How Not to Make a Lemon Souffle

I had extra eggs so I was going to bake a lemon souffle. But first I had to do a magic trick for the kids with a copper tube and a paint lid, switching hands and spinning three times. Our laughing woke the toddler midnap so I spent twenty minutes getting him back down.

The souffle recipe on page 740 referred me to page 739 to read about preparing souffle dishes which referred me to page 238 for souffle options which referred me to page 220 for the photo of the ovenproof baking dish. The kids finished stirring their unsupervised cobbler with its pinches of poppy, sunflower, and sesame seeds and hunks of melting anonymous berries oozing purple into batter the consistency of peanut butter. Hunting for a suitable dish for my souffle, passing the fruit bowl, I notice there’s only one lemon, puckered at both ends, on its way to leather, its molding belly anchoring a rejection from ZYZZYVA.

The toddler trundles down the staircase crying while the cobbler darkens in the oven. At the very back of the cupboard I find the Chessmans and dole out the seven cookies the raccoons didn’t get to when they pilfered from the tea tray I forgot on the deck last night by accident. Milk skin floats intact on both Elizabeth’s cup and mine (left over Earl from our writing meeting in the cabin), The Book of Questions on my desk, a harvest of light from the mind of Neruda (finished not long before he died, translated by William O’Daly) opening with: “Which yellow bird/fills its nest with lemons?”

How can it take two months to mail a tube of goat lotion...

...to my father-in-law in Mexico?! The excuses I jot down for him can’t do justice to the territory: stitches across my son’s eyelid, scabies scare, lice outbreak at the school, Easter vacation (kids home 24/7 for two weeks), great grandpa breaking his arm and fracturing his pelvis. Add the weekend demands of my husband’s schedule, and I’m fantasizing about beaming my father-in-law up, to float even with the stained glass lamp for that aerial view reserved for lucid dreams, acid trips or PMS: my son wringing out the sponge onto his little brother’s head while the paper airplanes soar and my daughter loses her second needle for the day: “Maybe by the couch?! I don’t know, Mom, but I’m not done and I need a new one!”

I’m not a bath-play-date mom but when my three year old and his friend can’t do without the windup scuba diver (the plastic turtle pool buried under a cord of madrone wood), I fill the upstairs tub with a foot of water. Of course, the little people end up stripping, hopping in. The next day, I get the call about the possibility of my son’s friend carrying an active case of scabies. I’m a river kid—please—I grew up being exposed to everything under the sun, but I also have the type of personality to err on the side of anal, so I pull the other two kids out of school until we can ascertain if we’re infected or contagious.

My father wryly reminds me that when my sister contracted it as a kid, my brother and I reduced her to tears by calling her “Scabes” and “Scaby Baby.” My mother, ever practical, says none of the rest of us caught it, which causes me to stop freaking out about my little family in the woods. With neither the freedom to fly nor the promise of the next day hangover wearing off when things right themselves and the world returns to its borders—I remain firmly lodged: yesterday a mother of three, today a mother of three, and tomorrow, damp towel around my head, eyes stinging with tea tree and pennyroyal oil, Patricia Hampl’s Burning Bright, An Anthology of Sacred Poetry to read.

Within moments, I’m in love with the Czeslow Milosz poem, On Angels, inspired by Hampl to go back to the making of my own “silva rerum (forest of things)”--a lifelong assignment begun years ago in Sandra McPherson’s undergraduate poetry class. (In addition to writing a poem a week, we compiled our own “favorite poems by others” reader). I bought a 11x7 sketchpad and handwrote out the first five stanzas of A Child’s Christmas in Wales (who can resist that Dylan Thomas headlong rush into image and sound, Mrs. Prothero, etc.), probably some stanzas from Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, maybe a couple poems by the Carolyns (Kizer, Forche).

As if in response to psychic calm, things begin to right themselves in the household. My husband extracts, without skewering his thumb, all two inches of my daughter’s hot needle from the dryer. And waiting for me on the floor (beside the youngest’s night bottle curdling towards morning’s yogurt), Noelle Oxenhandler’s The Eros of Parenthood, Hampl’s Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime. Definitely worth waking for, and the feral cats will take the yogurt without complaint.

When Sandy asks me for a poem to pen across her sculpture of a male torso...

I have to go through my inventory to see how many poems I’ve written from the male p.o.v., about men, or to men. It brings me up short to see, of course the polarization (towards the female experience), since, wouldn’t you know, I’d just this month publicly noted my emotional response to what I perceived as a lack of focus on female characters in Per Peterson’s novel Out Stealing Horses (“What is the purpose of revealing yourself in memoir?” posted at http://www.tiny-lights.com/). My point wasn’t that Peterson has to write more in-depth female characters into his novels, but that I feel responsible to write my own stories as a female writer.

Nudged by Sandy’s query, I discover a mere four poems written from male p.o.v. (one as Nefertiti’s sculptor--Thutmose, one as Pharaoh Ahkenaten addressing the sun god Aten, one as my husband, one as a caretaker). Another handful address other men—a hunter, a soldier, a poet friend who recently passed away, my father, stepfather, son). Would a man reading my words see himself accurately portrayed there? I’d have to ask. Not that I believe I should strive to balance the gender ledger overall in my work, but I do find it worthy to observe the habits of p.o.v., to consider how I might grow as a writer by visiting the male psyche as I strive to reveal the female psyche.

Living in the orbit of my husband and two sons, I have no shortage of men to observe. My husband--still addicted to Lee Child crime novels--muses aloud that 1) he can’t seem to put a Child book down, and 2) he can’t reconcile the recurring theme of women portrayed as victims of brutality. Since I’m always looking for a way to insert more poetry into my husband’s life (which he counters by forecasting my future as a triathlete), I was thrilled last month to read a promo snippet for The Man in the Blizzard, Bart Schneider’s detective novel featuring a Private Investigator with a photographic memory of poetry. I rang the bookstore and had it in hand within 24 hours.

I found Blizzard amusing and engaging, replete with a cast of full-fledged female characters (a daughter, an ex-wife, an assistant among others). Schneider encapsulates entire life scripts with levity and ease in the span of a couple sentences, for example describing the main character’s assistant: “Blossom had been a good girl from South Minneapolis...But the summer after her graduation, before she was to head to college...she met a freckly-faced monster named Kevin who charmed her into a few seasons of bondage and a hearty drug habit. She spent the next decade as a living ruin or in prison (p. 26).” Yet, as I discovered, Blossom is no victim in this tale.

I have to admit the book probably ventures closer to my heart than my man’s—with all those references to poetry (from Szymborska to current Sonoma County poet laureate Mike Tuggle)--but my plan is to put The Man in the Blizzard couch-end nearest the fireplace where the Child book usually sits and wait for the slippers to find the right feet and the adjoining body to lose itself in Schneider’s world while the kids plummet off the couch-back onto that familiar washboard gut.

--To sample Sandy's sculpture visit: http://www.sandyfrankfineart.com/.

--To view list of upcoming questions for Tiny Lights on-line Writer’s Exchange (and guidelines for submitting work) visit: http://www.tiny-lights.com/ under Guiding Lights.

“It’s teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It’s that simple.” (Anne Lamott...

...on character, Bird by Bird, p. 53). I’m listening. Mining about ten years worth of writing. Struck a few nerves in my inner calm. I call Barbara Robinette Moss (from my Iowa City writing group). I ask Barbara (author of the two memoirs Change Me Into Zeus’ Daughter and Fierce)... “Do I steer clear of topics that might upset my family? Do I consider my children, who they might one day be (or have become) reading what I’ve written, wondering what to make of their mother?”

In her sweet Southern drawl but firmly, Barbara says: “Kids care about hugs, cute shoes, a sandwich. The person you are day after day after day to them. Shelter. They don’t care what you did in 7th grade...or in college... Use the fear...Use your fears to help you write truthfully.”

Which I’m trying to do against the anxiety stirred up by having “Sheila’s Vine” come out in the anthology, Labor Pains and Birth Stories this month. Which means I’ve had to appear at a bookstore for my first official book-signing. Mary Allen (author of The Rooms of Heaven: A Story of Love, Death, Grief, and the Afterlife as well as my indispensable Iowa monastery, sauna, and midnight shopper cohort) advised me to wear comfortable shoes. She reminded me of the time I came to one of her first readings in San Francisco for The Rooms of Heaven, how she was wearing a new suit and new shoes and felt her insides didn’t match her outsides.

I took Mary’s advice and wore an old pair of beater clogs I’ve had for about ten years and managed mostly to feel like myself except for forgetting Rachel’s name—Rachel my mom friend from the bookclub I’ve had to abandon for a couple of years now in favor of writing time. Kind to a fault, she didn’t bat an eye and told me her own birth story—one of those frighteningly rapid “freight train” births for which she barely had time to make the hospital, and yes, she had to kiss her epidural goodbye.

Surrounded by savvy friends with clearer heads than mine, I’m back in the cabin with a two-story mug from Coffee Catz full of Lady Grey. All the dolls are talking at once, but that’s ok, at least until the bergamot and the caffeine kick in. Then they’ll have to take turns.

“I trapped my days for about 400 days, then I distilled them into this cross-genre book...

...[that is] partly imagination and partly the fabric of days,” said writer Nona Caspers, referring to her poetry collection: Little Book of Days, which she then proceeded to read from at the 2009 Women on Writing Conference in San Bruno. Basking in the pleasure of her turn of the phrase, I was once again reminded why I can’t do without the company of other poets. Not only were the poems witty and articulate, but the language Caspers used to discuss her work as well.

Like Liz Brennan, my own secret stash of poetry gold, driving to the conference with me. Who I get to see weekly, witnessing the unfolding of her Mother Theresa poems that chronicle the everyday, the ordinary struggle to be saint of the mundane. How does Elizabeth--principle wage earner for her family, mother to her son and herself a loving wife--stay connected to her work, and produce for me to read week after week yet another Mother Theresa poem. Each Wednesday I wonder where she’ll (MT) be next: perhaps 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.

A woman in the conference audience suggests carrying a talisman of one’s work in order to maintain the thread of the current project at hand. A good plan—though given life’s hectic pace, I’d probably lose such an object. Images work as talismans for me: the core image of the poem, story or essay gives off a certain alluring heat so I can’t put it too far out of mind anyway. I think of Jane Miller (in a 1994 Electronic Poetry Review interview conducted by Jocelyn Emerson): “I've always felt that poetry begins in a powerful emotional seed. Some artists are more inclined to bury this emotional energy than others; I prefer to bloody the back steps”(for context see entire interview transcript at: www.epoetry.org/issues/issue1/alltext/intmil.htm ).

And as a mother and a writer, I was particularly curious to hear the afternoon panelists respond to a question about how/when they write, given the demands of children and family, etc. Writer Yiyun Li answered closest to my heart when she said, “I write between midnight and 4 a.m. Then I try to catch up on sleep on the weekends. My husband knows I am happiest when I write.” I first met Li over ten years ago when she was an Immunology student who signed up for an evening writing course I was teaching through the Arts and Crafts Center at the University of Iowa—one of those students you don’t know how to help since their work already speaks for itself (inevitably headed for success). And here she was, two books under her belt, presenting, her two young boys the only children I saw at the conference. Inside I applauded her...writer, presenter, teacher, mother, going forward with her beautiful work, reading from her latest book, The Vagrants.

Floating around in my head for several weeks before the conference was an image from Li’s collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers of four 12-year old peasant girls purchased for a funeral: “The mercury killed them instantly, so their peachy complexions were preserved when they were paraded in sedan chairs before the coffin,” p. 47 from “Immortality.” I still can’t seem to get that image out of my head or heart, and thus must follow it’s heat to the next blank page...sitting on my desk.

(WOW on the web: www.smccd.net/accounts/skywow/)

February means skirting the flooded S’s of Green Valley Road...

on the way to Howard’s Station in Occidental for Eggs Benedict and banter with the wait staff we’ve come to love. It means checking on the river house, running down past the sauna to view the muddy swath of racing water, the feeder creek a white froth. Then sitting in Great Grandpa’s chair while the kids color on the floor in front of the fireplace, and the husband reads The Persuader (Lee Child, Reacher in trouble again), all five of us content to play house to the drumming of raindrops on the flat roof, the occasional sharp ping of a redwood frond hitting the skylights.

And....cruising Great Grandpa’s library: The English Years of Robert Frost, Into My Own, by John Evangelist Walsh, where I skim details from the time period when Frost moved in to the London suburb of Beaconsfield. Frost blames himself for some of the toll the move takes on his family (though don’t life’s difficulties beset everyone, writer or not?) And were any of us, in our later years, to put in one sentence the trajectory of our lives, it might sound as harsh. Walsh notes, of a trip Frost makes to visit the bungalow years later: The painful contrast between his lonely present, though filled with honors, and those far-off days when he had lived in obscurity on this quiet street with a happy growing family may well have been too stark for him to face. By 1957, of the five who had shared the bungalow with him, three were long dead—his wife from a heart attack, his daughter Marjorie in childbirth, and his son Carol by suicide—and a fourth, his daughter Irma, was confined in a mental institution. It was also in the bungalow, with his family, that Frost wrote both “Birches” and “Mending Wall” (in addition to others). These details, put forth in the prologue, remind me the life of the writer is one animal, and the work he or she writes is another.

But then I come across Sampo, The Magic Mill: A Collection of Finnish-American Writing, edited by Aili Jarvenpa and Michael G. Karni. (The title alludes to the Finnish epic creation myth/poem the Kalevala; the mill is one of its images). I breathe into these beautiful memoirs and poems—the descriptions of berry picking escapades in the woods, bears dwelling within reach (Jane Piirto, Blueberry Season), a story of a mother who couldn’t stop knitting (even while milking cows) and thus fell down a well with the needles and sock she was working on (Unto Seppanen, The Knitting, translated by Reino Virtanen). In Eeva Kilpi’s Excerpts from A Woman’s Diary (translated by Inkeri Vaananen-Jensen), I find a more accurate mirror of my experience of what it means to be a writer...and a mother, and how the two braid together, and are in fact, one noisy animal.

Kilpi recounts how an editor once called and asked her to write about how she would live the last day of her life: I would make notes all the time...I would clean at least one closet...I would go to visit my parents....[and] eat food that my mother prepared (perhaps it would be herring baked in cream, good, strong smelling food, food familiar from my childhood). ... I would prepare a good meal for my children...turnip pie, Karelian rice pastries, lingonberries, and pickled cucumbers...I would no longer grieve that many books would be left unwritten but regret that so many books would be left unread. ...I would look at trees. There is something universal in their shape and reach; they resemble nerves... (p.220)

which in turn was a seed, Eeva, for a lucid dream several nights ago: falling, hands outstretched, on my back, some 3 or 4 thousand feet from the very top of a redwood grove. My first impulse, fear. But when I looked up at the familiar green canopy and watched the thick red rivulets of trunk bark hurtling by, I relaxed. And noticed as well, each to their own foot-wide ledges at varying heights along the trunks, women in green tunics. How could one not be at peace in the company of another writer, the trees, and their silent emissaries.

Do you inform the sensei your two-year-old son...

...just peed on the futon in the back of the classroom or do you march all three kids out without her noticing? Do you tell her before you finish filling out the parental waiver, or after you buy your daughter’s Aikido outfit? As you sit facing the altar where the kids bow before stepping on the mat, the spiritual pressure overwhelms you and you blurt out, “Go ahead, fire us before we even start. Can I unzip that cover and wash it for you?” She’s tall, much taller than you, and halts mid-step, spins around, and says quietly...”Did it go through?” You want to die. But you swab off the cover, and find to your delight it didn’t permeate the futon. Mildly, she says, “I”ll wash it, but thanks for offering.”

What the heck, you’ll stay for the first part of class, as long you can still get to the post office by five. Somehow you manage a wave to your daughter, who looks impressive in her whites, and corral the sons on to the post office for the National Poetry Series postmark you need for your manuscript (where the boys swing in tandem from the velvet rope long enough to pull both metal columns down on the stone floor).

I’m thinking of The Fire Cat, by Esther Averill, when Mrs. Goodkind with her mannish smile decides to give Pickles the cat a chance: Pickles, you are not a bad cat. You are not a good cat. You are good and bad. And bad and good. You are a mixed-up cat. What you need is a good home. Then you will be good. Or the Bizarro comic strip depicting Frankenstein waiting outside the pearly gates. The angel says to him: Parts of you get into Heaven, parts of you don’t. How do you want to handle this? Both examples apply to how I feel both about my kids’ behavior and about my parenting abilities. Constantly thwarted, requiring constant assessment. Just like writing, facing that blank page again.

“Nobody under the age of 30 has anything to say,” I remember my undergraduate fiction teacher, Jack Hicks, telling me. Then he handed us a syllabus of assignments, for which we would be trying to disprove his theory. I came to his office hours one day, and he asked, “What are you reading?” To which I naively responded, “If I read, then I won’t come up with something original. I want the ideas to be mine, not someone else’s.” He was patient enough to point out the same stories are told over and over again, but it is your voice, your take, that will differ.

Writer Margaux Fragoso, in her well-written article Two Worlds: Depersonalization, Reassembly, and the Poetic Imagination looks intensely at the concept of “how an artist is forced to live twice”—once living an experience, and than again in the remaking of it in art. (Margie, Strong Rx Medicine, American Journal of Poetry, Vol.7 2008). “Not only does the poet, or artist, rend the world apart by isolating it into its disparate elements, she rends her own self by doing so” (p. 153). In that context, Fragoso asks “...would any mother wish upon her child the uncertain life of the artist: the pain of standing at the cliff-edge of poetic labor each day, to face the unfathomable darkness that leers in the gray space between the blueprints of a poem or story and its actual composition?”

I’d have to say yes, for I grew up listening to my father’s piano lullabies at night: Brahms, Bach, Beethoven. And later as a teen, listening to the syncopated rhythms of Bela Bartok: Mikrokosmos...my father's kitchen a constantly morphing shrine of anything we kids (his three) made—from my brother’s thumb-sized demon sculptures of grey potter’s clay to my sister’s colored pencil drawings of roses to a dreadful digital device I’d made one high school summer as an intern at Hewlett Packard (back when I thought I wanted to be an engineer) with its wires askew, counting randomly from 1 to ten. For better or for worse, I could see wishing the life of an artist on my children, as long as it gives them joy. Wether it be a life of music or words or the ability to drop, roll, and land back on their feet like cats.