A Mid-Atlantic Turning Point in My Writing

(This is the opening section of an essay I wrote a few years back about an Atlantic crossing on the QE2 that altered me and my writing, that gave me greater resolution and courage. The piece was published in The Spectator in Raleigh and won an honorable mention in literary magazine Rosebud's creative nonfiction contest. A Washington Post travel editor asked to publish it, but changed her mind when I told her it had come out in a local paper, and that I was writing about a subsidized press trip. I will be publishing this here as a serial. This is Part One.)






Even from the farthest reach of the dock on New York's 53rd Street, the Queen Elizabeth 2 was too long to photograph. I couldn't, with a wide-angle lens, get the whole ship into the frame at once. So I shot it by halves, the front and then the back, not sure what I'd do with two mismatched ship halves when I got home.

This ship, the QE2, is the last of the world's transatlantic liners. The Cunard brochure had described it as three football fields long. I don't measure things in football fields. I keep score in numbers of words, copy-inches, books. It's as a writer that I was heading to sea, and not only as a travel writer with a notebook, but as a novelist bringing along a manuscript that had been too long in progress. I was running late, by years, in getting another book out, felt pressed, frustrated, discouraged. I planned to look at the manuscript, away from my usual life, see where I stood with it. (Working aboard the QE2 was an idea that had also occurred to Francis Ford Coppola, Ray Bradbury, and other writers I would soon meet toting manuscripts on this voyage.)

But there was still another reason for my taking this trip: I am approaching the anniversary of my 25th year as a freelance writer, two and a half decades typing out of one little office or another in Raleigh, North Carolina. This crossing was to be both a celebration and, optimistically, the start of my career's second half, another 25 years. I wanted to spend a week living the writer's life the way it's supposed to be, working onboard ship in a grand, leisurely way ...And heading for new territory. My destination on this voyage was the country of Wales, a place I'd never been. One of my tasks there was to research an article on the struggle of the Welsh people to keep their language alive. I sympathized with their cause; after so many years of writing for publication, I'd come to wonder how much of my own voice was alive.

(Note: I'd love to hear from anyone who has had such a question about his or her voice...and how you've dealt with the issue. )

Today's Bold Proclamation

I'm hereby endorsing, supporting, and ordering bumper stickers to elect:
Al Gore.

He opposed the Iraq war early. He's in favor of the planet. He's for civil liberties and against the Patriot Act. I think he'll do as well as any on healthcare. These are the four biggest issues for me. I admire a great deal about Obama, Edwards, and Clinton. But every one of them has been at some point too hawkish for me.

And as for stopping global warming: it's damn hot here. Alarmingly hot. I say elect the guy today.

A Must-Visit: Dare to Be Fabulous

I just had a peek at a website with the enticing name of Dare to Be Fabulous. First let me mention that I've been feeling quite hit-by-a-truck today.

The art on the homepage alone perked me up enough so that I now have the strength to get out of the office and go to either a movie, a sofa with a book, or a hot tub. Any of those sound fabulous to me. I've just finished an enormous chunk of work done during the same three weeks in which we had both a small party and a houseguest for ten days. All three of these items are good and satisfying experiences, but at some point afterwards one needs a lie-down. This is it for me. Have a good weekend.

A Simple Means of Personal Transformation

A line from a story by Kristina Mahoney in The Boston Globe:
"I became curious about life beyond my own self-imposed limitations."

Following the example of her mentor, this woman followed her curiousity and her life grew immensely richer.

Change for the good can be that simple: following those flashes of interest that can come and go in a second, taking the next step, seeing something new grow.

The Morning Glory Project

I've tended to think--wrongly, I know--that a bold action is necessarily one quick simple movement. I'm finding that my current experiment in audacity--the Morning Glory Project-- is slow and involves lots of little pieces.

To paint these flowers on my aged car, I've so far assembled the equipment : borrowed sander, the right grade of sandpaper, spray paints, and a stencil. I also have an old $6 thrift shop filing cabinet I'm going to do first for practice. That's how far along I am now. Today I crank up the sander and grind on the file cabinet. Will report on progress.

I sorta wish I could just wake up tomorrow with giant morning glories growing all over my car. But doing the bits and pieces seems a necessary part of the process. As with writing books, etc.

From Passionate Marriage

My psychologist husband Bob often wants my opinion on books that pass across his desk. This one--Passionate Marriage, by David Schnarch--I grabbed. And I found that it offers some wisdom that applies to more than marriage.

From page 297: "We have the fantasy that we have the choice between being anxious or not. Unfortunately, we don't. Our choice is one anxiety or another. Do something scary--or face problems from not doing it. Make an error by commission--or omission. Face the anxiety that things will change--or stay the same. Do...things you've never done--or forfeit that taste of life. Face the anxiety of growing up--or the terror of living life as a perpetual child."

I decided somewhere in my college years that life was sufficiently daunting that going for broke hardly adds to the risk at all. I've certainly wavered on that many a time. Yet I still hold to it, act on it as much as I can.

Color Your Own Parachute

Perhaps thirty years ago I read an article in Travel & Leisure about Ireland's Dingle Peninsula. I'm pretty sure it was written by Paul Theroux, a fellow travel writer/novelist, though a much more prolific one. The photos showed mist and deep green. And there was a line in the story that I've remembered ever since, which said in effect: only a fool blames his bad vacation on the rain.
Last weekend, I was at Wrightsville Beach where I grew up. The weather was so-so, and the beach was terrific: the water warm and the waves, close-up, full of light. A few clouds didn't stop the major surfing competition that brought crowds to the beach--the Reef/Sweetwater Pro-Am--though surfers had to paddle in for a little while to let a spate of lightning pass.

One way and another, people brought their own color, their own good weather. It was inspiring. Now I'm toying with the idea of taking a surfing lesson; it seems the right thing to do before I turn sixty. Also to finally get around to going to the Dingle Peninsula. I was so happy that I finally braved getting into the water last weekend. I'm generally happier, I find, when I don't let myself be stopped by a trifling obstacle, when I go ahead and take the plunge.

Dressing Bold

"Loud and Clear

The Message in Accessories? Go Bold or Go Home."

This is a message in the new issue of W, my favorite fashion magazine--and even with the fun of the Internet, I'm still a hard-copy-full-0f-perfume-ads-magazine junkie.

Now the truly self-expressive person certainly isn't ruled by fashion mavens or trends.

However, there's an advantage to each new turn of the fashion wheel. That is: for a few months, those of us who like feathered pocketbooks or other such conversation pieces will have them easily available and can stock up. And then they'll be drifting into the thrift shops for a few years. So if big color and strange clothing creations are your style of high glam, this is your heads-up.

Then too, I just sort of like the phrase: go bold or go home. I like it even better this way: go bold and go home. The real boldness is authenticity. And decorating one's self according to one's genuine taste is part of being authentic.

Approached that way the whole process is a joy, as it should be, rather than a social obligation.

And decoration is, I read, more and more of a guy thing. Note above the fine start on a decorated mailbox from RK, a novelist/teacher as well as a valued commenter here. He is continuing to work on this, with the addition of red paint, and some leaf prints. Definitely going to be a bold combo.

The Admirable Art of Self-Promotion

For anyone who is hesitant about promoting her or his own work: take a look at this piece of encouragement in the New York Times.



I am one who is blessed with what my politician brother calls microphone fever. I like promoting my work. I respect others' efforts to promote theirs.



The only time I ever cringe in embarrassment is when my husband leaves my business card, with book credits and contact info, etc, at a restaurant table for the waiter to pick up with the credit card. That's my limit. Maybe it's the fact that he's doing it and not me. I'm not sure. (I keep giving him cards, because he puts a lot of them to good use when I'm not around.)



In any event, I think most of us have some shaky moment about advancing our own passionately-held cause. I believe that, on the whole, holding back from telling people about our work is a bad idea. It leads to resentment and poor sales, and who knows what else.



You might also have a look at the book refered to in the article: Brag: The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It. One review says it defines bragging as an act of authenticity. Seems right to me.

Obsession Update; Obsessive Art

The project to paint huge blue morning glories on my car has taken tiny steps forward. The custom-cut stencil has arrived from England. I borrowed an electric sander from one of my brothers. And I've acquired a thrift-shop file cabinet to practice on. (Keep in mind: I'm a writer not a visual artist.)

The idea of painting my car this way has dogged me for years. There's a very good chance that it will look awful. But I must proceed. It's in my DNA. Or my karma. It was the same way with the idea of setting a novel in the city of Varanasi, India; it was clear years before I ever visited the city that I had to write such a book. That turned out to be Sister India, which grew out of notes I took after spending a winter there.

I am possessed in the same way now, not only with the morning glories, but with research on a biography of a strange and little-known painter who died in 1947. It's a good thing it's possible to be ferociously pulled by more than one project at a time; I'd be in trouble if I devoted all my time to car painting.

The feeling I--and so many of us, at one point or another--share is that of the guy in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He's obsessed with the shape of a mountain he has never seen. He even sculpts the form in mashed potatoes at the dinner table. He has to find that place.

That's one kind of obsessive art. The other is the kind that is meticulously repetitive: Campbell Soup cans, for example. No doubt, the two types of obsessiveness are related.

I do have a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. And I don't want to romanticize that. It's no fun at all. But this passion for a project feels like an obsession of a different sort. It feels like love.

SIX LINKS, cool in extremely various ways, to more on art obsessiveness:


!Obsessive-Compulsive-Artistic Geniuses?

Why Do We Like to Watch Obsessive Art

On Being Eccentric

Inventive Art Created from the Mundane

Insect-Obsessed Artist

Obsessed with Painting vs. Finding a Balance


And A QUESTION: Do you ever get obsessed with a project, maybe one that you know is weird but MUST PURSUE anyway?

Billionaire Inventor Who Doesn't "Think Straight"

James Sorenson's teachers said he'd never learn to read, says Monday's USA Today. His mom said he could do anything he set his mind to. A friend and dean of a business school says he's a "non-linear thinker." The reporter who wrote the story said that "his thoughts meander so much that a few hours (with him) produced a...notebook full of disconnected clutter."

Yet Sorenson has, over his several decades, put his thoughts together extremely well and come up with a list of medical inventions to his credit. Many of his ideas have come to him while he's soaking in the bathtub with a washcloth over his face.

Now at 86 he has begun the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, sampling DNA in 107 countries. He wants to show that people have a common ancestry, without regard to races and ethnic groups. His hope is that demonstrating this will lead to world peace. His wife of 60 years says," I stand back and wait, because he does the impossible...You can't tell him he can't do something."

Biography Research: Repotting a Book-in-Progress

When I was a few months into my research on my biography of painter Elisabeth Chant, I bought a thrift shop item to house my growing stacks of notes.

That piece of furniture, shelves that were more like mail slots, was fine for a while.

But recently I realized I needed more space, and lots more different files. The distinctions in topics were growing ever finer, in addition to the added piles of bulk material.

So: a new container. I'm up to a very deep-drawered file cabinet, dressed in a sari from Varanasi, the setting of my novel Sister India. (This is the very distinctive Banarsi brocade.)

And this doesn't count the shelves of books, or the digital material.

I expect I'll have to repot another time or three before this book is done. It's a satisfying piece of the process, seeing it grow.

Repurposing

I like using things in ways other than their original purpose. To me, that's one of the three basic approaches to creativity, to making up new stuff:
1. use a familiar object for a new purpose
2. look at the familiar from a different perspective
3. combine elements that haven't been put together before (or never so well.)

This assemblage to the right is my project of last weekend: the idea being to do something with the unsightly nearly-six-foot multi-armed "stump" at the edge of my woodland garden.

I find it wonderfully phantamagorical, and expect the flower-pot-handed arms to start waving, hydralike.

Another nice thing about this kind of project is: it's not my writing, my career, and all that...I'm free to do it as sloppily as I want. Very liberating.

A Passion-Driven Career Move

The founder of Felony & Mayhem press, Maggie Topkis, likes mysteries--yet found that a lot of the kind she most admires were out of print. So, according to The Week magazine (summarizing a story originally in Forbes), she read about a machine that could print out a paperback in seventeen minutes.

She got the rights to a British mystery Death in the Garden that had come out in '95 and started printing copies. That was the beginning. She has since gone on to publish more than forty titles--"bringing the best in bygone mysteries back to life."

Necessary Uncertainty

From an old (last winter's)More Magazine, a story on re-creating one's life by Susan Crandell:

"Most great ventures arise in uncertainty. Did Louis and Clark know they would make it to the Pacific? ... The hallmark of an adventure is not knowing the outcome, trusting in the flow of events....The least successful reinventers were the ones who'd figured everything out, down to the last decimal point....You're smart. You can make some of it up as you go along."

More, by the way, did not choose me as one of their winning women in their over-forty model search. More's the pity. But wasn't it wonderfully cheeky of me to enter the contest?

How to Reduce Fear: A Strategy

The idea is to take small steps in each beginning of the work on the project. And there's neurological reasoning behind this.

The approach is called the Kaizen Way, developed by Dr. Robert Maurer. Japanese business people used that word to describe the way they went about rebuilding their businesses after the devastation of World War II.

I found a description of this technique in Unlock Your Creative Genius by Bernard Golden:

"Maurer suggests that the human brain, motivated to maintain stability and security, is wired to resist change....The fear center of the brain, the amygdala, can lead us to react to situations without first checking in with the cortex, the more objective administrative part. Thus, new challenges can arouse fear in the amygdala, the center of the brain that is involved in the "fight or flight" response. However, small steps toward change or creativity do not trigger such a response. In effect, taking small steps toward change allows you to sidestep the fight-or-flight response...."

The Anxiety of Completion

I'm almost through with a revision and ready to send it to my agent. This makes me alternately want: to procrastinate and drag the process out...or to ship it off hastily with barely a proof-reading.

Anybody had that experience?

I'm managing to keep steadily working on it without following either rash course. In between bouts of writing, I plunge into a frenzy of gardening or crossword puzzles, both of which are somehow relieving. I'm open to other strategies, if anyone else is familiar with this state. I

I'm also excited about this project, which is a great feeling.

A Bit of Pagan Encouragement from Emerson

"The maker of a sentence, like the other artist, launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of a wild, creative delight."

Art Car: Going Bold on the Road

Some time back, I confided to you here that I've for years longed to have large cobalt-blue morning glories painted all over my 1992 pine-sap-speckled, beach-corroded Camry. (My novel-long-in-progress is titled Cobalt Blue.)

Well, I have just now ordered a stencil of morning glory blossoms and leaves, had the size of it doubled to 16 inches, and am commencing on research on car paint.

I meant to have an artist do this job; guess I'm getting gutsier: I'm going to do it myself.

And, for better or worse, you will see the finished product here. Note car in its current state (with a hint of my previous novel's title on the license plate.)

I always used to worry about seeming eccentric, and have reacted against that so much that I think I come off as rather buttoned-down. But once you have an art car, it's official, you're eccentric. It's the ultimate credential.

Saying Just Enough

Yesterday I got feedback from my writing group on fifty pages. Mostly they liked it a lot, which is always nice.

However, the parts they felt needed more work had problems of two kinds, directly opposite to each other. Or, you could argue, two sides of the same nickel. In some places, I'd hit people over the head with what I was saying, and in others I'd left too much to the imagination.

For me, getting this balance right is and has always been the hardest part of writing. If someone has discovered a guideline that works (other than getting feedback), I'd love to know.

What I'd really like is a clarity meter, a little gizmo like a photographer's light meter that can be held close to the page and that will then register the exact degree of balancing needed.

Rebelliousness

A lot of us like to think we're rebellious--as if there were something innately valuable in opposing whatever somebody else comes up with.

Intellectually, I know that's just as reflexive as slavishly following instructions.

But my gut has never gotten the message.

And in the last 24 hours, I've staged one of my frequent rebellions against myself. Having declared my ideal best life ruling principle at this site yesterday, I went home and was seized by all of my soft addictions nearly simultaneously: steady snacking all evening while turning through trashy magazines and then working crossword puzzles into the wee hours--I simply could not get myself to stop earlier and go to bed. Then of course I overslept hugely. And, worst of all, I indulged in beating up on myself.

Now none of this is so bad, obviously. Still. I'd like to feel I can stop. And an hour or two of those activities would have been plenty.

What happened is: the part of me that doesn't want anybody--including myself--telling me what to do got really fired up by my new ambitions.

The trick now is: to stay focused on my larger aim and outlast the rebellious part (I've been through this sort of thing a time or two before.) Will keep you posted.

More on Soft Addiction

A few weeks ago I wrote here about a book I was reading, The Soft Addiction Solution, on the idea that lots of us zone out much of the time doing the same habitual stuff: the TV and chips, or any repetitive escapist activity.

What I like about the philosophy of this author, Judith Wright, is that she doesn't preach discipline, self-restraint, character, deprivation, etc.

Instead the idea is to make a more satisfying choice, at least some of the time. I'm all the way to step one of this process, which is to make one overall decision about how I want my life to be, so that I at least have the option of making my daily decisions in support of that big one.

For example, like Lance Armstrong's Live Strong mantra.

I had to think about it for a while before I came up with mine. In fact, as recommended, I "test-drove" it for a few weeks. I'm happy with my selection, which is: I am living my life as my best self. I'm sorry to say I'm not bold enough to put this in boldface. I take that back. I'm putting it in boldface AND ALL CAPS: I AM LIVING MY LIFE AS MY BEST SELF.

It's a pretty clarifying idea. And I pay attention to it some of the time. I'd say it has steered me away from a lot of fried food and to a couple of yoga classes--and made clear a few times that it was time to knock off work for the day and go home.

I'm excited about this. It works. Will keep you posted on the next step in this process.

Discernment

What's the bold action for this moment? By bold, I don't necessarily mean flamboyant or loud. I mean taking the most direct road to where I want to be--and doing it without obsessing over it or second-guessing myself.

Here's the moment in question: I'm suddenly depressed (since Friday morning), mysteriously losing too much hair, and have also lost a surprising amount of weight (7 lbs in a week and a half.) I expected to lose some weight because I was teaching writing at a fitness spa, Rancho La Puerta, for a week of that time. So I ate healthy and worked out a lot. But I didn't expect to lose that much.

At first I thought I was just having back-to-the-desk letdown. But that doesn't cause weight loss.

What I've done so far: checked with my hairdresser yesterday morning and found that she too noted some missing hairs, called my doctor, went in and got a thyroid blood test in the afternoon, am now waiting to hear from test in a couple of days. So far so good, on the boldness front.

Now it's Wednesday morning and my impulse is to lie down on the floor and close my eyes.

Is that the boldly effective move? Will it help? Or is it better to keep working?

Sometimes making the bold move isn't the hard part. Instead the trick is to figure out what that move is.

Buddhism teaches sticking to right thought, right speech, right action, etc. I'd like to have a sort of pocket calculator that tells in any given moment what the right move (or lack of move) is. But I haven't yet seen one in any of the gadget catalogs.

Easy Does It

A useful bit of wisdom at a turn in the path.

Performance Anxiety

There are some yoga poses that are for me a reliable indicator of performance anxiety.

These are any that require balance on one foot.

When I do these at home, I can balance for long periods of time with no problem.

When I'm in a class with other people, I have a lot of trouble getting into equilibrium and staying that way. I'm never conscious of any audience effect in yoga classes-- but what else could cause this difference?

One thing I've learned that helps when I'm wobbly. The Sanskrit word for it is drishtee, roughly translated as "point of focus." That means find a spot to fasten your gaze on and don't look to the left or right.

When I do that, pretty soon I'm maintaining balance. The same principle applies to working on a novel: just focus on the work at hand.

(The photos are at Rancho La Puerta where I've been teaching: the sculpture in front of one of the yoga studios, the one of me taken on the grounds just after I finished with my last class. This is a good example of how we unconsciously reproduce what we see or visualize. I passed that sculpture every day, but didn't realize I had copied the pose, and even dressed the part.)

The Guts to Be First

(First a note about photos, etc. I'm on a Spanish-speaking computer and can't find some of the clicks. So I can't seem to move these the way I want. What's here: the swing under the Rancho pepper tree, a blossom that was growing beside me in the chi kung class, and a bit of BOLD ART in my room. And then the story....)

The couple that started the fitness spa in Baja where I'm teaching this week are an astonishing example of bold creative thinking. They were health nuts in 1940, with some ideas that are treated as news in recent years.

The place now called Rancho La Puerta welcomed its first visitors under the name Essene School of Life: "$17.50 a week, bring your own tent." (The Essenes were, among other things, highly successful farmers of antiquity, producing prodigious crops in poor Dead Sea area soil.)

Founder Prof. Edmond Szekely of Transylvania and his wife Deborah created what was in its early years the home of what the Prof called cosmotherapy, a regimen heavy on grape juice. He also believed that people need 20 minutes a day of direct sunlight for vitamin D, but that baking on a beach blanket is unhealthy. He was sure ahead of a lot of folks on that one.

A 1949 article in The San Diego Union reported that he kept a crystal ball in his study.

Szekely foresight also led to the school being an organic farm with a mainly vegetarian diet.

Today Deborah Szekely is still fit and active and inspiring, and still the grand dame. (The Prof died some years ago.) Grape arbors are still here, visible through a glass wall of the yoga gym. And the food remains largely vegetarian.

Now it costs a bit more than $17.50 and there's no need to pack a tent. The garden campus has enough Mexican-style cottages to house about 160 people, attending classes on mainstream topics like writing and Pilates.

And nobody thinks it's odd any more to eat a lot of vegetables or to drink the fruit of the vine for high anti-oxidant levels or to avoid skin cancer by limiting sun-time.

A fair number of people are comfortable with the idea of a crystal ball.

Back then it took courage.

The School of Life

TECATE, Mexico---This week I'm teaching writing at the health and fitness spa Rancho La Puerta in the mountains of Baja.

The guiding principle of this place is to help make healthy people healthier. Hikes go up the mountains (seriously up) starting at 6 every morning. And there are six or ten different classes going almost every hour from 9 until late afternoon. Most are about physical fitness: dance, yoga, that sort of thing.

In the afternoons classes focus on mind and spirit, to add to the body part of the equation. These are referred to on the schedule as the school of life, and include such topics as bird-watching, introductory Spanish, meditation, how to get the most out of a nap, etc.

This is my fifth time spending a week teaching here, and I love the place. When I'm not on duty, I feel as if I'm enrolled in the school of "improved self" and the process is delightful. (The gyms are charming, which I didn't think was possible--stone and tiles and good art and glass walls with views of gardens. Pictures to come.)

When I'm home, I do work out, but certainly not hours a day. In fact, I was once accused by a significant other of being interested in nothing but words and ideas. (Not so. But it was indeed true that I'm not interested in watching ballgames on TV.)

In any event, it's a huge shift to go from most days spent at my desk, to yesterday's cardio boxing, my first such experience, followed by this morning's 3.5 mile hike, exactly one half of that uphill.

The change--such an immersion in physical activity--feels invigorating. It feels bold. For the moment, I'm a new woman, and enjoying it.

Rancho La Puerta

I'm off to teach writing for a week in a fabulous spa in Mexico called Rancho La Puerta. It is heaven on earth--pardon cliche, but got to pack. Will be in touch here soon.

My Writing Office

Because of popular request, I've posted here the pictures of my newly feng-shuied office, which I wrote about several days back.

It feels about 20% larger than it did. Easier to find things too.

The mantel is now, at the direction of the office organizing person, a promotional center for my work, ("a shrine," she said), lining up books I've written and books that have something by or about me. The one tucked in at the very end that appears to have been published by an elementary school student is a mockup I made of my still-in-revision novel Cobalt Blue. I take visualization of the finished product very seriously.

Grant News in the Form of Rejection

I just now found out that I didn't get a grant I'd have loved to have.

The odds were tremendously against my getting it. Intellectually, I didn't expect it to happen.

Even so-- Pooey!!

On the other hand, I learned recently this encouraging bit of information: many grant sources won't award an applicant until they've applied at least two or three times.

My experience in winning these things is a mix: one fellowship took about ten tries to get (and that means ten YEARS), one took two tries, and, thrillingly, I got a couple of others with my first application. Actually they were all pretty thrilling when the answer was finally yes.

I suppose I could code it as a form of boldness, of creative courage, to apply to the same people more than ten times. In any event, it finally worked.

I've only applied for this grant once. So maybe next year--or in 2017.

"Soft Addictions"

I thought I'd recovered from last week's sudden end of the semester of teaching. But no.

Now I'm not sure if it's Duke withdrawal or caffeine (too much or too little.) In either case, my head, if not my spirits, is light.

I suspect caffeine. My wicked near-constant sweet iced tea habit.

Speaking of which-- I'm in the process of reading a book called The Soft Addiction Solution. Pardon the cliche, but it's an eye-opener. Not that I don't know about my harmless calming strategies: the nights with trashy magazines, the tea, the crossword puzzles even at red lights. What's new to me in this book is a way of reclaiming some of that time for conscious life, not through deprivation at all, but through a focus on something more inspiring.

Of course I ate chocolate cookies while I was reading about this. Nonetheless, I see a door opening before me in this book. I like the fact that it doesn't suggest giving anything up.

After Deadline

So the semester ended Friday.

Saturday I spent on the sofa with a novel, a book of crossword puzzles, and a lot of chocolate cookies. Sounds blissful, exactly what I'd looked forward to--but it wasn't. Instead it was like the days after finishing a draft of a book; theoretically, I feel released. But in fact, I feel foggy, emotionally flat, and irritable.

Sunday was better. I ran some errands, planted a bed of impatiens, stayed awake all day, congratulated myself on having that much energy.

Today, Monday, I'm back at my desk. The work version of post-deadline is: all those little things I was expecting to be eager to catch up on, I'm not. Not eager at all. Any sane person reading this is probably thinking: take a day off! But I don't feel like it. Not eager to do that either.

This mood (which feels chemical/physiological) will pass in another day or so. Most likely by tomorrow. The transition has always taken three days in the past. You'd think I'd learn.

If I did learn, what would I do differently? Probably nothing different. Maybe these periods simply have to be weathered.

I welcome ideas, if anyone knows how to better manage this sort of thing.

My 200th Post--School's Out

I'm about to finish doing the grading for my semester of teaching fiction writing at Duke. So it feels right that this entry is an auspicious round number.

Grading is tough in a creative writing course, as every writer/teacher knows.

I do have a system, but there is an unavoidably subjective element. I'm giving it my best judgment, no doubt, overthinking it--not much else I can do.

I'm also startled to discover that I'm losing these people I've focused on so intensely these last four months. I'm not used to this; it's a long time since I dealt with a graduation or last day at summer camp. I'm not jaded, to put it mildly. I'll be watching for their books forever.

At the same time, my schedule will be my own again. I don't mind that part at all. Also, I'll be chatting at this location more frequently than I have this semester. Let me know if I've gotten over-didactic.

Gutsy Writer: The Photo

Here's the picture of novelist Lionel Shriver promised in the previous post. Her books have the kind boldness that you'd expect of someone who, at age fifteen, changed her name to Lionel from Margaret Ann.

Lionel Shriver: One Gutsy Writer

Recently I've fallen in love with the work of novelist Lionel Shriver. So has much of the rest of the world. I wish I'd known about her novels long ago.

With her seventh and eighth novels, she has finally gotten big-time attention: bestsellerdom, a huge feature in The New York Times, book tour of New Zealand, etc.

NB: big success came with her 7th and 8th published novels. And she said her former agent refused to handle the seventh one and so she sent it out herself.

A+ for ENORMOUS PERSISTENCE. (Also, for quality in writing, insights, and plots.)

The two books that have finally brought her much-deserved attention are We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Post-Birthday World.

Both these books feel so honest that they seem skinless, exposing bare nerve endings.

I went to hear her read a week or so ago at Raleigh's Quail Ridge Books (turns out she spent much of her youth in my town and I interviewed her father a time or two for The Raleigh Times.) I asked her if she'd always been so bold as a writer or had she developed that courage over time.

She seemed genuinely baffled: "That's what writing is for," she said, "to SAY THE UNSAID." She wondered aloud: What are other writers doing? (boldface and caps are all mine)

And another thing: as the Times pointed out, she isn't exactly groveling over success. The head on the story: "After Lean Times, Prizes and Not One Apology." The Times referred to The Guardian (she lives in England) as saying that she had "violated the British law of self-deprecation by boldly declaring that she had WANTED HER BOOK TO WIN" the Orange Prize, which it did indeed win.

Do we ever really believe that someone doesn't want his or her book to win?

From henceforth I hold her work (including the PR wing) before me as a shining example, and will post here in the next couple of days a picture I took at her Quail Ridge reading.

On Taking a Stand

Be bold, but be impeccable.

I heard a speaker at a seminar last spring advise that. I think it was Katie Orenstein, a writer of op-ed opinion pieces among other things. She attributed the line to her mother-in-law.

It's a fine piece of wisdom, if you're inclined to be impetuous.

I spend too much time on impeccability. Quadruple-checking does me more harm than good. I'd like to work out a good balance. Oh hell, a perfect balance--that's what I'd really like.

Make It Legible

Last week a "room redesigner," Julie Tomlin of Raleigh/Cary, spent three and a half hours in my office and when I returned in early afternoon, the place had been transformed.

She didn't add anything or take anything away. Instead, she shuffled and restacked and consolidated, and now it seems as if the room has come into focus. And I feel as clearly located and defined as if I were sitting on top of a float in a parade.

A doctor I know has the clearest handwriting I've ever seen. It's like an architect's printing. He said he made it that way on purpose. It was a way to say: here I am, here's what I'm prescribing, and I stand by it.

I don't think doctors' reputedly messy handwritings are by design a way to hide. But it has crossed my mind before that my own might be a form of privacy. Nobody's every going to be prying into my bits and pieces of handwritten journal. It wouldn't be worth the effort to decipher.

All of which is to say that: making things clean and clear is a way of declaring one's self. Of standing by who and what we are.

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.