What will you be thankful for?

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These last few years, Thanksgiving has been hard for me, and Christmas, too. In the first 30 or so years of my adult life, those holidays meant traveling to the farm, where my parents lived, out the coast highway from Chehalis, Washington. As I’ve said here before, Mom was born in that house, and I grew up there.

Mom cooked everything. My sister who lived nearby probably was always helping. But all I had to do was show up, and help with the dishes. Even when we had infant and then toddler and preschool twins, my husband and I made this trek. The house would be full when we arrived, smelling of turkey and pies and all things good. We had the longest drive to get there, and we often held up dinner. Maybe that was why everyone lit up with smiles and laughter and hugs to see us.

After Dad died in 2010, we kept up the pretense for a while, but it turned out that my sister and her husband were by then doing most of the cooking. We moved Mom into an apartment in town and my nephew and his family moved into the farmhouse, and had their own firmly entrenched holiday rituals, with my niece’s family. Our traditions fell apart. Mom’s last Christmas of relative good health, I brought her to my house, and she was restless the entire visit and wanted to go home. The following summer she went into nursing care.

This is Mom’s fourth holiday season at The Haven. I’m thankful for the amazing staff there and for the way they dote on Mom and call her “Grams.” I’m grateful for my youngest sister who lives five minutes from The Haven and visits Mom almost every day. I’m grateful for my trips over, for the ferry ride from Edmonds to Kingston and for the lovely drive with its water views (and great blue herons and eagles). I’m grateful for the Hospice team, which has now stepped in to help with Mom’s care. 

Asking why my mother has had to go through this–questioning the fairness of it all–those are habits that I have had to let go of. It is what it is. I’m glad I have such a great mother. I’m glad I can still visit her. I’m glad I can write about her journey.

I’m also grateful for Annie Proulx’s acceptance speech for the National Book Award’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. You’ve probably seen it, as it’s had a lot of Social Media shares. It really does say it all. That Proulx included a poem by Wisława Szymborska, “Consolation,” is an added bonus.

 

Annie Proulx, 2017 winner of The National Book Award’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

Although this award is for lifetime achievement, I didn’t start writing until I was 58, so if you’ve been thinking about it and putting it off, well…

I thank the National Book Award Foundation, the committees, and the judges for this medal. I was surprised when I learned of it and I’m grateful and honored to receive it and to be here tonight, and I thank my editor Nan Graham, for it is her medal too.

To me the most distressing circumstance of the new order is the accelerating destruction of the natural world and the dreadful belief that only the human species has the inalienable right to life and God-given permission to take anything it wants from nature, whether mountaintops, wetlands or oil. The ferocious business of stripping the earth of its flora and fauna, of drowning the land in pesticides again may have brought us to a place where no technology can save us. I personally have found an amelioration in becoming involved in citizen science projects. This is something everyone can do. Every state has marvelous projects of all kinds, from working with fish, with plants, with landscapes, with shore erosions, with water situations.

Yet somehow the old discredited values and longings persist. We still have tender feelings for such outmoded notions as truth, respect for others, personal honor, justice, equitable sharing. We still hope for a happy ending. We still believe that we can save ourselves and our damaged earth—an indescribably difficult task as we discover that the web of life is far more mysteriously complex than we thought and subtly entangled with factors that we cannot even recognize. But we keep on trying, because there’s nothing else to do.

The happy ending still beckons, and it is in hope of grasping it that we go on. The poet Wisława Szymborska caught the writer’s dilemma of choosing between hard realities and the longing for the happy ending. She called it “consolation.”

Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax, 
but only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily. 
If he happened on something like that, 
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.

True or not, 
I’m ready to believe it.

Scanning in his mind so many times and places, 
he’s had enough with dying species, 
the triumphs of the strong over the weak, 
the endless struggle to survive, 
all doomed sooner or later. 
He’d earned the right to happy endings, 
at least in fiction,
with its micro-scales.

Hence the indispensable 
silver lining, 
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled, 
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded, 
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered, 
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways, 
good names restored, greed daunted, 
old maids married off to worthy parsons, 
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres, 
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs, 
seducers scurried to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted, 
pride humbled, wounds healed over, 
prodigal sons summoned home, 
cups of sorrow tossed into the ocean, 
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation, 
general merriment and celebration, 
and the dog Fido, 
gone astray in the first chapter, 
turns up barking gladly in the last.

Thank you.

Happy Thanksgiving to you from me. I hope you write.

What to Do When the Power Goes Off

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Ever since I returned home from Ireland, my daily life has contrived to present a series of insults that, in turn, have contrived to sabotage my writing life.

I had a very bad headache, probably sinus, that sent me to bed for a few days. Then we had some interesting drama around our daughters (you really don’t want details), and then the car accident, then the doctor appts., etc., plus the huge inconvenience of not having a car for a week (thank you, Annie darling, for sharing yours–though that meant I had to spend about half of every day driving people around). Now that I have a rental car, I thought my time would be freed up, and I can blame aforesaid appointments for part of the busyness I am still caught up in, and Emma’s not yet having a driver’s license. On top of those things, we’ve been without power, on and off, for two days.

And then, my mother. I’ve been to visit her twice in the last couple of weeks, and it looks like I’ll be headed back as soon as I can make some space (or her situation becomes more urgent).

Not that I want to be like the Puritan Divine who wrote in his spiritual autobiography, when his wife was ill, “The Lord has sorely tempted me with many trials.” I know that it is not always about me.

And what does any of this have to do with a writing blog? It’s just this:

This is your life.

Once upon a time I told my sister-in-law (who was a professor at Whitworth College, plus mother of three young adults around then), that I had decided to write my doctoral dissertation when my twins started kindergarten. “It will be easier then.” Her eyebrows went up, her eyes widened. “It will be different when they start school,” she told me, “when they are older–but it will not be easier.”

When your writing powers seem to be stuck on the “off” position, it’s up  you to write anyway.  Don’t put off writing until some magical time in the future when you have more time. Don’t expect future-you to be better organized, better motivated, or better…in any way. If you want to write, write now. If you can’t write a lot, write a little. Break it down into the smallest possible steps. Open your notebook and pick up your pen or get your laptop out. Set your timer. Some people advocate rewards; I like bribes (a latte at a coffee shop being my go-to bribe).

And if you haven’t signed up for my PDF, “A Writer’s Alchemy,” please do so–it offers seven days of my blathering on about how to write every day.

 

 

Stuff Happens

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But bad stuff does happen. Wednesday evening, for instance, while my 18-year-old and I were on our way to a homework date, another car slammed into ours in a parking lot. The driver wasn’t able to explain why she was zipping along so fast. Our car had to be towed, and we were lucky it wasn’t worse. (My daughter’s life flashed before my eyes; I’m still shaking.)

It certainly feels bad to me, but when a friend said, “Maybe you should blog about it,” I decided that, wishing away the fact of the thing wasn’t helping, and I remembered that writing could help.

Writing always helps me find some objectivity, to hold things at arm’s length and look at it. But writing can help me process feelings, too, not so much “at arm’s length,” but bringing them up close and holding them. There’s probably an analogy here between that sensation and the way the accident happened in a split second and in slow motion.

There’s also something to scribble about in the way all those intense feelings flooded back when Emma texted from school the next day that her back hurt and she couldn’t take a deep breath. I want to remember the kindness of the woman at our clinic who stayed on the phone with me until she found us an appointment. The doctor who examined me, too, and said, “Get a massage; you need it for the tight muscles in your neck and shoulder, and you need to have a good cry.”

Many years ago I heard the poet Chana Bloch tell about the range of emotions she went through when she learned that she had cancer. I also remember how beatific she looked, repeating for our benefit, “I am going to live through this, and I am going to write about it.”

Stuff happens. And even the bad stuff becomes material, for a writer. But first you have to figure out how to get through it.

 

 

 

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig!

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The only complaint I can make about my trip to Ireland is that it was too short. Nonetheless, in two weeks time, Carla and managed to squeeze in an amazing amount of touring, sight-seeing, and poetry. I thought that I would blog about it, my very first day back, and the next…and the next. But it was just too overwhelming to process, and what should I focus on?

An Exercise for the Overwhelmed Writer

When my students felt overwhelmed by a subject, I used to assign an exercise in which they had to list ten things they could put into a piece of writing, you know, if they were really going to get down to it. It works for an ordinary day (it’s a Heather Sellers‘ exercise), so let’s see how it manages to contain my two-week sojourn:

  1. After landing in Dublin on Sept. 29, we drove (all day!) to Castletownbere, which is the largest fishing port in the country. My first Irish Coffee (in Ireland, that is) was imbibed that evening at MacCarthy’s Bar (which happens to grace the cover of this book).
  2. The next day, we hiked up to a stone circle — “20 minutes” our B ‘n B host said. It took us 2 1/2 hours, and according to my fitbit, we walked 5 miles, all told. But, worth it. It was our first up-close introduction to Irish sheep and cows and stone fences. And the pied wagtail.
  3. Although we weren’t successful at finding a poetry reading (as advertised) on the Beara peninsula, we had better luck on our second night, in Cork. The reading began with part two of a Poetry Slam contest, held above a pub, rather late at night. After that, an open mike allowed us to share our work. Four young American poets were also there and read, and a host of Irish poets. And, yes, the next day we visited Blarney Castle and, yes, I did kiss the Blarney Stone.
  4. Everywhere we stayed, we had a great experience with our Air B n’ B choice, and in Limerick what made it special was Emmett at Nelly’s Corner Cafe. (Did I not take a picture of him?) He was always there, no matter what time we stumbled in, and introduced us to black and white pudding, plus the most amazing cappuccino’s. He pointed us toward St. Mary’s Cathedral (the oldest building in Ireland still used for its original purpose), and King John’s Castle, which, if a bit commercialized, gave us a thumbnail history of Irish oppressions. 
  5. In Limerick, on Oct. 4, we attended the “Make a Joyful Noise” poetry reading and open mic. Featured readers were Michael Gallagher and Lorraine Carey.
  6. Listowel deserves a longer stop — as they host a full-on literary festival every May. I was pretty delighted with the Listowel Writers’ Center (I want one in my neighborhood), complete with barista.
  7. In Sligo we stayed with Durkan and Nicola at an Air BnB waaayy off the beaten path. The house was built in the 1790s, and was preceded by another manor house, and before that, by a castle. I asked, innocently, “So your family has lived here since the 1790’s?” “Our family has lived on this land since 243,” I was solemnly informed.
  8. We had done a lot of driving that day (“Mad. Certifiably mad,” Durkan said when we told him how far), so we almost talked ourselves out of finding the open mic down in Sligo town. But we decided to go — and once again it was amazing and unique and we were glad to be there. The Illuminations Poetry Reading, hosted by Patrick Curley, met in The Bookmart and the readers and audience squeezed in amid the books to read poems and excerpts of plays.
  9. On our drive from Galway (could do a whole post on the nightlife there) to Belfast, we detoured to the coast to find breakfast, and happened upon the mythical island of Hy-Brasil. Later I purchased a book of poems by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and found that she had written a series of poems about the island. There was something magical afoot on this entire drive — including a labyrinth, and the ruins of a 15th century Abbey at Fenagh.
  10. About Belfast in Northern Ireland, just Titanic. Also amazing food, great pubs, and so much more that it really deserves its own top-ten list (as do all the items here). And for Dublin, ditto. Both of these are international cities with a million things on offer. In Dublin we walked through St. Stephen’s Green; we saw Ulysses at the Abbey Theatre; we went to Trinity College and spent a blissed-out hour with the Book of Kells and other manuscripts; we had tea with Carla’s professor (from 54 years ago!), Dr. Maurice Harmon, and his wife, Moira (a true highlight in a trip full of highlights); we shopped for sweaters. We visited bookstores and listened to really bad poetry. We found Harry Potter in Irish. We were…overwhelmed.

    What One Writes Next

The next step in this exercise is to choose one item and begin again. You can start by listing ten things just pertaining to that item (a useful strategy if the overwhelm continues), or you can simply begin writing.

Thank you for sticking with me this far. I’m sure I’ll have more to share with you, stay tuned!