The Defiant Ones

A student wrote me an e-mail the other day apologizing because he was dropping the creative nonfiction class I'm teaching. He'd really enjoyed the first four weeks, he wrote, but his course load was too heavy and so he was dropping the class, but he "defiantly" hoped that he could take it sometime, maybe next semester.

I wrote him back and said I'd be happy to have him back in class if he "definitely" wanted to be there. But not "defiantly."

These days the news is full of the H1N1 virus. But I'm more concerned about the "don't read/can't write/ can't spell" epidemic affecting the youth of America, most particularly the ones I teach. Each year, it seems, I'm spending less and less time on the creative aspects of writing, more so on the writing skills these kids should have mastered in junior high. Sure, it's great when a kid understands, by the end of a semester, that the big letter goes at the beginning of the sentence and the little dot at the end. That's progress. But if I'm supposed to be teaching them to construct a compelling narrative with personal and universal appeal, I'm not able to do so. You can't build a house using only a screwdriver. And if you can't write a sentence, you can't write. Period.

Defiantly so ....

This Sporting Life

I still dream of being a sportswriter, and the dreams are always bad. Most often they’re deadline dreams where I can’t find my computer or I’ve lost my game notes. Where I show up for a game long after it’s over. Where someone is yelling at me over the telephone and I hang up and quit. Trust me, they’re awful. It’s been twenty-two years since I wrote my last newspaper story and I still have the dreams.

Most of my dreams have one foot in reality. Contrary to popular belief, being a sportswriter is hard work. You work late and get up early. You work on holidays and weekends and spend a lot of time on airplanes or waiting for one. (A friend of mine joked that she knew it was time to retire when she went to a friend’s house for dinner and reached for her seatbelt). Also, you don’t get to turn off the TV when the game gets ridiculous. You have to sit around long after the carnage is over and figure out how to frame a compelling narrative for an awful game.

I can’t speak to how the profession is now, but it used to be a lot harder for women. There was the locker room thing, of course. The doors opened grudgingly, often as a result of legal challenges, and once inside, I learned to follow a code of etiquette in order to survive. I learned to look up, never down, at a gigantic naked man. After skidding off a piece of wet tape and nearly falling, I learned never to wear heels. I learned, as poor Lisa Olson evidently did not, never, ever to sit and be idle, lest I be accused of peeping. And I learned from a Now-Famous Veteran Reporter how to deal with a gigantic naked man who insisted on flashing me whenever I came within whiffing distance. “Tell him you’ve seen better burritos on a Chihuahua,” NFVR counseled me.

I started thinking about all this after reading the “Fifth Down Blog, ”a regular interactive feature in the online edition of the New York Times. In this particular blog, readers posed questions for Judy Battista, the paper’s beat reporter for the Jets. “K in MD,” for example, wondered whether clock management “is a quarterback issue or a coaching issue? I ask this after watching Chad Pennington’s problems in the last two minutes last week.” Ian, meanwhile, asked Ms. Battista’s opinion of rookie quarterback Mark Sanchez, whether he can replicate “the success of Joe Flacco and Matt Ryan in their rookie season.”

Not surprisingly, her answers were comprehensive and thorough. The real surprise for me was the implicit level of respect accorded to her by her questioners. And yeah, okay, I realize the blog is refereed by NYT editors to circumvent the occasional nutball who might believe a woman’s place is in the home, not the press box. But I wager to say that if blogs had existed a quarter century ago when I covered sports, there would have been a lot more “It’s back to the kitchen for you, girlie,” instead of a mutually respectful dialogue between reporter and reader.

Evolution?

Novel Issues. . . .

Unstuck again. Full speed ahead.

A Good Yarn, Part II

A Diet High in Fiber

One of the best things about living up here on

the North Coast of the United State is our proximity to diverse landscapes. Go north a few miles and you'll hit the south shore of Lake Ontario. Go west and you'll enter the Niagara Escarpment. Go south and east and you'll more than likely come across one of the eleven Finger Lakes. If you look at a map, you'll see the lakes resemble the thin fingers of an invisible hand spread across Western New York. But I like to imagine the lakes were created when a giant's hand came down out of the sky and raked his fingers through the earth.

In addition to being the second-largest wine region in the United States, the lakes are also home to a number of fiber artists, many of whom took part in last weekend's Finger Lakes Fiber Arts Festival in Hemlock. My sister Penny and I drove down on Sunday and spent

a couple of hours fondling the most beautiful yarn I'd ever seen or felt, most of it hand-dyed and spun. We also petted a couple of alpacas (they have very soft necks) and held a huge white angora bunny. We dropped in on a sheep herding demonstration, where (as my sister pointed out) it seemed like the dog was having a lot more fun than the sheep. In fact, the sheep reminded me a little of my students at the end of a long semester ("What? This shit again?"). They were hilarious, but my favorite animal, hands-down, was the goat in the picture above, who seemed fascinated by a toddler in a stroller. I think he looks like Jeff Spicoli, the Sean Penn character from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." What do you think?

I bought two skeins of sale yarn. But I could have spent a fortune.

The Tangled Skein

Writing last week was crappy. Really. For four days straight, I showed up and banged away at the keys only to end up deleting most of what I wrote. Nothing is more frustrating. I compare it to knitting where you realize you made a REALLY OBVIOUS mistake on an intricate cable pattern three inches ago and so, in order to live with yourself and start sleeping at night again, you just have to rip it out.

But there's another analogy between writing and knitting that I call "the tanged skein." If it sits around long enough, yarn has a mysterious way of getting tangled up. Before you can start knitting again, you have to sit down and untangle the skein. It's tedious and takes patience, but if you stick with it, you get to a place where the yarn seems to smooth itself out and fall away from the skein the way it's supposed to.

I think writing is like that, too. Often you have to go back to where the knot is--the line in the poem that doesn't work, or the character action in a story that feels out of character or forced-- and undo the tangle. In writing, this means delete, move stuff around, start again: whatever works. Eventually you write yourself right.

If all else fails, you can knit.

A Good Yarn

My Name is Sarah and I'm a Knitter . . . .

I posted a picture of my cats on Facebook a couple weeks ago and got some interesting comments. Some sharp-eyed readers honed in on the plastic bins the cats were sitting on, more specifically, what was in those bins.

Yes, it's yarn. Yes, I knit.

God, I feel so much

better now that that's out.

Actually, I've been knitting on and off for most of my life, but I took it up more consistently in 1984. That was the year I quit smoking (cigarettes) and needed something to do with my hands that wasn't lighting and/or stubbing out Newports. So knitting it was. I knit sweaters for myself, my sisters, my mother, and my friends. I knit mittens and gloves and hats and scarves and when I wasn't knitting, I was chewing on my knitting needles because I so badly wanted to smoke a cigarette. Eventually that addiction faded away, but I've kept knitting, especially in the fall. How else can I excuse my addiction to NFL on CBS or the baseball playoffs?

Last year I knit my three sisters and five of my friends fingerless gloves in all colors of the spectrum. This year, in an effort to be kind to the environment and to my bank account, I'm going to knit a multi-colored blanket using scrap yarn in my bins, donations from friends, and recycled wool from thrift shop sweaters. I plan to knit until the end of the year and will blog my progress at various times, with pictures.

The Other Yarn

Revision on the novel is progressing nicely. I finished the Section I on Thursday and will begin to tackle Section 2, the part I wrote this summer, tomorrow.

I've been revising poems as well. Such fun . . .

Home Again, Home Again

Goodbye to All That . . .

In Western New York, seasons do not arrive or depart according to a calendar date. You learn not to expect spring on March 21, but weeks later, with the appearance of the first daffodil or forsythia buds. On the upside, summer usually makes an appearance long before June 21 while the downside is the possibility of snow on Halloween. In fact, that’s happened three times in the 18 years I’ve lived here.

My summer this year started on May 1, when I opened a blank page on my computer and typed “Part II.” A couple hundred pages later, I finished the first draft of a novel, as well as a dozen or so first drafts of poems I may or may not renovate. Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, I didn’t have to be a Kelly Girl or part-time professor. I got to be a writer for four straight months and I’ve loved every second of it.

While we’re still more than three weeks from the first day of fall on the calendar, there are signs that autumn is already here: last weekend’s long line of cars in front of the dorms at the University of Rochester, for example. The ripe beefsteak tomato on my fire escape garden. The temperature that feels more football than baseball The perceptible difference in the light at the end of the day—no longer the white heat of summer, but the gold of autumn.

Damn. I’m not ready for this summer to end.

Mad Dash Home

My residency in Nebraska City ended on August 7 and rather than going south to visit a friend of long-standing in Illinois, I decided to drive to my dad’s house—what my mother used to call a “mad dash home.” I don’t know exactly what constitutes an MDH in time and/or distance, but it pretty much means driving a very long way in one day to get HOME. Which is what I did. After dropping a fellow resident off at the Omaha airport, I pointed my car east on Interstate 80 and drove the 700-hundred odd miles from Nebraska to Michigan. Except for a driving rain that followed me through Iowa and western Illinois, a massive traffic jam west of Joliet, and the general yuck around Chicago, it was just fine.

Admittedly, a little mad, though. I’m a driving fool.

A Trip Through Life

The last day of my residency, I went Dinty Moore's for lunch. DM’s is a tiny little Nebraska City institution consisting of an old oak bar, two fans that would probably do very well on “Antiques Roadshow,” and the best shredded beef sandwiches I’ve ever tasted. Now I don’t do a lot of beef, but when in Rome, you must eat beef with the Romans. Or something . . . .

Anyhow, the waitress/bartender. Linda, asked me where I was from and when I told her I lived in Western New York, she said she’d never been there, but she’d like to visit some day because she’d heard the Finger Lakes were beautiful. “But you know,” she said, “I think every place has its own beauty. You just have to be able to see it.”

I started writing this as a travel blog about my trip to and from Nebraska. And so, since life is a trip, I’ll keep on writing about the places it takes me. Try to see the beauty that’s there.

Downs and Ups, and Sign, Signs, Everywhere There's Signs

Downs and Ups and Are

 We There Yet?

In my family, the words "remember the time when . . . " will usually spin off into a story about something that happened when we were young, often on one of our yearly family vacations. Not long ago, my father was reminiscing about the trip we took to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Now, it's important to add here that the Upper Peninsula is Michigan in name only. I think I heard once that if Car 1 started driving south from the Michigan/Ohio line at exactly the same time that Car 2 headed north from the same point, Car 1 would arrive in Atlanta, Georgia, long before Car 2 hit the northernmost tip of the Upper Peninsula at Copper Harbor. 

This may be an urban myth and/or geographically incorrect, but it illustrates the point nicely that Copper Harbor is UP THERE and FAR AWAY. And to four kids under the age of nine, driving the length of the UP seemed like forever, probably even longer to my poor parents. Upon arriving late at the small motel/restaurant where we were staying in Copper Harbor, my dad asked the owner whether it would be possible to order peanut butter sandwiches for the kids and two cold martinis for the adults. "I think I can do that," she said.

I don't remember, but I'm pretty sure we asked the question "Are we there yet?" a time or two during the drive that day, a question I've asked myself a lot recently as I sat down to write. So I'm happy to report that on Monday, August 3, at approximately 3:13 p.m. Central Daylight Savings Time, I arrived at the end of the first draft of my novel: 416 pages in all. 

I like to tell my students that writing is a lot of downs and ups: You get it down, then you fix it up. I have a lot of fixing up to do, but for now, I'm going to enjoy the moment. And maybe celebrate later with a glass of Champagne.

Signs, Signs . . . . 

I had to include this photo of last month's sign in front of the First Baptist Church.  

About that Champagne  . . . 

I searched this town for a glass or a split of Champagne (i.e., anything bubbly and fortified). No glasses, only bottles. So the toast is on hold.

 

A Winery in Nebraska, Poetic Closure, and Are We There Yet?

A Winery in Nebraska

Since it's been nearly a week since I'd driven more than three miles at a time, a Saturday road trip was in order. After consulting my map and several pamphlets on local attractions, I pointed my car south and headed down Highway 75 toward Brownville, Nebraska. It's a tiny town shouldering the Missouri River, but one with a big and rich history. As with most river towns here, Lewis and Clark figure prominently in that history, but more recently, the town has become a haven for art galleries and bookstores. They're located along the town's main street in old, old brick and frame buildings. Being a bookstore addict, I visited several and came away with a now out-of-print poetry book, Collecting for the Wichita Beacon, by William Kloefkorn, a terrific Nebraska poet.

I took my new book down the road to the Whiskey Run Creek Winery. I bought a glass of chardonel and took it outside to the deck where I read poetry, listened to the waterfall and watched a cardinal tangle with a worm. The winery's main building is a 100-year-old barn that was moved 18 miles to its present location in 2001. Take a moment and click on the link above to read the entire history and view pictures of the move.

Driving back, I crossed the river into Missouri and took Interstate 29 into Iowa and then west on Highway 2 into Nebraska. Three states in thirty minutes . . . 

Poetic Closure

When does a poem end? And how will it end? In fire or in ice . . . oh, wait, that's the world.  But back to those questions. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard "this poem isn't finished yet," I could pay my Sprint bill for the next year. That's a lot of nickels. And that's why, from 9-9:50 on Thursday morning, I sat in with a couple dozen MFA students from Nebraska-Omaha and listened to Bill Trowbridge's lecture on poetic closure, aptly entitled "Are We There Yet?" He started by relating the story of how, when he was a kid, his father hated that question. Hated it. So much so that on one family trip, when they were within one hundred miles of the Grand Canyon and The Question was posed yet again, the dad turned the car around and drove all the way back to Omaha. 

While this isn't an option for concluding most poems, Trowbridge did discuss ways in which poets could end poems: the lid-snapping closure, anti-closure, the snaps-shut-but-still-surprising closure. He distributed handouts with great examples and included one of my favorite all-time endings, the one to James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota." Check it out for yourself and see if that ending doesn't surprise you just a bit.

Are We There Yet?

Almost! I'm figuring the first draft will be complete by Tuesday. I may even type up one or two of the wanna-be poems currently soiling my notebook.

 

 

Swimming Alone, Dining Together and More Pie

Swimming Alone

I don't know about other writers, but I do know that I need some sort of daily physical activity other than typing (picking my cuticles while I wait for the next line to emerge doesn't count). For me, that form of activity is swimming, and on the days I don't swim, I try to walk. Magical things happen when you leave your computer and start to move. Your brain doesn't shut off exactly, but it does relax and when your brain relaxes, I've found creativity really kicks in. It's often after a good workout that I do my best writing. 

Anyhow, I love to swim outside during the summer, so I was happy to discover the Steinhart Park Pool here in Nebraska City. One dollar entitles you to swim laps from noon to 1 p.m. I went for the first time Wednesday and for the entire hour, I was the only swimmer in a seven-lane, fifty-meter pool. I asked the lifeguard afterward if this was the exception rather than the norm. "Nope," she said. "Hardly anyone swims laps." 

That's the pool. Steinhart Lodge, built in 1949, overlooks the pool. It's part of Arbor Day festivities here in Nebraska City, which is the home of the Arbor Day Foundation.

Dining Together

For the past two nights, the other residents and I have done dinner together. On Wednesday, we went to a Mexican resident, El Portal, for dinner and drinks and last night, we cooked out on our patio. Erica, one of the visual artists in residence, made a delicious salsa from ingredients she'd bought that afternoon at a small farm market. The other visual artist, Neva, grilled brats and corn on the cob (also fresh from the farm market). Food has never tasted better.

Pie and More Pie

This has to be the pie capital of the world! There were five--count 'em--five kinds of pies on display at the farm market and more to be found at Arbor Day Farm, where they grow apples and grapes. Not all of them are as towering as Chris' (see earlier entry), but they're all tasty.

I'm on the next to the last chapter of the first draft of my novel. Have also drafted a couple new poems that might be keepers.

Killer Tired, Pie, and Thrift Shops

Greetings from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Arts Center in Nebraska City, Nebraska, my home away from home for the next couple weeks. That's our front entrance 

(above) and the window immediately to the right is our living room and kitchen. It's across the street from the First Baptist Church, whose sign is currently featuring the message: "You think life is exciting -- wait 'til you die." 

There's a poem there someplace . . . Stephen Dunn would know what to do with it, I'm sure.

Yesterday, I finally got to do what I'm supposed to be doing for the next two weeks, which is write. I wrote four pages on the first draft of the novel I've been working on (and off for the past couple years) and scribbled some wannabe poems in my notebook. I did all this despite being killer tired, but it was the good kind of tired where, if I wanted to, I could have crawled in bed for a serious nap or else done a power quickie. Contrast that with the bad kind of tired, which hits you midway through a tough day at work so that by 1 p.m. you're thinking that if someone offered you the choice of a nap or a million bucks, you'd take the nap. 

I'm thinking that driving halfway across the country is exhilarating, but also way tiring. So I wrote a lot and yawned a lot. I also moved around a lot, which helped. I moved from my office to my bedroom where I sat on the bed and typed and then to the patio where the stray kitten kept me company. He also kept me awake by periodically pouncing on my toes, perhaps thinking that they were some kind of exotic white sausage.

Yesterday was also the birthday of Denise, the center's director, so the four resident artists along with Denise and Pat, the center's assistant director, walked up to Chris's Cafe for pie and coffee to celebrate. The chocolate and lemon meringue pies were architectural wonders--in fact, they brought to mind the photos I've seen of the opera house in Sydney, Australia. In a word, towering! Afterward, the other artists and I walked down the street to a thrift store where I bought this full-length Ralph Lauren sweater coat for three dollars. I now have a reason to look forward to fall.

After two days of clouds and showers, the sun is out: I plan to write all morning and then go for a swim. 

From the Mississippi to the Missouri ...

Greetings from Nebraska City, Nebraska, where I'm spending the next couple of weeks on a writing residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. There are four of us in residence right now, five if you count the stray kitten that sleeps on my patio: two painters, a composer and me. I'm not sure yet what the kitten's talent is.

After fueling up at a great breakfast buffet at the Kingsley Inn, I started on the third and final leg of my journey on Sunday. I'd contemplated driving north to DesMoines to see Edward Hopper's "Automat" at the art museum. But a glance at the map convinced me that it was too far out of my way and after nearly sixteen hours of driving in the previous two days, I wanted just to get there. And so, after a walk along the Mississippi River, I headed out on Highway Two, a scenic two-lane highway that crosses the state from east to west. Along the way, I saw only two McDonald's (good), hills and wildflowers (even better) and too many wild turkeys to count--the bird, not the drink. The wild turkeys I saw tended to huddle in gangs by the side of the road and glare at me--somewhat malevolently, I thought.  That could have been because I was the only car on the road for miles. I also saw a quail or two and dozens of hawks dive-bombing the farmer's fields in search of small mammals. Iowa Public Radio broadcasted both hours of Bob Edward's show--a real treat to hear, as we don't get it in Rochester. I also listened to the Cardinals get thrashed by the Phillies in Philadelphia and lots of Foreigner-Journey-Kansas-Boston on an oldies station. More than a feeling . . . 

I stopped for gas in a small town where the gas station bathroom featured a sign on the door designating it as a safe place in a tornado-- somewhat ironic, since the tornado action during the weekend was in Western New York. 

After that beautiful drive across Iowa, I crossed the Missouri River into Nebraska City, Nebraska, around 3:30 in the afternoon and checked in at the Lied Lodge & Conference Center. 

As stated in their literature, the lodge is environmentally friendly, heated and cooled with renewable fuelwood that's grown on the grounds. It's also gorgeous, if you like Stickley furniture and Craftsman decor, which I do. The lobby (pictured here) was a nice place to sit and type on my computer. As an added bonus, students from the University of Nebraska's low residency MFA program are currently in residence here and there are faculty lectures each night. I hope to catch William Trowbridge's lecture on Thursday--he's the author of The Complete Kong, which contains one of my favorite poems, "Kong Looks Back on His Tryout With the Bears." 

More about that and the residency tomorrow.

Greetings from the road

Greetings from Fort Madison, Iowa! I'm officially west of the Mississippi River by about a hundred yards, having crossed over from Illinois last night. I'm on my way to Nebraska City, Nebraska, for a two-week residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts where I hope to draft more poems and finish a first draft of my novel. Rather than fly into Omaha, I decided to make the journey part of the experience and write about it.

Friday, I drove from Rochester to my father's house in Michigan (above) and yesterday, I made the drive from Michigan to Fort Madison. It's a little off the (very) beaten path of Interstate 80, but the drive here was much more scenic, if longer. I listened to two baseball games on the radio--the Cubs beat the Reds in an early afternoon game and the Tigers came back in ninth to tie the game and win in extra innings. I was chasing the game on the White Sox network and needless to say, the announcers were less than pleased that the White Sox essentially blew a chance to pick up a game on the Tigers.

I'm staying at the Kingsley Inn in Fort Madison, an old Victorian building built in the 1850s that faces the river. It's named after Alpha Kingsley, an army officer from Vermont who supervised the building of the actual Fort Madison. One of my ancestors on the Freligh side, John Henry Freligh was also from Vermont and he became a riverboat captain on the Mississippi. Not to hard to imagine that passed this way a time or two.

I'm off to find breakfast and take some pictures of the river, which I'll post tomorrow.

Fourth of July

Happy Fourth of July from the North Coast! This is the first of a series of posts from my new blog, named for my book of poems, Sort of Gone, published in February 2008 by Turning Point Books in Cincinnati, but also named for the state of mind writers enter when they're working well. You're there in whatever place you're writing--home desk, Starbucks, bed--but you're sort of gone to whatever place one goes to when you're writing. 

I can't think of a place I'd rather be!