Big Two-Hearted River

That's a Hemingway title and I think it fits.

A week and a half ago, my brother Franc had a scary bout of heart bypass surgery. Today we learn that my other brother (and Franc's identical twin) Harry has to have the same operation. Tomorrow morning.

Harry's doctor has the advantage of knowing about Franc's identical heart. That will probably mean one less incision. Also, Harry saw up-close the shape Franc was in during the days just after the surgery, so he knows exactly what he's in for. Otherwise, it'll be the same--attaching him to the heart-lung machine, cutting open his chest, stopping his heart, sewing in new vessels taken from pieces of vein in his arms, the whole terrifying miraculous ball game.

It'll go fine. Franc's doing well, so Harry will too. It cannot be otherwise, their lives and hearts are so entwined.

Here are a couple of pictures of them, working at the house they built with friends on the NC coast. Not good photography, but this is the best I have available this minute, and now is when I'm posting. Franc on the left, Harry on the right, .

Neighborhood Witches, Psychic Aunties and Spiritualist Grandmothers

I'm looking for true stories about people like Miss Chant, the subject of my biography in progress.

The title of the post pretty well sums up the category. If you grew up knowing an older person in your community who was considered to have special powers and be a little strange, I'd love to hear from you. Please leave a comment here or email me at ppayne51@cs.com.

Thanks.

Open Heart

Brother Franc had his heart operation early yesterday, didn't wake up last night. I drove halfway to the wrong town to teach this morning. Then at 10:30 at school I got word he'd opened his eyes, squeezed Mom's hand. I am so relieved.

Almost everybody comes through this operation. The survival rate is 98%. And yet it's so frightening. Maybe it's the fact of several large tubes coming out of holes in his chest and neck. How much worse this day would feel if the prognosis wasn't good, I can only imagine.

Elizabeth and John Edwards and their family are among the boldest of us today. Those folks have courage.

The "Hard Part" of Doing

This week, for me, is hectic, tightly scheduled, and emotionally intense.

I have classes and student conferences today and Friday--and tonight I go to my hometown so I can sit with Mom, especially, tomorrow during my brother Franc's heart bypass operation. Then assuming all goes well--which is what's supposed to happen and going to happen--I'll come back Thursday night, and teach on Friday.

Yesterday and the day before weren't so hard, since all I was doing was preparing for classes and making phone calls and wrapping Mom's present for her 85th birthday, which is today, etc. Those things are not hard, though I'd thought in advance they would be.

This morning I'm dealing with students, which isn't hard at all. Now I'm thinking it's class--yes, that's what will be hard.

I also know that when I get there, class won't be hard at all.

What I'm starting to realize is that, for the most part, assuming I'm not trying to solve some famous impenetrable math problem: None of the pieces of doing what needs to be done are hard.

If Franc's surgery doesn't go perfectly, that will be seriously hard. But that's not doing--not for me at least.

So I'm starting to think that, for the most part, doing isn't so hard. Asking myself hundreds of times a day: will I get everything done?--that's hard, but not necessary. If anything, it slows me down.

With a good plan, it ought to be possible to stop asking that useless question and dreading "the hard part."

Then the hard part would be to stop obsessing over things I can't do anything about.

The Stress of Waiting

In one 24 hour period last week, my mother had a bad fall and my brother Franc learned that he has to have surgery soon for 5 heart bypasses. I'm not happy about any of this.

I responded by immediately getting a cold.

What this means is my immune system is a bit cowed by the stress of these events. I don't like that either. At times like this, I want all my systems to step up to the plate and do better than usual.

There's something unheroic about getting a sore throat in the face of trouble.

Both Mom and Franc are going to be okay. That's the main thing. But there's not much that I, even at peak health, can do to make sure of that.

I prefer problems that can be solved by some thought and energetic effort. More and more as I get older I see people facing problems that can't be fixed that way. These require their own brand of courage, a kind I haven't really begun to work on. (Except for weathering the times of waiting to hear the fate of a book. I guess those sorta count.)

The Board of Inspiration

Two days a week I sit in an office at Duke borrowed from Dr. Melissa Malouf, a novelist and an English and creative writing professor. This is my campus home base during my semester of scholar-in-residence.

Among the many novelties of this sojourn is working in someone else's office and staring at her bulletin board of author/artist/et al portraits.

This inspiring collection is mainly postcards sent to Professor Malouf from former students.

I felt immediately at home here, in part because I've spent years with identical Henry James and John Lennon photos propped before me on my own turf. (Don't know how I missed the shirtless Mark Twain.)

It's inspiring to see the ancestors arrayed next to one's writing desk. And we can claim whoever we want for our artistic lineage. I certainly had no idea someone else was claiming James and Lennon. I guess that makes Prof. Malouf and me cousins.

I've several times felt the real power of putting a visual image in front of me. I had on my desk for a while a watercolor of freesia and irises. Then one day I realized that I was seeing it double.

What had happened: I'd unknowingly brought into the office the two kinds of flowers that were in that picture and put them in a similar vase. I'd physically reproduced the picture without being aware of it. So maybe this month I'll find I'm looking past the bulletin board at the real Virginia Woolf or Oscar Wilde.

One way or another I expect to feel the power of this collection of worthies. Start your own Board of Inspiration and see how it works.

A Bring Home the Troops Rally

I know it's not the 1960s, but a huge percentage of this country claims to be against the escalation/continuation of the war in Iraq.

This photo shows a bring-home-the-troops rally in Chapel Hill a few days ago.

The turnout was kinda sparse. About 40 people, a number which I found dismaying. Especially for famously peace-loving Chapel Hill!

As for the war, if we're agin' it, we need to be actively doing something to stop it. At least making our voices be heard.

The High Cost of Self-Doubt

I've just had the privilege of reading excerpts of the daily journals/"free writings" of over a dozen writers.

I was staggered by two things, the talent showing itself in the quality of the writing and the amount of self-doubt.

The quantity of energy devoted to self-doubt is huge. It's wasted.

This is a subject I have an honorary doctorate in; I've near-endlessly second-guessed quite a number of the words and actions I've ever let out into the world.

Seeing how much fuel a lot of good writers are wasting with fear has hit me hard--the way going to a slaughterhouse can make a person a vegetarian.

I think I've (unknown to myself) classified a lot of that second-guessing as a virtue. For myself, I've peeled the Virtue label off. It's a natural impulse among humans, completely understandable. But doing that harsh internal cross-questioning is not where I want to spend a lot more of my time.

Shipping a Grant Proposal

My own acts of courage are so minor that they're not even recognizable as such. I think the same is true for a lot of us who aren't living in poverty or war zones or currently raising kids.

Still the small daily triumphs do matter.

Take for, example, the hell I went through yesterday sending off a grant proposal to the proper government agency, using no stamps at all and no paper, using nothing but my computer.

Notices of Error, Notices of Corrupted Files flew at me. Hours passed. Hours! Still, I fought on. Clicking and clicking and calling 800 numbers and clicking.

My office partner congratulated me late in the afternoon for holding back on shouted obscenities during the half an hour that our upstairs neighbor Sarah had a small child in her office.

I kept thinking of Winston Churchill's phlegm-y voice saying, "Never give up. Never give up." And then at a little after 7 p.m. It went through! Received! Verified! And I dragged on home from the battlefield, weary but triumphant.

Now, transcending computing difficulties may not be like carrying people out of burning buildings. However, it's major in my world. Or was yesterday. (I was in a meditation group some time ago, and the leader asked others what their major current stresses were. One woman said, "This group and my computer.") So I'm celebrating--soon as I figure out how I want to do that.

Four Women on Horseback

If you haven't seen this video, please have a look. Dozens of horses are trapped on a small patch of island, have been there for three days. Eighteen have already drowned. Efforts of soldiers and firefighters to save them have failed, then four women climbed into their saddles and rode to the rescue.... Be sure to watch through to the end. The impact grows.

The Lowly--and Lofty--Scarab

Did you ever wear a scarab bracelet? They were a must-have item when I was an eighth-grader. I later heard that they had some sacred symbolism, but never investigated further.

This afternoon, doing some research on my E. Chant biography, I turned up a detail about a close friend of Chant's. Her name was Margarethe Heisser and the two of them shared a studio that was an arts center in Minneapolis around the turn of the previous century. Heisser, I learned from an online profile, always wore scarabs.

A scarab is a dung beetle (or representation thereof), revered in ancient Egypt, all the way back to prehistorical Egypt, as a symbol of the sun god, and of creation and transformation.

Here's the part that I seized upon: the Egyptian word for this insect was hprr, which meant: "rising from, come into being itself."

That concept is exciting to me--of continuing to come into being, in this life. Growing into the largest possibilities of oneself.

And a dung-beetle that becomes the sacred emblem of the sun god is a pretty good example of a positive transformation.

My Cheeky Relatives

Monday morning I opened my local paper, turned to the page where my sister-in-law Ruth Sheehan's column runs and saw the headline above her picture: HARRY IS THE BABY'S DADDY.

Well, the Harry she refers to is my brother, her husband; and their youngest child, to my knowledge, is age four. I went to reading really quickly.

Harry had confessed, Ruth wrote, to being the real father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby.

"He blubbered. I forgave.

He'll be flying to the Bahamas today to collect the bank account numbers, the keys to her mansion there and, oh yeah, his daughter, whom I have graciously agreed to raise as one of my own -- in exchange for a nominal $50,000 a month."

The point was the media overcoverage of this story, and the possible motivation one might have for wanting to claim the baby.

However, what this reader delightedly noticed was the pure brass of the story, which I found hilariously funny. Though, reading between the lines, I came to understand that I don't after all have a new niece.

Illustrious Writer Guests

Yesterday, I enjoyed another one of the perks of teaching at Duke this semester. Novelists Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise came to talk to one of my classes meeting jointly with another class.

This was a special pleasure because a book they wrote together (they're married as well) is a long-time favorite of mine: Days and Nights in Calcutta. I read it at the suggestion of the editor of one of my books, just before I went to Varanasi to do my research for Sister India.

I'll never forget it. The book is divided in half, each of them giving an account of spending a season together in her hometown, formerly called Calcutta. It's astonishing how different two exceptionally well-written pieces on the same experience can be, in both style and content.

Her tone was full of concern and upset, awareness of pain. Her style, as I told the students in introducing them, was vivid and tightly woven, a dense dramatic fabric that then meandered like a river.

Clark's stance was amazement at the beauty and mystery he saw there, his tone had a spacious, light-filled feel. The image that came to mind: a glass pavilion.

The two of them talked with the students for almost two hours--he kept going while she left to prepare for her formal presentation in the Rare Book Room.

Wow, what a day! And I sort-a had a day off from spouting my own views. It was refreshing and inspiring. I heard some good reviews from my students too, two of whom asked if I could get them copies of her formal lecture. (Now that kind of student is a teacher's dream.)

Writers Workshop in the South of France

I had a request to tell you about write-in-France opportunity, which looks pretty delicious to me. VCCA-- The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts--has a recently acquired studio in the medieval village of Auvillars in Gascony. I've been to the Virginia campus, for a workshop led by feminist writer Naomi Wolf, and discovered that VCCA tends to do things well.

So have a look at this site if you're interested in your petit dejeuner in the courtyard of Moulin a Nef before starting the morning's classes.

Thoughts on Aging with Flair?

Sunday my beloved husband Bob turned 65. He can pass for 50, but still.... It's one of those significant numbers. Also, this weekend the obits in my paper were full of lads and lasses in their 50s and 60s. One I knew a bit, have been acquainted with for thirty years at least--I never thought he was the type to die. He was too much an extrovert to get that quiet. The same with Molly Ivins, subject of yesterday's post. And as for me, I buy ever more moisturizer. Do you suppose dying can be done with individuality and pizazz? As I write that, I think of Art Buchwald, dying a week ago on his own terms and, as a good newsman, being first with the story: announcing on a pre-recorded message that he'd just died. That's undeniably flair.

Molly Ivins: Who Did Her Best to "Let Freedom Ring"

Quoted from The Nation about the wonderfully gutsy political columnist Molly Ivins, who died last week:

Speaking truth to power is the best job in any democracy, she explained. It took her to towns across this great yet battered land to say: "So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin'the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was."

TOADS in Writing Classes

I sprung a little surprise in my classes this week--plopped a live European Green Toad on the seminar table. He's a sweet little creature that I've become a bit attached to.

Here's the reason: when I teach characterization in first person I sum up the methods as: the character's Thoughts, the character's choices of what to notice or Observe, Action, Dialogue, and Sensations.

These add up to the acronym: TOADS. Very handy, I think.

The weather has been cold here, though, and I've only seen a few tiny frogs on one warmer day recently and they moved far too fast for me to catch. So I bought Toadsie at Pet Smart. And he, like me, is now guest faculty.

After I'd put him on the table--followed by a wide range of reactions from class members--I asked the students to write about a character surprised by a toad and show the response through the character's bodily sensations, actions, etc.

The idea is to help people to monitor what bodies actually do in response to emotion. So that they have a vocabulary for such moments in their writing and don't have to resort to cliches, like "my heart was in my throat."

I was pleased with the way the classes went. In the group today, several students read their reactions, which were all strikingly different in both language and content, which makes for distinct characters. Plus, the class was kinda fun. At least nobody was phobic or allergic.

More Notes on My Life at Duke

Note One: My four-month teaching appointment here has a wonderful bonus. My office building is a mere 82 steps from the front door of the main library. In this building alone (pictured at dusk when I'm heading home) there are 3.4 million books. It feels at least as big as cyberspace. And the medical school library is only ten minutes walk. All of which is pretty handy, since I'm doing research on my biography.

The locked stacks on the history of medicine have given me quite an insight into what my subject's life must have been like during her three years in a mental hospital starting in 1917. I feel very wealthy having all this material so close at hand.

Note Two: I love public speaking, and almost always feel relaxed doing it. Uncommonly relaxed, in fact. I feel the only obligation I have, in most cases, is to be mildly entertaining.

With teaching, however, I've always felt that it's my duty to get across what I'm supposed to be teaching; the students are supposed to know how to write a pretty passable short story by the end of April.

The weight of this responsibility often makes me try too hard. I'm overly careful about how I say things in class. My speech, when I'm presenting an idea, gets all halting and tentative, which I hate. Must do something about this.

Note 3: I haven't heard any mention on campus of the infamous sexual assault accusations against three lacrosse players or of the prosecutor who is now under investigation. The subject is in the newspaper, of course. But I've heard no buzz at all in the buses, halls, or on the quads. It's a relief to me. I graduated from this school; I love it; I don't want it reduced to this court case, whoever is right or wrong in the matter.

And should you be longing for my opinion, based on nothing but the newspapers and local off-campus gossip-- I think these guys are innocent of sexual assault. However, a party that features low-income women of color stripping is a shameful misuse of privilege.

Anything is Possible: The Tale of the Growling Beauty

Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau told The Week magazine HOW HE GOT HIS CONFIDENCE.

He was 16 and looked 12, was walking down a street in Manhattan. A phenomenally gorgeous twenty-something woman was approaching in the sidewalk traffic. Her beauty was creating quite a stir on the street. "'Guys were gawking, cars were slowing.'" He was too shy to look at her as she came closer. "'My discomfort must have been obvious because as she passes me, she leans over, her breath is warm, and she softly...growls in my ear.'" From then on, he considered anything to be possible.

On a related subject: you know that More Magazine senior model contest I so brashly entered? I learned that last year there were over 19,000 entries. This is going to be my excuse for not being even a semi-finalist. Although-- anything is possible.

First Week of Teaching at Duke

Off to a good start, I think. The intro class (in fiction writing) was slow to start talking, but I feel the potential. And the next level of the course, which met for the first time yesterday--that class is already on fire.

Also I met yesterday for the first time with both of my independent study students and got off to a good start, I felt. Though there was a meeting time confusion with one, which I regretted. He was waiting for me for quite a while.

I'm a bit staggered this morning. Yesterday, in retrospect, was intense, though it felt pretty relaxed at the time. The students are impressive.

It does feel like a triumph and a great pleasure to be back on the campus I loved so much as a student myself. It's A TRIUMPH OF THE B-MINUS STUDENT to come back with a title like "scholar in residence." In my defense, though, I did do well in my major. And got A's in writing classes.

I'm finding that I'm much more diligent as a teacher than I ever was as a student.

Official Start of My Spring Academic Career

Today was the first day of classes at Duke, and the official start of my semester as scholar-in-residence in the English Department there.

My first class isn't until Friday: intro to writing fiction, 2.5 hours meeting once a week.

However, I have already taken possession of my 2 classrooms, half an office, and a location in Duke's piece of cyberspace, on which I have just posted a syllabus. I have also received the much-needed advice of the department's computer expert. I hope I teach my students as kindly and effectively as my computer advisor has been teaching me.

What I'm most accustomed to is working with writers privately, in groups and one-to-one. I now feel as if I'm setting sail on something gigantic.

So you feel free to SEND HAPPY-SEMESTER VIBES to me and the 30 undergraduates who are traveling with me these next four months.

Senior Model?

This may be THE CHEEKIEST MOVE of my recent years: I'm entering the More/Wilhelmina 40+ Model Search: open to women in the 40-60 age range who feel they have a few trips down the catwalk in them.

I'm 58 years old tomorrow, and I never took the first walk down any runway.

When I've told people I'm doing this, I've sensed:
*a whiff of disapproval (this isn't going to feed the hungry, you know)
*fear for my feelings being hurt when I don't even make it to the semi-finals
*glee and you-go-girl enthusiasm.

Or maybe these are just my own reactions, the first two of which I'm hiding from myself. All I feel is THE GLEE. I love the idea of being whisked to New York to be surrounded with pampering professionals devoted to my getting the most out of my eyeshadow. Oh, baby!

Most particularly, I love the idea of strutting around at the lofty age of 58.

Plus, I'm used to rejections: I'm a writer. I can't imagine even blinking at not making the cut. My books are much better than my looks, anyway, and they've all faced some form of disapproval along the way. I'm rarely wounded for more than a day.

So, I proceed. And I'm taking delicious pleasure in filling out the little form and sending the picture, the very one I use on this website. Doing this brash thing is for me a highly personal vote in favor of vivid life and delightful possibilities--and fun--at every age. Who wouldn't be in favor of that?

More, by the way, is a cool boomer-babe magazine, and Wilhelmina is a modeling agency. It's not too late to enter, if you're the right age.

Getting Started with Fiction

This morning I fiddled with fiction again for the first time in months. I'd been doing research on the Chant biography and working with clients and, in recent days, preparing to start teaching fiction writing at Duke for this semester that starts next week.

On the strength of the wonderful short stories I've been reading to prepare for the two courses, and the fear-blasting effects of Unlock Your Creative Genius which I reviewed in my previous post, and excitement about the idea that cropped up during the week of vacation I took between Christmas and New Year's--I jumped almost-first-thing today into THE MOST DAUNTING PIECE OF WRITING I COULD CONTEMPLATE. I didn't even bother to take my coat off. Just sat (checked e-mail) and started work.

It came out pretty well. I was pleased with what I did in this crack at it.

I didn't feel I was driving with the brake on, as I very often initially do. I had no conscious fear or hesitation. I did, however, eat FISTFULS OF ANIMAL CRACKERS while I worked. If that's what it takes--fine! I don't mind a crutch that works. I count it a very good morning.

And now back to work on the class syllabus.... I hope it will inspire the students as well as it did me.

Real Solutions to Problems with Creativity

I'm so excited about recommending a book I was given at Christmas. It has the somewhat hypy-sounding title of Unlock Your Creative Genius.

But the fact is: the approach described in this book works. It's working for me in dealing with moments of thinking: I can't do this... and variations on that. Or moments of not even thinking, but instead feeling a leaden drag when I approach a daunting bit of work.

If you ever had a moment's procrastination in starting your creative work, buy this book and use it. (And add a comment on this blog about how it works for you.) I've never seen such a practical answer to the problem pulled together anywhere else.

Also, the chapter titles offer little epiphanies in themselves. The one I most identified with was "No One Is Going to Tell Me What to Do--Including Myself." That sure hit home.

To give credit: the author is psychologist Bernard Golden. The publisher is Prometheus Books in Amherst, NY. The person who chose this book for me was my columnist sister-in-law Ruth Sheehan. She said it was just the kind of thing I like to write about on my blog.

The 5 Things

A "virtual happy hour" on Toby Bloomberg's Diva Marketing "tagged" me to answer this set of questions that's making the rounds: What 5 Things You Don't Know About Me.

So here I go:

1. I love celebrity gossip, watch E!, subscribe to People magazine and Vanity Fair, etc. Annual highlight: the Oscars.

2. I was a pretty decent fifth-grade tap dancer.

3. While I'm reading on my sofa, I eat vast quantities of Raisin Bran dry out of the box.

4. I long to get an artist to paint blue morning glories all over my '92 Camry.

5. Sorting things into piles--putting all the apples together, all the oranges together, etc-- is soothing to me.

Okay, now here's who I'm tagging to take up the challenge: Billie Hinton, Sarah Blackmon, JA Konrath,and Budd Parr.

Dancing in the Streets

Ever gone herd dancing? That's when a group of people dances (fast-dances) together, without regard to gender or couples. It's a great thing. Not that the two-by-two thing isn't good too. But a gyrating group is exhilarating.

That's the subject of Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Dancing in the Streets--or, why we don't indulge more often in what she calls "collective joy."

According to a review in the January Elle magazine, "she accumulates a compelling case for the benefits of serious partying." She finds that our forebears were much more likely to take part in group dancing and chanting, and that in more recent centuries, elites have attempted to discourage that kind of behavior, in an apparent effort to KEEP THE MASSES UNDER CONTROL and hold onto their own dignity.

Well, I've never responded well to being told by someone on a stage to hug the person next to me, or some such.

But I do like voodoo drumming (and old rock and roll) and group dancing that goes on and on. Don't do enough of it either. Perhaps I'll arrange a change.

Today's bit of boldness: My wear-under-sweaters white turtleneck was too long for the sweater I put on this morning. So I cut about six inches off the bottom. There's nothing sacrosanct about the way it came from the store.

Thought for the future: Next time boldly measure first.

Topnotch Reading List

The Raleigh paper's book editor Peder Zane has a new book coming out from Norton next month that is essentially a recommendation of a lot of very good novels, plays, and poetry: "The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books,"

In the meantime go to the Top Ten website and have a look at the list. Some titles are predictable, some are surprises.

Then POST YOUR OWN LIST there. I found it an interesting exercise. I was startled to find that in addition to my beloved Henry James, V.S. Naipaul, and Anita Brookner, I also listed Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon, the retelling of the Arthurian legends from the women's point-of-view. Sentence by sentence, the language in that book isn't up to that of my other favorites. But so what? It's mesmerizing, and it is one of my favorites. So -- my little bold act of the day.

Feel free to post your list here as well.

How to Become Great

"To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great." Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

This Hegel quote was part of the signature of an e-mail I received from a staff person at Penguin Putnam dealing with some bit of business about my novel Sister India.

It's tough to hang onto this philosophy when one has been for long involved in the publishing business. We've been having a lot of conversation lately on this blog about market requirements, and what to do about them.

To meet Hegel's standard of indifference to public opinion and to get published would require one of several STRATEGIES, it seems to me:

1. Make the work of such transcendent quality that it might eventually be recognized for its value, though not necessarily in the writer's lifetime. And trust to either luck or young proteges to see that that reevaluation happens.

2. Self-publish, like James Joyce, among others.

3. Do such amazing and relentless self-promotion that a new standard, a new market is created.

4. Rely on accidentally meeting the requirements of publishers while doing one's own thing.

5. Meet enough market requirements to get in the door, while ignoring others. Make only the tolerable compromises, without damaging what feels vital. Promote like crazy.

Number 5 is my current choice.

How about you? OTHER OPTIONS?

(Every time I think I'm going to write for only a line or two, turns out that I'm wrong, I go on...)

Holiday Innovation

We're all aflutter at my office building today because this house, built in 1910, is on Raleigh's 35th annual Historic Oakwood Candlelight Tour.

The queen and owner of the building, Carrie Knowles, shares my views about creativity and self-expression. Her studio and writing office are called Free Range Gallery. Here's what she just had painted so that you see it as soon as you come in the front door.


And here's the Christmas/holiday/winter solstice tree: it's made of cans of food that will be given to a soup kitchen when the tree comes down. This construction, a piece of art in itself, was made by Carrie's 16 year old son Cole Leiter and his friend Wilson Sayre.

Happy holiday preparation!--whatever you celebrate. I hope you'll take pleasure in doing it your way.

The tree of cans is a good demonstration that self-expression isn't necessarily selfish at all, can be quite altruistic in fact. For more on this, see The Healing Power of Doing Good.

The Luminous Egg: Visual Suggestion

Remember that floating orb I wrote about? It's the piece of art I bought by/from my artist-buddy Carrie Knowles. I had to have it because it looks like the image of a floating ball of light that inspired both the biography I'm working on, and the new novel (tentatively "Pascal's Fire") that I have also (barely) begun.

Here you see the ball of light, in the center of the mantel in my office. I'm delighted to have it there. And it's not just to make the place look more interesting.

I find if I put a visual image of a goal before me, I'm more likely to reach that goal. CONSTANT SUBLIMINAL SUGGESTION works wonders on my typing fingers. I've found it almost magical.

Anybody else had any experience with this sort of thing?

Please Note

Good conversation going on in the comment section of the post titled: "An Extremely Bold Question."

The subject has evolved to WRITING FOR THE MARKET: is it damaging to art? and if not, how do we psyche out the current market requirements.

Do join in with your own view--here, or in the comment section to the earlier post.

Do you tailor your writing to what you perceive market requirements to be?

Authentic Speech

Check out a feisty blog, Inventing the Rest of My Life, on the More magazine website.

More is an excellent magazine aimed at women over forty. I think the More articles would be of interest to a much larger group, but then I also read a number of men's magazines, and, more shocking, some aimed at 20-something fashionistas: "Drew, Ashlee, Kelis... share their secret shopping lists...," etc.

"Inventing the Rest of My Life" is written by 65 year-old Suzanne Braun Levine. "Recently," she writes, "an invitation to speak to a large national women's organization was withdrawn when the planners visited my Web site and saw the phrase 'the fuck-you fifties.'" That's the lead-in to her discussion of "appropriate" language and behavior.

I love her conclusion: "What I hope to see is not that the coarse language becomes commonplace, but that we get to the point that we Second Adulthood women don't have to call attention to ourselves in order to be noticed. Then each of us can find the words to speak out in her own voice and on her own terms." That's my wish for everybody.

The Courageous Miss Chant's Cottage on Cottage Lane

The exceptionally bold Miss Elisabeth Chant, the subject of my biography-in-progress,lived in this house about 70 years ago in my gorgeous and charming hometown of Wilmington, NC. I was there for Thanksgiving with my family and took a few pictures.

I especially want to show the house, because one of her descendants turned up in the comment section of my previous post, the one where I asked: why don't more of you comment? I'm so glad I asked that question.

Chant, a painter, was exceptionally BOLD in that she was a full-time artist, and single woman, who traveled the world alone in the first half of the 20th century--and she had the nerve to go around in my small Southern town in medieval clothes with hair like Princess Leia--and to confide, when it wasn't fashionable, that she was being led in her choices by Athena and several dozen other spirit guides. Any one or two of those situations is enough risk for most folks.

An Extremely Bold Question

How come most of y'all come and visit and let me blather on and yet don't comment?

Has this blog attracted all of the world's shy people?

I'd love to know. And I'd be grateful to anybody who answers here about the reason he or she keeps silent. You can even be Anonymous. Or Startlingly Revealing. Or Controversial. Or...you tell me....

The Fundamental Trick of a Writing Career

Underlying most of the decisions I make about my work is this: to what degree will I alter the work I feel called, even created, to do, in order to meet the requirements of the marketplace?

My standard for myself is that, in revising for the market, I figure out how to, at the same time, make the work better overall. I find a way to do what an editor wants (or that I'm guessing an editor wants) that better serves my own purposes as well. And what a wrestle with the work that can be!

On the other hand, if I'd gone farther in the direction of the market in my career so far, more people might well be reading my work. It's very hard to see the line between too much compromise and not enough. By the time we find out, it may be too late. The work is diluted and published, or the work is rejected.

I'm not one who is opposed to revising, to working with an editor. Not at all. I believe in selling, in publishing. Part of the job I feel I've somehow been assigned in life is getting the stories, not only written, but published. So the question rolls on, I've had to resolve it anew with every new project.

I never quit until the work both meets my standards and is published. But damn, it's right wearing sometimes.

At the same time, I'm grateful for my strong clear sense of mission. If I didn't have it, I expect I'd be wrestling with whether I was doing the right work.

"Take each day with no backward look."

That advice -- "Take each day with no backward look." -- just jumped out at me when I went to visit Scott Burkhead's site, Daily Spiritual Guide.

It's from Hazelden's Touchstone Meditation Series. What a VIVID and LIGHT-AS AIR life I'd live if I thoroughly managed to do that!

If one is prone to a bit of scrupulousity--did I say the wrong thing? Did I say the wrong thing that day 18 years ago?--this could be a LIFESAVER. With the aid of meditation, medication, and exercise, I'm about 98% better at that than I used to be.

Taking Charge of My Workday

I'm feeling unusually CLEAR-EYED today, because of an exercise in time-monitoring.

For the next couple of weeks at least, I'm tracking HOW I SPEND MY WORK TIME AS A WRITER and where I spend my money.

It's a trifle irritating to be watching myself so closely. One the other hand, the effort is giving me a POWER RUSH. I feel as if I'm in charge of what I'm doing.

Of course, being self-employed I should feel that way. But often instead, I feel that time has slipped by and I'm not quite sure where. Same with money.

Now I'm watching where they go, with special interest in time, whether any given moment is spent on art, administration, consulting, or promotion of my work.

It makes me feel uncommonly brave simply to be willing to do this. Because I suspect that some days I HIDE OUT by busying myself with administration--tearing the edges off sheets of stamps, etc.

I tried this monitoring once before, very briefly, and it made me much more effective and CONFIDENT. I'm curious to see what fuller information will do.

Visionaries Wanted

Here's a powerful resource for social entrepreneurs. That's you, if you're somebody with an idea or plan to CHANGE THE WORLD.

ECHOING GREEN offers big fellowships to help set world-changing ideas in motion.

I learned of the site through Naomi Wolf's Woodhull Institute newsletter, and found it an inspiring place even to visit.

Visit soon. The next deadline is the end of this month.

Floating Orbs, Synchronicity

I just bought a small piece of grown-up art. It's the one in the lower right hand corner with the red dot on it that means Sold. I was astonished when I saw these pieces because the image of floating orbs of light, central to all of these, is also central to the biography I'm working on, and the novel which will follow.

These prints were made by my friend and office partner Carrie Knowles. I watched her putting up this series for an open-to-the-public show on Sunday, November 19, 1-5 p.m.
A couple of years ago, sitting at lunch chatting with a reiki teacher, I saw a small ball of light rise from the top of her head, zigzag upward, and vanish a few inches from the ceiling. Nothing like that had ever happened to me. And at the same time it felt perfectly ordinary.

But this "ordinary" event was a big deal. (I think I've written about it before on this blog.) It became the seed for a novel I began.

Weeks into the novel, I felt seized by the need to find out more about a painter I'd heard of in my hometown in my youth.

I tend to FOLLOW THESE URGES WHEN THEY COME. So I did a bit of research.

I struck pay dirt on my second or third dig into archives. In an art library at UNC, I found a bit of her journal, in which she'd written a note that people sometimes see a light over her head.

That was my eureka moment. It was clear to me that I had to write both books, and the biography was what I wanted to do first.

When I saw these floating lights go up in the room next door, it was just as obvious that I needed one of them for my room, for a book cover, for a talisman. It felt like a good celebration of the ongoing projects, and of the good results from following mysterious urges.

If you're in Raleigh and loose on November 19, stop by and see this collection. My personal floating orb will be there, with its red dot, through the end of that afternoon.

Yes, You Can!

Around the corner from my office, a church sits up on wood blocks. A bold-thinking downtown developer, Greg Hatem, had it scooped up from its old site and moved to what was a parking lot.

A lot of people might think that a church building stays where it's planted for as long as it exists. And the same with parking lots.

This guy wasn't stopped by that kind of silly assumption. Now he's spiffing the place up to rent, and it's a lovely addition to my leafy old-fashioned neighborhood.

I so admire this move: TO SIMPLY DISCARD THE IDEA THAT SOMETHING CAN'T HAPPEN. The world gets much richer if we step right through the conventional wisdom. In fact, a lot of improbable and amazing things can happen with perseverance, imagination, and looking past the frozen ideas of what's possible.

In it most radical definition, a church embodies a sky's-the-limit view.

Quaker Wisdom from a Catalog

In one of the million catalogs that arrive at my house, often in duplicate, I found a nice bit of wisdom.

Signals sells "gifts that inform, enlighten, and entertain." Among these is a framed print with the Quaker saying:

LET YOUR LIFE SPEAK

The selling copy contains some possible interpretations: "Live authentically. Let others know what matters to you. Embody your truths and values. Follow your vocation." (boldfacing mine)

Nice work, copywriter. It's a rare thing when ad copy enlightens, or re-enlightens.

For many years of my freelance career, I wrote ads and catalogs and brochures, etc. in maybe half of my time. I still take on such jobs occasionally.

But I never have gotten such an inspirational message across. Not even in the sappy inch of copy I wrote for an ad in inflight magazines advertising a teddy bear to take home to the kids. Though writing it managed to bring tears to my eyes.

So now I ask myself: what does "Let Your Life Speak" mean for me today? (Long break for thought.) It means: step lightly, listen to small whispers of impulse and consider following.

What I hear first as I listen: my stomach gurgling. I'm going to run out and get some lunch.

Medical Test Reveals Current Mission in Life

This morning a doctor gave me an all-clear you-are-not-malignant diagnosis.

I didn't really think I would hear anything else. But last week's routine test didn't look right and had to be further investigated. Even though that's very common and usually isn't a problem, still...

The interim of five days allowed me to think things over.

If I had only a short time to live, what I'd say to God is: make it long enough for me to finish this biography of Elisabeth Chant. Because I think it's part of what I'm here for.

So now once again I have "all the time in the world." And it's very clear which item I ought to put at the top of my to-do list every day.

Even a hint of mortality can be very clarifying.

Resting the Brain

This week I had once-every-few-years crash into sleep. This happens when I pass a number of deadlines and I've been working too hard for too long. Then as soon as the last thing in the pile is done, leaving a couple of days with nothing do-- suddenly I'm too tired to remain sitting.

So I slept most of a day and a half. In the brief intervals of being awake I read O Magazine, which I always find encouraging at wobbly times.

Then I got up this morning and came to the office as usual, feeling almost normal, but a bit like I just got a cast taken off of my brain.

Used to be that this happened once a year. Now it's more like once every four or five years. Maybe I'm learning a bit more about balance.

But I'd been overworking since last December. And so...

I'm glad it doesn't happen while I'm still on deadline.

I think it gives my imagination a fresh start.

More on Glastonbury and the Isle of Avalon

More and more, I allow my book research to take me geographically, as well as imaginatively, where I'm yearning to go.

Here are a few more shots from last week's trip to Glastonbury in Somerset, England, in search of my biography subject's story.


The white pigeon (i.e, dove) that landed in the Abbey ruin near the alleged grave of King Arthur (one of my subject's obsessions) is an important mystery visitor in the story that is starting to unfold.

The white specks in the landscape photo below are a flock of doves. The picture is taken from the side of the strange steep hill called Glastonbury Tor, an ancient site for both Christian and Druid pilgrims. If anyone knows which species of white pigeon this is, I'd love to know.

A Writer's Photography

Used to be that I took pictures to illustrate travel stories. For many years, I published in travel sections of newspapers and magazines like Travel & Leisure, some women's magazines, Family Circle, etc. It was never my favorite part of the work. I didn't feel confident that I had what I needed in the can.
Now, working on research for my biography of painter Elisabeth Chant, I'm shooting for documentary purposes, and for descendants of hers who have been helping me track down her story. Plus, of course, these days I can look at the back of the camera and see how the photograph is going to look. I'm still no Brassai, but these will show a bit of where I'm seeking my subject.


The trip was to Somerset in the southwest of England, where Chant spent the first eight years of her life, in the shadow of such sites as Glastonbury and Cadbury Camp, an alleged site of Camelot. She came back to this area in her mid-thirties. Throughout her life, she was much affected -- in fact, formed -- by the history and myth and natural world that surrounded her here.



These are a few of the 298 images I collected. It seemed like a thousand at the time I was shooting. These show:
*The ruin of Glastonbury church. The original rough hut of a Christian church here is alleged to have been the first in Britain and possibly in Christendom, established shortly after the Crucifixion. The ruin in the photo is also held in legend to contain the graves of King Arthur and Guinevere, and has a marked site on the grass within.
*Glastonbury Tor, the steep and weirdly conical hill that is both a Christian and Celtic pilgrimage site. The open arch is the base of the tower at the top of the hill-- what's left of a more than 500 year-old church. Looking through it, as I stood at the top of the Tor was like looking out to sea. There's a semi-straight path up and down the Tor, as in the photo, and a path that winds slowly around the sides, forming a giant labyrinth.

Some have called this spot "the holiest earthe of England."

And then there's the 16th century Mermaid Inn where I stayed for my week of archival research and exploring. Miss Chant continues to lead me to some intriguing places.

Returned from Research Expedition

I got back to NC late last night from the rural southwest peninsula of England, the county of Somerset, where I was chasing the ghost of my biography subject, painter Elisabeth Chant.

I think I did get a glimpse of her.

Very good, and exhausting, trip. I added several pounds of photocopies to my files on Chant's early childhood in the town of Yeovil.

More later when I've unpacked and refocused my brain and eyes.

Research for a Biography

This weekend I head for southwest England to the county of Somerset to do more research on my biography subject, the painter Elisabeth Chant.

"Miss Chant" is how I always think of her; that's what she was always called in my hometown, where she spent the last 25 years of her life.

She was born in a crossroads English village called Holwell, outside the town of Yeovil. I'm spending next week there, looking for descendants and for every physical site and old record or newspaper clip that has to do with her family. I do know that the house her father was born in is still a residence. You can bet I'm going to be knocking on that door.

Though I started life as a newspaper reporter, I'm still fairly new to this kind of research. A few days ago it was terribly daunting. Now it's extremely exciting. I do find, though, that I'm pretty dependent on "the kindness of strangers."

Good-hearted and experienced archivists and genealogists are e-mailing me now with leads and bits of info. Everything that comes in is a fresh treaure.

And soon I will be on the ground in her old town. That's her in the picture, by the way. She died two years before I was born. I'm hoping her spirit is traveling with me on this venture.

Editing Marathon

Just now finished my part of a monster-huge project with a client. Her book is due today. We've passed 31 versions of the manuscript back and forth between us, marked up with red type comments in the last week and a half. We worked all through the weekend. Last night I shut down at a little after 2 a.m. She was on-line to me again at 6-something this morning.

And with all that, it turned out that my computer had suddenly decided not to send the two crucial files back to her on the night before Due Day.

As Harry Belafonte sings, "My Lord! What a Morning."

I got hold of Heidi, my tech advisor, on the phone. She talked me through solving the problem, while -- it sounded like-- she was cooking breakfast. Incredible relief!

Next up: to tend to a couple of other projects and get ready to go to the UK on Sunday to do research on my biography subject, who was born in a 15-house crossroads in the southwestern peninsula of England.

Hypnotic Cues for Creativity

I keep various toys and such around my office to help me ZONE OUT FOR WRITING. Some toys have a relaxing effect in themselves: like a slow-moving mobile, or one of those glass things that you turn over and watch bright-colored goop inside slowly run down to the bottom. It's THE LAVA LAMP PRINCIPLE: you stare and forget other stuff and slow down to the motion of the object. Relaxing.

Other things work to induce a relaxed and focused frame of mind (called TRANCE) not because they're innately hypnotic, but because I associate them with the way I felt the last time I messed with them, and I then start feeling that way again.

For example, a particular piece of music, or the smell of just-watered house plants, used again and again, becomes a cue to go into a particular frame of mind.

The blue image is something I put together just now while playing with some of my office objects. I like to look at it. It's a pale blue marble in a cobalt blue plastic box, shot close-up with flash and with the window light behind it.

I think it would make an interesting cover image for my most-recently completed project, my novel "COBALT BLUE." In the book, cobalt blue refers to the color, a tube of artist's oil paint, and to A MYSTICAL VISION.

If that picture doesn't put me quickly into a productive writing state, I don't know what would. BTW, the way I learned a lot of this stuff is from my psychologist-husband Bob Dick, who uses clinical hypnosis a lot in his practice.

An Adventurous Woman

Recently, and for the first time ever, I read two huge biographies of the same person, back-to-back.

And who was the fascinating subject? Not Benjamin Franklin or Clara Barton or any of those classic worthies.

Instead: Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, who was in the league of Cheekiest Women of Our Time.

She married the son of Winston Churchill, and then producer Leland Hayward, and diplomat Averell Harriman, and in the interims was the mistress of some of the richest and most powerful men in Europe.

"Pamela had been in the headlines for some fifty years, nearly always in extreme terms: the dazzling saloniere, the 'international siren,' the homewrecker, the gold digger, the power broker. 'If I had ever gotten bothered about what people thought, I would never have gone anywhere,' she told a reporter for The Washington Post in 1983." From Reflected Glory by Sally Bedell Smith.

According to one of her biographies, the word was that when she needed surgery three different men paid the same tab.

Now, I don't admire that. However -- I do greatly admire that she appeared to live the way she wanted to live and didn't appear to be held back by propriety. She was a 70s girl in a 50s world, and that took a lot of cheek.

She also wound up accomplishing quite a lot, when she went political in her later years. She became a major fundraiser of the Democratic Party, was sometimes referred to as the "doyenne" and "First Lady" of the party. So The Life of the Party by Christopher Ogden has a double meaning. She was "life of the party" in two ways.

As a 70-something she made People magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People List. And she even died with flair: of a stroke in a swimming pool in Paris.

What Writing Type Are You?

What type of writer should you be? This little quiz is a hoot: as much fun as finding out your sleep number or your Myers-Briggs type. It's also flattering. And encouraging.

I took this test and learned I should be a screenwriter. What I write is novels and nonfiction books and articles, and virtually everything but poetry and the city directory. But I've never sold a screenplay (though I have sold screen rights.)

I wouldn't mind a bit getting a story into the theaters.

BTW, I first ran across this item on the site called Mom and Apple Pie: Serving Fresh Poetry. The link's to the left on my blogroll.

Wonder how Henry James would be profiled by this test! Or Don DeLillo.

Horseback Writers, Galloping Creativity

For writers in or near central North Carolina:

Writer and rider Billie Hinton, a wonderful regular commenter on this blog, will be hosting in October an all-day experience using horseback riding to jog loose the creative juices. It's called "CREATING FORWARD MOTION IN YOUR WRITING."

Billie will lead the workshop at her home. "Up to 4 participants will explore forward motion and movement with horses, planned writing breaks, lunch, and guided exercises in the midst of autumn color and hopefully, sunshine!" Email Billie at billie@billiehinton.com for details.

I highly recommend it. BTW, Billie is also a psychotherapist.

The Definition of Courage

Shirin Ebadi, a woman judge in Iran, was demoted to the position of court clerk after the Islamic revolution in that country in 1980. The very thought of such a thing happening makes me feel momentarily blind with fury. Ebadi fought back using her legal skills, and in 2003 received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Last week a reporter for my local Raleigh newspaper interviewed her and asked her this question: "Would you define courage?"

She answered: "Courage means persistence in your belief, that difficulty along the way does not cause you to deviate from your path. It means you will make your best effort for what you believe in."

Succinct. It applies just as well to the long stumbling process of writing.

Ebadi, who has been jailed and gets death threats, has had to put up with a lot worse, though, than uncertainty and rejection and revision. Sunday, two days after that interview was published, she refused a summons from Iran's Revolutionary Court. Her book is Iran Awakening.

Publishing Requirements, Art Trends: How to Hitch a Ride

A large part of success in getting published or in almost any activity is being able to BORROW ENERGY from the great forces. Even when making the most iconoclastic art, it helps to have an awareness of the tides and trends--for making the best choices of allies, venues, timing, and marketing strategies.

Friend, shaman, and author Kelley Harrell gave me this week the startling seasonal wreath you see here, in celebration of our heading toward the cold season. I love it--the drama of it, the mystery, and the gutsy lack of cuteness.

Among other things, this wreath reminds me that, though we're heading for cold, we're now in the harvest season: editors who were at the beach a lot in summer are back in their rolling desk chairs now. It's time to send out the new ideas, harvest results from earlier efforts, and begin a new cycle.

The dark image, with its mirror and cross and feathers and cobwebs, is also for me an image of the meditative moment: when action will come to a dead-halt, before setting forth again in a new revolution.

Until I placed this rather delicate structure where it is, I hadn't realized how my mantel has been working on a theme. At the other end, though I know you can't see clearly, are prints by my artist and office-partner buddy Carrie Knowles. The shorter one is a highly stylized rendering of a greenish-gold sun. The tall one is three pictures: each one of the same wave forming and growing taller. (She made that rising wave while living in Australia, only weeks before the tsunami hit Asia.)

All these images are reminders of the great universe beyond the day's activities. They also manage to remind me that even if my work is new and odd, I can still hitch a ride on the existing power and HELP MY CHANCES FOR SUCCESS BY:
*locating the most sympathetic markets for my style and purposes
*calling people when they're most likely to be in their offices
*finding out the schedule and deadlines for a target magazine's theme issues
*jumping on opportunities wherever they turn up
*not planting flowers in the shade, thinking they'd be so much more comfortable there (as a beginning-gardener friend of mine once did)
*figuring out when to try to ride a big wave and when to run for high ground

May we all have an especially rich harvest this year!

A Liberating Vow

From frequent contributor and novelist Billie Hinton:

"My personal philosophy is that we all focus entirely too much energy
on 'how we can make things happen,' when really what we need to do is
VOW it, SEE it, and do the DAY-TO-DAY WORK we need to do while the universe puts the bigger pieces together."


This could be very relaxing approach, as well as a lot more productive. Day-to-day work is not a small thing, after all.

Besides-- remote control of the publishing industry through tensing of my neck and shoulder muscles is a poor strategy, now that I really look at it.

Strategy (and Hope) for the Stubborn Artist

A recent essay in the New York Times Book Review quotes Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, as defending the potential of the books that get the least marketing effort and sell the fewest copies.

This situation, he says, "is where the major writers of the future usually start. It's where much of the best writing is, the work of the ODD, UNCOOPERATIVE, INTRACTABLE, PIGHEADED AUTHORS who insist on seeing and saying things their own way and change the game in the process. The 'system' can only recognize what it's already cycled through. What's truly new is usually indigestible at first."

I tell myself that. And at the same time I know it's easy to discount criticism of my work as lack of appreciation for genius. (please take that comment in the ironic way it was intended)

HERE'S MY STRATEGY: I do my work the way I want it. Then if it doesn't sell the first time out, I take any feedback and revise in a way I think will satisfy the editor and that still is true to my vision, my voice, my purpose.

Sometimes I go through that process several times before a book sells. And it takes a godawful long time. But I've always felt that the book was better. And I take comfort in remaining fundamentally pigheaded, though it may not always show.

Advanced Decision-Making Skills

I've been obsessing today about whether to schedule a trip to NY and London--for book research--in October when the weather is better and my gut tells me is the best time, or in November when the airfare drops about $200 and I'd have more time to get ready. What would you do?

I knew something like this was going to happen today when I went to get dressed and was completely stymied: all my clothes were wrong. This is never a good omen. But I did manage to get dressed: jeans, boots (we had hurricane Ernesto today) and a striped T-shirt. How could that be so hard?

And then an epiphany in an e-mail from one of my sisters-in-law, who said in passing that she'd NEVER REGRETTED A SINGLE ADVENTURE she'd ever taken. I like that attitude. From that perspective, it doesn't matter if my trip is in October or November. I'm just tickled that I'm going.

Cryptoquote from Sophocles

Toward the end of finishing a book, I get re-hooked on word puzzles: crosswords and cryptoquotes, the ones that are seemingly jumbled letters and the trick is to break the code and read the quotation.

My guess about why is that every day during these periods I'm impatient to feel THE SENSATION OF FINISHING AND TYING UP ALL LOOSE ENDS. Solving these little puzzles gives me this feeling, so that I don't wrap up the book prematurely.

Not long ago I triumphed on the cryptoquote in my local paper, thus revealing an important piece of wisdom. The quote of the day was from Sophocles; his message was: "Fortune is not on the side of the faint-hearted." Finding that felt like a double victory.

Play Your Own Tune

Remember the mad genius mathematician in A Beautiful Mind? I've been reading that book about John Nash by Sylvia Nasar because my biography-in-progress is about a woman who conversed with spirits and was hospitalized--against her will.

Nasar quotes an item found in Nash's mother's scrapbook, which she placed there when Nash was a child, no doubt in an attempt to reassure herself. Mrs. Nash is quoting Angelo Patri:

"QUEER LITTLE TWISTS AND QUIRKS GO INTO THE MAKING OF AN INDIVIDUAL. To suppress them all and follow clock and calendar and creed until the individual is lost...is to be less than true to our inheritance....Life, that gorgeous quality of life, is not accomplished by following another man's rules. It is true we have the same hungers and the same thirsts, but they are for different things and in different ways and in different seasons....LAY DOWN YOUR OWN DAY, FOLLOW IT TO ITS NOON, or you will sit in an outer hall listening to the chimes but never reaching high enough to strike your own."

I don't know who Angelo Patri is or was, but he's onto something there.

Speaking of Elves and Faeries

I've just come from the monthly get-together that I fondly call Mystic Pizza. It's a few people--frequently very few--who get together at a local K&W cafeteria to talk about metaphysical subjects.

This time the talk ranged from the story of a FAIRY SIGHTING to the question of whether cause-and-effect rules the universe.

Everyone seemed open to the most extreme possibilities. On each subject, at least one person had no doubt.

I've read that something like 42% of Americans believe in ghosts. But most of us don't go around in the world at large talking about such things. And that's understandable. For one thing, it could put a job at risk. (In my first novel Revelation, I wrote about a minister who heard the voice of God, and TOLD, and his liberal congregation began to question whether he was well.)

I wonder WHAT THE WORLD WOULD BE LIKE, IF WE ACTUALLY TALKED FREELY ABOUT WHAT WE REALLY BELIEVE.

For myself, I face no risk at all. As an artist with a metaphysical bent, I have a cultural sanction for being wacky. It's expected, nearly obligatory. The fact that I tend to wear classic clothes (with a twist) instead of flowing gowns with moons and stars on them is probably more of a liability than claiming gnomes are doing my garden chores. But I boldly go on with my quiet presentation.

At the same time, I find that, with nonbelievers, I talk far more skeptically about the "supernatural" than I am. I'm completely willing to believe stories of ghosts and fairies etc--and I want to get to see them too. Sunday I went to a Body, Mind, Spirit Expo, and bought a fifteen-minute reading from a guy, Christian von Lahr, who sees "little people." The way I tell the story of that intriguing conversation varies depending on who I'm talking with. I've heard myself speaking with a lot more skepticism and irony than I feel.

As the popular saying goes: what's up with that?

One of the Paradoxes of Creativity

It's easy to think of bold creativity as a move to be louder or faster, or working longer hours, being more offensive, more "different."

But that's not necessarily true. At times, it's better for our work to have the guts to be slow or scared or silent or child-like. IT TAKES GUTS TO "REGRESS", but it can be just the right thing for the best function of the senses and the imagination.

My husband Bob's Turkish Kangal Dog, Kaya, is very bold about regressing. He goes back to being a puppy whenever he feels like it. Here's a moment from this past Christmas when he was feeling like a child again.

A Very Assertive Girl

Lee Smith's new novel coming out next month is about A NOTABLY BOLD CHARACTER. I like that this protagonist is a teenage girl. On Agate Hill is the story of a 13 year-old during the Civil War. From Lee Smith's website:

“I know I am a spitfire and a burden,” she begins her diary. “I do not care. For evil or good this is my own true life and I WILL have it. I will.” She keeps the diary in her treasured “box of phenomena” which contains “letters, poems, songs, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, and bones, some human” by the time it is found during a historic renovation project in 2003. These items tell the story of Molly’s passionate journey through life.

The Missing Link to Oprah, Etc.

About that story on writers' attempts and strategies for getting on Oprah. Sorry I left the link out of my previous post. I still can't make it work; I get nothing but pop-ups. But if you want to go hunting for it, the piece is "Oprah Means Business for Authors" in the August 8, 2006, Chicago Sun-Times.



And here is the sea-going pedal-kayak that was supposed to go with the earlier coastal-retreat post. Actually pedaling this vessel out in the mile-wide Core Sound behind the Outer Banks is a wonderful meditative little adventure. Now, as I look at this picture, it seems quite a bit like the writing/artistic experience: setting forth alone in one's little boat, afloat on a mysterious medium.

Getting on Oprah

Check out this piece on how writers have managed to get themselves and their books on Oprah, and how they've embarrassed themselves trying.

I once had a writer attend a workshop I was teaching who'd been a guest on Oprah with her book and sold a pile of them, and still wondered if she was "a real writer." Dear God! Does self-doubt never end?

I've never been on the show myself, not that I haven't tried. I collaborated on a book The Healing Power of Doing Good, with Allan Luks who previously had been on the show to talk about the message of the book. When the publication date came, the producers felt they'd already adequately covered the subject.

Then when Oprah came to Raleigh to speak, I hired a courier to take a copy of my novel Sister India to the stage door and do battle through the crowd for me. I was told that somebody there had taken the book off his hands.

That's been a few years ago now, but you never know when Chicago is going to call.

Deadly Serious Career Planning

Here's a writing assignment guaranteed to clarify your goals in your art career and in every thing else: WRITE YOUR OWN OBITUARY. I gave it a try and I promise you, it is immodest.

MY FAKE OBIT:

Nobel laureate and bestselling novelist Peggy Payne, 3-time winner of the National Book Award, died yesterday at the age of 122, at her home after a brief illness.

An outspoken advocate for self-actualization Payne also wrote a number of nonfiction books, including a much-loved biography of painter Elisabeth Chant.

Her books combined her explorations of the supernatural and paranormal with her travels in exotic and enticing locations, including India, Ireland, Greece, Brittany, and the city of New Orleans. Her work has been published in 42 languages. She continued to travel and write and lecture, and to work with other writers, until weeks before her death.

Most of her novels were made into movies and a script she co-authored received an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Born in 1949 in Wilmington, NC, to Margaret and Harry Payne, she lived in North Carolina throughout her life. She and her beloved husband psychologist Bob Dick celebrated her hundredth birthday on a round-the-world cruise on the QE2. To the end of her life she maintained a close relationship with her family and friends, continuing to have tea with her writing group each Thursday she was in town.

In the second half of her life, she amassed great wealth and created a foundation to support artists, inventors and start-up businesses in imaginative undertakings.

Having wrestled with obsessive-compulsive disorder in her early years, she achieved in her fifties a state of inner peace that she considered her greatest achievement. Her explorations of the supernatural led her to ecstatic experiences of God and to an intimate connection with spirits.

She is remembered also as an enthusiastic gossip, a fan of old rock and roll, a magazine junkie, connoisseur of thrift shops, slapdash gardener, sometime clothes horse, and reader.

The Duke pep band will play at her funeral.

Inventist.com

"Don't just walk on water. Hop on it."

That's the slogan for the Aquaskipper, one of the cool inventions at the site called Inventist.com.

I consider inventing gizmos to be one of the finest of the fine arts. This inventive site features peculiar vehicles for transporting the daring individual--designs that go far beyond the pogo stick and the unicycle. The Aquaskipper, for example, allows you to scoot across water in a very undignified rabbit-like motion.

The site is worth visiting for entertainment value alone. The video of a guy hopping along the water should qualify for "America's Funniest Home Videos."

And one of my bold fifty-something brothers bought one of these items and gave it to his wife for her birthday. Talk about bold!

A Decent Income for a Writer

I do admire an artist who manages to BILL BOLDLY and be well paid. This item is from Bookslut and may be of special interest to my fellow writers in NC where Charles Frazier got started.


"Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier made headlines by getting paid $8 million, 17 NFL teams, and the state of Delaware for his new novel, Thirteen Moons. Kirkus has the first review of the forthcoming novel, and they find that Frazier's BIG-ASS PAYCHECK was totally worth it."

(The caps and boldface are all mine.)

Re-entry

Today is my first day back after vacation. I haven't adjusted to getting up at work-day time. I don't like some of my e-mail I found waiting. And I woke up feeling beat all to hell from miles of kayaking on Core Sound.

WISH I WERE STILL THERE.

Boldly Sashaying Out My Office Door

As of 4:30 today, Tuesday, August 1, I am on vacation until Monday.

This is A BIG MOVE for me. I don't do it often enough--though, God knows, I fritter away big chunks of time on a daily basis. But I'm assured that vacation is very good for one's writing. And I've seen that myself, though it's always hard to remember from one time to the next.

Anyway, I'm going to the beach, leaving normal life in the care of a house-sitter. I plan to venture out into the Atlantic in a one-person, pedal-instead-of-row sea kayak--and, during the heat of the day, to read in the shade. I will come back so refreshed that you probably won't recognize me.

Just wait and see.

Getting Unstuck

If you happen to be in central North Carolina Friday, you might be interested in this event:

My psychologist husband Bob Dick is running a HALF DAY SEMINAR, helping people to USE HYPNOSIS to get unstuck, whether the issue has to do with creativity, relationships, career, health, etc.

I went to one of these once myself and got myself out of a sticky writing spot, through a wonderful hypnotic trance dream. Long story: but basically I went down a well, literally got stuck there, settled in, and a door opened onto such light that I had to squint. I also came out of the afternoon with a practical idea that helped solve my problem.

Call 919 929-1227 if you're interested.

Bold and Passionate

Here's an UNUSUALLY BRAVE EXAMPLE of somebody making a leap on behalf of her true purpose. This little tale comes from a cool site called BLOGGER STORIES.

"Nadia Muna Gil stepped off the tried and true path to follow her passion. She left a well-paying job, at a prestigious Wall Street firm, to pursue CHEESE BLOGGING and education full-time. The Cheesaholics Anonymous blog is more than a blog about cheese .. it is also a woman's dream to tell the world about artisan cheesemakers."

Turns out (when I visited her site) that her company also does cheese education events, at least one of which has been featured in The New Yorker. Not bad!

Writing and Teaching at Duke

My career will take a new and intriguing turn this coming spring.

I've accepted a one-semester-long position called SCHOLAR-IN-RESIDENCE in the English Department at Duke University.

So for four months I'll be teaching two fiction writing seminars to undergraduates. I've done a lot of kinds of teaching, but this particular job already feels especially satisfying. I graduated from Duke -- and I love the place -- and there's a nicely circular feel to coming back there now.

Of course I'll continue writing and consulting...though far less than usual during this spring.

I look forward to a taste of campus life again. I always loved living in a dorm with a cafeteria downstairs, though I understand that this is not part of the deal.

Literary Feedback: Writing Group Hates My New First Chapter

I read the first chapter yesterday of the biography I've just begun to my long-time writing group (23 years). It was the WORST REACTION I EVER GOT FROM THIS GROUP.

I kind-a like the chapter, and so did the only other person who has read it.

The most encouraging response I got out the meeting was: well, you always make it work in the end, so you'll no doubt do it again.

WHAT THEY HATED: the way I used PERSONAL MATERIAL as well as the stuff about my biography subject. One person wanted me to turn it into a novel. They also didn't like most of the references to the sources of the information I got; instead wanting me to just tell the story, without interruption, and put footnotes as needed. (That makes a sort of sense, but I'm always interested in THE UNDERPINNINGS OF A STORY.
Also, I started life as newspaper reporter, so I'm inclined to attribute.)

WHAT I'M GOING TO DO: Let it sit for a few days then see how it looks to me. What I now expect is that I'll stick with the approach of including my own piece of the story, and perhaps go a little deeper into one piece of that, hold some of it back until a later chapter, and then make the reason for my own WEIRD FASCINATION with the bizarre artist who is my subject part of the discovery process for both writer and reader.

EMOTIONAL RESPONSES:
1. Well, shit...how inconvenient that I need to take time to think about their reactions, to figure out how to make the story widely accessible without abandoning any of my purposes in writing it
2. Refreshed...this is not a healthy response, my being so kneejerk rebellious that I feel energized by opposition
3. Grudgingly glad to have early notice of what I'm up against in meeting readers' needs with the way I present this project
4. Startled by the vehemence of some of the reaction
5. Wearied by the knowledge that I've taken on something complicated. (My psychologist husband Bob has always said that I like "Great Wall of China projects.")

IN THE SHORT-TERM: I got my car washed this morning. This felt very pertinent, somehow. I also once again have the impulse to paint flowers on it.

Deadline for Perfection

Sunday is the deadline I gave myself to become as physically fit as I can possibly be, or give away any clothes that don't fit -- no more saving them until I get around to being that size.

This may not seem related to bold creativity in art or any other field. But it is.

What I mean by fit, I regret to say, is movie-star perfect muscle tone. Ripped. Never mind that I'm 57 years old.

For me, THIS PREOCCUPATION IS RELATED TO CREATIVITY IN 2 WAYS:
*it's wasting mental time
*it's a bit perfectionistic, and perfectionism is a notorious hindrance to trying out new ideas, and getting work finished

Probably I should settle for reasonable fitness -- which I already have -- and quit being an idiot about this. But I had an eating disorder in my twenties, and those things die hard.

The main thing going on with me though is not about muscle tone and appearance. It's that I'm having trouble MANAGING MYSELF. I tell myself to jump rope. Then I quit after about ten jumps. This is new. And very unnerving.

I'm not quite sure what to do. My whole being rebels against the idea of giving up.

My First Writers' Retreat Experience

Last night, I got back from Weymouth, the writers hide-away in Southern Pines, NC.

I am A NEW CONVERT to this approach to writing. And I'm surprised. I've always thought I would hate going off somewhere with a laptop and a lot of silence, when my formative writing experience is a newsroom.

The way I worked it, though, it wasn't so silent. It was more like taking my toothbrush and moving into a newsroom, day and night. And I loved it.

The way I got my noise quota, was to have an adjoining room with Billie, the friend I went with. We kept the door open and could toss comments back and forth occasionally.

Also, the gorgeous grounds of the place are used for weddings and such, which are visible from the upstairs writer rooms, and were very entertaining. At one point, Billie, who had a better view of those events than I did, reported, "THE FLOWERGIRL IS NOW BITING PEOPLE." (This is possibly one of those had-to-be-there items, but it was wildly funny and companionable at the time.)

At the same time, I got A HUGE OF AMOUNT OF WRITING DONE. I wrote the first, second and third drafts of the first chapter of my new book, a biography of a painter, Elisabeth Chant. And I spent 18 hours on work for a client. We were there Wednesday afternoon through Sunday afternoon, and walked into charming downtown Southern Pines for most every meal. I got that much work done and still it FELT LIKE A VACATION.

I highly recommend it. And if you're not a rowdy sort of writer, you can arrange to be as quiet and solitary there as you want.

NOW ABOUT THE GHOSTS: in planning my trip to Weymouth, I was very interested in tales I'd heard from other writers-in-residence there of ghostly encounters. Bottom line: I didn't see any ghosts. But still, there were a number of peculiar things going on.

GHOSTLY CLUES:
*A closet door opened by itself
*A chair twice appeared to be slightly moved
*Two nights in a row there was a sound like cardboard boxes being pushed around overhead
*A latch of a room down the hall made some clicking noises with no one around
*And others

I thought of perfectly ordinary explanations for all these things. But I HOPE I'M WRONG about those. If you're a ghost hunter (or skeptic), please feel free to weigh in on this.

Off to Weymouth

Most of next week I'll be holing up at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines, where I'll be a writer-in-residence.

This will be my first experience of working at a writers retreat.

My plan is to, among other things, write the first chapter of my biography of painter Elisabeth Chant.

Also, I'm hoping to see a ghost; the place has a reputation for being haunted. I know five credible people who have had ghostly encounters there.

Ideally, I'll see the ghost of my biography subject. That would definitely be worth the trip.

I'm not sure how I'll react to working in a quiet place. I live in the country and I drive into Raleigh to work to make sure I have enough people and noise around me. This will be an adventure, and pretty likely to stimulate some different brain cells.

I will report back, about the book and the ghost.

Career Success Barbie Doll

Some time back, I promised a picture, and then couldn't find the picture. The file finally turned up, and here it is: my Career Success Barbie Doll.

Sorry that the picture is lousy. It's a photo of a photo, with a camera I'm still not used to.

Here's the reason for this little tableau. By accident, I had discovered that VISUALIZATIONS CAN REALLY WORK. And putting before me in physical form an image of what I want works even better.

I learned this when I found that I'd unwittingly reproduced, with real flowers, a floral arrangement that was on a picture near my computer.

If an image could work that easily to get me to produce the real thing, I wanted to apply the principle to something more important.

So I set out to EMBODY MY CAREER GOALS. Here, on the grungy window sill of my office at that time, is the doll I "dolled up" to be a visual symbol of the success I wanted.

This doll has a photo of my face attached, with the hair cut to the length of mine then, and tiny mockups of my books, existing and planned. Four of those are now published, which is one -- or two? -- more than were published then. And another is recently finished.

Note in "my" right hand the pink quill pen, and in my left, the cell phone and the Oscar. I do now have a cell phone. That much of those items has come true.

I haven't exactly come to look like that. But I find in the photo on the bio page of my website, I'm at least wearing the same color.

Perhaps it's time for another version of my icon, to project a few more books down the road. Or one to focus entirely on publication of the just-completed one.