winter talk

I’m not having enough fun.

I started the year with reflection and resolution, having made it through the holidays intact and if not refreshed, then at least rested. I engaged with my new job duties right off the bat, worked at adjusting to the shortened hours at my job and set up a new schedule for my creative life. I rewrote the beginning of my novel, incorporating the advice given by my critique group and esteemed faculty at the SCBWIWWA fall retreat. Then, as the snow fell, the power winked out and the generator kicked on I slowly ground to a halt.

I had plenty of food. I had heat. I could take a shower and even run a load of laundry. But my husband was in B.C. and I was on my own as the tree limbs cracked off and fell on the roof. The landline cut out. No internet or television of course. Cell towers lost power and so could not provide a signal. So I wrote and I thought a lot and I took notes and I read. I did not motor on joyously through my book. In that endeavor, I slowly ground to a halt.

I thought: I can’t write my way out of this. The whole idea is stupid. It’s not going where I thought it was. It seemed clever but now I’m not so sure, maybe I should just cut my losses. Hell, I’ll shit can the thing. I have all these other shiny ideas, easy to write, ALREADY OUTLINED. I am not an outliner but I was driven to it. I was talked down off of that branch by my pal Dana before it broke under me, and I recognized this monologue for what it was: winter talk. It’s January. February is just around the corner. We have not seen nothin’ yet as far as the Northwest winter goes. It does go – on and on.

Here’s what I decided: I’m not having enough fun, and fun is really important to me. So instead of distracting myself with a shiny new story, instead of further whining and dark thoughts, I am going to be in the business of manufacturing fun. Like a little jolly elf, with a tiny, tiny hammer and a sweet little workbench, and a twinkle in my eye. I’m having some friends over on Friday to design puppets. Then we’re going to make them. Then we’re going to make stuff up for them to say. Then we’re going to play. Hopefully by then there will be less winter left and some fun will have spilled over into my writing. Wish me luck.

storytelling brain

Jason Gots posted a brilliant essay and video this week on his blog big think. Cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga talks about how the mind creates coherence through narrative, seeking to bring all of the experience and sensory input into a truth that can be understood and identified as an expression of the self. He postulates that this is why we are drawn to fiction, for the reader’s experience of a story that, when later encountered in real life, can be coped with and assimilated. This is an expression of something I have always felt sure of, that storytelling is intrinsic and necessary to the human experience.

And: it’s nice to have the blog back after the SOPA protest black out. The very clear and simple message that creative expression needs to be unfettered, is a part of free speech and a human right, seems to have been absorbed by Congress. Could be that the internet as a growth sector and economic engine had something to do with it. At least that is the narrative coherence I am telling myself right now. Enjoy the wise and insightful words of Professor Gazzaniga.

 

first snow

Our first snow of the year has come and gone several times over the course of the day: big, fat, wet flakes that lay down an inch or two of snow efficiently and then melt away. Just before the snow begins to fall again in earnest the birds come to the feeders that Vic keeps full of seed and suet blocks and seed blocks. Our usual flock moves excitedly from one food source to another, Juncos, House Wrens, Nuthatches and Chickadees moving through the whitening branches and perching on the tomato cages, while from the undergrowth the Towhee asks his (or her) one-note question over and over, “What?” And then after a pause, “What?” For the third year we have hummingbirds wintering over and they are feeding today, too.

As the snow thickens everything quiets and you can hear wings working in quick bursts, or the sandy sound of a bigger bird like a Flicker landing on the fig tree. The smaller woodpeckers come in pairs – I think they are Downy – cocking their heads and peering about jerkily. As nervous as they look, they are the last to fly off if a door or gate is opened and a human comes into view. Snow brings the shy ones out, like the Townsend Warbler we rarely see, with his yellow head and shoulders.

Across the room from where I write, the cat sleeps on his pillow, gently snoring while Ollie patrols the yard’s perimeter and races back toward the house, stopping to lick snow.

These past few weeks I have been adjusting to a new job and have been meditating on and writing down my goals for the year. The strategy of what this year’s position should mean to a narrative about my working life; what new skills I’d like to learn or share with colleagues; the word counts and chapters and drafts I intend to complete and be accountable for; the illustrations for a picture book that have been haunting me and how I can form a story from their first glimmerings. Watching the birds feed as I sit at my laptop I realize I need to add this to my list: Pay attention, listen, watch and take the time to appreciate this moment. The first snow of the new year.

between Christmas and New Year’s

I woke up December 30th with a sore throat, the same sore throat that has haunted me the past few months, coming and going, always threatening to turn into a cold or worse. I thought about canceling the drive to Port Townsend to see my friend Martha. The forecast said rain and I had promised to bring my corgi, Oliver who hates to travel. Between me being miserable and Oliver being miserable it seemed stupid to push things. However, I have known my devious ways for decades and recognized this as rationalization. Besides, the lure of seeing Martha’s two grown girls, home from New Orleans for the holiday, and watching Oliver run on the beach with Mrs. Peel, his sister (though not litter mate), was strong. I bundled up, poured a thermal cup full of tea and went. There was little traffic on the bridge and the sun broke through the clouds as we crossed the bay to Bainbridge Island.

I read yesterday that the average adult spends over eight hours in front of a screen every day, and that’s without television factored in. Appalling. Instead of pulling out my laptop I read the comics, thought about doing the crossword and instead just sat in the sun in the driver’s seat and looked at the water. I love the Seattle/Bainbridge ferry run. It’s long enough to create a sense of passage without taking all day. The morning continued to clear and by the time we crossed the Hood Canal Bridge the day was turning beautiful, clouds on the horizon but clear sky above. The water was ruffled on either side of the bridge. Ollie had taken up a miserable sitting stance, head lowered, refusing to lie down.

I drove through Port Townsend with joy, as I love the town, but also because Martha has recently moved back into her house by Fort Worden after a year in Mexico and several living with her paramour John, in his house across town. It was a pleasure following my old route. The place has been painted and re-floored and had several busy friends working on plumbing and cabinetry throughout the afternoon.

The girls are grown women now, though still largely themselves: creative, inquisitive, outgoing, guarded, sparkling, opinionated and wry. The twenties are a splendid decade. After lunch we took the dogs to North Beach, through the pine forest on the edge of the Fort. There was a cold wind and the high branches thrashed with it, a thrilling sound. The dogs were a trotting team, neither willing to let the other pull ahead but both old enough not to pull on their leashes. The path breaks out of the woods overlooking a meadow and pond that long ago was called the Chinese Gardens because the Chinese immigrants to Port Townsend planted truck gardens on the sunny slope. They brought poppy seed with them and this generous plant, grown for opium and medicinal use, escaped and traveled to the town. Today Port Townsend still has extravagant displays of these volunteer flowers in all colors, the blue green foliage distinctive in the gardens and roadsides. I have some of these in my own garden and shake the seed out of the dried pods in the fall, hoping for a cold winter to temper their life and encourage a strong spring showing.

On the beach Mrs. Peel chased the waves, which were high and made me worry for her. The beach is her great love, next to the ball, and she will run its course until you make her stop, hurtling through the wash and nipping at the foam. Oliver indulged her but then sheltered behind my legs. It’s a wide world and sometimes a dog feels small in it.

We were all cold and headed back after a short time. Skirting the meadow at the top of the hill and by the pond are gorse thickets, showing their wintertime red and gray stems. A beautiful color palette that I told Martha I thought could be mixed in watercolor by combining Rose Dore, Paynes Gray and white, though now I think you would need Alizarin Crimson to pick out the reddest stems. Martha shares with me a love of color and she is a master watercolorist. Her color charts are inspiring, as are her paintings. The dogs sniffed at coyote markings and settled into their traces again, leading the way.

Over tea we talked about music and books and our walk. Martha mentioned that a Japanese buoy had washed up on North Beach. “Did you hear?” Pilar asked, “a body washed up downtown and they’re doing forensics on it but they think it’s from the tsunami.” So it had already begun, the revisiting of this great disaster of 2011, the flotsam and jetsam of sorrow and loss from Japan. No light without darkness.

Waiting for the ferry in Winslow, after we had taken a walk, I got in the back seat with Oliver. He crept up in my lap to be petted and then curled up next to me. He stayed in that same spot, resting, until we got home to our own house and its own brand of joy. The new year was breaking the following day but he didn’t know that. He greeted Vic and the cat and ate his dinner with gusto, tracking sand back to his bed where he passed the night with ease and snoring. As did I.

Photos: Gorse by Carl Gray; Martha and Pilar with baby Oliver and Mrs. Peel, and Herself in the water one summer, by me

2011 in review

One of the many reasons why I love WordPress; their annual roundup. My annual visits would make up many blog’s Monday, but I am thankful for all of you. Thanks for reading and for commenting. Happy New Year!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 3,900 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

a year in animals

I have felt the winter solstice profoundly this year, a marker of both darkness and achievement, the doorway to light and the future. Weirdly, I am feeling optimistic at the end of December, looking forward to the new year. The week between Christmas and New Year’s day is inevitably one of lists – best movies, best books, highlights of the twelve months. The couple who deliver our papers (the Seattle and the New York Times) annually send a holiday card thanking us for our business and chronicling the wildlife seen in the early mornings along their route. I loved this year’s entry and so am sharing it. I was reminded of my own sightings on Tiger Mountain: my first bobcat; goldfinches, grosbeaks and cedar waxwings at the feeder along with the many year-rounders: four kinds of woodpeckers, Stellar’s jays, towhees, nuthatches and juncos, and several kinds of hummingbirds; a brown bear who visited our feeders in the middle of the night, standing on his hind legs to get to the seed. You can do worse than to judge the year by interactions with the natural world. Are you a hiker? Fly fisher? Traveler? What moments brought surprise and wonder this year, made you pause and simply relish being alive in this marvelous world?

From Kurt & Susan Strickland’s letter:

The guys at the Salmon Hatchery say they met their quota of 1.8 million Chinook eggs and 1.2 million Coho eggs. One of my enjoyments this year was observing a very large cutthroat trout from the hatchery bridge.

Animals spotted since my last letter include:
Owls – More numerous this year. They sometimes fly above my vehicle’s headlight beams, looking for rodents. Their winter-whit feathers came early this year.

Coyotes – Twice I have interrupted a dinner of house cats by these menacing pests. Another time, though, one was running away with a dead cat in its jaws.

Bears – Over a year ago, in one 75-minute period, I saw 5 bears…all in the city limits of Issaquah. This year though , wildlife officers have done a good job of live-trapping them, keeping their damage to a minimum.

Cougars – Once every 10 years or so, I spot them. This year, on Sept. 1st, coming down Tiger Mountain, my eye caught animal movement. In a 3-second time span, I saw not one but two young cougars about the size of medium dogs, looking off the road into the brush. (I think their mother was saying to her teenage kids, “get off the #*!@*% road.”) They have a large territory, and further up the mountain, above 1000 feet, one of my early-shift Boeing customer’s neighbors saw the mother & two cubs at 8 o’clock in the morning, crossing their lawn.

Frogs – our red-legged leopard frogs have come back. 3 years ago its numbers were decimated by a parasite, but this year full migration appeared strong.
Bullfrogs – Invasive species. Over a year ago, I saw a bullfrog & stopped my truck. It was so obese it could only jump about 1 foot. It reminded me of “Jabba the Hut” from the Star Wars Trilogy. I left it knowing it could become a raccoon dinner.

Raccoons – In the last 20 months they ate the baby squirrels in a nest outside my side window, as well as the Stellat Jay nest eggs. In town, up on Squak Mountain, about the 600 foot level, someone posted a sign at their mail stand, telling of a 50 pound raccoon advancing on people, in the daylight.

Arrogant Bobcats – 5…they do owwwn the road, don’t they?

Deer and Rabbist – Plentiful

Elk – The herd appears to be growing north of Highway 18. Last spring my headlights panned over a field with adult elk, and a number of calves popped up.

Beavers – At Four Lakes

Eagles – Up & down the valley

Rooster – Yes, McNugget the bantam rooster is still alive & strutting in front of Staples on Front street, across from the Darigold.

The beauty of this valley still astounds me. I’m coming to understand the reasoning behind why you put up with long drives and fight the time stresses of elsewhere …to be here.

 

Photos: Chinook salmon by Ingrid Taylar; Barred owl by A.J. Hand; McNugget from the blog of Larry & Kathleen Cragun

Poetry in December

I used to print a letterpress card and send it every year, usually with a poem I admired or that expressed something I was experiencing or thinking about. Truthfully, this was just an excuse to read poetry as the days grew short and the nights long and the months of Northern darkness began. I still read poetry in the winter, because I need to. Here is a beautiful poem by Galway Kinnell I love for the vision of nature it gives me, something I have never seen, fresh and miraculous.

Daybreak

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it as slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and, as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity, they sank down
into the mud, faded down
into it and lay still, and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.

Galway Kinnell

 

Photo by Brandon Hair

The Apothecary – book review

If you are looking for a book to give a young reader  this holiday season that combines a ripping story, great characters and emotional heft, I recommend The Apothecary by Maile Meloy. A middle grade novel, it can be read by all ages for its fine drawing of history along with meditations on family, war, power, freedom and the threat of nuclear weapons. If this seems heavy freight for adolescents be assured that these deeper themes are carried along by adventure, budding romance and magic.

Janie Scott, the daughter of two successful Hollywood writers is wrenched from her comfortable life in 1952 Los Angeles when her parents take a job writing for BBC television. In brief scenes we know the ease and pleasures of Los Angeles, and are introduced to the paranoia and destructiveness of Joseph McCarthy’s State Department investigation into communism, the impetus for the family’s move. Arriving in London to a cold, cramped flat, Janie records her impressions of her new life in her diary and reacts with typical adolescent resentment to the changes she experiences. On her first day in London she meets the Apothecary of the title, who runs London’s version of a neighborhood pharmacy, supplies the family with hot water bottles and gives Janie a remedy for homesickness that seems to work.

In her new school Janie meets Benjamin Burrows, the Apothecary’s son, who has lost his mother to a German bomb during the Blitz and who refuses to “duck and cover” for a nuclear bomb drill. The two become friends. Benjamin would rather be a spy than dispense prescriptions like his father, and the two stumble upon Cold War espionage when they observe suspicious meetings in the park and discover that Benjamin’s father is not what he appears. No spy, he has alchemical powers and harbors secrets that place them all in danger. When he disappears, entrusting an ancient book of spells and transformative elixirs  to Benjamin, the reader and Janie are swept up in a journey of mystery and suspense that could end in the world’s annihilation. With magical transformations, a pickpocket, murder, and the race to contain the power of nuclear bombs through physics and magic (and what is physics if not magic?), Janie, Benjamin and a host of well drawn and engaging characters are propelled through laboratories, capture and flight until they end up in the Arctic aboard an icebreaker with everything at stake. The resolution is surprising, suspenseful and tender, and left me hoping for a second book with these characters. I loved the magic and the very real relationship Meloy establishes.

Huzzah for the resurgence of illustrated books. The lovely drawings by Ian Schoenherr carry the story forward. A gorgeous book in the hand, compulsively readable and beautifully written. May I suggest that a local independent book store will allow you to page through and discover first hand the charms of this book? Indies rule.

admiring all the nanowrimo participants

I want to give a shout out to all of the writers who participated in NaNoWriMo and spent their November generating something like 1500 words a day (sometimes more, sometimes less), eating sugary inspiration and losing sleep over their stories and word counts. All of you are powerful and visionary, able to see yourselves as authors and  willing to take on a difficult challenge. I didn’t join the number this year but I cheered many friends on and followed their daily reports, Word Wars, fears of failure, crows of victory and generous encouragement to fellow writers. The Seattle area generated millions of words and hundreds of gatherings and I’m proud to be from this place. Next year I will take on my 5th NaNoWriMo. I’m committing now. Remind me if I start whining about being busy next October. Visit the National Novel Writing November website to see the cumulative word count and read all about this year’s accomplishments. And while you’re there think about making a small donation. NaNoWriMo is what storytelling, literacy and passing the creative baton to the next generation is all about.

steven salerno & audrey vernick

It’s always exciting to find a new illustrator to love. My early morning Twitter check-in paid off big time with pal Audrey Vernick’s link to Steven Salerno’s illustrations for her upcoming book, Brothers At Bat. I love the story line, based on a true story: the twelve Acerras brothers (from NJ) who formed a family baseball team.

Check out Steven’s blog with his illustrations and sketches for the book. Always such a pleasure to see the process an artist goes through to create their work.

This is the second baseball book for Audrey – we came to know each other through She Loved Baseball,  her picture book on Effa Manley, another New Jersey baseball luminary. I have her first Middle Grade novel, Water Balloon on the top of my stack of books. Awesome to start the day off with such bodacious talent. A tip of the cap to Steven and Audrey!