Happy Birthday, "Charlotte's Web"!

On this day, 60 years ago, Charlotte's Web was published. I remember the shock I felt in grad school, when I realized that one of the guys who wrote the Strunk and White guide was the same White who wrote Charlotte's Web. I'm always impressed by people who can write equally well in different genres, and also by people who write well for both adults and children.

I adored Charlotte's Web. It's probably one of the first books I read over and over again. I loved that the characters pull together against great odds and develop interesting, non-violent ways of resisting their oppression.

Of course, I wouldn't have used that language at that time.

Charlotte's Web is why I'm not afraid of spiders. I suspect it's also the reason that I've been drawn to vegetarianism my whole life, although you wouldn't know it by the way I've been eating lately.

I haven't gone back to reread Charlotte's Web as an adult. I suspect it would hold up well and hold my interest as an adult reader too.

That book has a great first line, some might say one of the greatest first lines ever:  "'Where's Papa going with that ax?' said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast."

Most of us think about the characters, when we think about that book, but E. B. White says he was writing about the barn.  Other critics/scholars say that he was working out his longings for his childhood and for other settings in this book.  It's a great reminder that we can do the same thing.

You can find a great NPR piece here.

A quote from The Story of Charlotte's Web:  E. B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic by Michael Sims:

"'Remember that writing is translation,' White wrote to a student while composing this tale about the animals in his barn, 'and the opus to be translated is yourself.' The Story of Charlotte's Web explores how White translated his own passions and contradictions, delights and fears, into a book that has had astonishingly broad appeal across age groups and national boundaries. He knew that empathy is a creative act, an entering into another's reality. Empathy and curiosity happily coexisted in his spacious imagination. He studied the lives of spiders for a year before writing his novel. 'I discovered, quite by accident,' he explained, 'that reality and fantasy make good bedfellows.'"

Surreal, but Super, Friday

Yesterday was a strange day, but overall a good day.  It seemed surreal as I lurched from experience to experience.  Did it seem surreal because I got so little sleep the night before?  On Thursday, I stayed up until 11 working on computer issues.  Of course, I still got up early.  I worried that I'd slog through the day, but I felt energized, for the most part.

How was my day both strange and wonderful?  Let me count the ways:

--I got to the office to find I had no working phone.  It's been technology hell week at the office, with computers going out, power failures, and now my phone. 

--Actually, I'm quite happy not to have a phone.  I can't get much work done without a computer, but the phone really seems like an anachronism to me.

--Along with work my school pays me to do, I got some poetry packets ready to send to literary journals.  I love putting packets together, thinking about how 5 poems work together.  I love the chance to reread my poems. 

--I met a writer friend for lunch at our favorite all-you-can eat sushi/Chinese buffet/mongolian barbecue place.  I always load up on veggies and allow myself a few fried things.  We haven't seen each other since July, so we had a lot of catching up to do.

--She's now in a relationship with a person in Oregon.  She went out there to visit and told me about her adventures with Civil War reenactors.

--Yes, Civil War reenactors--in Oregon!  Oh, my brain wants to run with this.

--My friend has been wrestling with anxieties about logistics and the relationship.  There's a continent between her and her beloved, after all.  They both have strong roots to their current location.  It's not an easy airplane trip.  Her beloved is in the Air Force, which means it's even harder to think about the future.  Her beloved is convinced that it will all work out and doesn't want to dwell on all the anxieties.

--I suggested that my friend write out her anxieties.  "Write a novel," I said.  "Two lovers, separated by a continent and the Air Force.  Throw in some vampires and an apocalypse of some sort, and you've got a best seller!"

--I suggested that she go further, that she write a chapter, send it to me, and I'd write some more and send it back.  I love this idea of writing a novel this way--but how long would it be before I chafed and wanted to do what I wanted to do with the plot?  Or would it continue to be a lark?

--In the afternoon, back in the office, I decided to change my password so that on Monday, I could be ready to go with the mandatory sexual harassment webinar training that I'm required to do by the end of the month.  But it was so quiet that I decided to go ahead and do the training.

--It's the exact same training that we did a year ago!  Sigh.  And I'm required to spend 2 hours with it.  So, as it droned on and on, I deleted old e-mails, stopping occasionally to do the required tests.

--Can anyone in an American workplace think that it's wise to brush up against people suggestively at the copy machine?  Really?

--But I know that we haven't all evolved, and so I slogged on through.  I got a lot of e-mails deleted too.  My e-mail has been crashing every few days.  I am so bad at e-mail management.

--Of course, it doesn't help that I get e-mails that have absolutely nothing to do with me.  Yesterday, someone forwarded me an e-mail which had nothing to do with me that I could see.  I wrote back to ask for clarification, and she forwarded the same e-mail again, again with no explanation of any sort.  I was tempted to write back, to see how long we'd carry on this non-communication.  But I had sexual harassment training to complete, and so I stopped.

--After I spent hours--hours that I'll never get back!!!--on the training, I felt that cotton brain that I get when I spend hours submerged in Online Land.  I needed to do something else.

--Since I still had no phone, I went to the conference room and called a friend who has moved several states away; she kept her cell phone # so it was a local call.  She used to work at my school, so she's got interesting insights into how things used to be, and that helps me realize that things have really changed.

--We had a FABULOUS conversation about mid-life job upheaval, about vocation, about feeling called to do something or not called to do something.  I will likely write more about this in a separate post.

--I told her I'd been feeling lazy, because at one point, I'd determined that I'd only see my current job appointment as a reprieve, and I had planned to be looking for something else.  But the thought of putting those packets together just makes me feel so tired.

--She laughed, and she said, "Kristin, I've known you for a long time, and one word I would NEVER use to describe you is 'lazy.'"  She suggested that I'd been through a trauma, and even though it had ended well for now, it's understandable that I'm tired, that I might need some time to just recover.

--I felt such RELIEF when she said this.

--And then it was night, and time to head over to an inner-city, inner-county Lutheran church.  My spouse had been invited to do a drumming workshop, and I wanted to be there, in case he needed help. 

--It was an amazing experience.  I wrote about it in more detail in this post at my theology blog.  Words cannot adequately express my great joy at the experience of singing "We Are Walking in the Light of God" in a small church with a choir of 40 children drumming enthusiastically.  Wow.

--Is that joy trying to tell me something?  Music, kids from surrounding public housing, instruments, church--or is that joy leading my spouse to some place I only glimpsed last night?

--As we left the church, children ran to hug us.  Very surreal--just hours after the sexual harassment training, I've got all these tiny arms flung around me.

--One little 5 year old girl who had the most skill with a hula hoop of anyone I've ever seen asked, "Will you come back?"

--It seems like a far deeper question than she likely meant for it to be.

Pilgrimages, Spiritual and Literary

The other night I went to my church writer's group meeting. It's a ragtag group, a few church people who are interested in writing but living busy lives. In fact, we're so busy that only one other member showed up. I was early, but that was OK. I had some rough drafts with me to work on.


That church writer's group is not a group that exchanges rough drafts. We have only met once, before last night, and we talked about our goals and how we planned to meet them.

Since only 2 of us came to the group, we had plenty of time to talk about my church friend's recent trip to the Abbey of Gethsemene. He was headed to Kentucky for a wedding and decided to stay 2 extra days at the home of Thomas Merton.

He had a great trip. We talked about the worship services. We talked about his conversation with some of the monks, one of whom was alive when Merton was there and considered it his life's great grace to have known Merton. We talked about silence: how refreshing it is and how hard to find it in regular life.

He talked about his conversation with a monk who told him that you realize your heart's yearning by praying.  I wondered if he meant "realized" as in to recognize or as in to come to fulfillment.
Yesterday I dug out my journal that I was keeping in 2004 when I went to Mepkin for the first time. I wrote about my yearning to go back, about wishing I had a job that would allow me to get to places like Mepkin Abbey and Lutheridge more often.

Oddly enough, now I do. At the time, I was yearning for a job that would put me geographically closer. Instead, my job morphed into an academic job that gave me more leeway about when I take vacation.  The yearnings of my heart realized?

However this week has been one of those weeks where it would be nice to be close enough that I could just drive out to one of my spiritual landscapes for an afternoon. I'd like to take some hours to walk the grounds and to sit in silence.

Maybe this afternoon, I'll give myself a break and take a virtual walk by looking at old photos.

Our talk of Merton reminded me of a plane trip where I devoured Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own:  An American Pilgrimage.  Oddly, I wasn't the only one:  I saw another man in the airport holding area reading the book too.

What a great book.  It hits all my favorite bases.  It looks at the lives of 4 great American writers:  Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy.  It uses the lens of faith, particularly the Catholic faith, and place and community and the history of the middle part of the 20th century.

Maybe this week-end I'll give myself a retreat of sorts by rereading this book.  I remembering consuming it in great gulps when I first read it back in 2004 or 2005 when I first read it; I could scarcely bear to put it down.  I could use that kind of delight and nourishment.

Here's a Flannery O'Connor quote for your Friday:  "I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else, and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of our times." (quoted in Elie's book on page 155)

Fiction Harvests, Past and Present

Today I have my fiction lunch with my friend who writes all sorts of things.  I've probably referred to her as my poet friend, my Hindu friend, a fellow drama geek.  She is all these things and more.

I know for sure that I wouldn't have written any of the short stories that I've written in the past year if we hadn't scheduled deadlines and pushed to meet them.  I think I'm about to realize that I have enough stories for my linked collection.  In fact, I think I'll realize that I have more than I need. 

What a luxury!  I can discard some of them.

What agony!  Which ones aren't necessary?

Well, the short story that I wrote for last time's fiction lunch.  I tried alternate narrators, first person, two parents.  I suspect that their voices sound exactly alike.

In fact, my worry is that all my first person voices sound exactly alike--like me.  Will it matter?  Most of the characters who narrate my stories are, in fact, very similar to me:  female, middle class, U.S. citizen, coming of age in the last quarter of the 20th century.

I was working on my story and trying to remember last names that are typical of South Carolinians.  I was drawing a blank on information that I once would have sworn I'd never forget.

I remembered a novel that I was writing in 1999, when we first moved here, and I was both thrilled to be living here and terribly homesick for familiar, Southern landscapes.  I filled that manuscript with familiar names and places and stories that I once would have sworn I'd never forget.

I read through 30 pages or so, even though I quickly found some last names to use in my current short story.  I was charmed by the novel, even though the agents and publishers where I sent it when it was finished were not as charmed (although they offered encouragement).

I recognized similar themes that I continue to work today:  how do we live our best lives as artists?  How does place and family affect us?

In my current short story writing for the linked collection, I'm always intrigued by how my stories weave/wobble back to certain themes and imagery.  There's lots of creativity going on.  Quilts make appearances--do they always mean the same thing?  We can never escape family issues.  There's a theological stream that sometimes lies deep and sometimes bubbles to the surface.

Some of you might be saying, "Hey, I recognize those themes and images from your poetry!"  Yes, indeed.  I've got my little plot of land that I continue to farm.  Hopefully the harvest will be abundant.

And in the meantime, it delights me:  the writing, the discoveries that I make as writing, the past manuscripts, my hope for the future.

And more:  it sustains me.  I feel lucky to have this rich earth (both literal and metaphorical) to call my own.

Crankies

I thought about writing a post about my crankiness when it comes to Breast Cancer Awareness month.  But then it occurs to me that maybe I'm so aware of it because I go to a gym in a hospital to work out.  Maybe in other parts of the world, people aren't even aware of this month as having special cancer awareness.

Does other cancer warrant a whole month?  Maybe I'm just blissfully unaware of Colon Cancer Awareness month.

Now, before I go further, a few disclaimers.  Yes, I've lost people to cancers of all sorts, and yes, I understand the importance of early intervention.

But why no Lung Cancer Awareness month?  Lung cancer kills more women each year than any other kind of cancer.

Why no Ovarian Cancer Awareness month?  Imagine what might happen if the same resources went to solving ovarian cancer as we've spent on breast cancer.  Right now, most women won't discover that they have ovarian cancer until it's far too late.  What if we could develop some kind of test that would insure early detection?

I could write a feminist essay about how breasts have more cachet in our patriarchal culture, and thus, it's easy to have a breast cancer awareness month.  Lungs just don't have that same kind of pretty sex appeal.

I could write an investigative essay about how various foundations and individual crusaders have taken their personal battles to new levels.  What if one of those early crusaders had suffered from ovarian cancer instead of breast cancer?

But then I wonder if I should be writing about any of this at all.  Maybe I shouldn't let my crankiness get the best of me.

Yesterday at the office was one of those days that tested my optimism in so many ways.  Lots of fallout from badly executed decisions--not my decisions, but I'm left to deal with the negativity.  I can deal with one or two bits of negativity in any given day, but hour after hour challenges my optimism.

Here's my biggest fear:  I think of myself as an optimistic person, but what if I'm deluded?  What if I whine and complain so much that people avoid me?

I'm hoping that if I have a fear of becoming a negative force that my fear will help me be alert so that I don't allow that to happen.  I'm hoping that I can have a day when I succumb to crankiness, that people will forgive me, that I can rise to a new, optimistic morning.

So, I will try to let go of my crankiness about Breast Cancer Awareness month by being grateful for my own good health, by saying prayers for those stricken by disease, by hoping for a world where cells never go cancerous.  I'll try to let go of my work crankiness by remembering how many people would be grateful to have a job, even if it involves dealing with the crankiness of coworkers.  I'll take my time-honored way of righting myself:  by writing my way back to my true nature.

Today I Am Going to Start Living Like a Six Year Old

Edward Hirsch wrote a poem, "I Am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic," which you can find any number of places, but I like the presentation here.  In my head, I often confuse the title and the first line, and I often say, "Today I am going to start living like ____________."

I've written a poem with the first line "Today I am going to start living like a hospice chaplain."  But this morning, having dropped my sister and nephew off at the airport and completed a morning boot camp workout class on the roof of a parking garage, I have a different spin on the line.

Today I am going to start living like a 6 year old.

What would my life look like?

--I'd write/draw more and worry less about publication.

--I'd see the world in terms of hiding places.

--Five dollars would seem like a fortune.

--I'd do experiments with pop rocks and black cherry soda.

--I'd write up those experiments.

--I'd sing, loudly and often.

--I'd dance without worrying about what anyone thought of me.

--I'd eat at least a half a pound of bacon every morning.

--I'd play games with rules that only I could understand.

--I'd worry less about mess and housekeeping and chores and the to-do list, and I'd simply be with people.

Obviously some of these are more sensible than others.  While I love bacon, it would not be wise to eat so much of it.  My arteries just hardened a bit even at the thought.

What I really want to get at, with this post and the poem I might write, is the joy and wonder of the world that we often train ourselves not to notice.  I've been resisting that tendency to drudgery my whole life, and I hope I continue to do so.  But I'd also like to play more.  What would it feel like to write a piece that went nowhere?  Could I truly not care?  What would it feel like to waste a whole day, a whole week-end, to do nothing that had a larger purpose?

Today I'm thinking it would feel very restorative.

Columbus and Myths of All Sorts

--Today is the federal holiday that celebrates Columbus Day; I'm willing to wager serious money that most of us don't have the day off.  When your mail doesn't arrive, you can take a minute to remember Columbus, who wanted to find a shorter trade route, but failed miserably in that goal.  Still, most of us think of him as a success.

--What lessons can we creative types learn from Columbus?  Many of us start off with a vision for where we'd like to go, perhaps even with five and ten year plans. Yet if we're open to some alternate paths, we might find ourselves making intriguing discoveries that we'd never have made, had we stuck religiously to our original plans.

--We tend to think of Columbus as being one of the few to realize that the earth was round, but that's a myth.  Garrison Keilor's The Writer's Almanac post for today reminds us:  "Legend has it that only Columbus believed the earth was round, but that's not true; most educated Europeans at the time knew the earth wasn't flat. However, the Ottoman Empire had cut off land and sea routes to the islands of Asia. Columbus became obsessed with finding a western sea route, but he miscalculated the world's size, and he didn't know the Pacific Ocean existed."

--I need to start thinking about mythology in other ways too.  In two months, I need to be finishing an academic essay in which I talk about women poets using Greek mythology to talk about work, more specifically work outside the home.  If you've got poems out there that use Greek myth to talk about the workplace as women experience it, I'd love a copy of those poems.  I've got lots of books to look through, but I'm aware that there's a wealth of poems published individually which will be hard for me to find.  If you don't want to comment publicly here, feel free to send me an e-mail:  kristinlba at aol.com.

--Even if I can't refer to the works of anyone else, I've got my own work.

--Speaking of my own work, I should look through my old poetry notebooks.  I first write and revise poems on legal pads, and then, later (sometimes months or years later), I type them into the computer, making any last revisions that I can see.  Lately, the typing into the computer part of the process has gotten neglected.

--I need to do this not only for my academic essay but for my Fall submissions.  The journal Slant only accepts submissions until Nov. 15, and they've always liked my poems based on mythology best.

--And thinking about mythology always gives me an entry into new poems to write, as does history.  I have Halloween on the brain, and global warming, and the treasures that Columbus did find (tomatoes!  peppers!  chocolate!).  Could these swirl into a poem?