got word about an hour ago that my uncle died this morning.
he had cancer.
he had had a mild heart attack in june area? and that was when they discovered he had a couple spots on his lung. and then they found it in his lungs, his kidneys, his liver, his brain, his spine and in his bones.
So from diagnosis to death - three months. with no symptoms of cancer.
he is the first of my father's siblings to pass away. he was younger than my father... he would have been 56 this year, if he wasn't already depending on his birthdate.
am probably cancelling classes on friday, and leaving class early today. just want to go and hug my daughter.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
back to the grind
Fall has settled upon us after a fickle summer, and the season finds me back at the grind, teaching.
That adage about how those Who don't, Teach, always scares me. I teach writing. so somewhere in the back of my mind I wonder, can I really not teach?
This summer has been spent in a blur of days, every day with our daughter. Every day writing, polishing the manuscript, sending out queries. I had hoped to have had it agented by now. Everything tells me not to give up, when it is the easiest thing to do right now. This book, this novel I have written, I have been sitting with it for so long that I wonder if anyone else in the world will read it.
It needs a life of its own. It has been too long in the nursery. It's time to push it out of the nest and let it fly on its own.
And I have begun to write again. I write in our daughter's naptimes. When she is asleep, i curl up in our bed, with my notebook next to me. I write for about twenty minutes and then when i can no longer escape the cobwebs, I close the book up and sleep.
So, even though I may not have time to write, I am writing. I never stop. I've drunk the kool-aid so to speak. And that's all there is for me.
Have hope for me.
In other options: As this blog is kind of about what else we do (or i do) when i'm not writing, aka running or attempting to run a household.... on almost no money.
I have once again discovered the joys of QuietBooks.
to those not familiar with Quiet books, quiet books are almost always home made. Out fabric. Every page is something to do, some sort of activity. Educational somehow. Martha Stewart did an article on them in one of her issues, and it was awful. way too minimalistic, way toos imple. If you want to find a good Quiet Book, find a Mormon Mother. odds are she will either know of them, or have some of her own, either passed down, or ones she's made.
so for the baby, we have been making quietbooks. My mother is tackeling the Book Of Mormon quietbook. I tackled the little hymnal with pictographs for I Am a Child of God; Teach Me to Walk in the Light; Joseph Smith's First Prayer; and I Love to See the Temple.
My mother is an artist, so it's taking a little bit longer than I would like, but the quiet book will be fantastic. So in the mean time, she loaned me the quietbooks I had as a child. The ones my brother and sister had. We all shared them. And you konw what, they're still pretty cool. Full of great ideas.
I am reading like crazy, but having a hard time finding a book I love.
But here's the recent list:
Three cups of Tea - Greg Mortenson (AWESOME book. Go read it.)
Atonement - Ian McEwan. I actually put it down. I skipped sixty pages and didn't miss anything. not that great.
I'm reading The Kite Runner - still not impressed with it.
Mutiny on the Bouty- Nordhoff and Hall. great book.
Tess of the D'Ubervilles - I forget who. Hardy? beautifully written. but can life get any worse for this poor woman?
The Alchemyst - I dont kow who. Not the huge amazing one. the child/YA book. Ok book. not amazing...
What else have I been reading? I can't remember. But I've been reading a lot. That was one thing I pushed to do this summer. Read.
The baby and I are almost through Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets.
And I have almost fnished knitting my first sock. it's for the baby....
Made lots of pajama bottoms for her and a pair for her cousin for christmas. knitted a set of baby blocks for the new baby (not me, my sister)
Trying to set up daily lessons for the baby, so play time is also learning time..
And trying to figure out what is going on in my life...
That adage about how those Who don't, Teach, always scares me. I teach writing. so somewhere in the back of my mind I wonder, can I really not teach?
This summer has been spent in a blur of days, every day with our daughter. Every day writing, polishing the manuscript, sending out queries. I had hoped to have had it agented by now. Everything tells me not to give up, when it is the easiest thing to do right now. This book, this novel I have written, I have been sitting with it for so long that I wonder if anyone else in the world will read it.
It needs a life of its own. It has been too long in the nursery. It's time to push it out of the nest and let it fly on its own.
And I have begun to write again. I write in our daughter's naptimes. When she is asleep, i curl up in our bed, with my notebook next to me. I write for about twenty minutes and then when i can no longer escape the cobwebs, I close the book up and sleep.
So, even though I may not have time to write, I am writing. I never stop. I've drunk the kool-aid so to speak. And that's all there is for me.
Have hope for me.
In other options: As this blog is kind of about what else we do (or i do) when i'm not writing, aka running or attempting to run a household.... on almost no money.
I have once again discovered the joys of QuietBooks.
to those not familiar with Quiet books, quiet books are almost always home made. Out fabric. Every page is something to do, some sort of activity. Educational somehow. Martha Stewart did an article on them in one of her issues, and it was awful. way too minimalistic, way toos imple. If you want to find a good Quiet Book, find a Mormon Mother. odds are she will either know of them, or have some of her own, either passed down, or ones she's made.
so for the baby, we have been making quietbooks. My mother is tackeling the Book Of Mormon quietbook. I tackled the little hymnal with pictographs for I Am a Child of God; Teach Me to Walk in the Light; Joseph Smith's First Prayer; and I Love to See the Temple.
My mother is an artist, so it's taking a little bit longer than I would like, but the quiet book will be fantastic. So in the mean time, she loaned me the quietbooks I had as a child. The ones my brother and sister had. We all shared them. And you konw what, they're still pretty cool. Full of great ideas.
I am reading like crazy, but having a hard time finding a book I love.
But here's the recent list:
Three cups of Tea - Greg Mortenson (AWESOME book. Go read it.)
Atonement - Ian McEwan. I actually put it down. I skipped sixty pages and didn't miss anything. not that great.
I'm reading The Kite Runner - still not impressed with it.
Mutiny on the Bouty- Nordhoff and Hall. great book.
Tess of the D'Ubervilles - I forget who. Hardy? beautifully written. but can life get any worse for this poor woman?
The Alchemyst - I dont kow who. Not the huge amazing one. the child/YA book. Ok book. not amazing...
What else have I been reading? I can't remember. But I've been reading a lot. That was one thing I pushed to do this summer. Read.
The baby and I are almost through Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets.
And I have almost fnished knitting my first sock. it's for the baby....
Made lots of pajama bottoms for her and a pair for her cousin for christmas. knitted a set of baby blocks for the new baby (not me, my sister)
Trying to set up daily lessons for the baby, so play time is also learning time..
And trying to figure out what is going on in my life...
Saturday, June 27, 2009
We sit in the after rumbles of a thunderstorm. The storm is mostly past us save for some distancing thunder and the occasional flash of light. The rain has moved on. But it knocked out the power half an hour ago, so we still sit here in the storms echoing darkness.
My little girl in a dark blue denim jumper, pink crocs and pig tails has sprawled herself across the carpet in one of the less dark areas. She fidgets and wiggles as she tries to get comfortable. Though the patch is lighter, it gives no warmth.
The dog is curled up at my feet, content as long as I am.
The last time we had storm, lighting struck in our back yard, twenty feet from the house, and severed the electric fence. Today instead of working that hard it merely dropped a tree on my mother's car.
And still in the midst of this darkness, my daughter gets up from the less dark patch on the carpet, and brings me a book.
* * * *
we later learned that the storm may have spawned a tornado. our nieghbors ((down the road a bit) saw a tornado touchdown at shadowbrook (the big golf range and resort.) not far from their house.
we lost quite a few limbs off one of our trees. power came back early this morning. We ran the generator for about forty minutes to ensure the freezer didn't thaw. in the process somehow, we filled our house with exhaust fumes because we didn't know there was a chink somewhere...
people are still without power today.
sara and tom went to our friends (the ones who saw the tornado) and on the way back saw a GIANT tree lying ontop of just handfuls and handfuls of power lines.
we ate dinner after the baby had gone to bed. cold cut sandwhiches and soda out of the single serve bottles. we sat under the buttnernut tree that had shed its branches around us, very narrowly missing the house.
we sat, ate, and watched the sunset. the fog rose up inthe valleys. it was a dark purple and blue. and in the midst of the turmoil and oncming darkness, there was beauty.
my love went to help my sister care for the sheep. before two long, they were nothing more than two bobbing lights on the horizon and faint voices, among the sheep baas, and the low moos of the cows.
My little girl in a dark blue denim jumper, pink crocs and pig tails has sprawled herself across the carpet in one of the less dark areas. She fidgets and wiggles as she tries to get comfortable. Though the patch is lighter, it gives no warmth.
The dog is curled up at my feet, content as long as I am.
The last time we had storm, lighting struck in our back yard, twenty feet from the house, and severed the electric fence. Today instead of working that hard it merely dropped a tree on my mother's car.
And still in the midst of this darkness, my daughter gets up from the less dark patch on the carpet, and brings me a book.
* * * *
we later learned that the storm may have spawned a tornado. our nieghbors ((down the road a bit) saw a tornado touchdown at shadowbrook (the big golf range and resort.) not far from their house.
we lost quite a few limbs off one of our trees. power came back early this morning. We ran the generator for about forty minutes to ensure the freezer didn't thaw. in the process somehow, we filled our house with exhaust fumes because we didn't know there was a chink somewhere...
people are still without power today.
sara and tom went to our friends (the ones who saw the tornado) and on the way back saw a GIANT tree lying ontop of just handfuls and handfuls of power lines.
we ate dinner after the baby had gone to bed. cold cut sandwhiches and soda out of the single serve bottles. we sat under the buttnernut tree that had shed its branches around us, very narrowly missing the house.
we sat, ate, and watched the sunset. the fog rose up inthe valleys. it was a dark purple and blue. and in the midst of the turmoil and oncming darkness, there was beauty.
my love went to help my sister care for the sheep. before two long, they were nothing more than two bobbing lights on the horizon and faint voices, among the sheep baas, and the low moos of the cows.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Required Reading
So what do writers do when they can't write (or aren't writing)? I read. I read to try to keep up with my skills. I read to be critical, to basically look up the skirt of fiction and see how it's being done. I read because it's like going to practice kind of. You want to be aware of how things are being done, you want to study those around you. It's still tying me in to writing, and it keeps me thinking and my compass on writing, even if I am not sitting down to write at that very moment.
Some things out there in the most popular works I can't stand because it boils down to bad writing. For me this was the Twilight Series. Great story idea, though Bella is a bit submissive, anti-feminist, and lives to surve and suffer. I could only call the writing mediocre at best. (But hey, she's got a contract and lots of money, and I don't.) Fiction is subjective at best. To call something good or great is to understand that someone in the world is going to think that the brilliance you love is nothing but tripe.
Other things inspire me to push my writing further. The most recent occurence of this was
Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen which I finished yesterday.
I think good writing, will resonate like hearing a clear pitch on a bell, or an instrument. You know it when you see it, when you hear it.
Below is the Read Before you Die list from Professor Doctorow. I had the chance to take his Craft of Fiction class my final year at grad school, and it was briliant. His biggest thing was for us to push the envelope of writing, to not be afraid of the classics, to make us read, and to get us actively reading and writing.
We read a book a week. I didn't love every book we read, or every book on the list, but I have learned to appreciate them for what they are doing. Does this mean I want to go back and read Moby Dick again? Not really. But do I realize now that Melville was stalling for time and experimenting with form, to again buy time? Yes, that I do.
Something else interesting Professor Doctorow said: when asked what craft book he would recommend to writers, he said that, "I have not read a craft of fiction book that does not make me want to vomit. Tell them to go read. Chekov. Especially Chekov."
Essentially, if you want to write, you have to read. If you want to write good stuff, you have to read good stuff.
So in the interest of sharing, here's the list. If there's any of the MFA people out there who remember books I've forgotten off the list or things we read or should read, feel free to post them.
E.L. Doctorows Read Before You Die List - read them several times if at all possible.
martin ing - london
sea wolf- london
people of the abyss - london (great book.)
tom jones - fielding
tristan shandie - im not sure
bleak house - dickens
tale of two cities - dickens
david copperfield - dickens
two more dickens for good measure
chester tower series - trollop
lord jim - conrad
tess dubervilles - hardy
far from the madding crowd - hardy
the rainbow - lawrence
sons and lovers - lawrence
sentimental education - flaubert
madame bovary - flaubert
red and black - stendahl
les miserables - hugo
49 - hugo
hunchback of notre dame - hugo
dead souls
anna karenina
war and peace
death...sonata
ALL of chekov
crime and punishment - doestevsky
diary of a madman - doestevsky
brothers karamazov - doestevsky
house of the 7 gables - hawethorne
scarlet letter - hawthorn
short stories - hawthorn
tai pei - melville
moby dick - melville
billy budd - melville
prince and the pauper - twain
ct yankee in king arthurs court - twain
life in the city - twain
washington square - henry james
daisy miller - henry james (avoid later work as a writer. he can trap you in his voice. only his early work, until you have established your own voice.)
american tragedy - dreiser (came 28 yrs after his first book sister carrie)
middle march - george elliott
daniel - george elliott
mrs dalloway - virginia woolf
to the lighthouse - virginia woolf
frankenstein - mary shelley
house of mirth - edith wharton
age of innocence - edith wharton
pride and prejudice - jane austen (doctorow said this was probably the most perfect book ever written)
emma - jane austen
that's the list he gave us to read after our class.
the books we read in class: moby dick;
sister carrie;
tom sawyer;
mrs dalloway;
journey to the end of the night by celine (very cool book with a very unreliable narrator)
lots and lots of Poe,
metamorphosis by kafka;
the trial by kafka;
marquis of O and other short stories - by kleist;
dantes inferno;
the emigrants by sebald;
I'm missing about five books. we read a book a week.
He also said to be reading what is being written now. Always be reading.
To add my own to that list:
jhumpa lahiri
bharti mukherjee
jonathan safran foer
of course! e.l. doctorow
sherman alexie
chuck wachtel (of course again!)
of course Doctorow's work - the March; Ragtime; Book of Daniel.. anything he writes is brilliant. and I mean BRILLIANT WITH A CAPTIAL B. (doctorow was also all about pushing the envelope. making you work as a reader. these aren't pop fiction books. this is a course in literary fiction. so intellectual writing. it will require some work on your half. he raved about woolf because there you see someone who got bored with plot and just eliminiated it from her books. and then you see what happens... He pushes the envelope in his books. beautiful, brilliant writer. i need to read more of him.)
Sherman Alexie - The Lone Ranger and tonto fistfight in Heaven; anything else by sherman alexie. he is beautiful. he was one of the first native americans to write about life as a native american. as a real one, not as a romaticized thing. but really. his work from the lone ranger and tonto fistfight in heaven is the basis of the movie Smoke Signals.
Bharti Mukherjee - The Middle Man and other stories ; Desirable Daughters... anything else you can get of her.. love her voice.
Willa Cather
Katherine Anne Porter
Jhumpa Lahari
Chuck Wachtel - I love this man. He is a prof and writer from my grad program. He taught me more about life and writing than he will ever know. His work is hard to find, but it is worth it. I love the Gates; and Because We Are Here; and What Happens to Me.. I love his voice, and I love him.
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World blew my mind
Ray Bradbury - I always love him. and as a writer I love him more as he ages. I just re read farneheit 451 and was still blown away by it. Ilove his short stories from One More of the road; I love From the Dust Returned. and of course Something Wicked This Way Comes.. and if you can find the short story There Will Come Soft Rains. you will not be disappointed. i think it's in the Martian Chronicles. Unlike some writers - dean koontz for example - they recycle their work. They get comfortable. Ray is in his upper 80s, still writing, new stuff, and it is beautiful. Definitely definitely DEFINITELY read One More For The Road. GORGEOUS. It is beautiful, tragic, funny. It's gorgeous. (Not Science Fiction if you're worried.) When he dies, I will go into mourning.
Terry Pratchett - he's lighter, but still a fun writer. when he dies, i will also go into semi mourning - he has alzheimers, a very rare and mild case of it (if there is a mild form of it..)
I also LOVED Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi - not fiction. but still amazing and beautiful and tragic and upsetting and just amazing. i highly recommend it. blew my mind.
Always read some Shakespeare.
Milton. If you have the patience and a good dictionary, read Paradise Lost, and then read Paradise Regained. it's told from Satan's point of view - from being kicked ot of heaven throgh the fall of Adam. it is beautiful, complex and challenging. If I hadn't had the prof I had in college to read it, i wouldn't have made it through. But it is to this day, one of my favorite stories, and it is just beautiful. When you think about this man who wrote this, he had to find words to describe some things that didn't exist yet. Legend goes, he wrote it 20 lines at a time; he would think about the 20 lines he wanted to write, take a nap, then wake up and recite them to his daughter, and that would be it. He was blind so he was unable to write. Just brilliant..
I love Beuwolf.
I loved The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Collins was a contemporary of Dickens. They were actually good friends. I don't know why we aren't told about this book more often.
I love the Brontes - I just re- read Wuthering Heights again and still fell in love with it. I also love the pbs verion this year... sigh..Heathcliff....
CS Lewis and Tolkien, thuogh the latter can be rather complex especially with all the names sounding alike. (I had to rename them in my head and notes so I could keep them all straight.)
I love Barrie - Peter Pan, and Farewell Miss Julie Logan (which is going to be VERY hard to find here in the States. Good luck. It's worth the read.)
Dracula by stoker is a great book..
Brideshead Revisted by evelyn waugh.
Water For Elephants - Sara Gruen
The idea is to become aware of good writing, and develop a taste for good, literary writing, and be able to tell the difference between what is popular and what is good. Don't be afraid to go against the grain. It's like eating McDonalds. Every once in a while is fine. But you need to eat something a little more complex and hearty with more nutrients to truly survive. The same for reading especially reading to write. I need to read Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, and Everything Asian by Sung Woo.
I'm curently reading Dangerously Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, and already I love it. I'm sure I'll post more about it when I finish.
Some things out there in the most popular works I can't stand because it boils down to bad writing. For me this was the Twilight Series. Great story idea, though Bella is a bit submissive, anti-feminist, and lives to surve and suffer. I could only call the writing mediocre at best. (But hey, she's got a contract and lots of money, and I don't.) Fiction is subjective at best. To call something good or great is to understand that someone in the world is going to think that the brilliance you love is nothing but tripe.
Other things inspire me to push my writing further. The most recent occurence of this was
Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen which I finished yesterday.
I think good writing, will resonate like hearing a clear pitch on a bell, or an instrument. You know it when you see it, when you hear it.
Below is the Read Before you Die list from Professor Doctorow. I had the chance to take his Craft of Fiction class my final year at grad school, and it was briliant. His biggest thing was for us to push the envelope of writing, to not be afraid of the classics, to make us read, and to get us actively reading and writing.
We read a book a week. I didn't love every book we read, or every book on the list, but I have learned to appreciate them for what they are doing. Does this mean I want to go back and read Moby Dick again? Not really. But do I realize now that Melville was stalling for time and experimenting with form, to again buy time? Yes, that I do.
Something else interesting Professor Doctorow said: when asked what craft book he would recommend to writers, he said that, "I have not read a craft of fiction book that does not make me want to vomit. Tell them to go read. Chekov. Especially Chekov."
Essentially, if you want to write, you have to read. If you want to write good stuff, you have to read good stuff.
So in the interest of sharing, here's the list. If there's any of the MFA people out there who remember books I've forgotten off the list or things we read or should read, feel free to post them.
E.L. Doctorows Read Before You Die List - read them several times if at all possible.
martin ing - london
sea wolf- london
people of the abyss - london (great book.)
tom jones - fielding
tristan shandie - im not sure
bleak house - dickens
tale of two cities - dickens
david copperfield - dickens
two more dickens for good measure
chester tower series - trollop
lord jim - conrad
tess dubervilles - hardy
far from the madding crowd - hardy
the rainbow - lawrence
sons and lovers - lawrence
sentimental education - flaubert
madame bovary - flaubert
red and black - stendahl
les miserables - hugo
49 - hugo
hunchback of notre dame - hugo
dead souls
anna karenina
war and peace
death...sonata
ALL of chekov
crime and punishment - doestevsky
diary of a madman - doestevsky
brothers karamazov - doestevsky
house of the 7 gables - hawethorne
scarlet letter - hawthorn
short stories - hawthorn
tai pei - melville
moby dick - melville
billy budd - melville
prince and the pauper - twain
ct yankee in king arthurs court - twain
life in the city - twain
washington square - henry james
daisy miller - henry james (avoid later work as a writer. he can trap you in his voice. only his early work, until you have established your own voice.)
american tragedy - dreiser (came 28 yrs after his first book sister carrie)
middle march - george elliott
daniel - george elliott
mrs dalloway - virginia woolf
to the lighthouse - virginia woolf
frankenstein - mary shelley
house of mirth - edith wharton
age of innocence - edith wharton
pride and prejudice - jane austen (doctorow said this was probably the most perfect book ever written)
emma - jane austen
that's the list he gave us to read after our class.
the books we read in class: moby dick;
sister carrie;
tom sawyer;
mrs dalloway;
journey to the end of the night by celine (very cool book with a very unreliable narrator)
lots and lots of Poe,
metamorphosis by kafka;
the trial by kafka;
marquis of O and other short stories - by kleist;
dantes inferno;
the emigrants by sebald;
I'm missing about five books. we read a book a week.
He also said to be reading what is being written now. Always be reading.
To add my own to that list:
jhumpa lahiri
bharti mukherjee
jonathan safran foer
of course! e.l. doctorow
sherman alexie
chuck wachtel (of course again!)
of course Doctorow's work - the March; Ragtime; Book of Daniel.. anything he writes is brilliant. and I mean BRILLIANT WITH A CAPTIAL B. (doctorow was also all about pushing the envelope. making you work as a reader. these aren't pop fiction books. this is a course in literary fiction. so intellectual writing. it will require some work on your half. he raved about woolf because there you see someone who got bored with plot and just eliminiated it from her books. and then you see what happens... He pushes the envelope in his books. beautiful, brilliant writer. i need to read more of him.)
Sherman Alexie - The Lone Ranger and tonto fistfight in Heaven; anything else by sherman alexie. he is beautiful. he was one of the first native americans to write about life as a native american. as a real one, not as a romaticized thing. but really. his work from the lone ranger and tonto fistfight in heaven is the basis of the movie Smoke Signals.
Bharti Mukherjee - The Middle Man and other stories ; Desirable Daughters... anything else you can get of her.. love her voice.
Willa Cather
Katherine Anne Porter
Jhumpa Lahari
Chuck Wachtel - I love this man. He is a prof and writer from my grad program. He taught me more about life and writing than he will ever know. His work is hard to find, but it is worth it. I love the Gates; and Because We Are Here; and What Happens to Me.. I love his voice, and I love him.
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World blew my mind
Ray Bradbury - I always love him. and as a writer I love him more as he ages. I just re read farneheit 451 and was still blown away by it. Ilove his short stories from One More of the road; I love From the Dust Returned. and of course Something Wicked This Way Comes.. and if you can find the short story There Will Come Soft Rains. you will not be disappointed. i think it's in the Martian Chronicles. Unlike some writers - dean koontz for example - they recycle their work. They get comfortable. Ray is in his upper 80s, still writing, new stuff, and it is beautiful. Definitely definitely DEFINITELY read One More For The Road. GORGEOUS. It is beautiful, tragic, funny. It's gorgeous. (Not Science Fiction if you're worried.) When he dies, I will go into mourning.
Terry Pratchett - he's lighter, but still a fun writer. when he dies, i will also go into semi mourning - he has alzheimers, a very rare and mild case of it (if there is a mild form of it..)
I also LOVED Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi - not fiction. but still amazing and beautiful and tragic and upsetting and just amazing. i highly recommend it. blew my mind.
Always read some Shakespeare.
Milton. If you have the patience and a good dictionary, read Paradise Lost, and then read Paradise Regained. it's told from Satan's point of view - from being kicked ot of heaven throgh the fall of Adam. it is beautiful, complex and challenging. If I hadn't had the prof I had in college to read it, i wouldn't have made it through. But it is to this day, one of my favorite stories, and it is just beautiful. When you think about this man who wrote this, he had to find words to describe some things that didn't exist yet. Legend goes, he wrote it 20 lines at a time; he would think about the 20 lines he wanted to write, take a nap, then wake up and recite them to his daughter, and that would be it. He was blind so he was unable to write. Just brilliant..
I love Beuwolf.
I loved The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Collins was a contemporary of Dickens. They were actually good friends. I don't know why we aren't told about this book more often.
I love the Brontes - I just re- read Wuthering Heights again and still fell in love with it. I also love the pbs verion this year... sigh..Heathcliff....
CS Lewis and Tolkien, thuogh the latter can be rather complex especially with all the names sounding alike. (I had to rename them in my head and notes so I could keep them all straight.)
I love Barrie - Peter Pan, and Farewell Miss Julie Logan (which is going to be VERY hard to find here in the States. Good luck. It's worth the read.)
Dracula by stoker is a great book..
Brideshead Revisted by evelyn waugh.
Water For Elephants - Sara Gruen
The idea is to become aware of good writing, and develop a taste for good, literary writing, and be able to tell the difference between what is popular and what is good. Don't be afraid to go against the grain. It's like eating McDonalds. Every once in a while is fine. But you need to eat something a little more complex and hearty with more nutrients to truly survive. The same for reading especially reading to write. I need to read Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, and Everything Asian by Sung Woo.
I'm curently reading Dangerously Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, and already I love it. I'm sure I'll post more about it when I finish.
Monday, May 18, 2009
When I walked across the stage at my MFA convocation, dressed in radiant purple robes, to be hooded like the scholars long before, I was told, along with the rest of my class, that we were among the ‘overly educated elite.’ I dreamt of best sellers. I dreamt of writers residencies where I would talk craft and how to write. I dreamt of prestigious offices in revered academic institutions.. Of my own writing office in my home with antique glass doors, book shelves lined with volumes upon volumes and a growing section of my own publications. I would say to guests, “Oh you’ve not been able to find a copy of my latest work? Here," I’d take one from the shelf, and inscribe it for them, “with my love….” They would be thrilled and on the way home, wonder how they ever got to be friends with someone as cool as me.
Five years later, I am neither on the best selling list, the glass door office hasn’t been built. And instead of haggling over publishing contracts, I’m debating over the pros and cons of a dairy cow versus a pair of dairy goats to supply milk for our small family.
I have, against my own wishes and (possibly) better judgment, become a farmer.
Realistically, it may not be a far fall from the metaphorical tree. I grew up in a rural area of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Farming had been the primary way of life until Procter and Gamble moved into the area in the late 60’s.
My family always had some animals (not used as pets), rabbits and chickens mostly. one of my earlier memories was collecting eggs from our barn red chicken coops during a thunderstorm. i pulled my shirt out to make a hammock for them, and the warmth coming from the small, golden brown eggs radiated through my shirt to my belly, even though i was dripping with rainwater. I still love the feel of a warm egg straight for the henhouse and the beauty of the light brown shells.
This rural up-bringing has always set me apart. In many places I was a novelty so to speak. While living in the UK, I was an ‘agricultural consultant.’ By this I mean I ended up educating my city friends on the ways of country life. Behold the glories of Duck Tape (there it was Gaffer’s Tape) , hard physical work, and being unafraid to get one’s hands dirty.
While doing my MFA, my lifestyle was viewed by colleagues as some sort of pastoral idyll. They thought it sweet that I made my own bread, and that i grew and canned my own tomatoes. They marveled that I schlepped glass Mason jars, lids and rings through the subway turnstiles to my sister while she and her husband in Jersey City so she could make jam, syrup and preserves from the mulberries she found in a nearby park.
In this routine, my colleagues usually asked the same question: “well it’s fun, but why bother when you can just get it from the store?”
While it was certainly more work to bottle up all the mulberries into jam, syrup, or to dry them into mulberry raisins to be used in breads, oatmeal and muffins, there was something about it rewarding. something about doing for ourselves that made it worthwhile and made the jam taste all the sweeter. There was something about continuing the traditions we cherished so much. But to our city friends, we were novelties, and they smiled at us, and shook their heads.
“To each their own,” they would say, as they opened a jar of Smuckers grape jelly.
My sister, also one of the overly educated elite, graduated from an MFA theater program of only eight people. Her resume stretches longer than I care to think about. She and her husband moved to New Jersey so she could pursue auditions and an acting career. He was a successful equine massage therapist. But as time went on, they came out to the family farm more and
more, until they decided to make it a permanent move.
Fast forward a few years, and you find us all living on the same farm. My sister and her husband, my parents, my maternal grandmother and my husband and myself. Add to that two newborn babies, and we have four generations living on the same property we, our parents, paternal grandparents and great grandparents lived on.
The farm by this point was a farm in name only. A few of the fields were rented out, but that was the extent of it’s health. the ancient apple orchards survived in spite of everything, growing wild and tangled among themselves. But when we looked at it, each of us on our own, we could see what there was and what there could be.
So slowly, and individually, we began. It started with some Scottish Highland cattle and some Arucana chickens. The garden was expanded significantly. The barn turned into a working kitchen for canning season and smelled of celery and tomatoes for about three weeks in the summer while my sister, mother and grandmother all bottle home made tomato soup, sauce, stewed tomatoes and salsa.
Tomato season is followed quickly by apple season. The spicey aromas are replaced by a gentle subtle sweet smell as apples cook down to make apple sauce, or sliced apples for pies.
Then in the idle of the winter, comes maple season. Our patio begins to smells smoky sweet as the evaporator burns day and night to boil down the sap into thickened amber syrup. From one hundred gallons of sap, we get about five to ten gallons of syrup.
We have developed a strong streak for doing things for ourselves. We still make the majority of our own bread. We now make our own yogurt, baby food, ice cream, and are expanding our repertoire to include cheeses. When our daughter was developing severe rashes from her diapers, we switched mid stream to cloth diapers. From October to December I was bent over my 1970s Kenmore Sewing machine, making all in one cloth diapers out of old t-shirts and flannel until we had enough with the store bought flat diapers and ones we had borrowed.
Quilting has always been part of our heritage. My mother taught me to hold a needle when I could hold a pencil. So as old jeans wear out, and flannel shirts are no longer patched, they come to me, and they are turned into heavy quilts. I am learning to spin wool into yarn, and then to knit up anything we can think of with that yarn. I plan on expanding my garden to include herbs and flowers used for dying the fiber nearly every color of the rainbow.
On top of this doing for ourselves, we’re considering homeschooling or charter schools.
You may have noted the person change. What had begun as simply my story, has become a family story. Truth be known, this farm can’t run by itself. It takes a bunch of us to get the work done. We all contribute in many different ways, some not as obvious as others, but it is still all about getting the work done, and breathing life into what was once a nearly abandoned idea. The Family Farm, with the Family working on it.
We live in a time when the economy is like a drunken high school sophomore. Things that were old are suddenly new again. Subsistence farming is growing gradually as people become aware and realistic about their situations. Families are planting gardens again, buying pigs to be butchered at the end of the year. Murray McMurray – one of the leading poultry hatcheries in our country – has been consistently sold out of chicks. Books like Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day is on the best seller list. Ways of life that were scoffed at, or seen as sweet, are becoming more of a standard, more steady and strong like the rock walls that continue to line our countryside, centuries later.
The list is beginning to sound familiar. “Well I used to be a teacher…” or Social worker…. or any list of other occupations. And they turn to farming. Most likely not for the sole support, but as a supplement for their family. an actress, a writer, and a lab manager from Harvard. All reborn as farmers with horses, dogs, orchards, cows, gardens, and bee keeping operations either for themselves alone or for the small profit that comes once in blue moon.
Historically, farmers were not the most schooled people, neither were they the most pressing on the social ladder. But they had enough sense to survive. Now this new class of farmer is emerging, the enlightened farmers, with educations out the gesundheit, all to return to a more ancient and less applauded way of life. Though my studies didn’t teach me how to deliver a lamb or how to smoke out bees, my education taught me how to be a student, how to seek out teachers, and when in doubt, how to teach myself. in short, it taught me to keep learning.
These days when money is thin, and I find myself growing tired of having to make another few loaves of bread, puree up some baby food, hang the freshly washed still wet cloth diapers next to the fireplace to dry, which slowly eeks out the faint smell of urine throughout the room. It’s those moments that I wonder if this really was the best idea? My husband and I both still work, him full time, me part time. I wonder if this whole natural lifestyle is worth it. It really is just easier to go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, and a couple jars of baby food. And Smuckers really does make a pretty exceptional jar of strawberry jam. Is this whole thing worth it?
But when I see our daughter’s face when the sheep come up to her to say hello and the way she squeals at the new calf, when I taste the fresh bread, or do the basic math that shows how much money we have saved by making our own baby food, wipes and diapers…. when I realize that for as much as I worry, as long as we’re here and able to farm some, we will have food… when I see the apple orchards in full blossom and to steal a line from Keats, stand in the bee loud glade….or when I smell the roses my great-grandmother planted up against the barn - they were the only thing she brought to her new home when she married-
It’s those times I realize, that yes, this is worth it. It’s something inescapable i think. It’s part of my family's collective unconscious. And as long as we are here and are able to work together, we will have food, we will adapt to figure things out for repairs or how to make new things like toys and clothes. To raise my family to live in a cleaner more self sufficient lifestyle, in the mythology of her ancestors, this is worth it.
Five years later, I am neither on the best selling list, the glass door office hasn’t been built. And instead of haggling over publishing contracts, I’m debating over the pros and cons of a dairy cow versus a pair of dairy goats to supply milk for our small family.
I have, against my own wishes and (possibly) better judgment, become a farmer.
Realistically, it may not be a far fall from the metaphorical tree. I grew up in a rural area of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Farming had been the primary way of life until Procter and Gamble moved into the area in the late 60’s.
My family always had some animals (not used as pets), rabbits and chickens mostly. one of my earlier memories was collecting eggs from our barn red chicken coops during a thunderstorm. i pulled my shirt out to make a hammock for them, and the warmth coming from the small, golden brown eggs radiated through my shirt to my belly, even though i was dripping with rainwater. I still love the feel of a warm egg straight for the henhouse and the beauty of the light brown shells.
This rural up-bringing has always set me apart. In many places I was a novelty so to speak. While living in the UK, I was an ‘agricultural consultant.’ By this I mean I ended up educating my city friends on the ways of country life. Behold the glories of Duck Tape (there it was Gaffer’s Tape) , hard physical work, and being unafraid to get one’s hands dirty.
While doing my MFA, my lifestyle was viewed by colleagues as some sort of pastoral idyll. They thought it sweet that I made my own bread, and that i grew and canned my own tomatoes. They marveled that I schlepped glass Mason jars, lids and rings through the subway turnstiles to my sister while she and her husband in Jersey City so she could make jam, syrup and preserves from the mulberries she found in a nearby park.
In this routine, my colleagues usually asked the same question: “well it’s fun, but why bother when you can just get it from the store?”
While it was certainly more work to bottle up all the mulberries into jam, syrup, or to dry them into mulberry raisins to be used in breads, oatmeal and muffins, there was something about it rewarding. something about doing for ourselves that made it worthwhile and made the jam taste all the sweeter. There was something about continuing the traditions we cherished so much. But to our city friends, we were novelties, and they smiled at us, and shook their heads.
“To each their own,” they would say, as they opened a jar of Smuckers grape jelly.
My sister, also one of the overly educated elite, graduated from an MFA theater program of only eight people. Her resume stretches longer than I care to think about. She and her husband moved to New Jersey so she could pursue auditions and an acting career. He was a successful equine massage therapist. But as time went on, they came out to the family farm more and
more, until they decided to make it a permanent move.
Fast forward a few years, and you find us all living on the same farm. My sister and her husband, my parents, my maternal grandmother and my husband and myself. Add to that two newborn babies, and we have four generations living on the same property we, our parents, paternal grandparents and great grandparents lived on.
The farm by this point was a farm in name only. A few of the fields were rented out, but that was the extent of it’s health. the ancient apple orchards survived in spite of everything, growing wild and tangled among themselves. But when we looked at it, each of us on our own, we could see what there was and what there could be.
So slowly, and individually, we began. It started with some Scottish Highland cattle and some Arucana chickens. The garden was expanded significantly. The barn turned into a working kitchen for canning season and smelled of celery and tomatoes for about three weeks in the summer while my sister, mother and grandmother all bottle home made tomato soup, sauce, stewed tomatoes and salsa.
Tomato season is followed quickly by apple season. The spicey aromas are replaced by a gentle subtle sweet smell as apples cook down to make apple sauce, or sliced apples for pies.
Then in the idle of the winter, comes maple season. Our patio begins to smells smoky sweet as the evaporator burns day and night to boil down the sap into thickened amber syrup. From one hundred gallons of sap, we get about five to ten gallons of syrup.
We have developed a strong streak for doing things for ourselves. We still make the majority of our own bread. We now make our own yogurt, baby food, ice cream, and are expanding our repertoire to include cheeses. When our daughter was developing severe rashes from her diapers, we switched mid stream to cloth diapers. From October to December I was bent over my 1970s Kenmore Sewing machine, making all in one cloth diapers out of old t-shirts and flannel until we had enough with the store bought flat diapers and ones we had borrowed.
Quilting has always been part of our heritage. My mother taught me to hold a needle when I could hold a pencil. So as old jeans wear out, and flannel shirts are no longer patched, they come to me, and they are turned into heavy quilts. I am learning to spin wool into yarn, and then to knit up anything we can think of with that yarn. I plan on expanding my garden to include herbs and flowers used for dying the fiber nearly every color of the rainbow.
On top of this doing for ourselves, we’re considering homeschooling or charter schools.
You may have noted the person change. What had begun as simply my story, has become a family story. Truth be known, this farm can’t run by itself. It takes a bunch of us to get the work done. We all contribute in many different ways, some not as obvious as others, but it is still all about getting the work done, and breathing life into what was once a nearly abandoned idea. The Family Farm, with the Family working on it.
We live in a time when the economy is like a drunken high school sophomore. Things that were old are suddenly new again. Subsistence farming is growing gradually as people become aware and realistic about their situations. Families are planting gardens again, buying pigs to be butchered at the end of the year. Murray McMurray – one of the leading poultry hatcheries in our country – has been consistently sold out of chicks. Books like Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day is on the best seller list. Ways of life that were scoffed at, or seen as sweet, are becoming more of a standard, more steady and strong like the rock walls that continue to line our countryside, centuries later.
The list is beginning to sound familiar. “Well I used to be a teacher…” or Social worker…. or any list of other occupations. And they turn to farming. Most likely not for the sole support, but as a supplement for their family. an actress, a writer, and a lab manager from Harvard. All reborn as farmers with horses, dogs, orchards, cows, gardens, and bee keeping operations either for themselves alone or for the small profit that comes once in blue moon.
Historically, farmers were not the most schooled people, neither were they the most pressing on the social ladder. But they had enough sense to survive. Now this new class of farmer is emerging, the enlightened farmers, with educations out the gesundheit, all to return to a more ancient and less applauded way of life. Though my studies didn’t teach me how to deliver a lamb or how to smoke out bees, my education taught me how to be a student, how to seek out teachers, and when in doubt, how to teach myself. in short, it taught me to keep learning.
These days when money is thin, and I find myself growing tired of having to make another few loaves of bread, puree up some baby food, hang the freshly washed still wet cloth diapers next to the fireplace to dry, which slowly eeks out the faint smell of urine throughout the room. It’s those moments that I wonder if this really was the best idea? My husband and I both still work, him full time, me part time. I wonder if this whole natural lifestyle is worth it. It really is just easier to go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, and a couple jars of baby food. And Smuckers really does make a pretty exceptional jar of strawberry jam. Is this whole thing worth it?
But when I see our daughter’s face when the sheep come up to her to say hello and the way she squeals at the new calf, when I taste the fresh bread, or do the basic math that shows how much money we have saved by making our own baby food, wipes and diapers…. when I realize that for as much as I worry, as long as we’re here and able to farm some, we will have food… when I see the apple orchards in full blossom and to steal a line from Keats, stand in the bee loud glade….or when I smell the roses my great-grandmother planted up against the barn - they were the only thing she brought to her new home when she married-
It’s those times I realize, that yes, this is worth it. It’s something inescapable i think. It’s part of my family's collective unconscious. And as long as we are here and are able to work together, we will have food, we will adapt to figure things out for repairs or how to make new things like toys and clothes. To raise my family to live in a cleaner more self sufficient lifestyle, in the mythology of her ancestors, this is worth it.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
by ways of an introduction
By the time I can finally sit and scratch a few words on to paper, the voices in my head are already pissed.
“Write damn you! Write already!”
Never mind the four loads of laundry that still need to be folded and put away. Or make that re-folded as some probably were folded before and we’ve had to go digging through them in order to find clean clothing.
Never mind the dishes in the sink from yesterday, and the dirty skillet still on the stove from last night’s dinner.
And never mind the fact that the baby is still in her pajamas at two in the afternoon, as am I, and we’re both unwashed.
In the midst of the this, the yelling and impatience get louder and louder “Write already! What else is there to do! WRITE!”
I am jealous of my writing, umarried, non parent friends. There are no other requirements to get in the way of the art. No one to worry about except for yourself. You can do whatever you want. This is truly a selfish thing to say. But I think part of an artist’s life is innately selfish. One needs to be selfish, to focus on themselves, and what they’re doing, and not helping everyone around them with every aspect of their lives. They need to not be relied on. Just the artist and the art. Because somewhere, that battle between what you should be doing – the dishes, making dinner, working a real job – get in the way of what you really should be doing – writing.
There needs to be no one else in the room, looking over your shoulder, and wondering if you’re using just a bit too much black and red in the painting? “It’s so depressing? why not use some of that pink, and make it a happier picture?” There needs to be no one else in the room questioning the books you’re reading are just a little bit too out there? or if the word selection is really needed. “Do you really have to use the F word right there? It will make people uncomfortable.” This constant presence in the room, or in the mind of the artist is toxic at its very least, paralyzing at its worst.
And yet ironically, this is exactly where I find myself.
I find myself married for seven years, with no end in sight, nor do I want one. And I find myself mother to a beautiful little girl. I have no wish to return her.
I am surrounded by people, mostly my immediate family: parents, sister and her husband and their son, and my grandmother who is my last living grandparent; all who love me, call on me, and depend on me for various things.
Added to this, I find myself with one unpublished novel that is 99.9% done, and about five other ideas that are in varying stages of development ranging for hundreds of pages of polished text to ideas scratched out on note paper in crayon. What I do not have in my possession is the time to write them all out. Nor do you find me in possession of an agent or writing contract.
We all had dreams after graduate school. Writing, publishing, best sellers, readings, book signings. We were all going to be the next literary darling. We all had five year plans, and we all looked to the future with hopeful and enthusiastic eyes.
Fast forward those five years, and you find me frazzled, unable to speak a coherent sentence, chasing a half naked toddler who’s just peed on the floor, while my Alzheimer-ish grandmother stands in the laundry room because she has gotten lost and she can’t find her way down the hallway out the front door so she can hang the clothes out on the clothes line.
You’d also find me desperately making bread, laundry detergent, granola, yogurt, baby food, and cutting out fabric to make baby clothes and extra diapers, just in case….
And then somewhere, in the middle of this, of this manic opera of duties, of shoulds, of musts, or have tos, a realization hits me as unwelcome as a cold shower. This is my life.
Next come the questions: how did I get here, and how do I get back?
So, allow this, dear reader to be some entertainment, word of warning, teaching, What happens when a writer doesn’t write? What happens when life gets in the way? How do we realign our lives to meet up with our dreams and goals, taking into account the loves and passions we have found along the way? And how do we get by on making nothing?
“Write damn you! Write already!”
Never mind the four loads of laundry that still need to be folded and put away. Or make that re-folded as some probably were folded before and we’ve had to go digging through them in order to find clean clothing.
Never mind the dishes in the sink from yesterday, and the dirty skillet still on the stove from last night’s dinner.
And never mind the fact that the baby is still in her pajamas at two in the afternoon, as am I, and we’re both unwashed.
In the midst of the this, the yelling and impatience get louder and louder “Write already! What else is there to do! WRITE!”
I am jealous of my writing, umarried, non parent friends. There are no other requirements to get in the way of the art. No one to worry about except for yourself. You can do whatever you want. This is truly a selfish thing to say. But I think part of an artist’s life is innately selfish. One needs to be selfish, to focus on themselves, and what they’re doing, and not helping everyone around them with every aspect of their lives. They need to not be relied on. Just the artist and the art. Because somewhere, that battle between what you should be doing – the dishes, making dinner, working a real job – get in the way of what you really should be doing – writing.
There needs to be no one else in the room, looking over your shoulder, and wondering if you’re using just a bit too much black and red in the painting? “It’s so depressing? why not use some of that pink, and make it a happier picture?” There needs to be no one else in the room questioning the books you’re reading are just a little bit too out there? or if the word selection is really needed. “Do you really have to use the F word right there? It will make people uncomfortable.” This constant presence in the room, or in the mind of the artist is toxic at its very least, paralyzing at its worst.
And yet ironically, this is exactly where I find myself.
I find myself married for seven years, with no end in sight, nor do I want one. And I find myself mother to a beautiful little girl. I have no wish to return her.
I am surrounded by people, mostly my immediate family: parents, sister and her husband and their son, and my grandmother who is my last living grandparent; all who love me, call on me, and depend on me for various things.
Added to this, I find myself with one unpublished novel that is 99.9% done, and about five other ideas that are in varying stages of development ranging for hundreds of pages of polished text to ideas scratched out on note paper in crayon. What I do not have in my possession is the time to write them all out. Nor do you find me in possession of an agent or writing contract.
We all had dreams after graduate school. Writing, publishing, best sellers, readings, book signings. We were all going to be the next literary darling. We all had five year plans, and we all looked to the future with hopeful and enthusiastic eyes.
Fast forward those five years, and you find me frazzled, unable to speak a coherent sentence, chasing a half naked toddler who’s just peed on the floor, while my Alzheimer-ish grandmother stands in the laundry room because she has gotten lost and she can’t find her way down the hallway out the front door so she can hang the clothes out on the clothes line.
You’d also find me desperately making bread, laundry detergent, granola, yogurt, baby food, and cutting out fabric to make baby clothes and extra diapers, just in case….
And then somewhere, in the middle of this, of this manic opera of duties, of shoulds, of musts, or have tos, a realization hits me as unwelcome as a cold shower. This is my life.
Next come the questions: how did I get here, and how do I get back?
So, allow this, dear reader to be some entertainment, word of warning, teaching, What happens when a writer doesn’t write? What happens when life gets in the way? How do we realign our lives to meet up with our dreams and goals, taking into account the loves and passions we have found along the way? And how do we get by on making nothing?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)