WRITING

POSSIBLE

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The novelette “Of Mist and Grass and Sand” was expanded into the novel, Dreamsnake (1978), winning the 1979 Hugo Award, the 1978 Nebula Award, and the 1979 Locus Award. This is the cover of the copy I first read and not representative of the story at all.

In addition to classes called “What If” about speculative fiction and “Utopia and Dream” about idealistic societies both real and imagined, I taught genre fiction to my sophomores and juniors. Science fiction, fantasy, mystery . . . I found short story examples and we read and discussed the expected tropes and the real-life satisfactions, explorations, and potentials of each.

 

One story I enjoyed teaching was “Of Mist and Grass and Sand” by Vonda N. McIntyre, which I first read in editor Pamela Sargent’s collection, Women of Wonder (1975). Continue reading →

HAPPY CANADA DAY

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In the second and third terms of my MFA program in 2006, I wrote my critical essay about Canadian writer and Nobel Laureate Alice Munro. My first drafts discussed several of her stories and my essay ballooned past forty pages, but the final version was just over thirty pages, the maximum I was allowed, and focussed on just one work: Munro’s transgressive short story “Meneseteung” (1990). Continue reading →

HOPELINGS

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header+logo+2Bracken, the online journal from Washington, believes in hope to get us all by through with “love of the woods and its shadows.”

It is a beautiful magazine I’ve already recommended. Begin with Bracken’s main page because just now you do not want to miss another look at Amanda Greive’s art, and then click on “Coronavirus Hopelings” for a series of lovely offerings. I sincerely recommend the short piece from yesterday, called “Yellowing.” I’m there too.

P.S. I am a little embarrassed to ask, but I would be grateful if you “liked” my photo essay at Hopelings.

Why We Write: On Pandemics, Heat Waves, Police Brutality, and Resiliency

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Melissa HartHer mother’s “writing represented both financial and emotional survival. For money, she edited a small newspaper and freelanced articles. For solace, she wrote stories at dawn. Some were published, and some weren’t. Publishing wasn’t the point.”

Melissa Hart is the author of Better with Books: 500 Diverse Books to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Acceptance in Tweens and Teens (Sasquatch, 2019).

Go here to read the whole of it: Why We Write: On Pandemics, Heat Waves, Police Brutality, and Resiliency  

 

 

 

 

a poem

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by Michael Meyerhofer

FOR AHMAUD ARBERY, AN UNARMED BLACK JOGGER KILLED FOR ALLEGEDLY LOOKING IN THE WINDOW OF A HOUSE UNDER CONSTRUCTION

 

I was twenty-two, white, in love

that day I wasn’t shot for trespassing.

It happened nearly two decades ago.

Continue reading →

about BUTTERFLY FONTANELLE

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“Butterfly Fontanelle” was the title of a short story I began writing more than three years ago. The fontanelle is the soft spot in the top on a baby’s skull where the bone has not yet quite closed over the brain. A “butterfly fontanelle” is the shape of such a soft spot, like two paired wings. Human babies, like most all mammals, are born before they are mature. A newborn cobra can already bite and kill you. Mammals may be able to stand but most are still becoming. For example, most people know a puppy’s eyes remain closed for a couple of weeks after birth, but her ears are sealed shut too. A puppy cannot learn until she is about three weeks old. Human babies . . . must gain sight and depth perception. Infants are becoming human.

But first, because this has been a hard week, I want to share a publication on the Brevity blog: “Art Saves Lives” I am wearing my felted Acme hat, handmade on the east slope of the Olympic Mountains.

Continue reading →

TIME & TIDE

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Three of the local whimbrels. Eight have been out in front of the house for the past few days. A loose dog chased them off but the returned soon enough. They are after sand crabs, I think.

“Time and Tide wait for no man” is how the saying goes. It is a recommendation against procrastination and as I am reading Patrick O’Brian’s naval novels (for the third time) I understand the reference. However . . .

We waited for the tide to turn so that we might have our walk. It was past dawn, though if the sky were clear we would not see the sun for at least two hours. Out we went a half hour past full but the stretch of rocks were were most interested in searching were awash and we often had to run up shore to avoid getting wet.

There were fourteen whimbrels further note on the shore, and when we returned home there were four plucking sand crabs from the wet sand.

We saw no one, only the tracks of one earlier walker, and perhaps that person went out last night. Their prints vanished in the waves.

We found the ocean and we gathered and we were fortunate to be together.

This evening we watched “Shelter in Poems” from the Academy of American Poets. You might find it here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/shelterinpoems

After a false start with no sound, the poems start at about ten minutes and forty seconds in. I would like to say that if you can listen to Merwin’s “Thank You” without tears you are not quite human, but that sounds like a dare to some people. I will say that I taught many of these poems, I was grateful to hear them and to discover others that will carry me on.

TWO DEER

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IMG_5799A few days ago Gary was out on the road when he saw the first deer. He backed up against the garage door while she passed. He felt sure there was another. He didn’t want to spot them, though they had passed him before—running straight past as if he were not there.

There have been two does in the neighborhood so he was halfway expecting to see the other one come along.

 

And then it did.

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She seems to be moving along just fine. 

The second smaller one came trotting by and Gary thought it might be lame, seeing some small hitch in her movement, and wondered if it was the one we’d seen in the surf a while back. The pair is known. We often see their tracks in the sand heading north. Last Sunday we walked two miles north to Arcadia Beach and followed their tracks most of that distance.

 

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The top half is nearly clear and colorless. The bottom is basalt, I think.

In the mean time, we’ve had long walks and found sea glass and agates. This one is milky quartz still attached to matrix. Each of us has found these on occasion and labeled them “teeth.”

I think today might be a day to ignore the news. Neither of us slept well last night, and we need a break. Since we do not drive anywhere except to pick up mail and groceries and drop off recyclables (no mail delivery or recycling pick-up in our community) and we are trying not to order from Amazon, we’ve saved some money. But Gary ordered a CD box set yesterday, and that might mean I can order a couple of pieces of kimono silk on Ebay.

I have a couple in mind. I go visit the silks sometimes.

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The horsetails are coming up too. I started seeds for squash, green onions, kale, and tomatoes.

The middle garden Gary has been working on is looking beautiful. The daffodils are done, but my irises are budding, the daphne is still scenting the air, and the rugosa roses look like they are happy. In the “front” yard facing the ocean, we have done nothing, but volunteers are making a show with lamb’s ears, snow-in-summer, and violas.

I am weaving a new warp called “Marigold.” The second shawl is nearly done. I might take a break before weaving the last one with more yellow. I feel like sewing.

In preparation for that next quilt project, I have pre-washed vintage batik and block printed fabric from a favorite store in Portland, which is filling online orders. Cargo has marvelous, odd and wonderful things and they are good people. Calli wrote us a note and urged me to send photos of the quilt I make from the fabric she sent out the other day. I will certainly do that!

I am also taking a break, of sorts, from creative nonfiction and fiction writing beyond this blog. All my submissions are done, I have only a Brevity blog post coming up in a couple of weeks. I want to debrief about “Butterfly Fontanelle” and then maybe I will post a couple of off-the-edge short stories that need homing. I have one particular short story that means a lot to me. I often receive personal rejections in response to this one, but always rejection (close to 70!) every time. Editors have suggested revisions, but have not reached consensus about what is not working. (Tipped my hand too late or too early?) I’ve revised it dozens of times and stopped counting drafts after thirty-eight. Maybe a reader here can tell me what’s wrong with it. I’d like to get it right.

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ART STUDENT

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The Brahma Teapot with the lid off and tipped back to show the bull. I made an entire teaset (the goldsmith who commissioned it did not want anything representational) and dozens of mugs in this style back in the day. The clay looks like porcelain, but is only a low-fire white clay. The patterns are underglaze and protected by clear fired glaze.

Back when I was an art student, I thought I might earn money, if not actually a living, from my art. I envisioned a dramatic difference in my life compared to how I was raised.

I was first a Ceramic Art major at the University of Washington. In the clay side of the Fire Arts Building, we were divided into throwers and handbuilders. I was a handbuilder and our work was primarily sculptural art. It was gallery stuff and I did eventually exhibit in galleries and museums (Bellevue Art Museum and Tacoma Art Museum), but selling was what throwers did because they were in to “production.” That is, they made many of a single shape and sold bowls and mugs and so forth. The year of the first University Street Fair in 1970, I had still been in high school, but I sold handbuilt work. I did that again after I had studio space in the Fire Arts Building, in 1972 perhaps. I took over firing the Skutt kilns with everyone’s work, and completed dozens of handbuilt mugs for sale. A year or so later I juried in to the Bellevue Art Fair. I handbuilt entirely different mugs, dozens of mugs in the style above, and I was disappointment when a friend came along with her ceramic-handled flatware and sold more than I did. I mean: crushed with envy, destroyed. Of course, she is still making a living with her art, so she had the better instincts even then.

Long story short? Selling my work became a painful experience. I gave work away. I traded a teaset for a stunning 8″ gold stickpin. I completed two other pieces on commission and was shafted one of those times. I should focus on success, but I wanted then (and still today) to be the best or not at all. Selling, despite my day job in retail, remained a frustrating and unsuccessful experience, a reflection of failure, inadequacy, foolish hope.

But here I am, weaving shawls for sale. A stack of three quilts, unpriced but intended for sale. And my stories too.

I was still almost young when I began writing seriously. I had a fantasy of selling my first novel and making enough money to create that coveted dramatic change in my fortunes. I would quit teaching and write full time. I would pay off my mortgage. I had the same fantasy about the second (also unpublished) novel.

The first time I made actual money from a story was just a couple of years ago with “If It Were True Owls Dream” which was a fantasy story. My first fantasy and first cents-per-word payment. It made me laugh. I did not need the money as I felt I had and no longer had delusions about fame and fortune. By then I was beginning to wonder about how to construct a story where (nearly?) all sources of conflict were absent. And I thought that perhaps I could make some money selling SF/fantasy. Maybe. Or not. Did it matter?

But then Trump and covid19 and rejection from publishers. I send essays off to Dinty Moore and he is kind enough to publish them in the Brevity blog. Mostly recently I wrote an essay about the creativity we will find after much of what we assumed was true about the world, how things work, and ourselves is unraveled. That essay goes live next month. Does anyone think this will be over next month? Convince me.

And then I decided to serialize some of the story that has consumed my writerly imagination for a long time, years. That is why bits of “Butterfly Fontanelle” showed up here. A little at a time goes up as I work through the only draft I could find on this computer. There is a 37k word version someplace, I think. I am working from the fourteen thousand word version. It’s growing a bit. Each day I work on it, I am a little bit surprised at what is happening. I am trusting that by the time I put up the 15th or 18th installment, it will end properly, that it will have gone someplace. I honestly cannot recall how this one ends. Not for sure. Maybe. We’ll all find out together.

And I have retired from teaching. The mortgage is paid. And here is a dramatic change to my life.