Help Wanted

By Sharon J. Anderson

Fantasy Jobs (in chronological order)
Miss America
Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz”
Maria in “The Sound of Music”
Nancy Drew
Sherlock Holmes
Archeologist
Barbara Bain in “Mission: Impossible”
Stephanie Powers in “The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.”
Diana Rigg in “The Avengers”
Margaret Mitchell and/or Scarlett O’Hara
A keyboard player for Carole King, Judy Collins or Joni Mitchell
Ayn Rand
A gang member in “A Clockwork Orange”
Lighthouse keeper
John, the beloved disciple of Jesus
Barbara Jordan
Flannery O’Connor
Vanessa Redgrave in “Julia”
Sigourney Weaver in “Aliens” and/or Newt, the child she protects
A mother with two children
Cherry Jones’ lover
Mary Oliver and/or Anne Lamott
An Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker

Actual Jobs (in chronological order)
Babysitter
Gardener
FBI Laboratory File Clerk
Janitor
Dishwasher
College Student Newspaper Editor
FBI Crime Laboratory Digest Editor
Book Editor
Book Marketing Manager
Director of Communications
Senior Marketing Writer
Freelance Writer
Part-time Music Store Employee
Part-time Gas Station Attendant
Independent Creative Director & Storyteller

The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

Here I Am – Miss America

By Sharon J. Anderson

The first job I was determined to have was Miss America’s. In the early 1960’s, the crown came with an eye-popping $10,000 scholarship, plus Bert Parks announcing to the entire world precisely where and who I was. For my talent, I would play Beethoven’s, “Fur Elise” on piano, and then hope for an in-depth question about current events that I could tie to the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations, my obsession at the time. I pictured myself wowing America with a detailed explanation of the amazing similarities in the bullet trajectories inside the Presidential skulls.

There I was, embodying both beauty and tragedy on a stage. And here I am, still pretty much doing the same thing. “Drama, drama, drama . . . always such drama with you,” my mother would say whenever she passed me nose-deep in The Day Lincoln Was Shot or newspaper accounts of the 1966 kidnapping of 17-year-old Peggy Ann Bradnick on her way home from school in Shade Gap, Pennsylvania, not far from our house. Holding Peggy at gunpoint, William Hollenbaugh, the kidnapper, led police and FBI agents through the thick mountains of central Pennsylvania for eight days. An FBI agent with my same last name — Terry R. Anderson – and a police dog were killed in the final shootout with the deranged loner, who was also killed. I was both entranced and frightened. I was lonely, too. Would I kidnap or shoot somebody one day? I needed to know.

I gave up the Miss America track and became an investigator. I had questions. I wanted answers. I wrote letters. I wrote to the makers of Lifesavers candy: “How do you get that hole in the middle?” I wrote to NASA: “How do astronauts go to the bathroom in outer space?” I wrote to Betty Crocker: “Why do you always look the same?” I wrote to the U.S. Mint: “Why is Lincoln on a penny? Don’t you think he’s worth more than that?” The answers came in large envelopes or boxes that included free Lifesavers, autographed photos of all seven Mercury astronauts, boxes of muffin mix and a spanking new Lincoln penny on a special card with my name on it, as though the coin had been molded and pressed just for me.

Intent on developing my investigative skills, I began to read detective stories and watch detective TV shows. I fell wildly in love with “The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.,” Cinnamon from “Mission: Impossible,” and, most of all, Emma Peel from “The Avengers.” I secretly carried their pictures in a small file folder that also included newspaper photos of Barbara Eden (in her genie outfit) and June Lockhart, with a desperate look on her face, talking on that wall telephone in a scene from “Lassie.” I began to practice kung fu kicks and comb my hair to one side so I could fling it back seductively. Walking to and from school and while on family camping trips, I stealthily wrote down the license plates of suspicious cars and trucks in a small spiral-bound reporter notebook like the ones I saw on “Dragnet.” Once I tallied 1,967 licenses (the same as the year), I was going to send the notebook to the FBI for further investigation.

My fantasy sleuthing ended abruptly during my senior year in high school. That year, I pretended to be an undercover “student” cop a la “Julie” from “The Mod Squad.” To the members of my lunch table I whispered enough details about mysterious drug dealing to pique their curiosity, and later, their cruelty. One day, I opened my hall locker and discovered a plastic bag filled with white sugar labeled, in embarrassingly large black scrawl: ILLEGAL DRUGS!!! An attached note said, “You are such a liar!!!”

Yes, I was. Why? Why did I lie? Why did I create a fantasy life so believable that when I first saw the white sugar in my locker, I pulled out a pen that I had told others concealed a two-way police transmitter?

Investigating my behavior now via this writing exercise (using a pen) and with years of living and therapy behind me, I see that my fantasy life was safer than my real life. When the fantasies stopped at age 20, after a born-again Christian experience (I was dressed like Alex from “A Clockwork Orange” at the time, complete with white jump suit, bowler hat and one false eyelash), all hell broke loose. I came face to face with my profoundly disturbed and wounded self. I became suicidal, wanting to be with Jesus sooner, rather than later. Thanks to grace (embodied in countless beloveds demonstrating inhuman patience and unconditional love) and my own steely determination, I turned my investigative eye on myself.

The tools of my investigation are on display for all to see when one enters the stage of my home. Peer closely at a bookshelf and see The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller or Bodies Under Siege: Self-Mutilation and Body Modification in Culture by Armando R. Favazza or I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944 or Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton or The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich or The Illustrated Gospels. See The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright on my nightstand. See a documentary movie camera on a tripod in one corner. Hanging or propped against walls, tables and chairs, see more than 230 original paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculpture – collected over 30 years — focusing primarily on the female form.

See beauty and tragedy embodied together. See me. Crying one minute and laughing the next. See me. With exquisite taste in art and women and lousy taste in clothes and home furnishings. See me. A small independent creative director for large public corporations. See me. A lesbian Christian. Look. Here I am: Miss America.

About writing, Sharon says:  My regular writing process is similar to the one undertaken to complete this post. Pairing dissimilar words together (such as “wizened” and “baby”) always sparks ideas. My first thought when I read about this “Help Wanted” topic was how much I wanted to be Miss America when I was younger. I then compiled a fantasy list of jobs I’ve wanted during my life, followed by a list of actual jobs I have had. Next, I literally placed the two lists next to each other and stared at them. Then, I actually heard myself say out loud, “Well, there I am,” and began to write.

To begin a writing exercise, I often compile word lists based on two contrasting words. The time I contrasted “death” with “joy” led to a story that begins, “The first time I talked out loud about death was with a girl named Joy.” I also force myself to sit with images. One simple, stark image haunted me as a child: a black rectangle. Go to my website: www.sharonjanderson.com, click on the “Read” link and read my published story, “Black Rectangles,” to see where my pen went after I wrestled with this image.

I see writing much like my matron saint, Flannery O’Connor, who once said, “I work from such a basis of poverty that everything I do is a miracle to me; however, don’t think I write for purgation. I write because I write well.” And for that, I give simple thanks.

-from Topic post, WRITING TOPIC – JOB! WHAT JOB!

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What About Writers Conferences?

The National Latino Writers Conference is in Albuquerque today and tomorrow at the National Hispanic Cultural Center. La Bloga has a blurb about it, with mention of a few books having New Mexico themes.

Conference registrants get a chance to have their manuscripts reviewed by published authors, in this case Rudolfo Anaya and Ralph Flores. And this is what I want to write about.

For those of you who have attended or thought about attending writers conferences, how good are the review sessions when offered? How much time have authors spent on your manuscripts? Was the feedback substantive?

I also wonder, what is the future of writers conferences? Will aspiring writers always want to pursue the opportunity to show their work to published authors? I suppose much depends on the quality of workshops and reviewers at these conferences, but I do wonder how new technology changes the balance between those who have arrived and those who are on the path.

Just some of the thoughts running through my brain at quarter to 7 on a Friday night. Would love to hear your insights should you have any on the topic.

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Baldwin & Giovanni – On Truth & Love

I was going through an old writing notebook I filled in Taos last year, when I ran across some notes I had jotted down on Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin. It’s good to re-read writing practice notebooks. Sometimes there are helpful quotes, raw images, inspirational lines to be plucked from the pages of wild mind.

We read Another Country and Giovanni’s Room for the Intensive and I’d checked out a bunch of library books on Baldwin. One was called A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni (1973), published by J.B. Lippincott.

I remember thinking the generational differences between Baldwin and Giovanni would add a richness to their dialogue. It was true. At the time, Baldwin was 49 and Giovanni was 30.

On February 28th, 2007, Nikki Giovanni spoke On Poetry and Truth in the Ted Mann Theater at the University of Minnesota’s Minneapolis campus. The talk ran on PBS the first week of April and Liz taped it for me. But I didn’t get a chance to watch it until after the closing at the Virginia Tech Convocation. I was riveted to the screen.

She started out talking about how her dog, her mom, her sister, Rosa Parks, and her aunt had all died unexpectedly within a year period in 2005; she started out talking about grief and loss. Then she went on to discuss in great detail, the children’s book she wrote about Rosa Parks, titled Rosa.

She considered the book carefully and wrote with historical precision, considering every detail. That’s the hallmark of a good writer. I could see that writing the book had helped transform her grief.

I wish I would have had a chance to see Giovanni and Baldwin dialogue. They are two writers who have a startling honesty and unwavering passion for what they believe in. Speaking strictly for myself, I am completely inspired by both of them. After hearing an archived Baldwin interview, or listening to Giovanni speak, I want to run out and write my next book.

In Taos last August, I shared some of the Baldwin and Giovanni dialogue with the writers in the Intensive. Some found it inspiring. I thought it might be good to capture here the parts on Truth and Love. You can also still buy the book.

It seems like famous writers and artists used to publically dialogue with each other more regularly than they do today. Maybe it’s my imagination. But I’m hungry to hear gifted writers speak about their work and have frank conversations with one another about the issues of the day.

And while they are at it, I’d like to give them a go at world peace or global warming. It wouldn’t be the first time creative intellectuals debated the truth – and came to a place of compromise and love.

A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni (1973)
excerpt, p. 78 – p. 82 – On Truth

Giovanni: Exactly. And I’m talking about Chester’s [Himes] pursuit of truth. Because Richard Wright died, or was murdered, before he quit pursuing the truth.

Baldwin:  That’s right.

Giovanni: But Chester could say, Okay, I will pursue truth in this way, which looks a little better, so that you can make a movie out of it if you want to and it’ll still be true. And then takes it right to Blind Man with a Pistol.

Baldwin:  But, sweetheart, it’s the same thing we were doing on the plantation when they thought we were singing “Steal Away to Jesus” and I was telling you it’s time to split.

Giovanni:  But why do we –

Baldwin: Steal away, steal away –

Giovanni:  Why do we, as black writers, seem to be so hung up on the truth?

Baldwin:  Because the responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him. The act of writing is the intention of it; the root of its liberation. Look, this is why no tyrant in history was able to read but every single one of them burned the books. That is why no one yet really believes there is such a thing as a black writer. A black writer is still a freak, a dancing doll. We don’t yet exist in the imagination of this century, and we cannot afford to play games; there’s too much at stake.

A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni (1973)
excerpt, p. 92 – p. 95 – On Love

Giovanni:  People really feel the need to feel better than somebody, don’t they?

Baldwin:  I don’t know why, but they do. Being in competition with somebody is something I never understood. In my own life, I’ve been in competition with me.

Giovanni:  Which is enough.

Baldwin:  Enough? It’s overwhelming. Enough?

Giovanni:  Just by fooling yourself –

Baldwin:  That’ll keep you busy, and it’s very good for the figure.

Giovanni:  It makes you happy, you know.

Baldwin:  Well, it means that in any case you can walk into a room and talk to somebody, look them in the eye. And if I love you, I can say it. I’ve only got one life and I’m going to live my life, you know, in the sight of God and all his children.

Giovanni: Maybe it’s parochial, narrow-minded, bullheaded, but it takes up so much energy just to keep yourself happy.

Baldwin:  It isn’t even a question of keeping yourself happy. It’s a question of keeping yourself in some kind of clear relationship, more or less, to the force which feeds you. Some days you’re happy, some days you ain’t. But somehow we have to deal with that on the simplest level. Bear in mind that this person facing you is a person like you. They’re going to go home and do whatever they do just like you. They’re as alone as you are.

Giovanni:  Because that becomes a responsibility, doesn’t it?

Baldwin:  Well, it’s called love, you know.

Giovanni:  We agree. Love is a tremendous responsibility.

Baldwin:  It’s the only one to take, there isn’t any other.

Giovanni:  I agree and it’s awful; we’re supposed to be arguing.

Baldwin:  And we blew this gig.

Giovanni:  Goofed again. I think love is an answer but you have to be logical about it, you know.

Baldwin:  You say logical or rational and I say clear, but it becomes the same thing. You can’t be romantic about it.

Giovanni:  No, you can’t be romantic about love.

Baldwin:  That’s all, you know.

Giovanni: I think we’re in agreement.

Baldwin: You think we are?

Giovanni: Yeah.

Baldwin:  You asked the loaded question.

Giovanni:  I asked the loaded question?

Baldwin:  You did. You did ask the loaded question. But it’s all right, because we’re home free.

-posted on red Ravine, Monday, May 14th, 2007

-related to post: Nikki Giovanni – Hope at V-Tech

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Books With A Bang

It’s hard to come up with only 10 books that have had the most impact on my life. I’ve lived long enough to know there are many more than 10. But once I sat down to write, and began crawling through the recesses of childhood memory, a solid list began to form.

It reads to me like stepping stones, cairns on a map of my life:

1. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Walter J. Black Inc, New York, (1927)  – I used to sit and read his mysteries, rocking away and biting my fingernails. When I saw Galway Kinnell a few weeks ago, I was happy to hear that Poe was one of his favorite authors! See PoeStories.com for the latest and greatest on Poe.
2. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse – this book had a huge impact on me, along with The Prophet which I read my first year of college. There’s a great e-book of Siddhartha online.
3. The Prophet by Khalil Gibran – I was going through a change in consciousness at the time I started reading this book. Believe it or not, there’s an online fan site for Kahlil Gibran.
4. Nancy Drew Mysteries by Carolyn Keene - what’s not to like about Nancy Drew? I loved the Hardy Boys series just as much, if not more. I have a few originals of each around my bookshelves and in my collections. Books like these kept my sense of wonder intact. Nancy Drew is alive and well!  Check out Nancy Drew Sleuth.
5. Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton – first book I read by May Sarton. My favorite is Kinds of Love. I’ve read everything she’s written. May Sarton changed the way writers look at journals and their relationship to memoir.
6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker – had a big impact. But my favorite book is Meridian. I consider Alice Walker one of my mentors. I’ve read everything by her and saw her speak at Borders a few years ago. She has an amazing quiet and calm about her. A peacefulness I want to cultivate in my own life.
7. Illustrated Book of Bible Stories – One of my childhood mementos. It’s packed in a box somewhere. I ran across it when I moved in with Liz last December. I grew up Methodist and used to read these out loud to myself in my bedroom, marking the pages as I went. I think Aunt Cassie gave the book to me. Back then, it was tradition in our family to gift signed copies of Bibles and Bible story books.
8. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko – I read this book when I was going to art school. It changed the way I looked at the structure of books and writing. I love the story and her style; I recently read it again.
9. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley – first time I knew a woman could have this much chutzpah, blood, guts, all that and more. I loved this book when I read it at about age 11. I probably knew on some level right then and there that I wanted to be a writer.
10. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – I read a lot of books of this type in the early 70′s. So I guess for me, this Vonnegut book represents a certain genre that I was reading at the time. It was nearing the end of Vietnam, but war and peace were still at the forefront of campus politics. I remember watching Slaughterhouse-Five (the movie) in a dark college auditorium my 1st year of college. We were having sit-in’s and chanting for peace. We still are.

 -from Topic post: Ten Slam Dunks.

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

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The 1950′s — What Was America Reading?

It was the 1950′s. Gas was 29¢ a gallon, cigarettes 25¢ a pack, a hospital stay was $35 a day. The Franklin National Bank in New York issued the first credit card, and the World’s first shopping mall in the U.S. – Seattle’s Northgate Mall was built. The First Grammy Awards happened, RCA’s Color Television sets hit the market, and the films, On the Waterfront, All About Eve and An American in Paris were released.

Marilyn Monroe and her husbands Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller were pretty big. So were Peanuts, Mad Magazine, Jonas Salk, James Dean, Fidel Castro, Rosa Parks, Billy Graham, the Korean War, and Israel invading the Sinai Peninsula.

In the decade of blazers, bermuda shorts, saddle shoes, and sack dresses, writers like James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lillian Hellman, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, Maria Irene Fornes, Gary Snyder, J.D. Salinger, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Dylan Thomas were all doing their thing.

People change and grow. Countries have lives and spirits that change and grow. Would you say America is still in its adolescence?

You can tell a lot about a person by the books they read. You can also tell a lot about a culture. In the 1950′s, here’s what America was reading.

1 9 5 0 ‘ s – B E S T S E L L E R S

F I C T I O N

1. From Here to Eternity, James Jones
2. Return to Paradise, James A. Michener
3. The Silver Chalice, Thomas B. Costain
4. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
5. Giant, Edna Ferber
6. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
7. The Robe, Lloyd C. Douglas
8. Désirée, Annemarie Selinko
9. Battle Cry, Leon M. Uris
10. Love Is Eternal, Irving Stone
11. The Egyptian, Mika Waltari
12. No Time for Sergeants, Mac Hyman
13. Auntie Mame, Patrick Dennis
14. Andersonville, MacKinlay Kantor
15. Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan
16. Peyton Place, Grace Metalious
17. Eloise, Kay Thompson
18. The Tribe That Lost Its Head, Nicholas Monsarrat
19. The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir
20. Rally Round the Flag, Boys!, Max Shulman
21. Blue Camellia, Frances Parkinson Keyes
22. The Scapegoat, Daphne du Maurier
23. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
24. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
25. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
26. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
27. Exodus, Leon Uris
28. Poor No More, Robert Ruark
29. The Ugly American, William J. Lederer and Eugene L. Burdick
30. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence

1 9 5 0 ‘ s – B E S T S E L L E R S

N O N F I C T I O N

1. Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book; Betty Crocker’s Good & Easy Cook Book 
2. How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, Frank Bettger
3. Look Younger, Live Longer, Gayelord Hauser
4. Washington Confidential, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer
5. Better Homes and Gardens Handyman’s Book; Diet Book; Barbecue Book; Decorating Book; Flower Book
6. The Sea Around Us, Rachel L. Carson
7. The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version
8. U.S.A. Confidential, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer
9. Tallulah, Tallulah Bankhead
10. The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale
11. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Alfred C. Kinsey, et al.
12. Angel Unaware, Dale Evans Rogers
13. This I Believe, Edward P. Morgan, editor; Edward R. Murrow, foreword
14. How to Play Your Best Golf, Tommy Armour
15. The Saturday Evening Post Treasury, Roger Butterfield, editor
16. Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh
17. The Family of Man, Edward Steichen
18. How to Live 365 Days a Year, John A. Schindler
19. The Secret of Happiness, Billy Graham
20. Why Johnny Can’t Read, Rudolf Flesch
21. Inside Africa, John Gunther
22. Year of Decisions, Harry S Truman
23. Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, concise ed., David B. Guralnik
24. Etiquette, Frances Benton
25. Love or Perish, Smiley Blanton, M.D.
26. The Nun’s Story, Kathryn Hulme
27. Kids Say the Darndest Things!, Art Linkletter
28. The FBI Story, Don Whitehead
29. Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing, Robert Paul Smith
30. Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, Jean Kerr
31. The Day Christ Died, Jim Bishop
32. ‘Twixt Twelve and Twenty, Pat Boone
33. Masters of Deceit, Edgar Hoover
34. The New Testament in Modern English, J. P. Phillips, trans.
35. Dear Abby, Abigail Van Buren
36. Inside Russia Today, John Gunter
37. Folk Medicine, D. C. Jarvis
38. Charley Weaver’s Letters from Mamma, Cliff Arquette
39. The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White
40. Only in America, Harry Golden

 

-posted on red Ravine, Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

-Resources: 1950′s Bestsellers List from Cader Books, The Literature and Culture of the American 1950′s

-related to posts:  The 1960′s — What Was America Reading?, The 1970′s — What Was America Reading?

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Homage To A Candy Freak

-Homage to a Candy Freak, May 1, 2007, photos by QuoinMonkey,
all rights reserved

Twin Bing, Nutty Chocolaty Cherry Treat!
Palmer Candy Company, Sioux City, Iowa

Owyhee, Idaho Spud, The Candy Bar That Makes Idaho Famous
Idaho Candy Company, Boise, Idaho

Sifers Valomilk, The Original “Flowing Center” Candy Cups
Russell Sifers Candy Company, Merriam, Kansas

GooGoo Cluster, Milk Chocolate, Peanuts, Caramel & Marshmallow
An American Tradition Since 1912
Standard Candy Company, Nashville, Tennessee

-from Topic post, Candy Freak

-3:am Magazine – Portrait of the Artist as a Candy Freak, interview with Steve Almond by Amy Cox Williams

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

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Kerouac Goes To War

I was listening to NPR early Saturday morning on the way to a meeting. The journalist was interviewing a soldier from Wisconsin who had been shipped to Iraq for another tour of duty. In his cache, the soldier had illegally stashed a stack of books, including a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. He said he had read it as a young man and it inspired him.

Thinking he would get in trouble if anyone discovered his bivouac library, the soldier seemed pleasantly surprised when his superior was happy he had packed the literature. They now regularly swap books.

At the end of the interview, the journalist asked the Wisconsin soldier how he reconciled reading On the Road in the middle of a raging war with the Beat Generation’s anti-war sentiments. The soldier responded, “War is hell. But I’m a soldier and this is my job. It’s what I signed up for. I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

When I got home last night, there was a program on PBS about the Blue Star Mothers of Minnesota. The Blue Star Mothers of America, an organization that originated in 1942 in Flint, Michigan, is a support group of mostly women whose sons and daughters have gone to war. If their children don’t come home, they become Gold Star Mothers. No mother ever wants to become a Gold Star Mother.

I watched with sad tenderness as these strong women told their stories. It reminded me of when I was about 12 or 13 and the 22-year-old boy, James, who had just married my young Aunt Emmalyne, was killed in Vietnam only months after he’d left South Carolina for the front lines. She was pregnant with a child that would never see his father. The impact on our family was immediate and devastating.

I later lost contact with my Aunt after we moved to the North. But in my 30′s, I happened to be in Washington, D.C. when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by Maya Ying Lin, was dedicated. There were veterans milling around everywhere – some decorated and in wheel chairs, some in civilian clothes, most in fatigues strolling the grounds solemn and teary eyed. It was a rainy afternoon. When you walk in the mist, you get wet.

I walked the 246 feet of black granite until I found my Uncle’s name. Then I reached up on tiptoes, placed the rectangular paper over the 9 letters, and rubbed a graphite pencil across the granite. After I was done, I placed a red rose at the base. It was very powerful. The paper is tucked away with my keepsakes.

War is a horrible thing. And families are stuck in the middle. How do they keep supporting their sons, daughters, husbands, and wives in the face of the adversity, deceit, and media spin that flies at them every day?

In Taos last year, a woman in the writing retreat wrote about her two sons preparing to go off to Iraq. I think that’s when I started to see how none of this is black and white. From an emotional perspective, there are no winners. There are losses. And more losses.

I don’t support this war. I don’t support any kind of war. I believe in working toward peaceful solutions. But I do have a new empathy for families and friends who go off to fight for what they believe are the right reasons – individual freedoms. And I support every person on this planet being able to celebrate the richness and freedoms I wake up with every morning. I take them for granted. I don’t want to do that anymore.

I want to remember my Uncle James and every sentient being who has ever perished in war. My way of doing that is to write. And I know of at least two soldiers who are reading another writer, Jack Kerouac, in their downtime in Iraq as a way to lift their spirits. So this is for them.

 

BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE
Jack Kerouac

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

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Continue Under All Circumstances

By Teri Blair
 
I thought this directive, this encouragement, this heed applied only when things were going badly. You know, just keep going even though the chips are down on all fronts – when you have nothing to write in your notebook but garbage, when you just keep getting rejection letters from publishers, when you feel like the biggest fraud in the world trying to be a writer.
 
Now, I see it applies to the flip-side – continue under all circumstances even when things are going well. Because I see (in a string of days that are going well), that I am just as apt to toss myself away when abundance is coming into my writing life as when the horizon is bleak. It’s like the discovery a few years ago that I feel the same if I have 50 cents or 500 dollars in my wallet. I have the same sensation either way…always broke, never enough money. It has nothing to do with any dollar reality. Just the pounding voices in my head.
 
I’m in Holcomb, Kansas. I’ve returned for the 2nd time in six months to the setting of Truman Capote’s 1965 masterpiece, In Cold Blood. The first time I came out of curiosity, the 2nd from a series of serendipitous events that led me to discover forgotten and lost and distant cousins. Cousins who were raised here. Ones who knew the Clutter Family whose murder brought Truman Capote and Harper Lee back here to Kansas again and again to research their book.
 
And this time, instead of looking at the town with the eyes of an observer passing through, I am being introduced to people, one after another, who lived through the tragedy of ’59. Any one of them is a story. But there are too many. And it makes me want to hide under blankets or run away and definitely not continue under all circumstances.
 
But I will. Only because I was taught how. I will feel the bottom of my feet when I walk to feel grounded. I will sit still and not talk whenever I can. I will listen. Listen deeply. And I’ll try hard to remember that I don’t have to know anything. Be dumb. Just show up without the answers to any of my questions and listen.
 
To Janice, who sat next to Nancy Clutter in band. And her telling me about Nancy’s new clarinet that played like a dream, and how she was a little jealous that Nancy was going to get to go to college with that new clarinet.
 
To Sandy, who worked in the court room during the murder trial. And because she was so photogenic, she was asked to play Harper Lee in the first In Cold Blood movie.
 
To Marlene, who said she doesn’t want to keep reliving the tragedy over and over again.
 
To Eddie, who described to me Truman Capote’s pecking order of friends here, and what it did to the people when some were invited to the Black-and-White ball in New York City and others weren’t.
 
To Wanda, who looks very old and tired, who kept telling me she was far too young to remember any of the Clutters, but kept producing one yearbook after another from the library shelves for me to look at from Holcomb High School.
 
Continue today. That’s all. Just keep arriving in the next minute.
 
 

Continue Under All Circumstances is a writing practice written from the road while researching a story in Holcomb, Kansas.

About writing, Teri says:  I began writing in a Quonset hut on a farm in Minnesota, dragging hay bales around a blue window to create a little haven where no one could find me…alone with paper and pencil. I was often bundled up in several layers in desperately cold weather. I guess on some level I was really serious, even back then. I wrote in journals and diaries faithfully, always finding refuge in the written word. Instead of sitting up and taking notice of these tendencies, I spent years investing time in things I didn’t care about, like taking piano lessons and jogging. It finally became too tiring to fight what I really want to do. So on most days, I’ve stopped saying writing is for someone else, and I let myself do what I love.
 
Upcoming pieces this spring will appear in Nursing Spectrum, Teachers of Vision, Liguorian, Senior Perspective, and Mushing.
 
 

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Richard Wright – 810 Haiku

A few nights ago, I stayed up past midnight writing a piece. PBS was on in the background. I wasn’t paying much attention until pre-film credits started to roll and I glanced up to see opening scenes of Native Son.

Not the 1951 version where Richard Wright played Bigger Thomas. It was the 1986 version with Victor Love, Matt Dillon, and Geraldine Page.

I had never seen Native Son. Or read the book. I first started researching Richard Wright last summer when I did a presentation on James Baldwin. We read “Giovanni’s Room” and “Another Country” for the writing Intensive in Taos last year. I fell in love with James Baldwin. One of Baldwin’s mentors was Richard Wright.

After we got back from Taos, a writer friend of mine went to a Twin Cities used bookstore and bought up all the Baldwin books. Some were original paperbacks; they smelled like the 60’s. She gave them to me as a gift.

One was Baldwin’s collection of essays, “Notes of a Native Son.” When she paid the clerk, the woman said, “Oh, there’s been a resurgence of the Harlem Renaissance writers lately.”

I’m not surprised.

I found the 1986 film version of Native Son to be heavy-handed and over dramatic. But I stayed up and watched anyway. Out of curiosity, I decided to research Wright a little more and stumbled on a Washington Post article on poetry.

While taking refuge in France from the fallout of his books, “Native Son” and “Black Boy,” Richard Wright wrote and studied haiku. There are 810 in his collection, “Haiku: This Other World,” published by Arcade in New York.

Not only that, according to the Robert Hass article, 5 Haikus By Richard Wright, Wright’s agent said he wrote 4000 poems during the last 18 months of his life, from the summer of 1959 until his death in 1960.

It makes sense to me that Wright would turn to haiku. Simple. Bare. And elegant. A good place to stop and rest. Shelter from the storm.

I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.

A sleepless spring night:
Yearning for what I never had
And for what never was.

-Richard Wright, from “Haiku: This Other World,” by Richard Wright
(Arcade, 1998)

Saturday, April 21st, 2007

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Forget Vonnegut – Jane Kenyon Lives On

In the maelstrom of energy flooding paper, press, and print about the sudden death of Kurt Vonnegut, I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on about his life. At 3 a.m. last night, I was running around the Internet linking to articles, gobbling up details of Vonnegut’s death, birth, slow literary beginnings, and 70′s cult following.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.

Ignoring the wailing Irish banshee, a screaming voice inside my head snapped, “Stop it! ! Go to bed! You haven’t read a Vonnegut book in years.”

“Okay, okay, I’m going,” I said.

Rising from my prone position on the couch, I grabbed the laptop precariously perched on my knees to keep it from crashing to the floor. And that’s when it hit me – I’d fallen prey to my own crazy Kantian schema about death, dying, and immortality.

In some odd twist of synchronicity, I wrote a post last Monday on The Uses of Sorrow – What Is It About Obituaries? Curious about the death of Molly Malone Cook, I found a long, engaging obituary in the Independent. It was overflowing with history and details of her life I didn’t know, and probably never would have cared about if she hadn’t died.

Isn’t it strange? We are drawn to write more about a person after they die, than we ever would have while they were alive. It’s part of the human condition. But amid all the writers, ex-hippies, beatniks, and bohemians bantering a slow death march around Vonnegut, I find myself wanting to say, “Enough already.”

Forget Vonnegut. Jane Kenyon lives on.

I don’t want to sound irreverent. I loved Vonnegut and read him voraciously (was it Stephen King that said adverbs are killers?) in my early college years. In 1972, Slaughterhouse-Five was the top film in Friday night screenings at McIntire Hall. We were still doing sit-ins for peace, streaking across campus, and protesting the Vietnam War (I wonder what’s changed?)

But back to living and dying.

Remember that back and forth on red Ravine last February about Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, Valentine & Donald Hall? It inspired us to put one of Jane Kenyon’s books, Otherwise, on our list of Hungry to be Read.

Last night I went over to St. Paul with a writer friend to see Galway Kinnell and one of his protégés, Josephine Dickinson, read their poetry. (I’ll write more about these moving poets in another post.) It was one of the most inspirational nights I’ve had in months.

Galway Kinnell read a poem from his new book Strong Is Your Hold, which I immediately snapped up and brought home with me. The poem is a tribute to Jane Kenyon. You could have heard a pin drop.

If you don’t get out and listen to other living, breathing writers read their work, you’re missing out on one of the greatest pleasures of writing – listening. As evidenced by the explosion of blog world, there are 11 trillion writers out there, all wanting their voices to be heard. I hold to my strong belief that there is room for all of us. If we are generous of spirit and support other writers, we’ll be supported, too.

I teared up last night when I listened to Galway Kinnell read his poem for Jane Kenyon (1947-1995). He went to that dark place writers go, that place where angels fear to tread.

I imagined Kenyon, immortal through his words, smiling down on the silent, rapt faces that dotted the crimson velvet rows and stacked ornate balconies of the Fitzgerald Theatre. I bet she was pleased.

Losing a great writer who influenced our lives, perhaps even our livelihood, leaves a big hole. When Galway Kinnell read How Could She Not, I knew that writing about the death of Kurt Vonnegut is our way of grieving.

We know we’ll never forget Vonnegut. Because Jane Kenyon lives on.

Friday, April 13th, 2007

                           

                            ###                          

                               

How Could She Not

In Memory of Jane Kenyon, 1947-1995

The air glitters. Overfull clouds
slide across the sky. A short shower,
its parallel diagonals visible
against the firs, douses and then
refreshes the crocuses. We knew
it might happen one day this week.
Out the open door, east of us, stand
the mountains of New Hampshire.
There, too, the sun is bright,
and heaped cumuli make their shadowy
ways along the horizon. When we learn
that she died this morning, we wish
we could think: how could it not
have been today? In another room,
Kiri Te Kanawa is singing
Mozart’s Laudate Dominum
from far in the past, her voice
barely there over the swishing of scythes,
and rattlings of horse-pulled
mowing machines dragging
their cutter bar’s little reciprocating
triangles through the timothy.

This morning did she wake
in the dark, almost used up
by her year of pain? By first light
did she glimpse the world
as she had loved it, and see
that if she died now, she would
be leaving him in a day like paradise?
Near sunrise did her hold loosen a little?

Having these last days spoken
her whole heart to him, who spoke
his whole heart to her, might she not
have felt that in the silence to come
he would not feel any word
was missing? When her room filled
with daylight, how could she not
have slipped under a spell, with him
next to her, his arms around her, as they
had been, it may then have seemed,
all her life? How could she not
press her cheek to his cheek,
which presses itself to hers
from now on? How could she not
rise and go, with sunlight at the window,
and the drone, fading, deepening, hard to say,
of a single-engine plane in the distance,
coming for her, that no one else hears?

  -from Strong Is Your Hold, Poems, by Galway Kinnell, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006

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bell hooks & Thich Nhat Hanh – Building a Community of Love

I’m almost done with the bell hooks memoir, Bone Black. I posted a link to the bell hooks articles and profile in Shambhala Sun a few weeks ago in 10 Minutes with the King. But I want to repost Building a Community of Love: bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh as a separate log.

All of  the bell hooks articles in Shambhala Sun are excellent. But red Ravine is about community. I don’t want this one to get lost:

 ”Building a Community of Love: bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh“

 Or this one:

 “There’s No Place to Go But Up” – Maya Angelou in Conversation with bell hooks” 

In honor of all practice.

 Monday, April 9th, 2007

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More About the Monkey – Natalie Goldberg on Monkey Mind

As red Ravine gets ready to launch, I’ve been thinking about how important it is to have a teacher, a mentor.

Natalie has been that for me.

It didn’t happen right away. It developed over a long, slow time of showing up and not being tossed away. Sometimes it meant being willing to listen to what I might not want to hear.

And now I have practice. And now I have community. And now I have red Ravine.

All because I showed up. I listened. I practiced. I did things that didn’t make sense at the time or I didn’t have the energy to do – like travelling thousands of miles to Taos last year by car, plane, and Batmobile to write and sit with other writers in silence.

One of those writers is standing beside me as we spring board off into red Ravine. Wow. That’s amazing.

I have a lot of gratitude for the writers and teachers that came before me. And that they are willing to share their successes and failures, so that I might see my own more clearly.

I do a ton of research on my pieces and ramble around the Internet on a daily basis. Last week, I stumbled on this interview with Natalie Goldberg. It’s bare bones, back to basics. And it still rings true.

Here are a couple of excerpts about Monkey Mind from the interview with Natalie. You can read the whole exchange on “what it means to write down the bones” at Sounds True.

Thank goodness for teachers, in all their many forms. And from the bottom of my heart (which is feeling quite full these days) – thank you.

ST: Please talk a little about what you mean by monkey mind.

NG: Monkey mind is actually a Buddhist term. It refers to mental activity that creates busyness which keeps us away from our true hearts. And it’s an extraordinary truth. Look at our whole culture; it’s built on busyness, and that’s why we’re so unhappy. But part of us loves busyness, including Natalie Goldberg. You have to pay attention and learn to understand how monkey mind works.

What does your true heart want? You have to give it at least half your energy. Otherwise monkey mind fills your whole life with busyness

ST: During the Bones program, you talk about a key teaching you received from Katagiri Roshi – “not to be tossed way.” What does this mean?

NG: Don’t be tossed away by your monkey mind. You say you want to do something – “I really want to be a writer. But I might not make enough money as a writer.” That little voice comes along. “Oh, okay, then I won’t write.” That’s being tossed away. Those little voices are constantly going to be feeding us. You make a decision to do something. You do it. Don’t be tossed away. And part of not being tossed away is understanding your mind and not believing it so much when it comes up with all these objections, when it comes up with all these insecurities and reasons not to do something. Don’t be tossed away.

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

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Eulogy to Memoir

memoir

1567, from Anglo-Fr. memorie “note, memorandum, something written to be kept in mind” (1427), from L. memoria (see memory). Meaning “person’s written account of his life” is from 1673. The pl. form memoirs “personal record of events,” first recorded 1659. 
                                             – from the Online Etymology Dictionary

 ______________________

I’ve been thinking about memoir, the word, the difficulty people have pronouncing it. If you write creative nonfiction, chances are you read memoir. I am reading Bone Black, the bell hooks memoir about growing up in the South. Reading other writers jogs the memory.

My thoughts are pulled to the South because my step-mother in South Carolina passed away a few days ago. I wasn’t close to her, and had not seen her in a few years. Yet when I heard the news, I was flooded with memories of the time I spent with her.

That is the power of memoir.

I have a great sadness at her passing, though our relationship wasn’t as much about the present, as it was the past. Memoir is about the past. It revives and documents the history of living. History is full of contradiction.

Some of the sadness I feel is for my step-dad, who I was very close to as a child. In honoring his loss, I am sad, too. But the grief for me is deeper.

The most vivid memories of my step-mother are from the mid-sixties, my preteen years, a tumultuous time when my younger sister, two brothers, and I were uprooted and moved to the North. It was a difficult transition, and painful to be distanced from my family in the South – the only family I had ever known.

Looking back, it turned out for the best. I was exposed to a whole new culture in the North, different ways of thinking, talking, and living. I met my 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. Juarez, who made me read Dickens, believed in me, and inspired me to write. My experiences grew richer. All of them have led me here.

It has been 4 years since I’ve seen my step-mother; it was the year I quit my job and started writing. My last memories of her are leaning back in her rocker recliner, laughing and joking with us kids. We were all grown, well into middle age, attending a short reunion a few miles south of the border river that flows between Georgia and South Carolina – the Savannah.

Grandkids and great-grandkids were running, dancing, and jumping across the dark brick family room between rounds of lazy adult chatter and a noisy TV. I used to watch The Trooper Terry Show in that room, on a black and white with rabbit ears. It was the same 202 address, with the same aluminum mailbox, that received my letters to my step-dad in back slanted 6th grade handwriting.

The letters would soon drop off in 7th grade, a direct correlation to the rising teenage anger that welled up inside me. I attended New Cumberland Junior High in Pennsylvania and was teased mercilessly for my Southern accent. It wasn’t easy to change the way I talked. They might as well have asked me to cut off my right index finger. Yet, eventually, I did lose the accent. And ties to my Southern roots became confusing and disjointed.

It would take me a number of years to integrate and appreciate my past. That’s what memoir’s for. And in a few months, I’ll be travelling with my Mother to the South to begin researching my book.

Old endings. New beginnings.

I have done a lot of work since the sixties. A lot of letting go. On one of the last visits with my step-mother and step-dad, they told me how different I was from that dark, brooding teenager that sat in the corner rocker and never spoke. Those were their last memories of me.

When you don’t see distant relatives much, you tend to freeze them in place, lock them into distance and time. They are who they were the last time you visited them. But it works both ways. I am frozen, too – a still-frame snapshot in their memories.

Letting go is a great gift. It allows me to make room for all the good stuff. My memories may only be trinkets, shards of 40 year old bone, unearthed from iron-rich banks of Georgia clay that used to muddy my corduroys as a kid.

But my memories are mine. I choose to remember my step-mother for all the good things she gave the world, for what I loved about her:

• Southern manners, the way she turned a phrase, the lawdy mercies! and come here, shugah’s, and my pet name for Liz, Shug
• her warm smile, the way she laughed, a loud cackle that could fill a room
• Southern cooking, buttery mashed potatoes with thick gravy, piping hot cornbread that melts in your mouth, spinach greens with just the right touch of vinegar and salt, fresh turkey and cornbread dressing, sweet iced tea, and a huge vat of homemade banana pudding. That girl could cook!
• sipping 7up through a straw with me that time I was sick and laid up on the couch
• she liked to go bare foot, paint her toenails bright red, and always wore flip-flops
• she loved Granny and Pop the way I loved Granny and Pop
• she loved the youngin’s, the babies, and hugged them every chance she got
• she loved my step-dad, who I love, too

I live in the Midwest now. I walked the labyrinth on Monday and thought about how swiftly a little girl can shoot from 11 to 50, with barely a sneeze in between. My step-mother’s passing marks another fading link to my Southern childhood, roots whose stories die with the people who planted them.

I don’t remember the last time I openly grieved. We live in a youth-driven culture that does not emotionally or financially support taking quiet time to honor loss. But writing is a constant process of letting go.

It’s important to live well. Each time someone close to me passes on, it reminds me that this one life is precious. And the threat of death makes you want to live just a little bit harder.

In memory of my step-mother, Betty, who travelled into Spirit, Wednesday, March 28th, 2007, and is being laid to rest as I post this.

For all that has passed, and all that has been forgiven.

Friday, March 30th, 2007

-related to post, Labyrinth Walker

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Joan Didion & Martin Ramirez

Sunday Morning really rocked today. The least of it was that it ended with my beloved sandhill cranes roosting on the Platte River. Beautiful.

And Stevie Nicks is still rockin’ in middle age, after 30 plus years, with no sign of stopping. She said she’s not the least bit interested in telling a partner when she’s leaving and when she’ll be home. She chose art over relationships. Liz and I saw her a few years ago at the Target Center in Minneapolis. She is a performer like no other.

 But what I want to mention is that Vanessa Redgrave is opening Broadway this week with a one woman play on Joan Didion’s work, The Year of Magical Thinking. They interviewed both Joan and Vanessa. Compelling material. Redgrave is up there on stage by herself for an hour and a half.

“I’m not alone,” she said. “Hopefully, the audience will be filling these seats, right up there with me.”

Didion showed up at every rehearsal to watch Redgrave. The best quote from her about writing Year of Magical Thinking: “I had to write it down. I can’t think unless it’s in terms of writing.” The play includes the death of her daughter as well as her husband. It is hard to imagine her grief. Impossible.

 My favorite segment was on Martín Ramírez, an artist who was confined to a psychiatric hospital in the 1930′s after being diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic. It is a sad story. He hardly said a word in 30 years but found room under tables, wherever he could, and drew his heart out. Painter, Wayne Thiebaud, was allowed to visit Ramirez and talked about his work which is hanging in the American Folk Art Museum in New York City.

I wish I could see it in person. He drew with wooden matchsticks on whatever paper he could find. Some of his work used pages from books or candy wrappers. Some was on the roll paper that a doctor pulls out in the office and spreads across the stainless steel table for exams. His drawings were striking. Busting out of silence.

 There’s also buzz about The Secret being based on the Power of Positive Thinking work of Norman Vincent Peale, though he is not credited in the book. They made it sound like another James Frey.  

 If you get a chance to see this week’s Sunday Morning in an archive, take advantage of it. Otherwise, you can read about these items at the links provided. It’s one of my favorite shows on TV.

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Saint Teresa of Avila – Archetype Whose Time Has Come

I’ve got archetypes on the brain. First the Labyrinth. And now, Saint Teresa of Avila.

I’m thinking about her because Liz is sitting here researching subjects for a paper she has to write for her Psychology of Religion class. She’s digging into early 1900′s new agers: Carl Jung, William James (brother of the writer, Henry James), Marion Woodman, and Annie Besant, who was close friends with George Bernard Shaw, and Gandhi. Supposedly she was the first to call him Mahatma, Great Soul.

After hours of research, Liz ran into Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul, the latest book from Caroline Myss, archetype queen. Her focus abruptly shifted.

“Did you know Caroline’s new book is about Teresa of Avila?” she asked. “Isn’t that the same mystic the writer you saw in Taos wrote about?” 

“Yeah, it is,” I said. “Mirabai Starr. I didn’t realize they had both written about Teresa.” 

Wordraw and I had stayed behind a day in Taos after the last retreat to hear Mirabai read from her new book, Teresa of Avila: The Book of My Life. The book was due to be released February 13th.

On February 10^th, at the pre-book launch and benefit for SOMOS, the room at Mabel Dodge Luhan House where we had sat the week before in complete silence, had been transformed in 3 short hours to a crowded, way too hot, energetic bundle of Taosenos. They had all come out to support Mirabai.

 Over in the back left corner, I sat quietly near Sean Murphy, who was manning the video camera, and Tania Casselle, writers I met in Taos at my first workshop in 2001. I was among a group of 12 tired, road-weary writers who had just ended a year long retreat. We were either busting with pent up emotion or flagging with the numbness of no feeling at all. And who was the woman up front next to the stage wearing a wrap of bright orange?

Oh, it was Tessa. Mirabai Starr’s book has a forward written by Tessa Bielecki, an author who has been writing about Teresa of Avila, from what I can tell, since the 1970’s. Tessa took the podium first. She said Teresa’s favorite color was orange and she spoke about her likes and dislikes as if the Saint herself was standing there. Then Natalie introduced Mirabai who took the stage with wild applause. She is the first woman, and one of the only non-Catholics, to translate Saint Teresa’s memoir, The Interior Castle.

Until I heard Mirabai read from her book in a mesmerizing style that sounded like the channeled voice of the 16^th century nun and mystic, I had no idea who Teresa of Avila was. Maybe this says more about me and my ignorance than anything else. And it’s surprising, since I’m big on mysticism as the core root of all religions.

But even though I know very little about the Saint and her history, I do find it thought provoking that the Caroline Myss book about Saint Teresa was released on March 6^th, within 3 weeks of Mirabai’s. They had to have been up to their ears in Catholic Reformation mysticism at exactly the same time.

What’s going on with Teresa?

When Liz mentioned Caroline’s book on Saint Teresa, I was reminded of Wordraw’s blog piece, a writing practice from a few days ago, on Living a Double Life. Near the end, he was talking about Rilke, writing, and Saint Teresa: 

“Not tonight. Tonight I want to stay up, to read Rilke, swim in the life of Saint Teresa and write. And I want to wake up in the morning and sing to God, dash to work before the traffic on the bridge is deadening.”

His words took me back to the reception we attended in Mabel Dodge’s sitting room after Mirabai’s reading. It was crowded with people. I was hot and tired. Mirabai was signing books in the dead space of the Rainbow Room. Wordraw and I had to pack and catch the Twin Hearts shuttle back to the Albuquerque airport the next day, a venture that, depending on the driver, can sometimes be harrowing.

I decided to go back to the Ansel Adams room and shower. But Wordraw stood in the long line and bought Mirabai’s book. She signed it and chatted with him for a few minutes. He was beaming when he got back to the room.

A few weeks later, he is swimming in the life of Saint Teresa from his loft, Liz is researching whether or not she wants to plunge into the pool with Caroline Myss (who just jumped off the high dive), and Mirabai is probably somewhere in between Boulder and Chicago on tour. 

What’s going on with Teresa? She must be an archetype whose time has come.

Monday, March 19th, 2007

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Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry Project

When I was doing research on Ted Kooser for a piece I was writing, I stumbled on his America Life in Poetry Project. As I read more about the nature of the project, I realized that Ted is a bodhisattva – he gives back to the world – not only through teaching, writing, and his support of other writers, but by offering viable avenues to ensure the next generation of printed word maintains integrity.

You don’t have to be a poet to appreciate his great effort.

I am a big fan of writers and artists who are generous of spirit – those who give or have given back to the world without concern for themselves. Dan Wakefield , author of New York in the ’50s, teaches writing in the prisons. For me, he falls into this category. As do Alice Walker, Natalie Goldberg, and James Baldwin.

Quiet, compassionate determination to aid all beings. If you have men and women like this in your life, show them gratitude. It’s the greatest gift you can bestow.

You can sign up on the American Life in Poetry website to receive a poem a week in your inbox with a short intro by Ted. If you register, you can publish the poems in print or on your blog, as long as you include the copyright permissions and credit info.

Below is a little about the project, taken from the American Life in Poetry website. You can also click on the link for the full text.

The Poetry Foundation has formed a partnership with the Library of Congress to support the American Life in Poetry project, an initiative of Ted Kooser, the 2004-2006 Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

American Life in Poetry is a free weekly column for newspapers and online publications featuring a poem by a contemporary American poet and a brief introduction to the poem by Ted Kooser. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry, and we believe we can add value for newspaper and online readers by doing so. There are no costs or obligations for reprinting the columns, though we do require that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration, along with the complete copyright, permissions and credit information, exactly as supplied with each column.

“Newspapers are close to my heart and my family,” said Kooser, whose wife and son both work in journalism. “As Poet Laureate I want to show the people who read newspapers that poetry can be for them, can give them a chuckle or an insight.”

Poetry was long a popular staple in the daily press. According to Kooser, “Readers enjoyed it. They would clip verses, stick them in their diaries, enclose them in letters. They even took time to memorize some of the poems they discovered.”

In recent years poetry has all but disappeared from newsprint. Yet the attraction to it is still strong. Kooser observed that “Poetry has remained a perennial expression of our emotional, spiritual and intellectual lives, as witnessed by the tens of thousands of poems written about the tragedy of September 11 that circulated on the Internet.

Now I’m hoping to convince editors that there could be a small place in their papers for poetry, that it could add a spot of value in the eyes of readers. Best of all, it won’t cost a penny.”

-from American Life in Poetry

-posted on red Ravine, Tuesday, February 15th, 2007

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November 22nd, 1963 – Just the Facts, M’am

On the early afternoon of November 22nd, 1963, I was sitting in 3rd grade at a wooden desk drawing hearts with a BIC pen. It was 2:13 on Friday. I couldn’t wait for the weekend. My 3rd grade teacher, Miss Wells, wore pleated skirts that flowed behind her and she was tall, with slender limbs, but she had a kind, round face.

I was 9 years old. I didn’t know what I was about to find out – at 1pm CST, 2 o’clock South Carolina time, President John F. Kennedy had been pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas. He’d been shot, half hour earlier, while I was coming in from recess.

But let’s backtrack a little.

By 1 o’clock EST, I had finished lunch served on gray plastic trays by hair-netted, uniformed women: Tater Tots, Velveeta mac and cheese, a pint of whole Borden’s milk (sporting a daisy-ringed, smiling, Elsie the Cow), and all American apple crisp with brown sugar, oats, apples, cinnamon, nutmeg, flour, water, salt, and lemon to taste.

At 1:30, the moment Kennedy was shot, I was being called in from recess. When the bell rang, I stopped romping on the wooden planked teeter-totters, playing hopscotch in the dirt, and jumping through the wiry, jute ropes and tall metal swings of the 60′s. I walked toward the brick school building and flirted with freckle-faced Billy while we were standing in wobbly 3rd grade lines waiting for Mrs. Payne.

Mrs. Payne was on playground duty, just about to pull up her lanyard to blow her trademark silver whistle so we could walk single file back to the classroom. I loved Billy because he could rabbit wiggle his nostrils like me, a recessive gene trait we shared. The very act of flaring our nose holes, simultaneously, on command, endeared him to me.

By 2:00, when Kennedy was pronounced dead, Mrs. Wells was preparing to teach the afternoon lesson, South Carolina history. South Carolina, the Palmetto State, dressed in dark blue silk, a white crescent moon and silhouetted palm, was one of the 13 Original Colonies. Can you name the others? A 5th grader probably could. And in 3rd grade, I knew the following about South Carolina:

State Capitol: Columbia
State Bird: the Carolina Wren
State Beverage: Sweet Iced Tea
State Snack: Boiled Peanuts (hmmmm)
State Fruit: the Peach
State Motto: “While I breathe, I hope”

 

Around 2:15, out of a worn brown speaker cover high on the wall, dotted with symmetrically punched holes, the principal’s voice floated, disembodied, out of the public address system (remember the tinny, boxy sound of the PA?) I can’t remember the principal’s name. Just that she was stern, with an apple shaped, peasant stock body like me, curly short hair, and hard-soled pumps that clacked along the waxed linoleum when she snapped us to attention.

But this afternoon, she wasn’t snapping. In a quiet voice, the quietest I’d ever heard, she slowly announced, “Can I have your attention. I’ve got some sad news. President John F. Kennedy was shot today at 12:30 CST. He died at 1pm from gunshot wounds. Let’s bow our heads in a moment of silence.”

We sat there in our seats, stunned, looking up at lanky Clara Wells for direction. Miss Wells stared up at the speaker, blankly, but only for a few seconds. Then she quickly recovered and led us through the moment of silence. I don’t remember what, if anything, she said. I only remember the sinking feeling and the sadness that swept over me like a shroud.

Later that night, on the black and white Zenith, my parents and I, along with 189 million other Americans, relived the day: Walter Cronkite’s low jowls, Jackie’s pink pill box hat and Chanel suit, the raised right hand of Lyndon Johnson’s “do you solemnly swear.” It played like a dream sequence. My young mind could not comprehend the full impact. But I knew something big had changed.

 

When I went back to the South in 1999, Belvedere Elementary stood in the same place, along the scrub pines and dirty salt and pepper playground, across from the Methodist church. The Baptist church that my best friend, Susan, attended every Sunday was still on the opposite corner of the street. The school wasn’t open that day. I peeked in the windows but couldn’t see much. I took some photographs.

The place seemed smaller than I remembered it. But the memories, huge. I did a lot of growing up in that place.

A few weeks ago when I was doing Internet research for a presentation, I ran across Bryan Woolley’s account, The Day Kennedy Died, from a 1983 article he wrote for the Dallas Times Herald. The story is based solely on the facts. In this case, the facts are enough. The facts are powerful.

That day in 1963, this country had the breath knocked out of it. Something died: our collective sense of well-being and hope. Back then, I was the next generation. And the seeds of fear took root in my 9 year old heart.

But while I breathe, I hope.

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006

———————–

Here’s Bryan’s story. Just the facts, M’am. Just the facts.

———————–

Volume : SIRS 1991 History, Article 02                               
Subject: Keyword(s) : KENNEDY and ASSASSINATION
Title  : The Day John Kennedy Died                                            
Author : Bryan Woolley                                                        
Source : Dallas Times Herald (Dallas, Texas)                                  
Publication Date : Nov. 20, 1983      
Page Number(s) : Sec. Sec. 2-3 

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