The Seamstress: Reading Diary#1

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

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 fitness 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 Beattie, 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

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

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

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

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

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.