The Organic Writer: Yvonne Osborne's Writing Blog

Model On A Pillow (Magpie Tales)

2012-01-23T07:20:00.000-08:00

He strapped her to a bale of cotton,
and turned her in circles for the camera,
like an automobile under the lights.
He airbrushed the tendons out of her hands
the clench out of her teeth
and the stretch marks out of her thighs,
like an artist smoothing the parchment
hung on the wall for affect.

When Tess Kincaid of Magpie Tales offered this image for inspiration this week, for some reason, I thought of the Detroit Auto Show and all the models coiffed and collared.

Silenced (Magpie Tales)

2012-01-15T13:22:00.000-08:00

They bound my hair
and burned my shoes,
then stripped me of clothes
and entombed me at sea
with the others before me
who refused to sit silent
swaddled from view.

I choked on the bracken
and cried out for those
who knew of a land
that was pagan and free
to open the eyes of the ones
who surround me,
silent.

Thanks goes to Magpie Tales for the picture prompt, and today they turned 100! My link has been fixed. Sorry for the earlier broken one.

GOD LOVES TEXAS

2012-01-10T18:22:00.000-08:00

They want to write Thomas Jefferson out of history.
Delete him like a dark chapter
from the annals of American History.
He who coined separation of church and state
is a sword in the side of self-proclaimed historians
who bleed, but not of wine.

The Dark Ages weren’t as dark
as the house the Texas Board of Education wants to build.
With the buying power to control content,
America’s children will read what
they want them to read.

They soften the image of McCarthy—
His motives were pure.
Jefferson for McCarthy.
There’s only so much room.
Motives justify methods
because God loves Texas.

To defame a person,
first misspell his last name.
Sow seeds of doubt.
Rearrange his words and cast credit elsewhere
Remove Monticello from travel guides
and besmirch the gardens—
the vegetables he grew,
amazed at the temperate zone of a new world.

While at it,
rearrange the heads of the founding fathers,
Was that really John Hancock’s John Hancock?
Like the 12 apostles at the dinner table,
Mary Magdalene in the shadows.
Misquote Paine to fortify your position.
Who will bother to verify?

Purge American History of he who dared to separate
the church from the state.
As if one could take guns from the righteous
guards from the gate
inmates from their prison.
God out of Texas

They Say She's Crazy (Friday Flash 55)

2012-01-05T18:39:00.000-08:00

but she isn’t.
She has more than one name
and talks to those who aren’t there,
but she isn’t crazy.
She used to be a librarian-
checked out books with a date stamp
to those on death row.
She quit that job
so she could look in the mirror
without seeing those who aren’t there.

The Friday Flash 55 of mysterious origin (which can be researched here) is an ingenious writing exercise. Mr. Knowitall knows this and so encourages the writing of a story in 55 words, no more, no less. If I see you there, I'll follow you home.

TGIF!

Why You Should Preorder Books

2012-01-04T06:05:00.000-08:00

If there is a book coming out from one of your writerly friends via traditional publishing that you plan to purchase anyway, the best way to support them is to preorder. Publishers look at preorder numbers to determine their print run. Early sales are also important. The first two weeks of a book's shelf life are the most important. This article by Sophie Perinot at From The Write Angle explains why.

I did not know this. I'm inherently guilty of procrastination, but I did not know that my preorder could make a difference. For all the times I said to myself...I like the sounds of this and I'm going to buy it....later. I'M SORRY!!! PREORDER is the word of the day.

Thank you Sophie for opening my eyes.

The Stories We Tell

2011-12-30T05:48:00.000-08:00

Do you do this? Tape favorite quotes, poems and passages around your writing nook? Below are some of my notes to self and advice from the masters I've underlined in books and taped to the walls. Stuff I've learned on this writing journey but still need constant reminders of. How about you? Maybe there is something here you can use, something you, too, need reminding of.

Writers must read. (Don't assume everyone does. I'll never forget a young man in one of my creative writing classes who announced smugly, "I don't read. I only write.") Read voraciously in many genres. The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent reading.
In order to write, a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
-Dr. Samuel Johnson

Secondly write. Write insatiably. Write like you’re dying. Write, write, write.
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
- Ray Bradbury

The topic doesn’t matter. POV doesn’t matter. Genre doesn’t matter. The quality of the writing is all that matters. The art of writing itself is all that matters.

Your first paragraph must be as good as your last. The critical moment which propels your story forward MUST happen in the first 30 pages. "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is one exception that quickly comes to mind. I kept reading only because so many people told me it was good. But it took 100 pages to grab me. Most of us won’t have 100 pages to fool around with.

The stories we tell must set off the vivid and continuous dream, famed author and writing teacher John Gardner so often talked about, wherein the reader instantly forgets that they’re reading printed words on a page.

Improve your vocabulary, not with grandiose tongue-twisters but with small forgotten words. Gardner recommends that you go through the dictionary and write down all the relatively short, relatively common words that you would not ordinarily think to use, and then make an effort to use them as if they’d come to you naturally. Avoid trite, clichéd, and sentimental phrases like the scabies, "anything that would distract an intelligent, senstive reader from the vivid and continuous dream."

The characters we knock around must be interesting. The stories we tell must first and foremost be stories.
The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.
-John le Carre

I'd like to end with a wonderfully appropriate parable for the season that was passed on to me from my sister, the editor.

A grandmother is explaining life to her Granddaughter:

"There is a battle going on inside me. It is a fierce battle between 2 wolves. The first wolf is Evil: hatred, anger, greed, envy, ego, sorrow, regret. The second is Good: love, compassion, peace, joy, hope, empathy, serenity.

The same battle is going on inside you and everybody else."

The granddaughter asks, "Which wolf will win"?

The grandmother replies simply, "The one you feed".

I wish all my writerly friends an inspired writing life as laid out in Poets and Writers. While you're there, check out their concise list of contests, grants and awards and literary mags taking submissions. Many of these contests run through the end of January.

Happy New Year. May peace and storytelling reign in 2012. Feed the good wolf and go write some stories.

The Zen Of Repetition

2011-12-26T19:59:00.000-08:00

Driving home from the hospital,
we say the rosary.
I forget a line in the Our Father
and mumble a replacement.
He finishes for me.
How could I forget
that which was memorized at the knee
of Sister Severe?
Swimming upstream in the wake of his narrative
I navigate the mysteries.
Is it the joyful or the
sorrowful we parley?
He stumbles on the words-
they fall into his handkerchief.
I finish for him.
The miles pass unnoticed
and the mysteries come to an end
but the road continues
and the day approaches
when there won’t be anyone left to finish
that which is forgotten.

Friday Flash 55

2011-12-22T19:00:00.000-08:00

Love Me Hard

She picks up the disfigured,
the alcoholic and deranged.
She plays pool all night
and never pays.
The man with a limp,
and the lost lazy eye,
the scoundrels and the cads,
she plays with them all.
She takes them home and loves them hard.
They say that they’re lonely,
so why don’t they call?

If you can tell a story in 55 words, post it and let the most superb host from coast to coast know about it. He can be found HERE, ringing a bell. I had to do this one last time for 2011.
Now,
Tell me a story, tell me a story....

So You Say You're A Writer?

2011-12-17T18:30:00.000-08:00

I don’t like these monotonous gray skies, these decrepit clouds that can’t even deliver a good snowfall, these bleak windswept nights that encircle the crumbling brick of an unfinished house, cold as bare shoulders in an unheated room. Monotony, how wicked is your winter. I don’t like it when someone asks, “What did you do all day?” Knowing full well that I whittled the hours away putting thoughts into words and writing them down.

If I were braver, I would say, “I wrote. That’s all I did."

Writing warms this winter floor and turns monotonous gray skies blue. So, no, I didn’t bake anything or clean anything or visit the sick or feed the poor. Why should any of those things be more admirable than writing? More acceptable? Or is this just a misconception that rests in me? I certainly wouldn’t hesitate to pat myself on the back for any of those things. So why do I cower behind my written words like a plagiarist? There isn’t anything more painstaking than writing, nothing that takes more time, perseverance, memory, and intellect.

Our society measures success by money. Simple truth. So as a writer, most of us live outside the circle of society. If we are to live off our writing, we live outside the needs of society. We work at odd jobs that take as little of our time as possible yet keep us off the dole. We read meters and deliver newspapers and survive dog bites. We wait tables and stock shelves and work for temp agencies. We turn down full time jobs and full time money so we have time to write. We turn down the heat and buy second hand. We live on the fringe and that takes courage. Courage to stand up and say "I'm a writer." It's more than just putting writer as your occupation on your income tax return (though that is very gratifying). It’s putting yourself out there, facing rejection and the inevitable questions, because let’s face it, most people don't know the six questions not to ask a writer.

So they ask.

I have questions of my own. The Protestor was named Time's Person Of The Year, and the Occupy Wall Street movement is on my mind. As I browsed my local bookstore, I kept seeing dumpsters full of books. Would we throw away our books if ordered to do so? Stand idly by and let someone else do it? Would we raise a hand to the oncoming tank? Would we object to police drones flying overhead? If it all comes down around us tomorrow, would we still have the courage to write?

Three Contests of Literary Importance

2011-12-09T07:40:00.001-08:00

Winter is the submission season and here are three contests to get you warmed up.

Elana Johnson is doing a query letter critique giveaway. This one is for one day only so enter TODAY.

Next, there are only three weeks left in the Literary Lab's short story contest,Variations on a Theme. Go here or click on the botton on my sidebar for all the information.

Finally, Amazon and Penguin have announced their Breakthrough Novel Award contest for 2012. There's a General Fiction and YA catagory. Have any of you ever done this? Is anyone thinking of doing it?

That's it for now. Sharpen your pencils and put up your Do-Not-Disturb signs. You might not see too much of me over the next few weeks. I have a lot to do.

Books In A Dumpster (or who's afraid of OWS?)

2011-12-06T05:39:00.000-08:00

"With rebellion, awareness is born." ~ Albert Camus

I first heard of the Occupy Wall Street library on NPR a few weeks ago when they interviewed a school teacher from Wisconsin who was driving to NY on her weekends to help set it up. It struck me at first as whimsical. A library in a park? Out in the open? In a tent? What if it rains? Who keeps track of the books? Who catalogues them? Come on....how could this possibly work?

I've since found out that there is a long history of libraries springing up around progressive movements. The intuition of the Occupy Movement to build libraries resonates with the history of progressive change. It's a democratic impulse that has taken off like wildfire, and libraries have sprung up at Occupy sites around the country, driven by volunteers donating books and cataloging them.

These libraries all have one thing in common: their generous lending policy. You can return a book or you can pass it on to somebody else to read, whatever you see fit, and they are available to anyone.

I would love to donate a bunch of books to the Occupy library. What good are they doing on my shelf collecting dust?

I would love to get one back some day with an OWS stamp on the inside cover. What could be more exciting than to be part of this historic movement that is not going away anytime soon?

As of a month ago, the Occupy Wall Street Library had 5000 books catalogued on Library Thing. But at 2:30 am on November 15th the library was destroyed by the NYPD under the direction of the mayor of New York. Police in riot gear raided the park, seized everything in it and threw it all into garbage trucks. According to the Village Voice, librarians, like the other occupiers, were given only 15 minutes notice before the eviction, and so didn't have time to remove the library.

A college professor who was working at the site as a volunteer when the raid went down reported in The Nation that there were many, many college textbooks destroyed.

"For many," the Village Voice goes on to say, "the People's Library was one of the most remarkable institutions to arise from the occupation of Zuccotti Park. Its generous lending policy and catholic scope -- George Orwell shared space with Ayn Rand and J.K. Rowling -- made it one of the most tangible symbols of the sort of collaborative, open-source movement the occupiers were trying to build."

Of the 5000 donated books that made up the people's library, only about 1,000 were recovered and most of those were unsalvagable.

The good news is that they opened back up the next day with a donation of one. They have since regrouped and are now housed in three mobile units staffed by librarians, which they can take anywhere they want.

What would you think if you ever came across a used book that had a OWS stamp on the inside cover?

WHY YOU SHOULDN’T CALL ME

2011-12-04T05:09:00.000-08:00

A road, a river, a mountain,
restless desert eddies,
and still more space to navigate;
more than can be gathered.
Beyond the question of what you had
for dinner and if your roses bloom
or stand defeated in the heat,
about what matters, we sometimes fall behind.
Yet I feel you and hear your voice
in the strangers who surround me.
When the very silence howls an absence,
like the coyotes that run your foothills,
I hear you.
In this we aren’t so far apart.
They say we have them here.
Bold in the twilight, hungry and moving.

Reunion At Luskey's (a flash 55)

2011-12-02T06:09:00.000-08:00

He turned right
And she turned left.
He thought he had her figured out—
reduced to adjectives
on the back of a frame.
But he didn’t.

He called her over
to guess his name.
Like a pop quiz.
Thinking to trip her up
with his freckles and green eyes.
Thinking to make her fall again.

In between researching patterns for Christmas booties and bemoaning the lawn chairs left out in the snow and worrying about what's for breakfast, lunch and dinner in the house down the road (if we could harness the worry in my family and convert it into energy we could power the whole State of Michigan), I had to post a Friday Flash 55 for the incredible G-Man. Even if you don't have a story in 55 words that you want to share, you should definitely pop in HERE for the scariest thing I've seen this week.

TGIF.

High Street

2011-11-29T04:57:00.000-08:00

She wore a purple blouse and a blue sweater with no apparent care for color coordination. The sweater was missing a button and there was a coffee stain on her blouse. He’d studied her in the mirror of the backbar for a while and so had noticed all of this. It wasn’t often that he saw someone in the Short North as uninterested in physical appearance as she so obviously was. Short North people wore dark frames and artfully draped scarves and were concerned with nothing as much as their physical appearance.

She was engrossed in a book, and her legs stretched out across the adjacent stool in languid repose. He was attracted to the black tights that fit like a glove; her every curve spelled out in spandex like a rock star in a window poster at the now defunct Virgin Records store. Her sexuality was enhanced by her carelessness, by the threadbare sweater and the stained blouse and the hair that she hadn’t bothered to comb.

He shifted in his seat to adjust himself against the pull of the black tights. When was the last time he’d felt anything astir in the dead zone of his center? What was it that captured his curiosity like a prairie dog to the rising sun? He motioned to the bartender for another draft. Who reads books in a tavern on High Street? Even at the noon hour? She should be in the coffee shop across from campus with her coffee, writing in a journal or reading Atwood or Munroe. She looked Canadian. Something in the slouch of her figure and the way she caressed the cover of her book told him she wouldn’t be repelled by what he had become.

He picked up his glass and his cane and moved to the vacant stool beside her. She closed the book on her thumb and looked at him from behind a strand of hair. In contradiction to her appearance, she smelled like soap. Her one eye was blue and the other brown, a struggle against the dominant from the onset. She was younger than he, but not by much. In another time she would have been a protestor. In another time, but not this time, they would share a drink and then shack up together with their books and beaded curtains. She would hang posters and massage his wounds. In another time before the current time and the cane and the dreams, he would have struck up a conversation; he wouldn’t freeze in fear of the stammer he’d acquired. The short circuit in his brain would heal itself and the words would flow like the hair down her back.

He’d forgotten himself. There was no cure for the short circuit in his brain, no name for the whittler of his cane.

The art museum had an entire room devoted to the display of canes, works of art whittled from a single branch, but every whittler was named Unknown. They reminded him of soldiers minus their weapons and their boots, minus that which defined them, all those whittlers without a name. He went there on Mondays when it wasn’t crowded. There was a guest pass attached to his membership that he had never used. The add-on had been a waste of money.

She closed her book and curled her legs under her stool and looked at him with one blue eye and one brown. What was he waiting for?

Trampled

2011-11-23T04:44:00.000-08:00

Blogger keeps asking me to put ads on my site. Gmail encroaches on the right hand side of the screen with their eerie fingering. Facebook now takes up a third of the page with advertising. Players on the football field stand idly by for the TV time-out. Stadiums are renamed for the highest bidder. The banner ads on the front pages of the newspaper creep up and up. Content is influenced by advertisers instead of by the newsworthiness of the story. Investigative reporting is going the way of the land line.

We time our arrival at the theatre to miss the yelling and screaming of the selling. The glossy magazines shout at you from newsstands, fat with advertising. If you took out every ad from the glossies, you would end up with a slim magazine fit for your back pocket, like The Sun, an advertisement- free magazine of stories, poems and essays. You pay for your subscription and you get what you pay for. They don’t try to sell you anything else. If I could get something published in The Sun it would feel better than a front page blurb in the Atlantic. Well…..almost.

I would no sooner put ads on my blog than cut off my right hand. I wish they would just leave me alone and cut out the crap. The amped-up scheming of the advertiser during the holiday season strips my spirit like turpentine. Thanksgiving is a time for contemplation and fortification, community and church, parades and musicals, nourishment for the creative soul and the inquisitive mind. Why did we let the frenzied retailer hijack Thanksgiving? Forget the family gatherings and the euchre games and the gathering of cousins into the wee hours to catch up. We all have to go to bed early so we can get up at three in the morning to shop.

Thanksgiving is no time for manic shopping in the predawn hours, yanked from store to store like puppets on a string by the geek of the advertiser. One Day Only! Limited Availability! First 100 shoppers! Free shipping! Bullshit.

Do they think us simpletons? They raise the price and then offer free shipping. They double the price, then offer you two for one. Why is it my patriotic duty to put myself in the red to put them in the black? This marketing of Thanksgiving to the highest bidder makes Clockwork Orange look like the Ed Sullivan Show.

I really meant to talk about food. Are you a foodie? If you're still reading, let’s sit down and talk about what's for dinner.

On our Thanksgiving menu: organic turkey, stuffing, butternut squash braised in maple syrup, garlic mashed potatoes and gravy, salad greens dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar and apple pie for dessert. All served up at my daughter's house (first time!). She doesn't have a dining room table but she's going to pull in her patio table and put a tablecloth on it.

We’ve opted for traditional, but we have our own turkeys so it’s hard not to go down that road. What about your road? Is anyone doing something extravagantly different, like roasted duck or pheasant? Oysters on the half shell or a standing rib roast? What’s for dessert?

On our weekend slate: the browsing of bookshelves and the stringing of lights around that patio minus its table, the Columbus Museum of Art to view the Caravaggio exhibit (the only U.S. venue), the living room and conversation, the Lions Thanksgiving Day football game because that's tradition (even with the TV time outs). Any extra money I have is going for wine, beer, and books. No shopping. What about you?

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Keeping Things Pretty - Recommendations and Chaos

2011-11-20T15:20:00.000-08:00

I have an award to accept and one to pass on, a couple of reading recommendations, and an observation from farm country on football Sunday.

Jon Paul at Where Sky Meets Ground recently gave me this blog award.

Thanks Jon Paul!

He is participating in NaNo and tearing it up. In fact his progress has been so remarkable he's inspired me to participate in this novel-writing month next year. Check him out and follow if you aren't already. I'm supposed to pass this award on to 15 other bloggers. At this time, I'm passing it on to five, because it takes a lot of thought and time to do awards. I do reserve the right to name my other ten at a later time. Some of these bloggers are new to me while I've been following others for a while, but they all have one thing in common: they've created blogs I return to again and again, which is my definition of a lovely blog.

Zev from Swords Into Plows is a man after my own heart. Check him out and you'll see why.

Jessica Bell at The Alliterative Allomorph is an amazing talent. Plus she sent me her CD all the way from Greece, which is better than a postcard. Thanks Jessica!

Anthony Duce draws and writes and does both exceptionally well. He strives to say a little, but not too much, and somehow he always says it just right. He gives life to the still life and still life to the living.

Ed Pilolla whose recent post "Clothesline" was absolutely brilliant, and I'm not given to gushing.

Pet at Pencil and Box who blogs about things like an amazing yet obscure animated movie based on a story by the late Ted Hughes and because he's well written and pops in on me from time to time. He's from Spain and I like to keep abreast of what's going on over there.

If you aren't already following these five, you're missing out on some worthwhile reading.

Now, for those recommendations: I just finished reading ORYX AND CRAKE" by Margaret Atwood. That novel will make you hate us. Would I recommend it? Well... I read it in just two days. Atwood knows how to grab you by the scruff of your neck, and she doesn’t let go until she’s finished with you. Is it farfetched in its look at the future? I sure hope so. Are there elements of truth already lurking on the horizon? Sure. Enough of them to make you shiver.

On my bed stand now is CUTTING FOR STONE, by Abraham Verghese. I was told by one of my most thorough readers that she thought it the best novel of 2010. She has her own lending library and has never steered me wrong so now I'm steering you. I knew from the first paragraph I would like it. Don't you just love it when that happens?

And, finally, an observation from where I live: It's dark now and the gunshots have receded. It's hunting season, and from dawn to dusk, shots echo through the woods and across the fields. This might strike you as harsh, but it's actually a good thing. The deer are a nuisance, causing numerous car accidents and destroying crops. So far, five have been taken out of the farm, and we're hoping for many more to be harvested. When they start cutting into your income and wrecking your vehicles, it's time for a cull. They have no natural predators as the coyote and cougar are rare and the wolf are gone. Man is their only predator, but fewer and fewer hunting licenses are issued as the younger generation has taken to video games rather than hunting and fishing and outdoor activities. Their interest is gaming indoors, not hunting game in the cold of November.

One more think before I say adieu, one more thing. It's another football Sunday and the NFL is playing patriotic. It seems to be a new theme in sports, hyping the flag and the soldier and the occupation (but not the one in NY). The God Bless Americas, the trumpets, flags, and fly-over formations, Man shed his waste on thee... but something strikes me as false because I can't forget the scene from Thursday playing across America for those who were paying attention. A woman dressed in an overcoat with long hair and a backpack was dragged down the street by police in riot gear. They lost their grip on the backpack and went for the hair. She was dragged away,kicking and screaming and nobody helped. Maybe they were all afraid, unlike the boy who stopped a tank in Tiananmen Square. Dragged through the roadblock, dragged through the cameramen, dragged out of sight. Syria? China? Greece? Some barbaric Third World country? Did you see it? Was it just my imagination?

It's dark and the shots have receded but not the memory.

The Hallway

2011-11-16T06:23:00.000-08:00

Door one is for those with questions about their disability check.
Door two is for those who didn’t get their disability check.
Door three is for those who can’t find a doctor to treat their disability.
Door four is for those who have been denied their disability.
Door five is for those who were Sectioned Eight, no disability.
Door six is for those seeking legal advice.
Door seven is for those whose paperwork never not submitted, go back to door one.
Door eight is for those who got kicked out of the shelter for alcohol abuse, go back to door six.
Door nine is for those suffering hallucinations, go back to door three.
Door ten is for those deemed a danger to themselves by door three.
Door eleven with the red sign above it is for those who exhausted one through ten.

Reader's Reports - An Agent-in-Waiting

2011-11-14T06:38:00.000-08:00

I’ve finished my novel BLACK RIVER. It’s complete at 105,000, a word count I’m comfortable with. The genre is mainstream contemporary with cautionary undertones. (I know, I made that category up.) Now comes the spit and shine, and to help me see the gaps and inconsistencies, I’ve sent it over to Ethan Vaughan, an agent-in-waiting who blogs here.

Ethan interned at a literary agency over the summer and aspires to one day be a literary agent. Right now he's a college student who writes readers reports in his spare time, which is pretty cool. He has posted a sample reader's report which will give you a feel for how agents critique unpublished manuscripts.

He’s looking for manuscripts to read and critique on his blog. If you’re ready for a little exposure and an independent critique, you might want to check out his site, Searching For The Story.

What have I learned this time around? I found that I can write a novel under 140,000 words. With this one I have wiggle room. If something needs to be added, there's space. If something needs to be cut, I would still end up with a novel in the 90,000 to 100,000 word count which to me is a good range.

While this one is out with a couple of readers, I will compose my query letter, hopefully with help from Mindy McGinnis at Writer Writer Pants on Fire, one of my favorite people from Agent Query, the top spot for query assistance, and anyone else I can impose upon. Then I have a couple of short stories with a deadline fast approaching and then.....I concentrate on Will. Oh, I love the dark and desperate, the hurt and conflicted, those characters who love and lust and make mistakes.

Anything For Will

2011-11-11T06:44:00.000-08:00

She longed to feel him inside of her again but was beginning to wonder if she ever would. The memories were fading, like the pictures he sent. His helmet was etched with anti-war dogma, but he did what he was told. His letters filled a drawer but held nothing of what he was told, and he wasn’t sending pictures anymore.

Write a flash fiction piece in 55 words, post it, and then let the G-Man who is Mr. Knowitall know. It's easy, it's fun. It's Friday.

My 55 this week is a passage from a work-in-progress that is working it's way back up to the top of the stack. It's been bothering me. I can see it in the corner of my eye, getting dusty on the filing cabinet. Oh, the injustice! I had to bring Will back up on my screen this morning. I have to look him in the eye and decide what to do with him.

TGIF
Peace out

Unraveled

2011-11-09T04:11:00.000-08:00

If the sky were any prettier it would kill me. My incapacity to process it would overwhelm and cripple. The sun colors the sky best just before it breaks the horizon. It turns each wisp of cloud into a trailing kite. It enhances the tree in the fence row clinging to its last wind-torn leaf. It’s bigger than a barn from afar, this tree, and I don’t even know its name. Bigger than the tool shed and the barn put together. How come I’ve never stood underneath that tree with the birds’ nests unraveling in the wind? I’m too lazy. I haven’t walked through an adjacent field to stand under a tree bigger than a barn and older than the farm. My capacity to feel small is undiminished in the light of day. As the sun travels its low arc across the southern sky, I finish out the day in a multitude of smallish ways.

What's Under Your Sink

2011-11-03T04:30:00.000-07:00

I would like to share a post from Zev, an activist farmer that could enhance your life and your health, maybe even save it. As Zev shows us, everyone can be an activist. If you think you're too small to make a difference, you've never been bitten by a mosquito.

Hey....I just realized this is my 200th post!

Fitting it should be about something so important, something I would climb on the soapbox for.

Am I supposed to have a contest or a cyber cocktail party or something? No, I think I'll save that for when I reach 200 followers or nail an agent.

Like next year for sure!

Should You Have a Fever . . .(Teaser Tuesday)

2011-11-02T05:00:00.000-07:00

This week I've decided to participate in Teaser Tuesday, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading, wherein you open a book you're reading to a random page and post two teaser sentences.

So, here goes....

"My mother was too sleepy to take his temperature, but it's a fact that he had a fever, and that his fever led him to a night in my mother's bed-in her arms.

"My grandmother always claimed she could hear the electric meter counting each kilowatt; as soon as it was dark, she followed my mother through the house, turning off the lights that my mother had turned on."

Anyone know what novel these two sentences are from?

This is not a new release, and I know many of you have read it. I did when I was young and inmature. Something told me it deserved another go and I have not been disappointed. I missed so much the first time, like THE PLAGUE by Albert Camus, which I read as a young adult and didn't understand.

The rules say I must tell you, so without further ado,

the novel is A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, by John Irving, one of my favorite authors.

Click the link above if you want to share a couple of teaser sentences from a book you're reading and can recommend to a host of readers.

Thank you for reading mine!

Guardian Dear

2011-10-26T18:46:00.000-07:00

I’m going to hell.
It’s on page eleven
of the Sunday Visitor
circled in red by my mother.
My mortal sins number in the thousands.
Does God keep a stroke count?
I don’t want to go to hell.
I’ve read Dante’s Inferno.

If I make her breakfast will it erase one?
How about if I put clean sheets on her bed
and flowers in her vase?
None of this matters if I miss mass on Sunday.
It’s on page eleven.

But she likes flowers.
She used to tell me that if I fell asleep in the middle of the rosary,
my guardian angel would finish it for me.
I believed her.
If I die in my sleep
before atonement is complete will my guardian dear
take it on the chin for me?
Mother, will you?
And about all those rosasires I never finished . . .
did they ever count?

Where Did It Go?

2011-10-24T04:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, we pulled the soaker hoses and the tomato cages. I cleaned the greenhouse and mounded dirt around the pepper plants. They need a lot of tender care and we dropped the sides and shut the doors and watered them properly so we will have peppers at Christmas time. Red and green and yellow and orange. Like a Mexican Christmas, but we are here in Michigan, and the night approaches,

and the sun doesn't set where it used to. At the height of day, it is no longer where it should be. It doesn’t touch the front of the house, it doesn’t touch the mums in full dress. No wonder they stretch and stretch and turn leggy, reaching for the sun which slips further and further down the sky. It slips towards Detroit and the Detroit River. It’s falling into Lake Erie and over Ohio. It's falling towards Mexico where they can grow peppers in winter. Falling falling falling like the leaves from the maple and the oak we named after his parents. Strong and resilient, planted to survive and thrive long after we’re gone. Like the oak that was big when my father was small. Planting a tree is an unselfish gesture. It’s one of the best things we can do.

The Storm and the Hired Man

2011-10-20T19:07:00.000-07:00

The wind blew the muck out of the peatlands,
and blackened the sky like Gethsemane.
It billowed around the landmark oak
and advanced up the lane.
Germaine dropped everything and ran for the house.
The cattle lowed as the barn disappeared,
and though she pleaded
with him to stay,
he left to check on the herd.

If it's Friday, it's time for a little flash fiction, and if you can do it in 55 words, tell the G-Man of Friday Flash 55 fame.

Enjoy the weekend, whenever it starts.
Peace out.

The Occupation

2011-10-19T05:32:00.000-07:00

In the fifth week of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the wealthy are grumbling and pushing back. The grumbling started in Washington where the House has its own millionaires club. Now some of the wealthy individuals running for president are calling the protestors unpatriotic, un-American and nothing but a mob. In the Civics class that is no longer taught in high school, we were told just the opposite: that not only was protest and involvment patriotic, but that it was a necessity for a democracy.

Last week, someone posted a sign in the window of the Chicago Board of Trade where the street protestors could see it saying, "We Are The One Percent".

I wonder if it's still there. The protestors are.

Cock And Hen

2011-10-16T19:15:00.000-07:00

The chickens murmur and coo while I fill their watering cans.
They cluck appreciation for hand-tossed grain and dart to and fro on spindly legs.
The ebony rooster with a red comb fluffs his feathers against the October sky.
He cocks his head and eyes my approach, runs and hides in the tall grass, like a fledgling.
He’s shy, this flamboyant rooster with the gallant tail feathers.
When he doesn’t think we see, he stands quietly midst his flock, head high.
They peck at his feet and pay homage to his plume.

One hen from another flock,
new to the coop and confused,
escaped under the poultry fence
and nested under the Russian sage beside the house.
I find eggs under the purple foliage.
She likes it there.

Pay It Forward

2011-10-13T05:51:00.000-07:00

I'd like to give a thumbs-up this morning to a progressive who finally knows how to fight back hard against the ridiculous "class warfare" charges from the GOP. In one fell swoop, Elizabeth Warren, candidate for the US Senate from Massachusetts, delivered a powerful knock-out blow against this GOP nonsense.

"I hear all this, you know, 'Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,'" Warren said. "No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own -- nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory -- and hire someone to protect against this -- because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless -- keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

I've been in third world countries where armed guards stand outside banks and soldiers with machine guns guard the teller windows, because there is no viable police force funded by public dollars. The government is the police force and the people are so poor, the fear is that one of them might resort to robbing an unguarded teller. I've flown into these places with anticipation only to be met at the airport by men in boots with barrels pointed up and out. At me. That, for me, exemplifies the difference between a country that feeds on the poor and one that pays it forward.

If all politicians elected to serve the common good were more widely traveled, better read, and versed in history, maybe they wouldn't be so eager to gut the public sector.

If you were given a chance to vote for an Elizabeth Warren, would you? I don't want to live in a third world country. In a third world country, 99pct of the people are crackerjack poor and 1pct are wealthy. What are my chances of falling into the lucky 1? What about you?

Tell Me This

2011-10-03T05:28:00.000-07:00

Suzanne Casamento of the clever Question of the Day Blog
recently asked:
"What do you love about where you live?"

This set me to thinking, as her questions often do. I started blogging in the fall, and I believe there's a reason for that. It's the season of contemplation, of hunkering down and storing up. For the writer, it's the season of the run-on sentence and the convoluted paragraph and the crowded journal page, writing that leads to old memories and new ideas, new poems and new novels. Fall is the season of the writer. But what else do I love about fall in Michigan?

Hunting season, fried cakes, and pheasants,
the badgering of the crows
and the flocking of the starlings.
Crisp mornings laden with dew
after the night of the falling-leaf moon.
Apples on the ground and cider in the fridge,
pie in the oven and candles lit.
Drafty doors and tinkling chimes,
alone in the house
alone on the road
gravel roads and empty roads
Robust people in outdoor gear.
A basket of seed garlic,
planting garlic.
A wheelbarrow of beets,
eating beets-
pickled beets, roasted beets, beets with feta, beets with butter.
Beets.
The gunmetal sky, the changing sky,
a violet cupcake cumulus sky.
Moving water and great big lakes
the ice-encrusted dangerous lake.
Shanties, pasties, and pantries,
mums and wooly worms and fetching dogs.
Gathering eggs and harvesting squash-
curing squash and storing squash,
eating roasted golden squash.
Stately trees and scrappy foliage
turning color, surprising color-
modest yellow and outrageous orange,
stoic russet and flat-out red.
The harvest moon and the harvester,
billowing dust and jumping grasshoppers,
hopper wagons filled with grain,
golden grain and drying grain.
Men at work with gnarled knuckles and practical pants.
Men in hats who love to work.
Women in boots who live to work.

This is my Michigan in October.
This is where I live.

Where do you live?

He Lost A Foot

2011-09-23T05:23:00.000-07:00

and then a hand for a loaf of bread for another man’s crime.
He’ll hang by the neck; he’ll cook in a chair,
he’ll take the needle from an unsteady hand.
We’ll ogle and cheer the final throes,
proclaim our dominion and safe secure shores,
then tape shut his eyes and lock all our doors.

If you have a flash for Friday you can tell in 55 words, post it and then tell the G-Man where it is.

Shock-Resistant Shit Detector

2011-09-16T04:49:00.000-07:00

Do you engage your S.R.S.T. when you sit down to read a novel? Do you slip it into high gear when you're writing one? Are you empathetic and compulsive and fascinated by words?

This much I know: nothing else gets done when I'm caught up in the make-believe world of my novel. The greenhouse is a mess. There's a knee-high thistle in my hosta bed, cobwebs on the porch, cukes and tomatoes going to hell on the vine, garlic that needs to be sorted and stored in a cool dark place. These things bug me but here I sit with novel #2 spread out around me with pencil edits and crossed-out chapter breaks, unable to care about anything as much as I do it.

All I can think about is Boyd and his dangerous attraction to the migrant worker's daughter and why would he hide a gun there and a body here? What was he thinking? And why doesn't the ground stay frozen like it used to and the ice thicken on the lake enough to walk out safely on? Why do the creeps always have the upper hand? Why does his co-progatonist cut her hair to change her appearance and run away instead of standing up for herself and for him? Why do I care more about this than the weeds in my own life? Is this what John Gardner, teacher and writer, means by creating a vivid and continuous dream? Our own lives become a shambles as the dream on the page takes shape? Or is this the trance our readers are supposed to fall into, not us?

There are so many solutions to the problems our characters get into. As Gardner says, "Problems in novels are unlike problems in algebra which have one solution." Likewise, there's only one thistle to be pulled, and a set number of garlic to store, and one greenhouse to tend to, and I can knock the cobweb down with a broom. These things are easy and have one solution. A novel has any number of solutions, but, alas, I fear only one will be good enough. Only one will be brilliant.

A writer must have what Hemingway called the "built-in shock-resistant shit detector." In concert with the writer’s eye, (the ability to see how things really are and to write it down without falsification) and the appetite for compulsive revision—killing your darlings with a heightened intuition for the silly and the abstract—is the writer’s “special intelligence”.

We have to keep at it with daemonic compulsiveness until we can say, "It's as good as I can make it." And that will be good enough. Trust your unconscious. As Gardner says, "The unconscious is smart."

The pages are piled around me, numbered and full. The hum of the refrigerator is the only sound, and the sun colors the eastern sky like autumn sedum. I imagine these literary sages standing guard, daring me to try.

If I Could Be Anyone...

2011-09-14T02:57:00.000-07:00

It's launch day for Talli Rolland's WATCHING WILLOW WATTS. To help celebrate the event, Talli's hosting a blog party and asking the question, "If you could be anyone, who would it be?" Go here for the lowdown, prizes and more.

And about that question? I would be my great, great, great grandmother who busted her husband and brother-in-law out of prison in Alsace-Lorraine after the collapse of Napoleon's army, squirreled them away in a horse-drawn cart under a load of hay and helped them stowaway on a ship bound for America. And here I am today.

Congratulations Talli. Here's the link to Amazon

MONARCH

2011-09-12T06:47:00.000-07:00

I signed up to receive an Advance Reading Copy of Michelle Davidson Argyle’s new novel, MONARCH. I’m part of her blog tour and today’s my day.

MONARCH entertains diverse issues, from the plight of the Monarch butterfly to the underground network at the CIA (protagonist Nick's home away from home) and their global reach in the so-called War on Drugs. What, you ask, could these two things possibly have in common?

The migration struggles of the monarch and the natural world are central to the theme, tied to the illegal logging activities in Mexico. That, to me, was interesting, and I would have liked it explored in more detail. The connection was murky, but we're left with a feeling of hope. Whether realistic or not, that is up to the reader to determine.

From the opening scene, there's no shortage of murder and mayhem. The main villain is portrayed as the drug lord, Ferreira, but he is faceless—we never actually meet him. Having a faceless antagonist makes him less real and not a serious threat. The real antagonist, in my opinion, is Nick’s adversary, Kyle, and while he is a dispicable guy (an antagonist you love to hate), his character seems forced and contradictory.

There is a sharp focus on relationships in MONARCH, with conflicting results. Some were of no concern to me, while others of more interest weren't fully developed. For instance, I just began to take an interest in Nick's relationship with Lilian (the keeper of the Monarch Inn and romantic interest from his past) when I was suddenly whisked off to another hemisphere to explore his ambiguous relationship with the drug lord's wife, Catarina.

There was a lot of juxtapositioning of characters, back story, and location: from San Diego to West Virginia to Brazil, but after instilling some serious doubts in the reader, the author secured all loose ends in a satisfying way.

I especially like the cover, which was developed from Michelle’s own idea.

MONARCH is due out September 15th from Rhemalda Publishing.

Michelle's website is here, where you can find a list of upcoming dates for readings and signings.

She also blogs at The Innocent Flower and coauthors The Literary Lab with Scott G. F. Bailey and Davin Malasarn where she helps edit and publish "The Literary Lab Presents..." series of anthologies, an annual nonprofit publication that donates all proceeds to charity. Their most recent publication was NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND ANTHOLOGY, a collection of stories and poems from 24 different writers, and I can attest to Michelle’s tireless work and keen insight into the world of editing.

This is the first time I've received an ARC and it was exciting to be part of the process. Michelle's next novel, THE BREAKAWAY, comes out next year.

Congratulations, Michelle!

Who's Visiting You?

2011-09-01T06:07:00.000-07:00

I recently added a flag counter to my blog and have been amazed at the number of countries represented. I don't know how accurate it is, but I wish I would have done it sooner. If you're just starting a blog, I would recommend adding one. It's easy and fun to see where your readers are coming from. It makes the world seem intimate and small, which in the grand scheme of things, I guess it is.

It's a very foggy morning in the thumb of Michigan, a sure harbinger of fall, but summer temperatures are still with us for the Labor Day weekend. I hope to have time to visit "our" lake. Lake Huron is beautiful still, at least on the surface.

There are disturbing reports of pollution from coal-burning power plants and invasive species lurking in the depths and I hope that the people in charge of our environmental protection agencies know what they're doing.

I say "our" because the lakes are public as are the shorelines and beaches. The public is entitled to access up to the high water mark (an ambiguous boundry, I admit) but private landowners like to discourage the public from enjoying the access they are entitled to. They think of the lake in front of their property as theirs. The lakes belong to all of us and I encourage people who live here or are visiting here to feel free to walk the shoreline. Find an access point and walk.

To not spend time on or beside these basins of beauty is a sacrilege. Fish, skip stones, swim, hunt for shells and driftwood and collect pebbles, capture the beauty on your camera or canvas. All any of us would ask when you visit is that you leave nothing behind to show you were here....except something like this:

Take A Word And Plunge It Deep

2011-08-23T12:21:00.000-07:00

Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.
- John Morley

The space station flew over the thumb of Michigan
at 9:25pm on August 16, 2011.
I saw it.
And they saw me.
Out of the southwest it hurtled across the sky on a diagonal path to the north,
heading for Lake Huron, the Georgian Bay, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence
like a baseball thrown from the hand of God.
Firefly, firefly, fire fly for me
Bigger than a plane but smaller than Jupiter’s smallest moon,
brighter than a star but dimmer than the camera that flashed too soon,
(we try to capture moments like fireflies in a jar)
it was gone in minutes. If you paused to draw a drink of water,
you would have missed it.

Gone, but I remember. I write it down so I will always remember.
When I am old and feeble and resentful
of modern music, youthful exuberance, and everything new, I will remember.
When all I can talk about is what it was like when I was young,
I will remember the day I saw the space station
flung across the sky, like a child’s top with lights and chimes.
Like a present under the Christmas tree, mysterious and delightful.
I will remember if I write it down.

Write like you’re dying
and live like you’re new to the world with much to learn.
Curious as a child at a peephole, I wish to be.
Firefly fly for me. Sit at my side and flare for me.

If in the dark, I can better see, then I will sit up all night to decipher the day just passed.
Write about your failures “they” say, for from them you can learn much.
If you have writer’s block, write about your failures. You might find you can’t stop.
You’ll be like Jack Kerouac with a manual typewriter and a carriage return,
reams and reams of paper on a roll that spews out failures across the floor
and out the door like the meatball that rolled off the table when somebody sneezed.

The loneliness and ungodliness of the day past
with the anticipated tomorrow on the threshold, and, well, shit…
is unholy ungodly? Unholiness. That’s the word I wanted, Mr. Word.
What does Word know as he tries to tell me what is a word and what is not a word?
He replaces my words without my say so.
But I love Word. I love words words words wordswordswordswords.
See how words become swords? We wield our swords to make a point.
We spar and pivot through the day
and into the night as we search for the perfect word to end a story on.
A word to send on. To enter on. To return the carriage and close the cover on.

Contests

2011-08-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

I'd like to give a shout-out to a couple of contests that have come to my attention. The Literary Lab is hosting their third annual contest and anthology. You have until the end of the year to submit your short story. Click the button for details.

Lydia Kang whose blog is that of the famous Medical Mondays is having a contest to celebrate 900 followers.

Check it out. You only have until the end of the month. If you like books, you'll love her giveaway.

Now it's time to preserve a little food for winter: dill pickles, bread and butter pickles, green beans and pattypans, time to fill the pantry and then admire the clean shiny jars packed and sealed. Food for writing in the dead of winter....dill pickles for our bloody marys. Sustenance for entering some of those winter contests.

If you have a contest currently running, let me know and I'll add it to this post.

One Lonely Sparrow

2011-08-16T06:41:00.000-07:00

The sky darkened to the south across Mill Creek and the mucklands and the wind stirred the treetops with the change in the weather. Lightning forked across the sky from Lake Huron to Van Dyke. The cattle huddled under a tree for shelter. What do they know? One lonely sparrow fought the updraft above the creek and twirled across the sky, tossed and turned like a runaway kite. The rains came, gentle gentle, in contradiction to the raging heavens. This is my world. This is Boyd's world (Black River, novel in progress).

It has remained "in progress" for the summer as I am pulled into the garden: weeding, planting, and transplanting, trucking fresh produce to market, canning and harvesting and caring for the elders, and the day job hangs around my neck like an anvil. It's enough to make one wish for winter. I wish for winter and long nights at the keyboard, honing a story, nailing a query, finding an agent to be my friend, taking the anvil off from around my neck.

But then there's the pond...

Secluded and deep and, yes, full of bass and catfish and blue gill for the lone family angler. After a hot day in the garden, I like to go back and strip on the beach and jump in. There's a raft floating in the middle, the perfect spot to stop and catch your breath. I climb the ladder and stretch out on the weathered planks to admire the cloud formations. Hawks float overhead and then a vulture dares to circle to see if I'm dead.

I'm not, so beat it.

Back in the water, something nibbles my side, and I scream like the little girl the pond brings out in me. I have a definite hickey in the middle of my ribs. I was probably kissed by a blue gill. There are worse things in life.

The Cedar Swamp and The Car Wreck

2011-07-31T05:48:00.000-07:00

"With rebellion, awareness is born." ~ Albert Camus

Driving down a gravel road with the windows open, dust billows out behind me like a thunderstorm. The road is open and straight and the trees in the fencerows form a tunnel to drive through. Nobody is in front of me, the way I like it, and nobody is behind me to make me nervous. I hold tight to the raised center, like a gymnast on the highbar. Gravel sprays out behind me. I like to drive fast, but I take my foot off the gas because there's something I want to see.

I see you, America. You are musical with wild lilies in your ditches and flocks of sparrows in your tangled apple trees. You are out of tune, America, with your dilapidated farm houses, falling-down barns, and burned-out landscapes, the product of ruinous farm policy inflicted upon you.

With the windows open, I can see into the ditch and beyond, and with the wind rushing through the car, I am struck by a queer sense of nostalgia for these fading rural areas.

I turn down a road I've never had occasion to go down before and pass a group of mobile homes set up for migrant workers who labor in the fields with their long-sleeved shirts and baggy trousers and big hats.
.

A sign by the road says, "Coon Hunters Association",

and I wonder at the incongruity.

Down further, I pass another sign that strikes me as small. Sign, sign, everywhere a sign. . . Here in white, rural, flag-flying America, militia signs dot the landscape promoting freedom to do whatever one wants, but theirs is an insular rebellion. These self-proclaimed rebels are afraid to venture outside their township, their state, their country. They abhor migrants though they would not do the work they do. Packing heat, they're afraid of strangers, afraid of their own shadows that stretch out tall in winter and shrink to proper size in the heat of summer. Proper small, their America.

I put small in my rearview mirror and drive on, looking for the cedar swamps of my ancestors and an unfamiliar road. I am looking for the scene of a story.

When America was eighty years younger with untraveled areas, there was a boy who worked in the cedar swamp, cutting timber with his father. One day he was riding to the swamp in the back of a 1935 Chevy with a group of other lean, sharp-faced boys. They barreled down the gravel road, dust flying. It was a dry, hot summer and even the grasshoppers stirred up puffs of dust as they escaped into the ditch.

The boys got behind a pickup truck and were swallowed by dust. They couldn't see a thing, but the truck was going slower than they wanted to go, and they were young and in a hurry, and the driver took a chance. On a dare? With encouragement from the back seat? The details are fuzzy. We’ll never know. But this much we do—he pulled over on the left to get around the truck and ran head-on into the invisible oncoming vehicle. The collision crushed their steel bumper, smashed the hood, and broke the windshield. It killed the driver.

The boys in the back were struck silent and shaken. One of them is still alive to tell the tale, with a trace of nostalgia for that hot summer day and the boy that could swing an ax, and the cedar swamp that is no longer there, and the friend he'd forgotten about.

When you sit down with someone born on the cusp of the Roaring Twenties, you never know what you're going to learn, what forgotten story you might hear. Sometimes they surprise themselves with all that they know . . . with all that they’ve forgotten.

My dad has forgotten more than I'll ever know, and it’s funny how he has repeated so many stories over and over as we roll our eyes, but this one made us sit up in astonishment. This one he had never told before.

Today, I want to be irresponsible and rebel against the expectations that others have of me. I want to drive down a country road with the windows open, or jump a train, or learn to sail. I want to make a story.

The Artist and The Writer

2011-07-25T12:10:00.000-07:00

I recently collaborated with artist, Tony Duce, and he provided the image below for one of my poems, Still Life. I’ve long wanted to collaborate with an artist like this and it was a very exciting, informative process. Tony posts his drawings and paintings on his blog, Duce: Drawings, Paintings, Words, writing words to go with his images to give them a story. He has created images for other poets in the past, and I felt fortunate that he consented to work with me on this one. I love how he connected to my poem. I particularly like the way he drew the nude with her back to us while facing us in the self portrait. Hands played a large part in the poem and I love the way he drew them in the background.

STILL LIFE

in the chipped china plate
you won’t throw away,
in arms that drape shoulders
graceful as the legs on the bistro chairs
enclosed in a frame.
The ruffled tutu of the fuchsia
falling off to ground
is frozen by the chance
of a backward glance.
The sun sets a twenty-second fire
to the ridge across the valley,
fleeting as the shrug of your shoulders
to have missed it.
The self-portrait I couldn’t finish
stands in the back of the closet
behind sketch pads full of hands.

Visit Tony for more information on the painting itself and to view some of his other amazing work. I hope to collaborate with him again in the future. As I told him, seeing my poem come to life under his hand makes me want to concentrate again on poetry and take a hiatus from the angst of novel-writing.

So what do you think? Have any of you done something like this before?

Generation Hot

2011-07-14T06:08:00.000-07:00

This blog is primarily about writing, but as you may know, I like to veer off the beaten path into the sustainable, organic movement, and plug progressive policies that offer hope for the future of the planet. On this note, I'm proud to say that our family farm is going solar. Ground-mounted solar panels are being installed this summer. This is what the frame currently looks like.

Thanks to the help of government backing, the glass panels will soon be in place and we'll start collecting energy from the sun, doing our part to get the planet back to 350, the most important number in the world. Scientists measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in parts-per-million. They now say that 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere is the safe upper limit for humanity. This number is rising by about 2 parts per million every year. We're currently at 391.

Is it already too late for us?

Mosquitoes are on the rise along with sea levels. Drought conditions are wide-spread, and insect infestations are mounting. We have new, strange bugs in our garden and a squash beetle infestation unlike any we've ever seen this far north.

From dust storms blanketing Arizona (as shown in this video on C.M. Jacksons' blog, states-of-mine: "You don't need a weatherman to know...") to our own weird weather here in the midwest, it's obvious that something is wrong.

We can get back to 350 if we act before we reach an irreversible number, but we need to stop taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the air.

We need more of this....

And less of this.....

We should all get 350 T-shirts before Sept. 24th, the Moving Planet Forward, Global Rally Day. I'm picking out my color today. Maybe they'll add "Writers For The Earth" on the back. After all, writers are the most vibrant, alert, and fun people to be around. We nourish each other, as Joyce Johnson states in her memoir "Minor Charactors", her look back at the Beat Generation and her not-so-minor part in Jack Kerouac's life, Artists are nourished by each other more than by fame or by the public, I've always thought. I agree, and as we nourish each other, maybe we can pass the word and nourish this endangered planet at the same time.

OK....I'm stepping off my soapbox and into the garden. Happy day to you all.

CHEATED

2011-06-26T06:13:00.000-07:00

"You must live like a bourgeois and save all your violence for your art."
-Gustave Flaubert

Ever since reading that quote in this month's The Nation, I've wondered...is it possible to fulfill Flaubert's directive in the society we live in? With the burden to “earn a living” that is hammered into us from an early age, shackling us in adulthood? The hammer and sickle that squishes the creative spirit like a bug against a windshield? If I live like a capitalist, how will I have the time and energy to write? If I don't, how will I live at all?

In "The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter",

Carson McCullers shows us what mundane work does to creativity. Fifteen-year old Mick, a blossoming musician and idealist, has to drop out of school and go to work at Woolworth's to help support her family in the depressed south for ten dollars a week. Ten dollars will buy fifteen fried chickens or five pairs of shoes. She thinks about a piano but does not mention that aloud. She does not want to work in a ten-cent store but when they all start to think about what that ten dollars could buy, she is trapped into it. Her description of losing her energy and ambition to write music is a heartbreaking account of how hard it was then (pre WWII) and harder now to spend your life creating art without being independently wealthy.

In McCullers' words:

Now no music was in her mind. Sometimes a quick little tune would come and go. It was like the store took all her energy and time. Woolworth's wasn't the same as school. When she used to come home from school she felt good and was ready to start working on the music. But now she was always tired. A song she had started in her private notebook two months before was still not finished. She did not know how to stay in the inside room. It was like the inside room was locked somewhere away from her. She was mad all the time, only there was nothing to be mad at. It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. Just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.

How many feel like that at the end of the day? After years of nose-to-the-grindstone, the inside room—a metaphor McCullers uses to describe our inner selves where creativity begins—is forever lost and life is sleeping, eating, and working. There is no inside room where thoughts are developed, stories thrive, music is written, and great paintings are created to tell a tale, enriching our lives in the process.

Can you find your inside room? Can you stay there? I think it possible to live comfortably (which is maybe all that Flaubert meant) while staying outside the retail rat-race, far far from the shopping hordes and the rampant consumerism of modern society. Whistle, sing, write, or draw with passion, whatever it is that lifts your spirits and makes you feel alive, but live simply, like a frugal bourgeois. Save your violence for your art, and guard your inside room.

Of Food And The Human Spirit

2011-06-12T19:05:00.000-07:00

Eavesdropping in the grocery store, like any good, self-respecting writer, I overheard these conversations in the checkout line....

"My mommy and daddy got married."
They did?"
"Yup. On Wednesday."

"I can buy some food now and know it won't get eat."
"Oh?"
"Yeah, I was buying all the food and those people were eating it all. Now they're gone, so I'll have some food."
"Oh."

"The milk makes my hand cold. I had to set it down."
"Good. You don't want warm milk."

I was kinda glad to escape that store, but I still see that little girl with her proud proclamation, and the man with the groceries he was finally going to get to eat, and the old woman with the half gallon of milk and knarled hands.

Then I caught a report on the radio about planting potatoes in Peru. Because of the warming trend over the last twenty years, farmers have had to move their potatoes up the mountain to plant at higher and higher elevations for the cooler temperature. But the mountain only goes so high. In some areas, they are already planting on top of the mountain.

I've been meaning to share this story, so now I will. There was an old man who walked his dog along the road every day. Morning, afternoon, evening, regardless of the weather, he was out there. My sister and I always passed him when we drove to work at different times, and he always threw up an arm, like he knew you. He waved at everyone. Then one day he wasn't there. Several days passed, and no one saw him. My sister worried about him. She thought his family put him in a home. I said nonsense. She worried about the dog. I thought he might come back, but he never did. Every time I drive that stretch of road I think about him.

And further back inside my brain: When someone uses a cane or a walker, you can hear them coming. Thump. Thump. There’s an undertone of foreboding in that noise. You want it to stop. You want it to continue. You wonder when it will all come crashing down around you. One thing that has recently become clear to me is how much easier it is to give assistance than to receive it.

That's it. My blog has been quiet but I've been busy getting the garden in (everything is late) and editing Black River, my new novel. I have all these thoughts racing around in my head and no time to delve into them. If I go much further back in my brain I might discover something really scary.

The boy with the dandelion

2011-05-28T03:50:00.000-07:00

has dark skin and watchful eyes. An immigrant boy. A migrant. We are all of us the one and conflicted over the other. He picks dandelions and twines them into a braid. His father digs carrots and picks lettuce. His arms are brown and muscled and ready for work. The morning is misty and overcast, and the fields are muddy and wet, but the boy is barefoot and learning our ways.

Black River

2011-05-15T06:35:00.000-07:00

The rain falls and water creeps up the back of the farm. A field of rolling green spelt has turned into a lake. It changes the view at the horizon. It shouldn't be there.

Water was rushing over the road when we returned from our farmer's market yesterday. We barreled through with the farm truck and water splashed over the side mirrors. I wouldn't have risked it in a car. Mill Creek has left it's banks. It spreads and spreads trying to find the path of least resistance.

This all makes me think of my novel, Black River. I've finished it and now I have to begin the irksome task of composing the query, a writer's least favorite thing to do. It's a tidy manuscript at 105,000 words. Short for me.

We have problems but I'm glad I don't have to deal with the ones my protagonist farm boy has to confront.

The rains fall as the ice caps melt.

Do Your Fingerprints Tell a Story?

2011-05-11T05:33:00.000-07:00

We have new ID's at work with a chip in them. An electronic reader can know everything about you off that chip. They must be worn in lead-lined protective sleeves, lest random readers on the street capture the essence of you, like the sun burrowing through your clothes and the wind lifting a skirt. Do you think this is science fiction? Some new genre I'm delving into?

They took our fingerprints for this new ID, prints of all four digits on each hand and then separate ones of our thumbs and then the lone digit finger as identifier. They had trouble getting my prints. I have evidently worked the print right off the pad of my fingers. Did you know such a thing was possible? It is.

Notice I have no nails as well as no fingerprints.

The technician said they have trouble sometimes getting prints from masons and concrete workers and bricklayers. Add to the list gardeners and farmers. How about writers? All this tap tap tapping.

I had to wash my hands and apply corn huskers lotion. Twice. She was about to give up but finally got a set she thought would be "acceptable" and sent it off.

What if she hadn't been able to get fingerprints from me? Would I be allowed to move incognito through this new world obsessed with identity? Having gone through the lengthy process, do I feel more secure? Safe in my job, my identity, my world? This much I know: I felt somewhat special with my unreadable fingerpads and disappointed when she was finally able to "read" me.

How about you? Have you worked the fingerprint off the pad of your fingers? If so, how would you feel about that?

Mother - from playground to wheelchair

2011-05-06T05:20:00.000-07:00

An Epistle on Turning Fifty

First you lose the impatience of youth,
linger over emerging bulbs
and let the phone ring.

Mirror mirror on the wall,
from the first aching step out of bed
to grinding the next day’s coffee,
I am my mother after all.

I rub the bump I’ve developed in my palm
and gauge the knob on my wrist.

Not that this is me, mind you, but my mum is home from the hospital (yay!) and the infection she picked up there is gone from her broken leg, and I felt like sharing this poem with you. She is navigating her own home with a walker, and I take each aching step with her.

Life, a circle. From the playground to the dance floor to the yoga class to the acquiescence of a cane to the necessity of a walker to the resignation of a wheelchair, but back to the walker now! How far can we go?

Happy Mother's Day weekend to all of you who balance your lives like flamingoes on one leg, make time for creative endeavors, and carry the world on your backs.

THIS, NOT THAT, A Rant For The Earth

2011-04-22T01:26:00.000-07:00

Today is Earth Day. Plant a tree. Challenge a climate crank (those who think the Earth is flat and the ice caps aren't melting). Reduce, Reuse, Recyle. I invite you to visit my friend, Tricia O'Brien at Talespinning who has a way with photographs and a special post for Earth Day.

There are so many small things we can each do that add up to a global hug for Mother Earth. For instance, drink tap water or filtered water. The next time you reach for a bottle of water, consider the economy of drinking water from a glass that won't go into a landfill or require energy to be recyled.

I especially encourage people to boycott Nestle since they're drawing water out of the Great Lakes Aquifer to fill their plastic bottles which they then sell outside the watershed in defiance of the law of the region. It's more profitable than candy bars, but I don't know how they keeping winning a stay in the courts. The idea that bottled water is safer than tap water is one of the biggest health hoaxes in this country. (Unless, of course, your ground water is polluted by a neighboring mining operation or industrial enterprise.) There are more safeguards on tap water than bottled water, plus it's more economical and Earth friendly.

Following Tricia's example, I'd like to give you this:

A field of organic beans on our farm.

NOT THAT

A diseased field of Round-Up Ready beans.

Round-Up is poisoning the Earth and changing the molecular structure of our soil and must be banned.

Rise up for Earth Day. Make a stink!

Daffodils and Poetry and the Roughriders of the House

2011-04-10T07:10:00.000-07:00

April is poetry mouth.
I hurt, therefore I am.
My local library has signs posted for the high school poetry contest.
That made me feel good, that they're still open, still a haven for thought and knowledge,
still talking about poetry.

My thoughts are clouded this morning by my mother's for-profit hospital bed,
by the call button that isn't answered.
I think of the nurses who rush about, harried and anxious with impossible patient loads,
like the 30-student classroom my sister faces daily in her underfunded public school.
I pace the hall for an aide, for someone,
my mother needs to urinate
she needs her pain pill
she needs a hospital that isn't a for-profit
but most of our community hospitals are.

If you're a Republican Roughrider, you would put yourself
into a private hospital with a healthier ratio of patients to nurses.
With your House of Representatives health insurance,
you proudly state that America has the best health care system in the world.
Why would we want to change it?
You denigrate your president
and lead the charge against his efforts to change it.
You are a patriot and a roughrider.
You make disparaging remarks about
"Obama Care" as though it were an abscess on American's nose,
rather than an Affordable Health Care Plan for all Americans.
You will work to defund it and privatize Medicare and Medicaid.
You will cut EPA, NPR, PBS, DNR, public education and libraries
while keeping the Pentagon intact.
All this while cutting taxes for the elite.
A rich man will always care more about his money than his country.

Your children go to private schools and you have your own library.
You live in a gated enclave with trees to shield you from view.
You don't want to see and you don't want to be seen.
You call yourself a patriot.
You will work to rid the country of the health care plan
that forces insurance companies to pay for
preventive care without a co-pay or deductible,
lowering their margin of profit.
The smart Republican Roughriders coined a new name for it
to strike fear of rationing into the heart,
as though rationing weren’t already the law of the land.

My mother loves flowers.
The daffodils of spring have always been her favorite.
They have braved the cold on the south side of the house
and are about to open.
When they do, I will cut her a bouquet
and set them where she can see them.
She likes the Detroit Tigers but can’t watch them
because the hospital doesn’t carry that station.
Her television stays off. My mother is too smart for Judge Judy.
We took her in a transistor radio but it wouldn’t pick up the game.
We tell her about the games and we take in the sports section.
But her heart isn’t in it.

FOR WANT OF A TITLE

2011-04-02T07:25:00.000-07:00

I have trouble with titles. If I can write a novel, why can't I compose a clever title? Sometimes I can't even think of a title for a post. But March is behind us, and I got through April Fool's Day without being made one, as far as I know.

Allow me one more toot of the horn. Author and fellow blogger, Judy Croome posted a lovely review of NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND on Amazon and Goodreads. Her review gives you a brief snapshot of what's under the cover. Speaking of, we were all enticed by the front cover, I, so much, it took me a week to notice the back. Make sure you check out the back cover. No, I don't have an image of that to share, but it's sheer genius from the folks at the Literary Lab.

From the flip side.....I don't know a damn thing about my illness. I am not even sure what it is that hurts....

Michelle from the L.L. recently wrote an interesting post titled Where Have All The Bloggers Gone? Maybe we're just all bogged down. I don't know how some of you find the time to be as prolific as you are. And of course, the more you comment on others, the more comments you will receive, but keep in mind for every comment you receive, ten or more have visited, read, absorbed and moved on. I myself read a lot more than I comment. Sorry. I just don't have the time. The writing comes first.

I write before the sun comes up, make coffee, feel guilty, and write some more. I move my laptop to the couch to escape the blinding rays coming through the kitchen window. I drink coffee and read what I've written and pencil edit and drink more coffee. I feel guilty. I look at my blog roll, dream of agents and editors and what it would be to have a deadline (which I would never fail to meet, I might add). Lord, give me deadlines and a contract and a book of my own. Give me give me give me give me. Selfish little writer. Self-centered, obsessed little writer.

Just don't ask me how that novel is coming. Don't ask me what the current one is about. Oh, the questions people ask us….. Are you still writing that novel????? But what do you really do? Elspeth Antonelli at The Blood-Red Pencil says, “the best answer I’ve ever given to this question is, I kill people."

OK. It's true. I kill them and I bury them in the compost pile, but you can't talk about a work in progress. It would jinx it. The work would dissipate like chaff on a breeze. Talking about it contaminates it, like plutonium in the jet stream from failed nuclear power plants. Radioactivity in the milk and in the vegetables? Oh Lord, save us from ourselves. Man is the beast, as Deon Meyer poignantly shows us in his novel (my current read), BLOOD SAFARI, an adventurous journey through South Africa.

Money controls everything. People are not truly capable of conservation though they make all the right noises. It's just not in our nature. Whether we're talking about pumping oil or chopping down trees for firewood, the environment will be the loser. Nothing can stand in the path of man.

We do what we can. We plant crops and grow vegetables without chemicals and raise happy chickens that can scratch in the dirt and cattle that are free to graze under the open sky, but we can't control what's in the air that we breathe and in the water that comes from the well. No farm is an island, no city dweller alone in their condo, no country in control of their borders. The Earth is a circle of one. What happened in Japan happened to you and it happened to me.

It'll bog you down, if you let it, and there is no title for that.

Fifty Quintessential British Novels And Other Friday Things

2011-03-18T06:12:00.000-07:00

Accredited Online Colleges has published their list of Fifty Quintessential British Novels.

It's an interesting collection, ranging from John Cleland's Fanny Hill (or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure), and I much prefer the subtitle, to Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I know many of you are fans of his. I found some surprising titles in their list and a few to add to my Must-Reads. This is also a great site to research if you are considering taking online college courses.

While we are on the subject of books, I'd like to plug what I'm currently reading, SOUND OF THE CROW, by Layne Maheu.

If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.

Told from a crow's point of view, this is a wildly imaginative journey across the land of the beastman, Noah, as he madly chops down the giants that the crows live in. I've just gotten to the Deluge and I wouldn't have believed that a novel about a bunch of raucaus crows could keep me in thrall. I think we all share an interest in the ancient world, and I'm finding it immensely fascinating, viewing the unsettled state of things through the unblinking eye of the crow. What must they think of us now, I wonder.

Thank Goodness It's Friday! Ya'll have a great weekend. I'm off to Columbus, Ohio to see my daughter graduate from The Ohio State University with a degree in English. Yay!! While there, I will raid her bookcase, which is always chock full of delicious college reading in paperback form. I'm jacked up on coffee and my fingers are tingling at the thought.

Until we meet again my online friends, I wish you all well in your creative endeavors.

From Bad To Worse

2011-03-17T04:37:00.000-07:00

With the news out of Japan going from bad to worse, I'm thankful to see the sun rising this morning. I'm thankful for my cup of coffee and the electricity with which to brew it.

It seems no one is really in charge anymore as they frantically dump water from helicopters, of which four out of five completely miss the target. Now the U.S. government is offering the use of water cannons but five days and precious time has been lost and still a private company with a reputation for deception is in charge of the reactors. This reminds me of the oil spill last year in the Gulf of Mexico. Over and over again, around the world, we let the weasal guard the henhouse. It doesn't lend itself to good results here on the farm, and it doesn't lead to good results in the energy industry or in the world at large.

If there is a meltdown at this nuclear facility, scientists say a third of Japan could end up as a dead zone. I've never been there but I've heard it is a beautiful country. What does this mean for the rest of us? I fear for the future with weasels in charge. I fear for the earth. I wish somebody in charge was looking out for the common good.

SOLDIER

2011-03-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

They come home to cameras and flags,
balloons and poster boards.
They come home to old soldiers
in receiving lines with flags raised—
Hip Hip Hooray
old soldiers who form a gauntlet civilians hesitate to walk.
Like the mounds of dirt we skirt in a cemetery
(even after the soil settles),
we are not worthy to walk their gauntlet.
Don’t shake my hand; I only work here.
This receiving line is not for me.

And I wonder . . .
Are these new soldiers in it for the money?
Don’t hate me, I merely ask.
Serving merely for pay, says Webster,
is the definition of mercenary.
With the flag sewn backwards on their sleeves,
do they know what it means
to be in it for the money?

Sometimes they fly in alone to a girlfriend or a parent
and I wonder how they managed it.
There’s room for honest emotion
without the media attention and the old vets
who only want them to have what they didn’t have.

A mother and father wait outside the security checkpoint
with eyes fixed on the horizon of the terminal
for a glimpse of their boy.
They shyly hold two small flags,
like the ones sold on the 4th of July
that you’re supposed to—I guess—stick in the flowerbed
like an ornamental praying mantis
to show your support.
Thrust upon them like the recruiter’s handshake,
they aren’t sure what they’re supposed to do with them.

Their boy walks down the exit lane to meet them.
“Put those away,” he says. "I need a cigarette.”

PUBLISHED! Notes From Underground Anthology

2011-03-01T05:13:00.000-08:00

Last year The Literary Lab ran a contest for which the prize was ten page in an anthology. This morning they have unveiled their cover for the NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND ANTHOLOGY.

Isn't it stunning? This beautiful paperback is now available on Amazon in print copy for $10 or for the E-book at $4.99, click here. You can also purchase a copy at the CreateSpace Store where a greater percentage of the proceeds will go to the American Society of Journalists and Authors Writers Emergency Assistance Fund. All profits from the sale of this literary collection will go to that charitable foundation. Check out the LitLab's post for details on how to get a discount code too.

I was one of twenty-five winners, and my short story, MAYBE, is included. Thank you, Literary Lab. I'm happy and humbled to be a part of this publication.

If you haven't already checked them out, you should. There are a lot of talented folks who hang out in the lab and you might find you don't want to leave.

Peace out. It's March!

Nothing Boiling On The Stove

2011-02-23T04:18:00.000-08:00

Now I know what snow fog is. At first I thought my windows were steamed up, you know, like a kettle of water was boiling on the stove. Then I realized it was simply….very….foggy. The sky to the east was faintly colored through the gauze of white, a blushing bride, and the road was only indicated by the steep snow banks that line the side, indecipherable bumps in the morning light. Snow fog is unusual and disconcerting, like thunder in a snowstorm, or hail in a heatwave. But it’s deathly quiet, unlike either of the other two natural phenomena.

I understand why so many mysteries take place in a foggy bottom. Something sinister could be happening across the road, or in the road, or even in my own backyard, and I’d never know. In the fog, no one can hear you scream.

This all seems to connect with the chapter I'm currently editing, which begins:

Up where there was more water than land, Boyd crossed through the southern section of the Algonquin Provincial Park. The trees got taller as the road narrowed, and the sun dimmed behind the thickening cloud cover until its exact location was impossible to pinpoint in the gunmetal sky. He pulled off the road and studied the map, comparing it with the computer directions and Lucy’s scribbled notes. He had to be getting close to the camp, much further east and he would be in Quebec. He rubbed his stomach. He’d eaten the last of his beef jerky, and breakfast at the diner across the street from the Starlight Motel was long gone. He had stopped again for gas and bought a liter of water, and that was gone too. Thinking about it made him want to pee, and he climbed out and aimed an arc at the center of the road, melting a circle of snow the size of a balloon.

I feel like I could be there with him, lost in the middle of nowhere in the Algonquin Provincial Park.

A Writer's Prayer

2011-02-20T04:38:00.000-08:00

Good morning sky, amethyst and blue, good morning.
I stumbled out of bed with another chance to succeed where I have failed.
Winter left, you see, but has returned.
Returned. The birds were joyous for a day,
or two.
But they will return.
With coffee in my grandma's cup
and a sky of purple behind the white-doomed silo,
the writer in me has returned.
Why not a good day?
A quiet day.
A writer's day.
Lord, give me a writer's day.
Amen.

The Good Sex In Fiction Award

2011-02-18T06:33:00.000-08:00

Each Year Britian's Literary Review comes out with their annual Bad Sex in Fiction award. I think that's a little snobbish, poking fun at those of us who try to spice up our novels and fail. Now Salon Magazine has come up with a counter award and announced their Good Sex Awards.

Says Salon, "Writing well about sex -- one of life's most delightful and important activities -- is difficult, so instead of sneering and sniggering at the authors who get it wrong, why not celebrate the ones who succeed?"

They whittled their list of nominations down to eight. Click the link above to see them and read the excerpt from the winner, NEXT.

And then you might have to get up and walk around, or something. I love well-written sex.

I had planned to post this for Valentine's Day but had connection issues, and some of you may already have seen this in Salon, but I thought I'd go ahead anyway, because writing about sex is the hardest thing to do, yet if done well, is the most rewarding and, more importantly, readers like it.

I have my own nomination.

The sex scene at the end of THE VOYAGE by Philip Caputo is my winner. Do you have one?

Blogger Question

2011-02-08T06:36:00.000-08:00

I recently got wireless. Really. Can you believe it? But all is not well in Bloggerville. I can no longer upload photos and many profile pictures are little boxes with red X's in them instead of interesting images, and I keep getting these irritating security warnings about whether or not I only want secure web content to be delivered. Have any of you had this happen? I should not have to keep right-clicking to display pictures/page with full quality. Know what I mean?

Thinking fondly of my old dialup...

Hazel and The Mousehole

2011-02-06T05:48:00.000-08:00

This morning there was ice on top of the 5-gallon pails of water in the hoophouse-my backup to running hose across the yard to the frost-free hydrant. But lugging 5-gallon buckets across the snow drifts isn't much of a backup. I need a hydrant in my greenhouse or a better back. Greens don't need as much water in winter, but a little helps them in their struggle with these temperatures. Even though we have double layer frost covers on the spinach, mizuna, arugula, and komatsuna (an Asian mustard green with a sweet/tangy flavor), when it's zero outside, it'll get below freezing in the hoop house. We swept a foot of snow off the top of the roof yesterday. The weight of snow cannot be underestimated.

There was ice on the water in the chicken coop too. We have a base heater that the water container sits on, so it doesn't freeze completely and the hens are able to drink out of the trough. They sip and tilt their heads and peck at the snow on my boots. The rooster lords over them all, such a guy.

My sister had a calamity this morning with her chickens. She has a feeder attached to the wall and when she was dumping grain into it, somehow it broke loose and fell, and a wire impaled a feeding hen through the beak. Sissy got ahold of her and with a wire cutters tried to pry the wire out, but the chicken jerked away and tore the top of her beak off. My sister called us in a panic feeling woozy. It would be like losing a thumb. How will it eat?

One of our hens has recently taken to hiding in the corner behind a nesting box.

Sometimes just her head is burrowed in safety. We've come to understand that she is at the bottom of the pecking order and she hides to escape the abuse inflicted on her by the rest of the flock. They won't let her eat so my husband piles a little grain in behind the nest box where she likes to hide. Yesterday she was sitting on the top of the roost where the others don't seem to bother her. She's enduring, and she still has her feathers. She deserves a name. I think I'll call her Hazel. The runt, the tortured and abused. Hazel.

Sometimes I feel like Hazel, hiding in a corner to avoid critical attention, afraid to venture out of my comfortable niche, afraid to put myself and my writing out there. I dash off a few queries and then retreat back in my hole to write. But who wants to live in a hole? Like the mousehole in Notes From Underground, no writer can long stay in the hole under the floor. Oh, the writing is best done in the mousehole, but then we have to venture out, like the groundhog who did NOT see his shadow this past week. He's out and about, waiting for the brighter day he knows is near, and Hazel is perched above the rest, roosting out of reach, and the writer in me pushes the page across the space between us and says, "Will you read this?"

What Would You Do?

2011-02-01T05:13:00.000-08:00

Did you exchange your walk-on part in a war for a leading role in a cage? - Pink Floyd

I was cleaning out my filing cabinet shuffling through old poems and rejection letters when I came across an old letter from a friend in college. A friend I lost track of as we went our separate ways to pursue the careers we had supposedly went to college for. College was ideas and lofty discussions, poster art and handmade dorm curtains, group pictures of suitemates in their underwear with their hair in curlers, because we didn't care what we looked like. College was running to class and staying up late to cram for a final, but it was also walks along the river, winter camping trips and writing letters.

Then came the careers, succumbing to the machine, art reproductions on the walls and expensive treatments on the windows, running late to the job and too tired by the end of the day to walk to the mailbox. The letters stopped.

We were idealistic. We protested. We wore MIA bracelets and sent letters to boys in Vietnam, because they didn't have a choice.

(Photo Credit - Tim Page)

We made our own kahlua and yogurt. We changed vacation plans because of the gas shortage and looked at MPG stickers on cars. When Carter lowered the speed limit to 55, we complied. We were conscious of our footprint. The letter I told you about? It was from my lost friend suggesting that we should cancel our planned camping trip because of the gas shortage, and we did.

Maybe it's not good to read old letters. To realize how far we've retreated from what we were.

Strawberry Fields Forever

2011-01-29T06:33:00.000-08:00

I know y'all get tired of me carrying on about organics and genetically engineered crops and Monsanto's herbicides, but a new development is so upsetting I simply have to vent and share it with you. Whole Foods, Organic Valley, and Stonyfield Farms have all surrendered to Monsanto.

As reported in the Organic Consumer Association's newsletter, "These companies have betrayed their customers and publically stated that they no longer oppose Monsanto's efforts to contaminate our farmland with their genetically engineered alfalfa. Monsanto's GE alfalfa is a perennial crop, guaranteed to spread its mutant genes and seeds across the nation; guaranteed to contaminate the alfalfa fed to organic animals; guaranteed to lead to massive poisoning of farm workers . . ."

If you are concerned about our nation's food supply and the decline of the honeybee, which has been directly contributed to the use of GMO's, please read the article and take action. We deserve truth in labeling and I think we all have the right to clean food on the table, if so desired. When asked if they want herbicides and genetically-modified organisms in their dairy products, meat and vegetables, most people say no, but then they don't do anything about it. We need to voice an opinion while there is still time. The only thing that will make a difference is if enough people voice opinion and follow through in the grocery store.

Thank you for reading this through to the end. The only thing more important than what we eat is the air we breathe. Every year we have to put up with Roundup spraying in the field across the road. Every year they come in with their big expensive tractors and tanks of poison and race up and down the field as the toxic brew billows out behind them. The fuckers don't even care which way the wind is blowing. We can be out there picking strawberries and there they are, getting it done.

Thanks for hearing me out. If you care, please pass the word.

A Solution for Overpopulation to Rival Swift’s

2011-01-20T18:03:00.000-08:00

Roundup in the corn flakes
Roundup in the bread
Roundup in the pasta
Roundup in our heads.
Endocrine disruptors-
we don’t know who we are,
but we strive to feed the world
at Monsanto’s tireless side.
And in environmental testing,
male frogs like male frogs-
we’re feminizing boys
and they won’t know who they are.

If you can tell a story in 55 words, it's time to participate in the Friday Flash 55 event hosted by the G-Man. Post it then click it to meet the man and some other talented folks as well.

Actually, I cheated. This isn't fiction. I wish it were.

Oratorio

2011-01-15T06:57:00.000-08:00

The Christmas tree is back where it belongs and birds rest where ornaments did.
They appear to be fooled by it all
which makes us feel better for it.

The heirloom ornaments,
each with a story,
are tissue-wrapped and boxed up in the back room that has no heat
but it doesn't matter.
The figgy pudding drizzled with brandy failed to light. But it didn't matter.
The cookies were all eaten or given away to family members from afar who are now back in their own quiet homes and private lives, though we pretend
through email and the occasional phone call
to keep up.

Somebody could buy a puppy and I wouldn't know
or find a boyfriend
or a lover
and I wouldn't know.

Better not to let one know
about the lover.

Only the garland remains, strung around
the porch from hooks where ferns hung through October.
The cedar swag is lush in a different way.
And I might be jealous of a lover,
of one mindless for me
and damn the consequences.

To have that.

Not a puppy, though one understands
the need to lower oneself to the level of animals.
and puppy kisses
after the family Christmas
where we all pretend to like each other.

The standing rib roast didn't happen
but we always give ourselves another chance.

The Christmas cards didn't happen . . . where are they?
People don't send cards anymore and the few
we received aren't cards.
They're family photos-
pictures of dressed up children forced into
velvet outfits and smiles
with no note, not even a signature.
Don't send me those.

Or pictures of puppies
though some do the puppies because they don't have children
nor want them or their kisses and expenses.
You can't have children without
considering what they will take from you
over the course of a lifetime,
the arithmetic of it

When the tree is forced through the doorway
in the opposite direction, we sweep up the needles
and rearrange the furniture and think about next year

The Man In The Mirror (flash 55)

2011-01-13T18:23:00.000-08:00

Some of the worst mistakes of my life were haircuts. - Jim Morrison

After seeing himself in the video, he ran his hands through his hair.
“My God! I look like General Custer.”
That night he came home smelling of cologne
with a haircut and a new pair of jeans,
a phone number in his wallet, and a new disease.
New stuff to offset the old him.

If it's the end of the week, it's time for flash. If you have a story in 55 words, post it on your blog and then go tell the G-Man.

The Mysterious Disappearance of the Matriarch - Flash 55

2011-01-07T06:14:00.000-08:00

She drifted off to sleep, wondering—
would the pictures on the stairs again be rearranged in the night?
The first time it was her great-grandmother’s portrait
moved from top to bottom.
Each night another was moved.
The last morning, the wall was empty.
Her ancestors were piled against the wall at the bottom of the stairs.

Try your hand at a story in 55. Then let the G-Man know.

TGIF

Something Nobody Will Want To Read

2011-01-04T06:36:00.000-08:00

You have only to look around you and you’ll see
blood being spilled, in the most playful way,
just as if it were champagne.
-Dostoyevsky 1864

We can’t afford to stay warm.
Christmas lights strung around the porch
and across the buffet and above the cupboard
lift the spirit but don’t give off warmth.
The register beside my chair with a wee amount of heat
is all I have
and a feeling like broken glass.

I broke the votive candleholder
into a million pieces
Blood red shards of glass
scatter across the floor
and fly under the piano.
Now they’re embedded in the tongue and grove
of a hand-laid floor
(my father on his knees
when he was young).
A feeling like that.

We’re weighed down in a wasteland of war—
scavenger of commodity.
Libraries languish and roads crumble,
and children go without textbooks
so we can spill blood like champagne
and march in step.
Flags wave grandly from gated communities
and likewise weakly from a doorjamb
in front of the hovel without heat
for heroes in uniforms
with flags sewn on backwards.
A feeling like that.

Friday Flash 55 - Father

2010-12-30T18:43:00.000-08:00

In the fog, the strobe lights on the bus
alert the children.
In the fog, a figure leaves the forest
and waits at the edge of the clearing
to watch as the child who will never know him
climbs the steps with his Spiderman lunchbox.
In the fog, it’s as if he wasn’t even there.

A thank you to Galen, the kick-ass host at Mr. Knowitall who orchestrates the Friday Flash 55 event. If you have a story you can tell us in 55 words, tell him first. See you on the other side of 2011!

Advent Ghosts - The Making Of

2010-12-24T08:38:00.001-08:00

This story is my entry into Loren Eaton's Shared Storytelling event for Christmas 2010.

The schoolhouse was transformed for the Christmas play. There was a stage in place of a teacher's desk, a velvet curtain instead of a chalkboard, and tinsel draped around the windows. The children were dressed in patent leather shoes and even the boys who had grown out of their desks but couldn’t pass 6th grade were dressed up and behaving.

Mary folded her hands in her lap and admired the drape of her robe and repeated her lines to herself. She was the lead and her mother had spent extra time on her hair.

Joseph beckoned to her from the dark behind the stage by the door that led to the outside, and she adjusted her veil and went to him.

The lights were dimmed, and the audience held their breath for the play to begin.
They waited. The entire schoolhouse held its breath, but Mary and Joseph didn't appear.

The play was aborted and the dogs were brought in, but it was of no use. The two were never found. Only a veil blown into a ditch and covered with twigs and snow was uncovered.

If you think Christmas might be more about Dicken's Marley than Santa's Rudolph, please read the other stories that make up the Advent Ghosts 2010 event organized by Loren Eaton at I Saw Lightning Fall.

What A Smart Boy You Were

2010-12-22T04:49:00.000-08:00

When you’re snowed under,
there’s no getting away from you.
Out of cigarettes,
you search drawers and cubbyholes,
empty butts out of ashtrays,
and roll your own.

The storm is as focused as the hawk
that flies over the chicken coop.
Thoughts like sentence fragments
march around the house,
the thought of what you’d do
to keep from running out.

If you can’t bear the quiet,
imagine yourself deaf, like an old man steeped in it.
Imagine yourself trapped in a house
with an old man who won’t stop talking—
stopped up by memory with no one to listen.

The wind doesn’t count.
The partially-deaf man can bear the wind,
unlike a room full of people.
The wind is an undertone,
like the hum of a furnace.
It circles the sleeping house, unanswered.

The man becomes a boy in his sleep.
The boy who ran down the road
for the pleasure of it.
The boy who could take up any task
and finish.
That boy wasn’t confined
by his body to memory.
He was making them.

And what about that snowstorm?
Not the ones the old man talks about.
The one here and now,
the one we’ll want to talk about when we’re old.
Ah, but remember . . . nobody will listen.

Write it down so the memory has backbone,
like the sketch found in a drawer
and the note from a teacher of long, long ago.
What a smart boy you were.

I wrote this in a nostalgic mood because Christmas isn't only about merrymaking and then decided to post it for the One Stop Poetry site's One Shot Wednesday. If you've written a poem or even a short story you want to share with the fine folks at One Stop Poetry, follow the link.

What A Weasel Does

2010-12-09T02:06:00.000-08:00

A weasel got in one of our chicken pens and killed 14 birds two nights ago. The havoc wrought by a weasel is that of a teenage vampire movie. They bite off the heads and drink the blood. But this isn’t a movie; this is life on the farm. It looks idyllic from afar. Many think we have it made. They haven’t gone outside on a blustery winter morning (when will this wind abate?) to find a slaughter.

Three more were killed last night in similar beheading fashion. The surviving chickens were very happy to see my husband this morning. Chickens are skittish (wouldn’t you be?) but once they got over the initial startle, they hung around his feet like a child under her mother’s skirt. After the cleanup he needed to go to the pharmacy and refill a blood pressure prescription he’d let lapse. This work will kill you in more ways than one.

He buried the beheaded in the compost piles—manure recently hauled out of the barnyard and spread in heaps along the field beyond the chicken area. It serves a dual purpose. One must get rid of the carcasses lest more vermin be attracted to the area, and digging in this frozen ground would probably put him in it.

It’s a devastating loss, and I’m sure it’s as crushing to my husband as agent rejection of my writing is to me, (though he shouldn't take it personally). Our fear is the weasel will be back, him and his buddies. It’s winter and food is scarce. He’ll be back. We have traps but weasels can weasel out of them, just as they can circumvent chicken wire. A friend suggested we put a radio out there. Play a little AC-DC or Alice In Chains. How about a little Marilyn Manson music for the weasel? I’m afraid he'd like it.

The Fiberglass Angel

2010-12-06T05:35:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Day my daughter
(named after an Allman Brothers song, not a saint)
helped out at a soup kitchen.
I’ve never done anything that commendable.
She got the idea from a friend,
not from me.
I think holy are the No Toxic Spraying signs
we store in the milkhouse for winter.

But I remember
my mother’s Christmas angel,
yellowed with age, the only one we ever had.
Fiberglass, Mother warned when we were little.
It’ll cut you if you touch.
So we never did.
We held our breath as she stood on a chair to place it on the top branch.
We broke all her glass ornaments on the hardwood floor,
the guilty one downcast with the evidence at her feet.
We needed no scolding from mother,
we dealt it out in holy measure amongst ourselves.

The nativity scene, ox and ass, baby and mother were another matter—
solid wood and unbreakable Joseph. We rearranged them throughout Advent.
Baby Jesus kept coming up missing.
I placed the shepherd closer to the action than the wise men.
They were wise but late arriving in their fancy robes and strange hats.

I gave a bushel of beets to the food pantry.
Does that count?

Dad wrestled our eight-foot trees into their stand
and trimmed the bottom branches.
(A Linck tree was never tied to the wall.)
Mother handled the lights and the angel while we fidgeted
with the ornaments spread out in front of us.

Their trees got smaller as we all left
(like mother, standing in stocking feet to place the angel)
and now the tree sits on an end table.
What glass ornaments remain stay wrapped
because there is no room on a tabletop tree.
But for an angel, yellowed with age, there always will be.

Home From The War To Rage On The Road

2010-11-30T19:10:00.001-08:00

A neighbor boy home for Christmas after four years in the Marines and two in Afghanistan was driving a tractor down the road when a car came up behind him and attempted to pass him as he was making a left-hand turn into his driveway. The tractor flipped over and landed on top of him.

The local parish priest was called to the scene to administer last rites but the accident scene was blocked off and the police wouldn't let him through until it was too late. Maybe they don't train officers in such matters anymore, just like driving schools don't teach driver's education the way our teachers did when it was part of the high school curriculum. Tractors have the right-of-way. Here in farm country it is common to see farm equipment on the roadways. They are like pedestrians and cyclists. They have the right-of-way.

Just another one of those things that make us walk around in the middle of the night or sit in a chair with the light on instead of sleeping. Someone grieves while someone else is rejoicing. Such is the human condition. The best we can do is accept our measure and prevail. Take up the pen or the brush or the hammer. Take on the day.

The Little Man In My Phone Line

2010-11-28T14:22:00.000-08:00

My blog has been as dormant as the shrub roses, hunkered down like an asparagus bed. I shall blame this first and foremost on my dialup connection which took a nosedive a couple of weeks ago, going from bearable to exasperating. I must be the last person in the county holding out for affordable high speed internet but if my server kicks me off like a shoddy trespasser one more time I will be at the mercy of whatever wireless is offered here in no man's land.

I have, however, been writing a lot, loving it, getting up in the middle of the night to do it, and my blog has also taken a back seat to that. Yet I worry about bloggyville and think about it more than one would think normal. What's normal? Who was it I recently heard say, "I would not wish the life of a novelist on anyone." ?? Help me. Why would anyone aspire to such angst and self deprecation? Why indeed. But I love to write, even when it exasperates me. It's a lonely endeavor, so talk to me.

Now I better try to post this before the little man boots me off.

The Winter Grave

2010-11-16T16:10:00.000-08:00

The winds of November remind us to hurry—
plug the drafts under the door
store the squash
and wait for winter.
Will there be food? Heat?
Will the water drag or flow?
Will we be dependent upon the slug?
The stealthy bow?
If there's a death in winter
what do we do with the body?
Should we predig a hole like we do
for our live Christmas trees
so they can live on?

The cattle huddle
around a full hay wagon,
backs to the wind.
Will there be shelter from the storm?
Will the river flow unencumbered
around fallen timber and jagged floes?

The barn is warm at night with their breath.
The clover is sweet and the loft full.
They chew their cuds
content
and warm.
What will we do with the body?

Still Life In A Killing Frost

2010-11-10T04:38:00.000-08:00

The sun burst out from under a cloud bank
and the grass is once again green.
The trees are shanks of orange
and the fields are gold.
The mossy sides
of the dying ash shimmer
as though it weren't so
and the mums are earth afire.
Everything faces east.
Still. Still. Still.
Not even a raucous crow greets the day.
But the clouds prevailed, opened and swallowed.
The trees are black and the grass dormant.
Mums sway under the weight of frost
and the crow awakes
with moving eye.

Things We Need – Things We Don’t

2010-11-08T04:12:00.000-08:00

Her hair was too long for her age,
thick and heavy, a platinum wave.
She was all hair.

Two weeks ago she came to work with a cut
above her ears,
like a salon model.

Last week in a team meeting she joked
how she could pull it out in swatches.
Look . . . it doesn’t hurt.
We made her stop.

She wore a black hat on Wednesday
with a floppy brim and a red rose in the center.
Yesterday it was a saucy denim one
with a papery orange poppy.
We traded lipsticks in the lounge,
adjusted hats . . . not a wisp of blonde.

She has a season pass for the theater,
tickets to the Dixie Chicks,
family leave for the next round,
a calendar full of events.

A Mouth Full Of Stones (Friday Flash 55)

2010-10-28T18:29:00.000-07:00

Don’t blast a call to prayer outside my window.
I pray when I want
and drink when I want and sometimes I want.
Our best times involved copious amounts—
me and my Bobby McGee,
hair flowing free
not swaddled in silence
with a mouth full of stones.
Don’t blast a call to prayer outside my window.

If you write a Friday Flash 55 or just want to know what it's all about, visit the G-Man here.

Ampersands and Colloquialisms

2010-10-19T04:51:00.000-07:00

The Falling Leaf Moon is on the wan and still we haven't had our first frost. This is unusual for the Thumb of Michigan and for me yet one more symptom of unsettling climate change. Should I be happy with these extended frost-free days or concerned? I know one thing: weeds are growing faster than they did in the heart of summer, at a time when they should be dead and buried.

I hate weeds. I hate cliches and redundancies. I try to make sure I never use these nasties in my writing but once in a while one shows up, like a weed in the greenhouse. Speaking of, I'm planning to make full use of my greenhouse this winter and to date I've planted spinach, komatsuna, and mizuna. I cleaned out the weeds from around the edges for a weed-free environment. Now I need to clean the weeds out of my manuscripts, past and present.

Edittorrent has posted a list of writing pitfalls to avoid. Of course Edittorrent is quick to point out that one can break a rule if done to good effect. But can we be the judge of our own good effects? I know a weed when I see one but would I know an ampersand and recognize a colloquialism? Will my one-word sentence be of good effect or make you groan? Oh what an obsessive pastime this writing business is.

Now, how many writing rules have I broken in this post? Don't we all like to break rules? Like smoking in the bathroom and walking on rooftops and eluding the police? Like throwing in an occasional one-word sentence?

OF SONG AND WATER . . . Shallots and Garlic!

2010-10-11T05:33:00.000-07:00

Is it really October? October 11th?? Holy cow! The weather this past week has been so beautiful I've lost track of time. What have I been doing? Checking in occasionally on all of you and planting shallots and garlic-Purple Stripe, German Hardy and Porcelain, rows and rows.

One thing I did want to share with you this morning is the book I'm currently reading....OF SONG AND WATER.

This novel by Joseph Coulson is the story of Coleman, a jazz musician who can no longer play, his mentor and teacher, a black man trying to live quietly on the edge of a white town, his father, an expert sailor, and his grandfather who was a rum runner on the Detroit River during Prohibition. Coulson expertly weaves his tale between generations, from the shores of Lake Huron (our beloved inland sea)and the narrows of the river, to jazz clubs in Detroit and Chicago and a marina in winter where Coleman retreats to his father's sailboat.

I don't know how I happened upon this gem but it's a captivating story that had me from the opening paragraph.

He climbs without faith, the ladder unsteady, the wooden rungs brittle, each step filling the air with the sound of old bones. Don't look down, he thinks, watching the slow drift of his shadow, seeing its darkness on the long white surface of the hull.

I think it unusual to find novels that take place in and around the Great Lakes (UP reviewed here is another) and I'm always excited to find one.

Would you rather read a novel that takes place somewhere you've never been or one that takes place close to home in places you've seen? I think the latter adds an element of understanding because you can bring your own experience into the narrative rather than having to depend solely on an author's skill at guiding your imagination.

To Tamper With The Truth (Banned Books Week)

2010-09-29T08:44:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again....Banned Books Week. Time to check out the ALA List of banned and challenged books and read a banned book. Jemi Fraser has an excellent post on this subject here, and then there's this passage for Three Word Wednesday from Rebecca,

To tamper with the truth
And court false tales . . .

Can you guess what banned book inspired these words? Check out Rebecca's blog to read her entry and find out.

I'm proud to say my local library has posted signs for Banned Books Week, challenging patrons to read one. I'm reading A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY. So what are you reading? Let's hear it for the mighty book!

When the Geese Fly

2010-09-22T06:30:00.000-07:00

The geese have been flying overhead with their mournful honking. I can’t think of anything that more poignantly portends autumn than the migration of Canadian geese. And if a sound could describe the silent angst of the querying writer, it would be geese flying overhead. It was eighty degrees yesterday, but the geese tell it all. Then last night a powerful storm blew through the area and this morning my ferns lie broken on the impatiens (which aren’t long for this world), and I hang them back up wondering where I’ll put them come October.

I told myself that fall was a good time to start querying agents again. But now I have to think about my ten pages for the Literary Lab's Notes From Underground anthology and ponder where my little story is going. A short story is a semi-circle and doesn’t really end, but it has to go somewhere. I want my readers to sit back at the end of it all and say, “wow,” or at least, “hmmm.” I don’t want to let down those who expressed confidence in my ability to see it through. That, plus my second novel is gnawing at my inner consiousness. It currently has no ending whatsoever and has sat on the back burner since the geese last flew the other way. So how do you organize your writing life? What is more important, querying the old or losing yourself in the new? And if you juggle both, I'd like to hear about that too.

Notes From Underground

2010-09-15T18:14:00.000-07:00

The Literary Lab recently held a Notes from Underground contest, and I am honored to have been selected for the anthology. It was an eclectic and somewhat intimidating contest, so I was jumping up and down this morning. So excited!! Please pop over to the Lab to see the others who won. I'm proud to be in their company.

The Man In Black

2010-09-14T05:45:00.000-07:00

I just realized that a true protest singer of the sixties, one who often collaborated with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, was none other than the Man In Black, one I never thought of as a protest singer. After listening to an NPR special on American Roots, I know why Johnny Cash dressed in black. And sadly the reasons are still true today. This, from one of his songs,

I dress in black for all the downtrodden, for those who are serving time past the time their time is up because of the times.

I just wanted to throw that out there because I thought maybe some of you didn't know that either.

And for the downtrodden writer on the query quest, how about a different way of looking at rejection. With so much talk out there about rejection, how to handle it like a big girl and plod ahead without drowning yourself in drink or giving up the game to pursue something you don’t like as much, like waiting tables or nine-to-fiveing it, I like what Holly Root had to say recently on her blog.

"With so much talk about “rejection” on the internet, I sometimes wish that we could talk in terms of “decline” rather than “reject.” There’s no moral judgment here, just an opportunity I won’t be part of."

I like that. How about you?

A Ginsberg in our Midst?

2010-09-03T04:49:00.000-07:00

The sky is gray and rumpled
low-hanging clouds skuttle
across the land without a shadow
taking their rain with them.

A day like this calls for a strong cup of coffee. Coffee and books and hours of writing. Autumn come!

I've been sitting on a few awards that I need to pass on and I will. I will, I promise, but right now all I can do is share with you an amazing poet and writer who is new to the blogosphere but obviously not to the power of the written word. You can check Alisa Dodge out here. You won't be sorry. I promise.

Paper Lanterns

2010-08-31T07:29:00.000-07:00

For the last post of August, let’s talk about the upside of drought and unrelenting heat. Let’s assume this record heat (August was the sixth driest and the hottest on record for the Great Lake State) is not a harbinger of what's to come, climate upturned on its axis, chill in the desert of Palmdale where my sister lives and asphyxiation in the upper midwest. So what can be an upside to drought? First, there are no mosquitoes. I mean, not one single solitary bloodsucker is left in the Thumb of Michigan. Second, in the still of the exhausted summer night outdoor candles stay lit. They burn all night, inspire and enthuse, the only draft the flutter of a moth's wing before it's coerced into the fire. Paper lanterns sway next to the Boston ferns, and I think of swaying to the dance in a gauzy skirt the color of summer.

Let's talk veggies and the bounty of summertime. Melons that won't usually fatten in Michigan have thrived in the record heat. Cantaloupe and Sugar Baby watermelons, fully seeded for the future, have graced our tables—homestead and market. Tomatoes dropping ripe from the vine take all our time-salsa, canning, and bread salad. Peppers ripening to red and orange in the heat take no backseat to tomatoes. Volunteer cilantro from last year's planting sprouts underneath the soaker hoses in the pepper row as if they know their rightful place, and we pick and we pick and we pick. The butternut and delicata winter squash are a golden tan with skins that cannot be pierced with a fingernail, hence ready for harvest.

So what does this have to do with writing? What, I say, doesn't it have to do with it? We eat to live and writers live to write. I drink and eat and write. I bemoan my ability to keep up but the harvest is plentiful and I persevere and tend my soaker hoses and baby my laptop and long for the time to bring a new novel to fruition. I listen to music that gives me goose bumps like John Lennon’s Working Class Hero and then I go back outside to watch Orion march across the southern sky, because I have to. The new moon is dark and hidden like a story aching to surface. I’m writing about the secret everyone in my family knows but no one talks about. What are you afraid to write about? What are you waiting for?

The Poetry Bus

2010-08-16T19:02:00.000-07:00

The Poetry Bus this week is being driven by Chris at the The Enchanted Oak. We had to chose one of two photographs to use as inspiration, and I chose this one -Alfred Stieglitz Georgia O'Keeffe--Hands, 1919

The poem links are up here.

My ticket to ride the bus....

THE HARDEST THINGS TO HOLD

The blues man wraps band aids around his fingers
and holds the quivering note beyond its value.

Grandmother had hands of steel
that whipped egg whites into peaks
and eroded the corner of the cake spoon
we all covet.

My sister's hands are bare.
She drinks cherry juice for arthritis
and sharpens her knives to an edge.
The piano is out of tune and the garden lies fallow.

The hospital had to cut
my mother’s ring off her finger.
They put it in an envelope with her name on it,
and gave it to me to hold.

The artist holds her left hand perfectly still
and draws it with her right.
The teeth that fall out of her
great grandmother's mouth in her dreams
are in the center of the palm.
The hardest things to draw are hands.

THE BOY FROM YUGOSLAVIA (Flash 55)

2010-08-12T19:26:00.000-07:00

While the teacher was at the beer garden they beat up the new boy with the funny name and she hid behind the country school and covered her ears until they were finished. He ran past her bloodied and in his place, face etched with the horror, and she thought, maybe now they’ll believe us.

If you can write a story in 55 words, post it on your site and then visit the G-Man to let him know. You'll get marvelous feedback from his many participants and even a visit from the man himself.

Have a marvelous weekend, writers and compatriots.

Control

2010-08-11T05:11:00.000-07:00

The family of woman and children,
baby bottles, car seats and strollers,
head scarves and . . . tennis shoes?
make their way through the checkpoint.
A line of impregnability,
from the wrinkled forehead of the matriarch

(it’s always been this way)

to the teenager in black scarf

(I’m reminded of Minstrel Shows and the subterfuge of black face but can’t say why….is imitation the highest form of flattery?)

that drapes her face like a mantilla and frames her dark glasses,
modern as the painted toes

(slattern)

she bares to remove her shoes.
It’s our choice, she would insist if asked.
But I wonder where the men are.

The men behind the choice come through later,
unburdened in blue jeans, serious as kings.
Unencumbered but for their wallets and cell phones,
they sport flamboyant heads of hair
I’d like to run my fingers through . . .
and pull.

The women sit in chairs with their legs together
and await direction.
They cosset the children and await the men.

Meeting Mojo

2010-08-09T05:11:00.000-07:00

Lightning flashed on the horizon but stars blinked overhead the night I met Mojo. He came in the middle of the night. He woke me up. He knocked on the door and I unlocked it.

He stood in shadow but I knew who he was. I invited him in.

“No,” he said. “You must come out.”

So out I went. We sat on the porch and lightning bugs landed in his hair and formed a constellation called Perseverance. Night birds chirped from the half-dead ash trees along the road and Mojo tapped his elongated fingers on the arm of the metal chair. He said no two sound alike if I would but pay attention, and I listened to the sing-song from across the yard, much like the murmuring amongst a flock of hens, low and throaty and full of mystery, as they run here and there with their full-hipped waddle.

I asked him why he came and went like a flimsy idea and he said it was I who could call him up at will if I but put aside that which wasn’t necessary to the writing life. He rose to his feet, and the lightning bugs flew out of his hair and flickered away into the hayfield.

“I have something for you,” he said. “We can go inside now.”

We sat at the kitchen table and he lit up a cigarette, holding it like a joint between his thumb and forefinger.

“What is it you have,” I said, impatient with his silence.

He stubbed it out. It didn't smell like a cigarette. It smelled like clover. “Show me your room,” he said.

I took him into my room, and he drew artwork from inside his shirt like a sorcerer and displayed it on my bed, and I waited for him to explain himself. Then he handed me a letter from an agent.

“Take it,” he said, forcing it upon me. “It’s a good letter and nothing to be sad about.”

I looked at the envelope. The return address was New York and my pulse skipped. A letter from New York, but one to be sad about.

“You should display it like a painting,” he motioned to the one on the bed. “And learn from it. You will not have success until you have had rejection you don’t turn your back on and refuse to learn from.”

And he was gone like the constellation of fireflies, leaving only the memory of his presence, but his words are etched along the knobs of my backbone.

All this in a dream.

The Lifeblood of Fiction

2010-08-04T07:47:00.000-07:00

Sitting at my laptop in the night with a glass of water at my elbow, there is movement in my peripheral vision. I glance at the source, alarmed, but the shimmering movement is only the play of moonlight on the water's surface. With each keystroke the water jiggles and though I know what it is, the ghostly shimmer fools me again and again, like the slap of the flag on my dad's flagpole in a brisk wind when I'm working in the garden. It has me looking over my shoulder, again and again. And I'm reminded of a passage from THE SOUND AND THE FURY.

If character is the life of fiction (as John Gardner says), description of time and place is the lifeblood that supports your characters along the way. Consider how William Faulkner describes water in a basin in the moonlight....

I could hear Shreve working the pump, then he came back with the basin and a round blob of twilight wobbling in it, with a yellow edge like a fading balloon, then my reflection. I dipped the rag, breaking the balloon.

Or this passage that blends the best description of twilight I've ever read with the memory of the brother who never grew up...

As I descended the light dwindled slowly, yet at the same time without altering its quality, as if I and not light were changing, decreasing, though even when the road ran into trees you could have read a newspaper. I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling like butterflies hovering a long way off. Benjamin the child of. How he used to sit before that mirror.

I just finished Ian McEwan's SOLAR, which set me to thinking about the importance of character development and how essential it is to make your readers care about your characters. Maybe this is an unfair comparison I'm about to make, but McEwan has been compared to literary giants, from Dickens to Faulkner, so my guess is that it isn't. The characters in SOLAR were as flat as failed bread and I had to force myself to keep going. Halfway through, I stopped waiting for it to get better and resigned myself to disappointment from an author who has never disappointed me before. So, even the experienced writer slips on occasion and falls into the trap of their own verbosity. Not only was the main character unlikable on a personal level, but as a scientist he seemed unmotivated, selfish, and greedy. And the only time McEwan comes close to a Faulkner description of time and place is when his Pulitzer Prize winning scientist steps out of his air conditioned car in the heat of the New Mexico desert and falls to his knees under the weight of it.

I think the main problem for me is that climate change is such a serious subject it doesn't lend itself well to the slapstick satiracal style McEwan uses to drive the novel forward. I found it hard to sympathize with this unlikable character who zips his penis in his snowsuit during a trip to the Arctic, this overweight academic who overeats before an important speech at a climate change conference and has to swallow his acid reflux as he tries to convince investors to take their money out of coal and oil and put it into solar. Who could take him seriously? This buffoon who has multiple failed marriages and countless affairs and who behaves badly at the turning point of the novel. And the multiple cast of supporting characters are equally unlikable and unmemorable. I didn't care about any of them. Characters are the life of fiction and these ones were dead in the water before the halfway point.

I think it unfortunate that one of the premier writers of our time missed an opportunity to bring solar power and all the possiblities encompassed within the miracle of photosynthesis into the mainstream conversation. Most readers won't put up with unlikable, boring characters, regardless of the subject. I would love to hear other opinions on this subject. And if any of you have read SOLAR, what'd you think?

If you can't give your readers a character to love, you'd better at least give them one to hate. Make your reader feeling something. Take Faulkner's Jason-one of the most despicable characters in the history of American literature-Jason Compson will stay with me long after I've forgotten McEwan's Michael Beard. Indifference to character is the death knell for a novel.

The Wrong Side of Town (Flash 55)

2010-07-29T19:14:00.000-07:00

Beside a three-story house in Romanesque style
that’s falling down,
a station wagon is parked
in the tall grass on two flat tires.
An old man sits behind the steering wheel
and reads the newspaper,
oblivious to the crumbling ruins.
He does this every day,
past All Saints,
warm in his sunroom
but going nowhere.

If you can write a story in 55 words, let Mr. Knowitall know. TGIF party animals!

Miner Dorm

2010-07-15T20:36:00.000-07:00

I remember the radio I won
selling magazines
and the song playing
the last time I lay with you.
The dorm was emptied for summer—
wisteria in bloom.
We lay on the bed
and listened to the closing of the doors.
We didn’t make promises to keep in touch
because we knew that we wouldn’t.

This is a Flash 55. And least I forget, Mr. Knowitall is the motivating factor.

If It Were My Home

2010-07-12T19:01:00.000-07:00

If It Was My Home is a new site that will allow you to quickly compare the breadth of the BP oil spill to your home town or city. Just type in your location and it will take the spill out of the Gulf and put it in your backyard. I did it. It filled Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay and spilled into Lake Erie.

The photograph of the struggling brown pelican is from Charlie Riedel at AP.

Pelican, brown pelican, preen once more for me.

49th Festival Of The Trees

2010-07-01T07:02:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the 49th Festival of the Trees. When Jade Blackwater first contacted me and asked if I would be interested in hosting July's celebration, I didn't know what to expect. I certainly didn't expect the outpouring of artistic expression that I received. I would like to thank Jade for seeking me out and Dave Bonta , co-founder of the Festival of the Trees, for all his help with coordinating submissions that came in through the blog.

July 1st is the first day of the heat moon, and we're on the cusp of the dog days of summer... thunderstorms and fireflies, straw hats and cold drinks, days of lazy summer heat when finding shade under a tree is sometimes all one can think about. So, without further ado, let's check out some trees.

I'd like to kick this off with my favorite childhood hiding spot. This old pickling pear tree.
Yes! it really is a pear tree and, yes, there has been a rope swing (recently updated) hanging off the same limb for seventy years. Three generations of inquisitive adventurers with scabbed knees, bare feet, and dirty faces have wrapped their legs around it. If you climbed up the trunk to the fork and then higher.... out on this limb,
your mother couldn't find you, nor your older bossy siblings. You could read uninterrupted about adventure on the high seas or about a little girl in the Maritimes, or just watch squirrels navigate the narrow branches above while you, blameless, dropped hard, inedible pears on your brother's head as he tried to swing.

From Tricia O'Brien at Talespinning, we have a few of her amazing photos complemented by her signature haiku, as well as a flash fiction piece about a young cypress tree (relatively speaking as a cypress can live for thousands of years) that wishes it were a boy.

His roots had long ago stretched so far around his base they looked like a nest of pythons.

When reading Tricia's short story, I couldn't help but think of the Ents, the endearing talking trees in Lord of the Rings. Tricia weaves a story the Ents would give a magestic nod of the head to. She even has a Part II later in the fest.

Speaking of The Ents, I think it appropriate to elaborate a bit on what these, my favorite fantasy trees, are. They're a fictional race of people who closely resemble trees from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy world of Middle-earth. They appear to have been inspired by the talking trees of many of the world's folklores. At the time The Lord of the Rings takes place, there are no young ents (known as entings) because the entwives (female ents) were lost.

This is Treebeard, the oldest of the Ents. His motto was: "Do not be hasty." I think I shall make it mine as I try to live with a lunar calender and stay out of the rat race of modern society. The fate of the Ents is something I couldn't get out of my mind as I collated everyone's favorite trees.

Next, I would like to present Suzanne Casamento, who writes young adult fiction and, as she has now proven, poetry, writing about her favorite tree in poetic form. I think you'll all be spellbound by Suzanne's poem, drawn up the ladder to climb inside her secret hiding place and then...

Turn to yesterday’s last page
Its telltale folded corner begging me to finish
Someone else’s story

This next entry from Ed Pilolla juxtaposes nicely with Suzanne's poem. Ed is living the writing life in Hermosa Beach, California (am I a little bit jealous?), writing like a fool, in his words, but still taking the time to compose and submit Tree Rings. Hauntingly beautiful...

We journeyed our entire lives to arrive here, both of us with knots lodged within the rings of our lives,

this poem lodged in the roots of my soul. Thanks Ed.

Liza Carens Salerno at Middle Passages posts a lovely ode to New England stoicism and how she happened upon the perfect tree.

Fall seeps in via the patch of burnt-umber on the tree by the market in mid-August, through the crimson poison ivy vine twisting around a pine deep in the woods.

Thanks Liza for a native's perspective of color-seeking tourists. I want to crack a lobster and, somehow, you've made me yearn for fall colors before the Fourth of July!

V.R. Barkowski who lists amoung her accomplishments, recovering sociologist, mystery writer, and museum whore (my participants have some of the most interesting professions!), pays homage to her favorite trees through photography. You will absolutely swoon (in Tricia's words) at the photo from Savannah. And I wonder at those who could be in the shadow of such as these and not really see them at all, a thought brought to mind by her use of a William Blake quote...

Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all.

Kenneth Pobo also wrote a poem for the festival. I was thrilled to get so many poems, the highest form of human expression. Ken doesn't yet have a website or blog but I loved his poem so much I was compelled to include it anyway. He can be reached at kgpobo [at] verizon [dot] net if you want to offer your accolades.

BACK YARD BIRCH

Tall Wisconsin birches
line the highway. Light sifts
down, leaves almost translucent.
If I were the moon, I’d talk
all night with a birch, or
a forest of them, but I’m just
a guy with too much

weeding to do. Our one birch
provides good conversation.
Small, but airy, a tree
with nothing to prove. I put
violas at its base, an offering.
Catbirds, tasteful but busy,
like this tree too, a fine

launching spot on their way
to a blueberry bush. Wrens
turn leaf into recording studio.
In winter, a gray sky wraps
empty branches. Spring
will come. And when it does,
the birch will be ready.

You know I could relate to this one....to a guy with too much weeding to do but who will still take time to talk to a birch. And the last four lines are alive with imagery. Let us know, Ken, as soon as you get your site up and running!

Next, from Biologist, D.N.Lee, at Urban Science we have this entry from her travels in Europe, introducing us to the Mimosa Tree, which is also her favorite tree from childhood-

"My,fancy seeing you here. Are you here on holiday in France, too?"
"No, the trees replied, "we live here. You must be mistaking us for our cousins who live everywhere".

Indeed, I didn't know the Mimosa tree was so widespread. Nor did I realize it is sensitive to the touch, as shy as a praying mantis, and its leaves fold inward if you should touch them. Don't touch this! Thank you Ms. Lee for sharing with us your favorite tree along with memories from your grandmother's backyard.

From Marian Veverka we have this ode to the trees, a whiplash of a poem that sets us amoungst the branches of trees standing naked before the storm, limbs tossed and tangled like a schooner in a typoon. And, yet, again,

"your limbs provide the home the sparrow needs."

Thanks, Marian, for a beautiful poem that left me breathless. And honest folks, I'm not usually given to such gushing but you have all left me awed by your talent.

Next, to Lye Tuck-Po at Fieldsketches

where we have something really different, a tree/temple in the Cambodian woods. Tuck-Po, who is an anthropoligist living in Malaysia, photographed these ancient trees in Prasat Sambor, Cambodia. I think this is one of my all-time favorite trees. Who wouldn't want to enter this door and curl up inside with a dog-eared book? (One of Suzanne's!)
Just click the link to view more of these ancient trees of Cambodia. The second one is eerie and reminds me of the Alien curled up in the spaceship. I digress. Thank you Tuck-Po for sharing these stunning photos from the Cambodian woods.

From Australia, Jacqueline Yetzotis at Saving Our Trees takes us for a stroll down her street into the fork of a red flowering gum, the tree that most symbolizes Australia for her. Bird and bees love them and you will too when you see their amazing blooms. They reminded me of birds of paradise, or like something out of The Wizard of Oz with their little rosy faces. Check it out and see what I mean.

Next, from an Australian transplant, we have the unbudding of a Tulip Poplar. Joan Knapp, a microbiologist who now lives in Georgia, gives us a frame-by-frame video of the development of the beautiful flower on a Tulip Poplar tree. The progression is amazing and I was almost sad to see the dying of the flower but then realized that, too, is beautiful and essential, the closing of the circle of life.

Casey Harn shows us the inside of a different sort of a cathedral, the sort that man can't replicate with hammer and nails and architectual genius, a cathedral in the woods on the 15th Day of the Rose Moon. Now if that title doesn't pique your interest, I don't have one that will. Rose Moon is a Native American name for the moon that appears in June.

Casey posts by the Lunar calendar and uses the Native names for each moon cycle. July is the Heat Moon. Thank you, Casey, for sharing some of your Native American culture and your cathedral in the woods.

Next up are the fragile branches and purple berries of the Elderberry tree. Brought to us by Elizabeth Enslin, an anthropoligist and recovering academic based in Oregon, the elderberry has a long, rich history of delicious sustenence. (Especially in the dead of Prohibition.) Check out her pictures of elderberry clusters and tips on how best to enjoy them. I can't resist relating a personal story about how my grandpa got himself in a heap of trouble over a neighbor's jug of elderberry wine. But I'll save it until later.

The most poignant submission I received was this video story from wildlife biologist Jackee Alston who just suffered the loss of her mountain's old-growth ponderosa forest due to the human-caused forest fire in Arizona. Thank you Jackee for sharing this amazing video. We can only hope that the ponderosas will return en masse for future generations to enjoy.

From Poetry Daily, we have a killer of a poem, Twin Tree, by featured poet, Carol Muske-Dukes, Poet Laureate of California. I stood beside you weeping,
trying to hold your heart together with my hands
at the fork where you'd leaned apart,
There is nothing else for me to say. My words pale next to hers. Hers are enough.

Suzanne Murray, an artist based in North Yorkshire, UK who specializes in calligraphy and lettering art submitted these samples of her work. I can see why these are some of her favorites.

I know a pine tree that leans over near a sea.

Suzi also blogs at Spirit Whispers and there shows us the birth of a baby Scots Pine cone and why her work is inspired by pine trees and also by the words of George Seferis- Greek poet, essayist & diplomat, and winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize for Literature-

One night I stayed awake all night under this tree...

On a lighter note, we have an amusing anecdote from Michelle Markey Butler who is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh and blogs atHeir Raising. Boys will be boys, but really....you wouldn't want to do this to your favorite tree!

From Becky Miller at The Rainy Day Wanderer you can browse a photo gallery of amazing tree photos she arranged just for us, from her backyard to the Asheboro Zoo and in an array of seasons. Thanks Becky.

Have you ever been to a hazelnut tree farm? Erika Rathje has. Enter here and scroll down until you come to the geometric marvel of the hazelnut tree farm with her description underneath the photo. I may never get an opportunity to visit a hazelnut tree farm. I didn't even know there was such a thing. So thank you, Erika.

And finally, I have Tricia's Part II, as promised. Waylaid at last with her, trussed and captivated, she sets us down gently.

Oh, would you like to hear that story about grandpa and the elderberry wine? I cornered my dad on the porch yesterday and made him repeat it to me so I would get it right. This is what happened.

It was 1928 and the country was tiring of Prohibition. But people became resourceful and ingenious. My grandpa, along with many others in these parts, made elderberry wine out of the elderberry blossom, which makes the best wine according to the experts, and he and neighboring farmers often got together to spin yarns and compare homemade concoctions.

Grandpa always planted the navy beans on June 6th. That morning after breakfast a neighbor came over with a jug of elderberry wine and Grandpa opened up a bottle of his. They got to talking and exchanging stories, and several glasses later he looked at the clock and said, “Hey! I have beans to plant.”
The neighbor said, “I have errands to run.”
And off they went.

Grandpa hooked up the team of horses to the drill he used for planting beans and drove them out to the field.

My dad was only eight but he remembers my grandmother looking out the window later and saying,

“I wonder why your dad is riding on the drill…”

He usually walked behind it, but there he was, sitting atop it, swaying with the motion of the horses and singing at the top of his lungs.

The next morning after chores were done, Grandpa hitched the horses up to the drill and started out towards the field.

Grandma said, “Where’re you going, Raymond?”
“Out to plant beans,” he replied.
“I thought you did that yesterday.”
“I did,” he said. “But I forgot the seed.”

It is fitting that I should close with Roberta at the Growing with Science blog . She gives us the walnut tree. I'd forgotten how beautiful this tree is. Once again, an example, I think, of a tree we take for granted. Thanks, Roberta, for reminding us of the walnut tree!

The August 1 edition of The Festival of the Trees will be at Growing With Science Blog
Theme: Trees Through a Child's Eyes
Send to: growingwithscience [at] gmail.com
Deadline: July 29

That’s all folks. I have enjoyed reading and compiling all the entries. I learned so much myself, I hope you have all gained something too. If I've made any mistakes or left anyone out, please contact me and I will right any wrongs immediately! Whew. I want to thank everyone who participated and helped make this a success.

Thank you all for reading. Happy Heat Moon!

For The Small People

2010-06-22T20:35:00.000-07:00

Firefly,
firefly,
fire
fly for me.
Pelican,
brown pelican
of the Gulf Coast pelicans,
(you were a postcard pelican)
preen once more for me.
BP CEO sail your yacht
on a pristine sea.
For me.

Summer Solstice and a Writer's Stew

2010-06-21T13:29:00.001-07:00

We farmers are always stewing over something. Right now it's lack of rain. We await the rain with the patience of fishermen. While we wait, we water the fledgling asparagus ferns with a hose in hopes that one day we'll have a beautiful asparagus bed. We water the tomatoes and the rest of the nightshades, we douse the broccoli, melons and lettuce.

We do our best, but well water is not rain water and irrigated vegetables do not have the flavor and nutrients of those watered from heaven. Something about the rain and the nitrogen and ozone it picks up on its way through the atmosphere makes all the difference. Ever do a taste test between a Michigan strawberry and a California one grown and irrigated in the Central Valley? Such a poor imposter that. But we've run the soaker hoses because the promised rain has alluded us for two weeks running. It goes around Deanville Mountain to the north. It goes off into Lake Huron to the east. It rains to the south of us and to the west of us. Enough, you say! Enough. OK.

I'm keeping this short, though my June contributions have been paltry. I'm saving my energy for a slam dunk Festival of the Trees at the end of the month. You have until June 28th to post your entry and send me the link. I'd like to thank Tricia O'Brien for this captivating teaser and mention of the Festival. Also, thanks, Tricia, for the Pertinent Posts Award!

I have not been very prolific of late so it's very consoling to be told I'm pertinent! Not to be confused with impertinent. Isn't it interesting how two words can be so similar in spelling and pronunciation yet so dissimilar in meaning?

(Warning.... I feel a tangent coming on.)

I think it is impertinent of agents to say they are too busy to reply to everyone who queries, that they can only be bothered to reply to those queries that interest them. Of course we writers are supposed to be patient and understanding. Am I being contrary to call that impolite? How do we know our email was ever received if we never hear back? So I have something else to stew about too. Enough, you say. Go to bed, Yvonne, and you’ll feel better in the morning.

OK. But first I'm stepping out on the porch to watch the fireflys as they try to attract a mate. Good night, happy hunting and a soulful Summer Solstice to all.

Festival of the Trees (call for submissions)

2010-06-11T07:04:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to announce that I will be hosting the 49th Festival of the Trees.

I am now taking submissions for the July festival. Please check here for submission guidelines, the history behind the festival, and July's theme. There is a contact form on the main site, or you can email me your link. I know there is a lot of talent out there, and I look forward to your entries, whether it be poem, flash fiction, photo, painting, haiku, etc. All mediums are welcome. Don't leave me standing alone like the last elm in North America.

The current festival is being hosted by Casey Harn so make sure you check that one out while you're at it.

Lets turn our attention away from war and oil spills and the destruction wrought by man and have some tree love.

(photo courtesy of Deviant Art)

Ahhh, trees . . . big, small, scraggly and knarled, or majestic and stalwart, they do their part in keeping the lid on a steaming planet.

I'll see you in the woods, twenty rods beyond the brush pile in a clearing by the creek, short of the bee hives. Don't disturb the bees, just send me your stuff!

The red ones are theirs and the green ones are ours

2010-06-07T04:48:00.000-07:00

I have a friend whose father was an explosive specialist in Vietnam during the Tet offensive. He was an engineer and walked point. He broke his tailbone jumping into a ditch. He was testing the terrain.

He is still in therapy for Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. He couldn’t hold a job because he was too explosive. If anyone touched him he would go crazy, fighting all the time, still fighting.

My friend says his father hates the 4th of July. The fireworks become tracers. “The red ones are theirs,” he told him. “And the green ones are ours.” It’s scary having a father like that.

He told me a story. He and his brother were spending the weekend at a cottage in the woods with their father when he found him inside, staring at a wall. He asked him what was wrong and his father said he was trying to remember the name of the corpsman who patched him up. He could see his face but couldn’t remember his name. He tried all weekend to remember that name. He wasn’t really at the cottage in the woods that weekend. He was sorting the red ones from the greens ones. He was looking for a friend.

He wouldn’t let his sons go in the service. He told them they could do anything but that.

I would pack my son off to Canada or further before I would let him be taken or coerced or bribed, whatever you want to call it when they dangle education, bonues and promises of honor and esteem in front of wondering eyes. I would pack him some cookies and peaches, blankets and sheets, candles, soap and towels. I would wish him music and books and easy nights and happy days. Can you pack a box of happiness? What would it cost to mail a box of happiness, return receipt requested?

Underground

2010-06-03T05:11:00.000-07:00

The Literary Lab is running a new contest, Notes From Underground. It is the perfect contest for the crazy writer in you. Crazy and wonderful. Anything underground is intriguing to me, and this more so because of the obvious reference to a particular Russian writer (at least I found the title so). I have a few smouldering ideas I can dredge up and expound upon, and I bet you do too. Click on their link for more details and then grab this cool image for your sidebar.

You have most of the summer to come up with something intriguing enough to capture thir attention.

In the meantime, Suzanne Hayze and Amanda Bonilla have started a new joint blog, Writing Out The Angst. They helped each other and signed their agents within two months of each other and now they're offering to help all of us. To kick things off they are offering query critiques to a few lucky followers. But beyond that, their new blog is writer friendly and chock full of agent information.

The Roman writer and statesman Seneca said "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."

Bloggers From Around The World

2010-05-31T04:32:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day is special to Americans and usually spent close to home with friends and family at picnics and parades, as we remember those who came before, but first I would like to take you on a little world view whirlwind. Starting off relatively close to home, I'd like to introduce Helen Ginger, writer and freelance novel editor extraordinaire who writes a great interactive blog at Straight From Hel . Helen recently passed the Sunshine Award to me.

As I understand it, this award is passed on to five followers who bring a ray of sunshine to your blog. That would include ALL of you who follow and/or comment here but I'd like to follow Helen's example and award it to five new followers. Gabriela Abalo who lives in Lusaka, Zambia and blogs at Embracing Who We Are, gives us a different perspective from a faraway land. Suzanne Casamento at Question of the Day has my vote for the most unique blog with her thought-provoking questions. Jo Schaffer at Shoveling in a Jo Storm has had a lifelong love affair with books. Read her amazing "life list". Cynthia Reese, who not only writes romance, but Southern Style Superromance, blogs at her self-proclaimed undisciplined blog, and finally, my newest follower, Julie Musil, who just posted a moving tribute to veterans.

And then there is Mary Anne Gruen who lives in the Adirondacks and writes at Starlight Blog . Mary Anne just made me her singular recipient of the Blogger BFF Award and paid me the most wonderful compliment at the same time. Mary Anne, you rock! I just love these two little girls sharing a drink.
(Two little novelists in the making, don't you think?) Sometimes it is nice to be singled out. Thank you Mary Anne. I am going to follow your example also, because I like the idea of "one". I would like to bestow my BFF Award on Annie who blogs at Wine and Words She writes amazing poetry and is one of my most frequent commenters, and you all know how much needy writers need reinforcement. As an example of her powerful poetry, check out this. Thanks Annie for following me.

Finally Al at Publish or Perish tagged me a couple of weeks ago. Al shares amazing "piccies" from Down Under on his blog. If I never make it to Australia, at least I'll have Al's piccies. Check him out if you haven't already done so.

In this game of tag, one must answer the following five questions five times and then tag five people. I'm "it" and having procrastinated long enough, here goes:

Question 1 - Where were you five years ago?

Living in a little cottage on a hill of sand.
Painting the flag pole with my father.
Writing on an old desktop computer and saving my words on floppy disks.
Spending a weekend by myself at a friend's cottage on a lake with my manuscript spread out in beautiful disarray, listening for the loons and counting water lilies.
Unpublished.

Question 2 - Where would you like to be five years from now?

Published.
Visiting a Gulf of Mexico free of oil rigs.
Writing full time and growing clean vegetables for healthy people.
Repainting my father’s flag pole. With my father.
Spending a weekend at the cottage on the lake.

Question 3 - What is (was) on your to do list today?

Weed the vegetables and pray for rain
Call my son to wish him a happy birthday
Send out a query letter and raise a flag.
Comb my hair and scrub my nails.
Lay a bunch of irises on my grandparent's grave.

Question 4 - What 5 snacks do you enjoy?

Peanut butter and chocolate ice cream
Nuts
Michigan blueberries
Michigan strawberries
Michigan Duchess apples

Question 5 - What would you do if you were a billionaire?

Gather the best minds in the world together to figure out a way to plug the BP oil well.
Use my money and influence to get the rigs out of our coastal waters and BP out of America.
Open an independent bookstore and sell fair trade coffee.
Work to preserve farmland and educate kids about where their food comes from.
Rest.

I tag five very special bloggers:
Talli, my blogging friend from London has has a book coming out in 2011!
Liza Carens Salerno, the amazing author of Middle Passages.
Samuel who is simply fabulous with spot-on advice in his daily pep for writers. IN EVERY POST!
Tricia, one of my oldest blogging buds. A must-read blogger.
Carolina, who only asks that you take off your shoes before you enter here.
Amy at She Writes who has a way with words not often found in today's fast-paced world.

Oops! That's six. What was that rule about rules....

If you haven't yet checked them out, I highly recommend that you do so. Happy Memorial Day to all. Raise a flag. Whichever one is in your heart. I have to get started on my "to do" list.

The Clean Ground

2010-05-26T04:04:00.000-07:00

When I leave the pavement with a jolt
I leave what I have for what I know,
for the gravel roads of home that run past
tangled fencerows where the only gaps
are where elms once stood.

I cross the ditch which becomes a torrent in spring
and drive past gnarled oaks and lilacs that bloom on old wood
and try to remember why I left.

The pond lies at the lowest point on the farm
with banks of waving cattails.
Two months past summer solstice…
it’s only half full. A new dock straddles dry ground
because the drought persists.
Clouds hurry overhead.
They neither darken nor slow though we watch.

Dust coats the Queen Anne’s lace
and Ice Age boulders that lie scattered along the fence,
smooth and broad as shoulders.
Bobolinks flirt with each other and the pheasants have returned,
waving mulberry plumage above the grass like ladies with parasols.
Pesticides had thinned them rare but now the ground is clean.
There are worse things than drought.

I saw an eagle yesterday.
He was young because his head was dark.
Eagles don’t often crowd the hawks, but there he sat
atop the ageless oak, surveying the dryness.
Because this is a better place than some.