Shabbiness and Authenticity

Last night, we watched part of a PBS show about an English family circa 1920's, to judge by the period costuming, who is living in what I first thought was Italy, but later realized was Greece (the show was The Durrells in Corfu). 

I was less interested in the slow moving plot than I was in the house where they lived.  I gathered that we were supposed to find it decrepit.  The long shots showed some missing shutters, and the inner shots showed peeling paint, and every shot of peeling paint showed that a different paint color behind the peeling.  I assumed that I was supposed to see the furniture as shabby, not simply period pieces.

The decaying house looked so lovely, shot in that PBS light.  I thought about my own house and how lovely it would look with the right lighting.  I thought about a photo shoot in an issue of some country living magazine that comes to my door.  The owners of the old farm house said that they had decided not to replace mismatched floor boards because it looked more authentic.

Authentic--I'll start using that word to describe my house.  It doesn't need work:  it's authentic.  Why remodel my authentic house?

 The roofer came and we discovered that we don't have a roof leak--that the roof is in good shape and has at least several more years on it.  That's good news.

We spent part of yesterday taking apart the gutter system--lots of leaves packed in the gutters, which meant that water overflowed and went through the scupper and ran down the interior wall.  Happily, it seems to be an easy fix--unhappily, after all the rain of the past two weeks, the interior walls look horrible now.  We'll let them thoroughly dry and see what we're dealing with.

Hard to believe it was just 4 weeks ago that we sat on our friends' patio and watched the storm.  I am still a bit overwhelmed by how much work there is to do, but luckily most of the work is in the cottage, and so we will get to it when we get to it.

Although we have lots of work to do, I'm grateful to PBS shows and photo shoots of houses that make me realize that we can still be perfectly happy in our houses, even if they're shabbier than we'd like.  We can have lots of repair work that needs to be done, but still be rich in friends.

It is good to remember what really matters.

Writing Cycles, Submission Cycles

A week ago, I got the idea a story based on Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried."  Instead of Vietnam, it's set in a for-profit art school that's closing.  What I find interesting about this fact is that in the weeks before I got the idea for that story, I was feeling uninspired and wondering if I was done with this idea for the collection of linked stories.  After all, it had been almost a year since I left the school that has served as inspiration for those stories.  I wasn't sure that the stories I had would assemble themselves into a book.  And then, bam--a new story idea comes to me, and it's a great way to end the collection.

As I've been writing the stories before the one I started writing a week ago, I wasn't sure that the fictional school would close.  So far, the real school hasn't closed.

I have that school on the brain for many reasons, one of which is that we're approaching the one year anniversary of my leaving.   I came to my new job as the school was moving into high gear to find a new accreditor--and yesterday, after a long process, we got news of the granting of accreditation.  Hurrah!

In some ways, this process reminds me of writing a dissertation.  There are benchmarks that one must meet and then revisions that must be done and then the wait for feedback and then more work to be done, and more waiting, and then, even more work that must be done, even when one is ready to move on to new projects.  And finally, the good news, the "yes" that once might have seemed like such a distant goal.  Yet because the process has been so very long, the ecstasy blends with exhaustion.

And of course, this process is like most creative processes.  One reason why I'm not more aggressive in sending out book-length manuscripts is because I feel like I don't have the time for an extended revision process or a publicity process.

But it's also because it's easier to put a packet of poems in the mail.  It's harder to get the manuscript assembled and sent.  And the rejection of an individual poem is easier to bear.  The despair that comes from the umpteenth rejection of the book length manuscript is easier to simply avoid some years by not submitting.

This year, with its hurricane, is a non-submitting year.  In some other year, I hope to write about how the acceptance of a book length work is similar to finishing a dissertation or an accreditation process.

Tropical Disturbances and Roof Leaks

We have had some kind of tropical disturbance off our coast for days now.  That means lots of wind and rain.

Ordinarily, I'd love days like these, especially since it's the only hint of autumnal weather we get in South Florida.  But with a roof leak, I look at the clouds with dread.

Each day I get home and put the drenched towels in the washer.  I empty the containers that we set out to catch the water.  I'm amazed at the amount of water.  Has it really rained that much?

I know that I am lucky in a way.  We could have a profoundly damaged roof.  We could live in Puerto Rico and have no roof.  I have electric restored, and I have a washer and dryer.  I have clean water running through pipes with which to fill the washer and dryer--I am surprised by how strange the wet towels smell.

There is a poem lurking in the smell that comes in the water that comes from the roof.

I tell myself that we were going to remodel the laundry room anyway.  As I watch water run down the walls, I can't remember if my spouse planned to rip out that wall that's now got saggy drywall on it.

It's the back corner of the house, and it doesn't seem to be spreading.  It could be worse.  The roofer comes on Friday.  It's fixable.

I shall keep repeating this mantra:  "It's fixable.  It's fixable.  It's fixable."  It's a good mantra for much of life.

Postcards from the Writer's Life

--This morning, I listened to this interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates.  While I find him to be a prophetic (in the Old Testament sense of that word) voice when he talks about race and the U.S., I want to know more about his writing life.  I'm especially interested in his pre-Pulitzer Prize, pre-MacArthur days and the transitions he had to make after those wins.

He alludes to his earlier writing life.  He talks about writing a daily blog that was read by 2 people, himself and his dad.

I wonder if he wrote about the same subjects then.  I wonder what it's like to go from that freedom of writing whatever one wants, to knowing that a wide variety of people will be aware of one's ideas--and they won't all be friendly people.

--I woke up this morning at 2:30 because the wind has howled for over a day.  It slams things--rain, mainly--into the house.  Would I wake up this way if we hadn't had a hurricane last month?  Probably.

--I had a wonderful writing time in these wee small hours of the morning.  I'm crafting a story based on Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried."  Instead of Vietnam, it's set in a for-profit art school that's closing.  It come so easily.  What a delight to write fiction that's flowing, instead of writing a sentence and wondering where to go next.

--I've been slowly getting back to submitting--mainly packets of poetry.  It's not like past years, when I'd get envelopes ready to go to the post office on September 1, when many reading periods start.

--I am feeling a bit of despair.  I thought I would be further along by age 52.

--But let me remind myself that I do have 3 chapbooks published.  And let me remind myself that the publishing life in the U.S. in the 21st century is uneven, at best.  So even though I haven't hit some of the milestones that I would have envisioned long ago, as a much younger writer, that doesn't mean that they are forever out of reach.

RIP Tom Petty

Yesterday was a day of many sadnesses.  What can one possibly say about a day that starts with news of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history and ends with the news of the death of Tom Petty? 

I don't have much left to say about this kind of gun violence.  What can bring any kind of comfort?  Do I believe that U.S. hearts can change?  If the massacre of children in an elementary school several years ago can't make us change our approach, what makes us think this massacre will?

Let me instead think about Tom Petty.  I found myself surprised to be so affected by his death--after all, I don't own any of his music.  Wait, yes I do--I have the two Travelling Wilburys CDs.  In fact, for a long time during his early years on the national scene, I might have said I didn't like him.

My earliest memory of him is a high school youth group gathering.  We were at someone's house to bake cookies for shut-ins, and someone had his cassette tape, Damn the Torpedoes.  We might have listened to a song or two amidst the Christmas music.  I wasn't impressed.  But then again, my other memory of that night is using a cookie cutter as an ice scraper, since snow had fallen while we were baking.

Through the years, I'd hear a song here and there that made me consider buying a whole collection, whether on vinyl or CD.  But then I would forget and then another CD would come, and I just never caught up.

Along the way, I was impressed with both his music and his lyrics.  I was impressed with how he looked out for his various band members.  His dedication to his art was important too.

I realize that I can expect more of these deaths in the coming years--musicians who were important to me in varying degrees.  Let me use these passings as a reminder to tend to my own artistic gardens.

September: a Month in Pictures

Last night, I was labeling photos for the flood insurance adjuster.  Three weeks ago, late in the morning, we'd return home to flooded streets and yards:

I was astonished at the tree damage.  We were lucky that a limb only fell on a motorcycle.  Some houses had palm trees through the roof.

Because of the tree damage, and because our home suffered this damage, we wouldn't have power until 12 days had passed:

We spent a lot of time on the porch.  When it was dark, the battery powered autumn trees with lights gave the porch a cozy feel.

Now that the power is restored, we've retreated to the cool interiors of our houses.  Hard to believe that it's October, that it will soon be Halloween.  My September time offline gave me lots of time to read--and lots of time to stitch.  I've been working on new autumnal placemats:

I had been saving a package of fat quarters for over a decade, waiting for a special project.  My younger self would have thought of something other than placemats, but we use those, and I like the way they make the front porch look.

Poetry Sunday: "Jamestown"

Yesterday, I had several gatherings with different types of friends:  my quilting group that had been put off because of the hurricane and my every other month haircut that's an abbreviated spa day with a different set of friends.

It's always interesting being with different groups of people, but I was fascinated with our various responses to Hurricane Irma.  One of my friends is in the process of moving to Gainesville, and she has properties in three places (Ft. Lauderdale, Gainesville, and the mountains of North Carolina), and all three were affected by the storm--that geography tells you about the breadth and strength of the storm. 

Some of us worry about how we will deal with these storms as we age.  Some of us prefer hurricanes to other struggles that the natural world presents because at least we know they are coming.  We are all concerned that our insurance costs will rise and that we will be unable to afford to live here.

It seems likely that Hurricane Irma will have a similar effect to the storm seasons of 2004 and 2005:  many people will make some life decisions that they wouldn't have made without the push of a major hurricane.

When I think about my creative trajectory, I see an uptick in poems with an apocalyptic tone after the storms of 2004 and 2005.  Just before the storm, the woman who cuts my hair had discovered that she didn't have a wind policy to protect her home.  She said, "I packed everything that was important to me in the car, and I drove to Virginia to start a new life."

Her comment--indeed the whole day--made me think of poems that I wrote earlier.  This one was partly sparked by the comments of historians on the 400th anniversary of Jamestown in 2007.



Jamestown
She remembers only one
fact from years of studying American History.
Not one colony survived
for very long without women settlers.
Without the women, the men planted just one
crop, tobacco, with no nutritive value.
The ground devoted to addiction, the colony starving.

She returns to her handy needle
to sew tubes of seeds into her hemline.
She measures the weight of her possessions
with a calculating eye.
She discards the frivolous scraps of silk
that once passed for undergarments.
She adds a well-seasoned skillet to her pack,
a way to cook as well as a weapon.

She locks the house but leaves the key.
She threads the needle
through her shirtsleeve where she won't lose
track of it. She sets off for civilization.