A book and a Barbie

Timothy gave me this book Christmas of 2021, because it was on my “I love Dave Grohl SO MUCH and I want this book” list. I didn’t have a chance to read it before Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins died the day before my birthday in March ’22, and then I didn’t have the heart.

I have done nothing but relish every story in it since I plucked it from my To Be Read pile a few days back. Dave Grohl has never stopped embracing the joy of what it is to be a fan despite his own impressive career. Even with the hard parts, it’s a blast to read about his journey and the people he’s met or befriended through the years (some of whom are my favorite musicians, too, and others whose music I’ll now seek out).

I never dreamed, however, there’d be a story that would blend Dave, two of his daughters, Joan Jett, and a Joan Jett Barbie doll. I had to get my Mattel Ladies of the ’80s rocker out and shoot her with his book to celebrate.

Guilty


A writing acquaintance, the poet and memoirist Shilo Niziolek, often posts memes she creates using Winnie the Pooh characters to her Instagram account. This one seemed only too relevant for the cycle where I’ve found myself over the past few weeks.

In some ways, I envy people who detach from the world. They don’t concern themselves with information they don’t want to know or hear. They take in news that supports their existing beliefs or affirms their comfort zones. They get their information about the world from pundits’ sound bites and ratings chasing (or more dismally, social media and its unchecked misinformation), and anything that jars them is easily dismissed as being the fault of the media or certain entertainers, influencers, politicians, and whatever groups or individuals are the target du jour. (Those groups often encompass some of the people I admire and respect most or love best in the world.)

I do try hard to keep out some of the noise because I like to sleep sometimes.

In 2017, work kept me so busy I could shut down a lot of what was going on and I was too exhausted not to sleep. It was also the year our property and homes flooded, which consumed my energy for nine months. By early summer of 2018, I emerged from home and work preoccupations to take in all the madness of the world. In June and July, my only escape was to be creative. I did a series of paintings and lots and lots of coloring.

At the beginning of 2019, that wasn’t enough. I’d bitten my tongue, mostly held my counsel, and accepted there were simply people I’d never again discuss certain subjects with. For almost three years, I’d silenced my voice except in the relationships or spaces I felt safest.

For a writer to silence herself is self-obliteration. I couldn’t accept this, but I didn’t know how to regain or retrain my voice. Though it didn’t seem obvious then, a little time and distance has made it perfectly clear why characters I’d known and loved for decades came back to me at that time. Maybe they were my safest place of all. Maybe if I grabbed whatever time I could find to return their voices to them, they would be an answer and a comfort and a way to express myself with compassion, creativity, and honesty.

It’s been quite a journey since. I’m on the sixth novel of what I thought would be one. This writing gave me purpose and direction during a pandemic that kicked off with my being laid off from my job. Over those years–2020, 2021, and 2022–I lost some friends to death, and because of the turmoil in the world or their own pandemic struggles, I also lost (or kept, greatly altered) a few friendships to politics, philosophical differences, and sometimes what I could only see as a violation of the trust and respect needed to sustain relationships in challenging times. You don’t have to agree with me, and it’s a terrible idea to flatter me or lie to me, but if you treat me cruelly, if you use my past trauma, my capacity to forgive, or my creative expression against me, you aren’t being a friend.

Now is now, and I’ve moved on from most of that, but I’ve also faced challenges and struggles that leave me vulnerable to the noise of the world. It does, truly, get in the way of creativity. It makes me unnecessarily question my choices and doubt my voice.

I’m trying, and though I know posting coloring pages seems like I’ve wasted time, those pages mean I was thinking about my characters and how to write them. Or the writing playlist photos, for example–the kind of thing people skim right over unless they happen to see something they like or want to argue about–reassure me that I’ve written, even if it’s only two to three paragraphs a day.

To write is to maintain some equilibrium.

I’ve written.

And I’ve listened to things more healing and sustaining, too.


Most recently, The Neville Brothers, Uptown Rulin’: The Best of The Neville Brothers; Randy Newman, Sail Away and the 4-CD set of Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman.

ETA:

Tiny Tuesday!

I realized at some point that I didn’t read any books during April. Not sure how that happened, unless it’s from keeping my eyes from getting fatigued. Did receive a book for my birthday, and it’s next on the list. This also arrived yesterday, so I’ve indulged myself in reading a few of the poems I loved as a high school senior. I volunteered to give Debby a refresher course, but she declined. She said she’s engrossed by a series about shape shifters.

Tom and I remembered we hadn’t watched the most recent season of The Crown, so it’s become our dinnertime viewing, and we’re now through the third episode. This particular episode made me sad to the point of tears. It’s hard to watch things when you know how painfully they will unfold.

Here’s the Neverending Saga playlist for my past few writing sessions.


Natalie Merchant’s Tiger Lily; George Michael’s Patience and the two-CD set Ladies and Gentlemen, The Best of George Michael; Bette Midler’s Experience The Divine: Greatest Hits and Bette of Roses; Robert Miles’s Dreamland; and Joni Mitchell’s Joni Mitchell: Hits. A good mix to write to.

Here’s your Jack update. Today, he went to his vet and got a little more hydration with Sub Q fluids, a special variety of dog food for gastro issues, and a lot of praise for being a good boy. He’s still eating some of the boiled chicken we have for him, but he also has a hearty appetite for the new kibble. It may take a few more days before he’s back to himself, but everything’s looking up, and his antibiotics and anti-nausea meds seem to be helping.

Because he’s been stoic through all of this, tonight, Jack got to wear “The [tiny] Crown.” If you think it looks a little more suited to a princess, he doesn’t care. He says if Harry Styles can make any fashion his own, so can he.


We are amused, and we concur.

The Scottish play and other things

…from Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth…

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

This… This is what I (and my class) memorized in English class my senior year, and I can still recite, with one caveat. I’d totally forgotten “To the last syllable of recorded time,” and have never missed it from my recitation. Ironic, since recording time is a vital part of a writer’s purpose.

They call it “the Scottish play” in the theater because saying “Macbeth” brings bad luck unless you’re rehearsing lines. There are stories a’plenty surrounding this superstition, and it’s definitely worth a fun Google. One of my favorite quotes from this passage includes the lines from which William Faulkner got the title for his novel The Sound and the Fury. I’ve disclosed before that I don’t read Faulkner novels. They give me headaches. But I love the synopses and the themes and everything I read about them, so as a college English major and English graduate student, I was saved so many times by Cliff’s Notes of Faulkner’s novels.

Here’s how I first learned about Cliff’s Notes. My sister was a senior in high school when she read Macbeth. Though, like me, she’s an avid reader, and we always read books beyond our “age group,” this was not a good experience for her. So she bought this.


Barnes & Noble “Book Notes,” friends, and that shows how long B&N has been important in some way in my life, because I was twelve going on thirteen when I picked this up and read it cover to cover, utterly mesmerized by the story.

Though I have TAUGHT Shakespeare, I’m going to admit freely that just as with Faulkner, I never hesitated to buy study notes for the plays. Guides aren’t meant to replace the text, but I’d rather see Shakespeare performed than read his plays. I perfectly understood my college freshmen who bought such guides. People spend their entire lives studying Shakespeare and writing literary criticism, and these were kids trying to navigate their first year of college, probably none of them English majors, who had four or more other classes loading them down, too. I just warned them to be careful not to count on the guides’ accuracy for writing papers, because they do contain errors.

Side bar: Teachers.

Though Debby doesn’t remember the class with any fondness, because as she told me, it also included The Canterbury Tales and Beowulf, (“Were they trying to kill you?” I asked), there is a bright spot among her memories.


Mrs. Lewis, 5th Period, once did her a great kindness which it’s not my place to share. But teachers can be far more understanding than you realize as a teenager. Teaching high school was supposed to be my vocation, but it didn’t work out that way. Ultimately I found different fields for my skills. Few regrets. I did get some teaching in, even in the corporate world, and no work I’ve ever done was as necessary to my happiness and mental health as being a writer.

I was curious about what notes I might have made in my textbook when I was taught Macbeth in high school by a gifted and brilliant teacher, Mrs. Bryan. I thought I’d kept both my junior and senior textbooks from the two classes I took with her.


This is how I found out I’m wrong. I have my eighth grade text book (a subject for a later post about teachers and school), the green one, and my eleventh grade textbook, the blue one. (I didn’t steal them. I asked the assistant principal at my junior high school for the 8th grade text, and the principal at my high school for the 11th grade text. Permission was given. School administrators can also extend great kindnesses.)

I was so distressed not to have that book from my senior English class that I immediately found one on eBay and ordered it. It won’t contain my class notes, but it will give me a view of the other material I read and the illustrations that I enjoyed.


I still have plenty of Shakespeare on the shelf, including the complete works (a gift from my college roommate Debbie). Inside it are some pressed flowers, though my memory of who they came from is gone. Also notice to the left all that Chaucer. I may as well speak of Beowulf (tiny and tucked in between Chaucer and Shakespeare), since Debby brought it up as being part of her senior class misery. I didn’t study Beowulf until my sophomore year in college, in a huge survey class I was required to take. It didn’t do anything for me one way or the other.

Years later, as a graduate student about to take my Masters comps, someone told me, “Brush up on your Beowulf. There’s always a Beowulf question you can use to write an essay.” I think it was spring semester, a year after my father’s death. I was trying so hard to study and prepare, but my bottled-up grief was getting in the way. I hadn’t written, other than for classes, for years, and I finally put everything else aside to compose a poem about my father. I worked for hours to write, edit, rewrite, polish, until I was satisfied with it. Then I reread Beowulf and it was so profoundly moving, so poignant, that I still remember lines from it. I never saw that coming! Sometimes you just need to be in a certain place emotionally, or mature enough, to appreciate a work of art that might not have affected you when you first encountered it.

Study guides like Cliff’s Notes can be a gateway to literature, though I doubt they can ever have the power of the work itself. But to immerse yourself in any story, to find agency and enlightenment and connection, is a gift well understood by those who would ban books. Those are three of the things they most fear as threats to their power: individual agency, enlightenment, and connection. They will go after schools and teachers, libraries and librarians, any institutions that defy them, and any groups they can target with all manner of lies to incite fear, even panic, to protect–not “the children”–but their love of power and lust for wealth.

Be mindful who you believe.

Struggling?

Mid-March, a blog post included this quote from a character in Louise Penny’s novel A World of Curiosities: “Happiness as an act of defiance. A revolutionary act.”

It’s not a new concept, at least to me, but it seems that now and again, I need a reminder to affirm it. I think always of this quote from the song “La Vie Boheme” in Jonathan Larson’s musical, RENT: “The opposite of war isn’t peace. It’s creation.”

Two musicians I keep up with on social media both live in Nashville. One has a new song coming out tomorrow, and he posted his performance of a cheerful song (by another artist) to celebrate it today. I sent him a quick message letting him know that I’m aware things are tough in Nashville right now, and that I value his creation, like happiness, as “an act of defiance” and “a celebration of existence.”

The other musician posted a song he just wrote in reaction to the Nashville school shooting. He brought his wife and two children here from another country. They support his dream of success in the U.S., and I’ve been a fan of his since I found him on Instagram. He’s struggling with recent events. His home isn’t far from the site of the school shooting. His children’s school is even closer, I think. He’s come from a place without this kind of gun violence. I sent him a similar message to the one above, citing his particular circumstances. It’s heartbreaking to me that he’s experiencing, as a father, husband, and artist, too closely what people all over the world simply don’t get about this country and its gun culture.

I don’t get it, either. The posturing, the fighting, the name-calling, and politicizing while the slaughter of innocents continues in workplaces, churches, synagogues, mosques, grocery stores, malls, hospitals, nightclubs, theaters, and in homes. Schools? It’s estimated that about sixty-eight percent of gun-related incidents at schools were with weapons taken from the shooter’s home or from a relative or friend.* An estimated 4.6 million American children live in a home where a gun is left loaded and unlocked.* In 2022, 34 students and adults died while more than 43,000 children were exposed to gunfire at school.*

Is there any place gun violence doesn’t occur? Victims are every race, age, gender, affluent or poor, even if in disproportionate numbers, in every state, city, and town. Among all the perpetrators, there is no single defining, common characteristic except one.

Guns. They used guns.

All this overwhelms me. Makes me feel helpless. It robs me of hope and joy. When I feel this way, creative things I love to do, want to do, seem pointless. I know I’m not unique. I know we all suffer. Society suffers.

Today, I tried to write, and nothing happened, and I reminded myself that art is an act of defiance. Revolution. Resistance. Connection. Love. Faith. Reverence. Growth. Hope.

A search for more led me to a collection of quotes from others who have said what art is. Maybe there’s something on the list that resonates for you.

Tomorrow, I’ll wake up and deal with the mundane: computer issues that frustrated me tonight. Making and eating breakfast. Reminding myself to breathe. To feel gratitude for everything good in the world and in my life, including family, friends, home, dogs, nature, humor, kindness, and art.

I’ll open my manuscript and try again to make something with words that affirms or comforts or challenges or engages, as so many writers, artists, musicians–all of the arts–have provided before me and continue to provide. I’ll try to be the opposite of the violence, fear, aggression, hate, dishonesty, greed, and prejudice that are part of this gun culture.

I’ll think about this.

*Statistics taken from the Sandy Hook Promise site.

Tiny Tuesday!

I don’t know why I’m how I am. I know there are women who want their spouses/partners to give them jewelry and trips and cars for their birthday. I’m not one.

When Lynne was visiting recently, we went to Buchanan’s, a favorite nursery in the Heights, so Lynne could buy botanicals for her yard. I always like going there because of the fun things I find, like little Rocky a few years back, who keeps vigil over Houndstooth Hall.

This time was no exception. I spotted a new friend among many other items and walked it over to Tom, telling him this was what I wanted for my birthday.

We know I can’t use him as a planter, because I’m more deadly than a great white shark to indoor plants. Even if I find nothing to put inside him, he’s still a delight.

Or maybe….

Tarot Etc. Thursday No. 24

It’s been a while for this category, but thanks to my birthday and Timothy, I have some new stuff to share. Like this coloring book.


Some of the sketches are Tarot cards. Others are just really cool celestial sketches. Or character-type sketches like this one.

I’ve noticed on some people’s posts of coloring pages on Instagram, they put something over the page to keep people from being able to just blow it up and reproduce it. The pencil is my way of trying to respect copyrights, too.

In addition to the beautiful coloring book, Tim gave me this Jacqui Oakley deck, perfect for a Jane Austen fan like me!

I picked The Magician card to share, with its description.

King of Clubs/The Magician: Skill. Jane Austen makes magic with her pen at her writing desk, using her prowess to begin something new.

Of course I believe writers are magicians, creating galaxies, worlds, beings of all kind, and stories. So many stories. I’ll have more to say about stories later in another post.

I did get some good writing done today, finishing one chapter and beginning another. I forgot to listen to music, though!

Hump Day

It’s been a day… So here are a few happier things to make it better.

When I was at Lynne’s for a few days last week, she made me an early birthday cake. IT WAS SO FREAKING GOOD.

We had another cake Sunday, when we finally got to celebrate Lindsey’s January birthday along with mine. It was a very fun night of food, conversation, and gift opening!


This is a pillow we got for their “you’re back at RubinSmo Manor after your big remodeled house” warming present. It’s from the web site of a favorite Instagram account of Rhonda’s, Lindsey’s, and mine, associated with Effin’ Birds, where nothing is sacred and the easily offended dare not go. 😉


Richard Marx, Stories To Tell: Greatest Hits and More; and Limitless.

I have done a bit of writing in fits and starts. A lot has gone on in and around Houndstooth Hall the last week or so, plus the world and all its happenings are a distraction. Since I’m still in the “M” playlist section, I decided to listen to the Richard Marx I have in cardboard sleeves (as I’m moving them from the box where CDs go when they won’t fit in the binders I use to a netted section in the front of the binder with all the Mellencamp CDs that are also in cardboard sleeves). Time will tell if that works out, especially since I have more in cardboard sleeves that would need to fit in this binder (thinking of McCartney and Petty, for starters).

ETA: My last book read this month, also a gift from Timothy, is the latest Stephanie Plum by Janet Evanovich. The supporting cast of characters she invents each book are brilliant and keep me laughing. They tend to turn up again in future books.

More birthday stuff to come. I like to drag this celebration out each time I hit 135 years.

Hey, hey, you, you…

Managed to get another book read this month despite the vision challenges, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & the Six. When I saw Amy at the beginning of March, she recommended the book to me because she’d enjoyed it (she may have also been watching the Amazon series; I can’t remember). She said things about the story reminded her of characters or situations in my old Rock and Roll Soap Operas, as I called them. This actually made me less inclined to read the book, since those old R&RSOs are the foundation for the series I’ve been working on since 2019.

Why? It’s not so much that I fear being influenced by another writer’s work. It’s because I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve created completely out of my brain, in my attempt to flesh out my characters, what is for me new and original writing. Then I’ll read some artist’s biography or memoir and find something from their real lives that’s eerily similar. Timothy, among others, cautions me not to let it bother me, as there’s “nothing new under the sun.” But the possibility that anyone would think I plundered artists’ or celebrities’ lives for my fiction has a real “ick” factor for me. I started writing these stories when I was thirteen, and I’m significantly older than that now. The characters have grown and changed, as have I. It would be impossible for even me to find anyone I’ve known or known about who’d be their prototypes.

In deciding whether I wanted to read the novel, I read about it first, and readers kept mentioning that it was loosely based on Fleetwood Mac. Then I found out Lynne had read it, mentioned that, and she said she didn’t see parallels to Fleetwood Mac (other than the obvious; they’re in the music business). She had a copy (I couldn’t find it as an e-book, and right now, it’s easier on my eyes to read print books anyway) and loaned it to me. And like her, while reading it, I didn’t get a Fleetwood Mac vibe, though the author has been very clear that she loves and is inspired by Fleetwood Mac.

I must remember that people see/read/assume/judge whatever fits their narrative. I learned, when I (either alone or with my writing partners) had books published, that people read through the lenses of their own experiences, fears, hopes, losses, joys. It’s satisfying when someone tells me what they enjoyed about something I wrote, but I’d rather not know their analysis of how it’s their story, or their relative’s story, or even what they believe is my own personal story. My characters are too real to me, as they are, to be reflections of me or anyone else. Lynne and I first created them as inspired by our musician crushes. Decades later, not a single one of those real-life inspirations has lived a life anything like the lives I’ve written.

So when I finally sat down and read Daisy Jones & the Six, I enjoyed it for the stories and characters it offered. It was wonderful to be lost enough in the story to laugh, cry, and worry. I could sometimes see where Reid’s research coincided with my own, but I totally accepted her novel as a work of fiction born of her imagination, and I liked both her narrative choices and her characters (including the unlikable ones).

FAR more disturbing than anything else is that the book’s genre is listed as historical fiction. Yikes! I think of historical fiction as being from the 1800s or earlier. Does this mean that by my writing a series stretching from the 1950s to sometime in the 1980s, I have become a relic? Am I just a few pages away from telling people to get off my lawn? Or…