A little catch up

So far it's been a pretty busy summer. In May we went to Wiscon, which, after missing it for three years, was great. I learned so much and collected so many story ideas it's hard for me to concentrate on what i'm supposed to be working on! It was also great to get out of my life for five days. It was hot, the food was amazing, and the panels were non stop. 

This fall I will be doing a writing workshop at the Elms Gallery in Flushing.  www.theelmsgallery.com It will start on the second Tueseday of September and run for 6 weeks. I will post all the details as I have them, but I really looking forward to it!

Rhythm

I belong to a writer's group that has been in existence, in one for or another for more than seventy years. It's true. It started, as a group of women, meeting in living rooms. They read and critiqued, all aloud. 

In the eighties, when I joined, meetings were being held in a church. They were still reading to each other.  I thought all the stories were amazing, and I couldn't understand how they all found things to critique. Everything each member read sounded so perfect. Except when it came to reading my work. As a teenager everything I wrote was, well.. Teen aged. I loved every word of my Warriors meets Diamond Dogs meets Time Square influenced short stories. Stories that no grown up should have to suffer through.

They did, though. Suffered through all of the awkward adolence-ness of my beginning writing, and made them into lessons for me. They taught me how to set a scene up, taught me how to describe things. (you can't have him open a refrigerator before you tell me it's there). They showed me the importance of verb choice. And, most importantly, they let me develop a critical ear.

It took time, but eventually, I began to hear what they heard.  All those little burrs, and big ones, in the rough drafts we dealt with. I could pick them out of my work, as well as other's. Because the truth is, there's a rhythm to fiction, a rhythm that you can't see with the eye.

The ladies that welcomed me into the group are gone now. The group itself was in danger of completely dissolving. It was hard for me, because I've been spoiled. It doesn't do me any good to read to an empty room.  No, now, after twenty-odd years, I need to hear my words up against an audience. I need to feel the moment I lose them before I can fix it.

Then one day, another member of the group called me. She and I are the last of the old breed, really, the only ones that remember the "originals", or at least the ladies that were there when I started. She said she was writing, and that she wanted to get together again. I was eager to agree. I didn't know how much I missed it until she said, "I miss hearing the stories."

Me too.  Now we meet at Baker College. We are small, but steady. We are a handful of diehards, and some new members. I'm excited at the prospect of new stories, and new rhythms.

Look outside

It's finally really truly winter. I had very little hope for snow on New Years day--it was forty three degrees and rainy. In Michigan, that's wrong.  I'm not really a fan of the cold, but I do love snow.  There's a fierceness to the sunlight in January and February that you just don't find in warm places.  When there's snow on the ground it's not even dark at night. 

Last year the snow was heavy and plentiful.  There was so much snow that my back yard was nearly filled up to the top step of the porch. Last year was the first year since I moved out of my parent's house that my Mother didn't call me to tell me to "Look outside." I used to look forward that little tradition, even though the older you get, I'd discovered, the less you really like snow. 

The morning after that first snow, I waited, but she didn't call.  I watched the flakes cover my neighborhood all morning from my kitchen, but she didn't call.  Finally, I called her, and said, "Look outside."

"Oh," she said. "It's snowing.  Now everything will be harder."
I
In hindsight, I probably should have known what she meant by that. When I think of the last few months of my Mom's life, there are a million things that I probably should have known.  She passed on her love of winter to me, and of snow, but she'd forgotten it this last year.  She only thought about how much harder it would be to get around in the snow, and the cold. I tried to talk her out of it, because I didn't want to think things would change. "You love winter. Just look at the snow.  It's beautiful this morning."

So I took this picture, and some others for her, so she didn't have to go outside to see it. 

I miss my Mom, which I know is to be expected. I suspect she was ready to go when she did, but that didn't mean I was.  It didn't mean that this morning when woke up I didn't wait for her to call me.

Nanowrimo, re-written

It's November 2, and we all know what that means. I'm already behind. Every year, I come up with a strategy to make it through Nanowrimo. Fifty thousand words in thirty days. Okay, that doesn't sound so bad. Does it?

It took me a while to warm up to the idea. The way it's supposed to work, is you sit down on November first and start writing. You don't stop to read, you don't stop to re-write, you just move forward. That, I've found doesn't work for me. The thought of ending up with fifty thousand words at the end was great. But the thought of 50 thousand words of crap... Well, that terrified me.

It's taken me a couple of years to realize what I need from Nanowrimo. It's not really the word count, but the reason to push forward, and to push forward in directions I would not have normally. So, falling behind in the word count doesn't bother me, I know it's inevitable, I mean, seriously, I have to cook two full Thanksgivings and work Black Friday in three weeks. But still, I'm grateful for the time I get to spend with the story. I have time to begin to like what I'm writing, spend time with the characters again. That makes the 4AM writing time worth it.

Ashes

All summer one thing has been waking me up in the middle of the night: what am I going to put my Mother's ashes in for the memorial? When I picked them up from the funeral home, she'd been dead about four days, I think. I thought I should feel some connection to them. I've read stories about people who have used the ashes of a loved one in tattoo ink, or even, in one instance, of a husband sprinkling a bit on his morning cereal. And everyone has stories of someone they know spreading ashes. I don't know what I expected. What I got was a discreet tote bag and a perfectly serviceable box. The funeral home lady made me open it and look inside-as though I could tell her, yes, I can see that it really is my Mother. So I thanked her and carried them out to the car. I rode around for a couple of hours, trying to figure out what to do next. I'd been to the attorney, I'd made all the calls I could think of.

But now I had my Mom in a box, in a tote bag, and all I could think of was, I'll be able to sleep again. And that I couldn't remember a single hymn that she'd told me she'd wanted sung at her funeral. Not one.

That was the end of April, and that thought hasn't gone away. I couldn't bring myself to buy one of the urns on display at the funeral home. They all looked so impersonal. Just like the ashes. So I put it off. I looked around online, sort of. Nothing seemed right.

The memorial is next week, and I can't imagine how displeased her friends would be with the box. Or nothing. Though, that's what I would prefer.

All summer I've been avoiding the art shop in the Farmer's Market. Mom loved to shop there. She bought prints that artists had made of down town Flint, and she bought lots of the pottery they sell there. I was there with my Dad and nephew two days ago, and the bowls on display made me miss her. Out of habit I began to price them for Christmas, birthday, anniversary, but stopped myself before I said anything out loud. Then I happened to look down on the floor, in the corner, and saw it. This potter that my Mother loved had made me an urn for her. It was perfect, a deep iridescent blue.

I'd like to think it's a little bit of an apology for not remembering the hymns, and for many other things too numerous to talk about. I'd like to think that it's a sign, that things will start to come back, that I can stop sleepwalking. It's not that I want to forget my Mom, it's the opposite. I want to remember something other than ashes.

And we lived the lie like the hope it was

With all this re-writing, re-living my youth, I've been thinking a lot about David Bowie. Those who know me won't find this surprising, or even interesting. That's okay, they put up with enough.

I've been listening to David Bowie in my writing life for thirty years. I'm listening to him right now, in fact, truth be told. He is, in many ways, my most lasting relationship.

Maybe that's overstating just a bit. Then again, if we're telling the truth....

Let me explain. David Bowie came to me one late night as I lay on the floor in my parent's living room. I couldn't sleep, so I wasn't just alone, I was achingly alone. Insomnia does that to you in the deep night. It cuts you off, makes you long for human contact. Makes you forget that you've ever had any.

For company I had the television. I was thirteen. It was the summer of Star Wars, my first religious experience, the thing that made me pick up a notebook and a pen. It was also the summer of my first experience with sex--not so religious. And it was the summer I found a name to put how I felt--that I wasn't alone completely in the brand of different that I was.

You'd think the sex would have tipped me off about being gay, but it didn't happen like that. I wasn't sure what had happened, and I wasn't sure I wanted it to happen again. I was a very sheltered thirteen year old, I think, or maybe we were all...slower back then.

But I remember very clearly that the secret that love came in different combinations was just that to me. A secret. I knew how sex was supposed to go from the junior high class, and I couldn't imagine that as something I ever wanted to do. I had decided that I would always be alone.

And then came the second religious experience of my life. The kiss. It was the music that made me look up at the screen, of course, jangly and shrill, and somehow compelling. I looked up from my notebook in front of me, and saw it. The few seconds of video made everything seem to fall into place in my life.

David Bowie, paper thin, and frail, walks unprotected down a nighttime city street. His face is a narrow smudge in the dark, his eyes on something ahead that we can't see. There is a group of people around him, but he's clearly alone, none the less.

Suddenly a man, a stranger, races up, throws his arms around Bowie and kisses him. Bowie half turns, as though to keep the stranger in reach, but the man runs away again and is lost in the night. At least that's how it happens in my memory.

Watching it now, on the tiny, and oddly unaffecting YouTube screen, it seems so mild, not at all earth-shattering. Although when MTV started, they clipped those frames away, so it must have been shocking at some point.

And to me--the last survivor of the insomniac wars that night, it was huge. The biggest thing in my life. It put my fumbling first time with a girl into perspective. Gave it possibility. Gave it a name.

I can't explain how it happened, why it struck me so. It's only my explanation of how David Bowie came to me. Why do I still carry him with me? I don't know. I do know that he's buried so deep to see with the naked eye in every sentence I write. I tried to resist, but that's a waste of time. It works and this is how it works. Star Wars gave me the desire to tell stories. David Bowie gave me the context for what I needed to say.

Modern Love

I've been watching a lot of old videos lately, as a result of trying to re-write my novel about a rock band in the 80's. I miss that time. It seemed that life was less lethal, but then I think that's how everybody views their childhood.

But the videos. I learned everything from MTV back then. I learned how to dress, how to act, how to talk. It was a window onto a world that I wanted to be out in. Instead I was stuck in the basement of a friend, just watching. No MTV at home, so I was rarely there. I've always thought that movies taught me how to write. Star Wars, in particular, and true, I did go straight from that theater to buy a notebook for myself. The first I'd ever bought. But MTV taught me something else. I think in some ways watching the world in two and a half minutes clips made me an observer. It made me an expert at spinning people and places and actions out into whole lives, make them go in the direction I wanted them to go. And I could do it all while lying on the clammy floor in front of the TV. Those videos, "Love is a Battlefield," Let's Dance," "Melt With You," taught me how to spin a story. Make fiction out of just a flash of something.

It was so limited. Now you can watch TV on your TV, your phone and laptop all at the same time. We can control what we see to the second. Now there is no VIDEO. There's no sharpeness to the images. No specialness. People look.... Ordainary now. Effects can be added, but they're effects. We all know those dudes in 300 didn't really look like that. And sticking Brad Pit's face on a baby was just.... It was not really magic. It was a mistake. In the end what we see on screen now is pretty much how the world looks.

In the novel, the main character sees himself on his TV at home, and thinks, "Who is that? Is that really me?" Onscreen he is pristine and sharpe and beautiful. Lying across his bed, watching himself, he is worn and used. He knows that he never looked like that.

No, the world never looked like that. But it does now, in my memory.