Why Aren't You Done Yet?

Writing is never done, as in finished. I think it was Robert Frost who said that we finally abandon a poem. I'm trying hard not to abandon a whole lot of poems and stories, but ennui has set in, a preference for mindless TV and watching the birds in the backyard. I'm strangely attracted to dead- heading petunias, watering day lilies, feeding the neighbor's cats while she's traveling. I am not much attracted to putting the last efforts into a chapbook that is 90% done or working on one that has been long out of print and deserves, maybe, reissue. I cannot bring myself to edit or revise or create new. I have kept my promise to an online group in which we each write a new piece per week and share them. But even with this project, I'm hiking uphill.

Maybe this is summer sloth. It's hot and getting hotter. Of course, I have nothing to complain of: not digging ditches or fighting wildfires. Not training horses or planting row on row of garden produce. Not harvesting lettuce. So many things that I don't have to deal with. So why drag around my chosen work as if it were a bag of rocks? Fear. Fear of finishing and having no excuse to avoid the inevitable criticism that follows publication. As long as all these stories and poems sit quietly in their ms boxes and notebooks, no one can tell whether I'm a hack or not. No one but me and my inner critic. I wish she would go on vacation. I'd feed her cats. Oh, wait, she doesn't have cats. She has me, her pet iguana with as much talent with words as a lizard sunning on a rock.

Action!

This weekend I did two things that taught me something about my ability as a writer. First, I visited a friend's home that impressed me with its decor and serenity. Muted palette, lots of white, old moldings and door brasses retained or replicated, uncluttered space, kitchen appliances disguised as cabinetry. But my description falls flat, lacks spice and depth. The other thing I did was to read excerpts from Jack Kerouac's prose. And beat my fist against my forehead. How is it he can put me right into a buggy, deep Mexican night so effectively and I cannot say just how it felt to be in that elegant home that I visited?

I let my frustration steep and started over in my journal. Only when I added action to the mix did I begin to catch what I had seen. Experience--that's action. Otherwise I am a visitor in a museum, feasting only with my eyes. Kerouac acted in response to the mosquitoes that shredded his skin to hamburger. He took off his shirt and put it back on. He climbed onto the roof of the car to sleep. He spoke to a sleepy constable. A perfectly designed and decorated room does not move. People in it have to run their fingers over an antique music cabinet, sit in the padded wicker chairs, peer into the bird cage, empty but for three large blue eggs. Someone has to eat off the perfectly yellow plates and drink from the sparkling stemware. Without action, the scene is a still life; with action it becomes life.

More Food

Last week I was moaning about having committed my time to prepping for a course scheduled for the 2011-12 year, Literature of Food. This week I'm loving that prep, not quite the same as being a prep cook, but I have found some tasty bits to add to my course notes. A delicious source is Alimentum, a periodical out of Nashville, TN. It comes twice yearly and is packed with fiction, poetry, art, and nonfiction, all centered on food, its delights and dangers, but mostly delights. Interesting bit of synchronicity too--last week a friend suggested that we begin looking for poems that contain recipes. And here on the masthead of Alimentum is Esther Cohen, Menupoems Editor! Nice.

An interview in the Summer 2011 issue, which I carried around all day yesterday and read in a succession of coffee shops (one of those I've-run-away-from-home days) features Amanda Hesser. She is described in the intro as a former "kitchen runner and bread truck driver" who "picked grapes in France, made pretzels in Germany, and cleaned rabbits in Italy." I'm not thinking too hard about that last job, unsure whether she bathed bunnies or butchered them. Anyway, she was also the food editor at the New York Times, a much better line on the resume than cleaning rabbits, I suspect. So now I'm off to search the Kindle Store for her book Eat, Memory. I love this kind of research--the kind that falls into my hands from casual reading. Yummy!

Writing about Food

Please, think deeply before you volunteer to teach a course on writing about food. Think deeply about the history of food, its importance, its implications, its impossible size as a topic of study. I gaily sailed into this ocean, puffed along in my little boat of a book, The Great Hunger. I wrote that book and thought that my abilities as a poet meant that I knew something about the literature of food. Ha! Writing about food as a general idea, reading about food as a hobby--this way madness lies. What I wanted to do was look at how food shows up in literature. But, glutton that I am, each book or article led to another and soon I was drowning in a sea of ideas and information. Will I ever find home port, that place of certainty and comfort?

The answer is: no, I won't. I'll bob around in this oceanic topic, at the mercy of the wind and the memory of my Grandma's cooking, my own culinary disasters and triumphs (yes, a few) and enjoy the ride. I have an outline for the ten week course that will keep us, more or less, on course, but each participant will have to map her own way, set her own destination. I'll wave to them from my little vessel and watch them sail off into a world of reading and writing and discovery about our most basic need and highest art.

The Gift of Writing

A good friend is overwhelmed by illness. Constant concerns about medicine, appointments, pain management and pending surgery and its aftermath have virtually erased her confidence and her sense of self. When I asked what she would like to do if she could, the answers were scarce, still connected to the need to organize a life around her chronic illness. This seems wrong. It happens, though, all too often. An otherwise smart, creative person is absorbed into the role of patient, or as my friend put it, into feeling like someone else's science experiment. As a nurse I saw this time and again. The thing is living with chronic illness is a reality. No magic pill or wand will remove it. How then to get back to some sense of who she is, of getting outside her box of pills and ills?

Here's what I am about to suggest: she might begin an autobiography of sorts, a life told on paper can build a perspective of and a distance from the all-encompassing role of patient-hood. I'm about to take her a loose-leaf binder, some index cards, some fat pens (easier on sore, stiff hands) and a set of suggestions about getting started on her book. I've asked that she commit to morning pages, a la Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. And to create a Life Line--a year by year gleaning of memories and notes that she can, at her pace, enlarge and explore. Oh, yes, and sticky notes--for whatever marking she wants to review later. I've offered to become her writing coach. Not a censor or a critic or a therapist--but someone who helps her develop a process that supports her efforts--looking at whatever interferes with writing daily, what happens when she has an AHA! moment, what resources and tools might make her more productive. What she writes is hers, not mine. After all, it's her life, and I have my own to write about.

Here's to Ebooks

Traditional publishing is languishing; but you probably know that. Borders is closing stores, B&N begs me to buy their stuff, more and more writers now publish with small independent presses, or issue DIY books. More than issuing, they celebrate their freedom to design, print, and distribute their own work, and in the process profit far beyond the traditionally amoebic and anemic royalties. Me too. My next book will be independently published, albeit in print form, not yet an e-book. But that will come. Here's why.

At the May meeting of Colorado Independent Publishers Assoc. (CIPA to its friends and family), the director of library services for Douglas (no relation) County, CO, Jamie LaRue, announced an important change in the way libraries handle e-books. Jamie's library will begin buying, FROM THE AUTHOR, e-books. Until now, the library was, in effect, renting e-books from a middle man. Given the level of technology, the borrowing of e-books will work: one borrower gets the book at a time for a limited use. Software protections will insure that the book cannot be transferred to a device other than the one checking it out. The books will be cataloged and can be signed out by using an interactive hand-held device, like an e-reader. If the book proves wildly popular, the library will buy additional copies FROM THE AUTHOR. If no one checks it out, after a time certain it will be removed from the catalog.

This makes me want to dance! The artist is back in control of her art (I almost wrote heart and that's true too.) It made the whole meeting room happy. We had cake and champagne. We toasted the arrangement that will link selected CIPA members to the library. They will be the first responders in this firestorm of free press. As Jerry LaRue said, millions of books are now blocked from public view because they lack a formal distribution process without the cumbersome system used by traditional publishers. Let freedom reign! Huzzah!

Silence

No television, no radio, no phone, no internet. Just me and Duncan the Dog. For three days on retreat I heard no human voice except that of a man who stopped his truck while I was walking the dog. He had lost his two dogs and wanted me to call the number on their tags if I found them. I did not find his dogs. What I found instead was that I am capable of parking the car on Thursday noon and not getting into it again until Sunday noon. That I can compose and revise effectively when there is little chance of interruption or distraction. True, I required breaks for reading, doing crosswords, and--guilty gulp--playing Spider solitaire. But during my time at Bloomsbury West in Silver Cliff, I worked on half a dozen poems, some from notes, a couple of revisions, read two and a half books: David Mason's Ludlow, a novel in verse; Annie Dawid's There Was Darkness Under His Feet; and Leslie Marmon Silko's The Turquoise Ledge. Interestingly, none of this reading intruded on my own writing. So there, no anxiety of influence here.

What did inform the writing was my drive down CO 9, where I had the road pretty much to myself, saw mule deer, elk--still wearing velvet on their antlers--one pronghorn antelope, and a small herd of bison. That last amazed me, about eight of the huge animals silhouetted against a vast snowfield. They were at a distance, so I felt safe in pulling off and staring at them. I could tell from the tracks in the snow, though, that they had inspected the fence line, and the fence was flimsy compared to the bison. A bit later I saw more bison, but in a small, muddy farm yard. Again I pulled over and took the dog out on his leash. He was completely oblivious to the bison, one of which kept its eyes on me with such intensity that, after snapping a couple of poorly framed pictures, I left. There was a fence and a ravine between us, but I doubt that either would have stopped a charge if I angered the herd. There were youngsters there, not small, but still, parental concern is what it is.