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.