WRITING

WHEN TO GIVE UP

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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.

The gulls often rest onshore near Asbury Creek just up the beach from us. I don’t know why there were a thousand or more the other day. We are careful not to disturb them.

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.

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THE INVISIBLE CRAFT

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I never claimed to be “blocked.” You know that word, right? It’s a term familiar even to many people, even those not devoting their days to being writers. Visiting my MFA Residency as an alum this past week, I am reminded there are several ways of being “blocked” as a writer. I’ve denied it until now, but yeah, I’ve been blocked. I have experienced at least three kinds of blockage: not writing much is rare for me and usually just means I’m resting and doing other creative work; writing badly, something that’s absolutely useless but at least it shows on the page‚oh, yes; and writing something I can’t let go of but keep fussing over and fiddling without getting anywhere. That last is where I am now. The most recent novel is done and however eager I might be to continue working on it, it’s time to set it gently aside.

I imagine the Parks Department is trying to figure out what to do here. Last Saturday, we walked to the headland a little over a mile north of our home, then around that headland and the next headland, and all the way to Hug Point beach. If we’d waited another hour for the tide to be fully out, we could probably have reached Hug Point proper. Instead, we were curious about what exactly had closed the parking lot for this popular park. The broken railing you see in the photo was washed away last winter. It’s worse now. The Parks Department probably tried to fix it because you can see fresh wood, but a few months ago, they blocked off the entire parking lot. We are accustomed to seeing the steep lot packed to overflowing in summer and pretty much year around in good weather. But most of last year, the descent was scary. We assume someone was injured trying to get around those broken stairs. We saw people both giving up and working their way around all last summer and into the fall before the lot was barricaded and the weather and tide shortened our walk north. We wonder when this mess will be repaired but expect the Parks Department is waiting for late spring and lower high tides.
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CLOSURE

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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.

When I was a girl these large green anemones [Anthopleura xanthogrammica, or the giant green anemone] were far less common that the smaller mauve-violet ones. Today they are everywhere.
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SUGGESTIONS for 2026

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It’s New Years Day, the day we make promises to ourselves about how to have a good or better year. But I’m not making promises, only suggestions for myself. Here’s the short version:

  • dress crazier
  • watch what I eat
  • vacation even if it’s just for the day
  • walk long and run short distances, no hurry
  • write and create objects to please myself
  • try
This sunset was photographed by most everyone we know. It changed and got brighter, more magenta than orange.

In 2025: I went through dramatic changes with my novel, the most notable of which was sending back the advance, cutting it to 60k words, and recognizing that if it’s going to be published I will do that myself. We stopped drinking altogether in October as a result of observation of a friend’s disastrous decline. I injured my foot in May and recovered enough by November to run.

Gary and I quit drinking in October. He was having a beer or three each day, and I averaged a glass of wine. Then our tenant totaled his car and left his home in filth to go into assisted living—that was September and we’re still repairing the damage caused by incontinence, smoking and drinking, and neglect. We were surprised by how easy we found our choice to quit drinking, we don’t miss the alcohol or the hangovers, and we’ve noticed we’re saving more than a hundred dollars each month, which is particularly welcome.

The national news was mostly awful, but we are well.

One more personal suggestion for this coming year… I was once an eight-hours-sleep-a-night person. When I was still a child in the early 1960s, an article about sleep made me determined to get my eight hours of sleep each night, and I maintained that excellent habit all through college and parenting and teaching Art and English and writing. But in the 2000s, I found teaching while caring for my mother did not leave me much “free” time to write, so I deliberately cut an hour from my sleep schedule. Seven hours allowed me to write novels and complete an MFA, but I’m now down to an unhealthy six hours of sleep and I’m missing those other two hours.

I really want that sleep back, and I will be taking steps.

I’ll probably read at least 50 books in 2026 and worry too much. We’ll pick up litter on the beach, hopefully find someone to rent our rental, and visit family and friends. I’ll bake and cook and make stuff. Gary will do kindnesses, remember, listen to music, and garden. No promises, but we’ll try not to do anything stupid while staring into the face of fascism and maintaining some level of optimism because we are hopeful people.

May it be enough.

.

HOLIDAY

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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.

This morning the shore is littered with spruce and fir needles, branches, yard debris, and at least two Adirondack chairs, one red, one green, broken into sticks. We brought home a big bag of litter. We started out thinking we’d walk north for at least a mile, but at the first seasonal creek had to wait out a wave. The tide was coming in and we decided we might find ourselves caught between beach access paths by a sneaker, so we turned south. We didn’t get rained on, but you can see the next squat coming from the southwest in the photo.
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WHAT I KNOW

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The storms come, no stopping them. They also pass.

The wind had been blowing since midnight, and the rain coming hard not down but sideways, off and on. Mostly on. I could see the ocean waves blowing back over themselves and sea and sky are both soft grays with a hint of green in the surf. Two and a half hours till high tide, but all the sand wet from the rain, and we did not get our morning walk. We got out the door for our three miles and had to turn straight back. We don’t mind a light shower, but this was a serious weather front. Storminess predicted to last without a break until Friday, which is not at all unusual for November. I used to count on a solid week of rain in this month—all day and all night without a break. But recently all bets are off. (The days in January of warm east winds and a burst of termites and carpenter ants drowned in the surf has not been predictable for years.) We average about 90” of rain a year—sometimes a mist or drizzle, in a storm sideways like a firehose, not usually coming “down,” and a hundred and fifty inches of rainfall isn’t unheard of. People new to the area are unprepared, friends naively suggest rain gear to walk the sand. Weather reporters in NW cities are alarmed by 45 mph gusts; we are accustomed to 65 mph. There is no rain gear that will keep you dry and safe in a full gale. Stay indoors!

Despite the foam, the ocean looks more tame in this photo compared to earlier in the week. The surf grew and after the rain splattered the glass, an updated photo was impossible.
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ALL HALLOW

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It’s the end of the month I turned 73, and we were busy with cleaning and walking; I’m running a mile at a time on the flat and writing and reading. There’s more. The basalt shore is stirred up along the edges and we’re finding things.

I think about and intend to show a day’s collection during every walk, day after day. Here, finally, is one day’s “catch.” At left a very large “ugly clam” that looks like nothing special on the other side, but the inside is beautiful mother-of-pearl nacre. Then three striped limpets, the most common kind, and four white ones with the one at left showing damage from worms and the one at right nearly perfect. Just left of that and above another ugly clam is my favorite and rarest type of limpets with vertical grooves and a hole shaped like a droplet, pointed at one end and rounded at the other. The green seaglass is the second glass this week, what I’d call “medium size,” and that find is recorded in my daily record as “1glass” and will join other glass in a glass jar. Recent tides have been washing up into the rocks and exposing treasures and trash buried the basalt, including several bits of pumice from the blowing of Mt St Helens in 1980 in the past week but none this day. The feather is what I call a “two-spot feather” which may have a single spot across the central vein, one spot on one side, or a distinct spot on each side, hence the name. If anyone can help identify the species of bird that molts these feathers, I would love to hear about it!
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TELLING IT LIKE IT IS

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I may be repeating myself here. I found this essay on my computer, and it’s mostly about my novel, which I’ve been writing about too often and will remain my obsession until I start another one. I’ve finished three book reviews and two short stories recently, found a draft of one that is a long way from being finished but I’m working on it, and two collections of short stories that I might send out. And the novel.

For the first couple of years she lived with us, our dog Yeti, a Saluki, never barked. And then one predawn, she “boofed.” She was standing on her personal oversized ottoman at the front window looking down at the garden. Outside the gate, a coyote was looking up at her. Since then we know the coyotes are around, but they are generally hidden. We recognize their footprints in the sand. [Larger and light and the toenails rarely make marks.] We saw her [the coyote in the photo] on our walk. Our friend said, “Whose dog is that?” No dog.
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WALKING

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Through June, July, and August, we missed our early morning walks, but this week, we’re back.

There was a full moon earlier this week, a lot of fog, but not the heavy fog that feels magical. (Sometimes the fog’s so thick, there is a magical band where we can walk north, hear the ocean on the left, know the houses line the shoreline to our right, and see nothing but the sand under our feet.) This was a tame morning with color wrapping all around the sky. People kayaked during the week.

I meant to write about distance today—how far, how fast, where we arrived. Instead, mostly what we found.

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INSTEAD, A NEIGHBORHOOD

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We’ve seen many orange jellyfish [west coast sea nettle, Chrysaora fuscenscens] stranded onshore in the past week. This is one of the half dozen largest from yesterday, about two feet across that center section, another 20 inches wider if measuring the splayed “arms'”, and yes, these sting. The colorless to blueish ones, moon jellies [water jelly, Aequorea sp.], don’t sting—just don’t touch any jelly and then put your hand in your eye or mouth. I’ve never been stung, but I’ve known to be careful since I was little.

I walked more than three miles yesterday and I wasn’t even sore when I got home. Miraculous! Gary and I went north to our “Turnaround Rock” a mile and half, up and down the beach, backtracking and noting how high the sand is. It was the furthest we’d walked since April. We met two local people we hadn’t seen in months. Earlier this week, we met a friend we hadn’t seen since last year! They all said they’d wondered what happened to us. It was my foot.

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