"Painting into Light"

"Painting into Light" is an art exhibition at Guilford College in Greensboro, a one-man show by my friend George Wingate.

Thursday night Bob and I went to the campus to hear the artist talk about his work. George was his intriguingly digressive, imaginative, thoughtful self, before a packed SRO house. I didn't take notes and couldn't begin to quote from his outpourings.

But there was a line on the wall in his artist's statement that is well worth passing on:

"It took a long time to discover that one can't make a career out of being somebody else. I still have to fight being somebody else. The artist even has to fight to not be what he/she was yesterday."

George was in high school with Husband Bob, which would make him approximately 67 years old. And he has been a full-time artist for decades, with his work on the cover of American Artist and well and lengthily reviewed in the New York Times. He's still engaged in a daily wrestle.

If you are too, you're in good company.





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Fueling Fiction With Gossip

A bit of frivolity that I've recently found to help my writing: stopping now and then to glance at one of my favorite gossip blogs.

Lately while working on revisions on my novel, I've found myself fairly frequently taking five-minute breaks to look at Jossip or Gawker, two of my vices.

On the face of it, this seems like a stupid thing to do. But the kind of revising I'm doing is tackling one small knotty problem after another. And about every third one, I hit a wall. So I indulge in a few minutes of gossip. And often I've come back to my novel with a new perspective on what I'm writing. In a few instances, a good specific usable idea has come to me while I indulged in media-celebrity gossip.

I'd been allowing myself to do this recently with good results. And then by chance, while looking for an endorsable link on procrastination, I found and linked to a site yesterday that makes a pitch for this kind of small break. I'm not the only one to find that it works. So here's the link again on what's billed here as "work avoidance behavior," even though it's not.

BTW, it's not gossip websites I'm necessarily promoting, instead the fact that small seemingly self-indulgent and procrastinatory breaks can be very productive.





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Best Business Practice

What's the best bold action I could take today? That's the question I just now asked myself. First, not getting into a dither about what constitutes best.

Then what?

Here's what it comes to: working on my novel, as I did yesterday and the day before.... Each day briefly unnerving to begin. Sometimes that sensation is no more than a hair wide. Sometimes larger. But always within twenty minutes the creaky hesitation goes away, and I wonder how I could have ever felt it and am sure that I'll never encounter it again.

Likely that companionable moment of unease is just a signal that this is what's important for me to do. Higher stakes than running a load of laundry or getting together the numbers for my taxes. So maybe I should welcome that friendly agitating signal.

And now to my novel, my dharma... I doubt if any of us have to search very long to discover the real work of the day.



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Not Bold: Identity Theft

Someone extremely close to me just had his identity stolen, his email hacked into, and his address list dunned for money. The message that went out to his whole list claimed he was stranded in London and so please wire $4,000 immediately.

One good clue: The letter-writer clearly wasn't entirely at home in English.

Then a second identity theft message said: this is not a scam, I'm seriously in trouble, send the money.

Well, I can't imagine anyone did--though he did get thoughtful responses from his friends, patients, children, ex-wife, and someone he hadn't seen since high school.

Turns out that the creative letter-writer is in Nigeria with a bank account at the ready in London. (Why is Nigeria the world scamming-business headquarters, when there are a number of other places with some dishonest people who need money? See L.A. Times profile "Nigerian Cyber Scammers." For a non-cyber view: a friend of mine grew up in Nigeria and still misses the country. see her wonderful book: The Gods of Noonday, which is one of the most beautiful tributes to a river I've ever read.)

Here is my message to these multi-national Nigeria-based Keystone Krooks: Get your own identity and then maybe some money will follow. Be yourself. Long-term, it's a much better strategy.




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House Guest Heroism

I think it takes a fair amount of the ordinary daily kind of boldness to be or to host a house guest.

Not everyone feels that way, I know. (My office partner, for one, is ever keeping visiting actors or musicians or exchange students for weeks and months at a time without even thinking to mention it at lunch.)

But for those several of us who retain any shred of worry about being fully known or (worse for me) the possibility of imposing on someone, the house guest business does take some gathering of nerve.

The last couple of days, Husband Bob's best buddy from his youth has been visiting from Wenham, Mass. A painter, George Wingate has an art show at nearby Guilford College. Hanging with George has been delightful. Imagine if the hyper-articulate and thoughtful Wm. Buckley had been liberal and better-looking. George is fascinating to talk with. I was very sorry to see him go.

At the same time, I always feel that I, and anyone faced with the state of my towels and Bob's insistence on reusing tea leaves, deserve some sort of human relations merit badge. It's good practice for larger negotiations.



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Blood Done Sign My Name

Saturday night I went to see a one-man play based on the nonfiction book Blood Done Sign My Name, the story of a racial conflict and killing of a young black man in Oxford, NC, back when author Tim Tyson was living there as a young son of a liberal minister.

His book, a bestseller that deserves to be, began when he, now an American studies historian at Duke, went back to Oxford to do some research and dig into what happened.

First example of boldness: to go to the small town where the white accused was acquitted and interview people about what they saw. (The anger at Tyson is still hot.)

Second example of boldness: to be the liberal minister (Vernon Tyson) holding a bi-racial service in a town divided by segregation and violence.

Third example of boldness: to live day to day as the mother of young black men, as does psalmist Mary D. Williams who sang gospel for the play. To be one of any minority group that isn't surprised by injustice.

Seeing the play made me think again about my rage when Blue Cross treated me unfairly recently. That kind of treatment I think of as simply unacceptable; as my mother used to say to her misbehaving children, "We're not going to have that." (That edict extended even to having diseases and once to having a hurricane.) My daily expectation is that injustice is behavior that "will not do."

For myself, I unthinkingly expect straight-up dealings because I have always been so privileged. Any exception to that is a shocking event.

And yet I grew up seeing and not-seeing and being a silent part of that kind of injustice during legally segregated years in Wilmington (where the racial violence occurred that makes up the last section of Blood Done Sign My Name.)

I read the book years ago, after my brother Harry read it and said: you have to read this. If you haven't already, do. And if Mike Wiley's one-man performance of 17 different roles in this story happens to play near you, be sure to see it. If you're like me, your eyes need constant re-awaking.




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You Gotta Be Bold to Be Old

I've just come back from taking care of my mother for a couple of days after some minor surgery. I was struck once again by the courage required to face the various adventures of aging.

Mom's actually quite sturdy at 86; the stories she tells are what make me aware of the perilous nature of being old. She's developed a sort of gallows humor to deal with some of it: tells a very funny and hair-raising and sad story about going out to lunch with two friends, one with Alzheimer's and the other with emphysema, breathing oxygen from a tank.

Bottom line: while she was trying to get the forgetful one to her house, the other one started running out of oxygen, and they were still ten miles from that woman's home. So Mom drove the ten miles at enormous speed hoping that a cop would see them and help, or that they'd get there in time.

They got there in time. The friend who got the oxygen lived several more months.

You gotta be bold and tough: either to be the one who's air or mind is running out, or the one seeing her friends fall all around her. As stages of life go: it looks at least as hard as the worst of ninth grade.



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"Ordinary Courage"

A politician once told me, in talking about a panel he'd been on where some too-amazing stories were told, that he "hadn't had the opportunity to rescue any children from burning buildings lately."

Most of us haven't.

And yet, most of us do run into plenty of opportunities and needs for courage.

I just ran into a blog and website called "Ordinary Courage." I highly recommend it. Very different style than mine: Brené Brown, the head encourager there, writes with great warmth and at length, whereas I take a shorter and pithier approach to the some of the same subjects. But we share a philosophy.

From Ordinary Courage: "...speaking honestly and openly about who we and about our experiences (good and bad) is the ultimate act of courage. Heroics is often about putting your life on the line. Ordinary courage is about putting your vulnerability on the line. In today's world, that's pretty extraordinary. For me, practicing ordinary courage means telling my story with all of my heart."

Me, too.

Brown is the author of I Thought It Was Just Me , which is about shame, which can seriously get in the way of boldness.




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Secret of Happiness (Bold Title, Yes?)

“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” --Charles Kingsley, nineteenth century English minister who wrote The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby, as well as being chaplain to Queen Victoria.

Quoted on The Happiness Project

(The very thought of water babies makes me both happy and enthusiastic. And I'm not even a huge fan of "cute," but I do find delightful the idea of chubby young things paddling about in exotic mysterious realms.)





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Deep Sea Explorer

How many women who graduated in 1955 wind up a full-half century later as National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, a founder of a company that is designing an undersea vehicle to allow "full working access to the world's oceans?"

Often referred to as "Her Deepness," Sylvia Earle is highly likely the only one. And she is an outstanding example of BOLD. She has:

*done research 100 feet underwater while pregnant
*led an all-female group of researchers who lived underwater for two weeks (after being shut out of an earlier expedition with men because the organizers couldn't handle the coed deepsea dorm idea)
*explored sunken battleships of the South Pacific
*in 1979, "walked untethered on the sea floor at a lower depth than any living human being before or since"
*raised three children and published a dozen-plus books

If you want to make a small bold move on behalf of protecting oceans (like the Atlantic at Wrightsville Beach where I grew up): here are ten actions to choose from. Or do them all.









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Hostess and Guest

My 22 year-old nephew Walker and his girlfriend Caitlin, both UNC students, came over for lunch today. She had never been to our house.

From 9:30 until 1, Bob and I madly scurried, getting ready. Mostly that meant near-renovating our house. He took more than a wheelbarrowful of papers and books out of the kitchen and den, that all might have a place to sit.

I wouldn't call it hostess anxiety, but it was definitely host-and-hostess hurryup.

And I realized that when I was that age and going to visit boyfriend's family, it never occurred to me, while obsessing over what to wear, that BF's family might be engaged in the same minor uproar.

Similarly, when I was teaching at Duke in 07, I was nervous before class fairly often, very much so at the start of the semester. When I was a student at Duke in the 60s, it never crossed my mind that a professor might be scared. What a ridiculous idea!

I find it calming now to flip the situation around, to remember that the other person may also be in a dither.





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Rejection!

Oh, dear, oh, dear, I lost a Follower.

What that means is: there's some cyberspace way people can sign up to be Followers of particular blogs. I guess that means subscribers.

On my blog "dashboard," I can see how many this blog has.

Well, today I saw that this blog is DOWN ONE Follower.

I was stung.

Now this is ridiculous. I myself jump all over the web, I play the cyberfield without a second thought. Also, after 37 years as a freelance writer, I can get a book rejection and not even blink.

But here's the difference: this is new. I never lost a Follower before. It almost reminds me of the early shocks of my first manuscript rejections. Of not being asked to dance in eighth grade.

I'm glad I know from experience that rejection can become simply part of the process, without rocking me.

In the meantime, Follower, where are you? Is it something I said?







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About Creative Genius

A delightful discovery, recommended by friend Sabine: the TED site and its speaker series...and the talk on "A different way to think about creative genius" by Elizabeth Gilbert, the wildly successful author of, among others, Eat, Pray, Love, three verbs whose order I regularly forget.

TED is a conference that aims to present "the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes)." I never heard of it before today and I now feel I've hit pure cyberchocolate.

Gilbert's talk is about the burden of fear and responsibility that a lot of artists and writers carry because the culture no longer believes in muses and daemons, but puts the whole weight of performance on the poor struggling individual. She considers this situation "odious...and dangerous" and is very funny on the subject.

She compares her situation of writing another book at forty with her greatest success likely behind her to the difficulty of starting out as a writer, when the people you run into all say: aren't you terrified...?

She describes herself as a writer "as a mule," she just keeps on pulling.

The idea is: instead of having to be a genius, just do your job of writing, painting, or whatever; and welcome whatever inexplicable assistance shows up in the form of the genius that can occasionally visit any of us.

Go listen to her on the site. She makes this very relieving idea charmingly hilarious and companionable.




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Jump in Soul First

"The authentic self is the soul made visible."

Sarah Ban Breathnach

It does take courage to make one's soul visible. But why cover it up with something much less interesting and alive?



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The Kick of Giving

Just read a new book that could radically change the world if enough people paid attention. Could certainly do good things for the world of any one reader.

Kickback by Robert Urbanowski is a philosophical cousin of a book I co-authored, The Healing Power of Doing Good. Note Kickback's subtitle: "A remarkable new law reveals how you get what you want by putting others first."

It's short, persuasive, inspiring, and practical. Shows exactly how to live by this principle.

Here are a couple tidbits I particularly like:

"Successful people purposefully contribute to others in order to help people accomplish their objectives...In this way, contributors literally surround themselves with success. They can do this because they don't see other people as threats--they see other people as resources. This is true of very high achievers."

"We do not defeat evil--we displace evil by doing good."

"...The common element keeping us from contributing is fear. We are afraid that if we contribute, someone else will benefit more than us, we won't get a fair return for our efforts....However, what we fail to realize is that by failing to contribute all we can, we fail to become the person we can be."


If we do our "networking" with an eye toward how to help, we might even stimulate the economy.








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The Facebook 25: A Self-Portrait

On Facebook, which I find baffling, I've been "tagged" to tell 25 random facts about myself. (Facebook reminds me of the floor of the NC House of Representatives the first time I went there to cover a story as a reporter: people popping up randomly all over the place in one big room, busily clustering here and there, no main focus of interest.)

The person who tagged me, my dentist, sent her own list of 25 items--one of these being the lengthy list of body parts on which she has had cosmetic work done. Well, I'm not going to go that far, but I'm going to put my list of 25, such as they are, here, which is not exactly private. (Bold, yes?) Here goes:

1. I love celebrity gossip magazines.
2. I like to take shortcuts, through parking lots and over little walls, etc. (on foot,I mean.)
3. Oh why not, here goes: when I was 25, I had my ears "pinned back" because they stuck out even more than those of Prince Charles who is also my age.
4. First thing when I get home at night, I need a crossword puzzle and a coconut popsicle.
5. I lived in Varanasi, India for three months once to do novel research and it felt like an entire separate lifetime tucked into this one.
6. I have twin brothers.
7. I like sorting things.
8. Oldies, swing, and marching bands are my favorite music.
9. I listen better if I'm doodling.
10. I'm sick of self-improvement and may give it up.
11. I still think I'm immortal and permanently healthy, even though I'm 60 years old.
12. I've always felt, without evidence, that I'm Irish and Jewish, and have recently learned that the Ireland part, at least, is true.
13. My house and yard are full of things I've painted flowers and designs on: morning glories on my car, tall frond-y weeds on the propane gas tank, the eyes of Buddha on the shed, ivy on the hot water heater, etc.
14. Millipedes give me the creeps. Also, power saws.
15. I love public speaking, off-the-cuff.
16. I'm a pro-porn feminist.
17. I like sparkly stuff.
18. If I've had previous lives, one was as a rabbi on the Lower East Side involved in the early 20th century labor movement. The other was as a fat sullen blonde French woman, living in a small town.
19. One of my books-in-progress, I've been working on on-and-off for 22 years.
20. I'm tres lefty in my politics.
21. Once a week, I get together with a friend and speak bad French for half an hour.
22. I was head junior varsity cheerleader at NHHS in 1963 and decided I wasn't cut out for management.
23. For a mild and civilized person, I'm uncommonly in touch with my more primitive and murderous side.
24. I'm either a chatty show-off introvert or an extrovert who needs hours alone almost every day.
25. I could talk about myself all day!

How about you? Add your own 25 in the comments. It's a very interesting exercise. I have just tagged you. That includes you, Julie Tomlin, and Toby Bloomberg, and Richard Krawiec, and Karen Tam. And especially you who are my regular companions here.



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Bold Money Management in Tough Times

Lately I've been wondering if it's better for all of us if I cut back and spend as little as possible, or continue spending as usual, or do what I can of next year's Christmas shopping now in order to spur the woeful economy. So far my own income has held steady in these trying times, so it's not a matter of having to decide between food and prescriptions, the situation that many are encountering.

Of course my decision is quite small-scale, but if everyone who could made an extra purchase or two now, it seems to me the economy would be quite stimulated.

So far,though, I've instinctively been cutting back. Most everyone seems to be doing the same thing, whether from need or caution. Not sure that's the best approach. Certainly it's not the boldest approach.

What do you think?






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A Sip of Bold Action

Today's little spark of inspiration comes from a milk carton. This morning as I took the chocolate Silk soymilk out of the fridge, I noted the advice on the side: "Take A Sip Forward," a sentence that, by the way, is trademarked.

The idea is that drinking soy milk is "one small step toward living at your best." The carton also told me to laugh, eat chocolate, and get exercise. But what struck me is the idea of progress measured in sips.

I've heard it said to people wanting to lose weight that "everything you put in your mouth counts."

The reverse of that is that each small good thing that any of us do, in any area of life,counts. Small actions that are creative, generous, courageous, add up and ripple outward.





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Persistence and a Technological Triumph

Allow me to crow. After two and three quarters hours of fiddling, husband Bob and I have succeeded in getting wireless to work at our house on my laptop. We've never even been able to use a cellphone here. We're in the woods and apparently hard for signal to find.

This miraculous computing capability was accomplished with a little AT&T gizmo that installed its own software. So far the process is dreadfully slow, but still it allows me to tap out a few lines, just short of midnight, by standing at an upstairs window with the machine held up in the air to the spot that gets enough signal. May sound clumsy, but just remember the Wright Brothers' first flights were pretty clunky too. Maybe tomorrow I'll be on the roof with this thing, or up a tree. At any rate, I'm thrilled with tonight's progress.





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Start A Business

When I was a kid, my mother used to drop pieces of advice on me as they happened to occur to her. One day, she said, somewhat out-of-the-blue: Never buy a business; you'll come out much better if you start your own.

I did do exactly that, when I was twenty-two and started freelancing full-time. Now, decades later I've discovered a series of books aimed at people wanting to start various highly specific businesses.

I stumbled onto Entrepreneur Magazine's Startup Series when I saw their book on blogging: Start Your Own Blogging Business, which is quite good, very thorough and detailed. The previous publications page showed 36 other books,

Start Your Own Bar and Tavern

Start Your Own Import/Export Business

Start Your Own Medical Claims Billing Service

or Car Wash, or Gift Basket Service, or Growing and Selling Herbs and Herbal Products, and so on.

If you're thinking about starting a business, do check the Startup Series to see if your specialty is included. I felt a spark of interest in starting something just from looking at the list.





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Boldly on Hold

Seems to me that though there's a lot of scrambling going on in these difficult economic days, in some sense the country is on hold. Lots of decisions, actions, expenditures have been delayed. (Yesterday a writer told me about her novel, which was close to sold in October. A well-known editor at a major house loved it, needed only a committee's expected approval, said it could take as much as a week. The writer is still waiting. Her agent says it's going to happen but not soon because, "Things are a mess here.")

This brought to mind a question: how does one best handle being on hold? A lot of that depends on money of course: whether, primarily, to focus on writing another novel or on finding a job bagging groceries. However, there's a psychological part of the response that is also important. It's a question of keeping on with what's important anyway.

Once in my early pre-email years of freelancing, I had a few days when I didn't have enough money to buy stamps. I just kept writing the letters, so I'd have them ready to send, when I got hold of the stamps. It was only letters, and it was only a few days, so no big deal. But now, we face something like that situation nationwide, and I think it's important that we keep on with our important work, even while on hold.

And maybe there are ways that being boldly on hold can offer something new and useful to the process. I also remember a screenwriter talking about how upbeat and productive she was during a writer's strike of many months. She had a sense of freedom, because she knew the phone wasn't going to ring, knew already that she wasn't going to sell anything today; and so she worried less and felt free to concentrate on her work.



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ORGANIZING FOR THE CREATIVE PERSON

My friend Sabine was helping a mutual friend overhaul the inside of her house. They'd been hard at it all morning and then met me for lunch (I, who had merely been sitting at a computer.) Their dust-stirring industry was inspiring to hear about.

Sabine had learned a lot of her techniques, she said, from Organizing for the Creative Person: Right-Brain Styles for Conquering Clutter, Mastering Time, and Reaching Your Goals by Dorothy Lehmkuhl and Dolores Cotter Lamping.

My first reaction: what a persuasive title. It begins by flattering the reader: I may be a heap, but I'm an imaginative one. The flattery sticks because there's truth to it, for most anyone who would pick it up. (Aside: another book that did that welcome-to-the-book gesture well was first published in Europe with the title Prisoners of Childhood. It went on to succeed in this country under the title Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self. What a difference a few words can make.)

Anyway, back to my point. I've found some good stuff here:

*you don't have to get rid of a particular objet, just find a place for it
*a pile of papers is a pile of unmade decisions (get BOLD and make those decisions)
*if you're intensely engaged in doing something you value, you're an instant success (this can be helpful for writers who ask themselves: will it sell? will it be good? am I wasting my time?)
*little bits of regular effort add up; regularly set a timer for 15 minutes and spend that long on one troublesome problem

And I haven't even finished reading it; my husband got hold of it, which is just fine with me. If we both did a bit of straightening, there's no telling what treasures we might find. (I found five lost items just yesterday: earring, purple jacket, camel pin, checkbook, and a notebook.) More on camel pin another day.

Happy organizing, you bold and creative person. Do feel free to report results here.



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Chasing Updike

My one meeting, some years ago, with my hero John Updike involved a very small bit of boldness, which turned out well in its modest way. It took place not long after my first novel Revelation had come out. I wrote about the incident at the time for a Research Triangle newspaper. I'm "the local novelist" of the story. Here it is, in memory of an extraordinary writer who died last week:


Author Mobbed, Politely

The afternoon book signing had been underway for twenty-five minutes, and the line was now stretched, more than two hundred strong, from the deep recesses of Duke's Gothic Bookshop across the wide traffic area inside the Bryan Student Center.

Seated in the back of the store was the focus of this throng, John Updike, signing copies of his books.

As the line moved slowly into the store, a local novelist, proud author of one published book, arrived to take her place in the waiting crowd. Ten minutes passed before the line appeared to move at all.

People waited quietly, many of them reading. The line inched forward as Updike fans continued to arrive, some with big sacks of his books. The local novelist carried in her stack a copy of her own book to give to her longtime hero. She and Updike were inextricably linked, she knew: Her own writing had been compared with his in many of her book's reviews.

An hour passed. People began to check their watches more often. The glass doors of the store were still several feet away.

A store official came out and warned: He probably won't get to you. More than one hundred remained, politely refusing to hear any such thing.

The local novelist did make it through the doors. Updike was in clear view now, his famous beak of a nose and his great pile of silver hair. Then, as those nearest watched, Updike stood up and left, vanished out the back door.

The local novelist turned to find that behind her was an equally disappointed local poet who had brought a volume of his own to offer as a gift.

The crowd broke for dinner, then reassembled later in front of Page Auditorium, to wait an hour to get good seats for the reading.

Updike read and talked to a crowded house. He was witty, hyperintelligent, genuine--everything that the assembled body had come to hear. Then he finished and left the stage. Again the chance to meet him had passed--until one student raced up onto the stage and back into the wings and was quickly followed by dozens more.

Good-humoredly, Updike started signing books again. Again the line moved slowly. Finally the local novelist stood before the long-awaited Updike--just as a student official interrupted, saying, "I'm sorry. We have to clear the stage."

The local novelist, about to miss out the second time, was suddenly wild-eyed. She shoved her book at the surprised Updike with both hands. "Here," she said. "This is a present. I wrote this."

Updike stared for a moment and blinked. "Follow me," he said.

"Keep your place in line," he called out to the whole crowd, "and follow me."

Single file then, Pied Piper-style, he led several dozen people in a circuitous route, out through the wings, down the flight of steps, out of the auditorium, across a stretch of campus, back into the student center. The line followed him faithfully as he searched for a place to sit.

Then the line waited again. Updike signed more books. He accepted the book, finally, from the local novelist, who forgot to mention their intertwined fates. He accepted the volume of verse from the poet. At 10 p.m. the crowd dispersed for the last time, six hours after it had begun to form. Fans of a different sort might have rioted. But for these New Yorker-reading groupies, gathered to honor a novelist of marriage, manners, and morals, a ruckus like that never would have done.





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Self-Doubt in the Great

Recently, in discussing the writer's self-doubt in the comments with writer Greta, I speculated that even my hero the recently passed John Updike probably had such moments.

In one of the tributes to Updike in The New Yorker since, I found proof of this. In a letter to novelist E.L. Doctorow, Updike wrote that as a young man he was busily unfolding his own stories with techniques learned from others (which, may I say, he utterly transformed.) But, writing one day in his later years, he said: "now I am almost paralyzed by thinking of the great number of contemporary writers who know things I don’t know and can do things I can’t."

Doctorow's comment: "The self doubt of this prodigious talent moved the hell out of me."

But he wasn't paralyzed. He kept writing and publishing. He kept at it, in spite of any wobbles.

(Tomorrow: a piece I wrote years ago about my one encounter with Updike.)



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Getting Up the Nerve to Be Genuine

I've just come from my friend Laurel's 70th birthday brunch, held by the members of her Thursday afternoon writer's class/group, which I have been a member of for 26 years.

In advance of the day, we put together a small album in which we each had six pages to use as we wish to express our appreciation to her. As I said in this book, these kinds of productions make me nervous. Too much untempered emotion, I suppose. But I got into it. We all did. She was overwhelmed. It was very satisfying for everyone involved.

Regularly and easily expressing emotion of the warm fuzzy kind-- for me that would be truly bold. What takes courage is so different for each of us. I tell myself that when I see someone go bonkers over a spider.




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