Feral Mom, Feral Writer

AROHO Speaks, Writer to Writer Interview with Lisa Lutwyche

2012-01-27T13:02:00.000-08:00

Lisa Lutwyche

Here's yet another A Room of Her Own Foundation Summer 2011 Retreat Interview; I know we can't all get away for a retreat (airfare, child-care, time away from the spouse/family, work, the cat, the dog, the novel manuscript, you name it).

Even though I was there at Ghost Ranch, I hate to say I missed out on Lisa’s Desert Delight Workshop (when I finally heeded our retreat organizer's advice to rest, to pace the inflowing surges of ideas about writing, hiding out for a few moments on the mesa that day). But I love that I get a mini-harvest here with Lisa anyway as she describes the cross-over between painting and writing. I hope to get the chance to work with her at one of AROHO’s future retreats.

Looking back on your history teaching night creative writing and watercolor courses, did the two disciplines/genres ever cross-pollinate in your classroom? Do you teach both watercolor and creative writing in one class as well? Can you give those of us “closet painter/writers” an example of an exercise we might use?

Interestingly, the two genres did work with each other, although never as a class taught specifically combining the two. I’ve often said that poetry is very much like watercolor in terms of brevity, commitment (you can’t really erase watercolor; it’s a staining process) and learning to love the “accident.” When I sit down to write a poem, I often approach it as a watercolor “wash,” a quick brushstroke of words used to capture an impression, whether it’s a visual or an emotional impression (or both). When I did the workshop at AROHO, I had the artists/writers look around and paint what they saw, then use the “watercolor words” to write a painterly piece of writing about it. That might make a good exercise. In fact, the first poem I ever wrote (that wasn’t for a school assignment) was a visual impression because I didn’t have my paints with me! Read more here.

I followed up with a bonus question here... (an exclusive additional fragment for my Feral Mom readers). I asked Lisa "What do you mean by "watercolor words?" And here's the poetry of her answer:

As for the "Watercolor Words," we used color words from watercolor sets, but we also used fruit words and fabric words and words from nature, all of which make their way onto paintboxes and colored pencils.

Think of this sort of thing:

A canteloupe sky, an alizarin crimson sunrise, a celadon sea, a sienna field, or distant cobalt hills.

It's just a deeper way of thinking of colors, and a good way to describe even moods.

Beautiful, Lisa. Thank you! Now I really can't wait to work with you....

Announcing Mother Writer Mentor: Practical Tips for Writing Moms

2012-01-17T12:34:00.000-08:00

I’m very excited to announce a sister site to the literary e-zine The Fertile Source called Mother, Writer, Mentor: Practical tips for Writing Moms.

This project has long personal roots reaching back to the year my second son was born. Fridays, thanks to the support of my father and his wife, were the day I got to sneak away and maintain my secret life as a writer over at Coffee Catz in Sebastopol. Owner Debbie, while sweeping the crumbs out from under my feet, would stop and ask how the babies were, smile, and listen to my dreams of pursing my writing.

Those Fridays (writing--when I wasn’t catching up with Debbie) along with my subscription to Poets and Writers kept me sane; I’d scope out the very back section where P&W lists specific calls for entries using the deadlines to create new work. Fresh from a disorienting experience with a midwife-attended-birth, I came across an ad for birth story essays. I wrote an essay and fired it off into the void.

The editor took it; some time elapsed between then and the actual publication of the book. I got cold feet; the feminist in me wondered how I could publish an essay that not only touched on date rape, but shed midwifery in a negative light. I retracted the essay. But the editor called me one afternoon. What could I stand to edit out so I could live with it in print? she asked. And we spent the better portion of an hour salvaging the essay.

I remember getting off the phone and thinking how unusual, and lovely, it was to have an extra set of compassionate eyes right where I was blind and that planted the seed for me to imagine a writing life in which I worked with other like minded individuals or co-collaborators to realize my professional writing goals.

Several years later, after helping promote the birth anthology (Labor Pains and Birth Stories), working side by side with that editor (maybe you’ve guessed by now, I’m speaking here of Jessica Powers, founder of Catalyst Book Press), it was easy for me to say yes when Jess asked if I’d like to come on board as poetry editor at The Fertile Source.

Since then, we’ve had number of ideas up our sleeves about how the world could stand to be a friendlier place for writing moms. Mostly questions. Like why isn’t there childcare offered at most writing conferences? Or scholarships that cover childcare? Or writing retreats for families? We also liked the idea of fledged mentors (children no longer in diapers, though maybe still underfoot, or in college or beyond) offering their support to new mothers.

These were some of the conversations behind the desire to create Mother, Writer, Mentor. While we develop the resource portion of the site, and in keeping with a vision of the kind of teaching lives we’d like to have (working with writing moms) we’ll each be offering a course this spring (from yours truly: To the Cradle and Beyond: Excavating and Writing the Poetry of Motherhood and from Jess: Sexy Mommy Stories: Writing Romance Back into Motherhood).

I would love it if you’d consider guest posting for us down the road or sharing your ideas about how we can offer a resource or two for the writing mothers in your life. Jess wrote last week about the changes to writing life since the birth of her son; I took over this week to look at writing while traveling with kids, dog in tow.

I Write, I Mother

I’ve posted at Feral Mom, Feral Writer for five years now, blogging a random act of desperation I took so I’d have a writing deadline when I was nursing my third child and wondering if I’d ever get back the brain-cells that seemed to be siphoned out with the breast milk. But I’m seriously considering a dog blog: Thorn In My Side: Not Your Usual Dog Lover’s Blog. Because I both love and can’t stand the fact that having launched all three children (the youngest started kindergarten this fall), I suddenly have a fourth. She’s the runt of the litter, a beautiful, troublesome Siberian Husky my husband brought home to protect our family for the times he has to work away from us.

I’m walking the black borealis of the glittering diamonds of sand, signature of last night’s rhythmic retreat of the tide, wishing mother earth were not mere metaphor but an actual entity with the power to keep my three children alive for the duration of this week’s vacation in San Diego. My husband works til five, so solo I’m tracking three bobbing black dots, the chinned hoods of our children, one child boardless, drifting further out, a little in trouble I realize as I walk towards the surf zone dragging the reluctant Husky, the lifeguard pulling up behind me, megaphone chirping as he orders my flailing eight year old to stay where he can stand because of the rip tide.

Read more here.

AROHO Speaks: Writer to Writer, An Interview with Catherine Shubert

2012-01-14T15:40:00.000-08:00

Catherine Shubert

In an effort to share the bounty of last summer’s AROHO (A Room of Her Own Foundation) retreat, I will continue the cross-posting of interviews with retreat participants; last month I had the chance to catch up with writer, teacher, study abroad student Catherine Shubert.

We understand you attended Oxford University as a study abroad student—any desire to tell us about that experience and how it translated into your writing? Does your work teaching Spanish in the Teach For America program find its way into your writing as well?

At Oxford, I had 1-2 tutorials for an hour or two each week, which were conducted one-on-one with an advanced literary scholar. I presented an 8-10 essay for each tutorial, and in the days leading up to the tutorial, I was meant to be reading, researching, and crafting my writing. I was on my own in the stacks, making sense of literature and ideas for myself. This was vastly different from the lecture-group discussion experience at universities in the States, so it was a difficult but worthwhile adjustment. All in all, it forced me to tackle the challenge of developing my own voice, thereby making me a better writer. I think as a woman it was an especially strengthening experience for me, since Oxford has historically been a male-dominated institution. Read more here.

Blast Furnace Live with Poem for Jack Foco

2012-01-12T00:03:00.000-08:00

Painting by Jack Foco

The autumn issue of Blast Furnace has arrived; poems circle a posse of familiars from Morgan Le Fey, Pushkin, librarians, King Kong and St Francis to Icarus, Snow White, and Eve, all thanks to editor/publisher Rebecca Clever.

An additional poem for a painter I knew and loved in Iowa City joins this mostly immortal line-up; I’m pleased to have the poem “Nine days before he died, the crows came at dawn” for Jack, painter, appearing at the comet’s end of the issue as well.

This one goes out to those of us who knew and loved Jack all those Midwest afternoons out at the Art Farm…

Notes on Jack from an earlier post can be read here.

Since posting the above text, I've heard from a number of my Iowa City friends. I asked Laurie if I could post the poem she wrote about Jack as well. I would love to hear from anyone else from our heartland time--if you have any artwork or writing you'd like to post in tribute to Jack, please contact me.

Anticipating the Afterlife by Laurie Klemme

In memory of Jack Foco
March 13, 1950-November 10, 1998

On a warm day, for the pleasure of watching a bird
spread his wings against an autumn sky, a warm day, a slight
breeze, not much, his easy glide, white on a blue field
deep as the moment we lived in this afternoon. Jack, Ali, and I, alive
in this one moment, alive in one another’s time,

For the privilege of watching the bird, feeling
the breeze, the new silage in even rows stretching the landscape
over one of the hills he’s painted. We go in
to see his paintings. He enjoys this, us
here, changing the light, picking the features we like
best, the paintings we like best.
They’ve begun to resemble each other---a new focus, things
have lost their meaning,

An emerging preoccupation
with the field,

The white bird, gliding above it,
gone.

... this morning. He thought it was going to be
this morning that the sides met, a moment lifted him
from him, if that’s what’s next. And we talked at
what is next, the dream about the Light, the meaning
of Honesty, the freedom it is, everything okay.

I thought of Dante and reality’s authority.

He held his daughter’s hand.

Other poems by Laurie Klemme can be read here.

Phantom Narratives and the Reel Picture

2012-01-03T23:58:00.000-08:00

Photo by Robyn Beattie

…and I don’t meant zombie narratives, though my husband has a stellar idea for one of his own and is halfway through Volume 2 of The Walking Dead. Nor will I be addressing the Phantom of the Opera. I’m talking instead about the subterranean corridors one paces when the imagination gets fired by the unchecked reptilian force of jealousy, as mine erroneously was this past month.

One of the exquisite metaphors for projected infidelity resides in this cinematic jewel from the film Sylvia (the version directed by Christine Jeffs, starring Gwyneth Paltrow as the poet and the devilishly handsome, pre-Bond, pre Dragon Tattoo Daniel Craig as the other poet, Hughes). Sylvia sits alone in a room partitioned by a piece of mottled glass behind which Hughes and a female friend wash dinner dishes.

As the pair behind glass pass back and forth, you see what Sylvia sees: their bodies reduced to mottled chunks of color morphing out of their borders, overlapping, merging. Actually, you see Sylvia’s fear: where does her husband end and the woman begin? Was the affair inevitable, already ignited, or did the intensity of Sylvia’s gaze, and later, her jealousy, goad Hughes into the woman’s arms?

In good company with many a girl poet of my generation, I remember (at the naïve age of 19) stepping out of the pristine order of Plath’s poetry and circling her life, which really meant hunting Ted, blaming Ted, for Sylvia’s destruction; if only he’d been faithful, if only he hadn’t burned her journals, think what else she’d have written, as if Sylvia didn't have any vulnerabilities or failures, as if she belonged to all of us, women poets in particular, as if I personally knew, an attitude with an attendant voyeuristic hovering in the couple’s collective corona replete with light and distortions meant only for them.

Fast forward ten years: as a new mother, watching the film, I no longer could side with Sylvia. As the camera pulled up towards the ceiling over the cribs of her children, the window ajar to allow air, I folded with grief on their behalf, the image of my infant and toddler at home with their father calling up an unreasonable desperation to return home to them.

With an additional decade of motherhood behind me, I know none of us can tease apart the multiple truths wrapped around another human being’s fate. Best to transmute one’s ire at the young poet husband into an inquiry of the inadequacies of the human fabric we’ve woven that fails to support both women and men in their individual quests (raising a family and trying to fulfill both the wife and the husband’s life dreams, wether poet, soldier, diva, carpenter, farmer, priest). Better yet, to let Sylvia go, in peace, unsolved.

Other writers have done a much finer job of sorting through the psychological debris of how she came to no longer write poems or raise her children, including April Bernard, in her precise and lovely essay My Plath Problem (from By Herself, Women Reclaim Poetry, edited by Molly McQuade).

I agree with Bernard when she writes, “It is naïve to think that we can unlearn the biography and read the poems free from the pollution of context. But my hope is that by dragging myself, (and you, reader) through the maze of biography, we will have found ‘the best way out,’ which, as Robert Frost had it, ‘is always through.’” Bernard includes in the heart of her essay two reveries playing with the same sets of facts about Sylvia to create a Good Sylvia and a Bad Sylvia fairytale which lets us simultaneously err on the extreme end of two polar ways of perceiving Plath’s plight.

And still, here as I make my peace with Plath, I willl still say that if you are female, writing, attracted to men, considering mothering or finding yourself a mother in a marriage, you will perhaps at some point feel there’s something to be gained by examining Sylvia’s story. What if your lover, while courting you to core growth, fails in the end to alchemize your potential, but stills it somehow, stills you, or helps you on your way to still yourself? Or turn it around, what if you do the same to your lover, or worse, to yourself?

How complicated we are….

Detail from plate 133, Jung's Red Book

And fragmented on our way to eventual wholeness. I’m thinking of the facets of face from one of the color plates in Jung’s Red Book. Tiny blue and pinkish white tiles make up a face, they tilt towards various centers, say the eyes, for two.
I’m thinking too of “will”--how we can be pulled by the will of others in a kind of centrifugal mirror, each living thing around us pulling energy from us, that we simultaneously emanate our own energy and pull in the energy of others, bodily vortices.

So it matters—to choose a life mate carefully, to commit to stewardship of oneself, to respect the dance of opening and closing the borders of one’s mind as a writer...giving what one can of oneself while passing through. To give one-self a few quiet moments of “stop” for truce, a gap, long enough for integration, for the energies of fear and reptile to recede.

In one such gap, I shed the month’s grip of jealousy (mine) and its attendant phantom narratives (mercifully, unlike as was the case for Sylvia, absolutely unfounded). Which left me free to enjoy the family and the husband I actually possess.

When I woke, returned more or less, it was to a moment in the early dark of winter, driving the curves of Pocket Canyon, a pomegranate in a gingerbread man bag tied with a red ribbon to hand off, my ten year old ballerina heading (with a backpack full of Monday’s homework and a ball of yarn skewered with wooden knitting needles) towards another ten year old ballerina racing expectantly down the moss covered steps with a smile on her face.

I grabbed my girl’s arm and battled a few yards of scarf to find her warm cheek, frantic to plant a last kiss. Which she tolerated. Without a backward glance, she pulled her arm out of my hand, scrambling up the three flights of stairs to a house on the side of a hill in the sleepy little town of Guerneville. “We’ll take good care of her,” my friend promises, that knowing glance passing between us. A little quiet at our home, a sacrifice of trust to let my girl go, just for one night, and here I am missing her already as she sidles away.

At home, my husband’s drawing the outdoor bath, adding wood to the cast iron stove that sits on the stone patio beneath the redwoods. When he heard about the sleepover, he said, “Do you have to go now? I just fired this up for us…” And I’d promised to be back in half an hour, the boys shooting their pellet guns off the deck at the largest of the pumpkins listing to one side, still holding shape despite its molding innards, the Husky nipping at the kitten’s back.

There’s yet Pinot and vanilla ice cream to buy, so I drive the length of Main Street making a mental note of where I’ll do my last minute shopping far from the mall crowds: Hemp and Chocolate for truffles, River Reader for a book and calendar or two, Guerneville 5 and Dime where the woman behind the counter last time made other customers wait while my daughter counted out her change from her piggy bank, proclaiming with a smile, “Honey, you’ll use math for the rest of your life. You take your time, go ahead.”

My boys are only a fifteen minute drive away. There’s nowhere else I want to be, but there, now, as I rush out of the fluorescent light of Safeway, this last task between stars and wine and heat…can’t wait, can’t wait to sink down into the hot lavender water, wrestle my husband’s thighs for a spot, the wet stone of the patio glittering from tub to stove, stars visible in the tree canopy, three quarter moon casting its blue light further past the ring of our fires’ light onto the road descending from the ridge above us.

Photography of Robyn Beattie: http://www.robynbeattie.com/

Transformative Blogging

2011-12-21T11:05:00.000-08:00

Just a note to say I still have room for participants in my Transformative Blogging class, open to those hesitant bloggers-to-be wishing for a roadmap to help them proceed, or for those already blogging, this course promises to help set intentions and recalibrate blogging focus.
The course is offered through Story Circle Network. Outline and full details can be read here: Transformative Blogging.

Come out, come out and play...we have a beautiful group assembling already.

AROHO Speaks, Writer to Writer: Interview with Maura MacNeil

2011-12-14T10:46:00.000-08:00

Maura McNeil

I'm proud to cross-post this interview with Summer 2011 AROHO Retreat writer Maura MacNeil (conducted by Barbara Ann Yoder). I decided to jump in and give you a quick glance mid-interview. I continue to be moved by the tremendous strength and resilience of the women gathered for the retreat; it seems many of us crossed intense barriers (emotional, spiritual, physical) in order to perservere and attend the conference.

Is there one specific moment or event at the retreat that sparked an insight or shift in how you perceive either your work or yourself as a writer?

During the retreat I recognized that the fear I carried with me as a woman writer in the context of tackling difficult subject matter, or fearing judgment from others—all that baggage that we tend to carry around as writers that keeps us from writing what we are meant to write—is part of what Marilynne Robinson spoke of as a categorical way we are taught to think. While I listened to her words I suddenly understood that I had the power to break that spell. The “deeper experience hidden from the categorical ways we are taught to think” that Marilynne spoke to was a space I suddenly felt the courage to enter because I was surrounded by women who understood those words just as I did.

I arrived at the retreat having just lost my husband who died quite suddenly in June, so I was raw with grief. But at the same time I was in an emotional space where I was completely open to the authentic creative energy of AROHO women and to the possibility that I might be able to frame a new perspective on my writing life in this foreign land of widowhood where all that was “familiar” was suddenly erased.

Over the past decade or so, even though I was writing and publishing and editing, I felt as though my life had become increasingly compartmentalized into my “life as writer” and my “other life” that was filled with obligations that constantly tugged me away from being present in my creative life. I was increasingly distracted. When Marilynne told us that we should make ourselves into someone we might enjoy being with, that we should give ourselves a creative life that as writers we want to live, her words were like an alarm going off, and I knew that something very important was happening to my sense of myself as a woman writer.
More here.

Towards Mapping Female Geographies

2011-12-10T12:59:00.000-08:00

Photo by Robyn Beattie

I am pleased to announce a short-short up on-line at In Her Place, titled, "Reverie for The Girl at Gabe’s Bar, downtown Iowa City , where the accordian player belts out, in Anglo-Spanish, his love song," http://inherplace.org/stories/tania-pryputniewicz/reverie-for-the-girl-at-gabes-bar/

This fictive rumination of mine sought to answer the following question posed by In Her Place editor-in-chief Marci Daniels and co-conspirator Jessica Erica Hahn in their call for submissions:

In what ways does being female affect one’s sense of place, placement, and/or (dis)location?

A rich, viable question, worth I think, a life-time's scrutiny.

Robyn's images can be viewed on her site: http://www.robynbeattie.com/

Deciphering the Siren: Premature Gifts, Luminaries, and Transformative Blogging

2011-12-05T11:15:00.000-08:00

Detail from Mermaid, Howard Pyle

Jung’s wife, Emma, wrote that as a symbol, the mermaid wants to "entangle" us in "real relationships." She drags the man underwater not always to drown him, but sometimes to bathe him in the waters of life. Mermaids: Nymphs of the Sea, Aurum Press, Text by Theodore Gachot, Photography by Leah Demchick

I crept away early on Sunday, needing time away.

Startling, the pain of leaving my youngest child behind, his sweet, sweat-tufted hair, as he lay in his comforter. Last night as we fell asleep, he said he wanted to make me an early birthday present (months away), could I guess what letter it started with…You don’t have to tell me, I said, but stopped, overcome by his absolute need to cinch the giving in case something were to eclipse it…He blurts, it starts with f…no…I mean r…Roses!

I kiss his cheek as I’d promised, whisper, I’m going, but not loud enough to wake him, I know better. I climb the ladder to my daughter’s loft bed, her kitten batting at my ankles in a plea for wet food since I’m the feeder of all creatures under our roof. This kiss elicits a sleepy, bye mom. Last, the big bed, where husband, middle child, and the Husky snore, paws and shins churned in the electric blanket. I linger with a fraction of regret, listening to the familiar sheen of breathing I so love, a shield for my childhood’s fear of the dark.

I’m only driving an hour away to meet a friend to talk poetry over coffee—yet I hesitate again...wish to burrow down, drift back to sleep, rise late in the morning and walk the dog, leashed, so she doesn’t trigger the ferals up the trunks of the redwoods as will be their fate when my husband leaves the door ajar for the dog to come and go. To stay, grind the coffee beans, compose slow emails between scrambling eggs…But if I don’t get away, the other half of me suffers.

Under the supernaturally gorgeous 7 am skies full of gunmetal clouds, the black pavement of the road sparkles, slick, split by the yellow divider line mimicking the tangerine gold of the leaves as the muted grey of a mottled pair of white horses in the mist and the dark tributaries of the oaks fringed with velvet moss hurtle past. A slight rain descends; I’m near tears, confused by an ancient fear of losing children mingled with the urge to stop, get out, and ride one of the horses into the hills.

Likely the grief’s more triggered by this brilliance of nature and the fact that I’m a two-step away from summer’s cornucopia of nested stress. Events in my thirteen year-old marriage took most of my attention, though, the degree to which I’ve been devastated by implied actions on my husband’s part--the responsibility for my reaction--rests solely with me. A state of truce graces me for now, thanks to the net of helpers mirroring back to me ways I might better appreciate what I have, strive to place things in context, become a better person.

The need for privacy, though, extinguished any desire to write here with my usual candor. In the meantime, I’ve taken a fiendish delight in deciphering the siren: reading about mermaids, mermen, Emma Jung, in my attempts to explore the volatile/vulnerable conditions the bound circle marriage attempts to make of our desires and attractions. How we transform when we run out of air and storm the sea’s surface, claim our stake in the living, forced by circumstance to choose to be here. Through such trials comes the gift of incarnating more deeply, or at least that’s what I decided.

But let me also acknowledge the luminaries…like the dear couple, both Taiko drummers, inviting my family to a gathering the very day after my husband and I had it out (unbeknownst to them, of course). We left our house, the air heavy with the prior nights’ accusations and revelations, to drive out into the country to a home high on a hill overlooking Mt. Tamalpais. Legs planted in the vibrant green grass, our friends, married as long as my husband and I, took their position on either side of an oblong drum.

She with her long black red tinged hair, arms windmilling in gentle but powerful circles, knees turning in tandem as she poised to strike the drum. Her husband, with legs in warrior stance, connecting in slow, fierce strikes on the opposite side, the deep amber of his voice matching her softer but equally firm arc of song. In the background, our sons circled the lawn, hunting geckos in the stones rimming the hill, my daughter sprawled between my husband and I on the damp grass.

Though unable to set aside its sense of broken trust, the other half of my heart blossomed with possibility. Here, I translated, pure, from our friends, is what a couple in love is capable of creating. In the wake of their secure and fearless drumming, I took refuge from my worst fears about our marriage.

As we drove home, my thoughts ranged over the events of the last couple of years, coming to rest on the time, when, like my younger son, I couldn’t wait to give a gift. Late November, still concerned about my husband’s ability to recover from heart surgery, I’d painted him a mug: purple trident on one side, a crown and a heart in its middle, the first initial of his name along the handle, waves curling the cup’s rim, a second, secret heart at the bottom of the cup on the inside. Three weeks before Christmas, I gave it to him, here, I said, I just wanted you to have this now…and he took it…I didn’t say in case you die before Christmas….but I thought it, in fear.

In the rearview mirror, I see my youngest son drifting to sleep, his head resting on my daughter's shoulder. I wonder aloud to my husband, how many a wife, entering marriage, hasn’t felt a bit like the little mermaid, trading her voice for legs? He’s adjusting his sunglasses, the other hand resting on my thigh. I say it more to myself than him, and don’t expect him to answer.

The rest goes on in my head. Mermaid turned land girl or not, as women we continue to plumb the watery, emotional, psychic depth of human possibility. I think backing away from that gift and not voicing its truths would be a great loss in any marriage. Maybe it takes nearly half a century to find one’s voice (my plight anyway, but better late than never). And though the little Mermaid evaporates in the morning to join her sisters in the air, I don’t think the prince has it any easier. Every man, like every woman, has his dark hours to survive.

Detail of Book Cover, Author Theodore Gachot
Image: C.E. Boutibonne, Sirenes, EDIMEDIA

Which leads me to close on this final meditation, also from the book my husband got for me in our first year of marriage, Mermaids, Nymphs of the Sea: “In tales of human-mermaid romance, the need to return to the water became an emblem of the distance between the sexes that could be bridged only through the cultivation of empathy—the relationship of two disparate parts working as a whole (Theodore Gachot)." May we mutually, male and female, “bathe one another in the waters of life” and fulfill our truer nature as luminaries, all.

One last note:

I’ll be teaching a 4 week course for Story Circle Network in January. I'm indebted to both Barbara Yoder and Marlene Samuels, members of the AROHO Speaks Interview Team, for inspiring me to apply to give on-line teaching a try, and Marlene again, for recommending Story Circle Network. (Here's a slice of their mission statement: "The Story Circle Network is dedicated to helping women share the stories of their lives and to raising public awareness of the importance of women's personal histories").

This marks a much anticipated next step in my plan to create for myself the teaching life I so desire. I would love it if you joined me, or passed this link on to friends, those cautious but curious about blogging as well as those veteran bloggers who want to pause, take stock, recalibrate. Read a detailed course description for Transformative Blogging.

Autumnal Update and AROHO Speaks, Writer to Writer: An Interview with Marcia Meier

2011-11-12T14:24:00.000-08:00

This hibernal season I feel a bit like a spider with multiple webs underway at once. I love my work as poetry editor at The Fertile Source, I love my work as part of AROHO's 2011 Summer Retreat Interview Team, I love cross-posting and chatting over at She Writes, and I also love blogging here as Feral Mom, Feral Writer. I have some new projects in the wings for the New Year, including preparing to provide content and moderate discussion at The Collaboration Hub as well as teaching a few on-line writing courses.

I'm busy at work on a Word Press website where I hope to centralize the various content from other sites where I spend a good deal of my writing life. And that will also allow me to slip Feral Mom back to its original seed intent: to bare the landscape of the beautiful challenge and gift of raising children while writing (in the company of other mother writers and artists). I'm also pleased to announce that a prose piece, "Reverie for the Girl at Gabe's, downtown Iowa City" was accepted for on-line publication by In Her place and should be posted before Christmas.

In the meantime, please enjoy this interview I conducted with Marcia Meier. I plan to write my next AROHO reading diary on Marcia's book, Navigating the Rough Waters of Today's Publishing World: Critical Advice for Writers from Industry Insiders (Quill Driver Books, 2010) and will post a link here for you shortly.

Marcia—you are in inspiration—visiting your home site, one sees that you are not only a Member of The Redroom , but you are also currently in a low-residency master of fine arts in creative writing program through Antioch University in Los Angeles. You also have time to give writing workshops while keeping a very active blog at your Willow Rock Writers website. How do you balance it all and what advice would you have for writers trying to build web presence?

Well, when everything is listed like that, I do wonder how I get it all done! I was a print journalist for 17 years before I turned to teaching and books, and I learned how to be very disciplined and organized during those years, so that helps a lot. I try to give myself time to write every day, and I also try to set aside certain days for specific tasks. I usually meet with clients on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. That leaves Mondays and Fridays (and Saturdays and Sundays) for writing, reading and master’s work. Read more....

"Poet Teacher Seeks World" Blog Launch and An Interview with Feral Mom, Feral Writer

2011-10-28T17:06:00.000-07:00

While still celebrating last summer’s A Room of Her Own Foundations retreat, I realize I failed to provide a link here to the interview my poet friend Lisa Rizzo graciously conducted with me—I hope you’ll check out the interview as a way to support her brand new blog, Poet Teacher Seeks World. Not only did I enjoy seeking out her out at breakfast, and sharing a flashlight up the darkened trail back to our rooms on the mesa, but I also managed to solicit a poem of hers for The Fertile Source that we soon realized I'd first heard her read some years ago at a Women on Writing Conference (and promptly solicited from her back then). And Lisa, the offer stands....

We (the four of us on the interview team: yours truly, Lisa Rizzo, Marlene Samuels, and Barbara Yoder) have since also cross-posted our interviews on the AROHO Speaks, Writer to Writer website, where over the course of the next year we plan to present interviews with as many of this summer’s 2011 retreatants as possible (in the spirit of harvesting insights and passing on a little practical wisdom and inspiration).

And I've missed the practice of the regular flow of postings at Feral Mom--I've been shocked quiet for the moment, but more on that later...life continues to catapault me past the comfort of my furthest growth ring (ready or not). I'm sure I won't be able to resist writing about it for long. Under which circumstances have you been shocked quiet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

AROHO, Synchronicity, and an Interview with Marlene B. Samuels

2011-10-18T16:41:00.000-07:00

Photo by Lisa Rizzo

When I applied to attend a Room of Her Own Foundation’s Summer 2011 Retreat for women writers, I did so because of the conference’s promise of bringing together a group of writers for an uncommon experience: every writer would present as a teacher, every writer would participate as a student. Drawn to this non-hierarchical setting, in which beginning as well as more established writers would mix without pretension, I took a deep breath, and applied.

I set myself the goal of reading work by as many of the attending writers as possible. On my initial working list of 49 authors, I located seven titles at our library. The first one I randomly grabbed to read was The Seamstress: A Memoir of Survival, by Sara Tuvel Bernstein with an afterward by her daughter, Marlene B. Samuels.

My relationship to the Holocaust started as a child when I felt empathically drawn, like many young girls, to Anne Frank, The Diary required reading for the“Girl’s Club” I joined with 3 other 10 year olds in Illinois. But the connection felt eerily deep and immediate.

At that time, I began to write poems fixated on the image of butterflies drawn by survivor children on camp walls (the images continued to haunt poems years later in graduate school and beyond). I have had vivid recurring dreams about the Holocaust over the course of my lifetime. Wether those dreams were simply a byproduct of dipping into the field of collective memory or wether they were past life experiences, I have had a connection I can’t explain (and I’m not sure that connection needs a frame).

My night time dream experiences merged with waking life the night I finished The Seamstress. I found the memoir simply and beautifully written, explicit and revelatory (I posted a mini-review here at She Writes). While drifting off to sleep that night, I had the physical sensation of opening in layers like a cocoon; the places on my shoulder blades where wings would be tingled, like wingbuds. A weight lifted out of my body at that moment, and I accepted the cellular metaphor as a gift.

I was not surprised, then, when I arrived at the airport to take a shuttle to Ghost Ranch for the AROHO retreat, and just before the doors closed, in stepped a vibrant, lively, black-haired woman, smartly dressed, who asked if she could sit next to me, did I mind, she was actually booked for the later shuttle, but she thought, what the heck, she’d made it in time and might as well get on this shuttle since there was room.

“I’m Tania,” I said, and “you are?”

“Marlene Samuels,” she replied with a familiar accent...back East? Chicago?, charming, settling in beside me. I was in awe—and our journey as friends began, ignited by a rich conversation about her mother’s book, The Seamstress, her role editing and reshaping it, the twenty plus years bringing it to the publishing table. That set the bar for the remainder of the retreat, and the synchronicities and connections burgeoned over the next ten days of the retreat. I am very honored to repost Marlene’s interview here. Marlene’s interview was conducted by Lisa Rizzo and originally appeared on both Lisa’s blog, Poet Teacher Seeks World and will appear shortly on the AROHO Speaks, Writer to Writer website.

AROHO Speaks, Writer to Writer: Interview with Marlene B. Samuels

Marlene B. Samuels

Thinking back to the 2011 AROHO retreat, can you tell us about an idea, exercise or conversation that had either an identifiable impact upon your writing habits or became a finished piece of writing or one in process?

There were so many incredible moments and conversations it’s really tough for me to isolate a single one but what did make a huge impact on me is the passion with which each woman approached her writing. I was moved by the observation that even the most accomplished participants still expressed some self-doubt. To me that was very refreshing!

It’s noteworthy that we all struggle with the importance of being perceived as serious writers. We each struggle to find that space and consistency for our writing but there’s no precise formula. Kate Gale’s comment – that we schedule the various responsibilities in our lives and meet our commitments yet fail to follow suit with our writing - that was especially poignant. All too often, women put others’ needs ahead of their own writing schedules as though somehow writing isn’t a legitimate use of their time.

Bhanu Kapil’s direct questioning of total strangers really influenced my own work. Her method of querying them as the means by which she could pursue her writing project encouraged me to begin a project I’d been stuck on for about two years. Until hearing Bhanu, I’d been unable to muster the nerve to approach strangers. She was a true inspiration as well!

Is there one specific moment or event at the retreat that sparked an insight or shift in how you perceive either your work or yourself as a writer?

Yes, the evening readings altered my self-perception. Reading my work helped me perceive myself more seriously and hence, as a professional writer instead of someone who’s reluctant to say, “I’m a writer,” in response to the question, “What do you do?” Before the retreat I felt like an imposter if I claimed to be a writer. Somehow, it seems that as women, we have a misperception that unless our writing appears on the New York Times bestseller list or in The New Yorker or is reviewed by Oprah, we can’t claim to be writers. It seems most of us struggle with that but - my gut feeling: it’s a much bigger issue for women.

Is there a specific woman writer who inspires/d you? If so, can you tell us something about why?

Tania Pryputniewicz was amazingly inspirational – the mere fact that she committed to attend in the face of her own doubts, that she demonstrated such a unique approach to her poetry, and that she gave such a unique and creative presentation to the entire group inspired me. She discussed the collaborative process, an approach to writing I’ve never really considered. It’s given me a new view into the creative process, almost like a child being given encouragement to draw outside of the lines.

Bridget Birdsall’s one-on-one spiritual consultation with me – something I was really suspicious of but also curious about – was great fun, not to mention that her insights were exceedingly encouraging. Her strength of character and her intuition are also reflected so honestly in her own writing. There are so many others but I’m guessing the space of this interview wouldn’t accommodate my rave reviews.

How would you describe your typical writing day?

I spend a lot of time in approach-avoidance activities, that time wasting stuff, as I try to get organized. When I was in graduate school we used to refer to that as “pencil sharpening”! I have a terrible time actually getting started on the writing process each day because I tend to take care of all my other responsibilities - phone calls, bills, whatever else distracts me. But if I don’t do that first thing then it’s very tough for me to stay focused.

Afternoon seems the best time for me, when I can spend two to four hours writing. I’ve noticed that just in the few weeks since I got home from the retreat, I’m much more committed to my writing time. It feels really good and that in itself is very reinforcing of my writing commitment. I’m certain it’s the result of embracing the concept that I really am a writer and it’s my legitimate real career.

Can you describe for us what you’re currently working on?

I’m actually working on three things, each in a different genre. I’m completing a short story collection that I’ve been working on for years entitled, The Mental Health Poster Child. It began as my memoir but has evolved as a sequel to my mother’s memoir, The Seamstress: A Memoir of Survival. After her death I rewrote and edited when Penguin Berkley agreed to publish it. In addition, I’m co-host of a culinary website and its blog, www.expendableedibles.com . Both are progressing toward an “ethnographic” sort of cookbook. My third project is a sociology book based upon interviews with baby-boom generation women. That project really draws upon my training as a serious research sociologist but incorporates my more recently honed passion for writing creative nonfiction.

Is there a specific question you’d have liked us to ask and if so, could you answer it?

Actually, yes! The question I’m surprised no one asked – one I personally asked many of women during the retreat, “What influenced you to attend the retreat?”

I’ve never been to a writers’ retreat before, only to writing workshops and conferences -courses at University of Iowa Summer Festival or University of Chicago Writers’ Studio, that sort of thing. I’d followed AROHO for many years; read about the retreats, and vacillated between wanting to apply yet worrying I’d be out of my league. After reading the bios of women who attended – a huge diversity, it was obvious that I needed to attend. I decided that, unlike workshops, what I needed most was emotional and spiritual support for my goals. That’s an often neglected component to being a productive and confident writer. At some point, writers need that kind of support and connectedness with other writers more than they need instruction in the writing process.

Marlene B. Samuels: I’m an independent research sociologist, writer, and instructor and teach research methodology and sociology. I earned a Ph.D. and M.A. from University of Chicago. My research focuses upon changing American demographics, adoption issues, and currently, decision-making during life transitions. My writing encompasses three genres: sociology, nonfiction, and food.

I co-authored The Seamstress, my mother’s Holocaust memoir, wrote an academic book about career success plus short stories, essays, and food articles. My writing has been published in Lilith Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, University of Iowa Summer Anthology, Story Circle Journal, Long Story Short and others.

Links:

Website: http://www.marlenesamuels.com/

Blog: http://marlenesamuels.blogspot.com/

Website: http://www.expendableedibles.com/

Blog: www.expendableedibles.com/blog

Mother Teresa Meets Lady Diana

2011-09-30T17:14:00.000-07:00

Photo by Robyn Beattie

I’ve had Mother Teresa on my mind ever since I discovered writer Liz Brennan four years ago. Liz keeps a jewel of a blog, each post a wisp of haiku length reflection, titled Perhaps, Maybe.

Liz is the primary reason I’ve been able to keep writing the last four years; we meet weekly to lend one another books and discuss drafts of our poems. Every once in awhile, I have the pleasure of reading Liz’s Mother Teresa prose poetry. A construct of Liz’s imagination, this alternate Mother Teresa struggles as a single mother, attempting to be saint of the mundane whether she’s surviving an exchange with a bad clerk at the post office, eating noodles from her take-out container while driving, or sprinting to intercept the meter maid.

In turn, I’ve subjected Liz to my drafts of She Dressed in a Hurry, for Lady Di (along with a number of other personae poems) until mercifully the poem was published at Salome Magazine and parked at The Mom Egg in its micro-movie version, leaving Liz free to move on to dissecting drafts of Nefertiti.

This summer, while attending A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Summer 2011 retreat for women writers, I had the opportunity to get closer than ever to Mother Teresa through Mary Johnson’s spiritual quest memoir, An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service, and an Authentic Life. Johnson, after serving 20 years as a Missionary of Charity, found reasons to leave the sisterhood. In Unquenchable Thirst, she lets us in behind the scenes with the real Mother Teresa.

Which brings me back to Liz Brennan’s Mother Teresa poems (one of which recently appeared in ZYZZYVA, hardcopy only, sorry--I'd love to give you a link to her poem). At one point in Unquenchable Thirst, Johnson describes a meeting between Lady Diana and Mother Teresa. Liz and I, with that hopeless kind of hyper-synaptic, associative observation that tends to dog writers, were tickled the subjects of our individual poems, Lady Diana, and Mother Teresa, met between the covers of Mary’s book, in real time, once upon a time, not so long ago.

On a more serious note, my review of Unquenchable Thirst appears here on the AROHO Speaks website, as well as on Mary Johnson's site where she hosts a salon and invites us all to join a thriving discussion focused on the book (with changing topics, most recently, on faith and sexuality).

AROHO Speaks, Writer to Writer: Interview with Barbara Ann Yoder

2011-09-27T13:04:00.000-07:00

Barbara Yoder, photo by Michelle Wing

A Room of Her Own Foundation's Summer 2011 Retreat at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico proved to be a powerful and inspiring gathering of 90 women. I am excited to be part of an interview team with the primary goal of sharing, as best we can-- via interview--highlights from the retreat, writer to writer. I rubbed shoulders with Barbara Yoder at the retreat when we volunteered to sell books before one of the evening readings. I am so pleased to introduce you to her here.

Can you describe for us what you’re currently working on?

I’m writing a creative guide to overcoming self-censorship. The book interweaves memoir, myths, tales, and dreams with writing prompts and exercises designed to help women explore their inner lives and develop a gentle, supportive approach to writing.

How did you find your way to the subject of self-censorship and, in particular, the issue of self-censorship in women’s writing?

In the process of writing my first book another lifetime ago, I came face to face with my insecurities, compulsions, fears, perfectionism, impatience, self-tyranny, and many other bugaboos that made it difficult for me to write. After a whirlwind publicity tour for The Recovery Resource Book—replete with TV, radio, and print interviews—I went into therapy. I felt estranged from my creative center. I yearned for connection.

During my therapy years, I broke through my rigidity and fears, learned to build myself up rather than tear myself down, wrote journals and essays and stories, got an MFA in creative writing, and taught creative writing to adults in my community. I worked particularly closely with beginning women writers, and in them I saw some of the same self-censoring beliefs with which I had grappled. These issues appeared in my male students as well, but they were especially pronounced in the women. I wanted to know why.

Over the years I have come to believe that it is the cultural pressures women face, the stereotypes we see every day in the media and the misogynistic attitudes that have been passed down to us through the generations, that make us doubt ourselves and guard our voices carefully.

What myths and tales are you are working with and how did you choose them?

The book explores four major stories: “The Marriage of Psyche and Eros,” “Bluebeard,” the creation myth of the Garden of Eden, and the myth of Demeter and Persephone. In addition to retelling the stories, I interpret them in terms of personal, creative, and psychological growth, and I invite readers to write about the stories in those terms.

I didn’t choose the stories as much as they chose me. In my quest to break through self-censorship I embarked on a serpentine journey into my mythic depths. In addition to being in therapy, I read myths, tales, and scholarly and popular work about women’s psychology and spirituality. While I was in graduate school, I began retelling tales, and years after I finished school and therapy, I resumed telling and interpreting tales and making fiction out of them.

When I put the four stories together, I found that they formed a mythic foundation women could use to cultivate their inner Eros, transform the tyrant within, and embrace an affirming, sacred, empowered femininity. Together they offered deep and creative ways to overcome self-censorship.

Can you give us some examples of how you link the exercises to the tales?

Exercises—including meditations, visualizations, and writing prompts—relate closely to story characters and themes. The major and minor characters—Psyche, Eros, Aphrodite, Pan, Bluebeard, Mrs. Bluebeard, Eve, Persephone, Demeter, Hades, Rhea—are fun to work with. As we consider their behavior and explore the movement of the stories from creative, literary, feminist, and psychological perspectives, we come to know ourselves better and to discover our own stories.

Each tale also raises intriguing questions and offers many levels of meaning that will bring up memories, fantasies, images, dreams, and other material readers can explore in their journals and in their creative writing. With Psyche and Eros, there are exercises examining passion, jealousy, and the journey to the underworld. With Bluebeard we deconstruct the ways in which the archetypal abuser operates in our inner lives and our writing. With Eve we explore blame and guilt. With Demeter and Persephone, we look at our connection to the mother. My goal is to help women go deeply and gently into their material, write past their fears, and tell their tales with authenticity and passion.

How has the 2011 AROHO retreat changed you?

Before I came to the retreat, I felt isolated, unsure of my direction, ambivalent about my book, and worried about being such a late bloomer.

During the retreat, I made connections with women I admire and respect—women I’ve come to love—friendships that will last a lifetime. All week the women asked me what I was working on. They really cared, and that made all the difference.

As I talked with them, listened to their stories and presentations, shared challenges and insights, soaked up their wisdom, I felt that I had arrived. I was at home. I had a community—the kind of community I’d long been craving. I got clear on my direction. I knew that it was not too late for me; in fact, I was exactly on time, ready, willing, and energized to move into the next phase of my life as a writer.

Tell us about a woman writer who inspired you.

All of the women at the retreat inspired me!

Marilynne Robinson said, “All you need to do to be original is to consult deeply in yourself,” and I did.

Marsha Pincus helped me to break through my resistance and gather the courage to send my manuscript to readers.

Pat Fowler showed me the challenge of climbing Chimney Rock and led me to the top.

Sandra Hunter held my hand and made me laugh; I can see her chimneying up the canyon walls, a powerful image of accomplishment.

Bhanu Kapil showed me how to make a clay goddess, and the red earth pulsed in my hand.

Ruth Thompson led one of the best yoga classes I’ve ever attended, with a visualization that helped me sink my roots into the earth.

Kumkum Malik gave a meditation that was so powerful it has stayed with me. Today I can hear her calming voice inside me and it’s my voice, too: “I can do it.”

Barbara Ann Yoder is a freelance writer, editor, writing teacher, and coach who has a room of her own at home. Her fiction has appeared in Natural Bridge, and The Worcester Review, and she is the author of The Recovery Resource Book. She formerly served as executive director of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project and was a senior editor at National Writing Project.

Why Every Wife Could Use Her Own Hmong Tribe (and a Thundershirt)

2011-09-02T16:10:00.000-07:00

I have watched women all over the world weave over examined myths and cautionary tales about their marriages, in all sorts of mixed company, and at the slightest provocation. But the Hmong ladies did not seem remotely interested in doing that. Nor did I see these Hmong women crafting the character of “the husband” into either the hero or the villain in some vast, complex, and epic Story of the Emotional Self (p. 37)—Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

I’m sitting between two strangers, tears streaming down my cheeks, on a Southwest airlines flight. Fifteen rows back, my husband’s likely mildly irritated he lost his A seat status, maybe rummaging around for his free drink coupon. I’m surreptitiously wiping the tears away, aware that my sunglasses offer ridiculously thin cover for the way I’m melting down in public.

I’ll be deplaning in Albuquerque alone, my husband will fly home to California to kiss our three children and proceed with his two-city, two-job frenzy while caring for the kids, which accounts for why he forgot to book me home from the wedding we flew to the night before. Which means I’ll head to the high desert with wedding attire sans materials for teaching and presentations I’ll need for the eight day AROHO women's writing retreat I’m scheduled to attend at Ghost Ranch. My first week away from the kids in 10 years—my first passionate attempt at re-entering the writing world with others of like mind: A Big Deal.

As I work to stuff the upset threatening to burgeon into full body sobbing, an image keeps appearing in my head of the Thundershirt I saw an ad for on our flight the day prior—dogs wear them, and autistic children. Without an ounce of disrespect or humor, I’m considering ordering one (for the comfort of straight jacket minus confines of institution) to help me withstand the maelstrom that’s become the norm in our household.

I figure if I’m worried that this Thundershirt idea is a sign I’m losing it, I’m still ok enough to not lose it. Barely--a familiar vertigo coursing through my adrenals…the usual over-exertion, over-giving, over-analyzing. I’m in my 40s, I’m not a victim, and I don’t care to put a label on my husband or myself...but I do desperately want to move forward together, simple and productive like yoked oxen.

For now, the oxen are rear to rear and kicking, no yoke in sight. I feel like Ferdinand the Bull on the page where he sits on a bee (a family favorite, Ferdinand, with its droll illustrations that convey so much with such simple strokes, and for the subtle humor: corks hanging from the cork tree, the mother cow’s tender worry levitating still towards her massive bull-child).

By the time the stewardess brings my ginger ale, I’m thinking, so what, the husband forgot to book me on his flight, so what we can’t use the companion pass, our itinerary for the weekend risky from the get-go: a wedding in Chicago Saturday night, a return trip to California to repack, a return flight for me to Albuquerque at 3 am between Sunday and Monday.

And to make matters worse, two minutes before heading into the wedding venue, my husband received a text informing him that one of his San Diego roommates went down in the Navy SEAL helicopter that crashed (taking with it 22 lives) . Our delayed anniversary date fell apart as we tried, unsuccessfully, to deal with the sorrow of those lives lost while toasting the marriage of my beautiful cousin and her groom.

In Albuquerque, my husband buys me a tiny Yin-Yang necklace to help assuage my feelings of invisibility, 3ds our need to balance our male and female ways of meeting our days. In my room at Ghost Ranch, I find comfort in the image seconding itself already in the form of the tiny round mirror over my dresser. By crouching down low, I’m able to capture the half black, half white image.

In the small blogging group I signed up to facilitate, when we sit and write to the images we photographed for the day, I write, “Half black, half white, still arriving, a pale echo of the yin yang, surreal, my husband gave me to help me cross out of anger about being forgotten. There remains more light than dark, two fan blades extending into the dark. The border’s dimples, pearl deep perforations, decorate but do not fully cut open or apart the holder, frame, of mirror. I am not in the picture yet, nor desire to be. I am still arriving.”

It took four more days to fully arrive. Surrounded by a phenomenal web of women writers, my own emotional Hmong Tribe, how could I not come out of the marriage’s dilemmas? I shelved forgiving my husband for engaging in the present, integrating a new definition of “husband” Elizabeth Gilbert posits in her book Committed after observing the way the Hmong women of Northern Vietnam spend their days supporting one another, without the least expectation that their husband be everything to them. Their days, rooms, and routines are full of sisters, aunts, grandmothers.

Gilbert sums up one grandmother’s response to the question, “is your husband a good husband?” : Her husband was neither a good husband nor a bad husband. He was just a husband…As she spoke about him, it was as though the word “husband” connoted a job description, or even a species, far more than it represented any particularly cherished or frustrating individual. The role of husband was simple enough, involving as it did a set of tasks that he man had obviously fulfilled to a satisfactory degree throughout their life together,---as did most other women’s husbands, she suggested, unless you were unlucky and got yourself a real dud (p. 41).

(For the record, I wouldn't trade my husband. And what would my job description look like as wife, were he to write it? You have to read the rest of Committed to appreciate the humor and context here. But I loved that Gilbert goaded me to recalibrate, reconsider, how much unecessary pressure I might bring to bear on every nuance of my interactions with my husband. Certainly being a writer means everything gets scrutinized metaphorically, metaphysically, long into the wee hours of the night in the chambers of my little mind when I'd be better off dreaming my way to solutions.)

Gilbert rightly hints in the quote above that you can feel the vast psychological chasm between this kind of an answer (to the question, "is your husband a good husband?") and the one you’d get from an American wife at a cocktail party, or say, in my case, a writer’s retreat. But we weren’t talking about our husbands, we were busy writing our own answers to Bhanu Kapil’s list of questions that inspired her book of poems, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. Or listening, by moonlight, from the sunwarmed stone ampitheatre benches, to twenty-five women writers reading from their work, cactuses at our backs.

Or following Elizabeth Kenneday after breakfast down the trail on her Photo Stroll titled Illuminations, learning how to see. Rim lighting--morning sun wicking along the outlines of the tree’s leaves. Underlighting: otherwordly, unnatural, she said, for sunlight to radiate from the ground. Specular: blinding, off the mirror’s rim.

Blast Furnace: Poem for Jack Foco

2011-08-31T14:06:00.000-07:00

I wanted to celebrate this last day of August by announcing forthcoming work. "Nine days before he died the crows came at dawn", a poem for the late painter Jack Foco (March 1950-November 1998), will be up this fall, prior to Thanksgiving, at Blast Furnace; I will post the link once active.

For seven years I lived in the heartland--staying on past graduate school, "growing up" week after week (in the flounder after formal schooling) with humor and love thanks to a circle of serious, down-home assemblage artists, writers and musicians (including Jack's wife, Jill Foco: writer, artist, teacher, intuitive). Jack's artist statement, "Grateful for the Day" moved all of us to return to our medium day by day; helpless to help him, we could at least pay him tribute by using our time here wisely, working patiently, as he would have were he still here.

Of his move to Iowa City and its effect on his process, Jack wrote, "I began to struggle with the challenge of painting a landscape that offers more horizontals than verticals. Looking up, the sky presented me with a solution, and I began to render more and more of the sky and its shifting patterns as a part of each painting..." The painting at the top of this post, with its bouquet of snow-blues and lavendar sky, hangs on the wall in my writing cabin; I adore the range of blues. Here's to you Jack, surely continuing your inquiry into color and form in the afterlife with masters we have yet to name.

I hope you'll consider submitting to the Pittsburg based Blast Furnace. Here's an excerpt from the site's Mission and Values statement: Our mission is to publish refined poetry by "poets of place,” with themes deeply rooted in place. We value refined poetry that is architecturally functional and distinctive on the page. We value poetry that is stripped—burnt down—to its purest state, in both form and context. We value brave poetry that takes risks and, therefore, resonates with a discriminating audience. We value soulful poetry from the core—recited or read aloud—as it was originally intended.

Look forward to reading your work there should the opportunity present itself.

Announcing The Collaboration Hub

2011-08-22T10:59:00.000-07:00

Check out my latest project, inspired by AROHO's summer 2011 retreat. I've posted the text of the Mind Stretch Presentation I gave at the retreat here at my She Writes blog, as well as taken up the challenge of hosting a new group called The Collaboration Hub (for AROHO retreat attendees, She Writes members and anyone brave enough to find us) where collaborataive pairs or those looking to pair and collaborate over the course of the coming year can expect to share support, conversation, questions, resources, and more. Wish us luck, or better yet, join us.

AROHO Retreat 2011: Home Away From Home at Ghost Ranch

2011-08-12T15:38:00.000-07:00

I am reveling in the harvest of this year's work that has brought me to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico this week, my heart overflowing with the simple, transcendent power of the weave of synchronicities. Having just newly returned to teaching English at the Santa Rosa Junior College Fall semester 2010, I have been struggling with getting my public personnae up to speed, and I couldn't have had a more welcoming and inspiring experience than the one I've had so far with A Room of Her Own Foundation.

I specifically sought out AROHO's summer retreat because of the way it was framed and offered: as a give and take experience, every woman writer participating, sharing, presenting, receiving. I sensed that the venue resonated with exactly where I find myself on my "writer's trajectory": open, willing to learn, willing to challenge myself, and willing to give back what I have learned as well.

All of my expectations have been exceeded. I knew that in offering to present at one of the Mind-Stretch sessions, I'd have to pull myself together and do my least favorite thing one must do as a writer (for me anyway): speak into a microphone with composure, grace, and with luck, a sense of humor. I managed to get through my talk (Female Power in the Face of Adversity: Collaboration as Excavation) and presented the photo-poem montage Robyn Beattie and I made for Lady Diana.

But more importantly, my notebook is full of ideas from the other 16 Mind Stretch presentations; I have seed ideas for the next five years. What a gift. Can I just say thank you, thank you--to the web of family at home caring for my three children, the Siberian Husky, the new kitten. And thank you to AROHO for its existence, to every single member of the staff, to every single woman who came this summer (and to those participants who came before). I'm so very honored to part of this bloodline.

Marriage Alone: A Modern Odyssey

2011-07-01T16:46:00.000-07:00

A two city dilemma continues to dominate our family life for now. My husband is a weekend father, and I’m adapting, after nearly two years of this lifestyle, to parenting our three children alone, and to solitary marriage, becoming a weekend wife. A visit this week from a Danish childhood friend, who was an exchange student my senior year in high school (so many years ago), prompts me to run a non-sentimental scan of our lives from his point of view. Gentleman that he is, my Danish friend failed to judge us (at least verbally), though when he asked, Now why aren’t you living under one roof? I was at a loss to explain.

Surely we join a large number of other American families, due to these times (economy-desperation-driven) when extended commutes, even between states, might be the new norm. This week, solace comes in the form of a graphic novel adaptation of The Odyssey by Gareth Hinds (Candle Wick Press, 2010). I know it sounds extreme—how could I be bolstered by the story of a couple separated for several decades? But, by comparison, it makes light of two years apart. One has to cultivate gratitudes. Else sink.

As a poet reader of graphic novels, I hone right in on the author/illustrator word choice, for he/she must trim the text back to near poetry since the pictures convey so much so rapidly. Picture becomes wordless poem. I love the parallel postures, for example, of the grieving Penelope, hunched over on the floor of her island bedroom just after she receives the news Telemachus has fled in search of her husband, and the muscle-riddled back of Odysseus as he sheds his daily tears on a narrow promontory of his island where’s he’s been tethered by Circe. The panels appear on facing pages (46-47), a three D metaphor for the couple’s simultaneous grieving. Penelope’s body is inset against the larger backdrop of the sea and her island, a further nested metaphor for her solitude and the many miles between Penelope and Odysseus.

I also got hooked by a second parallel dilemma Odysseus and Penelope face as lovers in their prime. Hinds puts these words in Penelope’s mouth when Odysseus finally reveals himself to her, suitors murdered, she doubting his identity: “Odysseus, forgive me! You know the reason for my caution. The gods gave us so much pain—they kept us apart through the summer of our lives (p. 234).” I would argue that although apart, unable to consummate their love, both Penelope and Odysseus maintain a vital sensuality, but in strikingly different ways according to their gender.

Since Circe, Goddess, seduces Odysseus and we are told Odysseus sheds tears daily over his desire to return to Penelope, we forgive him—he has no choice but to give over his body. Clearly he remains emotionally faithful to Penelope. Circe validates his masculinity by forcing him to be her lover. Say a God forced himself on Penelope: we would likely judge it rape, given the power dynamic (Leda and the Swan, etc.).

Penelope’s beauty and female sensual power find validation in the many suitors and the sheer number of years they spend pursuing her. Were she to give in to their adulation, take a lover, her honor would be destroyed. In Penelope’s equation, she holds the power and maintains it. Were I twenty years younger, I might be grumpy about this gender difference; I must be mellowing with age. I wasn’t even ticked when Hinds paints a doleful Circe taking Odysseus to bed in her three arched stone bower at sundown, one last time, even after she’s been ordered to let him go. At that point, why not, who could resist such seduction, and by then I felt sorry for Circe having her lover stripped from her so.

In magnificent red panels, Hinds portrays the loathsome Cyclops, a powerful contrast to the dreamy blues of the panels depicting Odysseus’s sea trials. Another masterful panel is the page of consequence, in which Hinds frames the text of his dialogue within two halves of the head of a cow of Helion: one half, furred, alive, contains the admonition to the crew not to eat the cattle, the other half, a weathered skull, dead, frames the deadly consequences should they in fact kill any of the cattle.

Of working with The Odyssey, Hinds writes, “This is probably the greatest story ever told, and the challenge of retelling it in graphic form irresistible. It was incredibly exciting to work with this material—gods, monsters, flawed heroes, battles and all the best and worst of human nature, set against an ancient Mediterranean backdrop. It’s really a dream project.”

Seems every marriage contains the material on that list as well—or at least, that’s the possible range of personalities we sign up to encounter in our vows: “gods [the ones we assume the other to be at first], monsters [the ones we occasionally become while parenting, etc.,], flawed heroes [who you become when you realize you truly can’t rescue your spouse], battles, and all the worst and best of human nature.” I count my husband and I pretty spoiled--inserting photos of the kids daily into text boxes and speaking on the phone makes a two city life pretty easy, as do the weekend trysts (sweetened by absence, almost like young love, except for hum of washer and dryer, dog pawing at bedroom door snuffling to be let in, lasagna burning in oven, children damaging one another in background).

Nope, no texting or continual popping off of photos to one another for Penelope and Odysseus. All they had was some kind of supernatural faith in themselves, one another, and fate, fed by the occasional astral meeting, via dream—a kind of faith I could likely stand to cultivate.

AROHO Reading Diary #3: Wrecker, by Summer Wood

2011-06-17T18:13:00.000-07:00

Here it is, summer....and all three children home, the new pup still to train (give up a month of Saturdays?! I know, Jeannette, I'll give in and traipse us to town for an obedience class here shortly, or pay the price for life). So I admit, we've been out at the beach, eating fruit, boogie boarding, watching the pelicans draft off one another, ogling the real surfers.

I've dedicated summer to a submission blitz and to reading the work of the women writers I'll soon get to meet on retreat in August. This latest reading diary looks at Summer Wood's novel about the raising of an abandoned little boy, Wrecker. Check it out over at my She Writes blog:

http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blogs/aroho-reading-diary-3-wrecker

And if you missed it, a mini reading review of Storm of Terror, A Hebron Mother's Diary by June Leavitt: http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blogs/aroho-reading-diary-2-storm-of

Guest Post by Alexis Bonari: Graphic Novels Matter, Too

2011-06-03T16:18:00.000-07:00

Lured by the title of this blog (Feral Mom, Feral Writer), Alexis Bonari contacted me about writing a guest post. Enjoy her glance at the often underestimated role graphic novels can play in fostering a love for the written word.

My school library didn’t have graphic novels. To my knowledge, they still don’t, which is a shame.

I’ve never had difficulty getting into a written story with the exception of The Catcher in the Rye, which after finishing I threw across the room, screaming, “I wasted an afternoon for that?” After spending my grade school years in advanced learning courses, I had it in my bloated head that anyone who wasn’t a good reader or a writer just wasn’t a good student. Truth be told, as far upturned as my nose was back then I’m surprised I had friends.

Fail

Then, I met Robert. Robert is my significant other’s little brother. At the time of our meeting, he was 16 years old and diagnosed from an early age with a learning disability. He’s a talented artist (and Xbox aficionado) but he hated reading and his school grades repeatedly showed it.

The idea of reading being repulsive to someone was unfathomable for me. So, for the next several years I attempted to push him into a shape he wasn’t made for by presenting him with the latest publications in fast fiction (fail), speculative fiction (fail), fantasy (fail), and gritty nonfiction (super fail). He never got back to me about any of them and I found the books stuffed—spines unwrinkled and pages unturned—beneath his bed when I recently helped the family move to another house.

Revelation

My first foray into illustrated literature was with DC Comic’s Vertigo Fables, Bill Willingham’s adaptation of fairy tale characters like Snow White and Pinocchio trying to survive in modern day New York. It wasn’t until I was several trades into the series that I threw one of them across the room (bad habit, I know), realizing I had the perfect birthday present for Robert and infuriated it had taken me so long to figure it out.

Lesson Learned

Several weeks later, Robert confessed to me that Volume 1 of The Sandman (by legendary Neil Gaiman) was the first of my gifts he had finished reading. In fact, he had already bought the next several volumes and was newly engrossed in other graphic novels. Some of his more recent favorites include Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America by Geoffrey Canada and The Odyssey by Gareth Hinds, which are actually on the American Library Association’s 2011 Great Graphic Novels for Teens list.

It would be a shame to let children and teens become victims of book snobs (yours truly) and miss out stories, no matter the medium. Reading overstuffed paragraphs and chapters by the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Dickens admittedly isn’t for everyone, but stories are.

Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and researcher for College Scholarships, where recently she’s been researching softball scholarship programs as well as Mercedes Benz scholarships. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

The Seamstress: Reading Diary#1

2011-05-19T09:57:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in an earlier post, I’m looking forward to attending A Room of Her Own Foundation’s August Women’s Writing Retreat (still accepting applications here). A Room of Her Own Foundation (AROHO) offers hands on networking support to women writers--from serious grant support (check out their Gift of Freedom Award)—to sponsoring a number of writing contests and retreat offerings throughout the year.

In addition to rubbing elbows with a diverse score of writers, I will be presenting some photo poem montage work (the most recent--Nefertiti on the Astral--currently up at Prairie Wolf Press) and facilitating a small writing group titled, “The Exquisite Now with Feral Mom, Feral Writer” during which we’ll generate writing based on daily photographs, keeping the blog schedule on track, no doubt posting on the oddity of the week’s extreme quiet (shifting from our three child, one puppy, four feral cat, chainsaw wielding husband household to a room and bed of my own).

I’ve challenged myself (August bearing down) to read as many books as possible by fellow retreat attendees and have posted the first of these bite-sized reading diaries over at my She Writes blog, starting with a look at a holocaust account by Sara Tuvel Bernstein titled, The Seamstress: A Memoir of Survival (read in full here).

Hopeless Carnage: Sisu the Siberian Husky and The Song of Sedna

2011-05-06T14:45:00.000-07:00

Nothing nostalgic about this week’s incoming chaos: the ten month old pure-bred Siberian Husky my husband showed up with last Saturday with near-to-no warning or crate or fenced in yard to contain our ice-eyed bundle of pull.

Four days later, I’m tailing one of those Model T cars like my husband’s grandmother used to drive (her first car—which she bought for $5 with her first paycheck as a nurse). In my state of dog-deranged anxiety—I glance at the license plate and read, “Hopeless Carnage.” I’m thinking, “Isn’t that right!!” But as we near the red light and slow, I realize it actually reads, “Horseless Carriage.” I laugh, but just a little, still struggling to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of keeping the new family member.

It all started with a casual phone conversation. “I’m going to look at this puppy…” my husband said from his San Diego apartment, which, as any wife worth her salt knows, means, “I’m coming home with this puppy…” Honestly, who ever goes to “look at a puppy” and passes on keeping it…

Three days later he’s driving the ten hours towards us with our new charge despite my 80/20 vote for waiting to bring a dog into our already stressed household. And the craziness begins, for when you cross a cat-loving poet (me) with a Navy SEAL Instructor/ Sonoma Sate University Sea Wolf Women’s Cross Country Coach husband (him), the layers of trouble start cycloning towards the marriage.

First of all, my husband informs me he’s already bought the dog a nametag. Since he named the first two of our three children and I had essentially voted against bringing this pup into our home, I wanted a shot at naming her. I’d landed on Sedna—I know, I know---it sounds like Edna—but listen to the reason behind it. I’m hopelessly image driven, so I immediately had thought of The Song of Sedna (Doubleday), a beautifully written and illustrated children’s book by the talented San Souci brothers.

Eskimo girl Sedna falls in love with a handsome stranger (Mattak) who takes Sedna (and her faithful wolf companion Setka) away from her father to start life anew on the Island of Birds. It isn’t long before Sedna discovers she’s married a non-human—a bird spirit. When Sedna’s father comes to rescue her, Mattak pursues their boat in bird form, finally transforming his boat into a fire-breathing serpent, terrorizing Sedna and her father until her father sacrifices her to the sea out of fear. With the help of seal spirit guides, she’s able to overcome obstacles and harness her power for good to earn her position as goddess of the sea. Sedna sits on her underwater throne flanked by Setka and her father (who she has forgiven).

The kids aren’t buying the name Sedna, so I try for Setka. No go.

Frankly, I’m kind of ok with their refusal—I’m not sure I want to carry the metaphor too far…I’ve never caught my husband in non-human form, though when we were first engaged to be married and I slept in the museum air of his grandparent’s living room, where the Greek urns, Polish dolls, sculpted busts of some of the family and the relics of 20 years of diplomatic travel reside, I woke from sleep to the image of Neptune, brandishing his Trident, the dark sunrays of his hair writhing like Medusa directly over my face. Though startled, I wasn’t afraid and even felt a certain calm, accepting the visit and its message: You may marry and have this man for your husband for now, but someday he will return to me, for he is of the sea.

Back to the dog’s nametag, which reads Sisu. As is so often the infuriating but charming case, my husband’s got a rock solid alibi for getting his way: the name Sisu honors his late great grandfather, a Finnish running diplomat. Sisu in Finnish means “fortitude, tenacity, stick-to-it-iveness.” Sensing a divided front, the kids gang up on me and take a perverse delight in calling the dog Sisu as many times as possible in front of me while I counter with, "Her name is Sedna!" though she answers to neither Sisu nor Sedna as her former name was Dakota.

And Alibi number two: Sisu, Siberian Husky, family dog by day, will moonlight as the Sonoma State Cross Country team mascot, bolstering the team’s morale.

We survive the first night crateless, though I’m not liking the sight of this dog sprawled across our bed. She rotates between beds, resurfaces from our downstairs with a toothbrush, a bouncy ball she’s pocked, a foam pad she nips apart. The kids think I’m cruel the next night when we put her in the crate, but after so many years of rotating beds with children in a sort of sloppy free-for-all, I’m not willing to carry that dysfunctional pattern any further, especially not on behalf of a dog.

When we first come home from Petco with a lovely cream and black canvas crate, our five year old son clambers in with the remains of his father’s childhood tiny plastic green soldiers and leggos in tow; I hear my husband cajoling him out of the crate: “That belongs to Sisu, not you.” I overhear our two older children remarking they know how it feels to be displaced….and shortly my husband’s out on the deck telling them he’s the king of displacement... “I lost all Momma’s love and attention to you three for years…”

And I flash on a drawing my father’s wife shared with me (drawn by her father, Paul Beatty, of her mother. There were five children in her family). When I look at the drawing, I slip straight out of “mother self” and into her father’s point of view: there sits his wife, her eyes averted, gaze perpetually trained a little past his face and over to the kids. See how just over her third eye, he’s penciled in a tiny sketch of her face and upper torso. To see her, he first has to see through the body of swaddled infant.

So maybe Sisu has a third function aside from 1) family dog and 2) SSU mascot: lover of my husband.

Sisu should more aptly be named Houdini after the test of the first Monday of the week when I was faced with a full day of errands. Overriding my husband’s suggestion of putting Sisu out on our back deck (where I envisioned her using the picnic tables as a springboard to chase the deer, random rabbit or feral cat sure to cross our hill at some point during the day), I lead her into one of those collapsible metal crates inside the house. Piece of cake, I say to myself, lock up the house, and take the kids to school.

Three hours later, when I return home, Sisu greets me at the door with a wagging tail, a circle of shredded cardboard at her feet, a ball of yarn twined around the stairs, a bag of Easter chocolate foils scattered in the upstairs bedroom, a little offering of dog poop on my daughter’s comforter and sweater. All sides of Sisu’s metal crate remain securely shut—I check it again and again. There’s a little tuft of Husky hair near the bottom where the plastic under-tray has about an inch of clearance to slide out. My only clue. That evening, she chews through one corner of her canvas crate as well, destroying the zipper and her chances of sleeping in my daughter’s room.

To the sound of her yips and howls protesting her return to the metal crate downstairs for bedtime, I try to focus on her potential strengths: guard dog extraordinaire for the days my husband’s out of town. But when I take her out at midnight under the stars to pee, the posse of critters snacking in our compost bin at the far end of the yard (just out of sight behind the fence) scatter. She hurls her body back towards the porch, tail tucked snugly between her legs.

Hands down, she loves us up. And she collapses on my feet in a furry swath, follows my every move with her pale-blue eyes. And she’s a sheer muscle and furred torpedo of joy at the ocean circling the kids and the waves…But…

…alas, Sisu is on probation with me.

Then again, maybe I’ll have to shoulder some of the responsibility for her sudden appearance in our lives, for as I’m drifting off to sleep, out of the corner of my eye, I see the “image map” (made in the spirit of play around the subject of furthering my goals as a writer at the beginning of the year). Up near the top of the map, right next to several gold rimmed butterflies and a Cicely Mary Barker Flower Fairy sit a pair of grinning wolf pups propped against one another, muzzles open to catch the falling snow.

Image Credits:

Image of Sedna is from The Song of Sedna, written by Robert D. San Souci and illustrated by Daniel San Souci.

Detail from larger drawing by Paul Beattie. For more information, contact Robyn Beattie at www.robynbeattie.com

Some Mother: Abalone vs. Coffee

2011-04-15T13:11:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning…and I’ve believed my husband’s line that some other diver plans to meet him to brave the 19-plus swell he’s bent on surviving in order to nab three abalone. Despite a raging desire to meet a friend alone for coffee during this rare window when my husband’s home and thus can cover our brood for me, my mother’s intuition perks up when he says casually, “Of course I’m still diving and I’m sure some mother will watch the kids on shore.”

I really can’t remember the last time some mother offered to watch my three children on the shore of this remote cove at dawnbreak while my husband dove, let alone remember seeing another family with children on the shore of this cove…so, I cancel the coffee date and weather the half hour of hairpins past Fort Ross to our undisclosed location.

Food bag over my shoulder and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time on hand (one last chapter to reread before the afternoon’s mother daughter book club we’re hosting), I scramble down the 100 feet of steep cliff to the rind of sand we’ll park on for the dive’s duration, noting the healthily frothing feeder stream, wide with the recent rains, and the ocean’s jangle of white capped waves.

Weight belt cinched and mask in place over his eyes, my husband fin-walks backwards into the ocean while waving adios to me. I’m scampering to cross the log straddling the feeder stream because the three children, including the 5 year old, have since rock-hopped the 5 yards across the water and disappeared into the brush. Do I stay and watch my husband kick out so I can count seconds as he disappears into the choppy sea? Perch on the log and crack my book? Follow the children?

As the wind pushes at me and I struggle for balance, several seconds of raw pleasure wash over me at the visceral three-way-pull--this metaphor taking over my body as it poises--waiting for my brain to prioritize and decide which way to go since I can’t split into three, like the fractures Mrs. Which, Whatsit and Who make as a composite mentor/mother for Meg in Wrinkle.

I wave merrily to my man and settle on reading a paragraph, right there, standing on the log. Meg’s abandoning her plea to IT for Charles Wallace, finally hitting on the most effective of ploys: to flood Charles Wallace himself with all of the ferocity of her love. Even now, in middle age, I still identify squarely (as I did when I first read the book as a pre teen) with awkward, angry, doubting Meg. Wanting, like her, to open the vault inside where the power rests, the good kind.

A paragraph of time’s all I can take away from the kids, so I glance to where my husband last vanished…note the slick canary yellow of his board floating without body, wait until I see the hooded nub of his head appear and fling my voice to the shrubs where the kids fled…”Come back and play where I can see you…”

…which ends all the fun…and here they straggle back, the middle son with a new 3 incher of blood gushing down the shin, my daughter scowling at me with all the teenaged angst her 10 year old self can muster, the 5 year old taking so long to appear I fear the worst. Ah, he’s merely soaking wet, shoes dripping, his icy hands clamping my neck. I hold out the food bag; they drop in unison to the sand and eat in sulky silence--a week’s worth of lunchbox rejects: baggies of cut apples, dried cranberries, an orange, two freckling bananas.

Ten minutes later my husband emerges from the sea, three maroon-grey helmets of abalone suctioned to his board. But before I can reach him, he returns to the surf zone for a missing fin, ill-timed even for a veteran lifeguard, for he gets sucked under and tumbled for a healthy number of seconds. After eleven years of marriage, I don’t even waste the adrenaline on the trail-plus-flagging-down-rescue vehicle-math.

None the less, a tiny thread of worry wreathes its way towards my heart. Eventually I spot an arm, one leg, in the beery green curve of a descending wave, then the rest of him slides up on to the beach in a rush of foam, the missing fin clutched in one triumphant fist for our sons to witness. Then, on the road, our van dipping to the wind rush of traffic zipping past, he’s stripping off the wetsuit, flanked by former swimmers-turned-lifeguard friends, and one of the cops he knows, who all stop to chat while the kids holler, “Dad, Dad, we’re cold, let’s go!!!!”

Should I have given up the coffee date? Would some mother have miraculously appeared to care for my children? Should I just demand of my husband, like I demand of the kids, “come back and play where I can see you?” Flood him with love and hope he’ll walk away from danger and return home to me?

No, no, no, and to the last, yes, for a lifetime. That’s the verdict today. There’s nothing like abalone, sliced a ¼ inch thick and pummeled to draping consistency…fried with melting butter and crushed garlic in an open skillet on the outdoor wood-burning stove under the stars...

Further fun: A Wrinkle in Time, the movie, 2003; the version we rented also had a wonderful interview with Madeleine L'Engle in which she talked about the struggle she had publishing the manuscript, given that publishers at the time weren't so interested in strong girl hero types. She also let on that she wrote A Wrinkle in Time in five minute spurts "a few lines at a time" while her youngest was in diapers and she found herself happily balancing raising her children while writing.

Key to My Heart: Bank of America, Omens, and The Legacy

2011-04-08T16:26:00.000-07:00

We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so… Virginia Woolf, as quoted in Touched by Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Kay Redfield Jamison

So everything’s ajar. I know you know what I mean. It has been one of the toughest winters for our family. Wet madrone doesn’t burn. Neither does wet mildewed madrone. Or the rotted centers of tan oak trees. But it is what we have, my husband and I denying the light rain sheening our coats, his rusted chainsaw blade, the dank rounds splitting themselves for us on the 200 yard roll from the upper hill down into the yard. If you cram an arm load of kindling in and get the stove hot enough, something eventually burns. I spend the week weathering the keen fungus stench that greets my nose every time I rummage under the tarp. My son calls me back to the deck rail to show me both the slim half inch grey-black marbled snail he’s saved as well as the glittering spit arc of the tiny refugee’s trail.

To the sound of the hail descending on our skylights at 3 a.m., I fight the jade zone of my 40s: a new vague dread that the chestline’s going dromedary, the recipes more savory in the next kitchen over, the grey choking out the auburn in my hair, a growing anxiety that my poet’s fastidiousness for lighting on just the right way to say it might serve me better in the courts of the underworld or if I could afford a magnificent charger and a velvet cape to wrap around my shoulders. Except I live in the woods and I know better. What prowls around in the dark out here is best left unidentified and free to wander while I sleep.

Predators aside, worse than wet wood is the thought that the bank might not work with us (after a year and a half of losing our paperwork, they gave us a no verdict on the government home loan modification program), that even this spongy, wet heart of tree is something we are renting from an establishment that could take it all away. That my husband’s been working two jobs in two cities for naught…that the colossal effort to raise the kids alone in his absence will not pay off since we just may not be able to turn the house over to them in their futures.

But friends near and far have been reminding me to stop the noise in my head. Duane says Beauty is free (attributing the statement to Barbara). Bonnie says Read Byron Katie. Sandy says Stop by my studio to see Rapunzel (and other sculptures in process). Elizabeth funnels me CDs brimming with chanting. Lydia pours me never ending coffee in her kitchen, shows me the petite purple purse hearts in her yard to get me out of my head, sends me home with dry wood. Jerilynn sets before me colossal bowls of beef stew. Sydney ferries my daughter to and from, takes her an extra night or two to lighten the load of three children. Aunt Rose brews me cups of strong Irish tea. Dad and Robyn take the kids, Friday after Friday. Beauty is free, and the tiniest of omens have come to my rescue.

Like this one, that came shortly before we got news we’d not be getting help from the bank… I’m sitting across from my husband on our first date in months at Coffee Catz, crying, a miniscule envelope containing a high dose Ibupren between our steaming mugs that was doled out by my periodontist for a surgery I survived that morning. My husband glances down, asks quietly, What is that, the key to your heart? I can’t even muster a smile.

But sitting across from his blue eyes, I notice I’m still absolutely in love with him, and so, I stop my complaining and he has the kindness not to go off about how hard he's had it earning money in two cities with two full-time jobs to pay for a home he barely gets to visit. We part ways—he to call the bank and negotiate, I to pick up our daughter from her violin audition.

Later, when my girl and I stop by The Legacy, run by an all-volunteer staff, where you can walk in with a quarter and walk out with an elephant sized ball of yarn (and if you don’t have a quarter, you can walk by and find a yard or two of fabric from the free box), my daughter picks out an innocuous rubber stamp along with a bag of plastic greenery and flowers for a movie she’s planning to make with her friends and says, Mom, what does it say on it?

I hold up the tiny rectangular stamp. It takes some squinting, but I make out the light pink raised outline of a key, the old-fashioned skeleton kind, bordered by the words, Here's the Key to My Heart. I laugh. And buy it, along with a tiny cardboard heart box with lid (also going for 25 cents)for my husband.

At home, I sneak down to my cabin, cut out slips of paper and write on them all the things I love to do with my husband, starting with the simplest and of late, most impossible to have, Spend time with you.

Further reading: Loving What Is, Byron Katie Further Listening: Any of Snatum Kaur’s Chanting CDs www.snatumkaur.com

Spring Harvest: Botanicals, Photos, Poems and Prayers at Coffee Bazaar

2011-04-01T10:11:00.000-07:00

Announcing an April, 2011 showing of work completed in 2010 by Robyn Beattie, Ashley Frazer, Sydney Griffin, Tania Pryputniewicz and Penina Ava Taesali. Our 365 group met virtually once a week to support and report back to one another towards the daily practice of facing our work (in the choice of our medium). Drop by Coffee Bazaar all during the month of April in Guerneville, California, 14045 Armstrong Woods Road to celebrate with us the fruits of our year’s labor: a rainbow of botanical drawings, poetry set to photographs celebrating the life of sculptor Ananda Beattie, quotes for spiritual musing, and more poetry celebrating the winged (from hummingbird to hawk to the cravings of the body, freed). Coffee Bazaar is open 6 a.m.-8 p.m. seven days a week. Drawing by Sydney Griffin.

Prairie Wolf Press hosting photo poem montage Nefertiti on the Astral

2011-03-23T20:33:00.000-07:00

I hope you will consider submitting your prose or poetry or vidoe/media work to Prairie Wolf Press (http://www.prairiewolfpress.com/) in the future. Thanks to editors Joyce Daniels and Michael Sinclair for this opportunity.

Steve Pryputinewicz backs the poem, Nefertiti on the Astral, with the music of Bela Bartok (The Island of Bali) and Robyn Beattie supplied the exquisite bevy of photographs:

http://www.prairiewolfpress.com/premier_issue_volume_1_spring_2011/nefertiti_on_the_astral_by_tania_pryputniewicz

Nefertiti, Swimming to Antarctica, and The Creative Work Fund

2011-02-19T09:57:00.000-08:00

I am pleased to announce Nefertiti on the Astral, my latest photo poem montage with the photography of Robyn Beattie and my father Stephen Pryputniewicz on the piano (playing us a bit of Bartok as the backdrop), is forthcoming from Prairie Wolf Press in March of 2011. I’ll post the link once it goes live.

In the meantime, we are busy at work on the next photo poem montage, Amelia; Robyn’s keen eye and art radius means we’ve snuck a Monty Monty plane sculpture with its lovely chocolate bronze tones, and a second shot of its shadow, into the series of frames. Despite my own tighter orbit at home raising the children, where dinner and Boyscouts and ballet keep gallery openings at a distance, I’m blessed to have Robyn’s steady flow of images from near and far flowing into my home.

Winter mornings here mean the plume of smoke from the wood burning stove, and maybe a little more propensity, with the lack of sun, to battle emotional vortices. I just finished Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer by Lynne Cox. I envy her physical challenges: the ocean’s cold, whirlpools, weather, sharks, channels, strangers, all external tangibles she perseveres through to swim across each new stretch of water she set as a goal for herself.

I have deep respect for the way Cox was able to braid her life’s dream, so young, into later humanitarian goals that involved putting a personal, human face on the United States at a time when there was fear and tension between the US and Russia. Her body was a physical bridge. What a profoundly brave and powerful act, and what a creative way to put her passion into service for the greater good. Of swimming across the English Channel, Cox writes, “At age fifteen I had reached my highest goal in life (p. 94).”

In direct opposition to Lynne, I feel I met one of my life’s nadirs at approximately the same age. I’d prefer my challenges to be hers (physical and tangible)—but they have been internal, spectres of the past. I’ve decided, of late, to turn and face them down by writing a new series of poems looking at that time in my life, with a focus on the hidden gifts in trauma. Because I sense the beauty waiting, available, past a layer of assumptions that need to be put to rest.

I’ve been busy applying, with Robyn, for a Creative Work Fund grant to support this endeavor; this San Francisco based agency is offering grants for the Literary Arts (poets! Spoken word poets! Creative nonfiction writers) and Traditional Arts for lead artists and writers pairing with a non-profit agency to create new work. They support lead artists from 14 of California’s counties.

I learned about The Creative Work Fun two years ago from my sculptor friend Sandy Frank (thank you Sandy—for the fun we had sneaking off to the city and for a fabulous dinner). The preliminary cover letter is due already March 4, 2011, but if you miss this deadline, try the next; they are offering another round of grants as early as this fall in several other categories. See the website for details here: http://www.creativeworkfund.org/.

Further reading:

Grayson, also by Lynne Cox, a beautiful story I’m reading to my children about a swimmer, a baby whale, the beauty of the ocean, synchronicity, and the gifts that come when one listens deeply while staying in one’s body despite fear.

A Room of Her Own Foundation 2011 Writers’ Retreat, Ghost Ranch NM

2011-01-31T10:06:00.000-08:00

“...designed not so much to teach you what you don’t know (you already know a lot), but to discover new connections, forge new paths, and offer you plenty of time to write.” –excerpted from the site…to read the rest:

http://www.aroomofherownfoundation.org/retreat_2011.php

I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be attending the 2011 A Room of Her Own Foundation retreat at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico this August as both participant and presenter. Who could resist this line-up: Marilynne Robinson (Home, Gilead, Housekeeping), Mary Gordon (The Company of Women, Final Payments, Circling my Mother), Bhanu Kapil (The Vertical Iinterrogation of Strangers, Incubation: A Space for Monsters, humanimal), Ellen McLaughlin (Days and Nights Within, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, The Trojan Women), and a growing list of participating writers.

I will be presenting a mind-stretch session on the process of making photo-poem montages, consulting on poetry manuscripts and facilitating one of the daily small writing groups ("The Exquisite Now with Feral Mom Feral Writer"). I’m a little hard to be around here at home, because I’ve sort of already left…(despite clear evidence we are only now on the verge of February)….ecstatic about the daily hike to and from my summer retreat room...anticipating the inspiration hangover I’ll have after spending a week with so many powerful minds. I believe they are still accepting applications…hope to see you there.

Sleepwalking with Heidi

2010-12-18T10:16:00.000-08:00

The house quiets. The children sleep, their anchors lifting out of me one by one. And my naked self, neither mother nor wife nor friend, floats downstairs for a cup of tea, the open space between the wooden slats of the stairs tainted gold by tree-light and the lit lamps of the xmas village resting in eternal snow.

Too thirsty to sleep, too tired to write in the journal; the steam jet from kettle’s end curls the kids’ drawings on the side of the fridge. The fire needs a log. The rain-wet deck beneath my bare feet, night’s frigid blue-black backwood’s dark tangible as an entity, and Emma, the outcast feral cat, perched on the railing. She flees. The other three ferals, though tolerant of her presence at feeding time, fight her out of the cat-bed under the house.

Mug’s heat singing knuckles, I’ll linger at the top of the stairs, standing, reading, in front of the bookshelf next to the bedroom that’s long needed a velvet chair and lamp to call its own. Johanna Spyri’s Heidi falls open to chapter 12, The Sesemman House is Haunted, in which Heidi’s sleepwalking earns her an interview with the good doctor, who asks, “…just tell me where you were going.”

To which she replies, “‘…every night I dream the same thing. I think I am with my grandfather, and I hear the wind in the pines, and the stars are shining in the sky. And I jump up quick, and open the door of the hut, and oh, it is so beautiful! But when I awake, I am always in Frankfort,’ And Heidi began to sob, and fight with the trouble that swelled her little throat almost to bursting (p. 162).”

I’m transported into the fierceness of Heidi’s longing for the taste of goat milk, the round window through which the moonlight of the Alps slips down over her sleeping face and the gruff peace she finds in her grandfather’s care. And recognize immediately this image of a self that might travel outside of itself at night in pursuit of what one’s day self might ignore or need to set aside.

Molly Peacock, in her dew drop of an essay on the allure of flowers, State of Grace, writes, “‘I had two selves, really: a robot self to dispense my obligations, and a true self that was dangerously buried or, as gardeners say, “caught in the bulb.” But in that garden, where I was able to act dreamy, my true self was released’” (p. 134). This image appeals equally: the state of resting, dormant, lingering before the inevitable ascension sunwards.

I’m careful, though, to love my current placement in incarnation and in time, thriving under the maelstrom of raising children and negotiating marriage, taking as a self-stated mentor Pattiann Rogers, who writes in her essay, Degree and Circumstance, “If, through caring for my children, I lost writing time, I gained by the expansion of vision and insight and compassion my experiences with them gave me…The writing I was able to do in those years is suffused with the energy my children radiated” (p. 161).

My preoccupation with the fracturing of the self comes after a return to teaching after ten years of raising my children at home; one side-effect: an armful of books from the school library including an anthology titled, Women on War, stumbled upon while in the stacks on my way to some other volume (as is often the case).

In a post-grading brain-fog, I’d opened Women on War to Isabelle Allende’s excerpt from House of Spirits: The Hour of Truth with its brutal depiction of a detained woman’s torture. I opened The Sweet Breathing of Plants to a similarly intense passage titled, Fate of the Wise Women by Jeanne Achterberg; the paragraph my eye fell on gave a graphic description of the ways a woman accused of witchcraft might be terminated in Germany in 1629 (involving ladders, alcohol, matches, ropes, hoistings, weights, and hour long intervals of waiting to for the torture to repeat if the accused lived through the first round). There’s a holographic quality to such reading experiences for me, the words goading a cellular memory of the layers of horror women have survived.

I’m aware that men have suffered their atrocities over the centuries too. But, given this lifetime’s gender, I’m thinking of all of this in the context of what Eckhart Tolle describes as “the female pain-body,” (The New Earth) which, named, acknowledged, has a chance to heal. It’ll take women and men--and who knows how many years--to fathom and heal such outrageous trespasses, such devastating twists of the human psyche’s past.

The careful words of the writers who have picked their way through the carnage and made a map of their understanding, as well as a map of what eluded them, places me at the very beginning of the labyrinth (ever-shifting as it is, concentric, multi-dimensional). I’m indebted to every writer I’ve discussed here, as well as many others, for the threshold I have the means to cross—if I can just get both the sleep-walker and the day-walker inside to arrive simultaneously.

Further reading:

Photo of Heidi and the moon, Heidi and her grandfather appear in Heidi by Johanna Spyri, translated by Louise Brooks, Illustrated by Roberta Macdonald, Children’s Classics Edition

The House of Spirits: The Hour of Truth by Isabelle Allende appears in Women on War: An International Anthology of Writings from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Daniela Gioseffi

Degree and Circumstance by Pattiann Rogers appears in Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition, Edited by Sharon Bryan

The State of Grace by Molly Peacock and Fate of the Wise Women by Jeanne Achterberg appear in The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women Writing on the Green World, an anthology edited by Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson

5 Things I Learned About Writing in 2010

2010-12-10T14:46:00.000-08:00

I pledge to return with renewed vigor in January 2011! I bow down, for now, before the altar of teaching (I returned this fall semester to teaching after a ten year hiatus from the formal classroom). I did manage to post, in response to She Writes co-founder Deborah Siegel’s prompt “5 Things I Learned About Writing in 2010,” to my She Writes blog.

Motherhood, Matrices, and Accountability can be read here:

http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blogs/motherhood-matrices-and

Ananda's Line Live at Connotation Press

2010-10-17T22:29:00.000-07:00

Please celebrate with Robyn Beattie and I by stopping by to view the 5 poems and 5 photographs in honor of the late artist, writer, sculptress Ananda Beattie:

http://www.connotationpress.com/poetry/598-tania-pryputniewicz-poetry

Guest Poetry Editor Nicelle Davis at Connotation Press was kind enough to also interview Robyn and I regarding our artistic process of collaborating on poems and photography.

The Tenth Stair and the Making of “Amelia”

2010-10-15T18:02:00.000-07:00

Lately, I’m Owl in Arnold Lobel’s children’s story “Upstairs and Downstairs” from the collection, Owl at Home, in which Owl spends the evening rushing from his downstairs to his upstairs, calling, whenever he arrives in either location, “Owl, are you there?!” only to rush madly to the opposite spot to ask the same question of himself in the new spot. He never answers (how can he?) and finally, in exhaustion, sits on the middle stair, where he can best survey both destinations

The Tenth stair is not a bad location, and who wouldn’t want to live in any one of Lobel’s settings (given the sloping ceilings of Frog and Toad’s worlds, the moonlit path extending before solitary Grasshopper, the armchair and hot bowl of soup waiting—once Weasel’s outsmarted—for Mouse, arched neck of lamp with blossom shade warming head and book.

While the tenth stair’s a good metaphor for our psychic position, I have little desire to write about our family’s two-city dilemma nor the siphon of creative energy resulting from missed airplanes, trips to the ER, work obligations, the overlay of possible new grids and patterns to forge in a new city while still driving the old--you know, the human minutae song of what needs to be done, done better, now, while slicing cucumbers for lunches, peeling bandaids for skinned foreheads and vacuuming bobby pins up in the wake of the Sunbeam Fairy on her way to weekend Nutcracker practice.

I sequestered a day, though, to sit beside Robyn, my accomplice, so we could preview her images for the making of three new photo-poem montages.

And mercifully, within moments of sitting beside her with my double-bergamot Earl (tea housed in a substantial globe-bottomed Barbara Hoffman muted orange and grey gold petalled mug), I’m “home”—at peace, and the images for the poem “Amelia” take an order in my mind: here, opalescent mounds of buried pearls in an abalone shell will echo a line of cream buttons down the waist of a crepe dress will echo the silver rivets of an airplane’s wing.

Since the poem names its own set of images, it’s tricky which photos to choose…not overstate, not understate or compete with the words. What furthers the dream? Like here, these milk tendrils of brushed wool, so like incense rings, barely present enough to touch.

Because the poem isn’t about flying, or lovers, directly. But transport past thresholds alone. “And god approving” before the sun breaks through that sliver of sky-time, pre-dawn (finite! mercurial!) when hearing the sound of your own breath is enough.

Photo, abalone: Robyn Beattie www.robynbeattie.com

Link to our first photo montage: http://www.themomegg.com/themomegg/Blog/Entries/2010/5/8_Guest_Blogger__Tania_Pryputniewicz.html

To view more of Barbara Hoffman’s work:
http://www.occidentalpotteryandwood.com/

Girl, Surfacing: Honoring Ananda Beattie

2010-09-24T17:39:00.000-07:00

Forthcoming soon from Connotations Press: Ananda’s Line, a series of five poems inspired by the life of the late sculptor, artist, writer Ananda Beattie. Poems are paired with the photographs of Robyn Beattie; interviews with the poet and photographer will also be featured. Born in San Francisco on July 9, 1958, Ananda received her BA in art at Sonoma State University; she passed away on June 2, 2008.

“Sea Maiden" by Ananda Beattie (1995); acrylic on canvas, 18” x 24” in size.

Alice in Flames: Going Back to Work After 10 Years at Home

2010-09-03T15:08:00.000-07:00

Now it is more possible for a woman writer to be seen as, well, just that: neither nun nor orgiastic priestess, neither more nor less than human. --Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

I’m living at the mercy of some kind of activity induced vertigo, experimenting with the chronic assumption I can do it all. One of the vertigo’s contradictory side-effects, along with inhibited memory, is that it strengthens my mind’s way of stumbling upon the most vibrant version of the past, or version of someone’s name, in this case, a writer I’d read about in a newsletter. Her actual name is Ingrid Hill, but for whatever reason, I started calling her Iris Hunt (after reading the alleged account, in Glimmer Train's Bulletin, of her dedication to writing while raising her 11 children, the husband who walked out for a number of reasons, among others, complications arising from her success as a writer competing with his writing career). When I Googled to find out more about her and her powerful writings and couldn’t find her, I had to recheck Glimmer Train’s bulletin for her actual name, Ingrid Hill. Who then is Iris Hunt?

Maybe the self of mine rushing headlong away from the hole like Alice running against the backdrop of blue flame in Robyn’s photo. Foremost on my brain: how not to be a slip-shod sybil* under the demands of August. Which include: descending back into the realm of teaching freshman composition for the first time in ten years, one son changing schools, my overworked husband missing more flights than you can count on one hand, and the anxiety of living in two cities and hemorrhaging money while making money. *(I borrow the term from Germaine Greer, from her book by the same title--Slip-Shod Sybils—in which she “recount[s] the sad careers and frequently grim deaths of female poets from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries” pp. 88-89 Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing).

Here in present time my littlest son repeats for the fifth time, The one with the stinkiest tail gets the female, laughing infectiously with his brother, both sets of their bare feet skimming recklessly near the end of the couch in front of the hot woodburning stove, my husband maniacally filling the wheelbarrow outside with leftover clods of dirt and concrete from the deck extension construction we’re apparently undergoing (because why would you build a scaffold to stand on in order to shingle that side of the house when you could build a deck). Cheerful, busier than an ant colony, this family; I do best forgetting I’m a nun trapped in a mother’s life, since this life is the only life I can imagine having, or I’d have mapped it differently by now.

Much later in the night, near 10 p.m., after taming some misplaced feminist ire that rears up in me when I notice I’m still 90% on duty at my faculty BBQ watching the kids while my husband makes friends for us with my new colleagues (misplaced ire--because the moment I ask him to watch the kids, he does), there’s a timid knock on our front door. Against the pitch black sky stands a young terrified girl, shaking as I hand her a glass of water and my telephone. I don’t know what happened. All of a sudden I was in the ditch.

I make her a cup of tea, wrap a scarf around my neck, follow her out into the cold and dense tree-canopy dark, my Boy Scout son bursting out in front of us, his swiss-army knife flashlight illuminating the gravel, and 100 yards further, her car, one wheel lodged into the right bank. A series of long white scrapes flanks the passenger’s side door, the hood sheened dull green with pollen, dust, and a torn branch of maple leaves. We trace the maybe of her path: towards the right side of the road (with its twenty foot drop to the creekbed) followed by her overcorrection that sent her car scraping against the opposite bank of the road to land safely here.

I wait until her boyfriend’s lights rounded the hilltop above us, then leave them to the dark and their decisions. Back in our house, we’d just finished bedtime stories and turned out our lights when the second knock came. As I sat on the couch in my robe for the hour of phone calls to parents and insurance, I couldn’t help but think of my own daughter, the cars in her future, hoping that a stranger might make her tea, offer her help when she needed it.

I feel for the girl before me, head in her hands at my kitchen table, battling her fears about the fallout from her accident, how her peers and family will see her now. I remember a kid at school who crashed his car, how people talked about him. I don’t want to be that kid, she repeats. We talk long enough to discover she knows the grand-daughter of the man who built our house. When she stands up to go, she turns to me and says, I like the artwork in your house. And I like it that people know one another out here. Then thanks me for the use of the phone.

For the next 45 minutes, the dim red taillights of the boyfriend’s car winking against the ceiling, I can’t sleep. I hear the clanking of Triple A’s chains, the sound of the hydraulics it takes to maneuver her car onto the flatbed, the labored sound of the towtruck’s motor ascending the hill towards town. I realize, in the ensuing stillness, that I’m no longer at the mercy of the chaos and vertigo of the day’s responsibilities and sign off with God by giving thanks for the young woman returning to her mother unharmed, for the home we were able to invite her into (if only for an hour) and for the kind strangers of my daughter’s future.

Photo: Alice in blue flames by Robyn Beattie. http://www.robynbeattie.com/

Interview with Ingrid Hill, featuring her book Urusla, Under at Bookslut: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_07_005950.php

Women’s Spiritual Archives, Nausicaa vs. Heavy Metal, Helen Luke & Eileen Myles

2010-08-13T18:14:00.000-07:00

I think all of us need to be some kind of starfish to survive—have to be able to put our insides out and vice versa in order to keep our balance in the world…Eileen Myles, from "Survival of a Starfish"

The phrase “Women’s Spiritual Archives” floated through my head about two months ago one morning when I woke up, left over from the prior night’s dreamscape I could no longer haul up into memory. It continues to linger, for good reason, for while I am busy posing as the mother of three children, dutiful daughter-in-law, law-abiding citizen, PR person for my son’s Boyscout troop, aspiring poet, loving, faithful wife to Neptune- crazed cross-country coach by day/Navy SEAL instructor by night husband, etc, I’m really pretty much an astral traveler who wakes each morning surprised to have landed in the same body.

Having children means I spend more of my waking hours inhabiting that body, less time tuning in to all the extraneous layers of invisible hoo ha that can really keep a girl from having fun in the present moment.

But, I can’t help it, I’m attracted to the idea of scrolls and legends documenting the soul paths of renegade women warriors, I mean, who wouldn’t want to rummage around in the stacks of the women’s spiritual archive of all time? I suppose you’d have to cross water to get there, you’d arrive at some kind of jewel-studded temple, maybe you’d have auspiciously run into the right totem animal who gave you their tuft of fur, feather, or password…

Or…. Maybe the entrance to the archives would be disguised as Taco Bell and you’d have to go in the back where they dump out all the frying oil and hunt around for the secret door…(birthing kids did that to me--I’m jaded—I concede—our waking world is not in fact, flooded with angels, vestial virgins, and fairies alone).

I can easily trace this tangent to the book I’m reading by Robert Moss titled, The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead: A Soul Traveler’s Guide to Death, Dying, and The Other Side, in which he describes leading dream retreatants to a library on the astral. And I’ve had questions of female power on the brain lately—goaded by the trepidation I feel watching my little girl grow towards adolescence.

Remember the movie Heavy Metal? That scene of the young girl who wanders into the fields under the night stars only to be hunted, then overcome, by that menacing green glowing orb of light? I’d say kidnapped--spirited off--into the heart of evil, armed with nothing more than a sword, burgeoning breasts barely contained by her vest, and a pair of blood red boots bordering yards of naked thigh (and a valiant winged companion she rides). I remember watching that movie with mixed terror and fascination, a mythology any of us Earth girls recognize: ordinary girl self vs. the mythic star warrior one wishes to be, though here, depicted through a certain rampant slant of male lens of “woman warrior”…anorexic, busty, gorgeous but lethal, sex and death under one corset.

Around the same time in my adolescence, my brother began to draw; my parents found a drawing tutor for him named Ritchie, a thespian who traveled often with the Renaissance Fair. Ritchie brought humor and levity to our home. He came with a bevy of images for inspiration, including the work of Frazetta, with those muscled half-nude men and women, volcanoes expiring on the planetary horizon tilted beneath the wings of the alien birds the magnificent pairs usually rode. I don't deny the images themselves were compelling, or that the human body should be celebrated.

But as an antidote to the darker images I saw in our culture, like the HM girl, for some years I had a painting up on my wall of a string of vestial virgins gathering flowers on a mountain top, their bodies and radiant faces shrouded in white, an image that shepherded me through some years of soul tiredness when considering the issue of female power and how to proceed. A conversation I continually return to with my closest friends involves the question of imagery—where in our culture, where in myth do we see accurate reflections of what we survive as we try to raise our young, love the partners before us, reach our potential and attend to spiritual longing (with dignity).

A more recent antidote comes in the form of Hayao Miyazaki who has directed such sweet inspiring anime kid films (and I mean kid films in the highest sense--films I love to show my children and happen to enjoy myself) as Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro. Mihazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind proves to star a girl savior far more palatable and wholesome, voluptuousness present but not blindingly so as in the case of our Heavy Metal girl. Unlike the disturbing, instant, caustic catapulting of the HM girl into full woman/object/ hood, Nausicaa remains unmolested throughout the story, a girl who uses her intuition, compassion, and heart strength to save her people and respect nature without having to strut her bust. Her male companions respect and chaperone her spiritual gifts.

This version of woman warrior-hood is one I don’t mind sharing with my daughter, from ethereal opening scene of Nausicaa observing the falling spores--white as snow--for a long meditative moment to Miyazaki's signature core dream resonances spiralling up out of the plot, supporting a vision of the essential goodness to be found in the pure impulses of childhood and the necessity of remembering one's most innocent roots for their healing potential.

In the absence of healthy role models of female power lurks despair, depression. In the kinship of other women, both living and dead, I’ve found stepping stones to peace. One such kin thinker for me is Helen Luke, who writes in her essay, The Perennial Feminine; “If we are to stop the wreckage caused by the disorientation of women, by their loss of identity under the stresses of the new way, then the numinous meaning of the great challenge they face must break through from the unconscious; for no amount of rational analysis can bring healing. Only so can the images of the masculine and feminine, which have become more and more dangerously mixed in our society, be discriminated once more, so that they may come to a new synthesis in both woman and man.” (p. 13, Kaleidoscope, the Way of Woman and Other Essays).

The “new way” Luke refers to here points to the downside of feminism, how it contributed to some stunting of our power in surprising ways (and causing some destructive, extreme polarization for both men and women). I’d have to quote her essay in entirety to do her justice; I hope you’ll pursue her writings to see what I mean.

In my conversations with my friends, we talk about how to unearth those new ways of being, those new images. Luke, writing near the turn of the century, speaks to the need for myths to constantly be revisited from the reality of each particular time we inhabit.

I hold out hope for the arts--the anime form mentioned above, painting, sculpture, etc, and of course, my first love--writing--to inevitably unearth such imagery--inspired imagery--healing for women as well as men. I came across this tidbit from Eileen Myles Survival of a Starfish (in the anthology Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation, James L. Harmon). Myles encourages us, “in our time we have to write those books and pass on this message of the great vast female inside, the mind inside the mysterious female body, the dreaming female consciousness that is trying to wake up; we should pass that message on…We have to get our inside out. And women can take that in. Later on I would like to help men. But women first.” (p. 127). Amen, Myles. (And I hope you’ll read the rest of Myles’ bright, cheeky, splash-of-cold-water-in-the-face essay, which explores, among other topics, the question of who's in charge when beer or masturbation are involved.)

And here's a closing image from Robert Moss, which speaks directly to that astral double of mine I started this whole rumination with. Moss writes, “The sarcophagi of Egypt that have been found empty by archeologists were constructed as incubation and holding chambers for the living (not the dead) bodies of royal star travelers (p.8).” That’ll rewrite some history, inspire a few narratives, a screenplay or two (if it hasn’t already).

Maybe I’m just a star traveler light years from home. Or maybe I’m exactly where I'm supposed to be, just a mother of three children, balsa wood gliders now pinging off my cabin door signalling the end of my writing day. Here they are: my girl and her brothers, flouncing across the threshold, wrestling across my futon, spiraling to the floor in beautiful disarray the 90 poems I’ve given up on ordering for now.

Tonight, it’s back to the dream-lab, only this time I’ll try to get the shutter reflex going on my third eye so I can draw you a map to those girly archives I can’t get out of my brain.

Active Dream Workshops with Robert Moss: http://www.mossdreams.com/

Blue tornadoe by Robyn Beattie: http://www.robynbeattie.com/

The Thief, The Fishbowl, and The Bank of America

2010-08-02T12:48:00.000-07:00

The thief left a size 13 footprint on the chair he’d used to get from our window ledge onto the carpet, taking my laptop, the sword my husband wore for our Renaissance wedding, and a pair of abalone-shaped gold earrings.

My six-month old son on my shoulder, I listened to my husband place the 911 call, visions of CSI in my head, imagining the suspect as good as caught. The Sebastopol sheriff came by long enough to reassure us we’d never see the goods again and to chuckle about the footprint. “Nah,” he said, “we can’t do nothing with that.”

Which set the tone for the landlord’s visit.

“Anything you need to feel safer,” he’d said while drinking coffee at our kitchen table as he told us how violated he felt the time his home had been robbed years ago. I asked for motion lights and a taller fence to replace the two-foot white pickets. “Well, no, see,” he said, pulling on the visor of his cap. “This is the country…fences wreck the view. You’re in the fishbowl. People drive by and see the orchard, horses, your little family. I can’t agree to a fence.” And he went on his way.

So did we, shortly, to buy our own house. My husband built a deck around one of the redwoods adjacent to the east wall and added a couple cabins. He single-handedly took a pick-axe to the hill to make a yard for our three kids, then to the perimeter of the hill, lining the trail with abalone shells. We breathed out into the quiet acre, the only voyeurs the deer browsing through to eat Spanish moss off the downed oaks, the red-hooded woodpeckers knocking holes into the firs, the rains at night on the skylights. At last, no longer renters: this acre and all we’d do to it, ours for the duration.

A stripe of sun crosses the deck once a day, so the kids plant basil in pots. Each seedling gets no more than a foot tall before molding at the stalks; the deer eat my hydrangeas, coming up near the house to strip the few rosebuds off my bushes. Our first three years we chart the course of the sun across the land, dreaming our garden dreams (on the roof? a trellis up the side of the house aligned with that stripe of sun?) for the years to come.

Or, maybe just for this one last year. No thief to blame, nor footprint, for this turn in our luck--just the spiraled out economy, an interest rate on our home loan we can’t afford, the inability to refinance, eleven months of the bank losing our letters asking for
help. When a job for my husband surfaces ten hours away in San Diego, we take it, ignoring the toll it’ll take--his paying for a home he’ll live in solely on the weekends while I’ll raise our children during the week without him. Our son begins to draw black crayon helicopters labeled “Navy”, and says, “Yes, sir,” and “Aye, Captain” so many times his Waldorf teacher makes note of his comments on her mid-year report.

I was ll ½ when I left Illinois in a wooden camper my father built by hand. He moored it to the bed of a maroon 57 Chevy, painting the words “The Piano Doctor” in an arc above the plexi-glass windows. I loved our Illinois farmhouse: the rusted red pump by the juniper bush, the way the sky tinged green before the tornado, the root cellar with its hinged doors where we’d descend to sit out the storm. I’d run my hands over the jars of beets and carrots, sprigs of dill and capers floating between pale lime spears of cucumbers. Someday I would have such a cellar, my garden waiting in winter for my family to eat. We drove off that early morning towards California, my mother fretting about a pair of tablecloths still tumbling in the dryer she wanted to set out for the next tenant.

Spring break. After five months of straddling two cities, my husband drove us the ten hours to San Diego. Half way down, our acre’s grip began to loosen, for the ocean is the ocean all the way down the coast. We stopped in Shell Beach to visit my son’s godparents and headed for the dunes. The vast blue sky against the white backdrop of the sheer sand cliffs cleared my head. The children’s bodies, clothed in primary clothes, were as visible 1000 yards away as at 250.

The next day I sat on a bench outside the Navy Lodge, North Island, Coronado. Three helicopters circled in front of us. The kids abandoned their drip castles to watch the men dropping into the ocean and ascending in pairs slowly back up on invisible cable, as the questions flitted through my mind: Who will live in our house if we leave it behind? Who might we meet here? Who will we love? Who will we lose? The helicopters hovered side by side, then made their loops, all afternoon.

Later in the hotel room, I read about Tiny Broadwick, first woman to jump with a parachute out of an airplane in this area (on the airstrip behind us on base). How Charles Lindbergh started his infamous flight from New York to Paris from this runway. Between the beds on the floor, my son drew a picture for his father.

“Dad,” he says, “Check it out.”

I stole a glance at the red and blue helicopter, the obvious sun penciled in, a rainbow streaming from the other side. I didn’t take it as the burning bush anointing San Diego over our acre in the redwoods, but I couldn’t miss the simple truth that my son needs his father. Wether he’s a homeowner or a renter. Short fence or tall. In the fishbowl or out.

Photo by Robyn Beattie: www.robynbeattie.com

My Cat, My Familiar: Manifesting Totems

2010-07-16T15:32:00.000-07:00

In dreams begin responsibility, said a poet. In dreams, in imagination, we begin to be one another. I am thou. The barriers go down.--Ursula K. Le Guin, the wave in the mind

Iowa City. Summer in the heartland, years before manifesting the husband and the family. As I scanned my intuitions, consulting oracles to join a divided self--one lover states away and another before me in my room--I placed a tarot card (Crowley’s two of disks) on the floor on a silk cloth. The card depicted a crowned snake, in the position of a figure eight, its tail held in its own jaws.

I’d been working with a counselor who taught me to turn and confront the rapist in the series of chased-by-a-rapist dreams I was having. Astonishing things happened then in the dreams: the rapist morphed into a boat with wings, a butterfly. I could fly higher and faster. The ticker tape of past lives, that ran like wine at Blacks’ Gaslight village (where I woke often like a child with a dress on inside out), slowed some and I slept occasionally without the exhaustion of dreams dumping out their vessels into my memory.

Several days later my silver tabby, through the window, dragged in the snake he’d hunted, and laid it directly across the tarot card I’d left out. I wondered if I’d reversed my days and dreams. By the time I reached the snake, it was dead. I rinsed the blood off the card, gathered up the snake and found ground soft enough to dig apart, shooed aside my cat, buried the snake.

Mythical characters appealed during that time with their black and white pasts, their traumas clearly delineated. Take Batman: his parents were shot down on the street in front of him. A clear wound, a clear obstacle to heal. Much less murky than being taken advantage of when you’re drunk as a kid. I mean, did Batman, when working through his “issues” years later, trouble his psyche with questions of blame? Ever once think, my parents were shot because I wore such-n-such outfit? Or because I had that drink?

That summer in a movie theater, I watched Val Kilmer, blonde, adept, muscular; listened to singer Seal’s gravelly voice singing Kissed by a Rose. Nicole Kidman, red swath of cloth circling our from her shoulders in desire for what she couldn’t have (Batman) and elsewhere couldn’t recognize at home (lowly reporter), reminded me simply of how split we are in our attractions and desires. How we fail to recognize the depth of beauty in who or what we have right before us in present time.

I woke in the morning, opening my eyes to a dark shape inches from my head: a tiny bat my silver king had snagged, killed, and delivered to my pillow. Not batman, I took it he was saying to me. You don’t need batman the savior, but here, look at the real thing.

So I gathered the warm, still, creature into the palm of my hand, mind flipping from last night’s Hollywood image of Batman to this delicate mouse of an animal with webbed wings that Batman stood for. Thought about what bats do…how they send out a signal that bounces back when it comes up against something either to eat or to navigate away from, and saw the metaphor: my own radar disabled as a kid.

But on the mend, and not without kinship, my animal familiar, listening ever so carefully to the past I brooded on in my thoughts so loud he couldn’t help but hear it, offering what evidence he could that I was in fact, stepping carefully towards wholeness.

Once, before the birth of my first child, I saw my cat in a lucid dream, his own silver cord extending for miles below, flying beside me, my own cord beside his, proving irreconcilably what I already knew: he accompanied me even into sleep, as I struggled to face the night’s marauder-filled dreams.

The 4th by Zodiac

2010-07-09T16:15:00.000-07:00

Under the weight of my husband’s body, the back end of the tiny zodiac dips nearly even with the water’s surface as he uses his arms to paddle the boat back towards the shore so he can retrieve me from the river house where ten minutes earlier he and the kids had effectively ditched me to “check on the fireworks.” After 11 years of marriage, my husband aspires to keep me in the loop, so he kindly thought to call me on his cell while he and the kids were drifting towards the Monte Rio bridge.

“Could you come back for me?!” I’d said, washing the last of our dinner dishes with great grandma and grandma flanking me in the one-derriere kitchen. I in turn ditched the women, mumbling an apology, running full tilt past the sauna in the dark and down the patio steps, first the sand and then the obsidian river cool on my bare feet. From here, I can hear the voice of the announcer from the loudspeaker a quarter mile away on the beach, see the purple chem lights wreathing the heads of the crowd waiting for the night’s float parade contest.

“I don’t have the paddle,” my husband informs me as I step over his crotch to scoop up the four year old, sanding off the top layer of my skin against my daughter’s mud coated legs while she and her brother continue fighting in the prow. “Relax,” my husband’s already admonishing me, as we wend towards the carousing voices of a group of ten or so men sitting in lawn chairs on a dock below the Highland Dell.

In the dark, I feel cloaked but barely anonymous, and definitely not interested in accidentally entering the float’s line-up and the floodlights, which is exactly what my husband has in mind until I kill the fun, my sense of humor siphoned off under the four year old’s complaints about his life-vest, foam fronds stiffly pushing his thighs down and his chin skyward. “Relax,” my husband repeats from his full body sprawl behind me, his legs running down the length of the boat. My tailbone’s balanced on the back rind of the wooden seat and the din in the prow has not let up under the octopus of legs the five of us make. If I give in and lean back on my husband’s chest, we’ll be sitting in water, so I hover in place.

The voice at the mic is none other than the woman who certified us for lifesaving back when we were kids, my husband and I. The fire department’s curtain of water descends, and as usual, she’s announcing a last minute problem with the projector, and even when it is righted, the American flag displays backwards. “Honey,” I say to my husband, and mean it, “you’re the best Monte Rio has to offer.”

And with that, he obliges me, keeping us out in the very middle of the river. I’ve got my hands over my little son’s hands cupping his ears, and by the grand finale, the beauty of the nested, descending blooms of light silences us all, even the pair in the prow.

Sons and Guns

2010-07-02T18:40:00.000-07:00

Why we didn’t think to turn and follow the boy running at full speed past us down the lane of chest-high weeds to the pond’s edge I don’t know, except that summer in the heartland sheens one’s arms with sweat and dulls the mind; we’d driven for twenty minutes with the windows rolled down, the inrushing air retaining all of its heat and sting. Skirting the cornfields, we arrived at the farmhouse we’d been asked to babysit for the weekend. Feed the guinea pig, water the plants, no need to stay overnight, other folks, possibly the farmer coming and going.

Sun stupid, we stepped out of the car and heard first the odd sound of huffs of breath punctuated by the dull thud of boots, then the muscled torso of an average farmer’s son absolutely focused as he rushed by. He did not see us.

Just as we never noticed the broken front door pane glass, nor drops of blood scattered across the kitchen floor we crossed, unaware the sirens we’d hear in five minutes of our meandering over to the guinea pig’s dish had been called from a house up the road when the boy had been unable to find the phone here. We pet the caramel guinea, stroking the white patches along his knobby head, the tubby bloat of his stomach as he chirped and sidestepped our pats.

We left. But as we drove towards the main road, we could see the dirt plume from an oncoming sheriff’s car and a quarter mile back a thicket of red flashing lights. And shortly, stopping us with the flick of her hand, a woman deputy standing in the middle of the road. She pushed her thick blonde braid back over her shoulder as she approached our car, asking us if we were the property owners; a call of distress had been placed, a possible hunting accident.

As the fire engine bore down, we explained we were merely the house-sitters. She thanked us and waved us on, leaving us to slip back to the before: the smell of the sun warm furniture in the house, the sound of the young boy’s breaths, the what ifs we tried to puzzle together.

We’d learn the next day the boy who passed us was rushing back to the body of the cousin he’d accidentally shot and killed moments before we’d arrived.

Something about the three colors of the ocean waves today brings up this memory from over ten years ago. Strange to think the ocean makes me think of fields of corn, but the reverse was true in Iowa City for me when I lived there, falling asleep once on a retreat in a clearing, waking to watch the wind pass through the corn. Not wavelike, nor tidelike, but the scale of blues in the ocean and the way they refract back light akin to the greens of acres of corn waiting, sated with sun, for harvest.

I still ask how we walked into that farmhouse without picking up on the boy’s charged, residual field of absolute panic. Back then, I had no reference for the burden of sons—what they might or might not do by accident. Today in the camel-bending heat rising off the sand beside the ocean, I thought of those cousins, and the boy who lived, having to face two mothers—his own, and that of his cousin’s; though I can’t imagine how one would go about reckoning with such a leviathan tragedy, I pray he’s forgiven himself.

Photos by Robyn Beattie: www.robynbeattie.com

A Summer Solstice Promise

2010-06-25T09:44:00.000-07:00

I bark the admonition about non-retrievable body parts to my son for the third time as we course in a four-door car over the blue bridge into Coronado, his elbow and hand buffeted by the air current inches from the concrete dividers. I’m thinking about an article I read on the airplane the day before about some kind soul in China employed solely to out-sprint prospective suicides as they scale a bridge probably about this height. No sentry guards this California bridge, but suicide counseling signs--bearing an 800 number--flank north and southbound traffic on-ramps.

The look on my son’s face (his fun so wrecked, his experiment in partial flying so hammered) pulls me out of my free association. While I feel in the right as a parent, I see evidence of a self better shed, like the rich merchant in Heinrich Zimmer’s The King and The Corpse who refuses to give up a pair of battered slippers. The merchant, though he can certainly afford a new pair of slippers, focuses his attention instead on greater and greater money making schemes. At length, he accidentally dons a pair of fine slippers that do not belong to him. Then his misfortunes begin as his original slippers refuse to be buried, forgotten, and left behind much to the merchant’s dismay and eventual ruin.

Zimmer’s analysis of the tale equates the slippers with an aspect of the self the merchant did not heed letting go of at the appropriate time: “He [the merchant] is one of those who will not let themselves pass with the passing of time; but clutch themselves to themselves to their own bosom and hoard the self which they themselves have made. They shudder at the thought of the consecutive, periodic deaths that open out, threshold after threshold, as one passes through the rooms of life, and which are life’s secret (p. 17) ."

That’s kind of a lofty comparison to make with my hyper vigilant parenting skills, but I’m thinking I’d have more fun if I could, say, act like my husband does in the pre-boarding area at the airport. In his defense, he was not on his cell phone updating his profile on Facebook while my two sons, standing side by side on padded seats, left palm, nose, and most of their cheeks’ prints to the windows as the airplanes landed (to the heavy machine gun fire emitting from their thumb and finger guns)--no, he was making reservations for us so when we landed we’d have a place to stay.

As my blood pressure rose (flight delayed) and I failed to get my sons to sit next to us for the extra 45 minutes, I continued to marvel at how calm my husband remained. You’d never have guessed he had kids, not until he struck up a conversation with one of the stewardesses about smuggling in his sons early using his A pass. Or as he sprinted later that night across two lanes of traffic to hold the shuttle for us, one son following blindly into the intersection, the other teetering at the edge of the down escalator as I shrieked for him to wait for me (think background images from Denise Duhamel’s collection Ka-Ching! in which she graphically describes an escalator accident involving more than a dozen people, including her parents--backs of heads, hair in machine parts, etc). I reached my 4 year old just as we hit the bottom escalator stair, grabbed the scruff of his t-shirt as he turned to go back up the down-grinding stairs with its stoic and grumpy row of men (with their neat black bags on wheels) advancing.

Once I quelled the hysteria about the 7 year old crossing the intersection alone, sihouette visible against the bank of headlights (taxis and air porters halting for his dash), and muscled the rest of us up onto the shuttle, I glared at my husband. We’d spent the prior weekend, our first 3 days and nights in a row in 10 years away from the kids, so the contrast from the selves we resurrected as lovers and equals took a hard left turn back into the familiar--siblings at best, co-parenting rivals. My fallback, in almost all situations involving my children in public, entails either catastrophizing about potential dangers or dwelling in a perpetual state of embarrassment regarding the amount of noise we make and the lack of control we exercise.

Clearly hyper-vigilance, then, isn’t sustainable over the long haul. I’m no longer interested in being right, or in the hair color drain and toll on the adrenals. But how about spending more of my life’s hours in simple states of joy? New mothers need that vigilance when their babies are crawling towards light sockets or edges of decks. But my youngest is four now; aside from the occasional escalator to spar with, he’s pretty much launched.

Next day, sitting on the North Island Breakers Beach, kids cavorting at water’s edge twenty yards away, I made a solstice promise to try on my husband’s air of detachment.

First chance: the Museum of Air and Space, where, behind us my husband lingered alone near the entrance on his cell and both sons skirted the astronaut suit in glass case, tripping over electrical wires and velvet ropes to escape into the Alien’s Exhibit you needed special tickets to enter. I just smiled at the two docents in red jackets blocking me, and said, “But you see I think you want me to retrieve my boys.“ “Boys," I called once, then sauntered to the outdoor atrium where the helicopter and biplanes hung, without even worrying if they’d follow or whether or not my husband would find us.

How peaceful. No adrenaline zing, no harsh words for the husband when he caught up to us 3 minutes later, no one electrocuted. I took my time, lingered over what mattered to me: a case containing a scarf and shirt worn by Amelia Earhart. Did they really need to put her clothing on display? A little grim--but better: propped up beside the scarf: her book, For the Fun of It: Random Records of My Own Flying and of Women in Aviation , which she wrote about the compulsion to fly, why it mattered to try.

I lagged behind to watch some footage of Amelia arriving in the states after crashing one of her airplanes, affirming to the waiting press her commitment to persevere with dreams of further, greater flights. Then I moseyed with my daughter through the stewardesses of time exhibit, with its 8 or so mannequins sporting each decade’s garb. I fired a photo off to a friend, who responded wryly, “Thank god we don’t have to dress like that in order to be a real woman.”

But I didn’t even try to talk my daughter out of her favorite stewardess--the one in the fitted jacket, matching orange, red and pink miniskirt, so much visible thigh above a pair of knee-high red boots. I had to admit I kind of liked the boots myself.

Photos: Taken at The Museum of Air and Space, San Diego, CA

Horses, Motorcycles, and Lemons

2010-06-11T13:24:00.000-07:00

I can’t stop being attracted to horses so maybe I should just ride one; is it spring, or the astral maneuverings of my daughter’s obsession with horses surfacing as if I’d thought of it myself.

Like the woman with grey eyes and coral mouth preparing to mount her motorcycle in front of Howard’s Station over the weekend, sheathed in her leathers, something about the loose black hood framing her silver hair that made her appear as a nun as she tilted her head to slide on her helmet. We exchange a few words on Ninjas and I consider briefly, riding one again, almost not afraid of dying again, my daughter standing quietly at my side.

Not since the screaming descent, before children, on the carbon-fiber frame of a bicycle, my husband’s helmet glinting far below through the sun/shadow spattered curves I had yet to navigate, have I used that full-body lean and swerve to sweep the curves for the joy of it—with that unhesitating precision you need on a motorcycle. And without that god-commanded umbilical restraint hardwired into mothers that keeps them within a two foot radius of their children at all times.

The rider waves, snakes smoothly out of the parking lot. I take my daughter’s hand, steer us and the conversation towards breakfast and the rest of the week’s lessons in gravity and heat. One of my sons will fall out of a lemon tree; one of my sons will mist water from a spray bottle onto a light-bulb. Rinds of glass will continue to appear over the course of the week in the toy boxes under the stairs.

The sound of the shattering glass takes me instantly back to childhood, Illinois, my brother’s lemon meringue filling on the ceiling, thick shards of pie glass exploding into the corners of the kitchen and under the refrigerator the instant my mother took the pie out of the oven and set it on the cold counter.

Here, in San Francisco, the pupil’s of my son’s eyes shutter appropriately tight; talk of a concussion recedes and by afternoon’s end he’s selling the lemons he harvested for fifty cents apiece.

And in the last two miles before our house on the drive home, the wild turkeys with their boy-sock tan necks, black-ringed, jolt and tag raggedly along the edges of the horse pasture…my husband murmuring something about what how much horses weigh, how much damage a fall at full gallop can do, and why isn’t ballet good enough for our daughter. If horses are meant to be in her life, they’ll find her, I think to myself, knowing better than to share the insight aloud.

It’s not that I find my disinterest in danger waning, but a desire to inhabit the body returning as the kids individuate and release back to me parts of my psyche, incrementally, with highs and lows erratic as the tides. The body follows suit, with time on its hands again, wanting to wrap its arms around the neck of a horse.

Not necessarily to ride it, but just to stand there with my cheek against its hot and muscled neck, its whiskered muzzle and freckled lips so close but occupied, dusky pink nostrils flaring and breathing, taking in the afternoon sun side by side.

Photo: Robyn Beattie: www.robynbeattie.com

DreamSpeaker Honoree Penina Ava Taesali

2010-06-04T14:27:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, May 26th 2010, 5 women were honored at a DreamSpeaker event in San Francisco, hosted by the Purple Moon Dance Project and Jill Togawa, Artistic Director, in association with the National Queer Arts Festival, advertised as a “celebration, honoring the lives and contributions of lesbian and women of color artists whose work has inspired social change, peace, and healing in our community.” The five DreamSpeaker Honorees were Avoteja, Brenda Wong Aoki, Stephanie Anne Johnson, Judith Smith and a poet I’ve known for over twenty years: Penina Ava Taesali.

The women were honored with a weave of spoken word, music, and dance performances by others. At the end, each DreamSpeaker was invited to speak for several moments (since our hosts meant to give the honorees the experience of being in the audience, simply receiving after so many years of giving). Our hosts spoke of the importance of women’s spaces; in that spirit, I hounded Penina Ava Taesali for her extended thoughts about how she came to be a Dream Speaker.

I want to preface her interview with the bio that appeared in the DreamSpeaker program:

Penina Ava Taesali is a poet, writer, activist, teacher, and community organizer. Of Samoan and German working-class descent, Penina’s commitment to social change and the arts is rooted in her own personal history, identity, and intercultural complexity. Penina bore the vision of sustaining the arts in Oakland as a vehicle for working class, immigrant, and minority communities to confront the challenges of economic deprivation, violence, and criminalization. Penina served as Artistic Director and founder of one of Oakland’s groundbreaking community arts collaborative the AYPAL TRAC (Asian Pacific Islander youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership—Talking Roots Art Collective) for nine years.

Penina recruited local, national, and international artists to bring 10-14 arts programs annually to underserved high school and middle school students, including cultural and modern dance, hip hop, popular theater, shadow light puppet theater, creative writing, music and mural projects. Penina also founded and was managing director of the Pacific Islander Kie Association (PIKA), providing services to 60 Pacific Island youth and parents each year. Her interest in poetry inspired other projects, including “Poetry in the Kitchen,” an intergenerational program she co-founded with beloved oral historian and poet Al Robles. She received the “Best Spoken Word Performance of the Millennium” Award from KPFA FM. Presently she works to bring underrepresented families into school councils in the Oakland Unified Schools District.

Can you talk about what it means to you, the term DreamSpeaker?

I’ve been thinking about those two words and how Purple Moon Theater wanted to honor women using these two words. Dream is the ability to see something not yet manifested and when we speak we give form to the dream through the breath, through the language, and maybe language and action.

To work for change you have to have that ability to dream BIG, to see past the obstacles real or imagined, to not be in denial about the obstacles or challenges but to see the sun of the potential and possibility taking form, taking space, letting things work out and not lose focus when the work gets hard and tiring. But most of all be brave and nurture that small seed of the dream; when the magic happens, you can become proud and humble as you nurture that dream (with a little help from your friends) into reality.

A DreamSpeaker is a person who fights and speaks for someone who may not be allowed to have big dreams, like some of the youth who have been sheltered in strict families (perhaps their parents have already chosen who they will be and where they will be in their future). Dreamers in my eyes are the countless heroines and heroes known and unknown that make life worth living (poets and artists, community activists like MLK Jr., Cesar Chavez and Ida B. Wells to name a very few).

Can you talk a little bit about what it means to you to have been chosen for this award?

Since peers nominate for this award, I felt that my peers think my work is important, that it speaks for itself, even if the management or leadership in an organization doesn’t feel it important to celebrate accomplishments. So I am grateful that my peers nominated my work.

My friends and family seemed more excited than I was when I sent the e-mail notice about this award; it began then to mean much more to me than I thought it would. Being recognized encourages me to keep dreaming BIG. There is a sense of justice at play here. Honoring me is really honoring the work and people who love and care about me.

I think we are in a time when we crave ceremony and want to support one another through prayer, ceremony and ritual. I think people are hungry to reflect and celebrate and those venues are far and few between. We celebrate birthdays once a year, Oscar parties, Grammy and the like. One of the things I loved about working with the young people in the arts is that we had many recitals that led up to the annual arts festival. Having those recitals with parents and friends in the audience cheering for the youth validated the youth’s efforts and accomplishments. It was an awesome exchange.

What brought you here, to the stage, tonight?

I believe in the healing power of storytelling on the stage, in film, or in a book; people transform when witnessing the transformation. I believe the stage should be considered a temple. It is a place where magic happens, where community becomes community, where those who thought they could never relate to the actor, poet or dancer become connected. It is one of the great mysteries: how the arts and storytelling heal.

Both personally and professionally I believe that the arts make life worth living, for the arts teach us how to become human beings. I have experienced this first hand in my own healing. I found spiritual proprieties in dance and for many years I considered myself a spiritual dancer and was very enthusiastic about dance as a medium for healing.

Reading literature has a similar though less dramatic degree on me than live theater but I believe literature teaches us how to become human as well. Also the act of writing and reflection has been a great counselor to me; I have found through the act of recording dreams what the dream is trying to tell me.

In your work with students, would you be willing to share with us a few stories of how you came to realize how deeply you affected others with your teachings/offerings/programs you offered?

First, I have to say that working with teenagers was easy for me and the staff. We were absolutely crazy about the youth. And the youth knew it. They could feel that we had their backs and we followed through. So the youth would open up and they shared their stories, broke silences, shattered cultural taboos, broke generational gaps and were able to deeply express who they were and what they wanted for themselves and their families.

There are so many stories, but the one that comes to mind happened in our Poetry in the Kitchen class with student Cheo Satern. Cheo didn’t know she was a poet/writer/ spoken word performer until she found her voice in the workshops. She blossomed from a shy young female into the most requested poet to perform at major public venues in Oakland and the SF bay area.

Cheo inspired her other youth that may have been taught that young Mien females shouldn’t raise their voices and never take on feminist issues. Here she was: this young person who had so much fire and she just blew folks away. She told me she had some idea that maybe she was a poet because she loved music and poetry and had always written but never shared her writing. She thanked me for the class and took the workshop the next year.

There are many stories I can share but I think the under-story for me is how easy and natural it is for me to work with young people. They would just give me the world: their beauty and love unconditionally. I think it's very sad that our society may fear urban youth. It’s really tragic.

Did you face certain turning points in your life that caused you to commit even more deeply to your vision?

It took a lot out of me working on the frontlines for the youth and the artists. Our hearts were broken many times because we were gentrified out of the cultural center – we fought hard to save our space but lost it. Then bigger issues hurt our communities like Prop 21 and Prop 209. The zero tolerance climate high school students were up against during their public education would break anyone’s heart. For me it was the conditions that the youth were living under that kept my vision strong. We wanted to change those conditions. This was a youth organizing and arts education program, so we did have lots of victories as well as losses.

One victory would be the AYPAL youth who started the program back in 1998-2000 who successfully planned the AYPAL 8th reunion event in 2007. Those youth--now college students or working--kept true to a desire to help their communities. It was phenomenal to come to a planning meeting for the reunion and see 12 youth that had become young men and young women planning a huge event for AYPAL youth. They hadn’t changed much--they still had that burning desire/dream of justice.

I think it was the young people who would visit me and the staff, who kept in touch over the years, that strengthened my vision. It was truly a relationship and community development magic that I haven’t seen any place else.

When we were gentrified out of the cultural center my father encouraged me to go back to school, but I would stay another 5 years keeping the arts and the Pacific Island site going. I am glad I did because some of the arts programs have expanded and the Pacific Islander site is thriving.

What is your vision?

I have a vision all about the young people demanding their human rights: education, health care, and employment. I do believe the political leaders in Oakland have failed the young people. It should be a crime to fail the children. They give you everything and they are the future. The leadership in Oakland is a crying shame.

My vision has to do with young people learning the core values of brotherhood and sisterhood. That they make unity a groovy trend and reject American values such as having money and things. I came of age during the 60s and the 70s and there was a tangible, concrete sense that people cared about me and my family. That the educational institution made it possible for poor folks to get a higher education. My vision is for the young people to enjoy what I had as a teenager – education, trees, the fist of justice working for them.

But they have to do it now themselves. I see the young people rejecting the American values system as it is today. I hope the youth could also reject their I-pods and I-phones and texting all the time, for they need to reconnect with each other in a real grass-roots way. They need to learn how to be in relationship and communicate with voice and art. I think the technology advances in the past 10 years keep us isolated.

Who are the DreamSpeakers you have been inspired by in your lifetime?

The reason I am still standing and fighting for the community through the arts is because of my father, Iopu Taesali. My father encouraged me to dream and to make the dream happen. I guess my father was a dreamer as well. He was also a man of faith. He echoed many times when the doubt would sneak into my thoughts: “Daughter, you’re on your way.”

He would speak to me in metaphors when I would question my future as a writer or as the Artistic Director for AYPAL. “The pen cannot stand up alone.” “I was at Safeway today and I picked-up one bunch of bananas – they were heavy and I looked at the bananas but there were two bunches…solid gold.” Then he’d laugh and laugh. He’d share passages from the Bible too when I’d call him with some petty issue I was having (biblical passages I’d not really heard interpreted quite the way my father does). I really am a good listener – I think that is why AYPAL and PIKA were able to really flourish and expand.

My dear friend Sister Barbara is an amazing poet and DreamSpeaker I met years ago at a poetry reading. I’ve never met anyone like her. She trained men during World War II to skydive, to land on a tiny island in the Pacific, Mop, bringing medicine supplies for the people. She meets up with her other parachute buddies once a year and still sky dives. I could write so many Sister Barbara stories--she is my cheerleader and spiritual mother, coaching me never to give up. She plays this role for many women in her life.

There are so many DreamSpeakers that strengthen and inspired my values and passion working in Oakland with the young people. I became fast friends with Alicia Yang, Alan Laird, Jason Jong, Gina Hotta, Ellen Beep, Kallan Nishimoto, Dan Chumley, Al Robles, Bill Sorro, Julio Magana and Kawal Ulanday; they are like these gigantic gallant galaxies for all aspiring DreamSpeakers. My sister Eloise Taesali who is a DreamSpeaker Womanista who is now living her dreams as an artist.

And then there are the writers and poets, DreamSpeakers that have deeply impacted my desire to break the silences and write - -- Joy Harjo, Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, James Wright, Walt Whitman, Gary Snyder, David Robertson, and so many of the youth poets I was privileged to work for and with.

What is your vision for the women artists/writers, for them to build community and succeed?

My vision is that the funders start funding the arts, public space for the arts and the program staff to keep the arts going strong.

What would you say to a young woman starting out? What will she face, how should she stay strong?

I hope the young men could step up in this work too.

But I’d tell the young women to be flexible and not compromise the vision. Stick with it. Maybe they’d have to fake a smile and nod from time to time, but do your thing at all costs. I’d tell them: Stay true to their vision and surround yourself with like-minded spirits who believe in your work. There will be what the youth call “haters’”--those who want to see you and your work crash and burn because they have that human feeling of jealousy--but don’t take them seriously. There will be more people on your side if your vision is true to yourself.

And remember that people who want to make it happen somehow--one way or another--fall out of the sky from heaven and show up strong and willing to help. Accept this help, don’t question and analyze, for there are so many people who have the desire for Reverence and Justice. I’d also say take care of the self--including eating 3 healthy meals a day, exercising and paying your bills on time.

What is your next step?

My vision for myself is to live a healthy and creative life. I need to take care of my debts and my physical health. I am grateful that I get a second chance to put myself ahead of the community. I see myself easing up a bit on my high expectations. I need some serious R&R.

Any specific writing projects in the works (besides attending graduate school in creative writing at Mills this fall)?

I hope to write many essays, poems, novels and screenplays. I want to be the bridge for my relatives that were denied voice in Samoa, Portugal, Germany and here in America. I want to hear their stories desperately, so I have to make room in my mind and my heart to let them breathe because I know many folks will be able to relate to these stories.

Excerpts from the Life of a Heavy Bleeder, or “…candy creates obedience,

2010-05-28T14:12:00.000-07:00

because the sugar opens your opiate receptors, which often feels like love” (Jackson Bliss, Spring 2010 Zyzzyva, p. 94)…a perfect line for this wickedly cold late May spring day, portable heater melting the top layer of skin off my ankles as I pop chocolate covered almonds into my mouth in my cabin in what must be a fit of p.m.s.

I come from a family of heavy bleeders. There’s a story of my mother, in the years before her hysterectomy, missing the curb and falling, one of her pumps flying into the street to land in front of a station wagon. Unbeknownst to her, menstrual blood had gushed down along the inside of her nylons, saturating the inside of the shoe.

When the driver of the station wagon got out to help, the race to the shoe was on. He beat her to it and she had a good deal of trouble convincing him she wasn’t injured, truly, she just needed to get to a bathroom.

Call it female virility, if you will—my family measures said virility by how much damage you manage to inflict during your period. I didn’t enter the fray with a story of my own until I’d left home for college (and thus it was cool again to talk to Mom).

That Thanksgiving, as we stuffed the turkey, I told my Mom about sitting in a lecture hall taking an English midterm, identifying passages from Paradise Lost, and having to raise my hand to get the TA to take my exam so I wouldn’t have to walk in front of 100 students to turn it in. Then I asked the girl next to me for a piece of paper to cover the grapefruit-sized stain on my seat (this in the era before pads with wings).

“Atta girl,” my mother laughed, and poured me a glass of wine.

By Christmas, as we wrapped gifts, I told her about the boyfriend who refused to go camping with me during my cycle. “He says the bucks, during rutting season, have been known to—like, mount a girl on her period,” I said, wrapping a pair of slippers for him.

“Horse pucky,” my Mom said. “I think you better save the tag on those. This guy’s not gonna last, is he?!”

She was right. We didn’t even make it to summer, he and I, parting ways after an argument over a comment made by my women’s studies professor (I’d asked her if she’d ever heard the “randy buck” theory). She had laughed and suggested menstrual blood could be dripped along the perimeter of one’s garden to ward off the deer; I guess that would be the does, if the boyfriend was correct, and hopefully the bucks would come looking for me, but leave the tomatoes.

Three years ago, when my youngest was one, my husband and I headed to Canada to attend the wedding of one of my husband’s high school buddies. Poorly timed, as I was mid-cycle, bleeding heartily. After several wrong turns down verdant highways laden with maple leaf insignias and waterfalls (half-hour detours each), and I’d reminded my husband for the 3rd time I needed to stop and use the bathroom, I felt that familiar rush and realized it was futile.

A vibrant blood bloom greeted us from my seat in the rental car when we finally stopped. I began to giggle, resorting to the old trick: donning my husband’s sweatshirt around my waist, I charged for the bathroom. On the way back, I stopped and bought a handful of cookies from the vets manning the rest stop in at attempt to appease my husband, then rustled up the wet wipes from the trunk. Not so much to soak the blood up, but to soak it down into the cushions, another trick learned during the college days, desperately trying to clean blood out of the boyfriend’s bed before he woke.

Back at home, I stood in the doorway, watching my six-year-old daughter as she slept: golden curve of her tiny summer tummy housing ovaries packed with eggs waiting to be doled out over her lifetime, and sent heaven thanks that she has another six years, maybe five, if she starts menstruating like I did at 11. Will she, like me, bleed for seven days straight? Fill her shoes with blood like Grandma? Atta girl!?

Drifting off to sleep next to my exhausted husband that night, I pictured the couple who rented the car after us. Maybe on their way to Vancouver, stopping at an overlook, the wife leaving the back car door ajar in her haste to get the perfect photo of the sunset. Both of them at the black formica rental-car desk, trying to explain the damage, turning their miniscule digital camera screen to the agent to show him the photos of the buck--with a full rack of antlers--tearing at the back seat with his sharp hooves in some kind of maniacal trance.

Photo credit: Robyn Beattie, www.robynbeattie.com

Signs of Life: Gator Lizards and Baby Rabbits

2010-05-21T15:42:00.000-07:00

I’m just…a bridge between here and there, the world that is seen and the world that is unseen...Jo Kyung Ran from Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers

Through the glass paneled kitchen door, I spy my son, boots first, then grass-stained knees, then one outstretched wrist from which something dangles, then the rest of him sidling down the steep hill above our house, where, during autumn, pie-sized fallen maple leaves, numinous tan and plastered wetly to the bank, bring light into the house.

I step out on the deck and ask, with that casual voice critical to adopt with small children carrying potentially dead or potentially still-living but damaged reptiles, “What have you got there?”

“I saw the cat chewing on this…” he says. “It is totally dead, though,” he adds, holding it out to me. I’m not convinced, so when he flops it flat on the deck railing and goes in search of his camera, I lean down even with the lizard’s blue-green body, which though entirely intact, sports a disturbing rumple just after its neck. Its two front forelegs are laying underneath him as if he’s gliding along in water. I blow gently on the side of his head, and sure enough, he closes his eyelid ever so slowly.

When my son returns, we discuss, in the light of this new evidence: Should we let the cats finish him off? Leave him on the railing to die in peace? Which choice the most humane? Each question punctuated by the lizard’s three or four tiny displays of life, well—pain--as he opens his jaws wide, limps out his tongue, then hinges incrementally back up.

“Well,” my son says, “I guess I’ll bury him.” “Well,” I answer, “let’s leave him a bit longer.” Leaving out the rest of the sentence--though I think it—let’s not bury him alive. In the absence of finding his camera, my son goes in the house, takes a sheet of paper out of my computer tray, and asks, “How do you spell Gator Lizard?” He records the date and the time, and goes outside with the measuring tape, careful not to touch the lizard as he stretches out the ruler. When he’s finished recording its length, he draws a line on the page and disappears back up the hill in search of other creatures.

I remember too, my parent’s indulgence, allowing me one summer in Illinois to eye-dropper feed one surviving baby rabbit from a litter damaged by the farmer’s mower. Mom and Dad must have known (as I did with my son’s lizard) that there was little chance it would live, but they let me believe.

I remember the snow silver of its fur, brown underneath, each tuft of fur finer than my little sister’s hair, the pale pink petal folds of its twin ears, the liquid rind of its eyes looking at me as the drops of milk slid along the dropper against the shut seam of its mouth.

And just before I left to brush my teeth, the little rabbit hopped furiously around and around the border of the cardboard box. “Look, Dad,” I said, convinced all was well, the rabbit on the mend. So when morning came, and with it, no motion from the box, I didn’t understand.

But I remember gradually settling on this: sometimes signs of life are in actuality, signs of leaving. And it helped, walking out across the field with my Dad and a shovel, to go dig a hole, the cold metal of the shovel handle a good distraction from the longing for the rabbit to not have gotten separated from its mother in the first place.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Crows bordered the seams of your leaving" Poems Live Today

2010-05-19T09:34:00.000-07:00

at The Blood Orange Review:
http://www.bloodorangereview.com/v5-1/v5-1.htm.

The editors at Blood Orange Review are looking in particular for artists to feature in upcoming issues, so please consider submitting your words and/or your art to them.

Photo Poem Montage She Dressed in a Hurry, for Lady Di Live at The Mom Egg

2010-05-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

I’m really proud of this latest venture in technology (set to music--my father Stephen Pryputniewicz on piano, playing the music of Scriabin, and Robyn Beattie behind the lens for over 30 gorgeous photos). The poem, She Dressed in a Hurry, for Lady Di originally appeared at Salome Magazin. For text only visit:
http://www.salomemagazine.com/chamber.php?id=301

For the Photo Poem Montage, visit: the Mom Egg, where it is due to be posted on Mother's Day: http://www.themomegg.com/themomegg/Blog/Entries/2010/5/8_Guest_Blogger__Tania_Pryputniewicz.html

Our first recording attempt was conducted at my father’s house, where we spent half an hour moving the computer with an attached microphone we’d borrowed from my brother back and forth on a stool in the hallway…trying to get the right balance of piano to voice. Then we discovered we were picking up the hum of the heater in the hallway, and tried sticking the computer in the bathroom, closing the door, where the voice took on a sharp tile echo and Dad had to count seconds and guess when to start the piano to time it with the poetry. We had some eerie moments when the wire of the mic became somehow attenuated (overheated?) during the recording of a second poem (Nefertiti on the Astral) and in playback we heard a long drawn out garbled voice, as if we were channeling The Queen of Egypt direct. Once the hairs aligned in their usual horizontal positions along the backs of our necks and arms, we decided to call it a day and consider the recordings working drafts

Fortunately, during one of those fortuitous family, kids, and technology woe swapping lunch visits, my friend Lori offered her husband’s recording studio services, and with his excellent mixing skills, my brother’s help transferring the file to its final form for viewing, we came up with a much stronger version. I hope you enjoy this bouquet of sorts…for Mother’s Day, for mother’s everywhere.

Thanks to The Mom Egg for hosting the montage, Salome Magazine for originally publishing the text of the poem, and Michael and Lori for the studio opportunity. And of course, my co-collaborators Stephen Pryputniewicz and Robyn Beattie (http://www.robynbeattie.com).

Mothers and Daughters: A Bird’s Eye View

2010-05-07T14:54:00.000-07:00

This is dawn./Believe me/This is your season, little daughter./
The moment daisies open,/The hour mercurial rainwater/
Makes a mirror for sparrows./ Its time we drowned our sorrows.
--From Dawn by Eavan Boland

I must have been six or seven. We’d just moved from upstate New York to an Illinois farmhouse. Early spring, the cold air evident on the palm of my hand pressed to the window, eclipsed for the moment by the sun’s heat, its blinding swath across the pages on my lap. I pored over page after page of muted watercolor paintings of mothers in long flowing gowns with their hair pinned up, escaped tendrils curling about the throat and pearl earrings as they leaned over the child on their lap.

Other images: mother and child kneeling side by side along the cream border of sand by the sea, the pastel ribbons of their hats streaming behind them as they gazed at sea stars. Or sitting nestled against tree trunks, oblivious to the wind rustling the marsh flowers and weeping willows framing their togetherness. Who were these soft, sweet pairs? And so awoke in me a longing for symbiotic, sacred quiet.

Back to reality: Dad in the pantry grinding up soybeans for pancakes in the silver flute of the meat grinder, my brother shrieking, “Batman” from the top of the cellar stairs before launching his way to a broken ankle. The kittens--unbelievably adorable by day--attacking our ankles with miniscule razor claws in the tangle of blankets at the foot of our beds at night. The goldfish--so vibrant an orange his one day of glory, found floating eye to eye with the lid of his world—for my little sister to bury.

Time for breakfast around the spool table my father scored from his job at GE, the many melted candles forming a lava mound centerpiece. Then a game of hide and seek, my mother in the kitchen washing dishes at the sink, stopping to whisper places for me to hide.

Now, forty years later, I stand in the electrified field of my own kitchen: raising a daughter. She stomps before me, enraged with me for saying no to an overnight with a family I have only just recently come to know. I could easily spend her childhood lamenting how odd to find her so deeply wrapped around my heart, embedded in my subconscious, how uncomfortable to feel her groping around in there for the edges of her own self, unable to accept the simple yes or no answers my sons tend to accept.

I’m not alone—other mothers too talk about their daughters’ relentless hunt for full attention: daughters engage until they get your anger, or your apathy, or the pushing away when they won’t accept no. I’m guessing because we arrive here more than not lately (my daughter and I), she must be honing a skill she needs. So many buttons get pushed, it takes Herculean effort to remain patient--a lifetime effort: getting a better grip on how I respond. One friend, speaking on her own relationship with her daughter and the exhausting go-arounds said wryly, “Oh my God, is this the kind of garbage we [women] drag men through?!”

And now as I muck through the day, and pray for a tiny pocket of sacred time with each kid, I realize it is what it is….My daughter hunts me down tonight in the bathtub, where I’ve managed to submerge myself, half-clothed, in order to lure in the 4 year old son (mollified, or shocked I’ve plopped in, finally submitting to the “tick check” after the hour of scrambling through downed trees and brush). She stands in the doorway, tucking her violin under her chin. One string mercilessly tuned an octave low, she perseveres to show me the first bar of “Ruben and Rachel”. She’ll wait til the boys are asleep to fill me in on her heart-life. Phew…at nine, she still cares to talk to me.

When she finally drifts off to sleep, I think about all the mothers and daughters I know. I have friends still angry at their mothers, friends abandoned by their mothers at birth, friends who ignore their mothers, friends who crave more time with their mothers, friends writing letters to their mothers who have since passed on. None of us can be where we are not…I know mending the hurts of a lifetime has its’ own timeline. But I do wish for reconciliation where possible for my friends and their mothers.

And maybe that shared symbiotic quiet I experienced as a kid, looking with longing at those perfect images of perfect mothers and daughters had more to do with a craving for god/source/connection, which I mistook to be my mother. But not really—I wasn’t mistaken—for she housed my first experiences of love. And was as busy as I now find myself to be, and yet took the time to whisper “hide behind the water heater” to me before my brother belted out, “Ready or not, here I come,” read countless bedtime stories, put on countless band-aids, listened to countless complaints and continues to surround not only me, but my children with love.

Thank you, Mom.

Guest Post by Lisa Rivero: My Homeschooling Education

2010-04-30T11:37:00.000-07:00

I am very excited to embark upon the first of what I hope will be many fertile blog cross-pollinations inspired by a “blog-swapping” thread posted earlier this month at She Writes (http://www.shewrites.com/).

It is an honor to introduce to you writer and teacher Lisa Rivero, and to host her post today. Rivero’s blog Everyday Intensity (http://everydayintensity.com/) is a daily discussion of lifelong learning, living with intensity, creativity, and personal growth. She is the author of four books: The Smart Teens’ Guide to Living with Intensity (2010), A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Teens (2010), The Homeschooling Option (2008) and Creative Home Schooling (2002). Photo: Lisa Rivero, first day of school.

My Homeschooling Education

This week I was returning home from a walk in our neighborhood when I met another mother whose daughter, a college freshman, is the same age as our son. We hadn't seen each other in awhile, so we had the usual awkward but not entirely unpleasant experience of catching up on our families’ changes and growth, much too much information to fit in a five-minute conversation.

An added awkwardness is that, for the last ten years of our son’s elementary and high school education, our family homeschooled, so when my neighbor talked about how our local public high school did such a good job of preparing her daughters for college, I struggled, just for a moment, not to assume that she was making a broader point. However, something I’ve learned from homeschooling is not only to refrain from taking things personally, but also, and, in keeping with another of Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements, not to make assumptions, especially about what kind of education is a good fit for a child or family.

Perhaps you have considered homeschooling. Or maybe the idea puzzles you. Do you wonder what it looks like? Do you ever wonder if you could do it?

I want to share here a bit about why we homeschooled, how we homeschooled, and some things that homeschooling taught me.

Why We Homeschooled

When we started homeschooling at the end of our son’s second grade year, I had no plans to do so long term. All we knew was that our son, though very bright and doing fine academically in the classroom, was not thriving emotionally or socially. At the time, I didn’t know what the problem was; I only knew he was extremely unhappy at school, and he was beginning to shut down at home as well. The spark was going out.

In hindsight, I understand better why a full-time classroom—even a small one—was not the best fit for him. First, he is an introverted learner. My favorite pithy description of introverts comes from Jonathan Rauch: “introverts are people who find other people tiring.” Introverts don’t dislike other people, and they don’t necessarily lack friends. However, a full day of intense interaction with other students—especially other intense students such as the ones at the school for highly gifted learners our son attended—is simply too much.

Another lack of fit was that our son’s intellectual needs were varied and did not fit neatly into a single grade level. I’m not sure if any child’s learning needs are best met by a single-grade curriculum, but, for gifted learners, who may be extremely advanced in some subjects and closer to grade level in others, or who may have unusual interests that are not part of regular a scope and sequence, the rigidity of a day of third grade math followed by third grade reading then third grade science will inevitably lead to boredom or frustration.

When we decided to homeschool, however, all I knew is that what we had been doing wasn’t working and that we would try learning at home for a year while we researched other schools, as a way to buy some time.

Ten years later, our son “graduated” from homeschooling and was headed to college. We may have begun homeschooling as a way to fix a problem, but we continued because we couldn’t imagine anything that would work better or that we would enjoy more.

How We Homeschooled

One reason I hadn’t considered homeschooling sooner than I did was that I had bought into the usual stereotypes about homeschooling: that families who homeschooled all did so for religious reasons, or that homeschoolers were unsocialized, or that homeschooled children would lack the necessary academic skills and credentials to go to college and succeed.

What I learned is that homeschooling families can truly create an educational approach that fits their individual needs, personalities, and values.

In our case, that meant focusing on self-directed learning, creative thinking, and multi-disciplinary study as much as, if not more than, a more traditional approach to curriculum. We often followed our son’s interests in-depth, staying with one or two subjects for days or weeks, until they had run their course, rather than always fit in five or more subjects a day.

We also did not follow the usual academic calendar. We usually homeschooled through the summer, not in order to get ahead, but simply because that’s what our son wanted to do. Homeschooling and regular life were not that much different from each other. This flexibility of scheduling allowed him to be involved in figure skating for several years and to accept roles in local theater productions, without sacrificing sleep or study or peace of mind.

We took advantage of homeschooling groups and found one that was a good fit for us: a mixture of families of different religious backgrounds (including Muslims, Christians, Jews, and atheists) and who had different approaches to education. What united us was that we all saw the value that homeschooling has for strengthening the family, especially the relationship between parent and child.

When the high school years came, our son considered going to the local public or a private high school, but decided to continue at home. He took the SAT once—early—which allowed him to enroll part time in college during his sophomore high school year. He made the decision on his own not to take the SAT again just to improve his score, and to bypass the college preparation frenzy he watched many of his schooled friends go through. Instead, he used his high school years to continue to take advantage of time for hours of leisure reading, study of subjects that were outside of most high school curricula, and even daydreaming.

What Homeschooling Has Taught Me

Now that our son is nearing the end of his freshman year in a college honors program, I find myself looking back, not on what he learned from homeschooling, but what I did:

I learned that it’s okay to go against the grain, and that other people can make assumptions about me and my family without the world’s coming to a stop. A big question among homeschoolers is how to deal with the inevitable assumptions about why we homeschool or whether we even should. Having to face these assumptions has led to much personal growth for me, finally allowing me to begin to face and overcome a lifetime of people pleasing. Now I allow others their assumptions. In fact, I listen gladly to them without the need to be defensive. Homeschooling has helped to make this possible.

I learned that there are more “good fits” in education than we realize. Every child and family have unique needs that require unique solutions. Sometimes a school is a good fit, whether public or private or a hybrid. Sometimes learning at home is. Sometimes it’s a combination, or even another option we haven’t yet considered. We might not know what works until we try it.

I learned that there are many ways to approach education that work well, such as doing away completely with grading, allowing students a true choice is what they study and when they study it, and even taking time off from subjects when roadblocks occur.

Finally, homeschooling rekindled my own love of learning. I remember very clearly my own first day of school and the excitement of finally being able to learn everything the world had to offer. As with so many of us, somewhere along the line, I lost that feeling, and began to approach learning as a chore rather than a passion.

My spark is back.

Notes from the Dream Lab: El Beso, Women Scientists, Outer Space

2010-04-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, at night, I wish I’d married Norman / Mailer and just once would like to make a man / riding by on a bike lose his balance / and die...Rachel Zucker, from Museum of Accidents, Wave Books, 2009

I dreampt I was at conference, preparing to read. Only to discover the poems had been written so long ago I felt no enthusiasm for them. The woman next to me had decided to use the venue to display her other talents (besides the poems she came to read), in this case, her replica of Rodin’s El Beso, masterfully reproduced in bread dough. Baked.

Would you consider that a negative reduction of El Beso—from the high art of sculpture to food? Or maybe an honest elevation: when you are raising a family, what you produce, create, should translate to bread on the table.

I don’t have a clue. When I’m tired, I worry, my favorite adrenal-tapping habit, and fret over the old divisions, like the one between men and women, consider the opportunities my daughter will or will not have. Having birthed sons and a daughter, I understand on a cellular level my responsibility to rift-healing, shock-mending, for what good are divisions, blame, or complaining about who gets what when. Up to all of us to shape the possible future. Set a good example. Maybe get along with my spouse, that kind of nitty gritty: deceptively simple, pretty hard to do, absolutely worth the risk.

Or publish a book like Museum of Accidents, by Rachel Zucker, unflinching in its poet’s look at the female psyche under duress of childrearing and marriage, witty, sparse and full at the same time, as in poems like “The Day I Lost My De Ja Vu:” "now all of me but this is gone and I was never a girl./ never but mother never/ every same day new again. every way is without a way out or/way to look back, to be back, to bring the fabric into a tight/pucker or pocket or foxhole or hem, some little space to fall into a breath/like an open grave or little death. instead I learn bird names….” (p. 3).

My friend Sandy, who in fact sculpts, talks me down out of my anxiety: There are more women scientists now; our girls will be fine. She agrees with me when I protest, “shouldn’t we still ponder questions of women, charisma, power, and how far they do or do not get in pursuit of their potential?” I can’t help but glance over at my counter, where, coincidentally in alignment with what Sandy would say 24 hours later, just yesterday at the library, I’d scored 4 thick books to feed my son’s love for outer space, and one I grabbed as an afterthought, at eye-level when I stood up to leave the star section: Extraordinary Women Scientists, by Darlene R. Stille.

Stille devotes two pages or so a piece to 50 notable women scientists, from ornithologists to cosmonauts. After the excruciatingly long dance between the laptop on the counter (e-mail) and the fridge (suffering from leftover’s halitosis), stuffing yam shards and meatballs into zip-lock bags for the kids’ lunches, I skim the lives of these women. Every 8 paragraphs there’s a new face to take in. Born, blossomed, died.

By 2 a.m. I’m luke-warm in my conviction we’ve come a long way since the first Greek woman adept at predicting lunar eclipses, or the perfume makers of Mesopotamia 3200 years ago, or the mob-murdered Hypatia of Egypt (mathematician, philosopher, teacher)...Or sisters like Sophio Brahe, assisting astronomer brother Tycho, did he? Or she? discover planets orbit in ellipses…Or the more eccentric, supernaturally guided Mary Anning, fossil hunter (fish-lizard: Ichthyosaurus, near lizard Plesiosaurus, and wing finger Pterodactyl) born in 1799. Legend has it little Mary survived a lightning strike (nestled safely in her pram) that her nurse, the pusher, did not.

I love that biography author Stille and her consultants (Angela V. Olinto PhD and Enid Schildkrout, PhD) took on the task of creating the volume before me. “Although the education of women in industrialized nations, in general, is no longer considered a waste, the message that girls and women are not suited for science and math is still prevalent. One of the purposes of this book is to prove that this negative message is nothing more than a myth. (p.9),” writes Stille in her introduction, more than ten years ago, long before my daughter (and my sons) had the example of Hillary Clinton, or Sarah Palin (should she be your cup of tea) to dream towards.

Later, sitting in the dim lighting by the wood burning stove, I read aloud to my sons from Planets, Stars, and Galaxies: A Visual Encyclopedia of Our Universe, by artist and writer David A. Aguilar. Dennis A. Tito, the first space tourist, writes, “We humans are essentially explorers, so we’ll always be interested in what lies just beyond the next hill or sea or star…” and I can’t help but think, so it is with writing…only the exploration does not involve light years of travel, just a willingness to track one’s night time dreams and the stamina to sit in a chair long enough to record what comes pulsing back through the asteroid belts and supernovas of one’s fractally wired, highly distracted mind.

Celestial "photos": artwork of David A. Aguilar, Planets, Stars and Galaxies

Mary Anning photo: Extraordinary Women Scientists

An Easter Roadtrip: Helicopters, Hefty Bags, and Dinner With Persephone

2010-04-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

The tops of my feet ascend to the ceiling. Along with a chisel’s width strip down one shoulder blade, both feet from arch top to toes radiate back the day’s sun, day four of vacation in Coronado, testament to the rushed sunscreen slather (such zeal to get back to reading Dinner with Persephone, all three children busy with their drip castles and maze of wave-flooded highways). The tingling gives a mingled sense of levitation and vertigo, spiritual glee even, goaded by the cadence of the family snoring. Their night ends, mine begins, and I range like a loosed marmot over the day’s beauty: the four foot froth of breaking waves, the expanse of lacey white skimming towards the kids’ ankles, tiny flecks of gold skittering beneath the thin shelf of retreating water, pelicans collapsing beyond the break like umbrellas for the plunge.

With a life-guard tower behind me and two yellow trucks roaming the beach stocked with sturdy, tan, twenty-some-things, I can afford to dip back into my book chronicling a poet’s year abroad in Greece, fantasize someday it’ll be me eating olives and learning a language. Instead I feast on Patricia Storace’s imagery (Dinner with Perspehone) from a stolen statue from the Porch of Maidens, to the “dense pool of wavering emerald shadows, where the darkness was not nocturnal but fertile” to the history of the dreamers of Greece and the years of interpretation and omen.

When Storace writes, “A modern dreamer making a statue, according to several of my dream books, wishes to perfect some aspect of himself, and is preparing for an opportunity to do that,” I immediately think of the parallel to writing poetry. I recognize that striving to capture something in order to bring it forth for love of others, though I hadn’t exactly thought of it as something to perfect in one’s self, heart, or psyche. Daily, as I go about the daunting task of motherhood, there’s always 1% of my brain floating its way towards the next poem, or preparing for the opportunity, which opens up most often at night, like now, feet on fire, thinking of Storace’s world of incense, the vulgar gestures of taxi drivers, oleanders, and the Virgin Mary. Inevitably I will be propelled towards my unlined tiny spiral notebook, waiting for me on the cold porcelain rim of the tub. On such a sun-sated day, it’s hard to rise, but a friend recently reminded me how crucial it is to write when you’re happy.

And today’s happiness, frankly, hardwon. By the end of our ten-hour drive, the car floor a tangle of plastic Easter Grass, knitting projects for two of the children with more than one ball of yarn attached, power bar wrappers, popcorn, crayons, coloring books, a bag of sand and shells from the overnight stop at Shell Beach oozing its damp contents over socks and bottles of bubbles, should it surprise me Day One would explode with non-stop brawls. 8:30 a.m: two of my children staked out in front of the slider in hopes of seeing again who they claim was The Easter Bunny (one hysterical jack-rabbit we glimpsed skirting the parking lot at dusk the night before) until one of them decided the spot between the beds was prime “fort” real estate, announced it, and the grass couldn’t have been greener or more worth dying for.

After the fray escalates with a frenzy of punches, we make our fury-tag way out of the hotel lobby and out into the sand, where the drone of the motorized raker and the Navy Base helicopter give us better cover. I phone my mom friend Emily, mother of three children mirroring my children’s ages and gender, to talk me down out of the Hefty Bag Fantasy—you know the one—in which you duct-tape together a parachute and head off the Vista Point behind the rest stop while the family uses the bathroom. A serene, quiet float to the valley floor for a cup of coffee alone…

My friend’s gentle laugh, insistence on meeting for coffee when we get back, her offer to put her daughter on the phone to snap the kids out of their fight helps immensely. I’d have put my daughter on the phone, but from the velocity with which the tennis shoes and flip flops erupt over the palm brush, I predict my girl’s more interested in hitting her target than chatting. I say a hasty goodbye, take a deep breath, and hear myself shout, “If you don’t stop and drop to the sand to work this out instantly, I will get a newspaper and hire a sitter for you since you are not listening to me.” Arms reloaded with shoes, they all three stop—eye me curiously, and sit down. Wow. The weirdest things work when we all get pushed to the edge.

Later, I take a second weird joy in standing in the direct flight-path of the stream of helicopters taking off and landing on the airstrip behind our hotel. I never thought I’d ever experience such peace in the thunderous drone, the way all your cells vibrate, especially one’s throat and heart, so that for an instant you forget everything but the grey underbelly of the copter, childhood’s fascination for the perfect arc of spinning rotors, and the thrill of something so heavy defying gravity.

Fairytales, Good for Your Kids or Not? (Little Mermaid? Courageous Princess?)

2010-04-02T12:42:00.000-07:00

Sit down. You have a decision to make./ One way will be thorny and full of pain. One way will be orderly and full of pain./ Eventually the heart will be empty and open/ and then you will give back the pain....—Terry Ehret, “Behind Broken Hill Temple”, from Lucky Break

Driving home from yet another evening parent meeting, I catch out of the corner of my eye a deer daintily side-stepping into the brush. The thin flicker of white rimming the black dagger of her tail mirrors the lit borders of the clouds, all of us bathed in that ethereal blue of back-roads on a half-moon night. I’m thinking about REM, specifically Peter Buck writing, “To me, Losing My Religion feels like some kind of archetype that was floating around in space that we managed to lasso.” Because the kids are home with Grandma, I can crank it up and lean over the steering wheel, afford a swerve as I search the sky and ponder a discussion thread concerning fairytales posted recently on She Writes (http://www.shewrites.com/) that was initiated by writer Allyson Lang (who posts at www.northsidefour.blogspot.com).

Do you read fairytales to your children—given the manner in which female heroines are portrayed, endangered, damaged, in need of rescue? And how might our boy and girl childrens’ psyches be affected? These and other questions were considered.

I am barely emerging from the “blind symbiotic cocoon” passage of motherhood during which one is in the business of teaching one’s child to construct boundaries while still being, as a parent, somewhat merged with that child. My youngest weaned, I’m surprised to find one of my dearly held assumptions morphing: I no longer believe my children will emulate everything they hear, read or see.

I’m not advocating over-loading one’s two-year-old with fairytales. Every parent has to sort out the right time and place to introduce certain stories. But I fare better trusting that my children’s psyches come equipped for dealing with our state of humanity, planetarily. I’m praying they come into their incarnations wired to survive. Eventually they’ll have to sort through the various group-thinks of our people.

As I pull up the steep, uneven, pitted gravel lane to my house, CD skipping furiously at the last lunge over the deepest pothole, the list of questions goes on. What are we attracted to in fairytales, repelled by, and why? What might be to our specie’s advantage to living steeped in certain agreements about which roles each sex will play? Where is the source of one’s power? Why is it so easy to give away?

And, why so easy to sit in the van, alone between the dank trunks of the redwoods, watching for signs of light through the upstairs blinds, pretend I’m not home yet, listen one more time to Man on the Moon, wonder which songs will obsess my children when they are teenagers.

Thinking about the teenage years (my own) I’m grateful for the grim brutality portrayed in some fairytales (take Bluebeard, for example) for the simple message: you too can survive this or that horrific situation (male/female skirmish, child/parent/relative passage, or some other tale of abandonment or betrayal). I remember as a preteen (burgeoning with the siren’s vibrancy of youth) encountering predatory sexual male behavior (from boys wired with an equal ferocity for the hunt) and how fairytales helped me breathe… precisely because they take the amorphous emotional treacheries we all must navigate and pour them into 3D form, that once named, you can ride along with the heroine and contend with (battle, evade, or succumb): a failed magician, a Sea Witch, a pair of addictively beautiful red shoes capable of dancing their wearer to death.

Clearly, I’m not talking about Disney’s oversimplified versions of fairytales either. As a nineteen year-old exchange student in Denmark, I read H.C Anderson’s Den lille Havfrau (Little Mermaid) in Danish. So rich, in which the choice to trade one’s voice for legs to win a landbound lover is not rewarded—the little mermaid suffers very real consequences. While she garners a dance, a little time with the object of her desire, she does not get to stay on and live happily ever after, but evaporates in the morning to the voices of her sisters singing her soul a pathway to the stars.

Or at least that’s the version I remember, puzzled together with my newbie exchange student’s handle on the language. The shock of the little mermaid’s demise—that depth of sorrow, reflected a far more accurate truth about one aspect of the female experience, often unmapped, unacknowledged. Offset, for me, by the spiritual comfort of the sisters’ voices bordering her journey into the next realm.

And now as a mother, I’m grateful for the whole cast of characters misbehaving in fairytales in varying degrees. For their universal appeal, with the unfortunate hero or heroine suffering a fatal flaw, some common-sense block or predisposition to thinking the best of others…which is the case with most of us ambling through our childhoods. For some fraction of a decision, then, you might side with a “lesser” character, until your moral compass “trues.” At any rate, I love how you get to sort it out in the quiet of your own heart.

When my daughter was 7, my brother’s sweetheart Maria (formerly employed in the comic industry) brought us Rod Espinosa’s The Courageous Princess, a 235 page graphic fairytale starring Mabelrose, a tomboy of a princess who finds herself in the snare of a dragon named Shalathromnostrium. Shal ruthlessly lectures the captive Mabelrose at one point, “No one will rescue you! Not now, not ever. No one will rescue a second class princess from a poor kingdom…You will learn to like living here…You will be mine for a long time.” And…as you can guess, Mabelrose has to draw on her own strength and intelligence to escape and find her way home.

We enjoyed Espinosa’s vibrant colors and his dramatic pacing, from panels of starlight and vast aerials above the thundering waterfalls to a close-up of Mabelrose sleeping in the safety of a tree house in the kingdom of Leptia. You see Mabelrose nestled in the folds of a purple blanket, her legs curving to fit the oval room, books and sewing baskets tucked into shelves made of the tree’s twisting inner branches. In the same black backdrop of the panel, is the forest’s eye view of the bedroom, just a dim orange glow emanating from the porthole window spanning an empty knot in the trunk.

I have no idea how the next generation will re-interpret fairytales, but I love that I can either go to the bookstore (or more likely Google) and scope out alternative choices for my children, or get busy and join the conversation, take some responsibility (lasso my own archetype), by writing something myself.

Not long before I was scheduled to fly back to the states after my stint as an exchange student, my host-sister Ulla and her family took me to see H.C. Anderson’s humble home, and later, in Copenhagen, to a harbor, where just above the slate gray water line, sat a small, unimposing statue of the Little Mermaid. In my mind, she soared colossal, rivaling the Statue of Liberty. In reality, she can’t be more than three feet or so tall, and, I imagine, facing east for love of sunrise.

The Courageous Princess: http://www.antarctic-press.com/

Interview with California Parenting Institue Volunteer Lydia Stewart ...

2010-03-30T23:21:00.000-07:00

is live over at http://www.fertilesource.com/ this week. Lydia spoke with passion about her years of volunteer work at CPI on behalf of women, children, and their families in Sonoma County, California. It was a joy to hear how boldly Lydia was willing to speak up, and as a result, found herself invited to be a board member at CPI where she helped make immediate changes (for example, offering night classes for working families).

CPI is hosting a number of free events in honor of Child Abuse Prevention Awareness Month (April) such as The Toolbox Class (presenting "twelve 'tools' that help families develop a common langue to build self-esteem and resolve conflicts and develop empathy for others," Grandparents Parenting Again Luncheon, and Assets and Resources (in which "parents will learn how to evaluate their family's situation, create budgets, pay bills, and address emotional stress while meeting crucial family needs"). For more information, check out the interview or contact CPI directly at: http://www.calparents.org/ , 585-6108.

From the Unsharable Files: Self-Care, Hammers and Sex in a House with Three Children

2010-03-19T11:56:00.000-07:00

Warning: The following entry falls under The Reality TV banner. One could argue (and I often do) that certain states are better left uncaptured in words, photograph, or film, like that Stanley Kubrick movie (Eyes Wide Shut? Open? Lila, help me) in which he decides to be the first? to film a scene in which a woman pees on a toilet. Of course Nicole Kidman pulls it off, she’s wearing a stunning evening gown (I think…or was it a nightie)…So be duly advised, I’m no Nicole, just another mother of three trying to grub through the day with dignity…and when possible, with a little levity. (photo: journal, ocean at Bodega Head on tsunami warning day, March 2010).

From where I’m lodged under my husband, sunlight streaming across our torsos, I can hear the kids in the yard with hammers. Though we’ve given them goggles to wear for this latest rock crushing obsession, I thought we’d said Parents Present or No Go. On a “honey-I’m-finally-home” high, my husband’s voting for tuning their voices out, which I’m convinced he must have a special gene for, while I, at the opposite end of the spectrum, suffer from full libido lockdown. How romantic, I think, were I a husband to such a woman, whose final remark might as well be, “Can I get up now?”

And I’m thinking of the Sigourney Weaver article I read earlier at the dentist’s office (More, Jan/Dec 09/2010). Weaver describes her screen test for Alien, which included “ a scene that’s not in the movie where the Captain and Ripley have sex. I said to Ridley [director Scott] That is so ridiculous…” (and here I got called by the dentist…but to paraphrase and finish her sentence, Who could possibly think about sex with that monster on the loose?) Like I said, for me, it’s not so much a godforsaken motorboat headed monster oozing oil from his row of metal remote-control teeth, but the kids…the sound of their voices.

We persevere, until I can no longer deny that I’m burning internally. Which at first seemed like not a bad thing…but I mean, Burning. “Something’s wrong,” I say to my husband, to which he cocks his head to the window for a moment, and replies, “No-one is crying, they’re fine.” “No,” I say, “I mean, with me.” Then I remember yesterday at the health club, finally getting to an hour of “self-care”, I’d sank down into the swirling water, the air above the hot tub meeting my nose a cross between halitosis and dirty socks.

I said to the woman across from me, “Do you smell that?!” To which she replied, “Yeah, but it’s better than the slime that was in the corner of the tub yesterday.” I got out immediately, made a note to tell the staff, showered, and forgot all about it. Clearly the source of the burning. Given the seven day regime of sticky Monostat snow, I’ve switched allegiances to the steam room. Where the sound of the steam filling the room and the way it narrows my vision as if passing out makes me think I am passing out and visceral thoughts of Auschwitz flood my head so persistently I wonder if I’ve prematurely added the pressure of “relaxing and getting in shape” to my list of things to do on the way to putting myself together in order, now that two out of three kids are launched, to Getting a Real Job instead of Just Taking Care of the Kids.

At the dinner table, we notice a green/blue egg on our middle son’s forehead. He and his sister drop their eyes when we ask about it, further confirming our suspicions that a cover-up’s underway by silently eating all the carrots on their plates. “He…uh…did it to himself,” says my daughter. “Yeah,” says my son, “by accident. It doesn’t hurt, I swear, Mom.” The littlest will spill the beans the next day, you can count on him to crack: he was swinging the hammer and didn’t see his brother (doing little to convince me that sex while the kids are awake is ever a decent plan, as I’ve said oh-so-many times).

My husband waves such evidence aside with his carpe-diem approach to life, and takes more delight in their collusion—“Aw honey, look, they’re ganging up on us. Isn’t that cute?” I gather up the hammers and tuck them as far away as possible in the garage, and go upstairs to leave a voicemail for the maintenance guy at the club, stumbling over the phrase, “Gynecological Problem”, and forgetting to leave my name. Why, I convince myself, would he need to call me back anyway…For proof!?

Practical Detours: Tire Bolts, Crazy Chess and Newts

2010-03-12T13:31:00.000-08:00

So the noise coming from the back tire I noticed two days ago while coming home from a teeth cleaning failed to disappear. As I drove around town hoping it would, the gruff mechanic guy voice in my head just got louder: noises usually mean trouble and the sooner you bring it in the better. I emailed my husband for permission to take the van in (a ploy to buy me another driving day), and followed his advice to go down to actually look at the tire (conveniently forgot I was qualified to look). Sure enough sitting in the middle of the treads: a bolt, its ½ inch diameter octagonal head flush with the tire’s surface. My husband phones to make sure I looked at it, and closes with, “Whatever you do, don’t let them tell you we need a new set of tires…”

While I contemplated if I could take the kids to school first and go by the gym (where I’d just renewed my membership) to work out and drop off my youngest to meet his little friend in Junior Club before taking the van into the shop, my daughter came downstairs complaining of a sore throat, while explaining she’d still need to go to ballet in the afternoon even if she missed school. I talked her into “trying” and loaded her into the van…but after circling the play yard three times, I moved on to drop off of the middle son. The day began its serious disintegration now, when, realizing that my daughter’s condition would keep us from attending junior club, my youngest began to howl. Followed by his brother, who realized his after school playdate was being jeapordized now that the ballet carpool was on its way out the window.

I speed-dialed junior club, apologizing for canceling already our first attempt back to the club in two years and we hit the shop. With daughter and the littlest in tow, I headed for Coffee Catz for some hot chocolate therapy and a game of crazy chess with my son. I suspect he could play correctly—given that he can set up the board without help. It drives my husband nuts—he’d prefer I make my son move his horse two up, one over. But my take is what will he remember, looking back on this time in his life: how we forced him to play by the rules, or the warm cocoa and the oil painting here at Coffee Catz of an owl grasping a harp in its talons, the cat playing the violin, how easy it was to win?

“Look Mom, the queen can fly...” he coos, and there she goes, right over his bank of pawns, mine, stiff and black, straight to my king. One move, game over. Why not. past

Two hours later, the shop guy calls as I’m unloading my son out of the bathroom stall at the library. The flush of the toilet coincides with something about needing a new set of tires. “Can you just give me the bottom line?” I say, apologizing about the flush, telling him its not mine, but the kids. He’s unphased and says smoothly, “About $604 out the door.” Over shrieks of, “Are we still checking out I Spy?” I text my husband where he’s ice camping. The only reason he doesn’t fly off the handle when I ask for $600 is that he’s just learned his trip will be cut short; someone in his group got a DUI the night before.

I call the shop and agree to wait an additional hour for tire installation, the kids up to their elbows in the library fountain. We find three new I Spy’s, the beautiful water colors of My House Has Stars, and a darling no-word story called South about a little bird who gets left behind at migration time. Befriended by a cat who walks him through the city and over hill and dale, our little bird quells his weeping once they find his flock. “Again! Read it again Mom,” says my son, and settles into the crook of my arm as we sit on the floor beside the shelves of authors ending in M, his wet sleeves soaking into mine.

In the afternoon, we’re able to talk the playdate Mom into retrieving her son the half hour drive to our house. Exercise for me comes in the form of chasing the youngest along the trail as he attempts to track down the boys (who have taken off with a backpack full of hammers and hard-boiled eggs to make a fort). My little guy gives up at length. We can both hear the rustling of the brush where the boys are hiding, but he’s busy now rolling over logs in search of worms and bugs. He even lets me catch up to him, holding his palm out for me to see the rind of a translucent brown newt. Down in the driveway, I can spot the roof of our van, below which sit our spanking brand-new, bolt-free tires, which I’ll test on my way to tomorrow’s beautiful disintegration and god-willing, practical detours.

Procrastination: Preparing to Read at WOW, Skyline College Tomorrow

2010-03-05T16:36:00.000-08:00

Ten minutes gluing last year’s calendar image of—I believe--Marinot’s “girl reading in a garden” (the deliciously plump lass in dark teal skirt, lost to the book in her lap, wearing on her head a pale green garland, a gold tipped sleeve snug on the wrist she’s leaned against her cheek)…to the folder I’ve chosen to house the two poems I’ll be reading during the open mic portion at Skyline College’s Women on Writing conference tomorrow.

I’m in my cabin, having spent at least an hour looking for last year’s driving directions to WOW, which by now, even on our slow modem, I could have googled, downloaded, and printed, or…just left to my writing accomplice for tomorrow’s adventure, the lovely Liz Brennan, instead of sorting through the stacks of manila folders and the rollout shelf under my desk with its drawings by the kids, business card for Scene Clean (advertising clean up of homicide, death, filth, hoarding someone randomly handed me at a party), back issues of The London Review, a sweating mini candy-cane still in its wrapper, and a volume of Immortal Poems of the English Language that still smells like the Illinois farmhouse bookshelf it occupied when I was 8.

Can’t help cracking Immortal Poems; I’m right back in time, peering at those faint oval black and white photos and bad artist renderings of Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Yeats and Hopkins, mistaking Dryden and Shelley for women and E. B. Browning for a man, searching for the women. Phew, they exist…. Christina Rosetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie and Emily D—5 out of 56. Such math didn’t occur to me as a kid, but I do remember peering pretty intently at each of those women’s faces. I see that someone has scratched out the Smart under Christopher Smart, and penned in Dumbie, but honest…it isn’t my writing. My grandmother? Little brother? One of the ex’s?

Chalk up another half hour to re-reading poems…how can I not: Because I could not stop for Death, Ode to a Knightingale, Fern Hill, Moore’s Poetry, Dover Beach. Which does nothing for my confidence choosing worthy poems of my own to read aloud, but I think, if, before getting to the blank page on my desk for today’s raw writing, I sneak up to the main house for a warm-up on my cup of coffee, where I will likely encounter my three year old and possibly my husband who by now would like the computer back, I think I’ll be able to muster the day’s work…and possibly the wherewithal to call Scene Clean to tackle my desk so I have somewhere to plunk my elbows.

Notes from the Road: Footprints, Storefronts and Valentine Mimes

2010-02-23T11:22:00.000-08:00

This Valentine's Day we did the moonscape—the snowdrop white Pismo Dunes, pristine and lovely where the kids babooned up and down for hours. Sheer cliffs away, we never lost sight of our three speedsters against the two color panorama—miles of blue sky, miles of warm, gold sand with wind-sculpted ribs we couldn’t resist footprinting.

I set this storefront photo aside for the infamous day of love--took this photo on a recent excursion with my niece Natasha in San Francisco.

And this one—we both loved the way the houses across the street reflect over the statue’s torso.

Also wanted to share this intriguing call for submissions for an anthology from writer LA Slugocki at her site: Tales from the Velvet Chamber (http://talesfromthevelvetchamber.blogspot.com/). She is looking for:

Stories that radically revise stereotypes of "bad women" in the Bible, in myth and in fairy-tales. Stories that aren't afraid to be literary, transgressive, dark, and sexy. Think: Lilith, Medea, the Wicked Stepmother, the Evil Witch, Pandora, Eve, crones, sibyls, fates, muses. Contemporary adaptations are fine. Mythical adapations equally welcome. The spine: We begin to see these women through another lens.

I came across this call for entries, and a plethora of other inspiring ideas, through She Writes (http://www.shewrites.com/) —a fabulous network comprised of over 5000 women writers, editors, bloggers, you name it, all talking about writing and what it takes (from first time writers to seasoned published, book-toured authors). Hope you’ll check them out, and consider joining. Sometimes I get “internet head” or “high speed fog” with all the social networking outlets tugging at my writer’s time, but I love having the option to post specific questions and mingle with writers from around the world minus cost of airfare.

I had it in my head to post this poem for St. Valentine, but was eclipsed by the road trip and a less than spectacular ability to keep a grip on my (self-imposed) deadlines while driving, so here it is, a belated, cynical Valentine, just for fun, contrary as it is to my current state of relative equanimity.

Envy

the mime his concentration
like the chased in a pair of lovers
lost to the now, so busy moving,
gloved hands ever edging the door,

or women their addictions of the moon,
marking their gardens with morning blood
in cups of tin to ward off deer (in the knotted spent lust
of chocolate, tears over road-kill, yelling at the kids)

or young boys their absolute
disinterest in girls, given
the thrill of dead cars, bottles to shoot,
a can of beer to split in the fort

or Cupid his logic, messy as wolves in Grandmother’s
clothes and hatchets. Granted: one’s fated to grow,
bad love’s still love. And after, one’s less likely to join
the casually cruel in the audience willing the mime to falter.

I will be reading a couple poems at the March 6, 2010 mini WOW (Women on Writing) Conference at Skyline College for a 3 minute open mic spot I've been promised. Haven't read in public since 2005 (Copperfields Bookstore, one poem), so I'm a little nervous. But even I can get through 3 minutes of reading. By 2015 maybe I'll be up to 3 poem readings. Looking forward to the face-to-face contact with other writers after so many months of e-mail or blog comment conversations.

Coronado Storefront

Thresholds

2010-02-12T17:51:00.000-08:00

I spent today interviewing my friend Lydia Stewart regarding the volunteer work she has done for the past eight years at the California Parenting Insitute (for an article forthcoming at The Fertile Source—I’ll post the link when live) on behalf of women, children, and families in Sonoma County. Lydia serves on the board of CPI, all while raising her three young boys. I asked her where she’d like to see her career lead her in the future , and we ended by talking about how much of one’s heart goes into non-profit work (though, after today, following Lydia’s example, I’ll try to remember to say, “social profit” work). How or when do you pursue your own dreams, I asked her? With such a rich history of giving behind her, this Valentine’s Day I wish her love and courage to pursue her heart of hearts. Lydia, you inspire me.

A second friend comes to mind as I reflect on love in its many forms—writer Penina Taesali, who I’ve been blessed to know for the last 19 years. We met in an undergraduate poetry workshop at the University of California, Davis, and became fast friends. She, like Lydia, is a community saint, who has given tirelessly to the youth and families of Oakland; in recent conversations with her, I love hearing she’s beginning to turn that same compassion towards herself as she pursues her goals as a writer. In honor of Valentines Day, I wanted to post this blockprint design, titled, “Threshold,” I carved and rolled out in July of 2001 for Penina when she lost her father. In my notebook of blockprint drafts, I had recorded:

Penina shares my sun, moon, and rising sign—our birthdays two days apart-- my “older sister”, 11 years my senior. The news of her father’s heart attack registered as a physical pain in my heart and I needed to make this for her. Her father: deep orange and red, poppies, monk, wise man, gentle. A beautiful, tall, strapping Samoan man with a large Samoan heart. He nurtured Penina, urged her to follow her heart and write. I intended to have many poppies, but instead, this is what came: a door, the spiral path to the heart. And the door-- a false barrier, falsely open or shut, because love remains omnipresent. While I intended to have many flowers, simplicity won out: one heart, one door, one flower.

I’m hoping to roll out a cleaner print for you--but that could take some months to get to--seems I've given away all my favorite ones in the mail. Consider this one a bookmark. I also hope to get permission to post one of Penina’s beautiful stanzas she’s written about her father so you may have her words; my love to them both and to you all.

Bouquets

2010-02-05T16:10:00.000-08:00

"...the/mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either/knows enough already or knows enough to be/perfectly content not knowing..." Mary Oliver, from "Daisies", Why I Wake Early

Four deer eat Spanish moss on the hill above my cabin from a tan oak tree top downed by the last storm. Their burro ears twitch warily when I raise my cup of tea off my writing desk for a surreptitious sip, the movement enough to stall them, green moss tines wriggling in their jaws as they asses me assessing them. I have the mild urge to pet them, but know from the Fair Zoo how bony they are. On their end: a mild urge to flee--a stalemate--clearly they sense I’m just another deranged writer hunkered down to my desk chair five feet beneath them, a double-pane window and a damp, steep incline between us.

I’ve been waking with night dreams vapored. Fire: out. Deck boards: amphibious. No end to the litany of to-dos, and the wheel of days showing no sign of slowing. What gives, when all the tiny tasks matter and one remains dogged by the desire to do each task well? You layer your time, right? Take stock of the good, stop dwelling on the unfinished, the how far to yet go?

I remember taking a class from a tarot reader/astrologer named Quan Tracey Cherry in Iowa City, arriving at his doorstep with a bouquet made up of the ferns and flowers I’d found between his door and mine. It was fall, and flowers were scarce—a dandelion or two. I came across a cardinal feather, some overgrown stalks of grass gone to seed, some browning ginkgo leaves. Plenty to harvest, when I let go of my idea of bouquet and looked closely along the sidewalk for what was actually there: the odd bit of bark, the lichen covered twigs.

This year, driving, in the absence of sidewalks, weeds, and tarot, I’m gathering animals. Tracking them on the daily drive to and from town, two, sometimes three round trips. The yield: crows, crows, always raucous crows. Blackberry sparrows fleeing my van on Green Valley. Wild turkeys, gangling away, flustered, around the man-made pond at Lazy G Ranch. The kids and I spout out a greeting to the black goat, speculate he’s forgotten he’s a goat, so near he loves to stand to the white horse. One pert, pesky blue-jay right before Bones Road cruises the curve for crushed acorns. On Mill Station, the dark brown elongated heart-shaped shoulders of five turkey vultures congregate over a deer carcass in the ditch. Finally, in the rain plush grass of the kids’ school, forty or more robins feeding, and one massive crow strutting in their midst.

Later, animal totems of the day recorded in my journal, I spend a futile portion of the night trying to reassemble Rudy, my son’s 52 piece interlocking balsa wood Tyrannosaurus Rex. A xmas gift from my brother’s sweetheart, Rudy took residence in my son’s heart from the moment Maria took the time to snap him together (smart girl, suspecting accurately the fate of gifts delivered for future unsupervised assembly). Rudy’d fare better glued together and placed high on a shelf. But once named, along with my daughter’s matching interlocking Brontesaurus (Sally), he acquired stuffed animal status and slept under blankets. Ever since, we find dinosaur spine bits and forelegs in the couch, under the table, in the tangle of blankets at the foot of the bed. Though five goes of scotch tape refuse to repair his broken tail, Rudy’s got most of his outline. I gather up his errant parts and plunk them in a cup, tail end ferning up into the air.

"3 a.m. New Melleray Monastery..."

2010-01-29T12:44:00.000-08:00

...is up at Autumn Sky. New Melleray Monastery is one of my favorite places in Iowa, as I wrote in an earlier post.

Also live at Reality Hacker : an interview with Sandy Frank on her first completed Beings of Light sculpture; photo featured here was taken by Robyn Beattie.

This particular sculpture rests on our piano at home (a gift for my husband). It stands nearly 18 inches by 6 inches across, and given the light inside, is exquisitely warm to the touch. One's palm fits perfectly across the stomach--something you learn when you live with one of these miniature beings of light. I had to give her temporarily back to Sandy for a photo session, and I miss her already...

Contact info:

To view Robyn's photos: www.robynbeattie.com,

To view more of Sandy's work or to learn about the sculpture classes she teaches:

www.sandyfrankfineart.com
email: sandyfrankfineart@gmail.com

Storm, Revisited

2010-01-22T14:23:00.000-08:00

One January several years ago, 55 mph winds coursed through our redwoods. I woke and walked down the stairs to light a candle. As I blew out the match, the lights went out, followed by the unmistakable snap of a tree trunk. I called my husband and ran up the stairs to my daughter's room. Before I reached the top of the staircase, the tree fell, missing the house, but landing across our deck and damaging the hood of our car. After the third tree fell, we gathered up our children, backed the van out from under the tree, and drove ten miles to my father's home. All told, 8 of our tan oaks hit the ground (all previously infected with the sudden oak death virus), one of them narrowly missing one of our cabins, one crushing the clothesline stand the ladder to the children's play structure, another taking the power lines to the house down.

Since then we've taken down the remaining infected oaks near the house. And called in a tree expert to help us gauge the health of our Doug Firs, oaks, eucalyptus, madrone, and redwood groves. In addition to taking a few questionable other trees down, our expert recommended listening for high wind warnings ( and considering staying elsewhere when such storms came along).

So this January 2010, Monday night at 3:30 or so a.m., when one of our healthy oaks fell (root ball and all) parallel to the power lines (60 feet of tree missing our roof and cabins), I hatched an alternate plan to sit out the storm with its predicted 60 mph gale winds in the day, expected to drop to 40 mph at night. We packed up and headed to the family house overlooking the Russian River, arriving just before bedtime. We rolled out our sleeping bags in front of the fireplace. As I stepped out onto the back deck to survey the river, bits of rain stung my cheek; porch lights from the resorts across the way and the arc of my mother's flashlight glinted to reveal the vast, brown, swirling waters, cresting up over the bulkhead of the patio, creeping towards the sauna building. Eerie, but lovely--the sound in the dark, of river eddying around the tips of the bamboo lining the path to the dock.

We slept to the hum of the fireplace fan blowing its warm air over our heads. At 7 a.m., I rose, took stock--calling a river mom for a road report--was it wise to risk the drive to school? No sonner had I hung up (having decided to brave it), than the house shook with a terrific series of bangs--of the unmistakable tree variety. My mother and I froze--grabbed one another's arms. Two of the kids were safe in the kitchen eating burnt oatmeal. The other, still sconed in his sleeping bag, I rolled away from the sound. We waited for the rest...of our imagined tree. I opened the front door, flashlight illuminating a 20 foot redwood branch extending from the roof, spear tip resting on the van windshield.

Adrenaline propelled me under the branch and down the stairs to back the van out. But the brute limb, as I backed up, just came with me. I got out. I thought about it--but not with my best "woods smarts"...I had a feeling the heavy end on the roof might boomerang down and take out the car windows. But at some point, your "woods stupids" kick in and you just take an action. I yanked the spear tip free of the windshield wipers. It teetered peacefully in the air above me. So I shoved it. Hard. Bam...the good fairy of falling tree limbs for wives dealing with storms while husbands are out of town came to my rescue. The branch crashed down perfectly between the van and deck, missing the windows, my head, etc, denting only a foot of the garage door and leaving in the bedroom roof a spike of wood, from whose tip rain dripped steadily down onto the carpet.

The next morning, waiting to meet the contractor, a light rain persisits. Despite the threat of skyborne limbs, I'm still here. In the river house, in love with the wide river. And the dim barn blue of a heron with its slow lift, heavy winged ascent, and breath defying u-turn in its neck.

An Average Life

2010-01-08T13:05:00.000-08:00

This is poetry’s province; a form of deep memory; a place from which to witness the intangible, unspeakable thresholds of incarnation we misname an average life.--From The Poetic Narrative Of Our Times, by David Whyte

The same mist I drove out of this morning at 8 a.m. hung in the trees at 2 p.m. when I returned with the kids from school. At dusk, thicker still when I step out the front door for newly split madrone, startling a deer from behind the truck where she’d been feasting on gutter acorns out of the mounds of dumped leaves of Oakmont and elsewhere. I watch her three darting leaps up the hill, listen to an owl settling, hooting, in the top of a Doug Fir, wipe the black bark sludge from my hands….a few of my father’s old fence boards into the stove, and the madrone soon catches. While soup simmers, I sneak in a few sentences of an email to Denmark on the kitchen counter laptop, though something (timing of the Gods? obsessive 360 surveillance at 30 second intervals?) causes me to glance over my shoulder, in time to see my 3 year old under the table where he’s managed to plug in the iron and set out a few large silk napkins like his sister did last week. So matter of fact, intent, I have to admire his careful movements.

I finish the job for him, ironing his “cape”, tying it about his shoulders; then, rummage for a new undisclosed location for the iron. Naked but for his warm little cape and superhero boxers, he throws his arms around my neck, demands to give a kiss of thanks on my forehead. I carry him outside, where we listen together for the owl—a long moment. But dusk has deepened, the woods silent. A moss-damp, mist rich stillness.

Which invites listening. Attunement. I talk often with my mother friends about rhythms of togetherness and apartness—how as one’s children grow, one’s need for retreat changes. After eight years of raising children, I’m surprised to find occasional moments of shared solitude—if there’s such a thing…often in the woods (listening for owls) on our acre, or out at the ocean, the sense of renewal is as good with my family as when (if) I’m alone. (Or is that the result of writing regularly at night when they are asleep, or the result of no longer breastfeeding--no longer sleep deprived or in total hormonal uplink with the youngest).

I sense a heightened collective listening as we enter 2010. David Whyte’s post, The Poetic Narrative of Our Times, raises some beautiful concerns. Whyte writes: It may be that we live in a time of collective heartbreak, where for the first time in history we are being asked to witness the disappearance and reappearance on a global scale of what it means to be fully human; to give away our identity and see how it returned to us through a sincere participation in the trials and necessities of the coming years. Opening with descriptions of night mist and mountain-scapes, Whyte uses nature to ground his accurate but sorrowful observances and gives sobering examples from political as well as family life scenes to make his point about how much we stand to lose. On a positive note, he suggests, It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living. He calls on poetry to give an “unflinching” view of life on life’s terms, with all of its "terrible beauty" (see the rest of his post here: www.huffingtonpost.com/david-whyte/the-poetic-narrative-of-o_b_378536.html.

As a fond straddler of present incarnation and night time dreamlife, I’ve noticed a paradox: the more deeply I relax into my body before falling asleep, the more likely it is I’ll go lucid that night in dream. As if the “aloha” to each individual cell fires their imaginations to let go of their anchors and congregate in the astral body, take flight, out of the constraints of time and particular incarnation. I think we’ll need to inhabit both: earth as well as star realm, present incarnation as well as those of our dreams, in order to forge a consciousness our planet and our children might survive.

Further reading:

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle—I’m halfway through this excellent compilation of spiritual understanding—with its “evolve or die” call to growth.

Story of a Storyteller (Cathryn Fairlee) and A Musician (Stephen Pryputniewicz)

2010-01-01T19:03:00.000-08:00

Since the birth of my children, my father Stephen Pryputniewicz has cared for my children one day each week so I may pursue my writing (and wife Robyn as well, once she joined our family). I maintain this blog and write due to the blessing of their time. I wanted to start 2010 by thanking them—and writing about Stephen’s upcoming performance.

Currently a keyboard accompianist for The Hot Curtain Revue (a West County Comedy Improvisation Group active for the last thirty years comprised of founding members Scott and Darlene Kersnar, members Susan Packer, Frank Ferris, Steve Page, Michelle Jensen, and light techs Mike and Waits Taylor), Stephen performs next (piano, guitar, drum) with storyteller Cathryn Fairlee on January 23rd at Guerneville Community Church from 7-9 p.m.

How did you become involved with Cathryn’s work?

I first met Cathryn when I played at her wedding years ago. Last summer Cathryn showed up at a house concert and we spoke of Patrick Ball's storytelling punctuated by harp music. Soon after, Cathryn saw a Hot Curtain Revue performance and suggested we collaborate. Cathryn is part of a storytelling association and has traveled to many countries (including China, Guatemala, Ireland, Bali, Mexico, Turkey) but wanted to bring her work to a West County performance.

How would you describe her work?

Cathryn tells traditional stories from all around the world often including songs.

What draws you to her work?

I love storytelling in general, and Cathryn's is very theatrical. I especially like her use of distinct voices for various characters.

How did you choose the music to go with the work?

We started with a survey of music I already can play, and a handful of Cathryn's stories...kind of a synergistic jam session. Hard to describe: you had to be there. There are a few stories where I play an entire piece that sets the tone, some stories have little sprinkles of music throughout and other stories have music at the beginning and the end.

What have you learned by working with storytelling—how is it different, for example, than working with River Repertory Theater (a former West County Theater Company)?

I have learned to be flexible, and to listen carefully. It is similar to working with theater: knowing the story well enough to anticipate the music cues. However, storytelling is not scripted like a play. The story is memorized, but not verbatim. So the words that cue a piece of music may vary from telling to telling.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a piano player for improv theater?

Making the music loud enough for the actors to hear, while still being able to hear the actors! Having dozens of musical snippets at the ready for any mood.

How about challenges of playing music as a background to storytelling?

Rebuilding my guitar finger calluses after years of no guitar playing.

Any other upcoming performances where people can hear your playing?

To be announced: a performance by the Hot Curtain Revue, likely this spring.

To find out more about Hot Curtain Revue or upcoming performances with Cathryn:
contact Stephen Pryputniewicz at: kapoosta@sonic.net

or Cathryn Fairlee at: cfair.@monitor.net

Performance location: Guerneville Community Church, 14520 Armstrong Woods Rd.
Reservations by the 20th: $10; Tickets at the Door: $12. 707-433-2297

Lively Q and A to follow.

Watch for an article forthcoming in January by Cathryn Fairlee regarding this performance in The West County Gazette.

For more information on Patrick Ball (Theater of Legend-Celtic Harp and Spoken Word): www.patrickball.com

Sky Walking

2009-12-24T00:08:00.000-08:00

Watching shiny ribbons of blackstrap molasses fold into one another in a silver measuring cup. The kids rolling out dough, shaping their ginger kin. A week of late nights baking, knitting scarves, wrapping, rushing to and from, and voila: Christmas Eve, signaling an end to last minute everything.

I’m seeing the sky again—a good sign—easy to go for weeks without looking up. There’s a section of our country road I watch for now, just after a steep set of S turns sloping down. As you ascend the next curve, the oak trees on either side of the road lean towards one another, leaving a gap of sky in the shape of an hourglass. It is nearly five, and darkening rapidly: the hour of leaping deer. The pavement wet, wisps of mist hovering just above three rows of nested hills, the farthest tree-line a dusky blue, so familiar it warms.

Easy also, between hand-me-down Safari brochures (Africa! India! Egypt!), books on spiritual pilgrimage, and e-mail advertisements for prophecy retreats, to feel anywhere but here is better. If I just had the right guide, the right ticket, I could travel to the right place, imbibe the right information, and grow, bigtime. In The Camino: A Journey of the Spirit, Shirley MacLaine writes about why the physical landscape (the 500 mile famed trek along the Santiago de Compostela Camino in Spain) so dramatically affects walkers and propels them into grappling with unresolved life issues (here via the character of St. John of the Cross) :

“the ley lines [along the walk] were directly aligned with the constellations of stars, which would help resolve conflicts if properly understood…The dreams and visions of people walking the trail created footmarks of past truth, which created reminiscences, which were part of the human subconscious lurking within each of us as foreshadowings. (p. 85).” Further… “people always return to old haunts because they intuit that the karma there needs to be resolved.”

For a former spiritual “quester” (dream group, channeling group, reiki trade, chronic swapper with fellow book divas of destiny such as Kieran, Childs, Duane), motherhood grounds me squarely on this acre, or this 30 mile radius of S curves. I’m thinking you could “walk the Camino” in dream. Wondering if your astral self would soak in that kind of info-energy (to borrow a term from Gary E. Schwartz, author of The Afterlife Experiments). Or, is the physical body a better conduit, and it’ll (the trip to Spain) just have to wait until the kids are in college? Maybe you’re better off just sleeping when you sleep, since the daytrip with the kids burns so many brain calories, and you need the “down-charge” of dreamless rest.

Or could that lovely hourglass gap between the trees be its own portal? I’m just asking. But now that I’ve asked, I’ve probably set in motion a pilgrimage of dreams. Let them be be hearty, but sweet.

Photo: taken by Sarah Doherty, Castro Theater close-up, San Francisco

"Winter Solstice" Sculpture Poem

2009-12-18T09:42:00.000-08:00

Last May, I gave sculptor Sandy Frank a handful of poems (so she could choose one to pen across one of her magnificent male torsos). We're not through yet--but I wanted to post the poem and photo in honor of the approaching solstice. Combining the static element of written words and penning them across a 3-d surface has its challenges, and Sandy tells me the alchemy is far from perfected (she has other ideas in store), but here is a "draft" of our project so far.

Winter Solstice

Live long enough and you outlive
somewhere a lover, one you cast aside
or one you chased. One who didn't want you--
at least, not then--or one you cried to leave, but left.
No matter what the parting, there's a last meeting
in the eggplant black of dream, where we divide up all the eggs,
and ride a Lapland sled, our unborn children
falling in the snow. We'll not stop--
we have no choice: you're dying
and outside the dream my husband's body
turns towards mine. The Earth's
one lover lighter. The Northern lights
remain, the silver sound-prints of the reindeer's bell.

Forgive the iphone snapshots--I promise a link to studio quality photos (the full sculptures extend to upper thigh, complete with male genitalia) and a January post with Sandy's thoughts on the sculpture-poetry process (post-holiday frenzy).

Sandy's work: http://www.sandyfrankfineart.com/

“Niagara Falls” and “Birth Angel” Up

2009-12-04T15:18:00.000-08:00

Niagara Falls—written for my late stepfather Jon—is up at Tiny Lights: http://www.tiny-lights.com/flash.php?id=265
…When I couldn’t sleep at dawn, you brought me for a walk along the rim. Then took your own photo of the silver shelf at the top, so still who’d guess at the crystal thunder below, how delicate the thresholds, and our balance, dreaming, taking turns, half the planet flooding the astral at a time…

Excerpt paired here with Jon’s photo—taken that early morning. Bless you, Jon, and brother Jaye.

Also I’m sweetly honored/pleased to announce I’ve accepted an invitation from editor Jessica Powers to try the wearing of a new hat: as poetry editor at The Fertile Source (view Jessica’s welcome and one of my blockprints, “Birth Angel:” http://fertilesource.com/?p=578 ). Birth Angel dates back to the “one-child” year (before the next two children came along), when I entertained the possibility of earning a living making handmade greeting cards. The 50 cent industry profit, along with motherhood, swiftly whittled my list of loves down to two essentials: family and poetry.

Though I still am tempted (now that I’m able to consider the world above the diaper line again) to rummage loose the tubes of color and the little black Speedball roller. Washing the printboard off, watching the blues and golds and greens swirl down into the sink drain still trumps the finished artwork, I have to admit. Even tried photographing it--but like rainbows in oil slicks or Tibetan sand paintings you just have to Be Present all alone with your joy and the morphing colors vanishing before your eyes, sappy as it sounds.

Boats of Mercy and the Gift of Journaling

2009-11-27T16:46:00.000-08:00

...Look,/boats of mercy/embark from/our heart at the/oddest knock...
Kay Ryan, The Niagara River (2005), from "Chinese Foot Chart"

So when a wave recedes, and you’re standing there with your ankles moored, it’s best to close your eyes against vertigo…or risk losing your balance, confusing your body’s point of anchorage and giving in to the headlong return to the sea.

That’s how it has felt this month to write against the rest of my life and its responsibilities.

Over hazelnut decaf mocha, I discussed happiness with two of my favorite mom writer/artists. (See Jessica Powers' recent review (Can women be smart, empowered, AND happy? ) of Ariel Gore’s latest book, Bluebird: women and the psychology of happiness, on this very subject). Are we to only be fulfilled by our children? On the other hand, I asked my friends, “Will our kids think we are narcissists for pursuing our writing?” We each hoped not, because the few hours away are worth the recharge (the ability to return to our families having tended to ourselves). We each hoped we could deepen our artistic/writerly endeavors, while mothering our children with love and poise. Is it possible? To do both well? That’s what I’m after; it isn’t easy.

The retreating wave feeling descended this month for a number of reasons:

1) the holidays—though we had harmony at our Thanksgiving table and did not, after all, as was suggested in this week's NY Times article (Food, Kin and Tension at Thanksgiving), resort to playing “cruel comment” Bingo, which you win by running into another room to dial a friend with news you’ve heard a row’s worth of wretched, time-worn remarks from family members. I love my family and love time with them; fitting everyone in becomes the mind-scramble, on top of the pandemonium of the kids loose from school and schedule.

2) changes in my husband’s schedule for the coming year

3) my tiny laptop (seven years old) finally crashing (was it the frayed, duct-taped power cord? No, said the employees at Radio shack, in their loyal, customer-ethical way, both talking me out of buying their $100 power cord. “Try moving everything using a flash disk”, they suggested sagely. Tilting the greenish line-warped laptop screen just so once the kids and the husband were safely snoring, I salvaged my files).

4) loss of a writer friend (see last post)—lovely Barbara Robinette Moss, 54, artist, writer, in full bloom with her work. Over the last ten years, while she bravely battled her illness, she furthered her work and her skills, and had the time to look at whatever essay or poem I mailed off to her. Every time I talked to her she had a new conquest: “just finished a screenwriting course in New York,” “took an acting class,” “just opened an art-gallery with my Duane,” “will be teaching in Taos this summer.”

Inspired by Barbara’s daring, I am starting a new project for the New Year—poetry recordings with music. As soon as I learn how to get the right widget on the blog, how to get the microphone to talk to my computer, transform the wave file to mp3 etc, I will be posting these new collaborations—poetry set to piano music with my father Steve. We are looking at the Egypt series—debut poem, “Nefertiti Among Us.” It isn’t that I’m giving up on the world of print or on-line journal submissions (though these poems have been passed on three times so far) it is just that I don’t want to wait to play any longer.

I have kept a journal since I was five, and when life gets hectic, that is often the only connection I have to my writing. When I am feeling tired, when that retreating wave feeling comes and I fear I will never finish writing the words I am meant to write in this lifetime, I tend to feel journal writing is not enough. But I’m coming to see one’s writing truly is a mosaic, and it doesn’t matter if you write words down on a candy wrapper, in a journal, as a prelude to a poem, call it what you will, you do not know where it might end up years from now when you finally figure out where it belongs. Francine du Plessix Gray speaks to this in her essay “Black Mountain: The Breaking (Making) of a Writer” from the Collection Adam, Eve, and the City.

du Plessix Gray writes: “by 1926 I had two children. I lived in deep country and in relative solitude, encompassed by domestic duties. The journal was becoming increasingly voluminous, angry, introspective. The nomadic tomboy, finally denied flight and forced to turn inward, was beginning to explode. One winter day, I felt an immense void, great powerlessness, the deepest loneliness I’d ever known. I wept for some hours, took out a notebook…(p. 331).” She goes on to describe how the re-workings of those writings became the first chapter of Lovers and Tyrants, and how her mentor Charles Oslon had encouraged her to faithfully keep a journal. I can relate to the intense feeling of isolation and motherhood she describes, as well as the power of steady journaling. Inevitably you reach the core, your potential.

Heartprints: Barbara Robinette Moss, Airplanes, and the Midwest

2009-11-22T17:40:00.000-08:00

Just back from a remembrance celebration for artist and writer Barbara Robinette Moss, (Change Me Into Zeus’s Daughter, Fierce—for excerpts see: http://www.barbaramoss.com/ or an earlier post) recovering from the collision of aloneness and togetherness that occurs when you fly across the country for love of someone no longer incarnate to be in a room full of grieving strangers. By night’s end, familiars, via the common, palpable, bond of love for our late friend as expressed by speaker after speaker (furthering Barbara’s presence in our midst) in Kansas City.

Planes leave. On time. As did mine, without pity, as my husband and I encountered malfunctioned gas pumps on the freeway (20 minute lockdown) and the 5 a.m. mistaken merge onto the Bay Bridge heading away from the airport, with maniacal hairpin u-turn at the bottom of Treasure Island costing us another 20 minutes.

Once I got over the shock of missing my plane (how could I plan so carefully for the kids but fail to plan for my own departure--pages of notes re: pickup, drop off, carpool, carpool mom phone numbers, Aikido outfits packed, play-dates listed, dinner menus, backup helpers, backup backup helpers, etc), I used the 9 extra hours at the Oakland airport to put a dent in The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death by Gary E. Scwartz, Ph.D (with William L. Simon). A friend had hooked me on one of the book’s central images: that of the heartbeat, with its own unique sound-print, radiating out and out into space long after our physical incarnation has ended (maybe for eternity, is the theory).

“Is it possible,” the authors ask, “that cardiac energy provides a loving bond that not only exists in the physical realm but continues as info-energy after physical life has ceased?” p. 22. They started “with the hypothesis, the working assumption, that science can establish that love exists, that consciousness exists, and that survival of consciousness exists, in the same way that science has established that gravity exists, that electrons exist, that photons from ‘deceased’ stars continue to exist” (p. 11). I’m a believer, so such reading preaches to the choir, but for skeptics out there, check it out.

Hours later, with an afterlife hangover, overdosed on airport food and bad coffee, I found myself on the last leg of my flight to Iowa City. Incapable of finding the silver lining in my botched departure. Until my cab driver began to talk. About how he was really a singer in a duo. It was all coming back to me—the nature of Iowa City and its inhabitants: if you’ve ever lived in Iowa City any length of time, you discover everyone from your mail carrier to your street-sweeper has a manuscript. Hidden somewhere. So far this cab driver had admitted he was really a singer and a musician. But then he adds, “I’m glad to drive you, I was hoping I’d get an English major, actually. You know, I write a bit too.”

I perked up. Then: “My town--North Liberty—has a great library. Just got done reading a real good book by this lady…I’m sure you don’t know her…but we invited her to come and give a reading from her book, Zeus’s Daughter. Barbara Robinette Moss? Ever heard of her? I was hoping to take a class from her some time.” I put one hand on my heart and the other on his arm. “Stop it,” I said, “she’s the reason I’m here.” Far more eloquent stories about Barbara’s continuing presence and her effect on everyone she knew circulated at her remembrance, but I felt blessed by this tiny synchronicity.

It turns out perfect planning didn’t have much to do with catching planes on time, for three days later I found myself once again in the 5:30 a.m. dark, panicking, just off Highway 218, staring by the glow of my i-phone at the muffler of my friend’s car at our feet. Bless Google, and yellow taxi. Though last to board, I managed to catch my flight to Kansas City.

In anticipation of further trouble, I padded an extra hour for my return trip to the airport to fly home to Oakland. The hour came in handy: the friend (Tom--innocent! no ticket!!) driving me to the airport not only got pulled over by the cops, but took 4 wrong turns merging onto the freeway and needed an extra half hour to find a gas station.

But I’d do it all over again—for the magical, synchronous hours I had with friends in Iowa City—sleeping in Mary’s tiny Midwest garret, the cold, crisp air, the cherub angel and Escher print above the green armchair. The blue-black crosshatched pattern of the branches on the barren tree outside the window. For breakfast quiche with Bonnie, doves cooing in the background. For reconnecting with my poet friends Tonja (http://www.papagenopoetry.com/) and Laurie, my dancing friend Renee, other friends of heart Ann and Carol and Jeff. For the realization that the writer self I nurtured in Iowa City still thrives and remains as deeply important to me as the mother self I’ve reigned from internally for the last ten years.

And last, for the friends and family of Barbara I came to meet, and stories I heard about Barbara—whose heartprint I can sense, believe, is radiating out and out into the Milky Way.

Further Reading:

2004 interview with Barbara Robinette Moss: http://www.jodyewing.com/barbara_moss_10_04.html

An article about the gallery Barbara and husband Duane opened together: http://presentmagazine.com/full_content.php?article_id=1600&full=yes&pbr=1

"Engorged" up at Literary Mama

2009-11-03T13:32:00.000-08:00

I had to add this pregnancy photograph (taken by Robyn Beattie) to balance out the feral poem Engorged up at Literary Mama this week; the poem was written on behalf of anyone who has ever been there...and for those husbands, partners, and family members coaxing new or seasoned moms through the pain of such nursing. For me, it was the third child that brought on the condition, a shocker, after thinking I was a pro. Thank God for that British nurse: bless you, where-ever you are.

Further reading:

Just started Jayne Anne Phillips novel Motherkind; the main character is heading towards mastitis as we speak...

and once again, Robyn's portfolio can be viewed at www.robynbeattie.com

and Literary Mama's website: www.literarymama.com

Why I Love Co-sleeping

2009-10-31T15:05:00.000-07:00

I do miss my husband—who spends his nights usually in one of the three beds upstairs that I fail to occupy. But after he’s finished his nightly round of TinTin bedtime stories rife with stellar vocabulary for the under age-eight crowd (monocle, Yeti) and names you can’t restrain yourself from saying more than once (Bianca Castafiore, Snowy), I wouldn’t miss the night time conversations I overhear wedged between two of the three kids for anything:

my 6 year old son, to his 3 year old brother, on heaven:

But, down here’s way cooler than heaven. I mean, you get to do sports, like knit.

Can you tell he’s attending a Waldorf school at the moment? And that my sport loving husband (swimming and cross-country coach) will shortly be withdrawing our son’s enrollment when, I mean if, he ever reads my blog?

Co-sleeping criticisms come via the family. Early on I was stunned by the voracity of several generations of my husband’s family members inquiring about our sex life. Out of respect for them, I usually pretend I didn’t hear the question. “How are we managing what? I didn’t quite catch that.” And follow-up with, “Another hors-de-oeuvre?” My husband, far cheekier than I, chimes in with, “What do you think the kitchen floor is for?” which puts high color in everyone’s cheeks and signals my exit to the counter to trade in my champagne flute for a shot-glass.

I’ll admit, one time when I felt I just couldn’t bear sharing the bed with the kids any longer, I did the math. The nights with my children under our roof are finite, like there’s a number I could count to. It was pretty high, like more than a thousand, but still, finite (and they’ll have moved on to their own beds for many of those nights). One day my sons might wake up and decide they want nothing to do with me, mom. And the same for my daughter. So I’ll enjoy the conversation and I’ll take the many wee hour trips holding sticky hands on the way to the bathroom, good for encouraging hygiene, and from the Olympic sport of “Edge Sleeping” that stiff spine, good for encouraging the midnight detour to the kitchen for some stretching, and if I’m lucky, maybe even an uncensored romp.

"Rising Sign" and "Thoughtloops of a Breastfeeding Mom" Live

2009-10-31T14:52:00.000-07:00

Paired with the photo of an escargot begonia taken by Robyn Beattie, "Rising Sign" is our second photo/writing collaboration to date: www.themomegg.com/. The Mom Egg’s online zine appears as a PDF—our poem/photo displays on page 45. Also check out 4 prose poems by my writing cohort Liz Brennan on page 18, as well as the other fine work featured there. Liz's blog: numberthepages.blogspot.com/ and Robyn's photo portfolio: www.robynbeattie.com/ .

On the light/humor side of life, “Thought-loops of a Breastfeeding Mom” www.fertilesource.com/ raises questions regarding the division of labor (house, marriage) when the first newborn arrives and shakes up the routine-- permanently!