All Saints, All Souls for Writers and Other Creative Types

Today is the Feast of All Souls, in which we remember those who have died in the past year.  Yesterday was the Feast of All Saints, in which we remember all those who have died.  Even if you don't have a theological or spiritual interest, these feast days offer writers and other creative people an interesting opportunity.

As we watch the weather change and the days grow shorter, it's a good time to assess our creative lives.  What have we hoped to accomplish?  Where are we headed?  Which projects need to be declared dead?  Which projects might we resurrect?

Or, to put it another way, if you knew you only had a few years of creative life left, how would you spend those years?

The feast days of All Saints and All Souls also present an opportunity to think about our mentors.  What would they tell us about our strengths and weaknesses?  What would they advise us to do?

It's also a good time to think about the history of the art form we practice.  Who are the saints, the earlier practitioners, of our art forms?  What can we learn from them?

In many cultures, these feast days become a family time. Think of the Mexican tradition of taking picnics to the graveyard. Now would be a good time to record your family memories. Write them down while you still remember. Make a video. Assemble those records.


Dream a little on this All Saints Sunday. If you could create a new life out of the threads that you have, what would you weave? Or would you start again, with different yarns and textures? What is your dream of a renewed life?

Field Report from Our Sincere Pumpkin Patch

Like the Christmas season, Halloween is a holiday that makes me wish I had children who could still be enchanted. 

I do laugh at myself: this year, I couldn't even manage to get a bag of candy for trick-or-treaters, and I say I want children?

My sweet husband left the porch light on for me, and faced our first trick-or-treaters.  I know this because I called him shortly after they arrived; I needed to let him know that I was slightly later than I thought I would be.  He sounded out of breath.  I asked if he was all right.

He said, "Yes, but we just got our first trick-or-treaters."

I said, "Quick!  Turn out the porch light."  When he said that he had, I asked, "So, what did you do?  Give them pennies?"

He said, "We don't have any pennies.  So I gave them apples.  One of the kids said, 'Apples!  I love apples!'  And I gave one to the dad."

I thought of the scary stories of my youthful trick-or-treating, the razors that we were sure would be buried in apples. I hope that no one thinks of those stories anymore. I hope that our only trick-or-treaters didn't throw out my mountain apples!

My spouse reports that when the children walked away, he heard the boy say, "I thought it was a haunted house."  I'm trying not to read too much into that.

I arrived home, and we had a lovely supper while watching a rerun of M*A*S*H.  What a treat--it was a Halloween episode.  What great writing.

And then, a special treat:  It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.  I was overjoyed.  While I love a good Halloween episode of The Simpsons, there's something just so special about the Peanuts gang.

I was also struck by how much wisdom the show contains.  My spouse and I both said we wished more people would follow the advice of Linus when he said, "I've learned that there are three things you should never discuss:  religion, politics and the Great Pumpkin."

Maybe it was our bleary-eyed exhaustion or maybe we're both liberal-artsy people, but we saw much symbolism in the waiting for the Great Pumpkin.  My spouse focused on the religious allegory, and I thought of the show as a metaphor for the creative life.

Sometimes we have to wait in our pumpkin patches while others get to have parties and treats.  Sometimes we sit in our patch, hoping its sincere enough for the Great Pumpkin.  Even if the Great Pumpkin (whatever that represents in your creative life) doesn't come, you can still have interesting adventures along the way.  Some of your friends and family will understand your life in the pumpkin patch.  Many more will not. 

What a wonderful show.  I loved the colors and the autumnal theme.  I think I like this Charlie Brown show best of all.  If you're the kind of person who likes little-known facts, go to this story in The Washington Post.

We ended the night by watching a Cheers rerun--again, a holiday theme and great writing.

And now our thoughts may turn to more somber things. Today is the Feast of All Saints, tomorrow the Feast of All Souls. For a photo meditation, go to this post on my theology blog, and for a post with suggestions for how to celebrate, see this post. Tomorrow, I'll write a post here about these holidays and their significance for creative folks.

Scary Stories

When I got to spin class last night, the theme from The Exorcist was playing.  After class, I said, "That's the spookiest movie ever."

My spin instructor said, "And the scariest movie.  And the scariest book!"  She said she used to keep her copy in the freezer because her friend told her that the devil couldn't get her if she kept the book in the freezer.

Ah, the 1970's, when we worried about demon possession and the devil impregnating innocent girls.

When I wasn't reading romances in the bodice ripper genre, I devoured books about the supernatural.  I devoured all books, to be honest, but I loved books about the supernatural.  I remember being most scared by Stephen King's Salem's Lot.  I remember reading that vampires can't get in your house unless you invite them in, and the vampires in that book were skilled at manipulating people to invite them in, often against their will.

So I stayed awake, worried that I'd offer an invitation to a vampire in my sleep.  Later, I'd spend sleepless nights worrying about nuclear war.  And the standard worries, like not getting my papers written.  And always in the back of my mind, the worries about rape and other kinds of violence.

When I think of our fears that affect mass populations, I wonder why we're not more worried about the damage we're doing to the planet.  We've already changed the planet in ways we're just beginning to comprehend.  Last year's Hurricane Irene was called the storm of the century.  This year, we've had Hurricane Sandy, also a storm we should see only once a century.

These days, there are few things that keep me awake at night, but that's not for lack of things that make me fretful.  Last week my husband finally broke down and got an MRI.  He's spent much of this year hoping his back pain would go away.  It hasn't.

These days, when you get an MRI, they send you home with a CD.  My spouse put it in the computer and the computer read the data!  There on the screen:  my husband's insides.  What amazing technology.

And there, clear to our non-professional eyes, the herniation that's been causing so much pain for such a little bulge.

What will he do?  Consult professionals and see what his options are.  I'm trying to stave off panic by taking this process step by step.

And there's the issue of the cell phone charger left on the plane and the other instances of forgetfulness suffered by us both.

If you want a really scary movie for your Halloween, watch the movie Iris, about Iris Murdoch's descent into Alzheimer's.  Judi Dench should have won the Oscar that year.  What a frightening transformation.

What makes that movie scary is the very real possibility that it could happen to any of us.  I don't much worry about demon possession these days.  I do worry about losing my faculties, especially if it happens early.  Likewise, I worry about my spouse's health. 

Iris Murdoch had one of the most brilliant minds of her generation, and the movie was terrifying in its depiction of the complete loss of that brilliant mind.  As an English major, I can't think of anything more sad, whether that loss is delivered as death or Alzheimer's.

And as a writer, there aren't many things that frighten me more than the idea of that steep decline.  I'm not happy about the small losses I'm seeing now.  I used to remember more.  Now like the rest of the world, I look things up on the Internet. 

I've outsourced my brain.  Now there's a scary thought.

Maybe we haven't outsourced our brains.  Maybe we've just freed them to do other things!  My Halloween brain runs to apocalypse.  My sensible girl brain won't let me linger there long.  I have a memoir manuscript to pull together after all.  Will it be a scary story?  A comforting story? 

More than anything else right now, my hope is that my memoir will be a wise friend on a journey undertaken by many people.

The Hurricane Anniversary

Months ago, my mom asked if we could all come up to Williamsburg for their 50th anniversary celebration.  I did the usual calculations:  where would I be work-wise, what else was on the calendar, any other considerations?  Did I think about hurricanes?  Probably not.  If they had been married at the end of August, possible hurricanes might have entered into my calculation, but I'd have likely proceeded anyway.

Who would have guessed that we'd spend so much time monitoring a hurricane all week-end?  I should have known.  After all, I am always haunted by Hurricane Wilma, which wiped out the end of October 2005 and much of the rest of 2005 for us. 

Many more millions of people will probably have similar memories about Hurricane Sandy.  Although it's early, I predict that it will take at least a month to recover from this massive storm, and when I say "recover," I mean only on the most basic level.  And as we know, many humans and some institutions will never recover.

We were scheduled to leave on Friday afternoon, so I spent much of last week trying to guess where the storm would be and how strong it would be.  On Friday morning, it became clear that we'd be able to leave, but less clear that we'd be able to get back. I had one friend suggest that we cancel our trip.

I had already written to my parents to make sure that if we were stranded up in Virginia, that they'd be OK with that.  I have some extra vacation time, so it wouldn't have to be catastrophic.  I did have one friend remind me that it might not be vacation-like if we were stuck without power.

We decided to go and take our chances on the return.

We got to the airport early, since there was a storm in the area, and I wasn't sure what would happen.  It couldn't have been more easy.  We walked right up to the Jet Blue counter to check in our bags and had similar success at security.

As we left, the pilot said, "It may be a little bumpy, but we'll fly out of that soon.  If you're on the right side of the plane, you should be able to get a pretty good view of the hurricane."

We were on the right side of the plane, but all I saw were thick clouds, even though I kept looking for the characteristic swirl.  Still, it was cool to see the layers of the clouds.

We had an easy flight to the Richmond airport.  We did leave the cell phone charger on the plane, but that was the only glitch.

We had a great week-end with my parents, and my sister, brother-in-law, and nephew.  It was rainy and breezy, but since we didn't have sightseeing plans, that was fine.  We lifted our glasses several times throughout the week-end to the 50 years of married life my parents have enjoyed.

And since my parents lived in the outside edge of the hurricane cone, we kept tuning in to the Weather Channel.  It became clear that we wouldn't suffer a direct hit, but as the forecasters kept warning, it was hard to predict how much of the effects we would feel.

I usually get a lot of reading done when we travel, but I was too distracted by the storm.  I watched the Weather Channel on the Jet Blue flight up and back.  I got up in the morning and got sucked into the Weather Channel vortex.  Even though I know that once you've seen about 15 minutes of their programming, you've gotten the most important info, it felt impossible to tear my attention away.

Yesterday, I got up and checked our flight info.  The plane was still listed as an on-time departure, so we headed off to the Richmond airport.  We were one of two flights set to depart, so the airport was gloriously empty.  Before we checked our bags, I checked to make sure we had a plane and a crew.  The guy at the desk said we did.

We checked in and breezed through security. 

I happened to think to ask about our cell phone charger that we left on the plane. The woman at the Jet Blue desk said she'd just seen it in the break room where they keep the lost and found items. She called to see if someone could bring it to me at security but they were short staffed, so no luck.


But security had been easy, and we had 40 minutes before departure, so I decided to go back and get it. Sure enough, there it was. Hurrah! And I had no trouble getting back.  I was happy out of all proportion to have retrieved our lost cell phone charger.


And even if I had run into a line at security, it wouldn't have mattered, because our departure was delayed. One steward was delayed by flooding, so another one volunteered, but he still faced a challenge in driving to the airport through the increasingly heavy rain. 

But he made it and off we went to sunny South Florida.  It's cooler here than it was when we left.  We slept with a few windows open.  Ahhhh!

This morning, my thoughts are with the people who were more directly impacted by Hurricane Sandy than I was.  It's no fun to deal with that.

I wrote a poem about it, which I won't post here.  I found out over the week-end that my poem "What They Don't Tell You About Hurricanes" was accepted by Paper Nautilus and will appear in the Fall 2012 issue, when I will repost it here.  It seemed a fitting end to the Hurricane Anniversary week-end.

And perhaps I'll write a poem about Golden anniversaries and Hurricane anniversaries.  If you feel similarly inspired, feel free to play too.

A Poem for Reformation Day

Yesterday was Reformation Sunday; Reformation Day itself is October 31.  It put me in mind of a poem I wrote with images pulled out of the Reformation narrative.  It was written years ago, during another annoyingly hot October, where I thought about weather and social change--and this poem emerged. It appears in my first chapbook. Enjoy!




Reformation Day

The catholic heat holds us
in a tight embrace for what seems an age.
We participate in the sacraments
designed to make us forget the hellishness
of everyday life: afternoons at the pool,
barbecues, beach trips, and for the fortunate few,
a trip to the mountains, a retreat, a pilgrimage.

We pay alms as we must: electric bills,
pool chemicals, cool treats. We pay indulgences
when we can’t avoid it: the air conditioning repair
man, the pool expert who keeps the water pure,
men versed in mysteries we cannot hope to understand.

Finally, the heat breaks. A cold front swoops
down upon us from the north country, a Reformation
bringing with it the promise of other Protestants,
more weather systems to overthrow
the ubiquitous heat, to leave
us breathless with the possibilities of change.

Celebrate Literacy and the Arts on Reformation Sunday

Today is Reformation Sunday.  A year ago, I wrote about why artists and writers should care.  It's a piece that bears repeating, so here it is again.

Even if you're not spiritual or religious, if you're a scholarly sort, you should celebrate. If you're a writer, or indeed, an artist of any kind, you should celebrate.

Martin Luther and those other Reformers not only created new approaches to church, but they launched us much further down the road towards modernity than we'd have been otherwise.

I'm a Lutheran, so let me just offer some examples from the life of Martin Luther. Martin Luther was the first to translate the Bible into a common language that everyone could read. Why does that matter, you ask. Once everyone could read the Bible, the priests lost the control they had once had. Having access to those Scriptures made it possible for people to think for themselves.

And having the Scripture in those common languages made people yearn for literacy so that they could read those Scriptures. And I'm a liberal arts gal, so I believe that more literacy is better than less.

Yes there are dark periods in Church History where the arts have been repressed, and we see that repression more in some of the religions that came out of the Reformation than we do in Catholicism. But unfortunately, one of the messages of human history is that we're always struggling to find a balance between healthy expression and darker aspects of our nature.

So, on this Reformation Sunday, lift a beer or an apple cider in a toast to the Reformation. Take a popular song and make new lyrics, like so many of those early Reformers did: some of our most famous Lutheran hymns have melodies from drinking songs. Read a book or a blog post and think about how wonderful it is to have the ability to read and more stuff to read than you can ever plow through. Try a new art form. Think about your own art form and the reformations you'd like to see. Treat your inner artist with a spirit of grace, not judgment.

Marriage, Hope, and the Cuban Missile Crisis

My parents celebrate their anniversary today:  50 years together!

A few years ago I wrote an appreciation of their marriage, and since I have yet to write anything stronger, let me paste it here again, for your reading pleasure.

I can always remember how long my mom and dad have been married if I can remember the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962). My dad was a young officer in the Air Force, and up until just about the moment they got married, they weren't sure if my dad would actually be there, or if he might be called back to his unit. In later years, as I've realized how close to nuclear war the world came during that month, I'm amazed that they actually pulled it off--I'm amazed that we're all still here.


My mom and dad have only recently begun to talk about their wedding in the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I can't imagine my mom, as a young bride-to-be, planning the last details of her wedding, while watching world leaders huff and puff. She's rarely talked about that.

I can imagine how I would feel: terrified. I might wonder what would be the point of marrying and pretending that life would go on as normal.

And yet, here we are, 50 years later, with life going on as normal. If my parents had cancelled their wedding and lived as if nuclear bombs would rain down at any moment, they'd have spent 50 years living that way. They'd have missed out on the joy of marriage and raising two children. They'd have had no grandson (my sister's boy). They wouldn't have travelled or gone to back to school or had all the joys they've had.

I, too, have been haunted by the prospect of nuclear war, as have many people of my generation and older generations. I've noticed that younger generations just look at me, baffled, when I ask if they worry about the possibility of nuclear war.

Oddly, they're probably more at risk than I ever was. At least when the Soviet Union was intact, we knew where the nuclear weapons were. Now, many of them have vanished--but we know they're out there, somewhere.

Nuclear imagery has found its way into a substantial chunk of my poems, but I've never used my parents' marriage and the Cuban Missile Crisis in a poem. Maybe I'll let that percolate.

In the meantime, I hope that we can all continue to make gestures of wild hope, during these tough times, the way my parents did, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What would that wild gesture of hope look like, in this time of global warming and pandemic flu?

Love is always such a gesture. To commit to another person, to love others, even though you know they will disappoint you in ways that you can't even imagine--that's a radical act of life-affirming hope. We love, even though we know that all we love will be lost if we live long enough. Even if we don't have the dramatic backdrop of a international standoff that would likely end in nuclear war, to commit to love in the face of all that would erode that love is a such a bold act.

And of course, our love is not limited to people. We adopt pets with lifespans significantly shorter than ours. We write poems, even though we know that we'll be lucky if our readership measures in the hundreds. We read, even though we might be the last generation of readers--and some of us continue to be committed to our esoteric reading interests, even though we might be the only ones still reading those texts. We teach, even though we can't be sure of the lives we'll change--we can only hope to do no harm--and most career trajectories are similar, I suspect. We duck and cover and keep an eye to the horizon for those mushroom clouds--and in the meantime, we live our lives and hope for the best.

Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad! May we all have lives as full of love as you have had.