Something happened. I’d made a big decision, a big one, without even noticing. I’d made a hard turn into something that felt wonderful, and before I even knew it was happening, it happened!
I withdrew submissions and decided I was done with writing contests. I have dozens of stories and poems and essays published in literary journals. Why was I still submitting. (It’s more than a word, submitting.)
Continue readingYeti, our last dog’s favorite treat was a Greenie, a green starchy chewable bone-shaped object she could chew into bits and swallow in a minute of two. Green meanies are something else and they hurt my hand to hold, as I am in this photo. I wish people would pick them up so I didn’t have to.
In the first episode of the new series, Scarpetta, a scene from “28 years earlier” (1996?) had “The House of the Rising Sun” playing. Good cover. Gary would know the group, the guitarist, and the guitar the lead guitarist was playing*, but I’m not so knowledgeable. Absolutely everyone performed that song in the 1960s, mostly men and boys. I sang it too, when I was playing guitar and singing, because it has—what?—3 chords, 4? The fingerpicking is simple too, though I don’t remember any of that now. There’s a violin on the wall in that show, and I have to say that people do put instruments on the wall. It’s a show-off thing to do. But no one who really loves their guitar or violin or gold flute, leaves it out, not even to show it off. Displaying your instrument is about yourself.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about those days, about guitar lessons and singing. Candy Mack taught me to play “The House of the Rising Sun” out of The Joan Baez Songbook. When my mother heard it, she insisted it made more sense for a woman to sing it. “It’s been the ruin of many a poor girl…” works best, I’ve always thought. Men change the words to make it work.
Everything comes with a story. Every porcelain ornament, every basket, and everything hidden inside—pieces gathered, gifted, and made. That’s my two-headed dragon in the middle of the top shelf. The stories only matter to me, but I’ll admit that basket-weaving is one craft I’ve never tried.
I missed this past Friday’s post. Apologies.
I began writing fiction in 1990 as a result of a week-long summer class for teachers teaching writing. I had three art degrees and had taught art at an elite prep school but had been hired to teach English and Yearbook at the local public high school. On paper I was not remotely qualified for that position teaching English. The department chair urged me to apply because I’d subbed for her and she said i was better read that she was.
Over that long-ago summer of 1990 I prepared by passing the NTE exam, which granted me certification and taking graduate classes in English, writing, and computers. A writing-for-teachers class with Sandra Dorr offered assignments we might then use with our students. I did go on to use what Sandy suggested. Also, at the end of that intensive week, I went home and wrote my first short story, “Baptism.” Eventually, that story was published in Stringtown. I was teaching English part time to high school juniors and made it my policy from the beginning to write everything I asked my students to write. I stood by that policy for the next 25 years, despite a colleague telling me it was “ridiculous.” I’ve been a strong writer since I was a girl, but essays and poetry, not stories. That changed.
In the 1990s I began writing with a student over the summer. We met weekly to share progress and intended to each write a novella. But before mid-summer, it was clear we were writing full length novels. Hers was better than mine, and today Rebecca Olson is a tenured professor with many publications including two books. I am proud that two other former students have MFA degrees.
Continue reading
Four months ago today, our longtime tenant totaled his car. We were grateful he didn’t die, that he didn’t kill anyone else.
Yesterday I ran my mile and worked on our rental. We have reached the point in our work on this little apartment where “repairs” can be called done. Our son helped empty the trash into trucks and two dumpsters, a neighbor took aload in his pick-up for recycling, Gary stuff our Subaru with stuff for Good Will, we’ve scoured and scrubbed and repairs dents and holes, and a good contractor replaced the ruined woodwork. We’re now “renovating” and the apartment is no longer his. Gary cut back the hedge to restore some of the ocean view—our tenant never looked. Everything needed painting, the floors replaced, cabinets cleaned, stripped, and restored. Much of that is done too. The rusty kitchen cupboard latches needed more time to soak before I can scrub and reuse them, but yesterday I stained the drawer fronts, put a second coat on six cupboard doors and the south door, and worked on one side of the ancient 5-panel door that we hope to mount on a slider for a new bathroom door.
Does anyone remember when “Shabby Chic” was all the rage? Like it or not, out of fashion or not, I couldn’t scrape it all off. I am choosing to leave one side of the future bathroom door with all its four or five paint layers, flaking and alligatored. Back when it was popular, you could purchase a topcoat to deliberately alligator paint, because it was the style. I’m preserving the texture on one side of the door, making it smooth as butter with several coats of varnish. [I really I would use a favorite oil finish that I used on most of our floors. It’s seriously toxic and the last time I put on a coat, I geared up with full breathing mask and swore it was the very last time.] I will paint the other side of the door, which is in better shape because it was never exposed to the weather. That side will be “Chantilly Lace,” a barely tinted white I’m using for trim throughout.
Today is not a running day, but we will likely get a walk this cold morning. I have a Zoom later in the afternoon with a recent MFA grad I’ve been partnered with to mentor and offer support. Gary wants to run errands this morning and I should probably buy more paint, though I’ve done my best to use up what we already had. I have cabinet hinges and latches to clean and the kitchen drawers and one side of that shabby door to varnish. Four coats with a light sanding between coats 3 and four, I think. Maybe five coats. Six? It seems there will never be an end to the painting; much of the trim still needs a second coat. Some tidying is in order. We can’t afford to replace the kitchen counters
I will cook spinach with feta cheese this afternoon or maybe just toasted cheese sandwiches. I will rest and think about other projects I neglect. I’m rewatching The West Wing series, slowly. I’ll sit in my corner of the sofa after lunch. To say this old series “holds up” doesn’t do justice to this reminder about how government is supposed to work. At my left under the west window is a small plastic tub with an unfinished project, balls of yarn and the body of a sweater I began knitting for myself in 2024. That half-finished sweater waits for me to figure out the neckline. It’s striped in several fine handspun and hand-dyed 2-ply yarns held with a fine mohair/silk blend. It will be a pretty pullover, light and warm. Assuming I ever finish it.
The weather has finally turned cold with our first frost.
I am reading a wonderful novel, Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin, translated from the original French by Hildegarde Serle. The main character is Violette, a strong woman doing the best she can, and building a reliable and peaceful life on the edge of a cemetery where she is the keeper. Violette lies, and I suspected this lie. It’s the way we do lie and suspect lies about particular things, lying even to ourselves. I’m halfway through the novel and now I know.
In Zoom writing groups I hear poetry and memoirs detailing people’s terrible childhoods. I think sometimes we all had terrible childhoods. Violette was fostered, and that is almost always terrible. Our culture doesn’t seem to know how to love and properly respect children we didn’t birth. I say that, and yet I know of a former student who has done just that—spent her adult years caring for and raising a child she didn’t birth, a determined and generous woman giving a decent life to a boy-now-man. I would read her story about finding purpose in that, finding meaning while rescuing someone. I told Gary last night that I was tired of stories about love gone wrong, about abuse and excuses, about people hurting the one they love. Love should be what we have, I said.
I could write a memoir about the abuse I suffered as a child, mental illness in our family, guilt and grief, misunderstandings and trauma, and about worry—so much worry that leads to nothing. Disappointment. I write here about cleaning up the messy lives of other people while making messy mistakes in my own life. So much suffering. That unfinished sweater.
There is also the view from our west-facing windows. Every day we are here at the beach, I watch the swells build and break, and each day I look for a small something to accomplish. In the kitchen downstairs, there is a fresh loaf of sandwich bread baked last night and waiting to be sliced. I have been gratefully married to a man for fifty-two years this coming August, and he brings me coffee in bed each morning. I could ignore my aching hands, the morning headache, fluctuating blood pressure, the failures and errors and worry of all the rest. I could focus on joy. I can choose to let joy win.
Hello, readers. I wrote the post below before Good was murdered. Good was murdered. I have read the articles, the defense by MAGA, the responses from newspapers around the world by reporters who watched all the videos, and comments from all sides. It is not a capital offense to slowly drive away from someone—even if those someones were police officers, which they weren’t. Not even then is it okay to shoot someone three times in the head… and people bragging about it? This isn’t my country, the country founded on the ideals of respecting every individual’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But here, what I was worried about before:
A couple of things: I am reading Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen, and this morning I found Allison K. Williams’s post “There Is No Closure: Stop Organizing and Start Writing” was in my feed on Tuesday. Despite a rich life deeply engaged in literature or because of that, Allison K. Williams wants closure with her writing.
They connected in my experience.
Like last week, this post is late. I mean to write early, but it’s been a week of strong wind, heavy rain, an 18-hour power outage, some baking and planning and writing, and exhausting work on our rental. A friend sent me notes on the novella version of my book and I began a new draft. Good stuff. It sounds like I’m complaining, but I have no business doing that.
THE MARTIAN (2015) is one of my favorite movies. Even though it’s romantic nonsense, even though, even though I barely care about a space program, even though Matt Damon. As I write, it’s playing on Netflix, and at this moment I am playing hooky from cutting and sewing my quilt border in order to focus on the ending. Every time his character Mark Watney follows the science, every time he goes to the numbers, I want to cheer and laugh. That determination to find a solution in listing what he has available to work with, to calculate how long till this or that runs out, and every time he recognizes an opportunity, my heart sings. Mark Watney, Space Pirate. “Everywhere I go, I’m the first.”
I was reading a personal essay by a writer with her debut about to drop. She’d always dreamed of a purely literary life as a college professor, perhaps, who wrote in the evenings and weekends, during the breaks between terms. It was the lifestyle she thought she wanted. Instead, she had worked during recent years in a grocery store. She didn’t mind the work and interacted daily with dozens of other people. When she clocked out of work, she moved straight on to the writing and finished her memoir.
She still envied friends and fellow MFA graduates with work teaching at universities and colleges. Then she noted that they were badly paid, poorly treated, worked for hours past their “workday” and often between jobs. They struggled to find time and energy to write.
&PRIDE Press 