Sunday, October 31, 2010
Annoucements!
Found is another week closer to release and we begin planning the tour and the teaching that will be going along with the tour. Areas I've been welcomed include:
Seattle
SF
Georgia
Florida
&
Pittsburgh!
This means that fans from those areas have contacted me to host teachings, talks, readings and general frivolity which includes book groups and salons with wine and food! If you are one of those people who would like to join in on the Found Tour, give me a holler via this site. My team will work with you and it will be a blast!
One reading spot is now open at the Portland, OR, Transformative Writing Table, my weekly teaching circle that runs in the winter term. We begin this term Dec. 2nd and reservations are being taken now. One spot for reading and there are a couple for observing! Please let me know what appeals and get your writing hand ready! Go to Teachings to learn more. 
If you are woman writing poetry, prose, screen play or even just making journal entries, please join SheWrites.com! This is truly stunning site of women and resources. You will never be alone again, as a writer. Join and then FRIEND me!
Friday, October 29, 2010
Book Talk: The Possibility of Everything by Hope Edelman
From Hope's web site: "In the autumn of 2000, Hope Edelman was a woman adrift, questioning her marriage, her profession, and her place in the larger world. Feeling vulnerable and isolated, she was primed for change. Into her stagnant routine dropped Dodo, her three-year-old daughter Maya's curiously disruptive imaginary friend. Confused and worried about how to handle Dodo's apparent hold on their daughter, Edelman and her husband made the unlikely choice to take her to Maya healers in Belize, hoping that a shaman might help them banish Dodo—and, as they came to understand, all he represented—from their lives."
I'd like to focus my attention of Book Talk on two pages of Hope's book which breaks down, in detail, an explanation of the Maya calendar and more specifically, the Maya calendar as applied to the reality of how we are about to enter the last cycle of the calendar. I am so intrigued by what is happening right now, time acceleration, planetary alignments and a break through in consciousness, that I cannot read this passage from her book (pgs. 112-113) often enough:
"A few months ago on public radio, I heard an interview with an expert on the Maya calendar. He was talking about the concept of time acceleration, a phenomenon some present day researchers believe is encoded in the complex astronomical and mathematic systems the ancient Maya used to measure time. The Maya, who thought of time as cyclical, he said, identified Underworlds. The first one started 16.4 billion years ago with cellular development, the second began about 40 million years ago and tracked mammalian evolution, the third saw the establishment of family systems, and so on and so forth all the way up to the Ninth and final underworld, the Universal, which will start in 2011. When that one ends, a new form of human consciousness is expected to emerge and the Mayan master calendar will be reset to zero.
You have to imagine all Nine Underworlds, the man said, starting at different points in time but nonetheless running concurrently. Imagine them stacked on top of each other like a wedding cake, or a pyramid, so that each time a new underworld starts it's layer on top of the others, which serve as its foundation. And imagine each layer of the pyramid divided into thirteen equal slices, representing alternating periods of light and darkness that bring either progress and creativity or chaos and destruction to the earth. 
You might say, huh? That's what I was thinking in my car. But here's the part of the radio interview that grabbed me and kept me sitting for half an hour in a cafe parking lot to hear it in its entirety. We use a base-ten system for calculating time, but the Mayans used a vigesimal system meaning base-twenty math. According to their calculations, each of the Nine Underworlds lasts for exactly one twentieth the time of the one it's build upon. For example, as the man on the radio explained it, the Seventh Underworld, which started in 1755, is 256 years long. The Eighth Underworld, the one we are in now, started on January 5, 1999, and will last for less than thirteen years--which is one twentieth of 256. The ninth and final underworld starts in February 2011 and will last for only 263 days. This is why, the man said, it took 15 billion years for cells to develop but only about a dozen for the Internet to take hold. Because the shifts between periods of light and dark happen twenty times faster in each new underworld, the amount of change that used to take place in a lifetime now occurs in a single year. If it feels as if time is speeding up, the man said, that's because it is."
I find it absolutely amazing that the final phase of the calendar is upon us and that the final phase is nearly the exact number of days it takes to gestate a child within the womb. The average gestation time of a human baby is 280 days. This cycle is 263 days.
It is prophesied that a thousand Buddhas will inhabit this time. Look around. Are they walking among us? Is Eckhart Tolle one of them? Is Byron Katie? What about Lama Suyra Das? Khrisna Das? You?
I personally believe a new consciousness is about to be born in those who have been working for that goal and even in those who have not been working in that direction. We are all in this evolution thing together, if we realize it or not. Think to how there is evidence now that our cells contain the same matter as star dust and that mother's carry the cells of each child they have gestated and that we are impacted by our genetic line by as much as three or four generations. Look at the spiral of DNA, consider just what we are and what we come from and then look to where we potentially are going. Are we at the end of conflict in the world? Are we at the end of abusing children and women? Will guns be laid down and will flowers be passed around instead? Will we be doing yoga and qi gong in the parks and will our children be coming up with solutions to problems that plague the environment, as if doing simple math?
It's all entirely possible.
I beielive in the possibility of everything, as Hope aptly titled her book.
I love this book, for it's wider story of a mother in search of healing for her child, and I love it for the way Hope also brings forward gems like this dissertation on the Maya calendar.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Writing Prompt
INSTRUCTION: Taking the mudane, ordinary day and turning into a source of insight and wisdom only requires closer examination and of course, writing allows this exploration. The Monday Fresh Writing titled Making Change was written two years ago but only in part. A few days ago, as I revisited the tale, I finally had the distance required to see the situation more clearly. I did not come to the conclusions that are contained in this story at the time of the initial writing, I needed more time to sort things out. My son's illness, seemingly disconnected and random, makes more sense when placed into the context of the challenges of school that were occupying a great deal of my attention at the time. I was not connecting the dots until I wrote this story, worked in Jo's conversational snippets and my own feelings of confusion.
PROMPT QUESTION:
Can you describe a day, when things are pretty much out of hand. Keep the time frame to a small amount of time, perhaps an hour at the most. Both the scenes in the Monday essay a) being in the car with Jo and b) barf scene were short time frames. Ten minutes at most. Try to limit the time you are describing and include a lot of dialogue to keep momentum. Then explore the larger challenges that are being triggered.
EXAMPLE:
You fell down.
The tire blew out.
You got lost in a unfamiliar part of town.
You lost your cell phone.
You lost your keys.
The point is to find a moment when you are out of control and what this reveals about your larger life situation.
WRITE & SUBMIT: 500-700 words. Good luck! Share your writing on Sunday by posting in the form of a comment.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Fresh Writing: Making Change
My seven-year-old daughter Josephine is in the back seat, buckle tight over her lap and she clutches her brand new count-down-to-Christmas calendar. Dakota ate Jo’s first count-down-to-Christmas calendar this morning—chewed right through the 11th, 18th, 22nd, 13th, and the 10th.
That dog can’t count.
Dakota is a big old black lab and she belongs to my boyfriend who is in the middle of a crazy nasty divorce. Since I work from home, he's always leaving her at my place where she craps in the yard, pukes in the house and sleeps wherever she flops. That dog snores so loud, the floorboards shake.
I don’t say that I don’t want to take care of the dog. I'm trying to get along and show how I'm flexible and compassionate. It's a new relationship.
"I will get you a new one, I promise," I yelled as Jo sobbed great big tears over the trashed calendar.
Total fucking chaos.
An hour ago, on the ride home from school, my son threw up. One minute, he’s listening to the Bee Gee's high pitch Night Fever (disco is making a come back) while at the same time talking non-stop about a kid at school who keeps pushing him to fight.
Every single day it's the same thing, this kid can't seem to keep his damn hands to himself and the nuns at this school just don’t think the situation requires an intervention. Over and over again they say it's just “boys being boys.”
All of a sudden, conversation stopped and Spence got a strange look on his face.
“I feel sick, Mom,” he said.
I slapped at the automatic buttons on the door and got the window down just in time for Spencer to get his head out.
Jo screamed in that way she has, like a cat tossed into the tub.
“GROSS!” she added at the end of her long, tormented wail.
I pulled over, told her to please be quiet and went around and helped Spencer out of the car.
In the pouring rain, rush hour traffic weaving to get around us, Spencer heaved up a bunch of orange strangeness on a side yard of lava rocks. Orange on orange.
“What the heck did you eat, Sweets?” I asked, as if it mattered.
“Carrots,” Spencer said.
“Carrots?”
“I hated what they had for lunch so I just ate carrots from the salad cart,” he said, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth.
“On top of everything else I hate about that school, the lunch sucks!”
Spencer grabbed his belly and bent over. I rubbed circles on his back and looked up at the sky.
Winter rain soaked us both, top down but what I could I do? I had to wait.
I wiped at my glasses with one hand while my son let go another round.
From where she sat in the back of the car, Jo looked like a fish—great big eyes taking in everything.
Spencer was a student at a place called the Montessori Earth School, a tiny hamlet of a place run by a handful of Franciscan nuns who seemed to have the best intentions but the worst possible execution.
This year Spencer was being threatened, bullied and taunted by the one boy and then a another group of boys threatened to set him on fire. The plan was to douse him with lighter fluid and then set him aflame with one tossed match.
It's a mother's worst nightmare.
Spencer got the tip off from a pal in Lego-tectronics only the woman in charge of the program insisted the threat could not be proven. She claimed the whole “fire threat” had been manufactured by the Lego pal, who was under some kind of special psychiatric care.
After several emergency meetings, where I went from being an investigative reporter attempting to get the facts straight to a crazed mother on the brink of total fit, I found myself immobilized by confusion. What to do? Who to believe? What decision should I make?
The latest development, just this week, was how a troubled kid brought two guns to school—air guns—and of course, it was Spencer who flushed the guns out and turned the kid in.
The woman in charge of the program told me, “Spencer isn’t going to be very popular if he looks in cubbies that belong to other children.”
“I think we are missing the point,” I argued, maintaining a thin grip on my patience. “What the heck is going on at your school? What are you going to do?”
“Well,” she said, “he will be suspended for a week but you know boys will be boys. It’s important to have compassion for this particular child, he’s been through a lot.”
She suggested I come in, again, so we could talk about it with the nuns.
Finally Spencer stopped throwing up and I got him back into the car.
“I’m tired, Mom,” he said.
“I’ll get you home and to bed,” I said.
“That’s good,” he said.
The rest of the drive was quiet, not even music and Spencer leaned against the side door. His eyes were closed.
Jo said nothing, not a word.
I got us all home, put Spencer in bed and that’s when Jo started screaming about her count-down-to-Christmas calendar. It was in shreds all over the dining room floor. Dakota was flopped on the living room rug. She thumped her big tail, happy we were home.
~
It rains hard enough to turn the road into a sheet of reflected headlights. It’s five p.m. and everyone wants to go home. People honk their horns, impatient. Traffic jam. Jo and me are stuck in the slow lane and I worry about Spencer, sick in bed.
I adjust the mirror to see my girl with the count-down-to-Christmas calendar on her lap.
“Whatcha thinking?” I ask.
“About Spencer,” she says.
“What about Spence?” I ask.
“He doesn’t do well with orange food,” she says, a quality of the definitive in her voice.
“What?”
“Don’t you remember?” she says. “The fish crackers and then the orange juice?”
I chew on my lip and think back.
Spencer has thrown up, several times, over the last few weeks but I hadn’t really connected the dots. When you have kids, it’s like being in a blender. Life seems to happen in a blur of action, action, action—one day melds into the next. From first thing in the morning to late at night there is just so much to do: homework, housework, food to make, shopping to take care of and the extras which include sick kids and old dogs and new boyfriends. Most days, I can’t keep it all straight but Jo’s paying attention. She’s sorting it out. 
As we continue to wait in the traffic and the rain, it hits me. I can pull off this busy street, take a back route and get us home without waiting another minute.
And, I can tell my boyfriend to take care of his own damn dog since I don’t really have the time.
And, I do not have to go to one more meeting where I’ll be told “boys will be boys."
I can pull my son out of that school.
I can make a change. I can make many changes. It’s up to me.
I'm in charge. It's my life.
I ease the car out of the slow lane, make a quick u-turn in the middle of the standstill traffic and tell Jo to “hold on tight.”
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Announcements
Thursday Night Transformative Writing Circle: Winter term begins December 2nd and I'm pulling together a waiting list. If you would like to join a vibrant group of women who are all working on their memoirs, let me know. It's a great group and a couple of spots are open--for reading and observation.
My dear friend, Hope Edelman has just had a wonderful essay published in The New York Times Modern Love column. Check it out. Hope's book, The Possibility of Everything is also out there, making the rounds in paper back. A great story of a mother and a child who seek healing. 
Found: The True Sequel to Blackbird is coming soon! The pages are being prepped into galley right now and blurbs are coming in from some of my favorite writers. It's a very exciting time. Please let me know about teaching in your town as I am building the tour schedule right now. If you would like me to come, read, teach and hang in your city for the Found tour, let me know!
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
The Writing Prompt
INSTRUCTION:
Make a list of your worst qualities. This should be pretty easy. The negative voice is the head is pretty damned pronounced in a lot of lucky folks. Try to keep it ten.
Make a list, next to each of these worst qualities, where you heard this first. Ie: from your mom, your dad, your husband, an uncle.
Now make a list of the qualities that are the exact opposite of those negative qualities. You do not have to believe you are those things. Just write them down and have them on the page—in order.
Once your lists are created, set them aside.
PROMPT QUESTIONS:
What does the world say about her (or him) and what does she believe? What does she say to herself and when did this begin? What is possible for her, if the world and the voice in the head would be silent?
WRITE & SUBMIT:
Begin each section of your essay with the lines that are the questions and do this in third person.
IE: The world tells her she is too fat, too loud, too, too young. The magazines say she is too poor and the newspapers say she is too brunette and the TV says she doesn’t have enough friends.
She tells herself she is too nervous, too bossy, too opinionated…
If the world and she would stop telling her what she isn’t, this is what she could be….
REMEMBER: On Saturday, I post a few writers. Please keep your essay length work to 500 words.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Fresh Writing: Three Things She Doesn't Know
From the new book Found:
She is wickedly smart.
She is hysterically funny.
She is fantastically gorgeous.
Not necessarily in that order.
And yes, there is even more—good things, every single one—but she won’t allow herself to consider herself in such grand terms. If she thinks of herself with any kind of praise, a feeling of itching anxiety sends her running to organize a drawer, fold laundry, wash the floor on her hands and knees, or clean out the refrigerator. As she fritters over these meaningless tasks of order, she fills her head—like a countermeasure—with all that’s flawed. You talk too loud, your rear end is too big, your nose—what a honker on your face, and you’re not really that smart, no, you’re just street smart. You’re scrappy.
The voice in her head is a combination of the voices she’s heard throughout her life: Richard, Peggy, Deb, Auntie Carol. And the voice is also unique. It is her own.
The voice is like a form of protection—a firm taskmaster that needs her to lay low. It tells her she will die if she brings attention to herself. The voice believes that to know her merits is dangerous. Such knowledge would put her one step away from becoming arrogant or prideful and both of these very human qualities would then lead to her standing out in the crowd. To be outstanding would bring attention, and to bring attention would make her a clear target. The voice tells her she is most safe when she is below the horizon line and behind the scenes. When she tidies up, helps without complaint, and follows the rules, all is well for her. Anything else, any large expression, is disaster.
This is how she makes it as Richard and Peggy’s daughter—Jenny Duemore.
On the surface.
But deep below the surface of herself, there lives another truth. It is a seed, awaiting the mysterious conditions necessary for a new self to emerge. One day, those conditions will exist and the voice in her head will stop ordering her to drop down low and she will rise from her hiding place, scramble over the edge, and stand to her full and glorious height. She will dust the dirt of the past off her shoulders and legs and then, she will take flight. A phoenix rising won’t be her metaphor. Such a suggestion will be too puny and passé.
She will be without a name, an awe-inspiring sight, and will rise as bright as the sun. Right away, in one blink, she will merge into that light.
Most won’t see the ascension of the small human who once lay so low. When people finally look, trying to see this magnificent sight, she will be no more than a speck in the forever blue sky.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Inspiration
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
From A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles", Harper Collins, 1992
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Reader Writing
I have heard, via the grapevine of email, that you are out there writing and re-writing and tapping away.
But no writers have turned in any writing this week. Just write. It's all I can say. Write. 
As for me, I have traveled this week to a retreat in California which is being held by an organization known as Concerned United Birthparents.
Their web site is not the most retro and their promotions are a bit antiquated but WOW! What a conference. More than half the people here are adoptees in some stage of reunion (like me). I feel as if I have arrived at a source of important healing. I am blessed to be here and the experience is edifying.
More to come. Until then...WRITE!!!
Friday, October 15, 2010
Announcements: New Cover
Check out the new cover for FOUND.
The background art is by Blair Tyler Peters and is titled Once upon a time there was a little girl! Amazing. Love Blair and adore Seal Press for taking such pains to make a evocative and beautiful cover.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Writing Tip: Creating Your Writing Habit
& stick to it.
Joyce Carole Oats says she prefers to write in the morning, before breakfast. She’s a creative writing professor, and on the days she teaches, she says she writes for an hour or 45 minutes before leaving for her first class. On other days, when the writing is going well, she can work for hours without a break — and has breakfast at 2 or 3 in the afternoon!
Write when you write well. Make a habit of it, everyday. Make no excuses (rather, use that time of complaint to write).
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
The Writing Prompt: Book-ending
This week we're messing with beat and verse and just having fun. We're also looking at a little term called book-ending. I'm not sure where this came from but I've picked it up along the way and it's just repeating the first line at the end. Book-ending. See?
The two poems from yesterday are my experiments. Sometimes, I will watch a movie or just get an idea and what I want to say initially falls out in this form-poetry. But it's really more of a sketch of something that is coming down the line, perhaps a larger body of work.
I watched the documentary last night,The Business of Being Born and it inspired the poem, Reclamation. This writing is my own sketch of reaction to the situation of birthing in this country as well as the disempowerment of women and children who are separated from each other due to social stigmas and economics.
And of course, the first poem - on doing the math is about my own adoption.
If you look at both, you'll see that book-ending. Try it. Book-Ending is a great way to give your work polish and closes the loop, making it like a circle of thought.
INSTRUCTION:
Get out some paper and make a few lists. Once your lists are created, write a poem, a list or an essay. Just let the three lists weave together in a kind of connected flow.
PROMPT QUESTIONS:
1) Who are you?
What does your mother say about you? Your father? Your sisters, brothers, lovers. Make a list.
2) What about our world, gets you all steamed up?
Oil spills, politicians, gasoline powered cars, mean people, bumper stickers. Make a list.
3) If you had some advice, what would you suggest we do?
Listen more, talk less, walk more, cry more, hug more. Make a list.
WRITE & SUBMIT:
On Saturday, I post a few writers. Please keep your essay length work to 500 words.
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Monday, October 11, 2010
New Writing: Messing with Form
The Turn Around
I am not
a problem
to solve. 
I am not math.
I am not dust
to sweep
under and away.
I am not an embarrassment.
I am the one who remembers
her mother's voice
from inside the upside down of her womb.
I am the one who remembers
her mother's name and
the stories her mother read.
I am the one
who remembers
even before I was born.
I am a miracle.
A testimony.
A blessing.
Not a curse.
Not dust.
Not math.
I am not a problem.
I am the solution.
Reclamation
Take your body back
from The Man,
from The Doctor,
from The Magazine
from The Minister.
You are a woman
empowered with that womb
deep in your mammal skin.
Every human on this planet comes from that powerful place.
Bliss exists in your body.
You will remember
when unleash
your fear
and listen in.
Listen in.
Take no more abuse
to your feminine form.
Take your body back.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Inspiration: Present Tense?
Saturday, October 09, 2010
Reader Writing
A reader writes:
I am on a roadtrip heading to California. I am in Hawaii, and Maine and in a new house. I am everywhere and nowhere, and I am not here. I am far out in future, launched like a stone from the strap of a slingshot. I will land eventually, but that place of rest feels left to chance. I am stuck in internal struggle and a realization that the answers don’t live in a place of logic. Answers pulse thick and steady through these veins, like a stream off frozen mountains in late spring. And they sit there pooled in my gut. The real question, perhaps, is where am I not?
Tomorrow I am going to work. And after that, I am going to school for 7 hours to teach. And after that, I will come back home to this house that is all undone. I thought I was moving to a big new house in an upscale neighborhood. For a minute I forgot who i was. But now I am not going anywhere. And I need to gather up all my things, bring them back home where they belong. When I thought I was moving from here, I took down all the art, and patched nailholes and touched up paint. And when that was done, and the walls fresh and bare, I was relieved. But now that I am turning back, coming back, those blank walls stare me down and sink a heavy lonliness somewhere deep inside. I think, I think, art on the walls again will fix that.
For the past 15 months I have worked, days and weeks on end. This other house, in the upscale neighborhood, a shot at some possibility of getting ahead. It was never meant to be my home, but rather a project with a clear beginning, middle and end. The end being the for sale sign in the front yard, and someone else signing on all those dotted lines. But there was another end before that end, and the idea that I could own that home. And I got excited and agreed, and then I got scared and wanted to change my mind. And i waited and waited to feel differently about it, hanging art on those blank walls, carefully, with nails like straight pins, trying not to hurt the new smooth drywall surfaces. I arranged the pots and pans in the low cupboards, filled deep drawers with tupperware and mixing bowls. I put food in the pantry, hung hooks in the entryways. I spent days and too much money on fancy curtain rods, using a level to hang them all perfectly straight and right. I built out the master closet with more shelves and rods and drawers than I have clothes for. Numbers hang above the new mailbox that locks, waitng for the future bills that will come now in someone elses name. I know I am tired of this process and this thought loops through my mind, I just want my life back, I just want my life back.
It is ironic to think that my students are my teachers. I taught a class last wednesday, and students spent most of it working on an assignment. One student was utterly frustrated and on the verge of tears for most of the class. I found myself watching her, like birds watch nests. I kept making the rounds, noting progress, or offering suggestions. And each time I ended up back in the corner where she was, I asked how she was doing. And each time was the same, and her eyes filled with tears and her face got red. And I knew she wanted to give up. I leaned over and looked her in the eyes, and I let her tell me she was frustrated. And I just said don’t give up, and that I would help her. Class ended and she made a point of coming to thank me for helping her. Isn’t it all any of us really need, is to know we aren’t alone, and that someone is listening?
I admit my life shoots past me, and that sometimes I feel like an outsider. What keeps me upright and on a path, what feeds that part of me that bears lightness, is being a part of this greater whole. It’s being awake enough to seize opportunities to help other people or animals. Or opening up enough to let nature in. I love spring, when the robins come back, and the sound they make at daybreak. Or dusk, when they are belting out the last song of the day, searching for a perfect mate. Once I saw a baby hawk in my tree outside the window. And today I watched a squirrel on the fence, enjoying a fresh green walnut off the neighbor tree. I have been in this house long enough to know that the leaves on the maple tree out front will turn yellow and orange and then dark red. And if I’m not paying attention, rain and wind will strip twigs and branches bare for winter. And I will have missed the show.
I have lived long enough to know that life is a steady coming in and going out, giving and receiving, losing and finding. If I can get into that rhythm, in the knowing for certain that nothing stays the same, if I can surrender the resistance, I am less likely to suffer. Stronger than the sense of what am I giving up, is how do I get back what I had? What happened to my voice, my ability to reason and problem solve, my confidence and decision making? It’s like I packed it all up in a big box for the move, and now I can’t seem to find it. Yet I know it’s here somewhere.
I want to write about my neighbor and the dog bones, and the way passionflower vine grows to cover the ugly old metal and wire fence. I want to write about the strange and beautiful pink cluster lilies that are blooming now in early october on the north side of the house. I want to write about the soup I made today, and how it filled this half made home with a much needed sense of love and nurturing. I want to write about anything but darkness and dangers, because I spend enough time there. We humans are quick to label experience, with good or bad or tragic or joyful, a label that sums things up. What I know is that there is goodness and gifts in some of the darkest places, and that lightness also bears suffering.
My immediate desire is to simply have my life back in order, and for that to be enough. I feel like a dog, and that there’s a dried bone from a box for me, if I just do the trick. C’mon girl, speak your truth.
angie martorana
Friday, October 08, 2010
Annoucments:
Coming this Spring: Found: A Memoir releases March 2011! It is such a thrill to be working with Seal Press and the cover is now being designed. This image, from a wonderous painter, Blair Tyler Peters, will be the cover! Isnt' that cool? I love Blair's work. It's haunting and emotional. She's a lovely person too. Soon, I will be posting the Countdown to Publication announcements. Keep an eye on this site for more information.
Two observation spots remain open at the Thursday Night Transformative Writing Circle in Portland, Or. If you are interested in sitting, let me know via this site and I'll get you details.
Calling Memoir Writers to the table! If you are interested in learning the craft of memoir writing, winter term begins December 2nd and lasts through February. Contact me for more information and how to sign up! 
Come to Wordstock this Sunday at 11:00 a.m. at the Oregon Convention Center. I'll be at the OEA Stage for a special presentation of young writers in the Literary Arts Writing in the Schools Program. Introduce yourself, say hello, get a book!
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Thursday, October 07, 2010
Writing Tip: Ask
This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity.
~ Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Book Talk: The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
The Bird Artist finds its setting in Newfoundland of 1911. The village where the story takes place is named Witless Bay. Witless means “lacking in common sense” which in large part gives an idea of the narrator, Fabian Vas, as well as his family, the townsfolk and even the events that transpire in the story. The reader is told right off that this is one tale that lacks wit—or common sense. And it’s true.
Fabian Vas is an artist who sketches wild birds. He is the only son of Alaric and Orkney Vas, who have arranged a marriage for Fabian to a distant cousin. Fabian is already involved with an islander named Margaret but his parents do not want him to marry her. The mother, Alaric just doesn’t like Margaret and the father, Orkney, doesn’t want Fabian to marry someone he grew up with (as he did with Alaric) which is actually a testimony to the troubles in the marriage. Being a bit dim-wittted and loyal to his parents, Fabian goes along with the arranged marriage.
When Fabians father leaves to raise money for the wedding, Alaric Vas begins a love affair with the lighthouse keeper Botho August. And upon return is informed of the goings on. In anger, Orkney asks why his son, Fabian, has not vindicated him. Fabian gets a gun (supplied by Margaret) and kills Botho.
Orkney, Alaric and Fabian flee Witless Bay and go to Halifax, in order to proceed with the arranged marriage. In the midst of this journey, Orkney disappears and just after being married to the unsuspecting Clara (the cousin), Fabian is arrested for murder.
Alaric and Fabian return to Witless Bay and go through a trail, where Fabian is acquitted for the murder, which is blamed on the missing Orkney. Alaric kills herself and in the end, Fabian marries Margaret and is left to reflect on who he is—which is what this book is—a wide open reflection of boy evolving into a man who is both things, an artist and a killer.
I think what makes this book take flight is Norman’s wondrous study of birds via the narrators work as a bird artist and by how he places birds throughout the story as shadows of the plot.
On the first point, the study of birds as a way to add depth, complexity and even a form of quiet wisdom to the narrator, is provided on the first page when the narrator tells us who he is—"I am a bird artist, and have more or less made a living at it." Norman's narrator continues: "I discovered my gift for drawing and painting birds early on. I should better say that my mother saw that someone had filled in the margins of my third-form primer with the sketches of winds, talons and heads of local birds. “I thought this primer was brand-new,” she said. “But its full of these bird drawings. Well, somebody has talent.” After a night’s sleep, she realized that the pencil work was mine and was what I had been concentrating on during my school lessons. Actually, she seemed quite pleased, and at breakfast the following morning said, “awfully nice to learn something so unmistakable about one’s offspring.”
Fabian works at his drawings until he becomes capable enough to be published and secure a mentor who lives off the island. In some ways, Fabians drawing of the birds is a way he goes from being witless to actually being wise. In this description he writes of sketching a rarely sighted bird called a garganey: …and I made my way down to some flat rocks near the water, where I sat watching the garganey for a few moments. Then, moving to a more comfortable rock hollowed out almost like a chair, I sat sketching the garganey for a good two hours. I drew him as he slept. I drew him as he lifted his head, preened, skitted across the surface. He mostly held to one place, though at a certain point he flew off, circled, then lit down on what I thought was the exact same spot, hard of course to determine on a sun-glinted sea. It was as though he has enacted his own dream of flying, then had returned to his body. He fed awhile scooping, shoveling, shaking his head, dipping, drifting, slowly turning with the random eddies. The sea brightened, the wind picked up, and there were whitecaps. I drew. Those were the elements: water, rocks, sun; the garganey, a migrant here for a short stay, whose life I had only happened upon because of that morning’s particular luck. Luck like no other I have ever had, or have had since.
Here, Norman shows us the heart of his narrator and simultaneous uses this bird—the rarely spotted garganey, to shadow the forth-coming marriage (which will last about thirty seconds).
He continues to use birds, in many forms, as a plot shadow. When Botho August (the murdered lover of Fabians mother) appears in the story Norman writes: Botho August had contributed a dozen roasted puffins, those clown faced birds the locals called sea parrots. There was a small population of them on the cliffs beneath the lighthouse…By that time I had earned a reputation in the village for painting and drawing birds…Botho turned a puffin over on its platter with a fork and said “Ever draw one of these, Fabian.”
“Not a dead one. I only draw from life. From the wild.”
Botho stared at me, a hostile squint, as though I had talked down to him.
Just after Orkney leaves to raise money for the arranged marriage, Botho is in the family home and Fabian immediately knows of his mother’s infidelity. He writes: I had to flee my own house, where suddenly I could not breathe the same air as Botho August. I did not know how to think of all this. I did not know how to think about anything, except that I discovered minute by minute. I stopped drawing. I sat there. The owl picked apart the mouse. It got totally dark in the barn.
We don’t have a dead bird but we have a bird pulling apart a tiny mouse.
Another Botho August appearance, accompanied by a disturbing bird appearance is at a funeral, where Botho shows up drunk and angry that he has not been invited to the wake. He trips over a table and comes up, grabs a breast of quail from a plate and calls over to Fabian—“ever draw one of these, Fabian?”
When the marriage is arranged and Orkney agrees to pay for it, he does so by going off to kill hundreds of wild birds—and act which, in itself, lets us know that the father is not honoring Fabian but rather doing what he thinks is best for his son. The writer doesn’t leave the reader hanging about Orkney’s though—but rather lets some dialogue show that the man is struggling with his own choices, even as he makes them. He writes: "It can’t please you, the particular fact that I’m off to kill birds,” he said. “A lot of birds, mostly puffins and suks...” “Anyway, about the birds, Fabian. I am going to shoot any number….I am saying this because I want you to hear that I know exactly what I am doing and why. It’s my choice, this way, to earn money. Your wedding is the beneficiary, but you don’t have to like that.”
At the end of this novel, when all of the story is wrung out and the plot has been unwound to its conclusion, the lessons of character continue to emerge via the study of birds. Fabian’s mentor comes to the island, to say goodbye to his student (as he is dying of cancer) and Fabian shows him a large mural he has been commissioned to paint by the local minister as kind of creative spiritual penance.
The mentor comments on Fabian’s work but is also talking about his character, as well as giving him instructions on how to live: “My best guess is that you’ll continue to contribute. You’ll place your ducks, sandpipers, crows perhaps and a few others in journals. For practicality’s sake, you might specialize in those.”
“You’ve got a knack. And while you may never wholly earn a living from bird art—difficult for anyone—your mergansers, teals, all of your ducks, and if you work at it, a garganey or two, may secure you some small reputation outside of Witless Bay. I’m sure, anyway, you’re highly valued at home.”
I’m intrigued by all the attention to the birds in this book, which is never subtle. We know from the beginning what we are getting into, after all the book is titled The Bird Artist but still, the use of the bird—the pure saturation in the winged creature—would initially present me with some worries. Would writing about birds—so many and so often—be like covering all the surfaces of your house with flowered wall paper? Would it be suffocating to the writer and the reader? I—tending towards more subtly and more focus on humans—wouldn’t consider such a complete bath in feathers. I would think that all the “bird” focus would distract from plot and take away meaning but in this book, it’s not true. Bird is theme—mirror—shadow—and messenger. But it is also just what it is, a silent mystery that can only be deeply observed but never quite understood. Like man? Like life?
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
The Writing Prompt
So with the previous post in mind, let's not make this complicated.
Sticking with the same prompt, for the hero journey, re-look at the prompt and try your work from a third person perspective.
INSTRUCTION: The basic story of the hero journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life.
PROMPT QUESTIONS:
1) Where am I?
2) Where am I going?
3) What’s my threshold?
4) Who are my teachers?
5) What tokens, images, mantras am I carrying to keep me on the path?
6) What am I giving up?
7) What am I finding?
8) Darkness and danger along the way? That’s where the gold is.
9) How am I going to return to normal life?
WRITE & SUBMIT: I'll publish someone on Saturday (should you have the courage to submit.
Monday, October 04, 2010
Fresh Writing: Hero II
Sometimes a piece of writing needs to be revised from a different perspective. With that in mind, I'd like to take a look at Hero from last week. I decided to shift it to the third person, as an experiment. This is a groovy way to broaden a body of work and shake it into a different direction.
Take a look:
Hero II 
She stands at the edge, where grass meets concrete. Dried canes of the wild blackberry bushes arc and tangle together to send shadows against a gray wood fence.
It’s hot out. Summer hot.
She wears a dark gray tank top and an orange and brown dotted skirt, which she made to save money only she has the kind of expensive taste that led her to buy the one fabric that was full price, one of those jersey designer prints that felt like water against her palm. Even though the price was high, she could not say no. The cloth became a little indulgence during a time of economic strife and to balance things out, she only made the one skirt and wore it all the time, nearly everyday.
It is the end of September, surprising Indian summer heat, and her beautiful skirt gets another day around her waist.
She carries an inflated plastic bag that holds two hundred medium sized crickets. She didn’t count the bugs to make sure but the guy who bagged them says he did. She trusts him.
Inside the bag, the little brown crickets with long tentacles and slippery legs cluster near the bottom and in wells of a section of gray cardboard egg crate. They move in one undulating motion of aliveness and vitality.
The crickets were raised to be lizard food. Before this moment, they lived inside a glass tank at the pet store.
You can get one hundred crickets for five bucks. Two hundred cost ten.
~
Her son forgot his exercise pants and P.E. is sixth period. If he doesn’t suit up, he gets a lower grade and this is upsetting for him. He wants to do well. He’s shooting for straight A’s.
She discovered the pants as she sorted the darks from the whites. As soon as she saw them under a t-shirt and did the math about his day, she tossed back her own plans to get into the office early.
She washed the pants, threw them in the dryer and while she waited, she thought about how she had just enough time to get the gold name sliders had been ordered a week ago and now waited to be picked up. The sliders, for her husband, would be affixed to his office doors. She would make sure to get that job done for him too, since, she told herself, he was a busy man–an important doctor—and she had the extra time even though that wasn’t true. Time was a premium in her life. She never had enough.
As the exercise pants tumbled dry, she rode her bike to the store to get the sliders and felt good about leaving her car at the curb. She was helping to save the planet from global warming.
Just then, she passed the pet store and thought about the crickets. She thought, "I have time, don’t I?"
~
By her own math, she had been alive for forty-six years, almost forty seven and nearly every day had eaten some kind of animal—chicken, oyster, cow, tuna, cod, salmon, pig. She never really thought a lot about eating animals until one day she did. Her spiritual teachers pointed out that eating an animal brought suffering to the world. Animals—with their own lives—had died for her. After listening to these elevated teachers, she thought: my body is made up animals who once were alive and now they are not. That is bad. I must do something before it's too late.
That's when she started to free crickets as a regular thing.
Another reason for crickets was to level out all the other life she had taken. Mostly spiders (all those legs and eyes and the way they ran around in a scurrying fright), spiders freaked her out.
She had just sucked a spider—Daddy Long Legged—into the vacuum cleaner the day before and a day before that she had squished a dozen others, teeny tiny baby spiders that had hatched under the table in the foyer. She didn’t stop to gather them together and get them outside, the way she knew she should but instead smashed them like some old instinct.
Instead of being a woman of compassion for all living things, she had been thinking about the hurry she was in as she worked to get the house clean and ready for a party. She worried about all the work to do and how there was no time. Those spiders became the casualty of her anxiety.
She had it figured, in her own mind, that she would need to free at least twenty two thousand crickets before she righted the scales on her bad karma. After the spider massacre of the last two days, she added that she would need to save twenty two thousand and thirteen.
~ 
A few days before the spider massacre, her husband turned fifty-one years old and on his birthday, he received a letter from his ex wife—a woman who ministers at a new age church downtown.
The ex sent her letter certified mail and addressed it to where he works. He opened it and read how their son—the one who doesn’t talk to him anymore—is doing just great. The ex was making a point about how their son didn’t need his father. And never did.
This is a sword the ex wife jabs over and over again and has been jabbing since their boy was old enough to walk.
The ex is pissed that her own father left when she was a little girl only she forgets that part of her own story and keeps taking her rage out on this gentle, quiet man who won’t defend himself.
~
When her husband, the doctor, gets upset, he becomes like a turtle in hibernation. His head sinks lower on his neck or maybe his neck contracts toward his spine. She’s not quite sure what happens but six foot four becomes six foot two and then he’s like a tired old man who has no neck at all. He slumps and hangs his head. His eyes are rimmed red and he weeps.
She saw him go into himself this way during the court proceedings when the ex-wife-minister sued for more money. She saw him slip away when the ex-wife-minister sent text messages calling him a piece of shit. And she saw him disappear after the ex-wife-minister sent the letter that read, “our son is doing just great.”
Her husband seemed to forget her name and where they lived and what they were doing together. He forgot plans made on the night of his birthday, dinner and a show, and he forgot how much work there was to prepare the house for his party. He slipped away and left it all to her and of course, she found the time to get it all done
~
Why does this woman in the home made skirt, holding a bag of crickets and sweating in the sun, try so very hard to be good and get everything right?
Why does she wash her son’s exercise pants in order to get them to school on time and save his grade? Why does she get the sliders for her husband’s office door and make sure to hang them in place? Why does she clean up the house, kill the scramble of spiders, plan parties and nights out and worry after her husband who keeps getting beat up by the mean ass ex-wife-minister? Why does this woman feel so bad about eating meat and global warming and spending too much money on a swatch of fabric to cover herself?
Isn’t this women the one who was given up by her own mother on the day she was born? Isn’t this woman the one who was adopted by a family where all the people died, leaving her nearly homeless by the age of ten? Isn’t this the woman who was dumped on the streets, beaten by people three times her size and raped again and again?
Why does this woman forget that she is the one who educated herself and made some kind of decent life from nothing but the dirt under her own nails and whose every breath is like a miracle?
How much more of her time will pass before she realizes she in enough and that nothing is more precious than her own singular state of calm?
~
There is only enough oxygen for the crickets to live for about thirty minutes.
She lifts her soft skirt with one hand and steps into the ragged remains of the blackberry bushes. Over her shoulder is her purse stuffed full with the sliders for the office door and the clean exercise pants, still warm from the dryer.
With careful steps, she gets over to a corner were there are layers of dead and rotting leaves. As she goes, she loosens the rubber band around the top of the bag and the crickets begin to move as if they know.
Sweat rolls down her neck and between her shoulder blades. The school bell rings.
In one quick move, she turns the bag over and the bugs pour out like fluid. They land on the leaves in a cluster and are quick to flee in a small circle that gets wider and wider.
Careful not to step on the newly free, she gets back to the sidewalk again and makes sure the bag is empty. Behind her, the crickets run, scurry and then merge into leaves and bushes and shadows.
Yes, they might become bird food.
Yes, an inquisitive child, who likes to pull the legs off living things, might catch a few.
Yes, they might succumb to starvation or heat stroke or countless other disasters. 
It’s all possible but what matters to her is that they are not lizard food today. The crickets are free like she so wants to be but unlike the crickets, with their instinctual sense of flight, she remains caught in her own thoughts of not being quite enough for this world.
As she walks away from the edge of the sidewalk and makes her way to the school, she is already lost in calculation of what comes next. She figures she has freed about three thousand crickets in rituals like this one, which means she has about nineteen thousand crickets left to save. But what needs to happen now is the pants and then the sliders and then maybe she'll have time to work.
Sunday, October 03, 2010
Inspiration: Go Deeper Than Love
Go deeper than love,
for the soul has greater depths,
love is like the grass,
but the heart is deep wild rock
molten, yet dense and permanent.
Go down to your deep old heart,
and lose sight of yourself.
And lose sight of me,
the me whom you turbulently loved.
Let us lose sight of ourselves,
and break the mirrors.
For the fierce curve of our lives
is moving again to the depths
out of sight, in the deep living heart.
- D.H. Lawrence
Saturday, October 02, 2010
Readers Write
This weeks Writing Prompt prompted two shared essays! Thank you, ladies. Give comments readers.
A Journey, of sorts by Melissa
I squirm; it burns down there, hot and prickly and sore. I am sitting in the scratchy black chair in the living room, in the room where my baby brother gets changed, where I have been told to stay. My skinny white legs that get browner near my knees stick out from one of his diapers. It’s small, so small that my skin is wrinkled underneath the clear tape sticking to it, barely holding the edges together. I burn on the inside, too, right at the softest place of my belly, feeling just like the end of mommy's cigarettes when she takes a drag. Bright, hot, glowing.
Someone speaks close to my ear but far away, too. I freeze, like on National Geographic on TV on Saturdays when the animals in the grassy parts of Africa lie still and staring before the lions and tigers kill them. Maybe, I think, quiet stillness makes dying hurt less. I look through the curtain of my hair, but no one is here, even when I feel brave enough to look up and turn my head.
It is one of the inside voices.
I feel the empty spot in my body where I shattered like a mirror hit by a baseball. Each shard is a tiny reflector of pain, of a small, bearable piece of it. I am just one piece. I am the confused one, the one who stays at the end, the one who can say it is over, for now. I am the girl who gets left alone. I am the girl who wakes up with the sickened gut feeling something is horribly wrong.
I try to hold all of us together. I chase them. "Where are you? Where are you going? What happened?" They do not turn around. I can’t hear their words, but I know what they mean anyway. Some make fun of me. Some rock me and sing. Some yell at me. Some shape me into a cup to hold the hurt and teach me not to spill, no matter how much I shake.
But all fade. And I do, too.
Contemplation by Cheryl
I am sitting in my meditation garden. To my right sits my home. Inside the window are the chair and table where my practice of writing 300+ words per day has occurred since July 2. I plan to write 108,000 words and then see what’s next. The sun has just risen but once again today the clouds overwhelm it’s glow. Yet I am sitting in love. The journey from July 2 to September 29 has been, as they say, all over the map. At least the map of my mind, my heart, my emotional self, and my daily experience of living. Today in yoga one of my Jennifers gently prodded me with her endearing smile and gentle voice to respond to her writing prompts and so I am. And so I am. Am here, alive, in this garden, with this view, this place I have envisioned and longed for over many years, and created one weekend through my own sweat with only materials already at hand. Everything in this garden was either found or given to me. Paving stones long buried under other areas of the yard now grown in, smaller stones gleaned from years of collecting those that jumped up into my hands during beach walks, wildflowers from here and abroad sprinkled late in the season yet rising to the occasion. My work creating a circle of loving kindness in which to sit and feel, my small space in the world that feels like those little forts from childhood. My space.
In 90 minutes I am going to meet a friend for lunch, someone I don’t know well in the cultural sense, but know very well in the heart. I am going also into a phase of my life that is living from what truly feeds my heart and soul. Nancy is a curiosity to me being what I term a ‘fancy friend’, one whose outward appearance of being perfectly, stylish put together belies her inner warmth, humor, and struggles. She reminds me that we are all searching for friendship and love. I will wear jeans and my new heels with ruffles, very girly for me, with my favorite purple cowl neck sweater, my only every Saks purchase that I pull out when I want to feel Saksy. Oh, that was bad, but kind of funny, and unintentional! I love it when I write something that creates it’s own double meaning. Nancy is in two of the Pilates classes I teach and has been for years. One day she was the only person in the mat class so we stretched our bodies and talked about deeply personal matters of live and death, and bonded over secrets. So she is indeed one of my many soul sisters on this journey of living.
Mid afternoon will arrive. The time when I start wanting to escape, when the evening looms long and I don’t know how I’ll make it through without unraveling. I dread the evening as much as I anticipate the coming of the day. Morning is my time, those early morning hours just before the world turns over and lights begin to pop on behind closed blinds, the quite time. I don’t want this time to end, and wonder how I could make a living meditating, contemplating in the early hours. Today as I sit, I contemplate missing my nephews and later receive a call from my brother who must have picked up my radio waves. He is suffering in a terrible marriage but his boys are strong of heart and they will survive. I love them dearly.
The daily process of living, observing the light shimmer on white birch bark, the gentle tinkling of the wind chimes someone dear gave me years ago which keep him present every day, colorful artifacts of artistic endeavors with my now grown kids, the heart shaped rosebud leaves now yellow and beginning to float from their branches, daily visits from our hummingbird family (each one affectionately named “Hummy). These are treasures, teachers. I could probably be content watching the light move across the bamboo fence all day and yet am compelled to do something with my life. Truly, though, does it matter what? Will it matter in 50 years what I did today? What will matter more than witnessing in quiet awe the moving of the light?
Sticks and stones, often shaped as hearts, surround me in my home and yard. Coyote and the Rabbit walk beside me as totems and guides. I am most moved when sitting still, yet tend to scramble and hurry when in activity as though I’m out of time. Always trying to catch up. What would be a life led through contemplation and meditation? How might I move if moved by being present in the moment versus getting things done? Feeling that if I truly surrender and open to what I know I need and want I will disappear, become completely unraveled, and fall apart. I have felt this before.
I fear that my life will be taken from me, obsess over taking back my life. Walking in the dark to yoga is emotionally akin to doing a five day fasting vision quest in the forest. I fear creatures creeping out of the shadows wanting what is mine, what is me. Sitting in my garden at night, will the possums and rats come to nibble on my fingers? Yesterday I startled from meditation to the brushing of a tabby cat’s whiskers. She must have wondered if I was a statue. Is there a danger that as I sit blissfully entranced a passing crack addict will axe me? I fear losing everything, guard my small bank account from my husband who thinks what is mine is ours, worry that the day will arrive when I can no longer live in my home, wonder how I will ensure that does not happen. Dangling on the edge of reality at times. As I sit in love, aware of the paradox entailed in being human where one wears a shroud of darkness and of light. People around me seem to life a normal life. I feel left out of that.
Yet what is a normal life? I don’t even know what this question means to means. Normal life, or my idea of it, ended when my first Jennifer was taken from my arms on December 17, 1971. There is no such thing as ‘normal life’ for me. It’s all a question of how to quell my pounding, scared heart and avoid unraveling, falling to pieces, being blown apart. I need time, people who need me now, community, spiritual practice, god, Self. I need a bike ride to meet my son for a beer and conversation, my son whose birth allowed me to know with every cell that mother-child is real. He is real, and he is here, a touchstone. I need touchstones, heart shaped, soft, safe, sunlit touchstones with which to guide my journey because even with all this internal fear, I do find myself sitting in love. I need my daughter. Cool water. And time.
Friday, October 01, 2010
Announcements: New Video Promo
Help spread the word!