Tag: authors

Mid-week roundup

Still really having to take it easy. We had some brief power flickers today because of storms, but fortunately no outage. I think Tom said there are about 75,000 in the area without power post-storm.

So far this week, I’ve watched this DVD I bought sometime last year, the reboot of Sex and The City, ten episodes total. The second season of this starts streaming tomorrow, I think, though I don’t have whatever it streams on, as far as I know. I’d rather wait until the next DVD drops. Waiting between episodes of something usually means I forget about it.

Also read this book by ‘Nathan Burgoine on my iPad. I hadn’t realized this was an addition to ‘Nathan’s Little Village series, all of which I have and either read or will read. It was interesting to find two of his stories that Tim and I edited for Cleis Press anthologies fit nicely into this collection, too. (It was also kind of him to mention Tim and me as the editors who gave him his first YES. He’s published a lot since those days!) I was happy my eyes were willing to read, and this was an engaging way to ease back into doing so.

I might have to wait a while to tackle this one, a 1971 offering from James Michener. It’s around 750 pages; that’s a lot of commitment. One of my characters needed something to read back in ’71, and I chose this for her. I figured I can’t know if it engages her unless I attempt it myself. (I know what I’m getting into, having read Michener in the past, though it’s been decades.) It was either this or one of the Russian writers, but the timing was good for this one, and I think the Russians might exhaust me. Will be reading this one in hardcover.

Still not writing the new last chapter for my own sixth novel in the Neverending Saga, but I’ve done a little revising on earlier chapters. Even eyes need to take baby steps.

Mood: Monday

Photo previously posted here was of the work Pinecone #7, oil on panel with gold leaf, 2021, by Matthew Hopkins.

I’ve always liked pinecones, and I have several small ones Tom has found on walks through the years. They’re in one of our curio cabinets. The writer (not the actor) Maggie Smith’s book You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir begins with the existence of a pine cone that exposes a betrayal and leads to the disintegration of a relationship and family. It’s painful to read, and that it’s so sparingly, artistically written made it break my heart more.

Other readers might not agree with me, but I rarely like writing only because I identify with it, or I think it’s describing my own experience or that of someone I know or care about. I want to be absorbed into a world that exists in and of itself, for its own self, whether it’s memoir/autobiography, biography, fiction, or poetry. I don’t need to find myself in a work, only to find something authentic.

That being said, once I closed the book and thought about its impact, I did reflect on betrayal. I’ve experienced it a few times (not the way Smith has), to varying degrees, with mixed outcomes, and almost certainly with forgiveness because for me, that’s a vital step in removing its power. A person who’s betrayed me may not remain part of my life, and I don’t forget (because there are lessons in everything), but I’m not a grudge holder, and I’m not vindictive. Again, that’s a way to retake control of my own story from the one who betrayed me.

I also acknowledge there are times in my life when others have felt betrayed by my actions. I hope I was forgiven and think I’m more likely to have been forgotten, whatever outcome was best for them. I wasn’t malicious, just young and/or stupid and/or careless, and sometimes just lost.

“Betrayal” was number two of a topic list I made here on June 7, and I’d posted a photo that included the book filled with Post-it Flags. I’ll flip through it now to see if there are any quotes that, having resonated with me despite my very different story, might resonate with you.

p 169: “I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.–Lidia Yuknavitch”

p 211, in a chapter titled “About The Body”: “My trigger is stress, so my treatment is perspective.”

p 236: “How I picture it: A scar tells a story about pain, injury, and healing. Years, too, are scars. … The year of Rilke written on a yellow sticky note … referred to daily: ‘Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.’”

Pop vibe

Yesterday, they were able to fit me in to see my ophthalmologist for a second post-op consult, and he talked me through my concerns after an eye exam. Anxiety is a nasty little companion, and I’m really grateful to my healthcare providers for their understanding. Healing proceeds.

I’m able to stream shows on my laptop, with brightness lowered and without eyestrain, so I finished the rest of the episodes for the second season of “Dickinson” on Wednesday and Thursday (a character who should be sinister but is fun returned from the first season). Yesterday after the doctor visit, I finished the final season of “Grace and Frankie” which I’d started last year before I got distracted. Earlier today, I watched a documentary called “Inventing David Geffen” from 2012. Now and then, I get reinforcement for directions I take in the Neverending Saga, and this was one of those times.

Sometime in the last week, I was researching the pop artist Peter Max (I have two of his posters from my teen years hanging in the writing sanctuary) when I stumbled across one of his works called “The Different Drummer.” Online, it’s described as a “groundbreaking poster for a hip clothing store on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan frequented by hippies and rock stars at the height of the counterculture zeitgeist in the ’60s. This rare and vintage poster exemplifies this era of the artist’s work where his colorful and euphoric subjects explore fantastical worlds.”

I’m all about drummers and hip clothing stores, so now one of those posters belongs to me. Bottom right in this photo.

ETA ON 6/27: Got to move the “Three Guitars” painting where I wanted it originally thanks to the changes.

Deadline

I’m on a self-imposed deadline, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s more of a self-discipline thing, and also, I’m working against a sense that I might not be able to post a lot next week. (I have no idea if this is correct and won’t know until–next week!)

I have many things running through my brain right now and rather than try to make order from them by connecting disparate experiences, I’m going to put a photo here with notes in no order to remind me of what I was thinking when the time comes that I can develop thoughts/ideas/recollections.

1. “Dickinson.” The TV series and the poet.
2. Betrayal.
3. Point of view.
4. Big world/small world.
5. Travel.
6. Problematic things to say to writers.
7. Debate. (re: The Women’s Room)
8. The lens of ME-ism.
9. Answers are often only the lies we tell ourselves.
10. The perfidy of memory.

Pro tip: Post-it Flags could have saved many a book from bent corners, excessive highlighting, and the loss of references due to vanishing bookmarks.

Mood: Monday

Forbidden things and kitchen chaos
Artist unknown, from North East England
painting, 1985
available for public use from the Wellcome Collection’s Migraine Art Competition Collection

Joan Didion describes her experience with migraines in this excerpt from The White Album. When I found the above art on line, she was referenced. I’ve read the book but had no memory of the excerpt. I think my compassion for/identification with anyone who suffers migraines is so acute that I try not to hold on to their descriptions.

An online search for art relating to migraines shows a sad wealth of how people experience the illness. I was in ninth grade when I had my first, and it was terrifying, with complete numbness beginning down one side of my face before traveling down that half of my body. I was fifty percent skull-to-toe numb, which made movement challenging. My vision was impaired; I couldn’t string coherent sentences together. Emotionally, I was shaken then scared. I was supposed to be baking a chocolate pound cake, a home ec assignment, and I ceased being able to reason or function. I couldn’t read the recipe or measure out ingredients. My mother, aggravated because I couldn’t make words to explain what was happening, sent me to bed and finished the cake. (I still have and use that recipe from the index cards I used in class to write it down. It’s delicious, and I always think of it as my big fuck-you to migraines.)

I’m not sure when that episode repeated. It struck infrequently, without warning, and I was usually able to mask that anything was happening. It wasn’t like I had a job or had to drive or take care of anyone else. I might complain of a headache when I turned down invitations from friends, but mostly I kept it private. It was the only part of my life that became easier when my parents made me transfer schools. The friends who knew me best didn’t spend every day with me anymore. They weren’t driving yet either, so the most I might get other than an occasional weekend outing, or a sleepover with Lynne, was a visit from Riley, who did have his license because he was a year older. At the new school, I had a single genuine friend (the nephew of my first boyfriend from my other school; though the boyfriend, too, was a year older and could have driven to see me, we were on a break, one of many over several years). Though there were a few students with whom I had semi-friendly relationships, I had no after-school social life my sophomore year. (ETA: Things got… moderately better my last couple of years of high school thanks to the school paper, Color Guard, good teachers, and some new friends.)

I finished high school, went to college. I became more open about my occasional migraines with friends, and I found hit-or-miss ways to deal with them. From my mid-twenties on, they took a new form: a once-monthly event with different pain sensations and no identifiable common triggers. In my early thirties, at a meetup with a friend from junior high in our small town, she told Lynne and me about her migraines, vastly worse than my own. Her doctors tried one treatment after another until they finally gave her a hysterectomy. It was a drastic and not always effective solution, but she had no regrets. She finally had a much higher quality of life with her husband and two young children and a job she enjoyed.

Because of her, I finally recognized the pattern of my migraines, which had become more frequent. They didn’t come every month, but when they happened, they generally fell somewhere in the middle between my monthly cycles. Just being able to latch on to an answer, hormones as a possible cause, afforded me relief. I accepted that I would have four to six days a month in pain. I’d have to avoid driving, sunlight, and noise. If possible, I’d spend as much time as I could in a dark room, avoid television or music, and eat only bland foods. Food with strong smells were torment.

Since I had to be at jobs despite migraines–life doesn’t stop–I learned that if I were surrounded by my favorite coworkers, the ones who made me laugh, pain didn’t go away, but it took a backseat. The vision problems were-are–temporary. By then, Tom and I were married, and unlike a couple of the previous men in my life, he never treated me like I was acting crazy, or faking, or attention seeking. He took care of me in ways that were helpful and otherwise left me alone. He’d known other people with chronic illnesses, and he’s also a self-sufficient human adult. It makes a huge difference.

Post-menopause, the regularity of migraines tapered off. They still happen. They can still rob me of time and energy, but they more often manifest as vision problems without the excruciating headaches. During even the mildest migraine events, I still avoid light. I still can’t stand strong food odors.

This particular painting resonated. I thought of all the times I had to keep functioning no matter how I felt. The simplest tasks would feel overwhelming, my time out of my control, plus migraines involved constant trial and error: what worked or made things worse could change from episode to episode.

I know an artist who donates his time at a hospital leading step-by-step painting sessions as part of a cancer support group. What a wonderful gift he provides. I know people who color, knit, play an instrument, or find other creative ways to work their way through the fear, pain, and anxiety of illness. I couldn’t have written–I still can’t–my way through a migraine. I also can’t bear the eyestrain of reading. I wonder, during my years of adolescence or early adulthood, if some kind of creative outlet, or creative self-expression, might have helped me navigate the pain. I know from other artists’ experiences that it likely couldn’t have eliminated pain, but it might have made those lost days more bearable.

If you read here, or accidentally stumble over this post, I don’t have much wisdom to offer. I hope that when you can’t function, you know that it’s not a failure of character. Sometimes it’s everything you can do to get through a bad day or night. Even when you have good friends, family, healthcare, partners, or roommates, illness can be a lonely place. Please show yourself some grace, some tolerance, some patience, and do what you can to find what works and avoid what doesn’t when you’re going through a health event.

One of my own biggest struggles remains: not reproaching myself or feeling resentful about time and activities lost when I’m sick. I’m an old work in progress.

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.