every other woman in the U.S., I frequently wonder if there's not more to life than what I'm living. I'm a sucker for any magazine article that promises to show me a new way to organize my closets, my desk, my finances, my calendar, my life. I'm particularly drawn to material that promises more simplicity. Johnson's book was a delightful read.

Now, her book didn't teach me much that I didn't already know--but it's good to be reminded. Also Johnson roots her ideas in a spiritual depth that one doesn't often find in those pop culture writings that call to me so loudly. Johnson reminds us that we're not just cleaning up our spaces and our calendars for the joy of getting organized. No, we're making space for God.

If you're the kind of reader who finds any mention of God to be an immediate deal breaker, then you should avoid this book Johnson comes out of the Christian tradition, and so does this book (to explore her book in theological terms, go to my review on my theology blog). But even atheists could learn something from this book, although their motivations may end up being different.

Johnson talks about how we live in a land of plenty which can be as debilitating as living in deprivation. She explores what kinds of needs we may be attempting to address when we shop, often for items that we don't need, items that duplicate what we already have.

Then she gives us some practices to help us get in touch with what we really want and how we really want to live. She gives concrete actions that we can take to pare down our stuff, to gain mastery over our calendars, to keep our free time free, to make time for what's truly important to us, and to free ourselves from worry.

Readers of this blog have probably sensed that I struggle with worry and fretfulness. Here's a quote that spoke to me: "Yet we're reluctant to let go of our worry. We worry about not worrying. Many of us even believe that worrying about something earns us the right for nothing bad to happen."

And then she says this: "Such distortions are the enemy's work, convincing us that worry is a form of responsible vigilance" (153). She's using the traditional idea of "the enemy," Satan. Even if you don't believe in divine incarnations of good or evil, play with that idea for a minute: worry as not just frivolous or a time waster, but downright evil. All the time we spend in worrying prevents us from taking action to improve the world. Hmm.

Here are some more choice quotes for your Friday:

"Our purchases always make it obvious when we're serving two masters" (137): what does your spending say about you and what you value?

"As an introverted, task-oriented person, I confess I love email because I love getting a job done without having to actually talk to anyone, but I also know that God is teaching me to be more relational and that using email can work for or against that, depending on how I use it. So my goal is to use it as I use speech: to impart grace to others" (145).

Again and again, she reminds us that the purpose of speaking should be to "impart grace" "promote kindness" (64).

"If we knew that the most important things we ever did would occur as a result of interruptions, how we might live differently?" (109).

"Delayed decisions are often about fear of making wrong choices" (81).

"In the meantime, it's important to dream and ponder, What would my life be like if I weren't afraid? What if I chose to trust God a little more today?" (32, italics in original quote).

Crying at Work, Crying Over Work

2012-01-12T07:19:00.000-05:00

Over and over again, I hear people say that there is no manufacturing in America, that we've shipped it all elesewhere. That idea is simply not true. We still have plenty of manufacturing on our shores--depending on how you define terms, we're either first or second in the world for manufacturing (a fact I got from this NPR story; go here to read/listen).

Of course, a lot of those manufacturing jobs are done by machines. And many of the jobs done by humans don't have the middle-class level of pay that they would have had in, say, 1962. To understand that fully, I read a fabulous article in The Atlantic (written by the same person who reported similar information for the NPR story): "Throughout much of the 20th century, simultaneous technological improvements in both agriculture and industry happened to create conditions that were favorable for people with less skill. The development of mass production allowed low-skilled farmers to move to the city, get a job in a factory, and produce remarkably high output. Typically, these workers made more money than they ever had on the farm, and eventually, some of their children were able to get enough education to find less-dreary work. In that period of dramatic change, it was the highly skilled craftsperson who was more likely to suffer a permanent loss of wealth. Economists speak of the middle part of the 20th century as the 'Great Compression,' the time when the income of the unskilled came closest to the income of the skilled."

We are no longer in a time of great economic compression. Some manufacturing jobs pay workers far more than a worker in 1962 could have ever dreamed of making. But most do not.

The article does a great job exploring the decisions that corporate people make on a day by day basis as they decide what to manufacture in the U.S. and what to make in other countries. The article also does a great job in exploring what separates a low-skill and high-skill worker in manufacturing. And it's all highly readable and understandable, something I don't often find in articles which explore manufacturing; usually I'm either weighed down by the tedium of economic theory or by the angry political viewpoint of one side or another, or by the shallowness of the article. Happily, this piece is an exception. If you read only one piece of writing on manufacturing and the future of American jobs, turn to this one.

I've been thinking about U.S. jobs, about whether or not there are careers that we can count on anymore. I used to think we could count on educational jobs, but even first grade teachers are being laid off where I live. I think of caring for the old as an expanding industry, as the baby boomers age. But if the last 30 years should teach us anything, it's that no industry is safe. You can wake up any morning to find your industry has shifted right out from under you.

It's enough to make a girl cry. I loved Kristen McHenry's post about crying at work: "To cry, to well up, to lament, blubber, keen, or wail--all are unforgivable. Crying, one shows an unseemly level of engagement, a lack of ability to maintain objectivity and distance; one shows weakness, femininity and its inherent manipulations, that are you easily broken, that you are sickly in hue, a wreck, battered, without backbone, pallid and brittle and girly and irrational." It's a wonderful post, a prose poem that explores terrain we've all likely experienced.

In my current position, I have to be careful not to cry. I'm an administrator in a college that doesn't have as many students as we once did. If people see me crying, they'll assume the news is bad and that the news has to do with them. Not good.

When my grandmother lay dying, I called my sister while I was at the office and quickly dissolved into tears. I remember saying, "I'm glad I have an eye infection right now. It explains why my eyes are red and puffy when I see people after this conversation."

Yes, most of our workplaces give us many reasons to cry. There are many people and circumstances designed to get one's goat. I loved Kathleen Kirk's recent post about goats, goatherds, and goat cheese: "Bob was reminding us at church yesterday of the vigilance it takes to remain nonviolent in life, down to not letting someone 'get our goat'--that is, not letting someone provoke us into being cranky and irritable in our own actions and speech.

Bob told about a job interview, and a boss's warning about a certain manager:

'This guy seems to know how to get a person's goat,' he explained.

'No worries.' I countered, 'I’ll leave my goat at home.'”

I've been working at leaving my goat at home! Some weeks are more of a challenge than others. Some weeks, I dream of running away and starting a goat farm and selling goat cheese at some farmer's market somewhere.

My spouse would remind me that goats are mean and viciously destructive and that we should raise something else. Tropical fruits, perhaps. On our great Southeast funeral trip, we talked about raising buffalo. Could they survive in a central Florida ranch? Surely summers on the Great Plains are as hot as summers here--hotter, even. Do buffalo need a cold season?

I try to remind myself that every job has its annoyances. Every job involves a fair amount of tedium, since humans can't run on high levels of adrenaline very long and stay alive. Dave Bonta has a great post on tedium where he explores how our lives have changed since the Industrial Revolution:

"Those elders who had no choice but to knit if they wanted to stay warm in the winter might think today’s hobbyist knitters slightly mad, unless back in the day they happened to be of a creative bent. But I’m told that when an Amish man draws up a cost/benefit analysis of a project, the labor required to complete it will be listed as a benefit rather than a cost.

I imagine it was only after the Industrial Revolution that tedium became a nearly inescapable condition of life — and with it the necessity for diversion on an industrial scale."

Now it's off to check my prizeless Three Kings' Bread that I have baking in the oven. I realized that the bread is fairly low-fat for a holiday bread, and it hits my craving for sweets in a far more healthy way than cookies or cake. So, today, I'm baking another 2 loaves. Baking bread soothes me in a way that few other activities can.

I think of my grandmother, who got up every morning and started the dough for the bread (yeast rolls) that she served every day with the midday meal. She also made several pies a week to go with the meals that relied on food that she and my grandfather grew in their backyard garden. She sewed all of her clothes for most of her life--this fact explains why she rarely wore pants, which are much more difficult to make--as well as clothes for my mom and sister and me, and a variety of blankets out of scraps.

She would scoff at the idea that she was an artisan, yet I think of all these younger women and some men, flocking to these activities now. I think of the urban gardeners described in the article in The Atlantic, growing food on the roof of a building that houses the offices of one of the last small-scale manufacturers of after-market precision auto parts still in the U.S.

I yearn for a job that satisfies my yearning to be an artisan, to make stuff with my hands, to grow stuff, to nurture the next generation--yet that still gives me time and energy to write, to read, to think.

Ultimately, I think it's unreasonable for me to look for a paying job that satisfies all the needs of my working self, just like it's unreasonable to think that a best friend or a significant other can satisfy all my emotional needs. I'm working on being happy with a job that pays the bills but leaves me some free time to bake bread and to write and to work on whatever creative projects intrigue me without having to worry about translating my creativity into profit.

I'm trying not to be scared that my job and that the entire higher ed industry will vanish.

On to South Carolina

2012-01-11T05:07:00.001-05:00

So far, the 2012 presidential election hasn't interested me the way that past elections have. I have taken a "come back to me when the Republicans have winnowed out the crowd a bit" approach. The winnowing has begun, and now it's on to South Carolina.

People who don't understand South Carolina or the states that make up the southeast are often content to paint in broad, stereotypical brush strokes that involve images from the slaveholding past and Civil Rights era ugliness. Outsiders tend to think of Southerners as ignorant, gun-toting, sweet tea drinking rednecks who tend towards obesity and snake handling religions.

As with all stereotypes, some of this is true. But especially in the past twenty years, the region has changed substantially, with more Hispanic people settling in, with more manufacturing coming to the region, with more retirees from the north, with universities achieving national prominence.

South Carolina doesn't always behave like political pundits would have us believe. Jesse Jackson won the Democratic primary in 1988. This is the state that recently elected a female, a child of Indian immigrants, to the governor's office. I wouldn't expect that behavior from a state that's thought of as so conservative.

I'm still not as interested in political discussions as I once was. I'm tired of the outrage of others and exhausted by their despair. I tend to steer away from politics unless we can have a conversation that will leave me inspired. And so far, although it's early in the race, I'm not feeling inspired.

I still believe that big government can accomplish some things that we can't do on the local level. I'm not one of those cranky people who thinks that big government is the problem. I see problems on all levels of government. I also see potential. But right now, I'm not seeing much in the way of solid solutions--not from candidates, not from colleagues, not from essayist and analysts, not from government workers.

Maybe I don't see those ideas because I live in a part of the state of Florida where Republicans rarely visit. Our ad time costs so much to buy that I can watch T.V. in peace, undisturbed by political commercials. Maybe if I lived in Charleston or Columbia, South Carolina, I'd know more about the ideas and plans that Republican candidates have. Maybe I'd know more about what they'd do if elected.

I doubt it.

Maybe those ideas will come. After all, it's early yet.

And yet, it feels so very late.

Turning to Return Again

2012-01-10T08:12:00.000-05:00

This morning, I returned to running (I will use the word running, even though less kindly other people might use words like "slow jogging," "lumbering," "slogging," "shuffling"). It's been almost 2 months since I ran down the Broadwalk at the beach. Again, I wonder, why have I denied myself this pleasure?

Well, for the better part of December, I didn't run because I couldn't inhale without coughing. And then there was travelling and then there was my eye infection.

And then there was laziness.

I had perfect conditions for running this morning: a light breeze, 68 degrees, the moon setting to my west, the sunrise settling in to the east. I settled in and ran 4 miles fairly effortlessly--a run I did not deserve, to be sure.

I have returned to running before and not always with such lovely weather conditions. This summer I started running again after a multi-year pause. It was hot and humid, even before sunrise. I wasn't in the better shape I'm in today. And as I ran, I thought, why have I denied myself this pleasure?

It's a lesson I learn again and again, both in exercise and in other areas of my life (see this post about yoga, writing, and marriage, for example). I bake bread, and I think, why don't I do this more often? I return to writing short stories after a long absence, and I'm overwhelmed with joy to be doing it--and again, the question, why don't I write more fiction, if it brings me such joy? I phone or meet an old friend again, and I'm thrilled that we can pick up our friendship again as if there had been no absence.

I am glad that I can return, again and again, to the people and the activities I love. I am glad that I am not punished by having them taken away from me.

It's a good lesson to remember, as many of us return to regular life. Those of us who live on the academic calendar are likely starting classes this week or settling in to the classes we started last week. Those of us who spent December eating cookies for breakfast (but they were homemade!) must now return to vegetables. Those of us who haven't exercised in awhile must now limber up those muscles.

Here are two poems to inspire you to have faith in your muse, in your muscles, in your priorities, in the belief that it will all work out alright. The first appeared in Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature and the second in Emrys.

One Fast, One Slow

The muscles remember what the mind forgets.
The brain replays every decision, each move.
The muscles waste no time on useless regrets.

They keep an even speed, moving in the groove.
They do not lose a beat, always keeping the pace.
The muscles know only one way towards what they have to prove.

With the mind mired in time, the muscles move through space.
The body leaves the mind alone to second guessing.
The mind, unlike the body, knows there’s more than just one race.

The mind spends time wondering what is missing,
That abandoned job, the trip we never took,
The other people we could have been kissing.

The mind knows any decision is worth a second look,
Even choices made years ago.
The brain decides there’s no such thing as a closed book.

The muscles focus on their task, to strengthen and to grow,
The mind might say it does the same,
Two processes, one fast, one slow.

------------------------------------------------------------------

The Muse to Her Poet

You worry that I am some Ulysses,
headed off to distant lands the moment you turn
your back, easily seduced by goddesses,
and ever needful of new adventures.

You are the one who sets sail
for the distant island of your novel, sidetracked
from your true vocation by thoughts of the fruits
of fame, the warmth of characters
to put through their paces.
You are the one who often strands
herself on the dry, dusty shores
of academic writing, pursuing the metaphors
and symbols of other poets
while neglecting your own.

I am your muse, your Penelope, waiting
ever, always patient. I weave
even when you’re unaware, distracted
by those undeterred suitors of easier pleasures than mine.
I pluck out the threads that don’t match,
keep the tapestries safe,
keep my faith in your return.

Rosanne Cash, to Inspire and Fascinate You

2012-01-09T05:18:00.000-05:00

I started yesterday by hearing Krista Tippett interview Rosanne Cash. I came to Rosanne Cash by way of her CD, The List, a great collection of Cash covering classic songs, songs on a list of 100 songs that her dad, the famous Johnny Cash, told her she needed to learn. It's a great CD, one that my spouse and I enjoy singing along to on car trips. I also have Cash's memoir, Composed, which I haven't read yet, but may make more of an effort to get to it after hearing Tippett and Cash yesterday. I'd also like to get her CD Black Cadillac, which has some wonderfully poetic songs.

Cash talks about showing up every day to do the work and not waiting for some bolt of inspiration from the Muse: "Well, my friend Steven Pressfield, he wrote this great book called The War of Art, and he has this great line in it. He says, 'You have to show the Muse you're serious.' You know, you can't just expect to be hit by these beautiful bolts of inspiration and lightning. You have to keep showing up even if you don't get hit for a year or two years. Just show the Muse you are serious. And then that the relationship there feels like love to me. I mean, it feels like the heart opening."

She also talks about the idea of catching songs and then the conversation moves towards mathematics and physics--fascinating.

Throughout the course of the conversation, the women talk about her creative process, about composing as therapy, about her father and his death, about God and religion, about recovering from brain surgery, about whether or not her songs can stand without music as poetry--and it's a fascinating window into how music helps the poetry of the lyrics.

She also talks about Twitter, about how Twitter builds community and about how Twitter functions as boot camp for song writers: "If you can say it succinctly and somewhat poetically or with humor in 140 characters, that's great for refining the skills as a songwriter." She learned to knit via Twitter--well, she met a knitting teacher. I think the actual instruction, at least the first lesson, was done in person.

She talks about mystery and about getting ideas during the middle of regular life: "There are mysteries, you know; fractals are a mystery. And songwriting is somewhat mysterious — there are mysterious moments. And I like living with the questions, rather than the answers. Tom Waits said this great thing about songwriting. He said he was driving in a car on the freeway and he got an idea for a song and it was just, you know, like overwhelming him, the idea for this song, and he couldn't get a pencil and there was no paper. And he's on the freeway and he finally just looked up at the sky and said, 'Don't you see I'm driving?' And I feel that way sometimes too. Don't you see I'm getting my child off to school or helping with homework or, you know, just trying to be available?"

It's a great interview, well worth your time. You can go here to listen to the show or to read the transcript or to explore videos or other resources.

What Makes an Idyllic Sunday?

2012-01-08T09:26:00.000-05:00

A week ago, I'd have been eating bacon for breakfast while looking for bad guys with my 5 year old nephew. We were blessed with warm South Carolina weather, and so we could run outside. We stayed in R and R housing on Ft. Jackson, and we were the only ones there, so we could make all sorts of noise without bothering anyone. The cabins were on a lake, and we could have contests seeing who could throw pine cones and sticks the furthest.

Later, the whole family headed the the Horseshoe, that lovely quad at the University of South Carolina, where both my spouse and I completed graduate degrees and my sister earned her B.A., and almost a century ago, my grandfather earned a B.A.

How I love a Southern land grant school, with its historic buildings and large open areas!

We had a great time walking and climbing trees and seeing the buildings that had been built back near our old stomping grounds of Gambrell Hall and the Humanities buildings since we graduated.

The school was on holiday break, so all the buildings were locked up tight. Still, plenty of people were walking dogs and riding scooters and tossing frisbees. Idyllic.

It leads me to wonder why I don't do these things more often. For the past week, the walk on the USC grounds has been one of the favorite memories that my brain keeps circling back towards. Why don't I enjoy these kind of outings more often?

Well, one reason is the one that we all wrestle with. As a point of contrast, let's think about my yesterday. I ran a lot of errands and completed lots of tasks, tasks which had been postponed because of my trip to South Carolina. It was satisfying in a different way. It's great to have a working hose between the dryer and the outside wall, but not nearly as wonderful as constructing paper guns and chasing each other and discovering treasures in the pine straw. It's not nearly as fabulous as climbing cneturies-old trees with their low-slung branches and enjoying the holiday decorations that still festooned the campus.

I will likely always continue to wrestle with the issue of balance. I want more time out in nature, but I want more time to write. I want a clean house, but I don't want to be so obsessed with chores that I neglect the humans in my life. I want more time to read, but I also want to socialize with friends.

I'm grateful that I get days like last Sunday, days that remind me not to get too mired down in the daily minutiae. It will be an important reminder, as our new school term launches this week.

Prizeless 3 Kings Bread and Priceless Writers and a Poem

2012-01-07T07:55:00.000-05:00

If you haven't gotten enough of Christmas yet, you can still celebrate: today is the day that Orthodox believers celebrate Christmas.

I will probably be putting the decorations away today. I will miss the twinkly lights, the memories of the ornaments.

Yesterday was Epiphany, the feast day that celebrates the arrival of the three wise men (for a theological direction and photo essay, migrate over to this post on my theology blog). Inspired by this post by Wendy, the Bookgirl, I started a batch of 3 Kings Bread. I made the dough in the morning, put it in the fridge, and finished it in the afternoon.

I didn't have any candied fruit, so I used candied ginger, dried cranberries, and pecans, all chopped. Tasty!

However, I did forget to put any of the treats into the bread that should be there. Some bread bakers include a coin (wrapped in foil) that indicates good luck for the person who finds it. Some put a china baby into the bread. Other customs include a bean, a clove, a twig, a piece of rag. Some traditions have the person who finds the embedded item doing the clean up, some have the person hosting the next party in February at Candlemas.

My bread is prizeless, which has left me with all sorts of poem ideas. None written yet, but it's nice to have inspiration.

Speaking of poems, my poem "Heaven on Earth" is up at the online journal The Scream, for their Heaven and Hell issue: go here for a great selection of poems by a wide variety of people. An intriguing image accompanies each poem.

One of the advantages of an online journal is that one can include wonderful images. In the old days of print, we wouldn't see that. Journals could hardly afford to print words, much less images.

Or maybe you are tired of Christmas, tired of theology. Today is the birthday of Zora Neale Hurston, an author that most of us would never have heard of, if not for the efforts of Alice Walker.

I adored Alice Walker when I was in undergraduate school. If she had told me to read the secret love letters of Stalin, I'd have done it. So when I read of her love of Hurston, I got a copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and expected to be blown away.

I was not.

I found the dialogue tough to slog through. If you teach creative writing and you need an example of why a little bit of dialogue goes a long way, offer Hurston as the example of what can go wrong with dialogue. I found the book almost impossible to get through because of the dialogue. My love for Alice Walker was my only motivation.

Later, in grad school, I came to appreciate Hurston for her activism and to appreciate what she did in terms of advancing the female character (both the character that lives on a page and the character that women demonstrate in their behavior). I came to love her for the way she lived her life.

In midlife, I'm trying not to think about the end of Hurston's life, the fact that she died in poverty and slept in an unmarked grave until Alice Walker rectified that. I'm trying to believe that one can live a life on one's own terms without paying a terrible price.

Or perhaps I should take an alternate view. We hear about the fact that she lived in poverty working as a maid--but that might not have been so bad. Perhaps a woman who always lived life on her own terms preferred that choice to others available to her.

I think of my poverty years, and frankly, they weren't so bad. We did a lot of free or cheap activities, things I don't do now because my job keeps me busy. I'm not the impoverished grad student who couldn't afford to run the AC in the summer, and who had to be miserly with the heat in the winter--but I also don't have weekly gatherings with friends where we would have tea and treats and work on creating Christmas/birthday/wedding/baby presents for our loved ones.

I believe that fear of poverty keeps many of us from dreaming freely about our best lives. I want to continue to do that.

But for today, I need to tackle something simpler than mapping out alternative futures.

Today is a day for restoring order to my house. I have laundry that must be done, decorations to put away, a work week that kicks into high gear to think about--perhaps I should prepare a pot of soup to go with my prizeless 3 Kings Bread.

Journey Through Flannery O'Connor Country

2012-01-06T04:16:00.000-05:00

A week ago, we were midway through our journey from South Florida to South Carolina. We hit the road, right through Flannery O'Connor country (northeast Georgia, hilly but not the foothills of the Appalachians).

Here are some things I noticed:

--most of the west coast of Florida is for sale: industrial, farming, residential, you name it, you could buy it.

--Florida is either the 3rd or 2nd largest cow producing state; I'm not sure how the drought-stricken Texas ranchers selling their herds affects the statistics. On the east coast of Florida, we don't see as many cow herds. We saw a lot in our journey up the other side of the state.

--We also saw a sign that announced we had entered the dairy capital of Georgia, but we didn't see a single cow.

--We did see lots of religious billboards. On the east coast, there are plenty of anti-abortion billboards. On the west coast, we got a diversity of messages. All conservative, few humorous. Who pays for these billboard rentals?

--We also saw lots of faded (non-religious) billboards, like they'd been up for several decades. Hmm. Is the sun that more intense on the west coast? Do people have less resources to keep the billboards looking fresh?

--In South Georgia, we saw lots of billboards for lots of spas. Really? There's that much demand that can support more than one spa in South Georgia? We got our first hint that the word spa might not mean what it means in the rest of the country when we saw billboards advertising truck parking. We had a few moments of spasmodic laughter imagining the burly trucker coming in for a mani-pedi. Then we quickly realized we were looking at ads for houses of prostitution. Many of the "spas" had Asian names: Lotus Flower Spa, for example. After awhile, what was first funny became disturbing.

--Once we got off the Interstate, we stopped seeing those billboards. Of course, I was never sure we were on the right road. We followed my mom and dad, who followed their GPS device. For some of the time, it informed us we were in "unverified territory." Great. It's not like we were in the interior of Alaska. It made me long for an old-fashioned paper map.

--Sherman found his way through this "unverified territory." We saw a sign in Eatonton, GA, home of Alice Walker and Joel Chandler Harris (of Uncle Remus fame) that reminded us that Sherman had come through during his march to the sea. I thought of how far away we were from the coast and what a long, dreadful march it must have been, on foot, in heavy boots or no boots or boots with holes in the soles.

--We also drove by the exit for Andersonville, one of the largest Civil War POW camps where 1/3 of prisoners died.

--This part of the country has never really recovered from the Civil War. We saw lots and lots of trailers, and most of them weren't in great condition, or even good condition, even though people were clearly living there. We saw lots of people walking by the sides of the road. It felt very other-worldly--or 3rd wordly.

--Of course, we also saw lots of peach orchards and cotton fields--cotton, still being grown in this country! It was a good reminder that the land, even though it looks like red clay, can be very fertile.

--What interesting place names: Moccasin Wallow; Promised Land (SC).

--We saw a cow standing by an empty feed trailer. We imagined it saying, "I'm ready for the dessert menu. The service here is really awful. I'm not coming back here any time soon. If this waitress thinks she's getting a good tip, she better get a move on!"

--I saw several places that still had a jack-o-lantern on the porch. You'd think someone could plop a Santa cap on it or something.

--I knew that for a large chunk of our trip, we weren't far from Milledgeville, GA, home of Flannery O'Connor. I thought of her short stories. I wouldn't have been at all surprised to see a Bible salesman with a stolen wooden leg in his case or an escaped Misfit murderer.

--And we'd have missed all of that, had we taken the more obvious route, Interstate 20. There were moments when I had my doubts. At one point, I said to my spouse, "I think this two lane road just became a one lane road." He said, "At least it's still paved." Indeed.

Month of Broken Appliances

2012-01-05T07:40:00.000-05:00

December was not only the month where half of my extended family got sick after being together at Christmas, although that's probably the aspect of December that I'll remember. December was also the month of broken appliances at our house.

We went through not one, but two coffee makers. Both were fairly old, but still, it was strange. Our dryer stopped drying, and we've been coaxing the washer to work for the last several years. We finally decided that we'd gotten 20 years of use out of them, and it was time to replace them (they should arrive today). Our refrigerator started dripping water into the floor of both the fridge and the freezer--happily, that one was an easy fix once we unclogged the drain tube.

I thought of this again yesterday, as I tried to burp one of the Tupperware containers that I got from my grandmother years ago--and the lid cracked. Granted, the container is probably only 10 years younger than I am, but I still felt this strange upsurge of grief. Am I weeping over plastic? Has it come to this?

Obviously, I'm feeling grief over larger issues. On Saturday, I experienced this minute at the graveyard when I found myself thinking, does it all really just come down to this? A life, well-lived or not, and then centuries in the ground?

Well, yes, on some existential level. And no, on many other levels. And in between, we must all wrestle with these questions, if we're living lives that are self-aware at all.

Years ago, I wrote a poem that foreshadowed aspects of my current mood. I am not the speaker in the poem, not exactly. I was not in charge of my grandmother. For that matter, the grandmother in the poem is not my grandmother, not exactly. I didn't have to have a solitary wake; we celebrated my grandmother's life in not one, but two South Carolina churches.

And yet, as I threw away a 4 cup coffee maker that she bought my spouse for a Christmas gift almost 20 years ago, as the washer and the dryer that she bought me for a Ph.D. graduation present 20 years ago leave the house today, the grieving feels both solitary and strange. Maybe another poem brews.

In the meantime, here's what I imagined the grieving would be like when I wrote this poem years ago. It was first published in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review:

Inheritance

With a trunk full of Tupperware as my only
inheritance, I head back from the nursing
home where I have had to incarcerate
my grandmother. She has a tendency to wander
the streets, to rant at strangers.
After a lifetime of constraint and containment,
she has let herself go.

I have no idea what to do with all this plastic.
These containers will outlast me.
Long after people cease baking cakes and buying
heads of iceberg lettuce, they’ll have storage
for them, molded in shapes long since forgotten.

When the call comes, the one I’ve been dreading
with a sense of longing, when the nursing home informs
me of my grandma’s death, I do not cry,
but try my hand at pie baking for the first
time. The chewy pastry, so like hers, comforts.

I dig out my records, old vinyl, black and dense,
with a rich sound no CD can match.
I bought one record with this day in mind.
The Carter family belts out songs
of old Appalachia, songs my grandma used to sing
as she frosted cakes and created feasts.
I turn up the mountain twang, wrap a quilt
around my shoulders, chew on my pie,
and hold my solitary wake.

A Strange Week, a Strange Month

2012-01-04T09:22:00.000-05:00

I am back in South Florida, although it doesn't feel like South Florida, since it's 43 degrees here. When I left, we were having highs in the mid 80's, and now the temperature has plunged.

And yes, I've become the wimpy Floridian who turns on her heat. When we first moved here in 1998, I wondered why anyone would have heat when it so rarely got cold or even chilly.

I expected to be gone for at least part of the week last week, and so I left blog postings to run when I wasn't here. Last Monday, we left to meet my parents as they vacationed on Marco Island. A week ago, we got the call that my grandmother had died peacefully and in her sleep.

You may remember that for much of December, my grandmother has been sick. I've been expecting her death, in a way, and yet it still surprised me.

Last Thursday, we packed up our cars and headed north. And we've been travelling ever since, laying our heads down in a different bed each night--at least, that's how it felt.

I thought I might be able to get some Internet connections, but between rural travels and family priorities, it was not to be. So, I will likely post some reflections on what I've seen and what I've experienced in the coming week.

While I was away, Karen Weyant put my chapbook, I Stand Here Shredding Documents, on her list of the best chapbooks of 2011. Wow. I loved her short review, which gave me hope that my poems aren't swamped by despair. I look forward to reading her chapbook soon, and she's created one of the all-time great titles: Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt. If you go here to pre-order before Jan. 17, you get a special price of $6--hard to beat that deal!

In addition to a lot of driving, I did some reading (note that the lack of Internet access means that my reading time escalates). I've written about Ann Patchett's State of Wonder, and how that book was a bit of a slog for me, with a wham-bam ending that took about 20 pages and in some ways, made no sense to me, even when I read the ending twice.

Happily, I also had some great reading experiences. I read Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers, which was every bit as wonderful as I expected. It's a book about what happens when the Rapture--or was it the Rapture?--happens, and the people you'd expect to be taken aren't taken. How do the ones left behind make sense of it all and go on with their lives? As I was reading, more than once I said, "This book is the perfect post Sept. 11 book!" And as I kept reading, I thought that it was far broader than that, since very few of us will escape having to wrestle with having been left behind.

I also read Kate Racculia's This Must Be the Place, a book that I didn't expect to love as much as I did. If one of my work colleagues hadn't recommended it so highly, I might not have survived the first 20-50 pages, since the conflict that catapults the plot into action is the unexpected death of a character. The husband of the dead character travels back to her hometown to try to discover what her shoebox of memorabilia means. There's a great subplot that involves teenagers that seems very realistic to me. The novel revolves around questions of love and belonging and identity and art and work in ways that are both familiar and quirky and unexpected. It's a great first novel, far greater than most first novels, and I'm happy to say that the ending of this book did not disappoint in the ways that so many books have been disappointing me.

So, here I am, back in my chilly house, trying to regroup. Before my end-of-December travels, my schedule had already been disrupted by my severe cold and eye infection. I spent much of December eating homemade Christmas cookies instead of meals. At the end of September, at work we found out that our work was switching to an annual year accounting of our leave days instead of by the fiscal year, and we had to use up all of our 6 months of leave time by the end of 2011 before the switch. So even work has been disrupted, what with my leave taking and the leave taking of others.

In short, it's time to get back on track and time to remember what the track should be. Time to get back to regular exercise and more than one serving of veggies a day. Time to start sending poems back out into the world. Time to get back to writing poems. Time to think about larger manuscripts.

What the Airport Can Teach Us About Living

2011-12-31T07:04:00.010-05:00

Here we are, one of the busier travel week-ends of the year. Here we are at the time of year when we create resolutions and resolve to live differently. It seems a poem is in order.

I don't have as many poems that focus on New Year's, not the way I do for Christmas or Easter. "Zen Lessons at the Airport" seemed to fit tangentially.

And if you're looking for a writing prompt, you might start the way that I did, by imaginging that inanimate objects can have thoughts and desires, just like humans.

Zen Lessons at the Airport

The tarmac longs to lift itself skyward,
to fling itself free of the earth’s clinging
embrace, to shake off the cloak of asphalt
depression, to float in the fantastic
realms that stretch above.

The planes tell tales of improbable
kingdoms, castles of clouds and endless
vistas. The planes delight
in tormenting the tarmac with visions
of lands it can never visit.

The planes torture the tarmac, jealous
of its stability. They tire
of fleeing across continents, always rushing
to stay ahead of the harsh
taskmaster of the schedule. Breathless,
the planes race
from day to day, never having a chance
to enjoy the views, never knowing
for sure where they’ll be on any given day.

The tarmac stays anchored and mopes
about, frustrated by the familiar scenery.
The planes see the world, but yearn
for a friendly face and a rooted
future. The flowers bloom their riotous
profusion of flowers, even though the planes
overlook them and the tarmac wishes
for different colored blooms.

My review of "From the Fever-World" up at the Rattle website

2011-12-30T06:49:00.026-05:00

A quick note to say that my review of Jehanne Dubrow’s From the Fever-World should be up at the Rattle website here today. I've been increasingly impressed with Dubrow's talent with each book of poems that she publishes; it was fascinating to revisit her earlier work.

I just finished Ann Patchett's State of Wonder. I both loved it and found it tedious. It's beautiful and lush and filled with poetic description. I also found myself sinking into a sort of tropical torpor as I picked up the book each time to continue slogging through it. Book as dense jungle--if I had to write a pithy description, there it would be.

And then, suddenly, the end arrives, like a hurricane. I won't soon stop thinking about it and puzzling over it. I'm kind of annoyed with the ending, frankly, and I find myself saying that more and more often in the past year. Some would say it's out of frustration that I'm not writing books myself, but I don't think that's it. I'm noticing books that I'm reading that don't quite deserve the endings that they have: they haven't earned them or they come to suddenly or they make no sense or the book just comes crashing to a halt. More on that later, perhaps.

The Year in Review: 2011 Non-Writing Goals

2011-12-29T06:23:00.068-05:00

Yesterday, I wrote a post that talked about my 2011 Writer's Goals with an update in purple to report on the progress, or lack of progress, I made. Today, I'll do the same for my other goals for 2011.

Organization:

We've lived in this house for 12 years. Twelve years!!! How is this possible? Anyway, gone are the days when we moved every year, which exhausting though it may be, does force one to sort through one's stuff. So, this year, it's time to sort through stuff, particularly my bookcases. I'm holding on to many books that I know I will never read again, books that I don't particularly care about possessing. It's time to set some of my stuff free!

We got rid of lots of books, which meant we could reorganize shelves, which has our guest room feeling much more open and welcoming. We used to have bookcases back to back at right angles to the walls, which made me feel claustrophobic. Now we have bookcases against the walls.

I continue to work on getting clothes and other stuff I don't need or use anymore. I got rid of some clothes, some kitchen stuff, but there's always more to do.

Creative Goals

--Collaging. I'd like to have one day a month where I experiment with old-fashioned collage (by which I mean cutting up magazines and pasting).

I only had a day or two of collaging. But I tried to continue working in fiber and being open to creative opportunities. I've done a lot more with photography.

--More bread baking.

My bread baking comes and goes in cycles, but I think I've done more.
Technology

--learn to make better sound recordings. Perhaps it is time to invest in some equipment?

I didn't make any investments, but I did learn to use Microsoft MovieMaker a bit more. I still can't figure out the sound pieces--how to get rid of some sound and add others. Sigh.

--learning to make better sound recordings would help me create better book promotion videos and videopoems.

I created two book promotion videos, but not as much with videopoems.

Personal Improvement

--Weight Loss: In early October, one of our spin instructors offered us an opportunity to try to lose 10 pounds before Christmas. She would take our measurements at the beginning, and we'd weigh in each week. I had some trepidations about this (particularly the weigh-ins, which I worried would be shaming and would drive me to eat more), but I signed up. I lost just under 10 pounds in 10 weeks! I'd like to see if I could lose 10 pounds every quarter of 2011. I'd like to continue to be more mindful of my eating--and my drinking, which may do more to derail me than my eating. I was successful in cutting in half the amount of sugar I use in my coffee during 2010 (I used to routinely drink 1/4 to 1/2 cup of sugar in a day's worth of coffee--now it's half that). And during the 10 pounds in 10 weeks process, I was successful in being mindful about my wine consumption. I don't want to eliminate--just be watchful.

It was in this area that I was most spectacularly successful in 2011. In June, I signed up for a Weight Loss Challenge at my little gym that's part of a wellness center in the hospital near where I work. We worked out with our group once a week, we met several times with a nutritionist, and we had a weekly weigh in. By the end of August, I had lost 22 pounds.

People ask how I did it, and frankly, it was by counting calories, which I haven't done since I was 16. I kept my calories between 1200 and 1500 calories a day, which I tried to make mostly fruits, vegetables, and lean proteins. I was surprised by how successful the process was. Keep your calories down, and you will lose weight. Add in some exercise, and your weight loss will go down.

I was also surprised by how competitive I became. I really wanted to WIN. I wanted to impress the team of trainers. I wanted to please the person who weighed me each week. I thought it might have the opposite effect on me, and it did for some participants: "You can't tell me what to do; I'm going to eat what I want, and I'm going to prove to you that I can't exercise." Happily, I had the opposite response.

It feels strange to write this, as I've moved away from some of my good behaviors during the month of December. My severe cold meant that I missed almost 3 weeks of exercise, and I need to get back to healthier eating patterns. But I'm convinced that I will do this. I've kept the weight off, even through the holidays. I'd like to lose a bit more. It will be easier to get back on track in January.

--Add more fruits and veggies. Some weeks I'm good at consuming plenty of fruits and veggies. Other weeks, not so much. I'd like to continue to do things that work: a fruit smoothie for breakfast, a V8 juice during the day, baby carrots carried with me for snacks, veggie soups for meals in the office, desserts that help me with my more fruits/veggies goal (pumpkin bread, apple crisp, pumpkin pudding, berry crumbles).

Some weeks I do well, other weeks, less well. But most days, I do get at least 4 servings of fruits and veggies.

--Exercise: I've gotten a bit off track in the last few weeks. I'd like to get back to doing a bit of strength training, and to exercise on Tuesdays and Thursdays (running, ideally, but walking will be fine too). I've been good at going to spin class on MWF (and Saturdays, when I'm in town). I plan to continue to do that.

It makes me feel good to read that this time last year, I had gotten a bit off track. I got back on track and will again.
Relationships

--I'd like to be more present in my relationships with people. I feel distracted and disrupted. I want to be more attentive.

With an increasingly electronic world, I suspect I'll continue to struggle with this.
--I want to be like that TSA agent, who greeted everyone with such joy and enthusiasm in the Baltimore airport on the morning of Dec. 29. I especially want to exhibit this trait in the workplace. I want to be patient, but so much more, I want to see the value in each human who crosses my path--and I want each human to leave an encounter with me feeling any one of the following: enriched, helped, listened to, respected, engaged . . .

A worthy goal for any year--and I'll continue to work on this.

I have noticed that my goals don't change a lot from year to year. I want to treat my body better; I want to treat my friends and family better. I want to prioritize so that I'm spending my free time working on activities that are important to me. I continue to want to move towards the Buddhist teahouse approach of meaningful work. In an interview with Bill Moyers, Jane Hirshfield explains, "Teahouse practice means that you don't explicitly talk about Zen. It refers to leading your life as if you were an old woman who has a teahouse by the side of the road. Nobody knows why they like to go there, they just feel good drinking her tea. She's not known as a Buddhist teacher, she doesn't say, "This is the Zen teahouse." All she does is simply serve tea--but still, her decades of attentiveness are part of the way she does it. No one knows about her faithful attention to the practice, it's just there, in the serving of the tea, and the way she cleans the counters and washes the cups" (Fooling with Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft, page 112).

Worthy goals, and an ever-moving target.

2011 Year in Review: Writer's Goals

2011-12-28T06:55:00.064-05:00

At the beginning of 2011, I wrote a very long post with an assortment of goals for 2011. This post will look at the progress I made on the writer's goals for 2011 that I posted; as with yesterday's post, I'll put my updates in purple. Tomorrow, I'll update the progress made on other goals.

Writing Goals
Let me just capture them here:

--Write in my paper journal once a week.
I did not do this. I mainly use my paper journal when I'm away from the computer, or when I need to sort out something that shouldn't be done in as public a space as a blog is.

--Continue blogging and being open to new blogging opportunities.
I have done this. I've been interested in transforming blog pieces into essays and articles for other sources. I've done this to some extent. I want to do more. I've also written 16 blog posts for the Living Lutheran site and several blog postings for the Voice Alpha site.

--Write a poem a week: Let me define what I mean by poem, which is not what I meant yesterday, when I created my accomplishments list. I want a poem a week that is as finished as I can make it.
I wrote 48 poems, but not one each and every week. Sometimes, I wrote two in one week. For the most part, however, I did write one poem each week, with the exception of some travel weeks and wrestled into a finished shape. I also wrote a lot of fragments. I'd like to think they'll be poems one day, but I rarely go back to those fragments.

--Continue to send out submissions, both of manuscripts and individual poems.
I have done this.

--Write the short stories that my linked collection will need. Do the revising of the existing stories that the linked collection will need. Have the linked collection finished by this time next year.

Alas, I did not do this.

--Book Promotion: I'm seeing this year's AWP as a practice run for next year (this year's AWP isn't as scary, because I have family in the area and I know the city and feel confident about my ability to use public transit). I will force myself to go to Chicago in 2012, I will force myself to promote my chapbook.

Other ways of book promotion: making bookmarks. Making business cards. Creating order forms. Remembering to carry those with me. Creating a video promotion series for the book. Sending out additional postcards.

I should also start to think in terms of lining up readings. Will this be the year that my mom and I complete our goal/dream of doing a poetry and organ presentation? My mom is one of the best musicians I know.
I did a lot of promotion, sending out mailings and creating promos and lining up readings. My mom and dad moved to Williamsburg, so we didn't get to do as many projects as we might have in a calmer year. But I feel like I did a lot to promote my new chapbook.

--Other projects: I'd like to work on some book-length projects that my mom and I have been discussing, theology books and/or worship books for small children. Could we do it? We have an audience with my sister's child. He won't be our target age group much longer.

In an earlier post, I wrote these goals:

So, I think that in the coming year, I'll try to write in my paper journal once a week. While I'm at it, let's make some other writing goals, and let me keep them small and attainable. Then, at the end of 2011, I'll see how I did:

1. Write in my paper journal once a week.

2. Write at least one poem a week.

3. Continue to blog on a near-daily basis, when I have computer access.

4. Arrange at least 3 readings to promote my new chapbook.

5. Continue to submit both individual poems and book-length manuscripts.

These goals aren't very different from the goals above; I include them because I arranged precisely 3 readings. Interesting, eh? I did blog on a near-daily basis, and this year, I also wrote blog posts in advance for times when I was away.

My poetry goals don't change radically from year to year, but I do miss fiction writing, and I do miss all the other kinds of writing I might be doing. But let me remember that I did some writing that I don't usually do throughout the year, and that those opportunities took me away from fiction writing.

I did some other types of writing that I didn't anticipate when the year began. I wrote the August prayers for a book of daily devotions, Bread for the Day. I wrote some meditations on Sunday Gospels for the post-Easter season for Sundays and Seasons. I served as a judge for a poetry contest. I wrote several essays for The Lutheran. I wrote an essay for Women and Poetry: Tips on Writing, Teaching, and Publishing by Successful Women Poets.

All in all, it's been a great writing year. I'm hoping that 2012 will be even better!

2011 Year in Review: 2011 Reading List

2011-12-27T07:22:00.092-05:00

For the past several years, I've created a list of books I plan to read in the coming year--and then at the end of the year, I've written a post to report on how I did.

Will I do that for the coming year? I'm not sure. For the past year, I've felt this exercise wasn't as useful as I thought it would be. And my list seems to be made up only of the books that have been published in the past year. Maybe it's time to rethink or modify this process. Stay tuned.

So, I'll post the list from my original post below, and I'll comment in purple to report how I did.

So, here's the list. Obviously, I'll be reading more than these books, but I'd like to have read (or attempted and abandoned) these by Dec. 31, 2011.

Fiction:

In a way, my first book feels like cheating, since my book club has already decided to discuss it in 2 weeks. Guess I'd better get cracking!

1. The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason

I read this one--clever concept, but wore thin after about half the book.
2. Generosity by Richard Powers

This book got a glowing review in The Washington Post. It sounds like a novel that's both readable and ambitious (a book that deals with big themes--who are we if we can medicate away our persistent personality traits? a book that does different things with narrative). In fact, it sounds like Mason's book and this one are experimental. Hmm. I haven't always liked experimental writing, even though I wrote my M.A. thesis on James Joyce. But let me maintain an open mind.

I read this one and enjoyed it immensely until the ending, which I vaguely remember as disappointing.

3. The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

This book wound up on many a person's list. It sounds like an important contribution to Literature of the Vietnam War.

I still plan to read this one, but I haven't yet.
4. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Another addition that feels like a cheat, since I'm already partly done with it (although I didn't start it until Dec. 31). I thoroughly enjoyed The Corrections when I read it, so I looked forward to this one. And even with all the controversies that swirl around Franzen, I'm still open to his work. As I've been reading, there have been times when I had to set the book aside because the characters were so unlikable, and I could sense Franzen's disdain for them. How could he spend the amount of time with these characters that was necessary to write this book when he didn't even like the characters? Sheesh.

I found this book compelling, despite the repellent nature of the characters.

5. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

This book got raves from an NPR commentator, and it's linked short stories, a form which fascinates me.

I loved this book.

6. Room by Emma Donaghue

When I first heard the premise of this book, I shuddered. But after hearing Donaghue on the Diane Rehm show, and after hearing the praises that so many people heaped on the book, I decided to add it to the list.

Again, an interesting premise, with an interesting experiment in having a 5 year old child narrate. But that experiment wore thin after 20 pages, and the last half of the book was very disappointing.

Non-Fiction

7. Just Kids by Patti Smith

I determined to read this book a year ago, when a Washington Post reviewer called it the best book about being an artist ever. Ever??!!! Well, sign me up!

What a wonderful, fabulous book. It made me want to be part of the 1970's art scene in New York, even when I knew that Smith was describing a particularly gritty phase of the city's history.

This book may be my favorite book of 2011--maybe of the decade. Maybe of all time.

8. Changing my Mind by Zadie Smith

I love the novels of Zadie Smith, so I'm interested to read her essays.

I didn't read this one--I'd still like to.

9. Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers

A technology book needs to be on the list, and this will be the one.

I ended up reading a different technology book, Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. I still may circle back to Hamlet's Blackberry, since I find myself often thinking about The Shallows. I'd be interested to see how Powers handles this topic.

10. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

I love this title--and from what I've read of the reviews, the rest of the books should be a winner.

I didn't get to any of these history titles (#10, #11, #12); I hope to do so eventually.
11. History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism by Judith Bennett

A book I didn't get to last year--it sounded important, and challenging, and I need more of that in my life.

12. A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia by Lauren Winner

I've liked Winner's other works, which read more like memoir than anything else. I'm interested to see how she handles academic writing. History, theology, and insight about the daily life of colonists--let me give it a whirl.

Winner has a new memoir coming out in January--I can hardly wait to read it. It sounds like a lot has happened (a divorce, a time of spiritual aridity) since she last wrote. I am fascinated to see how the Girl Meets God writer deals with these issues.

13. One Life by Scot McNight

I haven't read Scot McNight yet, so let me start with his latest. It's getting harder and harder for me to find new theologians whom I like to read. Let's see about this one.

McNight is still on my list of books to read, but I haven't yet.

14. Curating Worship by Mark Pierson

I've been seeing the idea of curating things (a website, a career, an online presence) used as metaphor. Let's see how it's done with worship. My pastor is also reading this book, and he raves about it. Can we actually accomplish some of the ideas in the book, ideas that aren't exactly familiar to Lutherans? We shall see.

I read this one, and was both impressed (wow! how on earth does he do this???), despairing (I could never do such things, like spreading a truckload of sand across the whole worship space), appreciative (especially about the worship stations done in public spaces as an art installation of sorts) and dismissive (great for non-liturgical churches held in warehouses but difficult for those of us in traditional spaces).

15. The Heroine's Bookshelf: Life Lessons From Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder
by Erin Blakemore

I just heard about this book yesterday, and I like the premise, which is evident in the title.

Another book I didn't get to--it has yet to get to my local library, and I'm not interested enough in it to pay for it.

My other reading goals? To keep buying and reading complete volumes of poetry (and to remember to add those to my record keeping). I'd like to do more to mention what I'm reading in this blog. Some weeks I'm good at that, but other weeks I'm not.

I haven't been as good at record keeping, but I have continued to read complete volumes of poetry, more this year than any other year.

So, here's the summary: I read about 40 books of non-poetry, as well as about 5 that I started, read more than 50 pages, and didn't finish for some reason. I didn't read as many books this year as I did in 2010 that made me gasp with happiness, that made me want to slow down so that I could have the experience of reading the book for the first time for a bit longer, that I wanted to read again right away when I finished. But I have had books that stayed with me, books that haunted my thoughts, most notably Patty Smith's Just Kids. If I had had no other book to read this year, that one would have been enough. But I'm glad that I have a wealth of books, not a paucity. I'm also glad to have discovered Glen Duncan (I, Lucifer and The Last Werewolf) and Eleanor Henderson (Ten Thousand Saints) is an author to keep our eyes on.

I still feel like I'm not reading as much as I should, as much as I want to; and I know that I'm not reading as much as I once did, at least not traditional paper books.

I read a lot of blogs, which in some ways are memoirs/novels/autobiographies in process. I learn as much from many blogs as I ever did from books. But how to quantify that reading?

Reading is far from dead, but our delivery systems are quite different. Will this be the year that I get an eReader? Will I start reading on a smart phone? Of course, I would have to buy a smart phone. What will I read in the coming year? I will try to remember to keep blog readers up to date.

Twas the Day After Christmas: Owls, Santalands, and Work

2011-12-26T05:37:00.000-05:00

Most years, we're travelling, so to be home on the day after Christmas feels strange. We don't have clean up to do, left overs to eat, broken toys to mend.

Most years, Christmas doesn't come on a Sunday, so that, too, has discombobulated me a bit. We spent much of Christmas Eve and Christmas morning at church. My spouse is in the choir, so he had to arrive early to practice, and we were part of the money counting team, so we stayed after each service to count money and take it to the bank.

Soon I hope to get back to more every day practices, like exercise and eating vegetables and poetry. But for today, let me post a few thoughts and follow ups from the past week of posts.

At the end of Christmas Day services, the endangered baby owl was back near the butterfly garden creche scene. I was able to snap a few pictures.

Here's a close up of the owl. Notice that he's sitting in the Y of the tree trunk. It will help you locate the owl in the picture below. Look at the top of Joseph's head and let your eyes move up to find the owl.

I'm not sure why I'm so intrigued by the owl who comes back to the manger. But there it is. If I wrote children's books, could I do something with this idea?

For those of you who still haven't gotten enough of Christmas, you might go here to listen to the now very famous David Sedaris reading from The Santaland Diaries. It's the event that shot him to fame. It's still wonderful: snarky and transgressive and a strange yet oddly heartwarming look at the holidays.

Today is the birthday of David Sedaris. Before he became so very famous, we saw him read at the Ft. Lauderdale Borders near the beach--for free. As you might imagine, the place was packed; it was 6 years after his first reading on NPR. He was very gracious and seemed just a bit shocked to find himself so sought after.

I remember him talking about these strange little things that he wrote that didn't really fit into any standard model of anything published, but he had friends who were doing a radio show who were desperate for content. I think that radio show went on to be This American Life.

I remember thinking that it's OK if what you're creating isn't like anything that anyone else is creating. If there's not a market for it when you're creating, you might be in the process of creating the market without even realizing it.

And it seems wise to remind ourselves that we don't always have to know what we're going to do with the work, but we have to show up to do the work.

For those of you who have to return to work sooner than you want to, here's my favorite part of The Santaland Diaries:

"Today, I witnessed fistfights and vomiting and magnificent tantrums. The back hallway was jammed with people. There was a line for Santa and a line for the women's bathroom. And one woman, after asking me a thousand questions already, asks: Which is the line for the women's bathroom? And I shouted that I thought it was the line with all the women in it. And she said: I'm going to have you fired.

I had two people say that to me today: I'm going to have you fired. Go ahead, be my guest. I'm wearing a green velvet costume. It doesn't get any worse than this. Who do these people think they are? I'm going to have you fired, and I want to lean over and say: I'm going to have you killed."

I've been thinking a lot about work, the work we're called to do, the work we get paid to do, the work that we worry about doing. In all my reading about Vaclav Havel, I was heartened and a bit astounded to read that he worried about being the leader of Czechoslovakia and not in ways we would expect. He worried about the ways that power can corrupt. He worried about losing his moral moorings. He didn't say, "Whoopee, I'm head of my country! I can do whatever I want." He always considered what he was doing and why.

My job is nowhere near as important as Havel's, and I suspect yours isn't either. But these questions are worth considering: does our job require us to do things that deaden our souls? Are we losing our moral footing with the activities our jobs require? Can we change the job before it changes us?

I still love the idea of people, Havel among them, living in a repressive regime as if freedom had already come. Our jobs are probably not as brutal as a Communist regime, so we have even less reason for living in fear of acting as if we have the jobs we always wanted and making the changes necessary so that the jobs we have are closer to the jobs we want.

I keep thinking of all the people I've met this holiday season, people who have to work extra hours, sometimes in grueling conditions, but they managed to maintain grace, dignity, and even often, cheerfulness. We can too.

Christmas 2011: A Photo Meditation

2011-12-25T07:54:00.000-05:00

For those of you who want a collection of creche pictures and some candle pictures, head on over to this post on my theology blog. Over here, I'll post some pictures that say quintessential Christmas to me, along with some ponderings.

I can't resist posting this picture again (I first wrote about it here), with an update about an unusual visitor to the manger.

On our church property, we have several burrows of owls that are an endangered species. Yesterday morning, one of them tried to upstage Jesus and move in towards the manger. By the time we arrived for the evening services, the baby owl had moved on. But I found myself enchanted once again, by this baby Jesus lying amidst the mushrooms and the lily in the background that you can't see, this baby Jesus who is compelling not only to shepherds and magi, but to endangered owls.

My sister and I spent our childhood making Christmas ornaments; my parents saved one for each of us. Above you see the earliest ornament I made while in pre-school. I assume someone else put on the glitter long ago. It's survived while all the sparkly bits that I added did not.

Below you'll see my nephew, at the time he was about the age I was when I made the above ornament. To me, the picture below says Christmas morning, or at least, one kind of Christmas morning!

Happily, he is a child who can appreciate old-fashioned toys too. Below, the puppet theatre he got last year.

Some decorations that may make you happy.

Above, my mother's collection of Scandinavian figures. Below, some nutcrackers.

The picture below, with the snowmen in a canoe, reminds me of a time when we visited, all of us together, three generations. My mom got a carrot out of the fridge, and I can't remember what she was doing with it in her cooking prep. My pre-school age nephew pointed and said, "That's a snowman nose!"

I watched my nephew's face, with its mixture of horror and dawning realization of some level of symbolism that he hadn't grasped before. I felt like I saw a smidge of childhood innocence disappearing.

But then again, I tend to read too much into simple things.

What would a Christmas morning photo essay be without some decorated trees? Above, my sister's tree last year. Can you find the sock monkey ornament? (hint: look for a red hat).

Do you have Christmon trees like the one above in your church? Below you might be able to see some Christmons made in counted cross stitch that my step-mom-in-law made for us. They're nestled in with plastic canvas ornaments my grandmother made. I treasure them all.

Here's the larger shot of my tree this year. It's artificial, and while I'd love a real tree, they're very expensive down here. The tree above that cost my sister $40 would cost me hundreds of dollars down here.

And to sum up, here's a picture that represents what I wish for each of us:

My gingerbread people cooked into each other, and my spouse who was taking them off the baking sheets couldn't bear to rip these two apart. May we all have sweetness in our lives. May we not be ripped apart from the lives merged into ours. May our sharp edges melt. May our plates be both festive and nourishing food.

Grocery Shopping on Christmas Eve Morning

2011-12-24T08:30:00.000-05:00

Our Christmas Eve morning dawns strangely moist, with storm clouds to the north and west. I slipped out early to get to the grocery store before everybody else.

I was not the only one with that idea. I don't usually go to the grocery store on Saturdays, so I'm not sure what's normal and what's not. Many of this morning's shoppers had physical and mental disabilities. My theological mind immediately thought about how we're all broken people and how that relates to the Christmas message I'll be hearing later tonight . . . "be not afraid, for behold I bring you glad tidings of great joy" . . . somewhere along the way I have memorized the angel's words.

I pulled out my grocery list, and a woman who looked to have mental disabilities said, "Checking your list?" I said, "Twice." She said, "Merry Christmas!" I did too.

I tried to remember what foods we traditionally have on Christmas Eve. I tried not to cry when I realized that I don't really have much in the way of Christmas Eve traditions. My parents serve Scandinavian food, but I couldn't find herring in cream sauce at my South Florida grocery store.

My spouse has been craving Salisbury steak, so I bought some cube steak, and later today, we'll get out my grandmother's cast iron skillet and see if we can create a dish that's like the one my grandmother used to make, like the one my spouse's mom used to make. It's not a Christmas Eve tradition, but it will help us with our feelings of loss (his mom) and impending loss (my grandma, who still lies dying 700 miles away).

I will make some gingerbread people and decorate the sugar cookies that I made yesterday. I will try to feel festive. I will likely be successful.

People always ask me if I regret not having children, and I usually do not. But on Christmas Eve, I'm aware of how special it would be to have children around, children who would be enchanted and excited and thrilled.

Of course, I have enough friends from dysfunctional families that I know how badly it can all end up. On this Christmas Eve day, I'm grateful for my family, who may not have always understood my choices or my personality or my beliefs, but who loved me anyway. I'm grateful that I don't have family drama to complicate this holiday. I'm grateful that I can focus on some baking but can avoid a lot of the frantic aspects of the holiday.

May your Christmas Eve have sparkle and sweetness. May you hear good news and not be afraid. May you find the peace that you need.

I Review Books at "Galatea Resurrects"

2011-12-23T09:33:00.000-05:00

The latest issue of Galatea Resurrects is up, and I have two reviews in it. So, if you're looking for something that read, migrate on over.

I wrote this review of Faulkner's Rosary by Sarah Vap, a book I enjoyed very much. For those of you tired of the treacly views of the Virgin Mary we get in this time of year, these poems serve as the perfect antidote: "Vap also taps into a larger cultural motif by weaving Mary, the mother of Christ, throughout these poems. Poets who explore pregnancy have a variety of archetypes and ready-made cultural artifacts to use. Vap acknowledges her variety of choices in the poem 'To be breathed-in by a god,' where she lists an assortment of Marys, from the Virgin Mary to Mary Kay to Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary. This brief poem wrestle with the question about who is lost when we use these cultural archetypes and answers 'and we have lost the girl.'"

You may be saying, wait, "Ugh, I am so tired of the winter holidays." Vap's collection has plenty of poems that have nothing to do with the Virgin Mary. Most of the poems do deal with pregnancy and motherhood, however. But even readers without children will find much to enjoy here; after all, we're all living in bodies that give us challenges and joys.

I also wrote a review of Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Interviews on Sleeping with the Dictionary and Other Works by Barbara Henning. What a great book. It gives so much insight about the writing process, like this nugget: "For example, she describes writing her long poem Trimmings this way: 'Writing the poem also involved a process of making lists. First, I made a list of words referring to anything worn by women. Each word on that list became the topic of a prose poem (I started with clothing, then decided to include accessories. There were a few things I decided not to write about, such as wigs, dentures, and so forth.) Then I made more lists by free associating from words on the first list.'”

There's a comprehensive introduction written by Juliana Spahr, in which she "gives helpful background to the avant-garde groups and techniques used by Mullen. For example, she says, 'A number of the poems in the book are composed by the N = 7, a process attributed to Jean Lescure . . . ' (iii). She goes on to describe the Oulipo writing community that Lescure founded, and then says, 'In the N + 7, the poet replaces each noun in a text with the seventh one following it in a dictionary. The result is a joyous sort of a mad lib type of a poem' (iii)."

This book is useful in so many ways, from its insights into experimental and avant-garde writing, to its conversations between two poets, from the way the women discuss the challenges of being a writer in our modern life, to the insight we get into the writing process. Along the way, the book maintains an accessibility that might have been lost when it comes to poems that are so experimental.

As always, when I write these reviews, I'm struck by how broad the world of poetry is now--and I'm profoundly grateful. It's frustrating to know how much great reading is out there, and to feel like I never have enough time to get to it. But it's also a wonderful problem to have!

And if you'd like to review for the next issue, go here for the list of books available. You've got until April 15 to write the review, and you've got plenty of work from which to choose.

May our last days of 2011 be full of good reading!

Contemplating the Winter Solstice in the Southernmost State

2011-12-22T08:05:00.000-05:00

So, the Winter Solstice dawns. In other parts of the world, darkness has taken over. Beth Adams, who lives in a much more northern part of our continent has written an eloquent blog post, where she concludes, "I know from experience that times of obscurity are often followed by insight, darkness by light, and that the two are necessary for each other, but that wisdom comes from being observant to this very moment: the weak light, the clarity of ice. Today that paper-thin edge of duality — that single but two-sided coin — turns its face, but neither one is better than the other. I believe in long journeys, the persistence of love, and the value of endurance: my face in the stinging cold, my feet that want to slip on the ice but find their balance, the sun’s eventual return."

And yet, I live in a place where the sun never really retreats too far:

The sunrise this morning will be similar to the sunrise in September, when I took the picture above. The days are a bit shorter, and I can stay out a smidge longer without risking a blistering sunburn, but a South Florida December is different from what people in the upper 48 experience.

Still, I understand the desire for light, for candles for anything to stave off the darkness. Just because the sun never leaves us doesn't mean we're immune from feeling despair about the state of the world.

Last night I went downtown to First Lutheran to help serve dinner to the homeless. We had more people, over 130, than we've ever had in the three years that I've been helping. And it was a warm night, not the kind of cold night that usually increases the numbers. The words of Isaiah rumble through my head:

"They shall build up the ancient ruins,

they shall raise up the former devastations;
they shall repair the ruined cities,
the devastations of many generations." (Isaiah 61: 4)

We have a lot of building up to do down here in this part of the world, with its abandoned condo projects and deserted strip malls and foreclosed buildings of every shape and size.

More candles!

In these days when it's easy to succumb to despair, I will remember the lessons of Vaclav Havel, to live as if liberation has already come. I will sing back against the darkness.

We are like these finger puppets below, and we can fill ourselves with any number of ideas. It's easy to fill up with despair as we see the broken bodies shuffling down the street, as we hear of governments who can't solve problems. But we must resist the seductiveness of despair.

Havel said, "We may approach democracy as we would a horizon, and do so in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained.” You could slot any number of words in for that word "democracy." Maybe it's your creative masterpiece. Maybe it's the relationship with your spouse, best friends, or family members. Maybe it's a goal at work or the home renovations that never seem to end. So few processes are linear, after all.

We are like medieval Cathedral builders or Eastern European dissidents; we work towards a vision, knowing we may not see it in our lifetimes. That knowledge does not allow us to quit the work.

Our lives are a patchwork, and sometimes, those pieces go together more neatly than others. But hopefully, love stitches us together in strengthening ways.

Winter Solstice offers the consolation of a slow climb back to the light.

Christianity tells us that the manger is empty now, but won't be for long.

South Florida gives us all sorts of twists on this tradition. Our church has an extensive butterfly garden, and we change some of the statuary with the seasons. Below you'll see mushrooms growing around the baby Jesus, an untraditional touch. One year, we had a tomato seedling. If I had a wider range on this picture, you'd also see Easter lilies in the back. I'm still waiting for my poet brain to do something with these images.

May your solstice be filled with the promise of light!

St. Thomas and Snow Globes

2011-12-21T05:42:00.000-05:00

Today is the feast day of St. Thomas. For those of you who want a more theological post on this day, head to this post on my theology blog, where you'll also find a poem. It's a much more formal poem than I usually write.

I've had snow globes on the brain since I read this post on Dave Bonta's Via Negativa blog. His poem has an ecological focus; I've been thinking of the other ways a snow globe could be used symbolically. I've also been thinking of several snow globes that we have from my husband's childhood--but when we got them, all the water had left. Was there a leak? Did the water simply evaporate through the years?

Now those snow globes were the tiny, cheap, plastic kind, not the fancy glass kind that so many people collect. Still, it made me think about how change comes even the world that we assume to be unchanging, unaffected, closed-loop systems.

I haven't come up with a good title yet. You might suggest "Drained," but I've already published a poem with that title. I'd welcome any suggestions you have for a title, or for making the poem stronger.

Inside the snow globe,
children play for hours
without getting soggy and cold.

Inside the snow globe,
the hot chocolate never cools,
and dinner is always almost ready.

Inside the snow globe,
fathers don't leave, and dogs
don't die, and bedtime comes late.

But all snow globes leak
eventually, and we find them drained
of life when we clean out the house.

Wenceslas Square or Tiananmen Square?

2011-12-20T09:08:00.002-05:00

It's been an interesting few days, in terms of deaths and thinking about words and ideas and truth. I've been intrigued by all the people in North Korea mourning the death of their "dear leader." I know that in a totalitarian regime much of that emotion is fake, but still, the newscaster breaking down into tears? Was that emotion fake? Did the newscaster just not know about the atrocities committed by the dear leader? Did the newscaster know that a gun was offstage ready to shoot, if the proper emotions weren't shown?

What a difference in leadership style Vaclav Havel offered with his insistence on the truth and how to live life, even if one must tolerate totalitarianism. I've been wondering if the difference was because Havel was a playwright. If we elected a poet into high office, would we get a different governing style?

It reminds me of an exercise I used to do with my students. I've always told my students that they should plan what they would do in leadership positions, because they may very well find themselves there some day, and it might be sooner than they think. I tell them about Nelson Mandela, and that the reason that he was prepared to be president of South Africa was that he spent all that time in jail (more years than most of my students have been alive) planning for what he would do if he took over the country. He didn't nurse anger or bitterness. No, he planned, along with his compatriots, who were jailed with them.

Then I give them a copy of an interview (in the fabulous book We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews) with Jello Biafra which has this challenge: "It's time to start thinking, 'What do I do if I suddenly find myself in charge?'" (page 46 of the first edition). Many of my students find this idea to be a wonderful writing prompt, even as they're doubtful that they would ever be allowed to be in charge of a national government.

As I watch the latest wranglings by the House, I can't imagine that our government could get much worse. But then I think about totalitarian regimes, and I remember, oh yes, there's something much worse that ineffectiveness.

Anne Applebaum wrote a great essay about Havel for today's The Washington Post. She writes:

"In this essay (‘The Power of the Powerless’), Havel didn’t talk about marches or demonstrations. Instead, he asked the inhabitants of totalitarian countries to 'live in truth': that is, to go about their daily lives as if the regime did not exist, to the extent that was possible in societies where the state ran all businesses and all schools, owned most of the property and banned free speech and free press. By the late 1980s, 'living in truth' was widely practiced across central Europe. The first time I went to Poland in 1987, I stayed with friends. According to the law, I was supposed to register my presence in a private home with the police. 'We don’t do that,' my friends told me. 'We don’t believe the police have the right to know who stays with us.' I didn’t register — and because thousands of other people didn’t either, that law became unenforceable.

But Havel proposed more than mere civil disobedience. He also argued in favor of what we would now call civil society, urging the inhabitants of totalitarian states to found small institutions — musical groups, sporting groups, literary groups — that would develop the 'independent life of society' and prevent their members from being totally controlled from above. This, too, was widely practiced, in Prague’s famous underground philosophy seminars, in the illegal printing presses all across the communist world, in Poland’s independent 'Flying University,' and, most successfully, in Poland’s independent trade unions."

What a great vision--to inspire the people to live as if the life they wanted had already arrived. It's what I believe we find in the best religious traditions, which tell us that we don't have to wait for Heaven to begin to create the Kingdom of God--it's already underway, and we can take part. It's an exciting new--yet ancient--development in contemporary theology. Books like N. T. Wright's Surprised by Hope or Brian D. McLaren's The Secret Message of Jesus or Rob Bell's Love Wins argue that Jesus didn't come to get us to Heaven, but to show us that we could begin living like we're in Heaven right now, before we die.

Even if we're uncomfortable with these ideas in the political arena or the theological arena, they might make sense in other areas of our lives. What if we lived our work lives as if we've already got the great job? What if we lived our writing lives as if we already were the kind of writers we wanted to be? We might waste less time in feeling jealous or inadequate or any of those other emotions that so often wreck us.

I'm also keenly aware that for every revolution that goes well, like the one orchestrated by Havel, there are others that are squashed, like the Chinese protesters in Tiananmen Square. Still, it's fear of the machine guns (real and figurative) that keeps us from our full potential.

Wenceslas Square or Tiananmen Square? The Kim Jong Ils of the world hope that the memory of Tiananmen Square will leave us quaking in fear. The Vaclav Havels and Archbishop Romeros and Dorothy Days and Nelson Mandelas and Emma Goldmans and Archbishop Tutus of the world inspire us to keep our eyes on the possibilities of other squares and happier endings.

Charitable Giving and Dead Dictators

2011-12-19T05:22:00.002-05:00

When the former dictator of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, died, Donna Vorreyer wrote this post, where she mentions that Brent Mesick created this line as a Facebook status post: "All the dictators of my youth are dying."

I thought of that line again this morning, upon the news of the death of Kim Jong Il, of "apparent heart failure" (NPR update). Heart failure? The man who left so many of his people (over 2 million dying) to starve, literally, in the cold? Did the man really have a heart?

Well, there I go, mixing the metaphor with the literal. This morning, I'm thinking of the loss of Vaclav Havel and contrasting his life with that of Kim Jong Il, and thinking of all the dictators of my youth who are gone. My cynical brain says, "And so many, still left to die." I can think of some African dictators who deserve a long, cruel death. But that's not very charitable of me.

If you're one of the people planning to do some year-end charitable giving, Dale Favier has some great tips in this post. Here's my favorite: "If you're moved to put a smiley face on the envelope you send back? Or a note saying “keep up the good work!” or “thank you!” – it will be read and it will set a little glow in the heart of the person who opens it. Probably they won't have time to make any special answer, but believe me, it makes a huge difference. It doesn't get tossed unread. It registers."

Why have I never thought of doing that? Probably because I've set up most of my charitable giving to happen on a monthly basis, without my having to do a thing.

I'd add a tip from Peter Singer, who reminds us that our first world currency buys more in the third world (or developing nations, if you want to use a more optimistic term) than it does in the first world. He encourages us to give 1% of our charitable giving to the third world. Go here for more information.

In this post, Jim Wallis reminds us: "Last year, Americans spent $450 billion on Christmas. Clean water for the whole world, including every poor person on the planet, would cost about $20 billion. Let’s just call that what it is: A material blasphemy of the Christmas season."

Clean water for Christmas! Let's start working now for next year; plant the seeds for next year's charitable giving this year, as you unwrap presents.

If you're in the mood for a wonderful poem that talks about gingerbread houses and real houses and Nativity scenes, go here for Mary Jo Salter's poem, "Advent." Go here for my poem about nativity scenes and the strange creatures that find their way into them.

I'd rather be baking than heading off to work, but it should be a quiet work week, with students and faculty on vacation, and lots of staff people on vacation too. But if you're lucky enough to have festive baking on your to-do list, enjoy some dough for me. In the spirit of holiday baking, here's an unpublished poem, which I'd give a different title if I revisit it ever:

Advent Calendar

Orion, that winter visitor, reminds us of our frosty
obligations. Now is the time to prepare.
We dig in the cupboards for the cookie cutters,
creatures enough to create a healthy genetic
mix for the holiday planet we will create.

We remember anew the joy of the well-seasoned
skillet, so versatile as we fry the meat
and cook a well-crusted cornbread.
We strive for abundance, to be prepared
for the unexpected visitor, the waylaid
traveler who might arrive without gifts.

We rediscover the joy of bread baked
fresh in the morning. We afford
the extra splurges that festivity demands:
exotic nuts, dense pastes, sweet icings,
breads heavy with butter and spices.

We could not maintain this pace
all year, but for a month, we pretend
we can handle the additional load.
We try to ignore the yearnings from the stomach’s
pit, the one that wonders why every day
can’t be filled with goodies cooling on the hearth,
a household bathed in the fragrance of baking bread,
the comfort of cake.

Light the Candles and Write Daily and Be Grateful You're Not a Pioneer in 1845

2011-12-18T07:36:00.000-05:00

Last night, we watched the film Meek's Cutoff. Various reviews have said it moves at a meditative pace, which may be an understatement. In other words, it's slow, slow, slow, and I'm still not sure what to make of the ending.

Why do I mention it here? Long term readers of this blog may remember my fascination with frontier life and pioneers, a fascination born of my love for Laura Ingalls Wilder and the books she wrote. This movie does the best job I've ever seen at depicting what life was like for this band of pioneers heading west.

The covered wagons were so tiny and so fragile. I cannot imagine walking west in the clothes that the women wore; I can't imagine doing much more than sitting on the porch! I can't imagine how the sparse diets that the pioneers ate prepared them for their hike. But most important, this film shows how scarce the water resources were and how the presence or absence of water could make or break the group.

The movie made me think about what would compel these people to put a small collection of belongings in a fragile wagon and head off across the continent. I wondered what a similar analogy would be in modern life.

This movie also made me profoundly grateful to be born when I was, to be living in the first world in this century.

Here we are a week from Christmas, so let me mention that it's the birthday of Charles Wesley, who wrote "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," which might be one of your favorite Christmas carols. Today's entry on The Writer's Almanac website reminds us that Wesley wrote over 6,000 hymns. I wrote about Charles Wesley a year ago in this post on my theology blog.

How did he do write this many hymns, in addition to his evangelizing work? By writing, of course, "averaging 10 lines a day for 50 years." So, if you've ever wondered what you would accomplish if you simply wrote 10 lines a day, you'd end up with a rich trove at the end of 50 years. Ten lines a day--surely we have time to do that!

For those of us wondering if writers can accomplish anything more long lasting than a collection of writing, let us take a minute to remember the life of Vaclav Havel, the playwright who helped bring freedom to Eastern Europe, specifically Czechoslovakia, who has died at age 75. This wonderful article reminds us of the importance of his political work and the eloquence of his writing: "Havel's plays were banned as hard-liners installed by Moscow snuffed out every whiff of rebellion. But he continued to write, producing a series of underground essays that stand with the work of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov as the most incisive and eloquent analyses of what communism did to society and the individual."

I remember in the early 80's, during the Christmas season, when President Reagan encouraged us to light candles in support of the Polish Solidarity Movement. It seemed like such a small, insignificant thing, to light a candle against a repressive regime--and yet, how the world would change in one brief century!

So, let us light our candles against all oppression. Let us remember that many people in our "modern" world are still living a primitive Meek's Cutoff kind of existence. Let us remember that although the Soviet Union has collapsed, we have no shortage of repressive regimes. Let us write at least 10 lines every day that will inspire the world to move towards the darkness and away from the light. Let us always have the resources we need and the freedom to do just that!

Mortality and Advent

2011-12-17T08:10:00.001-05:00

For those of you who still yearn for more about Christopher Hitchens, don't miss the great essay by Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. She talks about meeting Christopher Hitchens as they prepared to appear on a news show, as they got their make-up done, "the objectifying ritual of having one’s countenance applied in the presence of another’s conveys a sort of detached intimacy. 'At last we meet,' he said, as though this were the one thing missing from his otherwise rich life."

Classy!

She refers us to this essay by Christopher Buckley, which is a wonderful good-bye of one friend to another. This chunk was my favorite:

"Lunch—dinner, drinks, any occasion—with Christopher always was [bracing]. One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick’s Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o’clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, 'Should we order more food?' I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit."

Now there's a remembrance! When I die, I hope my friends remember me similarly: she ate and drank with great abandon, she was fun, she was smart, I never wanted to leave her presence.

It's been a strange, strange Advent here, as Decembers so often are of late in my life. I've been sick, my spouse has been sick, my grandmother has been VERY sick . . . in short, mortality has been on my brain, even before the death of Christopher Hitchens.

Some people would decry my thoughts on death during the season of Christmas. But I would argue that Christmas always has that undertone of mortality. Those of us who get blue at Christmas are often sad because we're missing people who aren't part of our lives anymore, we're missing our childhoods, we're missing a time when Christmas meant more, we're missing the people who are part of our lives but who are very far away. In the northern hemisphere, the season shifts into winter, a time when it's hard to ignore the final part of life's cycle.

And I'm a Lutheran, a liturgical Christian, and December is not the Christmas season for me so much as it's the Advent season. And Advent is a time of looking forward and staying alert. Advent is an eschatological time in the Church, a time when we think about end times, but not so much in terms of apocalypse and the ruin of the earth, but in terms of salvation and new beginnings. My religious tradition does not believe that God will rapture us all before destroying the earth, but that God breaks through incarnationally into our normal lives and invites us to be part of the redemption of creation.

My grandmother goes towards her final exam (as Gail Godwin beautifully visioned the last days of an illness in her achingly beautiful novel, The Good Husband). I'm struck by elements of her small town life, elements that most of us won't experience ever again. For example, my grandmother's doctor has made lots of time for my parents and uncle to talk about what's right to do; yesterday alone, they conferred for three hours. Three hours! Suffice it to say that my doctors wouldn't do that--they can hardly make time for me, in this era of booking multiple appointments at the exact same 15 minute slot.

My grandmother's funeral service, whether it comes soon or years from now, will be at the church where my grandfather was pastor for decades, the church where my parents were married, the church were my spouse and I were married. She will be buried in Lexington, South Carolina, in the graveyard of the Lutheran church that's across the road from my grandfather's family farmlands.

Those farmlands are now surrounded by strip malls and suburbia. When I was young, those farmlands seemed very far away from what I would have called civilization. When I was young, they were far away.

How many of us still have that kind of connection to land, to place, to one church?

And yes, I understand that those kind of connections can be VERY stifling. Still, I feel a bit of sadness that so many of us are rootless and unbound.

So, here we are, a week away from Christmas Eve. Will it be a week of festive baking and meals with friends? Or will it be a week with a trip back to the family homeland? Or will it be both? It is Advent after all, the time of promises kept, Messiahs becoming incarnate, the now and the not yet of redemption.

"Self-Organized . . . in Unlikely Ways"

2011-12-16T09:26:00.000-05:00

For those of you who thought I might talk about the writings of Christopher Hitchens, who died yesterday, you'll need to go over to this post on my theology blog. Actually, it's not so much a post as a few thoughts and then a posting of a book review of God Is Not Great that I did for an offline newsletter.

I always admired the pieces that Hitchens wrote, even when I didn't agree with him. I almost always found him to have a fascinating mind, and I can't say that about many op-ed writers. I'll miss him, even though his tone was too angry for me to want any more than the occasional piece to read from him.

If you want more about Christopher Hitchens, the Slate website has lots of remembrances and lots of links to past pieces by Hitchens. You'll mourn a brilliant mind gone too soon--but what a prolific mind!

For those of you who need a dose of wonder today, try Michael Gerson's piece in The Washington Post, a piece that talks about God and physics and various mysteries of our planet and the universe: "Not only does the universe unexpectedly correspond to mathematical theories, it is self-organizing — from biology to astrophysics — in unlikely ways. The physical constants of the universe seem finely tuned for the emergence of complexity and life. Slightly modify the strength of gravity, or the chemistry of carbon, or the ratio of the mass of protons and electrons, and biological systems become impossible. The universe-ending Big Crunch comes too soon, or carbon isn’t produced, or suns explode."

And so I sit in my office and wait for the students who are likely to show up to complain about failing a class. They will say things like, "I don't understand. I turned in everything but that last project. And that thing that was due week 3. But I came to every class. Surely there's something you can do."

I will try to look on them with gentleness and compassion. I will remember that the universe is self-organizing in unlikely ways. I will hope for epiphanies to come to these students.

And maybe I'll go to the holiday luncheon. I always worry it will be like the worst of high school, where there's no place to sit, and I don't see anyone I know anyway. Maybe it will be like the best of high school, where I have friends who seem to understand me, even though I have self-organized in unlikely ways.

Morning of Sonnets and Cinnamon Bread

2011-12-15T09:39:00.000-05:00

This morning, I thought I would write a poem that somehow combined elements of zombies, hospitalized Grandmas who aren't eating, and Advent, based on my post of a few days ago (and for those of you who want a more theological approach to zombies, see today's post on my theology blog). It wasn't going well.

I thought about writing a blog post here about whether or not I miss teaching. I always answer that I miss the classroom and the interactions with the students--but I do not miss the endless grading of essays. I thought about all the teachers out there who are finishing up autumn terms. I thought about posting this sonnet from my 2nd chapbook, I Stand Here Shredding Documents:

Posthumous Existence

All during that penurious winter,
while struggling to breathe and coughing up blood,
Keats wrote lines so achingly tender
and letters that came as if in a flood.

What a thing of beauty would be such letters,
so different from that horrid e-mail
that seeks to chain her in these fetters
with the quest to leave a paper trail.

Once she read the great odes.
Now she reads prose that’s spectre-thin.
She teaches all the Composition modes
to students with ears of tin.

How she yearns for poetry’s beaded bubbles.
But she gets incomprehensible sentences for her troubles.

I wrote this poem in 2009, during an autumn that included reading Stanley Plumly's biography of John Keats, Posthumous Keats, and seeing the wonderful Keats movie Bright Star (see this post and that post for what I was thinking at the time).

I returned to my morning zombie/Grandma/Advent draft and notes and rewrote it in sonnet form:

I want to believe in the power
of a kiss to wake the comatose.
I want to believe our love won't sour
if we pay attention in a daily dose.

Will you recognize my face
when you lie dying?
Will you call my name?
Will I come flying?

I think of my grandmother's favorite foods
that she now refuses to eat.
I got through a variety of moods
as I tempt her with her favorite treats.

What a lie these narratives weave;
from death we will be granted no reprieve.

Here's what I first wrote for the last couplet:

What a lie these narratives weave;
we forget that everything we love must leave.

I'm not sure I'm happy enough with this sonnet to do much more with it, which truth be told is why I posted it here. But I thought it would be interesting to people who wonder about the writing morning of a poet.

I have been dipping in and out of Nikky Finney's Head Off and Split, a wonderful collection that won the National Book Award this year. Her sprawling poems make me feel like I'm writing spare, sparse little things. Of course, the sonnet form lends itself to spare, condensed writing. And I firmly believe there's room in the world for all sorts of poems.

Still, reading Finney's book makes me wonder if I should experiment with longer poems. I tend to write poems the length of a page of 8 x 11 paper. What if I went for 5 pages? What if I wrote a series of poems? I'll keep these ideas in mind.

I've also been making cinnamon bread and cinnamon rolls this morning. Yes, it's been a busy bread week in my kitchen (go here to see a photo essay about my Santa Lucia Day bread). And it's been a busy work week, and a week of increased family phone calls, as we try to keep updated about my grandmother's health. I'm grateful to get a poem of any kind--and a kitchen full of bread fills me with gratitude too!

A Movie for Those Who Don't Want Christmas Sugar but Don't Want Zombies Either

2011-12-14T05:12:00.000-05:00

We've spent a lot of time lately watching a variety of Christmas episodes of our favorite television shows, as well as the first season of The Walking Dead--ah, the joys of Netflix! For more on my zombie watching, see yesterday's post. In the midst of it all, we watched a very quiet movie which may end up being one of my favorite Christmas movies: Midnight Clear.

I'm not talking about the movie about World War II (called A Midnight Clear), but the movie that came out in 2006 with Stephen Baldwin in it. It's got lots of characters and story lines that I knew would intersect but I wasn't sure exactly how.

Because part of the film involves a church youth group that's out carolling, some have written it off as a feel-good Christian movie, but I didn't see it that way at all. A feel-good Christian movie would have a more upbeat, rah-rah Christian/Christmas message, and this one didn't.

The movie follows a variety of characters through the day and night of Christmas Eve. Along the way we see that no one is living a perfect life, although the diversity of ways that these lives have gone wrong almost stretches my willing suspension of disbelief at times. The movie also presents several characters whose lives haven't gone wrong so much as just not according to plan. I thought it was refreshing to see a conversation between the youth group leader and the pastor, in which the youth group leader expresses his doubt that carolling is worth the effort. The unspoken part of the conversation that hovers below the surface is the possibility that the youth group leader doesn't think that any of the church work that he's doing makes any kind of difference at all.

In some ways, this movie has a lot to say to us about work and the ways we look for meaning in our work. One of the characters owns a shabby convenience store out on the edge of town, and we see him doing tasks before opening up the store--including scrubbing the toilet. I thought, hmm, I don't think I've ever seen the American workplace depicted quite this realistically.

So, these characters go about their lives on Christmas Eve day, and their lives intersect--a typical movie might go the route of their lives will never be the same, but this movie doesn't--or does it? It's hard to say. The ending is very subtle, but very powerful.

I've spent days thinking about this movie. It's an interesting counterpoint to the zombies which also took up a lot of my viewing time. If zombies work as a metaphor for some of our deepest fears, this movie shows a more realistic depiction of the fears that many of us have: what if my work/life really doesn't make any difference at all? what if I will end up abandoned after all? what if I am stuck in an endless loop that will make me brain dead sooner rather than later? Perhaps this movie has more similarities to The Walking Dead than I realized.

In the end, Midnight Clear is a Christmas movie in the best sense of that tradition, with a quiet, gentle insistence that we will not be left alone to our own self-destructive devices. In our hectic Decembers, we often forget that part of the Christmas story, that glad news, the great tidings of joy. This movie reminds us of the true message of Christmas, and it manages to do it without sinking into either irredeemable pathos or treacly sentiment.

Zombie Apocalypse! (for Advent?)

2011-12-13T07:22:00.000-05:00

Some months, we hardly use Netflix at all. And then there are months like this one, when we've been sick, and at points can hardly move off the sofa--months like this one make me wonder what we did before we had Netflix.

We spent much of last week watching the Christmas episodes of every television show we've ever loved; it's amazing how many of them are on Netflix. And then, on Friday, I came home, and my spouse said, "I watched the first episode of a TV series I think you'd like. It's about zombies, but it's got an apocalyptic theme too."

Oddly, I had just heard this episode of On Being, where Krista Tippett and Diane Winston talked about theological themes in recent television, and they devoted a significant amount of time to The Walking Dead. So I was already interested in the show even before my spouse told me about it.

We've just spent the last few days devouring every episode from Season 1. I'm struck, of course, by the theological themes. I'm also struck by how the show is a metaphor for non-zombie-apocalypse life. In one episode, the main characters discover survivors that seems like a holdover from inner city gang life--but what a shock to discover that they're really a group of employees and families working hard to keep a nursing home (or is it a hospital?) going. The gang leader turns out to have been a custodian in his former life.

One of the characters of the main group laments over how things have changed, but the former custodian disputes that anything essential has changed. He points out that the strong still prey on the weak. Likewise, in the finale of season 1, a CDC scientist reminds the group that they will lose everything if they go back into the zombie-occupied world. But really, isn't that what we all face? We know that everything we love will be lost sooner or later.

As we watched, my brain drifted back to earlier apocalyptic loves of mine, most notably those nuclear war movies of the 1980's (The Day After, Threads, and Testament). I thought of lovers and families who are separated by apocalypse, who aren't quite sure what has happened to their loved ones, who want to maintain hope, even as the likelihood of reunion grows ever dimmer.

I've also wondered about what our apocalyptic scenarios say about our deepest fears. Sometimes, it's obvious: the nuclear war movies of the 1980's seemed rooted in what might happen any day as Ronald Reagan joked about bombing the U.S.S.R. The episode with the gang who turns out to be inhabiting a nursing home or hospital has clear Hurricane Katrina allusions--it's what we're all afraid of, being helpless, whether it be in the hospital or helpless in some other way, during a catastrophe.

We're in a zombie renaissance right now. Everywhere I turn, I'm seeing zombies in popular culture, whether they're taking over Jane Austen or appearing in Colson Whitehead's The Zone. What does it say about us? Are we worried that we're losing our humanity, that we're becoming little more than reactivated brain stems? I'll keep thinking about those questions.

You might not approve of my habit of watching apocalyptic movies during holiday times, but I'd say that it works theologically. I'll write more about this on my theology blog later this week, but for now, I'll just say that I come out of a liturgical tradition that stresses eschatology during Advent. We read the ancient prophets, like Isaiah, while remembering to stay alert and watch for the light. Some years, the texts stress the rebuilding of the ruined devastations of human endeavor; some years, the focus remains on the ruins.

It's also interesting to watch zombie apocalypses in the midst of Advent, which is part of our 6 week food fest that goes from Thanksgiving Week until New Year's Day. The Walking Dead has lots of scenes of zombies feeding, and rather voraciously, on very bloody corpses. Last night, I got the Santa Lucia bread started, while my spouse made homemade pizza, and then we settled in to watch different feasting.

I also have food on the brain because my grandmother lies in a hospital bed 700 miles away; she's not eating. I think that if I was any kind of good granddaughter, I'd get in my car with her cast iron skillet, and I'd head up there to cook her favorite foods. If life operated like a holiday movie, that would be all it would take! My grandmother's eyes would open, she'd eat the peach cobbler I would make for her, and she'd be magically cured of her pneumonia.

Of course, real life doesn't imitate that art, does it? I'd more likely drive 700 miles to an unresponsive grandma would wouldn't be able to eat the food I made, no matter how wonderful the out-of-season peaches in the cobbler.

Well, this post is not a cheery one, is it? For those of you hoping for a Santa Lucia Day reflection, head here to my theology blog, where you'll see I've been doing some baking while the rest of the world slept. Or if you're in the mood for some background about this feast day, head here.

Whatever way you use to chase back the winter dark, if you're in this hemisphere, or the metaphorical dark, I hope it's working for you. Beat back that chill however you can! That's the Advent message.

The Claustrophobia of "Room"

2011-12-12T06:32:00.000-05:00

I am prepared to be the only person who doesn't like Emma Donoghue's book Room. When it first came out, I said, "Hmm. A woman held for years as a sexual captive, along with the child who is a result of this captivity. And the book is narrated by the 5 year old child. No thank you."

But then I read rapturous reviews. And I heard Donoghue interviewed by Diane Rehm. And I heard more and more people who loved the book. So, I added it to my 2011 list of books to be read.

I've only read half of it. Maybe it will get better.

Don't get me wrong: I do admire what Donoghue has done. By using the 5 year old as narrator, she avoids the trap waiting for writers who write about horrid crimes: the readers turn into voyeurs. And she seems to capture the voice and the mind of a 5 year old.

But it's not a voice I want to spend hundreds of pages with. What's charming for 20 pages quickly turns exhausting.

I wondered if Donoghue intentionally spent so many pages in the world of the garden shed turned jail. Once again, at first I found it a charming place, full of imagination, even as I was realizing how reduced its horizons were. As I read the first half of the book, I started to scan it; I only need so many examples of how the mother and child have turned trash and tidbits into toys and imaginary companions.

I'll finish the book, since it's a quick read. But I must admit that if I had picked up this book without the benefit of any reviews or interviews, I wouldn't have continued reading.

Creating in Narrow Windows of Time

2011-12-11T08:00:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite undergraduate English professors always claimed that politics had no place in great art. She often went further and said that if a writer is political, the writer cannot create great art. In many ways, she made us wrestle with the question which haunted the 19th and 20th century: how engaged can/should artists be with the world?

Two authors with birthdays today have been seen as important precisely because their art or their lives forced their readers to think about the role of government in the world. It's the birthday of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet writer who paid quite a price for his art. I've always thought that writers like him played a role in bringing about the end of the U.S.S.R. by showing what life was truly like inside that regime.

Yet his life shows us the price that artists might pay when they engage with governments in this way. We know that Solzhenitsyn was forced into exile, and in some ways, he's one of the lucky ones amongst Soviet artists. He could have been killed. As it was, he was sent to a labor camps. He was allowed to leave; many weren't. His cancer was treated; many prisoners were not so lucky.

In an interesting parallel, Grace Paley was also born today. In her life, we also see a cautionary tale about the price that artists might pay for their creative works. While she wasn't sent to prison or exile, her extensive involvement in political work meant that she wouldn't have the same kind of creative output as other writers. I've always admired her fierce work in the field of disarmament, peace, and women's liberation.

Many of us these days may wish that political work was the force that kept us away from our writing --but for many of us, it's the actual work that we must do for pay. We may think longingly of what we'd create if only we didn't have to work for a living.

In an essay in The Washington Post, Abraham Verghese talks about the challenge that many of us face as we try to balance our creative work, our work for pay, and our family lives. He sacrifices sleep: "What remains, then, is the time that belongs to sleep. And it is most often from that cache that I must steal. It’s not a happy or ideal arrangement; I have as much need for sleep as the next person. I wake up wanting more sleep, and even on days when I plan to catch up on my deficit and go to sleep early, a novel or something else keeps me reading past the 15 minutes I allow myself."

Along the way he has this interesting nugget about modern parenting: "The current obsession for parents to be everything to their children, from purveyor of Mozart in utero to muse, coach, camp counselor and chauffeur to as many enriching activities as one can afford ultimately produces parents who accomplish too little at work. I wonder if it produces children who are more accomplished than the parents who had none of these things. (There, I said it. Someone must.)."

He contrasts this modern method to the one employed by his mother, and the advantage to a more left-alone approach to parenting.

And for those of us who only have a very tiny window of time, Dave Bonta offers encouragement in this post that describes the benefits of writing in brief increments. He says, "I find that just a few minutes of mindful awareness can yield creative dividends for hours. In fact, I often purposely refrain from trying to write a small stone for a couple hours after I come in from the porch, giving my observations time to age. A mere grain can germinate and take root — or irritate, like a grain of sand in an oyster." The post is full of rich nuggets like this one.

So, here we are, two weeks away from Christmas, the time of the year when most of us find our schedules increasingly busy and perhaps more frantic. Now is a good time to remember how much we can accomplish creatively, even if we only have a smidge of time each day.

Because I Could Not Stop for Emily Dickinson

2011-12-10T09:33:00.000-05:00

Today is Emily Dickinson's birthday. How I wish I could write glowingly of how I love her, how she gave me the courage to be a female poet, how she gave me the courage to write outside of my culture's expectations.

I'm so sorry. My 19th century poet heart belongs to Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Christina Rossetti.

Don't get me wrong: I WANT to like Emily Dickinson. I want to say that I've had years of teaching her and that my students always find her marvelous. But I can't. Whenever I've tried to teach her, my students just look at me blankly. And I try to explain the marvelousness of her, and they shake their heads.

I can convince them of the brilliance of the Beowulf poet and the Beats and the Modernists--but not Emily Dickinson. My students will accept later 20th century feminist poets, in all their variety. But Emily Dickinson? No. Ah well.

A few years ago, after reading a glowing review of the Helen Vendler book that looks at individual poems by Dickinson, I decided it was time to cure my Dickinson deficiency and bought the book. I have yet to even open it.

I love that Dickinson resisted the cultural expectation to marry. I love the tale of her lowering gingerbread and mittens for children from her upper floor window. I just don't love her work.

In the summer of 1986, the Folger had an exhibit of Dickinson's manuscripts and some artifacts from her life. As always, I'm struck by how tiny earlier generations were. I loved looking at her poems with their dashes. But that thrill didn't translate into love of her poems.

If Emily Dickinson was a dead, white, male writer from American history, I would not spend so much time wondering why I didn't care for the work. I'd shrug and move along. But Dickinson is such a huge poetic light in 19th century American poetry. And she's female. I feel guilt for not liking her. For not even really trying.

Now I feel a bit of fear for even admitting such things. I envision a future hiring committee stumbling across this blog post and saying, "Well, that's it. We're not hiring this moron."

But I think it's important to be honest. And it's important to note that there are many, many poets whom I love. I can talk at great length about how important Elizabeth Barrett Browning was to all of us female poets in terms of how she lived her life and created her art. It bothers me that Dickinson didn't show the same commitment to her poems, that she ordered them destroyed when she died.

Again that guilt for feeling the way that I do. It's so judgmental of me. Who am I to say that Barrett Browning was the correct model and not Dickinson?

Well, that's what teachers and literary scholars do, don't they? In that, I'm following in a great tradition of literary scholarship that says, "We like this writer for that reason and we wish this writer had done that." And yes, I understand the social constraints that kept Dickinson hemmed in and the ways that she resisted. I just like better the ways that Barrett Browning and Rossetti resisted.

So, happy birthday Emily Dickinson! Thank you for the poems that you wrote and for the ways you modeled for us how to be a poet. Those ways may not be our ways, but it's important that you blazed that trail, even if we've gone on to blaze a host of different trails.

Creativity Lessons from the Monastery: Use What You Have on Hand

2011-12-09T08:13:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, at Mepkin Abbey, we noticed that one of the huge, majestic trees had toppled over. But we were more awed by what the monks had decided to do with that tree:

A close up:

The other chunk of tree was later carved into a crucifixion scene:

A close up:

As I've returned to Mepkin Abbey, I've been struck by how the monks make art and express creativity with what they have on hand.

For example, this last trip was the first time I'd heard the organ used. Before that, if an instrument was used at all, it was a guitar. At times, the guitar was accompanied by an electric bass. And the monks are perfectly capable of singing with no musical instruments to guide them. I suspect that if they have brothers who play, then they have instruments. If not, they proceed with what they have.

You might see the labyrinth in a similar way. It's a huge labyrinth, almost exhausting to walk, and as the native grasses have grown tall, almost overwhelming:

The monks have taken what they have (acreage, grass seed, time) and created something special and unique.

Below in the distance, you can see a tribute (made of trees and benches) that the monks made to 9 (?) Charleston firefighters who lost their lives in a terrible fire that made national news:

When I was there last November, I delighted in this sculpture:

A closer look reveals that the sculptures are made of items on hand, like light bulbs (the sheep's eyes) and old fencing:

I think of how often I've let my finances constrain me. I yearn for expensive art materials--but often when I get them, I don't want to use them. They're so expensive that I feel like I need to be able to produce great art with them. But who can tell before one starts whether the art will be great or not?

I look around my house and try to view my stuff in terms of art supplies. I've got lots of wine corks--could I make a creche out of corks? I've got lots of old socks with holes in the heels--hmm, what could I make of those? Dust rags--the answer that immediately comes to mind.

I have lots of scraps of things, and there are even more scraps of things in the shed. I don't have land like the monks do, but my spouse is very good at using the small spaces we have.

One of the nice things about being a writer is that I've always been able to practice that art with just the materials on hand. Sure, it might be nice to have a fancier computer, but I really don't need it at this point. If I decide to branch out into book publishing, it might become a different story.

This monastic approach branches out into all areas of the monk's lives, from what I can see. I've been there for meals with pairings that I thought very odd: a spinach-tomato frittata paired with a cottage cheese and pineapple side dish. I wondered if the monks were simply trying to use up the food on hand that was about to go bad. How many of us might have run out to the grocery store to pick up some ingredients that we thought would be more appropriate for a side dish, like a salad or broccoli?

I used to spend a lot more time running errands, going back to pick up things I'd forgotten. But now, I try to make do with what I've got. It preserves more time for doing what I really love: writing, collaging, creating, cooking: all sorts of play.

A Different Art Exercise with Calendars

2011-12-08T07:03:00.000-05:00

My thoughts on calendars yesterday took me back to an exercise we did during the September retreat to plan the creativity retreat. We arrived to our tables after breakfast to find 3 markers at our seats; everyone had different colors. Our leader brought in a blank calendar page, October, for each of us. We were told to fill in our calendars however we'd like. We could use the markers of our neighbors, but we couldn't talk. We would have 10 minutes.

Here's what I did:

We had been studying the texts that talked about miracles, so I had multiplying loaves and fishes on the brain. I had Halloween on the brain, as you can see on the bottom left. The big purple thing on the left started out life as something else, and then it grew. The thorny branches above it came about when I was filling in a square that I thought was a travel week-end, and then I realized I was coloring a week early.

I wish I had taken pictures of everyone else's. We were a group of artists, so one woman turned her calendar sideways, and one woman simply colored in each block. Some of us treated the page like the calendar it is, filling it in with notes and appointments. Some people worked against the grid, and some people used it to impose order. It was amazing what we could produce in just 10 minutes.

We talked about how much we enjoyed the exercise. We talked about what would happen if we simply doodled for 10 minutes every morning; I have yet to try that. We talked about the medieval practice of the book of the hours and other illuminated manuscripts. I thought about combining doodling and collaging and keeping gratitude lists. I confess that I haven't attempted it yet, although I did buy a package of Crayola markers.

We talked about the activities that fill our calendars and our attempts to tame our schedules. We all wrestle with the same issues: too much that we'd like to do and too little time to do it all.

But the exercise reminded us that we each get precisely the same amount of time, no matter how we want to divide or decorate our little boxes. When we take a hard look at how we spend our time, we'd probably be amazed at how much time we're not utilizing well. How much television are we watching? How much Internet wandering? Are we exercising enough or not enough? Can we make a pot of soup that can nourish us for several days or do we feel the need to whip up something fresh each day?

And then there's the issue of laundry and housework. My house is dustier than I would like, but at the end of the year, I'd rather have more writing done than a dust-free house.

As we move towards the next calendar year, it's a good time to reflect on what we've done and what we'd like to do. How can calendars and to-do lists help?

Organizing a Book by the Calendar

2011-12-07T08:18:00.000-05:00

In November, I read a book, Jana Riess’ Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor, that was organized by the calendar year. Each chapter presented the author attempting to do a spiritual practice for a month (go to this posting for a complete review of this book). The book is structured in much the same way as Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.

One of the curses of being a writer is that I'm rarely fully lost in my reading. Some part of my brain is always thinking, hmm, I could do that. Hmm, I like this structure, I hate that aspect, I could do that in my own writing. I really like books organized by a calendar year, whether it be the chronological calendar or a liturgical calendar or a lunar calendar.

As I read the book, I thought about blogging, and about how I love that blogging is a chronicle of daily life and seasonal life, and occasionally big national events poke through, and sometime/occasionally/often historical events make an appearance. Blogging is an emerging art form, and I often wish I could see 100 or so years in the future to see what scholars make of blogging's early years. I find it intriguing that reading a blog, especially when I go back through the archives, is like reading an autobiography or a journal. And yet, it can be interactive, depending on the blogger.

If I was that future scholar, I'd also be looking for the ways that blog posts get repurposed, recycled, repackaged--much the way that we look at Dorothy Wordsworth's journals for insights as to how original ideas become the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge (most famously, in the daffodil incident, which I wrote about here).

And of course, in this era of eBooks, I've been looking at my own blog postings and thinking about future blog postings, wondering about creating an eBook as I go along.

I've toyed with the idea of launching a new series on this blog with an eye to an eBook. I've long thought of a book of writing prompts that took the same prompt and repurposed it for various types of creative writing and the kind of expository writing that a first year Composition student would do, with a research component for more advanced expository writing. Lately, as I've done more with photographs, I've thought that a photograph that starts the prompt could be useful.

My spouse said, "Who would your audience for the book be?"

I said, "Anyone who teaches on any level." Those of us who have been teaching for years have a stable of tried and true exercises, but there are plenty of people who are newer to teaching who would like the resource.

I could also see that writers might like a book of prompts. And it would make a great gift.

I also like the idea of organizing a book of prompts by the calendar. I think that approach would be more appealing than prompt after prompt after prompt, bound together by nothing more than the fact that they're writing prompts.

So, I may play with this idea in the new year: a prompt on Monday and a prompt on Friday--by the end of the year, I've got 100 + prompts and a possible eBook!

St. Nicholas Day Poinsettia Poem Draft

2011-12-06T07:45:00.000-05:00

Happy St. Nicholas Day! If you're looking for background on this holiday or for a more theological approach, head to this post on my theology blog.

If we're aware of St. Nicholas Day at all, we are likely to see it as an early gift-giving opportunity. This morning I decided to give myself the gift of time to write a poem, something that I haven't done in almost a month. I knew that when I was scheduling my Autumn of Frequent Travels that my writing might suffer, but my hope is that I've stored up some ideas for later poems. Time shall tell.

This morning's poem had nothing to do with my autumn travels. I've spent the last week delighting in the fact that our poinsettia bush has turned red again, for the third year in a row.

Last year, I took this picture because I was convinced that I would never see the phenomenon again:

Yes, that's a poinsettia bush--so unlike what I've ever seen before.

After Christmas of 2009, my spouse plunked a spindly poinsettia into the yard after Christmas Eve service. I didn't have much hope for it. After all, years ago I tried to nurse a poinsettia through the year to have it turn red in time for the following Christmas. My grandmother described a cumbersome process of watering and refraining from watering, of putting a bag over the plant and putting it in a closet where it would silently turn red for Christmas. My poinsettia died.

Imagine my surprise when our 2009 poinsettia not only survived but thrived and turned into a bush with deep green leaves. And then, I was even more delighted to see the plant turn red in November.

And this year, the plant has turned red again!

I have always assumed that the poinsettia was a northern plant, but it's not. It's native to Mexico, in fact. So in retrospect, it's not a surprise that this plant does so well in our yard of South Florida sand and the compost that we create copiously in hopes of keeping plants alive.

So, this morning, with Advent verses of restored homelands and young women pregnant with inchoate mystery ringing in my head, I wrote about our poinsettia bush.

I'm tempted to go back and load the poem with more: more Advent allusions, more about our family farming heritage. My spouse's family is from southern Indiana and my family farmed in east Tennessee and central South Carolina, and I often think of those rich soils and wish I could transport some of that dark dirt. I'm also thinking of my mom's cousin, who spent years growing poinsettias in a greenhouse in South Carolina, a very profitable business, but one that leads to a very hectic Advent. I'm thinking of the tiny poinsettia seedlings that I've seen in her greenhouse and the huge bush in my yard.

But maybe I won't weigh the poem down with all that. Or maybe I'll write a series. Or maybe I'll go on to other ideas I've had. A few weeks ago I was leaving the gym and I noticed a row of beefy guys working out on machines, and I had a flash to monks worshipping. Could I make that work? I bet I could.

I hope this St. Nicholas Day gives you the presents you need, the treats you want, whether it's a poem draft or kindness from a stranger or a good day at work or harmony at home. May your shoes be filled with good gifts!

Homestead Dreams

2011-12-05T07:58:00.000-05:00

If you came here hoping I'd write about Christina Rossetti (today is her birthday), head to this post of mine from two years ago. Today I'm interested in Rose Wilder Lane, who also has a birthday today. For those of us who grew up reading and loving the Little House on the Prairie books, we owe Rose Wilder Lane a debt of gratitude.

It fascinates me that she hated her pioneer background, and yet she's the woman who did so much to make sure that those books that glorify the pioneer experience came into existence. It's staggering to realize how much hardship Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder suffered after they went off to live happily ever after at the end of the series: "the family struggled with crop failure, terrible debt, diphtheria (which caused Almanzo to have a stroke), and a fire that burned down their house" (from The Writer's Almanac entry for today).

The Little House books made me want to head west in a covered wagon of my own. My yearnings amused my father, who was quick to point out my fastidiousness when it came to public restrooms would make it difficult for me to be a pioneer. My mother suggested that I talk to my grandmother, who might tell me what life on a farm was really like.

My grandmother has always scoffed at my desire to have a homestead of my own. For a long time, she would just dismiss me by snorting, "You have no idea what it was like." But years of gentle questioning have given me an idea of what it takes to grow one's own food, to create all the clothes and blankets, to preserve food for winter, and to keep up the house. And yet that knowledge doesn't deter my deep yearning.

I remember almost 10 years ago, when the PBS series Frontier House aired. It took 3 families and put them on homesteads in Montana and they tried to live the way that pioneers in 1883 would have lived. That show didn't quite cure me of my Little House yearnings, but it was a good counterpoint. Just the act of getting water to the house took Herculean effort. You wouldn't want to situate your house too close to the river or creek, because of spring flooding. But put it too far away, and your daily life became much harder.

At the end of the show, the experts determined only one family had prepared enough for the winter to survive it. They probably wouldn't have. Most of them hadn't stored enough firewood or food. The only couple that might have survived was the newlywed couple, and that was because their house was so small (thus needing less firewood) and they had chosen smaller animals (goats instead of cows) that would have needed less of the precious family food.

We also found out that of all the people who headed west, only 30% of them survived. The rest headed back east--or died. Very sobering, and not at all my vision of the homesteading time period. The Little House books don't allude to this reality at all.

Or do they? I confess that I haven't gone back to read them as an adult. It might be interesting to read them with my adult knowledge. And yet, I want to leave them as beloved childhood books. Why deconstruct everything we loved?

I am not the only one yearning for my own homestead. We're seeing an upsurge in people who are returning to old practices: canning, knitting, cooking, raising chickens and bees. What does it mean?

Well, it might mean that modern life seems that much more precarious, and it might make sense that we want to be able to provide for ourselves. It might mean that more of us are working less, and thus we need to return to some of the thrifty practices of our Depression era ancestors to survive. Some people look at the fact that it's women returning to these practices and wonder if we're giving up the gains of the feminist revolutions of the 20th century too quickly. For more on this idea, go to this great article in The Washington Post, which concludes: "Women like me are enjoying domestic projects again in large part because they’re no longer a duty but a choice. But how many moral and environmental claims can we assign to domestic work before it starts to feel, once more, like an obligation? If history is any lesson, my just-for-fun jar of jam could turn into my daughter’s chore, and eventually into my granddaughter’s 'liberating' lobster strudel. And as . . . delicious as that sounds, it’s not really what I want on my holiday table in 2050."

I suspect that homestead life appeals to so many of us because so many of us are working for and within institutions that don't care about us at all. If we lived on a homestead of our own, all of our efforts would be coming back to benefit us, instead of a huge corporation or stockholders. Of course, even the Little House books show that nature can be much harsher than corporate business cycles or market fluctuations. The Long Winter was my favorite of the The Little House books, and to this day, I'm amazed that the family survived. Many families didn't.

One of my favorite poems that I've written recently came out of these kinds of thoughts. In fact, I wrote it after writing this blog post--so if you've ever wondered if blogging can lead to a poem, in my case, it often does. I won't put the whole poem here, because I'd like to see it published in a more traditional format. But it seems a good way to conclude. Here's the first half of the poem:

Self-Reliance

I stare at the dead lizard stuck
in the printer, and I think
of little houses on vast prairies.
What would Pa Ingalls do?

That man could build a cabin
in one week-end with just a hand saw.
I was raised to be similarly self-reliant.
I could weave threads into cloth and die
that cloth in baths made of vegetable skins.
My mother taught us to darn and mend.
My grandmother taught me to preserve
food and to transform scraps
of cloth into sturdy quilts.

These skills do not help
me in my modern life.

. . .

When Atheists Yearn for Advent

2011-12-04T08:09:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on my theology blog about my atheist friend who found herself yearning for Advent. And so, she planned a little Advent party and enlisted my help.

Yesterday was our Advent party day. We planned to make lots of cookies and some wreaths. We thought about singing together--maybe in German, maybe in English. I even thought about making an Advent calendar, after a week where we exchanged e-mails talking about our Advent calendar memories. My German friend thought the Advent calendar an obscure, mostly dead German custom, but she was floored to learn how many of us had spent our childhood Decembers opening those little doors.

Well, the Advent calendar will have to wait for another day. We ended up concentrating on cookies. We made some and decorated some.

One of our group members baked lots of cookies ahead of time and provided decorations. We had a great time.

You'll notice the friend who made cookies in advance at the back of this picture as she uses her professional decorating tools.

But others of us took the whimsical approach:

Can you find the dreidel cookie above? Can you find the Bollywood cookie below?

You'll notice that the cookies above and below have eyes made from red hots. And I awake this morning with a case of pink eye! No, it's not cosmic justice from the great cookie gods. Some of my family members came home from Thanksgiving with not only a cold, but pink eye! And now, it appears to be my turn. Sigh.

Yesterday was loads of fun. It made me wonder why we only do these things once a year. I'm not suggesting that we celebrate Christmas year-round--but what other childhood customs could we recreate as adults to bring us joy?

A Slower, Voiceless Week

2011-12-03T07:22:00.000-05:00

So, while the rest of America has been ramping up their holiday schedules, I have been laid low by my cold. It's been an interesting time for me. In past years, by the first days of December, I'm usually done decorating the house, and I've started singing carols and I've often made a batch or two of Christmas cookies, a loaf or two of bread.

Not this year. I've taken sick days because it didn't seem fair to go to work and cough and spread my germs to everyone--but that makes me sound like an altruist, doesn't it? No, I've taken sick days because I could hardly hold myself upright. And I haven't been able to speak without collapsing into a coughing fit. It made sense to stay at home, especially since I have sick leave that will vanish if I don't use it by Dec. 30.

I wish I could say that I've used this down time to work on manuscripts, to write new poems, to launch new projects, but I have not. I had about enough mental capacity to watch old holiday episodes of T.V. shows while sipping soup.

Along the way, I've had some time to think about my voice, during a week where I didn't use it very much, and what remains unsaid. All week I've contemplated carefully before speaking; I've asked myself, "Is this sentence that I'm about to utter worth the two minutes of coughing that will follow?" Most of the time, the answer has been no.

So, until I decided to use my sick days, before I admitted that I really have been sick, I spent a lot of time at work not talking. It's been kind of refreshing. It's an interesting experiment, to measure each and every word.

I know, I know--you're thinking that I'm a poet, and so of course, I must measure each and every word each day, right? That's what poets do, right?

Well, I like to think I do that when I write a poem--but that still leaves many hours in the day when I'm engaged in non-essential talk. I realize that not all of that talk is as useless as it might seem. There are social nicenesses that make work more tolerable, after all. Small talk can lead to deeper talk.

What would happen, though, if I kept my mouth shut when I'm tempted to engage in damaging talk (like gossip) or in discussions that really aren't ever going to go anywhere? I have colleagues who seem to delight in expressing outrage over political situations, and they can go on at great length, but it's not really useful conversation, and it's not likely to lead to social change or anything positive. I'd like less of that talk in my life. I'd like to be struck mute when I'm tempted to gossip or to speculate about the fortunes of others.

I'd like my words to be measured and vital. That's my lesson from this most recent illness.

Moving Forward into Broad, Sunlit Uplands

2011-11-30T08:18:00.000-05:00

I returned from my Thanksgiving festivities with a whopper of a cold. Until last night, the main symptom of my cold was a severe sore throat. I haven't had a sore throat by itself for years; usually I have a sore throat because my stressed, teacher's voice submitted to a cough, which made my throat sore.

My dad returned home with the same sore throat. We spent the holiday with 5 children under the age of 6, one of whom had been sick, so we suspect one of them is the disease vector.

I keep thinking that I have a poem here--Thanksgiving and sickness, both my own and the Pilgrims'. Probably been done to death.

A better poem might be to think about how my cousins, sister, and I spent our youth during family reunions at the beach: we'd collect odds and ends of abandoned things on the sand and create an ice cream shop out of spent fireworks and shells and trash of all sorts. And now we spend time talking about the European debt crisis which may become a U.S. crisis yet.

In these dark days, I'm finding the words of Winston Churchill, who was born on this day in 1874, to be comforting: "The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'"

It's good to remember that no matter how dark our days may be, humanity has faced much worse. I'm thinking of reading A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead. It's a book about women of the French Resistance and how they survived or didn't survive the Nazis. I'm not sure I'm up to the task. But it would be a good way to restore my sense of perspective.

Today is also the birthday of Jonathan Swift, one of my favorite satirists. I'm always amazed by how many students take his writing in "A Modest Proposal" completely seriously, even after I've cautioned them that he's not really advocating the literal eating of babies. Many student brains are not built for satire. Or maybe it's a testimony to Swift's skill that he makes such a compelling case that we take him seriously at face value.

Who will be today's satirists that we will study hundreds of years from now?

Today is also the birthday of Mark Twain, a satirist of a different time. I remember the first time I taught The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in an American Lit survey class. I was prepared for students to be shocked or outraged by Twain's use of the N word, but that didn't phase them. They were upset by the way that Huck treated Jim, as was I. It was a good leaping off point to discuss how our society shapes our behavior.

The Writer's Almanac website entry for today reminds us that today is also L. M. Montgomery's birthday. I loved Anne of Green Gables, but I haven't returned to it as an adult. I like an author who "divided her time between playing with dolls and engaging in tomboyish exploits like climbing trees and building forts with neighborhood boys." I was surprised to read of her battles with loneliness and depression, but in retrospect, it makes sense to me.

It's an interesting collection of tidbits on The Writer's Almanac today: writers who battled against both outer and inner demons in so many different ways: Churchill, Swift, Twain, and Montgomery. Of course, what would great writing be without conflict? Boring, that's what.

So, today I'm battling my cold, and trying to be grateful for the good health that I usually enjoy. I'm wondering when I will ever find the time to decorate the house for Christmas. I have a variety of other wrinkles to my schedule, that I'll blog about later, but I'm trying to see the positive.

If you need help maintaining happiness, here's a great blog post with 11 tips. You probably already knew about some of them, but this time of year, many of us can use a reminder of how we can move forward into broad, sunlit uplands (to use Churchill's phrase, in the hopes that I'm not trivializing it by using it in this way).

Frequent Travelling Autumn Comes to an End

2011-11-29T06:17:00.000-05:00

First of all, for those of you who haven't yet gotten enough of my shopping tips, go here for my latest post on the Living Lutheran site. I talk about balanced gift giving. As you might expect, I recommend charitable giving--but I also have recommendations for the people on your list who really want a present to unwrap.

I am now back from my Thanksgiving travels. But really, I've been travelling a lot since the end of September. My life seems to be like that now--long periods of less travelling followed by a period where I'm on the go a lot. If I was truly good at this, I'd be arranging readings along the way. Yes, let me hold on to that thought.

Here are some notes from an autumn of frequent travels:

--We hear a lot of people going on and on about how there's no longer any manufacturing in the U.S. But there is. During the last two months, I've seen lots of factories in action, smoke coming out of the stacks, workers coming and going. But they're small factories, manufacturing parts or obscure machines or things that I'm not sure what they are.

--I also drove by many independent businesses--but these aren't the businesses that will rescue the economy. They're already employing as many people as they can.

--Lots of deer processing places, lots of agrarian products (hay, livestock, tools, machinery) for sale.

--Of course, I drove by many a manufacturing site that was shuttered--some for sale! I immediately thought about what I could do with an old plant.

--If I came to your house, and you served me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and black coffee, I'd wonder what was wrong with you. But on the road--yummmm.

--it's interesting to watch the billboards change along I 95. At my end of the state, we've got lots of billboards for alcohol and gambling and luxury cars. At Jacksonville, the other end, more billboards for lawyers specializing in injury cases than I've ever seen. All along the way, those anti-abortion billboards that remind us of how abortion stops a beating heart or that a fetus' heart starts beating 18 days after conception. Those billboards used to have a drawing of a fetus. Now they have a photo of a cute baby who looks to be at least a year old to me.

--I realized some time ago that travelling on a plane meant I'd finish a book or two, zip, zip. But lately, time in a car is the only time I have to listen to CDs.

--When I was at Mepkin Abbey, just days after being at Williamsburg, I had this bizarre moment where I felt like I was existing completely outside of space and time. Yes, time with the monks can sometimes do that to me anyway. But this year, the feeling was especially intense.

--What a treat it is to travel in autumn, when the landscape is in such a state of change--each trip a feast for my eyes.

--Months from now, I won't remember my aching back, but I'll remember long conversations with my spouse, who was often my travelling companion. I'll remember the joys of meeting up with old friends, the thrill of a different landscape.

More Ways to Support the Arts with Your Holiday Gift Giving

2011-11-28T06:51:00.023-05:00

As we think about our favorite books and chapbooks to give to others, let's not forget about other ways we can support the arts with our gift giving dollars:

--Give a subscription to a magazine or journal. I'm not going to make a list with this one. You know the ones you like. You know the ones you wish would publish your work. Do an act of good poetry karma and actually subscribe, if not for yourself, for someone else (and maybe they'll let you take a look!).

--Give a donation to a magazine or journal in the name of your loved one. Maybe your loved one is like me: my stack of magazines waiting to be read includes material from the spring. I feel guilt over the fact that I don't make time to read them. But magazines and journals need money, and I'm sure they'd take a donation.

--Likewise, you could donate to your public radio station, if you're blessed to have a good one. My local station, which is fairly huge, not only delivers great national programming, but does some local programming too, and they devote considerable time to the arts.

--Donate to other organizations that support the arts. Maybe you've got a local television station or radio station or newspaper/magazine which regularly supports the arts. Let them know that you appreciate it. While you're at it, make some suggestions about how they can make poetry more visible. Suggestions that come with a donation might be taken seriously (make sure to put your contact info on any communication).

--If you've come out of a great school program, donate back to it, in the name of your loved ones. You probably got some assistance, and now is a great time to give back to the community. This idea applies to more than just the MFA graduates. I got my first real non-family encouragement for my writing during undergraduate school, from my English professors to my school's newspaper. I suspect that in this time of shrinking budgets, any gift would be welcome.

--Shop at your local independent bookstore. Even if you're shopping for non-readers, you'll find all sorts of stuff there: notecards, coffee mugs, calendars, music, DVDs, magnets, edibles, shopping bags, and the like. If you don't have a local independent bookstore, shop online. Some of my favorite independents: Books and Books in Miami, Malaprops in Asheville, Charis Books in Atlanta, and Women and Children First in Chicago.

--If you're giving a gift to a poet, why not give a gift certificate to enter a contest? Most contests don't have a real certificate you can buy, but you can make one. Most contests don't cost more than $25, but many poets don't enter, because lots of fees can be prohibitive. Or give a writer the gift of a conference. These fees can be prohibitively expensive for the national conferences, but across the country, there are lots of local conferences.
--Give the gift of time. Agree to meet your writer friends for coffee and new work. Arrange poetry lunches. Go to readings together. Go see the one or two movies a year that are serious films about artists.

As I've said before, I've moved away from gift giving, at least to first world people. I'd much rather support the third world with my extra dollars. But I know that not every family works that way or would accept my social justice stance. So, if you can't support those who have nothing, you can do next best, and support the arts in other ways!

Poetry Makes a Great Present: The Annotated List of Chapbooks

2011-11-27T06:27:00.009-05:00

Friday, I wrote a post with recommendations of books for everyone on your gift-giving list. I arranged it by subject matter.

Here's the master list of chapbooks (the master list of books with spines was yesterday's post), along with brief descriptions so that you can get a sense of the book:

The Doors of the Body by Mary Alexandra Agner: a chapbook of poems that revisit primarily female characters from classic Greek mythology and fairy tales (Mayapple 2009).

Passage to America by Elisa Albo: Wonderful poems about the Cuban-American experience. "How to Make a Raft" is one of my favorite poems about immigration and the risks we take for freedom. (March Street Books 2006)

Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum? by Nin Andrews: For all the teachers on your list, who will recognize all the notes in this collection. (Subito Press 2008)

I Stand Here Shredding Documents by Kristin Berkey-Abbott: These poems show both the absurdities and joys of modern life, particularly as experienced by office workers and by women. (Finishing Line 2011)

Whistling Past the Graveyard by Kristin Berkey-Abbott: I still enjoy the poems in my chapbook, poems which explore how we live with the knowledge that all we love will be lost. (Pudding House 2004)

Saint Monica by Mary Biddinger: Poems that explore a Catholic childhood, poems the explore what it means to be a woman, poems that explore the intersections between religion, gender, and class. (Black Lawrence 2011)

Odes to Tools by Dave Bonta: Bonta writes a poem for every almost every tool in the shed (unless you've got a really well-stocked shed). Even those on your list who don’t like tools will find the poems in this chapbook delightful and accessible. (Phoenicia 2010)

Another Circle of Delight by Rachel Dacus: A wide range of poems that made me think about my body in whole new ways. (Small Poetry Press 2007)

237 More Reasons to Have Sex by Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh: The subject matter is clear from the title, but the whimsy is unexpected and delightful. (Otoliths 2009)

Little Novels by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton: For the English majors on your list--they'll enjoy these revisitations of classic works. (Pearl 2002)

Oyl by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton: (you get the Popeye reference, right?) Fun with popular culture! (Pearl 2000)

Oh Forbidden by Jill Alexander Essbaum: Untitled sonnets of longing and desire. Very sexy, very physical. (Pecan Grove Press 2005)

A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland by Jessica Goodfellow: This is the book for the astronomers and mathematicians on your list. (Concrete Wolf 2006)

The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald by John Guzlowski: Guzlowski is my favorite poet exploring World War II and the concentration camp/displaced persons experience. (Finishing Line 2007)

Dating the Invisible Man by Gwen Hart: Intriguing poems about relationships, with some pop culture references threading through. (The Ledge Press 2005)

Broken Sonnets by Kathleen Kirk: Kirk experiments with the sonnet form, including the first prose sonnet that I’ve ever read. She shows that even in brokenness, life holds sweetness, whether it’s in the perfection of the sonnet form or the imperfections of love. (Finishing Line 2009)

Dark And Like A Web: Brief Notes On and To the Divine by Nic Sebastian: In April, thinking she would write a poem a day, Sebastian started writing prayers and charms. She posted them to her blog for about a week before she realized she was creating something deep and special. Months later, lucky readers receive this collection of 15 poems in a chapbook. (Broiled Fish and Honeycomb 2011)

Something to Read on the Plane by Richard Allen Taylor: Taylor does a wonderful job at capturing regular, every day life and helping us to remember why we should appreciate it. (Main Street Rag 2004)

Little Spells by Emma Trelles: Poems that explore the weirdness and wonder of life in the tropics, in particular the South Florida tropics. (Goss183 Press 2008)

Stealing Dust by Karen J. Weyant: One of the best of the modern works of literature of the working class. In many ways, a wonderful elegy for the lost manufacturing infrastructure. (Finishing Line Press 2009)

Waiting for Pentecost by Nancy Craig Zarzar: Wonderful poems about all sorts of outsiders. (Main Street Rag 2007)