Last Day of Summer: Autumn Goals

This morning, I was all dressed and ready to go out on my run.  Then a rain storm swept through, which I assumed meant we were in for a morning of rain.  So, I settled in for a morning of writing.

Of course, it hasn't been a morning of rain.  But I still got some writing done--a poem!  A total gift, inspired by this post and this post on Dave Bonta's blog.  I wrote a poem that uses imagery of falling satellites and capital punishment and ends with this stanza:

"Let my death come as the unpacking
of a box of books,
old friends on a new shelf.
Let my death be as an apple
in the autumn, far from the tree,
but with new friends nestled
between the covers of crust,
a new home in warm pastry."

Today is the last day of summer, and tomorrow we enter the last quarter of the year.  Time to make some goals.  I revisted my 2011 writing goals which I wrote about here.  Many of those goals are still good ones:  a poem a week, that kind of thing.

But let me focus a bit more:

--I want to have my Fall mailing done by December 31.  Lots of packets to lots of journals.

--I want a strategy for submitting my book length manuscript, Ash Wednesday at the Trinity Test Site.  I have let most manuscript submission fall by the wayside during the past year.  I figured that I had a book coming out, and my focus should be on getting ready for that book and promoting that book.  Now it's time to return to other manuscripts.

--I want to re-order the manuscript that I've thought of as my spirituality poem manuscript.  I've written new poems that would fit, and I've gotten a glimpse of an interesting new possibility for other poems to include, which I wrote about here.  I'll focus on that possibility/task during my writer's retreat in November.

--I need to continue to promote my chapbook, I Stand Here Shredding Documents.  I need to arrange a few more readings and think about if there's anything else I should do.

--I've just begun to think about eBooks.  I'm ablaze with ideas, and it's time to think about whether or not they could work.

--It's also time to think about the fact that eBooks can do more than paper books.  We could have hyperlinks, photos, even video.  Hmmm.

--I'd like to take photographs that could work, should I put together an eBook of my manuscript Simple Things to Make Your Body Feel Good.

That list is more than enough for a three months.  Let's see what happens!

The Muse Kisses the Morning, and the Day Blooms

The closing on the condo that we've been trying to sell for over half a decade now didn't happen yesterday, but I'm trying to live in hope that it's a simple logistical delay, not collapse. 

So, to make myself feel better, and to record my inspirations for later, and to do some Wednesday Gratitude/Attitude adjustment, let me talk about some things that went right yesterday:

--Early morning, driving back from my run at the beach, I misread a hotel sign.  It said (I think) Ocean Mist, but I thought I saw Ocean Muse.  All the rest of my drive I kept repeating it.  I think it would make a perfect name for a seaside retreat or a writing program of some sort.

--As I was waiting for the closing that was not to be yesterday, I was recording some ideas I've had for eBooks.  I have lots of ideas, and even some partially finished manuscripts.  I pulled out one of those manuscripts yesterday, thinking it was 30 or so pages long.  Nope--I had written 136 pages back in the early days of this century.

--Why did I write this book?  Years before I started writing, my housemate had complained about fitness/wellness/nutrition books.   He said, "I just want some simple, easy suggestions for what I can do to make my body feel better."  I made a list.  I started writing little essays about each suggestion.  I am grateful for good ideas that I can write about. 

--I still have the manuscript, and in a file that my current computer can read!  These days, that fact seems like a miracle.

--I also still have the handwritten list of all the essays I meant to write, and soon, I'll see if I actually wrote them all.

--Even though we didn't close on the condo, we still went out for dinner with my husband's dad and step-mom.  We had a fabulous meal at a beachside restaurant.  The weather was heavenly, the view couldn't be better, the company delightful, and with time on the meter for a little stroll afterward.  I'm lucky to have married into a family who loves me, and whom I love.  I'm lucky to live in such a beautiful place.  I'm lucky to have this problem of wanting to sell a property. 

--And I'm lucky even if the news is bad, if the sale doesn't happen for some reason, we can go on, as we have been going on for years.  We have work, we can pay our bills, we have our health, and we still have all our wits about us.

--Tomorrow is the last day of summer.  Time to think about Autumn goals--but time for that tomorrow.  Today, I'll enjoy some watermelon and turn my face to the sun--but not for too long.  We're still in intense UV time down here.  No sense getting a severe sunburn!

MacArthur Dreaming

Ah, to be a MacArthur Fellow when the winds turn autumnal!

Yes, when I'm not dreaming of being a Supreme Court Justice or starring in the Broadway revival of Godspell (the only musical I'm sure I can sing), I dream of being a MacArthur Fellow.  Sure, I'd rather be a Nobel Laureate, but I assume that the competition for that prize is much stiffer--and writers who are U.S. citizens so rarely win.  So, yes, I'd be happy to win a MacArthur Fellowship.  I wouldn't even remind people more than once a day that it's also called a genius grant.

Today I was reading the list here, and thinking, wow, there's a lot of scientists on this list. Frankly, I'm not sure what some of these scientists are studying:  condensed matter physics and organometallic chemistry?  I'm reading and reading and thinking, c'mon, no writers of any kind?

Finally, I got to Kay Ryan's name.  And then, just before the end of the list, there it was:  A. E. Stallings.  What a thrill!

I've always loved these awards because of how wide-ranging they are (to see yearly lists, head here).  One year, an instrument maker is one of the Fellows.  One year, a deep sea explorer.  Every year, at least one writer or drama person is on the list, but often only one.

I find myself profoundly happy that Stallings won.  If my copy of her Archaic Smile was here, instead of at the office, I'd reread it this morning.  It's one of the more perfect volumes of poetry I've ever read.  There's a unity to it that many poets will never achieve.  Her skill with form, with rhythm, with meter--it takes my breath away.  Her deep understanding of mythology leaves me in awe.

I find myself thinking about one of my other favorite formalist poets, Catherine Tufariello, who loaned me her copy of Archaic Smile--after reading it, I immediately ordered it.  I was juggling a variety of adjunct jobs, but I loved it so much I bought it, even though it was only available in hardback.

I first knew Catherine when she came to work at a South Carolina community college where I worked.  Years later, when I was an adjunct at the University of Miami, I was told that my office mate would be Catherine Tufariello.  I thought, how many Catherine Tufariellos can there be in the world?  I left her a note on the desk we would share, but rarely at the same time, since that was how adjunct office assignments were made.  Yep, it was her!

We met weekly for lunch, and I'll remember it as one of those magical times, where we explored Miami and explored poetry and talked about our hopes.  Maybe it was magical because she knew fairly early on that she was only here for the school year--we knew we had to make the most of our time together.

At the time, Catherine worked almost exclusively in the formalist realm, and she inspired me to try my hand at formalist poems.  I'll never be as accomplished as Catherine or A. E. Stallings, but attempting those forms and meters has given me a new appreciation for poets who can make it look so effortless.

In honor the MacArthur Fellowship, I've ordered some books that I've had in the Amazon shopping cart for some time, as well as Stallings' second book, Hapax, which I don't have.  I ordered Tracy K. Smith's Life on Mars and Jessica Goodfellow's The Insomniac's Weather Report.  I know that Life on Mars has some science themes, and I'm expecting that Goodfellow's will too, based on her chapbook, A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland (an amazing book--and that title!--don't you just weep for joy and envy?).  I also ordered Christine Valters Paintner's The Artist's Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom.  I need some inspiration in that direction!

The Busy, Busy, Busy Emoticon

I'm not sure what this week will look like.  Lots going on this week, in addition to it being the last week of the quarter:

--hopefully, tomorrow we will be closing on a condo that we've been trying to sell since 2005.  My mother-in-law lived in it until she died right as the housing market started its long downward spiral.  It's been an interesting journey, which perhaps I'll blog about some day, but not today.

--my father-in-law and stepmom-in-law are in town visiting and we're having a good time with them.

--I'm off to a retreat to plan the Create in Me retreat at the end of the week.

--I must do follow up eye doctor tasks--pick up a pair of contacts that will let my corneas get more oxygen and see if I can make the switch.

For your reading pleasure, I direct you to some of these postings by others:

--Garrison Keillor gives an interesting history of the emoticon here (after the poem for the day).  Ever wonder who was the first to notice that a colon and a right parenthesis looks like a smile?  Here's your answer.

--a new way to look at plagiarism here.  It's not plagiarism, it's repurposing!  Feeling blocked?  Learn how to be uncreative.

--If, however, you feel like repurposing your own work, here are some interesting thoughts about how the skills you've learned in blogging apply to eBooks.  And perhaps you can repurpose some of those old blog posts!  Will people pay for what you've already posted for free?  This author says yes and gives you tips for how to do it here.

--More of these types of links from Robert Lee Brewer's blog here and here.

Inhabiting Our Characters: the Interview, the Dramatic Monologue, the Poem, the Poetry Reading

Today is the birthday of Anna Deveare Smith.  I'm thinking of her and of Studs Turkel and other people who have mastered the art of the interview.  It's made me think of all the things one can do with an interview.

I have a B.A. in Sociology, to go along with my B.A. in English.  I decided to go to graduate school to study English because I didn't like the direction Sociology was headed as a discipline in America.

Actually, it was one of my favorite professors who was quite blunt with me, and for which I will always be grateful.  He reminded me that I had almost failed Statistics, and that the future of the discipline was becoming much more Statistics focused.

In the spirit of full confession/disclosure, let me reveal that I FAILED Statistics.  We all did, every member of that class.  However, if you look at my transcripts, you'll see the grade of C.  How did I pull this off?  My Stats professor graded on a true curve, and half the class did better than I did, and half worse.  Thus, my C.

I would have wanted to be my generation's Studs Turkel, but instead I studied English.  It wasn't until the work of Anna Deveare Smith that I thought about all the ways one can use the interview.

I've always loved books that are simple transcripts of interviews or recrafted interviews.  I'm happy to buy books like that or to read/create those kind of blog posts.  But there's so much more that we could do with an interview.

Anna Deveare Smith shows us several of those possibilities.  Before she starts writing, she interviews a wide variety of people; she is perhaps most famous for doing this in Twilight:  Los Angeles, 1992, an amazing play which looked at the 1992 riots from a variety of directions and voices:  a police officer, Cornel West, an Asian owner of a liquor store, a Black Panther activist, Rodney King's aunt . . . I could go on and on, but you get the idea.  What she accomplishes still amazes me.

The plays that she writes would be important in their own right, but then, she also acts in them.  To say that she acts is not exactly the right verb.  She inhabits those characters.  I haven't had the good fortune of seeing her live, but I'm told that she transforms herself.

Long, long ago (1986? 87?), Whoopi Goldberg did something similar with her one woman show, which was billed as comedy, but was so much more.  Similarly, her work combined sociological insight and solid acting and amazing writing.

I love the art of the dramatic monologue, which can do so much and offers so many possibilities.  The work of Anna Deveare Smith works as monologue, but if you look at it on the page, it also resembles poetry.  Thinking along these lines makes my attention turn to poetry readings.  Could we learn something from writer/actors like Anna Deveare Smith?  Could we so fully inhabit our poems that we transform ourselves?

If we did that, would it be a poetry reading or something else that we haven't created a name for yet?  Could we inhabit our characters and then move back to our poems that aren't persona poems in any way?  Hmm.

Anna Deveare Smith shows us all what can be done with our creative work, a valuable lesson in today's multi-platform climate.  We can take that blog post and turn it into a poem.  If our poems have strong narrative voices, we could create a show along the lines of Anna Deveare Smith and early Whoopi Goldberg.  If we find ourselves channeling the same character when we're writing, perhaps we should devote a whole reading to that character--it's time to rediscover the joys of the art of oral interpretation, for those of us who were high school drama geeks.

And for those of us who weren't high school drama geeks, we can learn a lot about the skills of oral interpretation from these playwrights, like Anna Deveare Smith and Eve Ensler, who bring a documentary skill to their art, but who also bring a wide variety of characters to life.

Hildegard of Bingen, Administrator Extraordinaire

Today is the feast day of Hildegard of Bingen; go to this post on my theology blog for my thoughts on her and spirituality.  Actually, the post is less about her spirituality and more about what she was able to accomplish, despite being a medieval woman.

Thinking about her made me think about Julian of Norwich.  I'd never heard of her until I taught the first half of a British Literature survey class and wanted to include more women writers.  Frankly, there weren't many to choose from.  I'm grateful, in a way, because my inclusion of Julian of Norwich meant I had to learn a lot about medieval women and the monastic tradition.

Until I did that research, I would have told you that medieval cloisters oppressed women.  But really, they offered the only protection available to women who lived in/outside the margins of society (artistic, widowed, not wanting to be married, weird in any way).

I've been feeling irritable lately, and I know why.  I haven't been spending as much time on my writing as I wish I could.  I look back wistfully to those times when I had huge swaths of time all to myself.  I try to remind myself that I had all that time because my husband was working long, awful hours or because I didn't have many friends or my best friend had just moved or because I was underemployed.  Still . . .

I love the lives of these medieval mystics because they remind me of what can be accomplished, even in a life of containment and boundaries.  Let's take Hildegard as an example.  She was an Abbess, and because being in charge of one cloistered community isn't enough, she founded another.  She wrote music, and more of her music survives than any other medieval composer.  She was an early naturalist, writing down her observations about the natural world and her theories about how the natural world heals us.  She wrote to kings, emperors and popes to encourage them to pursue peace and justice.  She wrote poems and a morality play and along the way, a multitude of theological meditations.

She did all of these things, in addition to keeping her community running smoothly.  Yes, I'm thinking about Hildegard as an administrator, a woman who could be efficient and artistic at the same time.

During these times when I feel like I'm accomplishing NOTHING as an artist, it's easy to convince myself that I've peaked, as much as I was going to peak.  It's easy to sink into a spiral of self-pity and despair:  "I should have worked harder on this project, I should have followed through on this contact, I should have taken this job, I should have moved to that place."  On and on I can go in this way.

In these times, I try to stop the downward spiral by reminding myself of all I've done, despite my job which takes 40 to 50 hours a week.  A year ago, I was just about to get the news that Finishing Line Press would publish I Stand Here Shredding Documents. Of course, I didn't know that at the time.  A year ago, I was feeling despair, wondering if I'd ever have anything chapbook size or larger published again.  And then, the good news came.

Of course, it's good to assess periodically, to make sure I'm on the trajectory that has the most chance of taking me where I want to go.  For a long time, I kept this George Eliot quote taped everywhere:  "It is never too late to be what you might have been."  Now I smile, thinking that I was all of thirty-two years old when I wrote that quote everywhere.  I had just barely arrived at the situation that seemed inadequate.

So today, I'll remember Hildegard of Bingen and her example of what a woman can accomplish despite the obstacles that her society puts in her way.  I'll think about the ways that the Church fostered her creativity.  I assume that she wrote much of what she did because her religious community had need of it:  morality plays, liturgical music, letters that kept her community afloat.  I have hope that in later years, I'll look back and see the ways that my work fed me, both literally (with a paycheck) and figuratively (by time off to go to workshops and conferences, by colleagues who nourish me, by giving me the subject of many a poem).

Maybe I'll add some plants to the herb garden today in honor of Hildegard.  Maybe I'll listen to some medieval choral music or chant.  Maybe I'll write a letter to someone in power to remind them of the imperative to work for peace in our time.

Or maybe I'll write a poem (or finish the one I started a few hours ago).

Publishing Your Work as Both Book and Article (and Movie? and Sound File?)

Yesterday, my friend and I were talking about publishing possibilities.  She's got an idea that would make a good book:  a non-fiction, advice kind of book, a what employers wish students would know kind of book.  She was thinking about self-publishing vs. traditional routes.

I asked her about her intended audience, and she talked about our students.  Well, we know our students don't read, even if passing a class is at stake.  Why would they shell out money for a book that's not required reading?

Her idea is the kind of idea that could have many different lives.  She could do a stripped down version of her idea (which she defined as 40-60 pages).  I pointed out that she could do an even shorter version, something article length, a list of suggestions with a few sentences or paragraphs about each.  Our students might read an article which is essentially a list of things.

I suggested that she do all of the above, at different price points.  She could write the article and sell it electronically for 99 cents, one of the magical price points (over $2.99 seems to be the point at which people hesitate before clicking or decide not to click).  If people read the article and want more, they could buy the chapbook size book or the longer one.  They could buy a paper version or an e-book.

In early October, when both our lives calm down a bit, we intend to investigate this idea further.  I'd like to learn more about these different formats.  I have been thinking about assembling a book of ideas that teachers could use in both creative writing classes and composition classes.  I like the idea of selling individual chapters for relatively cheap, as an enticement, a try before you buy kind of thing.

For awhile, I've been thinking of using different platforms all at once:  electronic books, paper books, and for poems, perhaps sound files.  I've only just begun to think about different lengths and what things might be possible.  And for non-fiction, should we also be thinking about other genres, like video?  Hmm.