Not Just Waiting Around For It

Enough of dark and cold!

Oh, where to begin? A random plunge? 

 

Above is the title (perhaps no longer appropriate?) that I used for a first draft, now discarded—lengthy paragraphs that wound on and on, giving excessive background on my experience with unsought joy, revisiting at length past days of happiness (back in “the old Vienna,” as the Artist loved to say) before arriving, at last, to the place where I find myself now, where being open to the possibility of joy and ready to welcome it when it comes is not enough. In the present place intention is required. I need to seek joy out with the expectation of finding it.

Sunrise again -- that's better!

That, briefly, was the theme I had in mind, but my intention took a beating, even after having been written down and gone over repeatedly, pen retracing the words over and over, the words spoken aloud, visualization effected—the whole nine yards. All that, and yet joy eluded me. Irritability, not joy, was my companion. Rats!

 

Have you ever had meditation go sour on you? My intention session itself was fine, but joy did not (shall we say) manifest. And irritability is not much of a muse! No one wants to hear about it! We don’t need that from each other, do we? So I held off posting anything new here—especially after a comment from one reader about how he came to Books in Northport for “positivity”!

 

What brought on the bad mood? A combination of factors. For me personally, this is a difficult month, with a string of three-year-old milestones lying in wait on the calendar, but there is also the dark, dark cloud hanging over our country and the world, a cloud impossible to dispel and very difficult to put out of mind for long. 

 

Then, too, I was in the midst of a reading slump! Whether that was cause or effect of the mood, I cannot tell. I only know that Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, after an evening spent with it, struck me as silly and pointless and that I subsequently abandoned Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall halfway through, after the introduction had filled me with eagerness for the story. Eschewing literature after two or three impatient nights, I spent a couple of evenings with one of Lillian Braun Jackson’s Cat-Who mysteries and a big bag of potato chips, wallowing in escape reading and junk food.

 

(It really wasn't much of a party.)

My next reading choice, The Personal Librarian, was a relief and a step up. Authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray kept me turning pages in their engrossing work of historical fiction, and I have now ordered a biography of Belle da Costa Greene to see how known facts of her life stack up against the fiction. As J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Greene occupied a unique position in the world of art and book auctions of the period, her uniqueness taking on added poignancy 49 years after her death, when it was discovered that her birth certificate identified her as “colored.” It’s that secret identity that drives The Personal Librarian, certainly a fascinating aspect of the woman’s life, but I would like to know much more about how she learned about rare books and am hoping the biography will tell me that.

 

What really turned the tide of my mood, however, was the novel Black Cake, by Charmaine Wilkerson, a spellbinding story of a complicated family with complicated secrets, all connected by a recipe from “the island” that was their ancestral home. It was a book that carried me away and, finally, lifted me up. Awake half the night over its pages, only turning out the light after the book repeated fell from my hands as sleep overtook me, I had a happy reason to wake up in the morning: I had that book to finish! 

Have you ever had that feeling in the morning? Remembering as you came awake that an irresistible book was right there waiting for you? (So much better than only waking once again to the continuing nightmare of the current American political scene!) Now I see that Charmaine Wilkerson has published another novel, Good Dirt, and I am eager to get my hands on that, confident I will not be disappointed. 

Most highly recommended!

Switching gears for a moment: Meanwhile, when was the last time Sunny Juliet and I went to the dog park? When did poor Sunny last see anyone other than her dog mom? We’ve been alone too long!

This is her impatient face, between barks. Sigh!

What with bitter cold weather and then five days without our plow guy, it was a siege of togetherness, but I remedied that sorry situation for my girl on Sunday (though I rarely get photos at the dog park and didn’t on Sunday). On the way back through the village, I stopped at my bookshop only intending to snap one photo for my other blog, but then a family appeared, outside, gazing wistfully through the windows. I went to the door. “Would you like to come in?” They would! We visited, talked dogs, and they bought books—altogether a perfect encounter!

 

Back to reading: I’ll mention one more book here today. I’d ordered two copies of it, apparently, and then for the life of me could not remember why. The title, Faith, Hope and Carnage, seemed to threaten politics, but the content was actually a lengthy interview with an Australian musician whose work was entirely unknown to me, Nick Cave. (I know, I know—I’m totally out of it!) In an attempt to refresh my memory, I opened the book.

Not knowing what to expect, I am drawn in.

Even knowing nothing of songwriter-performer Cave’s work, I was taken by the way he talked about his creative process. Improvisation with collaborator Warren Ellis, he is quick to point out, is a lot more and something completely other than “winging it” (the interviewer’s suggestion).

 

No, that’s really not the case. We weren’t just two guys who don’t know what they’re doing. There’s a deep intuitive understanding between the two of us and, of course, twenty-five years of us working together. It’s an informed improvisation, a mindful improvisation. 

 

This theme of experienced, mindful improvisation comes up again. 

 

…[For] magical thing to happen, there has to be certain things in place. It can’t just be a couple of guys who don’t know what they’re doing, sitting around bashing shit out.

 

Cave’s seriousness about his music came clearly through his articulate statements, and without knowing anything of his music I was fascinated, but that wasn’t all. In the interview, he also talks a lot about God, about faith and doubt.

 

…[O]ne way I try [to find deliverance from suffering] is to try to lead a life that has moral and religious value, and to try to look at other people, all people, as if they are valuable. … I guess what I am saying is—we mean something. Our actions mean something. We are of value.

 

I thought of a friend of mine and a book she and her late husband worked on for years. She will recognize their work’s conclusions in Cave’s words, I know. 

 

And still there was more. This famous person completely outside my ken had, it seems, lost two of his four sons to death, losses that greatly informed both his music and his religious beliefs, and he has given a lot of consideration to grief and how it changes us—one of the major themes of my own life for the past three years, as you know. He speaks of the physicality of grief as “a kind of annihilation of the self—an interior screaming.” But he also speculates that “perhaps God is the trauma itself,” words that need a little more explanation: 

 

That perhaps grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things.

 

He speaks of grief as “transformative,” in which we may be “essentially altered or remade.” Another friend will perhaps be reminded by these words of our conversation on Sunday evening.

 

More of the book remains for me to read than what I have read so far, but I will definitely continue with it, as the themes resonate perfectly with this month of milestone days in my life—my husband’s hospitalizations, surgeries, his birthday, our last days together, and his death. 

 

Perhaps searing memories and my current reading of creativity and God and faith and grief in words from a musician who has had no part whatsoever in my listening life will not strike any of you as the joy my carefully worded intention sought to manifest, but it is what has come, and I am welcoming it. Taking it in. Seeing where it will take me in my improvised life during this last week of February as temperatures rise into the 30s, bringing rain to erode our mountains of plowed-up snow.

How long will this mountain last?

Where will the next weeks take me?

Being Here Is More Than a Vacation

Earlier this winter, when I announced here in “Books on Northport” that David and I would be taking a sabbatical, one of my readers (and you know who you are, BB!) asked about the difference between a vacation and a sabbatical. Actually, before he raised the issue he’d done a little homework and looked up a definition of sabbatical. Basically, a sabbatical involves some kind of professional creative work and time to “recharge the batteries,” often in a setting away from home. The away-from-setting may be chosen for its research possibilities, but that’s not always a necessary consideration.

But wait – isn’t an ordinary vacation supposed to “recharge the batteries,” too?

In the academic world, faculty members long for time to do what each calls “my own work.” Teaching, of course, is the primary job of most college and university professors, but they are also expected to (and usually want very much to) produce their original work – scientific research, creative writing, works of art, inventions, or whatever – and that can be hard to do simultaneously with the demands of preparing classes, teaching, grading, and advising students. Hence the sabbatical.

In our regular Michigan lives, I have a bookstore, which in summer is open seven days a week. The schedule isn’t quite as rigorous the rest of the year, but business is still a constant presence in my head, the first thing there when I wake up each morning.

David is not quite so tied to his gallery -- since the bookstore is right next door, he can come and go more freely, knowing I’ll keep an eye on things -- but he, too, although he produces more painting in his gallery than I get writing done in my bookstore, feels the pressure of business concerns on a daily basis. And naturally our days off are consumed with personal, household, and business errands.

Four years ago, down in Aripeka, Florida, I wrote ten short stories, and David made between 20 and 30 new paintings. It was an extremely productive winter for both of us. But that was four years ago, and while he has been productive since then, I have felt stagnant. So when the opportunity came along to rent this little cabin in southeast Arizona, even before we left Michigan my mind started recharging! I began a novel. I looked back at an unfinished short story. And then we started driving across the country....

my corner

Now here we are. I have finished the short story, and I written eleven chapters of the novel. It feels good.

David is having second thoughts about writing he’d planned to do and isn’t pushing himself to write, but that’s all right. He bought some new brushes and has the beginning of some new work underway, both drawing and painting. I’ve not been as diligent at my drawing as I’d anticipated but am not pushing myself in that direction. Getting as much writing done as I have been is the main thing; for me, drawing is meditation, not “my own work.”

The vastness of the Western landscape had us both overwhelmed for the first few weeks. It is so BIG! The effect gained by being here depends on being surrounded by the desert and mountains. But just being here, driving around and looking, sitting and looking, soaking it in, looking, looking, looking – all that is energizing, all of it refilling the wells of creativity.

It’s that kind of recharging, I realize – not electric, as with an engine or batteries, but more profound, as with an aquifer.

We’re reading a lot. David was thoroughly absorbed in Huffington’s biography of Picasso and read every word of it hungrily. He and I both read a fabulous book on coyotes and are now sharing a book on horses and racing by Jane Smiley. If you want to know what else I’ve read since our arrival, just look over at my “Books Read 2015” list, but my point is this: We read and discuss; we look at everything and talk about what we see; we pay a lot of attention to cloud formations, as if we are children again, lying on our backs in the summer grass. My short story was set in Scotland, and my novel is set in Michigan. Some of David’s drawing is figurative, nothing to do with landscape at all. That doesn’t matter. We’re working, and it feels good.

MANY books added since this photo taken!

Having a home base is important. During the day we are free to go out exploring, and then we come home to the cabin every night -- nesting, building our sabbatical libraries, and organizing and reorganizing our work spaces, secure in the knowledge that we have weeks in which to spread out and concentrate on work that is very personal to us and involves no one other than ourselves. 

Not everyone has the luxury of taking months away from work. I realize that. At the same time, since neither of us has a regular job or a position with benefits, we cannot look forward to ordinary retirement, either. Instead of the retirement other people have, we have this -- unpaid sabbatical time we have arranged to give ourselves and each other.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Non, je ne regrettes rien.

How Much Time Do I Have?

“How do you find the time to keep up a blog?” one friend inquires. Another asks, “Where do you find time to make jelly? To draw? To read so many books?” I answer, seriously, that I make the time by not doing housework, and that’s pretty true most of the time. Of course, with that kind of management plan—if I can call it such--when David and I have company coming, we both rush around in a frenzy, trying to make up for “lost time,” i.e., time we’ve “lost” by living in our creative moments as much as possible rather than attending to the daily maintenance tasks that would make our panicky bursts of housework unnecessary.

Other people live differently. Some find time for creativity by keeping themselves organized on a daily basis and keeping their lives orderly hour by hour. Better? Different. There is more than one way to live creatively. Is our way more stressful? Would we make life easier for ourselves if we were different? Well, the thing is, we’re not different kinds of people. We are who we are.

When I was in graduate school, my fellow students were shocked to learn that I typically went to bed at 8 or 9 p.m. and slept soundly while they were burning the midnight oil and grinding on into the early hours of the new (still dark) day. They, however, slept until noon! I started the semester by setting my alarm for 6 a.m., and as time went by, and I was tired earlier in the evening and went to bed sooner, I found myself waking and getting up and at my books at 5 o’clock, then 4, then 3 a.m. My fellow students and I were working the same number of hours—just different hours. Up at five o’clock this dark fall morning, I’ve got a load of laundry going while working on this new blog post. The quiet time before sunrise when the rest of the world (even Sarah) is still asleep feels delicious, as well as productive. And no, I don't set an alarm clock. Only did that when I was teaching.

I don’t know anyone on earth who has more or less than 24 hours a day to live, do you? Some of us have to make a living within the 24-hour timeframe, and “taking care of business” means fewer unstructured hours, but the richest person on earth still has only 24 a day and can’t buy more. And how many days does anyone have? No one ever knows.

...But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near...

- Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”

Another friend, whenever I see her, always apologizes for not reading my blog more often. I wish she would stop, because this is one of the many things I like about blogging: unlike telephone calls or e-mail or texting (I don’t do that last and had to restrain my typing fingers, the conservative linguistic little rascals: they wanted to put scare quotes around the word!), blogging is completely noninvasive. It doesn’t make demands. It’s just “out there,” to be visited if and when anyone cares to visit. You are not asked to hit a “like” button. There is no obligation at all.

On the other hand, as the Meg Ryan character said of her bookstore in the movie “You’ve Got Mail,” this blog is “personal,” a representation not only of my bookstore but also (because my bookstore is way more than a job) my life—my concerns, opinions, values, and how I choose to spend my time. It’s no secret that I make time for reading, and since I have a bookstore, now in its 20th year, my love and work regularly come together. Enough of my friends also love books that I hope they’re interested enough to drop in now and then to read about books I’ve found worthwhile. (And yes, my stories, too.) But whether you’re a regular follower or just dropped in today for the first time, whether you know my physical bookstore in Northport or live in a faraway country on the other side of the globe, thank you for visiting and reading! These mysterious, invisible encounters warm my heart.

“Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!” 

– Film: “Back to the Future”

The recommended book this week is My Grandfather’s Blessings. To learn a little bit more, follow this link. To pick up the book, page through it, and talk to me about it, stop by 106 Waukazoo Street.

What’s the Difference Between ‘Writers’ and ‘Bloggers’?

That could be phrased differently. I could load the question by making a distinction between bloggers and real writers, as was made in my presence once, on hearing which a couple of friends shot me alarmed looks. Would I rise to the bait? But I didn’t think it was bait and didn’t see myself as the speaker’s prey, and it didn’t seem the time or place to push the question.

On the other side are those who find ‘blogging’ itself a ridiculous and unnecessary term. “You’re not blogging,” one said to me. “You’re writing!” Well, I never denied that, but we make distinctions, after all, between poetry and prose, between journalism and drama, etc., etc., and certainly not all writing is blogging (whatever one thinks of all blogging), so clearly there is some kind of distinction to be made, and can't I be doing both at once sometimes?

But let's start over. Maybe I could come at the question from the other side by asking what defines a real writer. Is it –

• Someone who writes every day? (That’s pretty much what I do.) 
• Someone who writes for money? (Occasionally I write for money and would be happy to do so more often. Anyone want to write me a paycheck?)
• Someone who makes a living solely by writing? (Nope, not me.)
• Someone whose work is recognized by other professional writers? (And are they professional because they are paid for their writing, in which case either the second or third possibility would seem sufficient and this one unnecessary?)
• Someone who cannot cease and desist from writing, whether money or recognition ever follow? (Or is this merely a sign of mental illness?)
• Someone whose name appears in a cultural literary canon? (Who decides? And doesn’t it usually help to be dead?)
• Only a good writer? (Who decides? Is it a general popularity contest, or do we go by the critics? Or by awards? Or something else altogether?)
• Someone who puts himself or herself forward to others, publicly, as a writer? (I think there’s a lot to this, just as there is to being an actor or a musician or any other kind of creative artist, but is it necessary?) 

A couple of years ago someone who became a friend confided that she was “trying to write a novel.” I corrected her. She was writing a novel. She might not finish it, and if she did finish it might never be published, but she was, that year, writing a novel. Two years ago I spent a winter writing short stories, and when people asked, that’s what I told them I was doing, but I did not say, “I’m a writer.” David sometimes told people I was a writer--until I asked him to stop, because the next question would invariably be, “What have you published?” (Uh, a doctoral dissertation? No one cares.) And then would come, "What are you going to do with them?" So although I have been asked from time to time, “Are you a writer?” I don’t present myself that way to the world--except in my blogging profile, where I also call myself a gardener, but you can read my qualification of that term on the profile, also! No, I am a bookseller. Right now in my life, that is my central public identity.

But—coming back to my sheep--I do write this blog and have been doing so since the fall of 2007, and while I have never been paid a cent for writing it, I think my perseverance speaks to the seriousness of my commitment to the forum. I did not undertake blogging for monetary reward; does that make the effort something less than writing? If audience size is taken into account, my commitment may begin to look like madness indeed! But again, I don’t do it to win large numbers of readers. Does that make it less real? Or is it not real writing because I don’t have an editor or am not working on assignment? (How many fiction writers work on assignment?) You tell me.

Most of my life has been spent around creative people, and every single one of them has struggled with the relationship of work to money. For me, finally, the heart of the matter is to take pains with one’s chosen work to make it as expressive and as valuable as possible. If and when someone steps up and offers to pay for it, that can be taken as a kind of affirmation from the outside world, but if no patron or client materializes, if the work is never subsidized or purchased, its value has not been neutralized or negated. The value is intrinsic to the process.

In giving one’s time and care, one gives one’s life, and in this the meaning of one’s life resides. This is the stand I am taking.

As for my other, at least equally real writing—the nonblogging stuff, those short stories mentioned earlier--I may throw some more out into the blogosphere soon. A couple people liked the first Burger Shack story enough to ask for more. And why not? What do I have to lose?

Turning Pages Back to Childhood

All the foster homes before the Smiths’ were jumbled up in Larry’s mind. It didn’t make any difference. They had all been the same. Each time, he had tried to be good, to be obedient and helpful. Each time, he had hoped. Sooner or later, each time, Miss Carr [the social worker] had come for him. He had asked, each time, “Why? What have I done?” He had been too young to understand that there didn’t have to be a reason why. Not if you were a State kid, there didn’t have to be.

– Louise Dickinson Rich, Star Island Boy (1968)

Peggy’s cheeks grew even redder; they became like fire when she heard a snigger behind her. A minute later she felt a poke in the back, and quickly turned her head. A large and not particularly clean hand, with a bony wriest protruding from a worn brown sweater, was holding a folded slip of paper towards her. Puzzled, she accepted the note, opened it, and read “Dumb Swede” printed in bold capitals.

For a few seconds the room was a blur before her eyes. Then her heart stopped beating with the intensity of her rage and the blood flowed from her face. Never in her life had she felt such a white-hot tide of anger.

- Helen Dickson, Captain Peggy of the Mamie L (1943).

Was life simpler when we were children? Most of us didn’t have the responsibilities of adults when we were growing up. Some kids did, though. We probably didn’t have to make adult decisions every day, but some days, some kids did have to, and every one of us had a tough call to make once in a while. If the entire truth about childhood were told, we’d have to admit that, along with stretches of happy, carefree time, life for young people can be awfully confusing and, at times, terribly frightening. Still, what is the point of dwelling on pain, past, present or future, our own or other people’s? We can’t choose our nightmares, but we can choose our daydreams. When adults read children’s books, is it nostalgia for a simpler time of life or for some never-experienced “golden age”?

Every now and then (as reflected in my “Books Read” lists) I dip into a book intended for younger readers. Some are recent YA novels (and I should probably investigate more of those). Some are old favorites I love to re-read, but others are “new” to me, books perhaps written during my young years or even before, but that never fell into my hands until now. The last two old juvenile novels I read, by sheer coincidence, had a lot in common.

Star Island Boy, by Louise Dickinson Rich (also author of We Took to the Woods), is set on the Atlantic coast, while the story of Captain Peggy of the Mamie L., by Helen Dickson, takes place along the seacoast of the Pacific Northwest. Larry Scott, an orphan, is brought to Star Island as a foster child. It is not his first experience with foster parents, and his bruised heart is determined not to fall in love again with a family that can never, he is sure, be his for more than a short period of time. Peggy Norquist, by contrast, lives with her mother, father and little brother on a floating home that is moved from place to place with her father’s timber job, and at the very outset of the story Peggy seems confident and capable beyond her years. Her dream is to attend high school and be eligible then to train as a nurse. Larry, younger, is almost eleven and a half, and as the story begins he is not yet allowing himself to dream.

In the course of Star Island Boy, Larry is schooled in the ways of boats, currents, lobstering and community. Captain Peggy, already well versed in the handling of boats and the ways of currents and community, learns that human beings can be complex, neither all bad nor all good, and that getting along out in the larger world beyond her family requires patience. Boats, in fact, give independence and a feeling of competence to both these young characters. Both Peggy and Larry land in tight spots and are rescued by erstwhile “enemies,” which forces them to reassess their own earlier judgments, and both are told bluntly that no thanks are necessary, that seacoast life means neighbor helping neighbor when necessary.

What is most remarkable about these two books from my perspective as an adult reader in 2010 is how much independence these children had. It was expected that they would explore the physical worlds surrounding them and that they would sometimes find themselves in dangerous, even life-threatening situations but that they would learn valuable lessons from their experiences, picking up skills acquired only by doing. Their lives were not all play, either. They had serious chores and serious jobs to do and were contributing apprentices to small communities of hard-working, interdependent adults.

Life is no longer like this for most American children. Chores, when kids have them, are carefully supervised, recreation scheduled and circumscribed. Tethered to parents by cell phones, they “explore” shopping malls. It is a paradox. Sexually hurried into adulthood by consumer culture, too many are at the same time psychologically infantilized by understandably paranoid adults.

Stop her! Stop her! She’s on the soapbox again!

Okay, okay, I’m down. I’ll simply remind my readers about Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods and let anyone who wants to click here for a refresher on that book.


I count myself lucky to live in a rural neighborhood with semi-wild pockets, a neighborhood that gives me plenty of room to get outdoors and be a kid again. Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, recommends what she calls “the artist date,” a tool for creativity that demands only making time for “quality time” with yourself:

Spending time in solitude with your artist child is essential to self-nurturing. A long country walk, a solitary expedition to the beach for a sunrise or sunset, a sortie out to a strange church to hear gospel music, to an ethnic neighborhood to taste foreign sights and sounds....

Confession: I rarely schedule time for myself, and I usually have a companion in my solitude. Yesterday evening, for example, I went out with my camera and Sarah. Yes, she's really there, with that blinding sun behind her! I walked, Sarah ran. I picked up stones, she chased sticks thrown for her. My camera kept me focused, Sarah kept me happy, and waiting for sunset kept me from going home too soon.


It’s good to be a kid again for an hour or so.