Picture This

As the lavatory stall to the world, Facebook is a conundrum. It's a veritable mindsuck, but it's also a font of information. Often, Facebook is where I get a head's-up on the latest news-- the recent deaths of poets Lucille Clifton and Ai, for example, well before their respective obituaries appeared in the New York Times.

Facebook is also how I linked to this story, having completely missed it in that day's Times. The entry that accompanied the link was roundly dismissive of the twits who post photo blogs of the food they eat, especially the ones who do it daily. Now I'm not a regular follower of any of these blogs, but I happen to like food pictures. The Big Boy in my hometown in Michigan featured a photo of strawberry pie that would make you howl at the moon (failing that reaction, you might order a piece). Frankly, the pie was terrible--the crust was gluey and the strawberry filling was so sweet it made your teeth ache--but the picture was delicious.

I've never before posted a picture of food (at least, not deliberately), probably because most of what I make looks like dog food. But when I made this plate of bruschetta last weekend, I had to take a picture of it before I ate it. I like how the red tomatoes look on the yellow Fiestaware plate, next to the blue wineglass, and the napkin and the crazy-colored table. After I took the picture, I ate some and I was happy and full, and it occurred to me that food should make us feel that way all the time, instead of guilty and full of loathing. That "bad" is a word we should reserve for wars and for disease and for people who hurt other people--not apply to ourselves because we ate a chocolate chip cookie.

Yes, Spring . . .

The forsythia is out, the daffodils are up and the blog is emerging from its winter hibernation. Aside from three sinus infections, I actually enjoyed winter, particularly the four Wednesdays in January when I hosted the All Write! winter workshop in my house (half the class, hard at work, is featured in the photo). I've typically found January, not April, to be the cruelest month, but not this year. The camaraderie and level of work that was shared by the group was absolutely inspiring. The wine and snacks were pretty good, too.

At any rate, I've decided to host two new classes for spring: Poetry Boot Camp and Little Lies/Little Truths. The classes are designed to get you writing through a series of in-class prompts, with a little discussion of craft tossed in for good measure.

I've included times and rates below. If you're interested in reserving a spot in one of the classes, post your response below.

Poetry Boot Camp: Four Nights/Sixteen Poems

Four Wednesdays: May 12, 19, 26 and June 2

Time: 6:45-8:45 p.m.

Limited to six participants

Fee: $125 (payable at the first class.

Little Lies/Little Truths: Writing Flash Fiction/Flash Nonfiction

Four Thursdays: May 6, 13, 20 and 27

Time: 6:45-8:45 p.m.

Limited to six participants

Fee: $125 (payable at the first class)

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.