The Feminist Grandma

Happiness

Since September last year I’ve repeatedly told you that my novel will be published in September this year. “Why does it take a year?” people ask. I thought you might like to know what happens in between signing the contract and the glorious day when the book is born. I’ll tell you the highlights so far. The funny thing is, it’s almost all highlights.

My first joy was joining the Authors Guild. Since nobody agrees on the difference between ‘writer’ and ‘author,’ I’ve got my own: an author is a published writer. My late sister Luli Gray was a member of the Guild, and I would read her monthly newsletters and long for the day when I could join. Until a couple of years ago, only published authors or those with a book contract were eligible. For thirty years or so I’ve been on the outside looking in, nose pressed to the glass, admiring them.

 

So as soon as I received the proposed contract I joined the Guild, and the first thing I did was ask for their free legal advice. I was astonished by the speed and thoroughness of their legal team. They explained the effect of all the provisions and proposed several changes. For $135 annual membership fee I received what I estimate was about ten hours of expert legal advice.

But wait...there’s more! The Authors Guild has an online members forum, and it was there I began to connect with other authors. I received helpful advice about publicity and working with book clubs. Beyond that, I felt I had found the people who understand what it means to be a writer, who are dealing with the same thrills and disappointments as I.

Of course, there's a fair amount of whining, and an occasional thread filled with severely beaten dead horses. (Writers in the procrastination phase of task achievement like to get caught up in online debates.) But I began to make friends and exchange emails with a few who seemed to share my interests. I’ve bought books by three of them, and reviewed two.

 
The Authors Guild Community Forum

 

The long years of trying in vain to be published were often discouraging, but there can be advantages in waiting so long. First, there’s the absolute bliss when the time finally comes. Next, as an old woman, I’ve accumulated a lot of fuel for my imagination. And I admit it: I think I’m wiser than young-uns. (I’m sure they believe they’re wiser than I).

I'm wiser but they're cuter

Finally, because I spent most of my adult life earning a good living and a good retirement account, I don’t have to worry about making money. Writing, always a life of penury for most, is becoming even less profitable.  According to  research by the Codex Group for the Authors Guild., authors' median incomes have dropped 42% since 2009.

Along with that, it’s harder and harder to get one’s book noticed. The internet, streaming media, and goddamsmartphones occupy many minds, while the growth of self-publishing floods the market with books. So authors who can afford it hire publicists, and I can afford it. I gave myself a generous budget to do everything I can to promote this book.

I followed recommendations from writer-friends and people I met on the Author s Guild, and interviewed five publicists. The process was painful for me - I felt everything was riding on the decision, and it cost so much! But finally I settled on a firm that Authors Guild friends had praised in detail, and that firm in turn recommended a website developer.

Publicist

Designer

Now I had a team of three: publisher/editor, publicist, and website designer. To my non-surprise, it was all women. I’ve fallen in love with them all in the course of long phone calls and many emails.

Joan Leggitt at Twisted Road Publications - I knew I had found the editor of my dreams long before she decided to publish my book. When I first submitted it, she told me that magic is fine, but it has to be an integral part of the book. I rewrote the whole thing. My sardonic coffee shop owner became a powerful mystic and visionary; I added more magic and related it to my main characters. I submitted the book again, this time successfully. Then, as we worked together, she suggested one more major change, in the relationship between the twin sisters. I was dubious, but said I’d give it a try. Now I saw that the twins had been cartoon characters. With the revisions, they came to life. I was, and am, awed by Joan’s gifted eye.

Three more edits followed, by Joan and two others, calling for clarifications  or pointing out inconsistencies. I had to master the review function in Word, tracking, rejecting, accepting changes. The work was extremely tedious, and brought me to curses and tears, but I was impressed by the editors’ ability to spot tiny important problems. (The last editor presumed to tell me what my characters were thinking and were likely to do, and sometimes wrote new material. I did NOT appreciate that, but she did point out the mysterious disappearance of a biscuit.)

 

one of many comments

Writing is such a solitary pursuit; like God, we make something from nothing, and we do it alone. Now I had a publisher, who cared about my book as much as I did, and thought about it in the middle of the night.

I had to write a brief bio, dedication, and acknowledgments. The acknowledgments are complicated - I keep acquiring more people to thank - but the dedication was easy - thirty years ago when I finished what I thought was the final draft, I wrote my dedication. I would think of it wistfully from time to time. Now I can’t wait for the day when my dedicatee opens the book and sees that page.

At the same time that I worked on edits, I was responding to requests from Monkey C. Media. I had to think about new things, and answer long questionnaires. Appearance: How about these colors - what about this font? Strategy: What benefit will readers get from it? What action do you want them to take? Write 15 questions and answers for the press kit. Write the About page. We need professional photographs.

More fun, and another woman who is becoming a friend.  Adrienne Fletcher, a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, met with me for over an hour at her studio - she wanted to get to know me - and then shot what seemed like hundreds of photos in my backyard about a week later, at the hour of golden light.

Blurbs. Gotta have blurbs. Those are the little quotes from other authors that you see on the back of books: ‘compelling, intelligent and sensitive’ ‘makes Jane Austen look like a piker’ ‘the greatest creative genius since God rested.’

 

The Creation    image: catholic.org

 

Authors HATE writing blurbs, or that’s what I’ve heard from more than one. I know very few authors - I had two blurbs promised, but I needed more. That’s why I decided to start reviewing books. I would only review books I was enthusiastic about - there’s not much point in saying “Here’s a book you’ve never heard of and it’s not worth reading.” I didn’t see it as a trade-off (say nice things about me, and I’ll do the same for you) - but as a way to connect with authors. It would be hard to write to a total stranger and ask for a big favor.

This enterprise has only been slightly successful. I received very gracious refusals from several of my hoped-for blurbers, citing deadlines, illness, family troubles. One announced on Facebook shortly before I wrote her that she was no longer doing any blurbs. However, to my delight, I’ve discovered that I love writing reviews. I read more attentively, and I learn a lot by thinking about how other authors do what they do. I’ve decided to start a second blog - Big Books from Small Presses . Like this one, it will link to my website.

I confess I’m a bit worried about the amount of work I’m committing to. I’m working hard 4 or 5 hours in the morning, and often a couple of hours at night. My work with the publicist is about to begin; one of their key responsibilities is assigning me tasks. I didn’t realize when my author life FINALLY began that I was embarking on a full time job. And in this gestation time I’ve only had two days when I could turn to my fourth novel. But when I did, the ideas flowed and the words tumbled out. Now that my book is being published there seems to be a point to it all.

My retirement is over. In the kitchen, in the shower, on a walk, writing ideas or writing business keep popping up. On my magic whiteboard is a long list of things to do. It’s magic because it’s a gift from a Wise Woman - she’s so wise that I simply have to make it upper-case - and I feel her presence in my office as I work on the bed, snuggled by Moe and a blanket, with the whiteboard beside me. I have never been so happy.

image: A. Jennings (the rubber chicken belonged to my late sister, Luli)

PUBLISHED AT LAST!

My first novel, Dreaming the Marsh, will be published by Twisted Road Publications in September 2019. I am very excited, as I have been pursuing this dream for over 30 years, with pauses in the pursuit for various events and catastrophes.

I have loved working with Typepad, but in connection with the book I now have a website on Wordpress, and both The Feminist Grandma and my new blog, Big Books from Small Presses, will be there from now on. All my previous posts are also there.

Go to elizabethmccullochauthor.com to learn more about the book and to read my blogs. If you subscribe there, by entering your name and email address, you will get an email when I post something new,  about once a month. I hope you will - having lots of subscribers can help me get my second and third novels published.

A Long Labor

 

I have written three novels; each one took several years. But my fourth novel has been gestating for eight years. My back aches from the weight of it, and I wonder if it will ever be born.

image: scitechdaily.com

 

I’ve started my story three times. In my first attempt, a middle-aged woman finds her mother’s high school yearbook and tries to imagine her deceased mother’s life, while her mother argues with her from beyond the grave.

 

image:oaklandtech.com

 

The second version is the life of that same middle-aged woman. I’m confident that this third version, the story of her parents’ long marriage, is the right one, but I’ve put it down to revise other books, write the blog, travel, have surgery, adopt a granddaughter. I’ve written close to 380 pages, and I’ve only gotten the defenseless pair to their third and last pregnancy.

In my long dalliance with these people, I’ve had to do a lot of research, which is really fun. The most fun was learning about life on the home front during the Second World War. I found a Rosie the Riveter website with first person narratives by the women, now in their eighties, who helped build the ships and planes. click

 

Working on an airplane engine...

and a dive bomber

both photos of unnamed "Rosies" by Alfred T. Palmer of the Farm Security Administration

 

I read letters from women to their soldier boyfriends. I watched a documentary series about the war. As it turns out, my story begins a month before the end of the war, so I know a whole lot more than I can use (always a good thing with “historical” novels).

For more general research, and inspiration, I bought the complete New Yorker from 1925 to 2006 on CD’s - a bargain at $60 - which gives me a lot of contemporary news and views and culture. For instance, I learned (and used) the fact that in the spring of 1947 Richard Wright escorted Simone de Beauvoir around Harlem.

images: independent.co.com; national archives

From these old New Yorkers I get a sense of the writing of the time, and a certain insular Manhattan attitude that I need for some of my characters. It also gives me wonderful pictures of clothes and cars. I have yet to figure out how to browse through it without becoming caught up in a story or article.

I struggled with my other novels, but I don’t believe any of them were as challenging, had as many stops and starts, as this one. None of them required research into an era. None of them covered more than two years - this story lasts about forty years. More than that, none of them began with biographical bits of me. This one has strayed so far from its beginnings that I have disappeared, but one of the versions was very much me, and I found I wasn’t very fond of myself.

A couple of months ago I examined the situation. I’m 68, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life not finishing this book. My son suggested that if this one is such a struggle, maybe I should write a different one. But it doesn’t work that way. This story, these people, inhabit me.

A few weeks ago I reached a milestone - the end of the first section (courtship, early marriage, moving out of Manhattan) and began to believe again that someday I will reach the end. All I have left is the years with young children, the teenage years, the childless years, and the last year. The first draft will be massive, but then it will exist, ready to be cut and chopped and molded. I hate creating; I love revising. Michelangelo said “Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop.” I will have a huge block of stone to carve.

image:wikipedia

I've labeled my current work, about the years with young children, chunktwo; I’m three chapters into it. The milestone has given me confidence and new resolve. I can do this. I know where I’m going. I’ll work first thing every morning, after feeding the beasts. What could stop me?

the beasts

Anyone who writes knows what could stop me. A thousand distractions beckon, and the most tempting lurk in my laptop: Email, Facebook, Free Cell, the New York Times. Even if I avert my eyes from the Firefox icon and go straight to my word processor, when a question arises the Internet is at hand to answer it. So I’ve returned to Freedom, an app which I tried a few years ago and abandoned when I found how easy it was to get around it. It’s not easy in the latest version. I set a schedule to block the Internet, and it’s in effect until I change it - and I believe I can’t change it while it’s actively blocking. (Please don’t tell me if I’m wrong.) I’ve given myself Internet access five hours a day in three parts. It’s wonderful how this has freed up my time, not just the early morning writing time, but the rest of the day. I’m completing all kinds of tasks and projects, and reading more than I have in several years. click

Along with the Internet, my self-imposed monthly blog deadline troubled me. The blog posts take several days; I feared they would destroy my momentum. I ignored my May 6 deadline  and kept on chugging along in the novel. But I like writing the blog: it clears my mind; it amuses me; it’s a great writing exercise; and I love finding the illustrations. And so I’ve decided that every time I finish a chapter, I’ll stop and write a blog post. If the chapters come fast and furious, I’ll stockpile posts.

I just finished a chapter (As often happens, I didn’t realize it was ending until it did.) So here I am, in my look-at-me way, telling you about it.

NEXT POST: Sometime in June, or whenever the next chapter is done.

MOOC

 

Last spring I discovered MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses), when my friend Sandra posted a notice on Facebook of a Stanford course, Ten Pre-Modern Poems by Women. My sister Luli and I both signed up.

The professor, Eavan Boland, is an Irish poet and professor of humanities and creative writing at Stanford.click  She was aided and abetted by young poets in the creative writing program. After Boland talked a bit about the poet and her time, and described the poem, we read it and gave our first impressions. An illustrated lecture went more deeply into the poet’s life and times, and analyzed the poem. A contemporary poet commented on the poem, and then we had homework assignment. Faculty and students responded to each other in the discussion forum.

Some of the poems - Browning’s “How do I love thee?” and Rossetti’s “When I am dead, my dearest” were very familiar. I’d seen them so often that the words had lost their meaning. But doing the homework, and reading the faculty and students’ remarks, I saw them fresh.

"I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach"  Image: The Grand Canyon. National Park Service

 

"When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head..." image: Flickriver.com

I’d never heard of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, but I loved her poem, “Washing Day,” a picture of the weekly disruption in an 18th century English middle class family when the washer woman comes to do the laundry. It’s full of vivid scenes and pictures: the clotheslines break, the dog knocks over the drying rack. a little boy loses his shoe in the mud. We see the whole population of the household: the wife, husband, maids, children, grandmother, visitors. There are enough characters and action in Washing Day to make an amusing play, or if you are novelistically inclined there are plenty of scenes to get you started.

Laundry Day c.1765. Image: British Museum

 

For each week and poem there was a choice of three homework assignments, always including the opportunity to write a poem of your own. For me this was the easy way out. Rhyme and meter are in my blood - doggerel runs in my family. I can write a bad sonnet with the best (or worst) of them, but I soon found I focused more on the poem under discussion if I wrote one of the essays instead.

Rosetti’s poem came alive for me again when I went to YouTube and heard it set to music. I listened to three versions with different melodies and performers. The different songs transformed the poem into something new, and led me to examine the original more closely. click

I was enjoying this course so much that I signed up for another one, Harvard’s Poetry in America: the Civil War and its Aftermath. It had a great deal more material than the Stanford course, all of it tempting. It included a baritone singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot under a slide show of engravings and photos, a discussion of The Gettysburg Address, a Confederate nurse’s diary, and John McCain reciting The Cremation of Sam McGee, which he learned in Vietnam when the prisoner in the next cell tapped it out in code. I soon realized that if I added that course while continuing the Women Poets course I would be a full-time student. I don’t have time for that, so I stopped after a couple of weeks.

 

Union nurses in the Civil War. Image:civilwarsaga.com

 

I finished Ten Pre-Modern poems in June, and early in September I started taking Modern and Contemporary American Poetry from the University of Pennsylvania. Each poem was accompanied by a video discussion between the exceptionally good professor and his grad students, conducting close readings of all the poems - word by word and line by line, not neglecting punctuation and line breaks. There was a lot of additional material available, as well as very intelligent discussion on the forums. This was the best and most challenging of the three courses. I stuck with it for eight weeks, through the Beats, but with my Voices Rising concert and a trip to the Grand Canyon looming, and from sheer intellectual exhaustion, I stopped.

UPenn Prof. Al Filreis and grad student Anna Strong.. I loved watching these video discussions partly because Al reminded me so powerfully of my late friend Jim Hardy, down to his voice and the twinkle in his eye.

All the courses have participant discussion forums, and participants come from all over the world. I love hearing furriners talk about us, because it reminds me once again how very parochial we are. People from Peru or Pakistan aren’t necessarily affected by the American orthodoxy-of-the-week. In the Harvard course, several recommended Gone with the Wind as an excellent portrayal of the horrors of the Civil War.

 

image: ew.com

Most forum posts drew no response - I suppose we’re more interested in our own thoughts than in anyone else’s. In the Civil War poetry course, the longest thread by far was started by someone who asked people to share their creative work. The poetry poured in. None of it had anything to do with the Civil War.

Like any college student, I like to gripe. Judging by the professors in these courses, the current fashion in academia, perhaps stolen from literary fiction, is to discuss everything in the present tense. I hear journalists on NPR do this too.

I suppose somebody has decided that it brings history to life, but it annoys the hell out of me. Aside from impoverishing the language, it flattens our sense of history, and creates a false intimacy, a pretense that barriers of different world-views and culture don’t exist or don’t matter. It leads directly to our presuming to judge the outrages of other eras as though we sensitive souls of the 21st century occupy some moral high ground. I’m convinced that wickedness and cruelty, intolerance and exploitation, selfishness and greed continue in humankind at pretty much the same level through the ages. Only the victims and methods change.

 

image: thinglink.com

image: linkedin.com

 

The discussion in the women poets course frequently raised issues of class, race and gender. While I’ve been obsessed with these most of my life, I found myself impatient with what seemed to be requisite and rote comments. I finally wrote a waspish response in my essay about “Washing-Day,” which I generously share with you:

Yes, they hired laundresses, who doubtless had rough lives. Maids worked very hard and had little power or independence. The poet could have written about The Washer Woman, but on this occasion she chose to write about what it was like in the household on wash day. I see no need for 21st century readers to tut-tut about the evils of other historical periods - we have plenty of our own. If I read a contemporary poem about a young girl who is a gifted gymnast, I don’t feel impelled to discuss the sweatshops in which the beads were sewn onto her costume, unless the poet is implicitly leading me there.

 

Gabby Douglas. Image:usa.com

 

Aside from my quibbles with substance, I found the technology cumbersome. It took four tries to create a damn password for the Stanford course - with each try, they came up with a new rule: must have numbers, can’t use symbols, must be gluten-free.

  image:passwordmeter.com

                                                                                                                            
All my passwords are gluten free. image:fixyourdigestion.com   

 The Harvard course was worse. It ate my three paragraphs of delicious analysis TWICE. It buried all kinds of critical information several layers down in various links: there were eleven pages of FAQ, and then a separate FAQ thread in the discussion section. It took a lot of digging to discover that the course was designed for Chrome, and Firefox users (me) were particularly likely to have problems.

I recommended the course to Luli, but suggested she just read and view the materials rather than try to respond. She claims she once took a hammer to a recalcitrant computer, and the obstacles in this course were so frustrating that I was afraid she would blow up her whole office.

If I had a hammer...  image:hongkiat.com

 

The Modern Poetry course, which Luli was very engaged with, refused to recognize her after a couple of weeks, and though she and I spent hours on the phone trying to fix the problem, she finally had to give up.

It was their loss. Luli’s participation in the Women Poets course had enriched it for me and many others. Thanks to a wild and crazy adolescence, she barely finished high school and never went to college. She’s as widely read and knowledgeable as anyone I know except our sister-in-law Doris, but she hangs out with a number of highly educated writers and librarians, and she thought it would be cool to have a certificate saying she completed a course at Stanford.

 

Luli got a certificate. Image:stolinsky.com

 

We enjoyed the course together by phone and email. Luli in academia is a little like Alice in Wonderland - she sees things for what they are, rather than accepting the strange transformations of truth that blossom in the groves of academe. For example, here was her response to my discussion of the You Tube performances of Rosetti’s poem:

cor blooming blimey! what a load! i listened to the ones you mention, plus a passel of others...not all the way through any of 'em, because i thought them all total rubbish. as maudlin as a bunch of drunks. which the poem isn't. and so many overblown orchestral arrangements for this simple, tongue in cheek song. my god. but, i liked your essay.

A bunch of drunks. image:crujonessociety.com

 

For all my carping, I think MOOCs are great. However, be warned. Though all of the courses emphasize that you can participate as much or as little as you want, it’s hard to resist doing more than you have time for. It’s like  spreading a buffet in front of a hungry person. The Ten Pre-Modern Poems course is the least demanding (after all, it’s only ten poems) and its approach, including the assignments, the least rigorous. But I enjoyed it, I learned a lot, and it didn’t eat up my life. The Civil War poetry course was rich with material, and I will probably return to it. Though I didn’t stick with it long, my impression is that their poetry analysis is more historical than literary. The Modern Poetry course felt like a graduate seminar in poetry - very intense, and very focused on the poetry. I gained new appreciation for Dickinson, Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Ginsberg, and met others I’d never heard of. I do intend to go back to it, though I’m a little daunted by the time required to do it well, and I may tire of the close reading approach.

Here's a link to find MOOCs. click. Courses in subjects like engineering, computer science, and business far outnumber the arts and humanities. But their search engine is good, and if you’re so inclined you should be able to find the courses I’ve mentioned, as well as other humanities courses.

In the quest for eternal life and vigor, boomers are advised to keep exercising their brains along with their bodies. Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me, though vigor sounds nice, but I love reading poetry, and learning new stuff is fun.

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NEXT POST: JANUARY 8

Deadline

 

 

As I write this post, my self-imposed deadline looms three days away: September 11, a date fraught and ominous.  I could try writing about All That, but instead I wanted to think about deadlines.

I began this blog four years ago, posting every week. So afraid was I that I would miss a deadline that I wrote five posts in advance, to have a cushion, before I went online. I was glad I did. Mastering Typepad, the blog host, took a couple of weeks, with many inquiries to customer service.

 

I have always given myself a deadline and announced it at the end of each post. Deadlines make you accountable to someone else. Without one, it’s hard to persist. My novel, for instance, has no one waiting for it. The sheer momentum of the story, the eagerness to see what happens next, the delight in seeing what I’ve written the day before - when these fail me, there’s nothing left but discipline and desire, and sometimes both disappear.

This summer all the air went out of my balloon, and for the first time I missed my blog deadline. I offered myself both reasons and excuses. 

 

image:businessinsider.com

First, I went off to my fiftieth high school reunion. The weekend was rich with material. Between meals and parades and long conversations, the blog easily wrote itself. Then I lost my notebook on the trip home.

I could have recreated the piece, but upon reflection, I decided my thoughts were too snarky. This was an elite boys’ school that in 1974 had swallowed up Abbot Academy, the girls’ boarding school I attended and loved.

 

Draper Hall, Abbot Academy

On the first night of the reunion I was taken unexpectedly by white-hot rage, but the next morning, I calmed down and realized the 68-year-old men in their tie-dyed reunion t-shirts were not to blame for the loss of my alma mater.*

 

image: Tom Hafkenschiel

My reluctance to offend trumped my need for self-expression. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all, my mother told me, seriously hampering my development as a writer.

Second, two of my friends died this summer. Neither death was unexpected, but still...

 

image: Time.com

 

And finally, minor injuries and illnesses, combined with a complicated family trip, provided flimsy but effective excuses for procrastination.

Once our travels were over, I made several false starts, but none of the ideas caught fire, and I let them fizzle out. In the end, a month after the missed deadline, I posted the following apology: ‘To anyone who breathlessly awaits my monthly promised posts - I'm sorry.... I will be back by the end of August.’ The minute I wrote this, I felt confident again. It was a great relief. I was still a writer; I would be back. I immediately started writing, and posted my next piece on August 14.

I checked Thesaurus.com for a synonym for deadline, to avoid the tedious repetition of the word,and found exactly nothing. The closest they came was “time limit,” which is not the same thing, and lacks intensity. The Online Etymology Dictionary speculates that the word, first used in 1920, may have derived from the practice of Captain Henry Wirz, the notorious Civil War prison commander of Andersonville, who ordered guards to shoot any prisoner who crossed an imaginary line twenty feet or so inside the stockade.

 

Andersonville prison  image:georgiaencyclopedia.org

No one shoots a writer who misses a deadline. Instead she enters a strange state of listlessness. There’s no reason to start a piece on any particular day, and the days keep going by, filled with brooding and laundry. I’ve tried the ‘Write every day, regardless’ approach, and it works, but I keep letting go of it.

 

The Brooding Girl   image: Jean-Baptiste-Camille-Corot.org

FILLING MY DAYS

A Labor Day weekend plagued by adolescent angst has me in low spirits, and even with only three days to deadline I fiddled around on Facebook and played three games of Free Cell before beginning to write. As you can tell, I also zipped back to the internet, avoiding writing by consulting dictionary and thesaurus, but at least that provided some material, and I didn’t linger.

 

Goddamn Free Cell

I can’t say I am happy when I am writing, but I am certainly happiest when I have written. Writing makes me happy, and deadlines make me write.

 

*Alma mater: I wrote these words and thought, Oh! It means mother of my soul - how poetic, how true. But it doesn’t. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it means bountiful mother. Mrs. De, our fierce and peculiar Latin teacher at Abbot, would be ashamed of me.

 

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Next post: October 9

Retreat!!

My friend Sandra, mentrix in all things writerly, is a great proponent of writing retreats. She spent six weeks at Yaddo, and has just started a month at Studios of Key West, where she has solitary time and space to dig deep and bring forth wonderful work. click  These are both coveted creative retreats, complete with fellowships that provide  rent and more. But when Sandra doesn’t have a fellowship, she sometimes hauls herself off alone to a state park or a Cedar Key motel to burrow into her work.

 

   
KISSIMMEE STATE PRAIRIE, A PARK WHERE SANDRA CAVORTS WITH THE MUSE

 

I have always thought these self-made retreats were a wonderful idea, but until recently I didn’t feel free to abandon Joe for a week on his own with Amanda. Now that she is fairly self-regulating and insists she has no need of us except as chauffeurs and food sources, I have gained a lot of freedom. But I still had to figure out where to go.

DOCK AT CEDAR KEY

                                   
Cedar Key doesn’t appeal to me for more than a day - surely somewhere there is shade in Cedar Key, but I’ve never seen it. My friend Sue has a cabin at Murder Creek in the Oconee National Forest in Georgia, but it’s a six-hour drive, and maybe a little too isolated. click The prospect of being completely alone with my thoughts and the blank page, nothing but woods around me,  was daunting.

Then another friend, Mary Anne, told me of the Cross Creek Lodge, across from the Yearling Restaurant, and a mile up the road from the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings homestead, where Mary Anne is a docent. It’s a tiny motel right on Cross Creek, owned for several generations by the Palmeter family, and mostly used by bass fishermen. The price was $65 a night. And when I called to reserve a room, Gary Palmeter told me that Harry Crews used to come there to write. I would be surrounded by writer ghosts.

 

 

When my dream publishing house rejected my first novel last fall, the publisher generously gave me a long and insightful critique. Since my second novel is currently on submission, and my fourth novel, my work in progress for the last eight years, was comatose, I decided to take novel #1 to Cross Creek to begin my revisions.

In the weeks before my retreat I was very excited and very scared. Getting away from daily life and troubles is always appealing. The lodge had no Wifi and very limited TV, excellent conditions for creativity. But what if I holed up in Cross Creek and didn’t do anything but watch TV and eat cookies? What if I got scared of the solitude and spent my days driving the back roads, goofing around in the antique stores in Micanopy? What if my four days weren’t PRODUCTIVE? click  I had the solid reassurance of an already thoroughly polished  manuscript, and useful ideas for revisions. But my doubts were almost as high as my hopes.      

 

I made my packing list. Clothes: mostly muumuus. Gear: notebook, laptop, and flash drive. Entertainment: Jane Gardam on my Kindle, sheet music and voice warm-ups, and a hat in progress in my crochet bag. Food: Cheeses, bread, salad greens, salad dressing, tomatoes and fruit. A half a bottle of single malt in memory of my brother Dickie. click

I was elated as I drove the green and sunny road to Cross Creek. The Lodge was just over the bridge. There were eight cinder block motel units attached to a block house, and several mobile homes around the property where family members live. I was greeted by one large black dog, very friendly, and one tiny dog, very fierce. I knocked on the Palmeter’s door, and was welcomed warmly by Glory and Randy, who gave me the key, and told me to knock anytime if I needed anything.

The room was simple: a bed, small kitchen table, a kitchen sink, microwave and mini-fridge, a few dishes, salt, pepper, condiments, tea and coffee, a rocking chair and TV, a bathroom with a shower. I unpacked all my things and made the room my home.

I’m an early-morning writer, so my only ambition for the first day was to read over the publisher’s critique and let it percolate overnight. I went for an hour’s walk, and then took a glass of single malt out to the concrete deck overlooking the Creek. I sat in a grimy Adirondack chair sipping my whiskey, thinking of Dickie, who would have blessed this enterprise, and of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Harry Crews, both of them more experienced writers (and drinkers) than I. 

     
RAWLINGS                                                           CREWS

It was late afternoon and I faced west, the sun just above the trees, the mosquitoes not yet active. Cypress trees and cypress knees, a squat palm tree with its spiky trunk. Butterflies, dragonflies, a lizard threatening me with his bulging red neck.  Four men in two small boats with trolling motors. They smiled and waved; I lifted my glass. The creek swelled and rolled in the wake, and then was still, dark tannic water mirroring the leaning cypress.  Peepers and croakers and birds sang for sunset. I heard the splash of mullet jumping, but always looked too late to see anything but the spreading rings in the water.  

 

CROSS CREEK - PAINTING BY KATE BARNES

I ate my supper in front of The News Hour, read for awhile, and went to sleep early. I always sleep long and soundly when I’m away from home, so I didn’t wake till 6 on Thursday. I tried drinking my coffee on the deck, but it was mosquito prime time, and I fled. I settled down at the kitchen table and worked a solid five hours, going through the manuscript and making a to do list, ideas hatching and flying around.

It was about the same each of the three days - work, lunch, a long walk, a nap, dinner, some reading, some crocheting, early to bed. One night I had dinner at the Yearling, where the best food is fried. I ate in the bar, reading some Jane Gardam, thinking about not much, listening to the middle-aged local crowd tease and gossip. Friday I went into Gainesville for my singing lesson, bought bandaids and bug spray, and picked up a pulled pork dinner at Pearl’s in Micanopy, which sufficed for Friday dinner and Saturday lunch. Saturday night I celebrated with a bloody Mary and fried green tomatoes at The Yearling.         

FRIED GREEN TOMATOES (AND GATOR TAIL)

At home I do well to work for two hours straight. I wrote novels #1 and #2 in forty-five minute bits each morning. Now I had worked five steady hours for three days, and put in three hours before I checked out Sunday morning. And the magic of retreat continued - I finished all the revising and new writing in about two weeks at home. The new draft is resting until I have sufficiently forgotten it to read it fresh. Meanwhile...

I puttered around with blog work and some other things. Then my friend Nancy told me about a cabin on Lake Swan, outside Melrose, that was only $39 a night. Novel #4, which has three 100-page beginnings going in three different directions, was calling. I love this novel, connected as it is to my mother, but it’s been a real challenge. So five weeks after I returned from Cross Creek I was off to Lake Swan.

This retreat was much like the previous one. I had a larger room with big ceiling fans, a DVD player instead of a TV. There was a lovely shallow lake to swim in after I finished work. I had a bottle of icy cold, really bad white wine instead of the single malt, and I could sit with a glass and watch the sunset over the lake. Melrose was two miles away. I had gloppy Italian food at Betty’s Pizza, and excellent meatloaf with mashed potatoes at the Melrose Café. The art galleries were closed till the weekend, but I went into a junk shop and bought two fifty cent books. 

 

SUNSET AT LAKE SWAN

 

Despite the success of my first retreat, I was even more scared this time. It’s one thing  to revise an existing manuscript, with all sorts of material ready to inspire you. It’s another to stare into the void, to write from nothing. But I knew which version of the fourth novel I was going to go with, and I had a file with one-sentence sketches for the next few chapters. So I dove in.

I wrote four or five hours each of the next three days and by the time I was done had written almost forty pages. This time I was absolutely exhausted; new creation really takes it out of you. But again the momentum continued when I returned home - I’ve written almost every day, sixteen pages in two weeks. As soon as I finish this blog post, I’ll be back at it.

In these two retreats I began to practice the persistence I’ve tried to master for many years: moving on through the dead spots, writing even as my thoughts seem to spin and go nowhere. I have high hopes for finishing the fourth novel. It’s very exciting, because I have only the dimmest ideas of what I will see along the road to the end. There are few states more miserable than living with a dead novel, few more exhilarating than working on one that has come alive again.

 

WHAT'S UP THE ROAD?

I am very lucky to have Joe, who enthusiastically supports my writing, and is happy to handle the home front while I run away. When I returned from Lake Swan he said, “You might want to do this twice a year.” I haven’t told him yet that I’m thinking of every three months.

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NEXT POST: JULY 3

 

 

 

Mother/Ocean

 

             I

There were five on the boat
In the middle of the night:
Two in the cabin cramped under the deck,
Three with the ice chests under the stars.

Fishing all day
Under flat hot haze,
Drinking beer.
(The boy drank juice,
Sucked oranges.)
They let him cut the head
Off the maco shark Tom caught.
He sawed it with a bait knife
And saw what was inside.

No other boats that day,
Twenty-five miles out.
At Currington's Ditch
The Gulf gave wonders:
A blowfish, valiant puffer,
Three porpoises,
And always sharks.
'When you reel in your line
There could be anything.'

The sky began to clear
In the afternoon,
And sunset gave them glory
Yielding to stars.
They grilled the maco on the camp stove,
Finished the Fritos,
And cut into the chocolate cake
That Joe's wife Sara sent.
Coffee kept them fishing in the dark,
With Coleman light and stars.
No moon until they slept.

Bill started in the cabin.
They sent him out for farting
And so he joined the two:
Joe on the ice chests,
A jacket for a pillow;
Wayne on a lounge chair,
Hand hanging in fish scales.
Bill took the rear,
Spread a tarp,
And lay watching stars swing above him.
Cradled in the rocking,
He slept.

And woke to water pouring in beside him.
Shouted,
Rose,
And watched Joe stand as
Wayne fell off the lounge chair,
Boat fell from their footing
And water welcomed all.

Bill came up.
Mound of white hull
Tracked by moonlight.
Tom climbing up one side
Joe clinging on a line
Wayne coming out from underneath the bow
And no one else.
The boy was gone.
Bill looked again:
The boat with three men clinging now.
He bellowed my son's name
And fell under a wave
And rose to cry again.
Joe caught his arm
And hauled him out.
He caught a breath to shout again
When brown arm curving
Past the second wave
Gave answer.

Five on the boat again
Under the stars
Traitor turned over
They clung to her hull.

They talked of how it happened;
No one knew.
Of rescue, and Joe said,
"It's Sunday one A.M.
They don't expect us back
Till Monday night."
So all fell silent for awhile
And watched the solid sea.

'This was not my mother ocean.
No crest of beauty moving toward the shore
Nor sails near and far.
A bird perhaps
Or sometimes more
Who flew in safety and in power
Above us as we lay.'

They lay face down like sunbathers,
Lined up to broil.
And when the rain brought blessing
Embraced to hold their warmth against the cold.
Watched empty ocean over others' shoulders.

'This was another ocean,
Of curve and wave
And endless motion.
The sky itself would not be still,
But glittered stars
Or drifted clouds
And nowhere could our eyes have rest.'

Watched empty ocean teeming still below
(When you reel in your line...)
Thin sounds, thin light,
Dream-fish washed pale,
Seahorse, nightmare,
(When you reel in your line...)
Man o' war from Portugal,
Tuna, grouper, mackerel,
Lemon, maco, hammerhead
(There could be anything.)
                             II

Inland, I had no idea of danger.
Free of lover and of son,
Three-day weekend to unwind,
I had no plans, I could do anything.

When Monday night came
And they didn't
Angry at first (Bill promised he would call)
And then began to wonder.
Empty ocean, one head bobbing,
Pushed the vision under and
At midnight called the Coast Guard.

Dreamed: we'd found them
Woke: we hadn't
All in a rush
Upon my chest
Seavisions sat
And stayed.

Thought motionless above a sword:
No certainty, no pain.
Waiting brings its own reward:
At eight o'clock, at ten, the phone again.
"No word.
They say a storm is building
North of Tampa Bay."
"I know. I heard."
And through the day and into dusk
No word.
Until the call from Joe's wife Sara.
News so easy, words so plain.
"They found them all
And all are well.
Come to the house.
We'll drive to fetch them
Back from Cedar Key."

What story would they tell,


What could they say
To wash my fury and my fear away?
The engine died,
The truck broke down,
We lost our way?
Then at the house,
Joe's mother in the door,
"I have bad news.
The Coast Guard called us back.
They only rescued four.
We know that they have Tom and Wayne."
"But of the other three"?
"One of them is missing.
They wouldn't tell us who."

In the living room a country family.
Trophies on the mantelpiece,
Coffee on the table.
The television gave us light
Until an aunt turned on a lamp.
In the bedroom Sara lay
And waited by the phone.
Joe's sister
Sat with her.
Two pregnant women waiting.
I stood by a window,
It will be finished soon.
When this cigarette is gone,
When that runner turns the corner
God, he runs so slow!

"The Coast Guard wants you on the phone."
My son is dead my son is dead.
Someone walked me down the hall.
"Your son is safe, he's doing well,
We need consent to treat him."
"But Bill and Joe,
Which one is gone"?
"We cannot tell.
You all must come."

And so Joe's Dad and Mom and I
And theirs was dead or mine was dead
Took Sara's car
(She had to rest and wait in that dark room.)
We took one car
And drove two hours
And I watched cars, clouds, trees, flowers,
And theirs was dead or mine was dead
We didn't know.

             III

We didn't know how long
The time had been for them.
Three days, almost three nights they lay,
No sleep, no food, no water.
No rest for eyes from emptiness
Though weary minds devised odd sights
And some they told aloud.
My son saw fires on the waves,
Wayne saw a barge,
And on the second night,
Bill saw Death in a cloud
And watched it pelting toward them lit by lightning.

The storm brought waves above their heads
That threw them off the boat.
They struggled back to cling
To the hull and to each other.

Third day brought thoughts of rescue.
They knew the search was on.
By afternoon Joe's mind was gone.
He seemed to cheer a football game,
Cursed, and shouted Sara's name.
All vision now inside his eyes
Behind the brown stain rising as life fell.
Bill held him on the boat
Still and heavy in his arms.
Did he die there
Or in the wave that threw them off again?
Bill swimming out to pull him back.
"He's dead Bill.  Let him go."
And as they spoke, he sank,
Lean scarecrow in the water.
A half an hour later
The helicopter came.

             IV
Thank God for days
That heal salt sores in the flesh
Change funeral to memory
(Joe's mother in the door
Turned as I neared
And would not speak.
Her son was dead.)
The story encrusted with telling,
The pictures in ambush at night
Come fewer and fade.
Thank God for days.

But something stays.
Under wave the nightmare,
Under surf the stones.
And in a year I go
To the beach north of Daytona,
Pitch my tent behind the dunes,
Sleep and wake to rain,
Stagger between boulders   
And on the rock beach
Sit and watch the sea.

The rain ends with the sunrise.
Horizon shows the dawn:
No glory, merely day.
Above the line, pearl light.
Mist to the north tells rain.
Twelve pelicans measure the sky.
Below is broken slate,
But if there be measure of dread,
Dark under water confuses my eye.
Dark underwater:
Five lying, one dying,
The trying to save him
The waiting, the waves, yes
This is part of what they saw
Grey ocean, silver sky.
But from no land,
From grave instead.
My son is dead.
'He is not dead.'
He almost died.
'He did not die.'
He might have died.
'He did not die.'
My son will die. Dark ocean, let me be the first to drown.

 

image:callipygia600.com

 

Dear readers: I wrote this poem thirty years ago. I have traveled a lot this month, and been entirely obsessed with sewing this week, so I did not finish an essay for you. But I'm very proud of this poem. It is a true story, with the names changed.

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NEXT POST: JULY 25

 

Gratitude Journal

    Recently I went to a presentation billed as “Silencing the Inner Critic.”  It was very disappointing, and the speaker was very irritating.  She teaches all-day workshops on creativity, and her hour-long talk was nothing but an outline of those workshops. It was full of enthusiasm, vivacity and charm, but very little matter.  As you can tell, she certainly didn’t silence my inner critic.

image: pathseekerslifecoaching.com

But there’s always a nugget or two to carry away from these things.  Nugget #1 was my resolution to resume daily, first-thing-in-the-morning writing in my notebook.  And #2 was the gratitude journal.

image:gemrocksauction.com

I’ve kept a notebook for many years, a cheap spiral bound thing, badly battered by the time it is full.  Once I tried keeping several - green for gardening plans, blue for my diary, red for writing projects.  That was a silly, if elegant scheme - I can’t keep track of three notebooks - and I soon abandoned it. Now my notebook is always red, because I would like to be read. (We seldom-published writers must have our amusement.) My current notebook, a lovely fat one, is extra-special because it was a Christmas gift from Amanda. It was the first time she gave Christmas gifts, and I was delighted by her empathetic selections (Joe got a foam rubber football.)

image:amazon.com

My notebook holds my diary, my free-writing click, first drafts of fiction and blogs, and many shopping and to-do lists.  Sometimes in my diary I describe or celebrate a special day, but more often it’s where I focus on my troubles and try to come to terms with them.  Sometimes it’s therapy. Sometimes it’s whining.  

image:pal.ua.edu

I had heard the term “gratitude journal,” but it never grabbed me.  Now I thought I’d give it a try.  And I have been surprised at the effect. Here are samples, one from my normal diary, one from my new gratitude journal:

May 16. Friday.  Tonight is Amanda’s Honors Chorus Concert.  Yesterday I had a gloomy, out-of-sorts day followed by a night of poor sleep due to an upset stomach. Boy, this is writing that cries out for me to stop, and is also putting me to sleep.  My life is irksome. I stay irked.  I think I look for things to irk me.  I am falling asleep.                      

May 19. Monday. Gratitude: I am thankful that yesterday I could talk with Joe about my misery in this hard time with Amanda.  Only he understands what is happening here; only he need know.  And yesterday he gently reminded me what Dr. Lynne said about temporarily letting go of the demands we would normally make as parents.  That makes it easier for me to try and let go of my demands without feeling I’m being lazy, irresponsible, without feeling the people looking over my shoulder saying I’m a lousy parent.
    I’m grateful that he wants so much for this trip to NY to be what I’m hoping for, and that we are going to NY and staying in Chinatown.

image: wikipedia.org

I am grateful - almost breathless with excitement - that I’m driving to Orlando Thursday to meet Sue and Anne, staying in a luxury hotel.  I think we’ll drive back to Gainesville on back roads.
    I am grateful that yesterday Amanda played in the pool with me - a little hostile, a little aggressive, but still we played.
    I am grateful that I took away two precious nuggets from the empty talk yesterday at WAG - the gratitude journal, and the renewal of daily writing, which has disappeared in the chaos and grief.  I do indeed, have indeed, focused on my misery instead of my joy, and am/was becoming a negative gloomy glump.  Maybe there was something to Dad’s reply to “How are you?” “Oh, I’m always well.” He did live to 98, after all.

Always well: Dad at 90

    I am happy that I planted my three gaillardia yesterday, maybe rescued (I hope) the one poorly-planted cleome, THAT A MONARCH BUTTERFLY finally came to my thriving milkweed, and that I have three more milkweeds to plant.  Soon, if the monarchs come, I will have six ugly naked stalks.  And maybe the ugly nameless plant Bill gave me, with its tubular salmon-colored flowers, will bring me a humming bird.
          

image:thebutterflysite.com

    I am grateful that I am making progress with singing.  An die Musik - itself a song of gratitude and perfectly tailored to my situation, about the escape, comfort, release, shelter of music - is coming along.  Two techniques - head singing and pushing out my diaphragm through a whole phrase - should solve my range and breathing problems. Though I have trouble executing both of them.  Still, my range in warm-ups is already wider than it was - down to Bflat below low C, and up to high E.  These music lessons are my salvation.  Indeed I have many salvations.
    I am grateful that I can talk to Joe, and that he is helping me ease back on Amanda by taking on some of the reminding himself.
    I am grateful that I have this morning time.  The quiet sleep-breathing of Trisket behind my chair - she always wants to be where I am.
   
    I am late to the party. I googled gratitude journal, and of course I found a long list of links. I could read 8 tips for starting one, or take 11 steps to a powerful one. Berkeley presented research. Oprah weighed in. I found ads for beautiful little notebooks titled Gratitude, prices ranging from $9.99 to $156 for used(!) Amazon offers free two-day shipping if you subscribe to Amazon prime. You can also buy the “Bargain Attitude Changer. The #1 gratitude journal app for over five years. Use it for at least three weeks and your life will never be the same again. See demo.”                

available used for $156.19 image:amazon.com

    I think I will pass.  I’m perfectly content with my red spiral notebook from the dollar store. It makes a big difference to begin my day rejoicing, and it helps me notice small delights throughout the day. I am grateful for my gratitude journal.

 

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NEXT POST: JUNE 27

I'm Scared

It’s not funny anymore. It’s frightening.

I’ve just finished Connie Mae Fowler’s five-day writers’ workshop in St Augustine.click The best part was the workshop sessions and new writer friends.The second best part was having the hotel room to myself.

 

ALL MINE

The farewell dinner was last night.  About 6:30 in the morning I wake to a steady rain. I get dressed.  I pay attention when I put my cell phone in its holster, because the last five days I’ve kept it silenced in my purse. Methodically, I pack up each area - the bathroom, refrigerator, closet, dresser, desk, bedside table. Nobody distracts me with “Grandma, can I go get a donut?” “Liz, have you seen my glasses?” With everything packed I go through the room one more time, to be sure I haven’t left anything. Then I load the car.

Parking in St Augustine has taken all my cash, so I drive a couple of miles to Publix to get money for a housekeeping tip. I buy a sandwich for the road. I leave the tip, check out, grab a banana from the buffet, and head home through the driving rain.

 

IMAGE:NEWBYREALTY.COM

The thick, dark clouds are breaking up in the sky to the west, and by the time I reach US 1 the rain is slowing.  I leave the town behind, and now I’m on 207, a fast secondary road with trees, egrets, and puddles on both sides.  There is little traffic. I am entirely happy; the workshop revived my flagging writer, giving me energy, confidence, determination. I’ve made two decisions.  I will put writing first every morning, and make no dates before 11.  I will no longer say, “I’m retired,” but “I’m a writer.”

'O Happy Day' is playing on the CD player.  I think I’ll call Joe, share my happiness. I reach for the phone. It’s not in the zipper pocket of my purse. It’s not anywhere in my purse. I feel my jeans pockets, my shirt pocket. Nope. I review all my packing, and I’m puzzled. I remember turning off the alarm - is it possible I left it on the bedside table?

I pull over on the shoulder, trucks whizzing by as I get out to search. Passenger seat and floor, tote bag with notebooks, books, and magazines, computer case with a zillion compartments, center console, suitcase, under the seats. Nothing. And nothing to do but drive back to the motel. I consider calling to ask, but of course...

I’m proud that I’ve stayed calm, not frantic - it helps that I left early so there’s no worry about getting to my 11:00 therapist appointment in Gainesville.

I LOOKED EVERYWHERE

The worry begins after the friendly desk clerk has given me a new key card, after I’ve methodically searched each area of the room, looked in all the drawers and under all the furniture, after I’ve stripped the bed, after I’ve returned to the buffet and asked the woman who’s making new coffee if she's seen my phone. Back to the car, a more careful search with no trucks whizzing by two feet from my butt. I empty each bag, check the pockets in all the dirty clothes, move both seats and feel around under them. By now I know I’m repeating myself, hoping magic will put the phone where it wasn’t. I pat my jeans pockets, then my shirt pocket, and my hand bumps the cell phone belt.

Such a rush of relief. Then the real worry begins. By the time I reach the place where I pulled over,  an hour after my first departure, I’m near tears. This is no short-term memory loss. This isn’t like the comical incident of dressing a salad in a colander click, or locking my keys in the car.click. I paid attention when I stowed my phone, but with all the searching, all the thinking about what I had done, I didn’t remember it. 

The Muumuus and I joke about senior moments and brain farts, cozy and comfortable in our aging together. This wasn’t a moment; it was an hour.
Now my thoughts are flying. Alzheimers. Dementia. Researchers say about 1 out of 8 people over 65 suffers from dementia. I’m afraid to tell Joe, afraid tell Dr. Lynne, my therapist. I have told Joe that when I don’t know him anymore he can put me in a nursing home and divorce me, but he has to visit regularly to make sure I’m well cared for.

IMAGE:WISCONSINWATCH.ORG

I already have a strategy for my keys, and almost always put them in the basket by the door. Now I need a strategy for my glasses and phone too, and a mental checklist whenever I leave the house. I will have to establish compulsive habits. I must be present in every moment, pay attention to the now.

MY KEYS ARE HERE

But if I can’t let my mind wander, how will I write? Half the writing happens in my head when I’m cooking or cleaning house, swimming or walking. Just when my writer has come alive again, my mind starts to melt. It will only get worse. I will call my doctor and have the annual checkup that was due in July, ask for a referral for a neurological workup. There is a drug that can slow the progress of Alzheimers; best catch it early.

Last night I read a New Yorker piece about Phillip Roth and his friends. Roth decided to give up writing fiction at 78. “It’s hard to remember from day to day what you’ve done.” In Iris, the movie about Iris Murdoch, there is a scene where, as Alzheimers advances, she puts down her pen because she cannot remember words.

 

PHILIP ROTH IMAGE:NYTIMES.COM  IRIS MURDOCH IMAGE:TELEGRAPH.CO.UK 

I arrive at Dr Lynne’s with ten minutes to spare. We’ve been dealing with an old trauma, so that I can put it behind me. But this is too urgent; my fear is right at the surface. So we plunge in. She has theories about memory loss, information about how it works.  My story doesn’t worry her, and so I worry less. That night I tell Joe about it. He understands my fear, but thinks it’s like looking all over the house for his glasses when they are on his head. I see his point and feel better.  But I still want an assessment.

This morning in the paper, two items. Glory glory, Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  (In a New Yorker interview a year ago she said she would probably stop writing because “I’m eighty-one, losing names or words in a commonplace way.”) And Julie Samples, a graduate student at the University of Florida, has just published a pilot study in the Journal of Neurological Sciences.

The first deterioration in Alzheimer’s is often in the olfactory nerve, and begins on the left side of the brain. Julie put a dab of peanut butter on the end of a ruler, and brought it closer to each nostril until the person could detect the smell. She and her advisor report, “If they can smell it far away it means that nerve is working.  If you have to bring it all the way up to the nose it means it’s not working as well...We were blown away with what we saw...The right nostril was normal, and the left had impairment” in Alzheimers patients but none of the other subjects.

You know I went straight to the peanut butter jar. I put a bit on the end of a knife, blocked each nostril, and sniffed. Both my nostrils (and hence my brain?) worked just fine, smelling the peanut butter from about eight inches away. When I used the whole jar, I could smell it from a couple of feet away. I suppose I will mention this to my doctor when I get around to my so-called annual physical. And maybe I’ll ask for an assessment. But I am greatly reassured.

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NEXT POST: NOVEMBER 1

 

 

 

 

Privacy

Discreet. I like that word. In my mind I still partly live in my mother's world of short white gloves, hats and stockings, a world which was starting to crumble just as I was old enough to enter it.

I used to be very averse to exposing my private life to the world.  That has changed since I began blogging, and I’m not sure why.  For a long time I was embarrassed to let anyone know what I was really thinking.  The Voice of The Fathers was VERY strong in me, condemning a lot of what I did and thought, and I’ve always half-agreed with them. Of course it wasn’t The Fathers, it was my father.

ME AND MY FATHER, 1987

Now I write posts about fuck-me shoes and crude adolescent behavior on trains. I’m no longer embarrassed by my body - I''ve posted pictures of myself exercising in my underpants, and in a wetsuit like a fat black sausage. Below you’ll see me happily lumpy in a bathing suit.  At 65 I believe I’ve earned my lumps.
   
A friend tells me that to write memoir effectively you must be fearless. But I am not fearless.  I may seem to be baring my soul, or at least my past and my thighs, but I don’t write about my deepest sorrows or biggest regrets.  I don’t write about the thoughts and deeds I’m most ashamed of, not for lack of material, but precisely because I am ashamed.
 
I am more careful now about other people’s privacy than about my own.  When I write about friends or family I usually clear the piece with them. None of them has ever objected to anything I say, probably because I am still bound by ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.’

I am particularly concerned about Amanda’s privacy. I keep her worries, fears, and misdemeanors to myself. I avoid writing much detail about her life, except the sunny innocuous parts. 

I recently posted two pictures of Amanda as a toddler; you couldn't connect them to the nine-year-old she is now. I am leery of putting up contemporary pictures. I also have an ill-informed fear of the internet, and what might happen to a photo of her there, as though a stranger would track her down and harm her.  I know there are real dangers to children on the internet, but I suspect the ones I fear are not real.  Still, the Grandma in me yearns to share with the world the adorableness of this child.  So at the end of this post I’ve put up a few more baby pictures.

In fiction I have always felt obliged to make up characters.  I feel I'm cheating if I merely disguise someone I know. After I finished my third novel I wondered whether I would be a better writer if I were willing to go deeper inside myself.  I created a character based on me, though the scenes and details were imaginary.  But I found I loathed her.

I would not venture to defend any of these opinions, nor apply them to the work of other writers.  Indeed, I don’t believe they rise to the level of opinion; instead, they remain in the warm, murky waters of feeling.  They are mine, and I share them with you without any attempt to persuade.

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 I'M GOING ON VACATION. NEXT POST: AUGUST 31.