The Birth of an Art Opening.

All week as I've sat at my computer, I've watched an art show being assembled in the adjoining rooms.

My office is in an old Victorian home owned by my good buddy artist-writer Carrie Knowles,pictured here. The downstairs contains my office and her Free Range Studio, where the mantra is "Creativity should have no boundaries and dreams no fences..."

On Sunday, May 21, a week from Mother's Day, she's holding her first opening in this (Raleigh, NC) building we moved into early last fall. And YOU'RE INVITED. Carrie's a printmaker, and doing gorgeous pieces that use photos she made of cobblestones in Brussels, where her son is a classical musician. In these prints the stones seem to float.

For a thoroughly verbal sort as I am, it's a rousing thing to see, as I work, new prints spread out all over the floors drying, to watch the work go through various stages, and see the show start to come together. It sparks my own imagination to see all this going on around me. This work of hers is evocative and surprising, good qualities to have around when you're writing.

Next Sunday's party is open to the public. Come look if you're in this part of the world. It's at 410 Morson Street, near the Capitol, 1-5 pm. A handbag designer will be showing here at the same time. And I'll be here as a guest, with my own office neatened up a bit.

Access to Creativity

Artist Patricia Roshaven asked in a recent comment here how I get access to my own creativity.

In the course of working with other folks, I've put together dozens of tricks for doing that, but I'm going to ponder here what I regularly do myself to GET TO THE DEEPEST, WILDEST STUFF:

1. I start work, in my case, writing. The result may be awful for a while and then get better. And ideas emerge while I'm working.

2. After working--maybe later in the day--I do something physical and mindless: exercise, take a shower, eat lunch, do the laundry, run errands. After I've been writing, ideas pop up when I'm doing something physical and routine.

3. I've learned this one only in the last year: Keep a little sign on my computer that helps me remember the point of what I'm writing: insofar as I know the point. This may seem obvious, but what I write seems to come from preconscious material, and it slips away very easily. Here's a post about the therapy session I had that brought me to a breakthrough on this.

4. At times when I've felt gripped by fear, I've taken short breaks every hour and read something that helped me keep the floodgates open: in writing the first chapter of Sister India, I kept stopping to read a couple of pages of Natalie Goldberg's Wild Mind. At another point when I was feeling shocked by what I was writing, I read bits of an autobiography by a friend, Lucy Daniels, With a Woman's Voice, which was startlingly personal and disclosing. I kept thinking: if she can do this, I can surely keep on spinning this fiction.

5. Having lots of toys and visual stimulation has helped me when I needed to write an ad on a deadline. (I used to do a lot of this kind of work.) Also, meditation has worked well for this: read the basic information, then sit and not-think about it for half an hour. Several times I've opened my eyes and had the idea present itself full-blown.


Part Two of Patricia's question was: what causes creativity to stop for me. One word answer: overwork.

Please suggest some of your own creativity tricks in the comments section, if you will.

The Good News Blues

Used to be that at the completion of each draft of each book, I'd go into a three-day emotional hell that I referred to as POST-DRAFT NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.

This was like an amplifed version of coming out of a movie into bright daylight: *light too bright
*sounds too loud
*real world appears badly managed and in need of a wash
*irritants become infuriating
Fortunately, I seem to have gotten over that.

This weekend, I surprised myself with a writerly emotional phenomenon that I'd forgotten: AGENT-LOVES-MY-BOOK JITTERS.

As I boasted in my last post, my agent reported Thursday that she's quite keen on my novel. She's enthusiastically sending it out.

So this weekend, I spent much of Saturday BERATING MYSELF for:
*being too fat (false)
*being out of shape (somewhat true)
*wasting a lot of time (mostly not true)
*house in a perpetual mess (mostly true)
*berating myself (true)

Of course, I barely thought about the novel and its future at all.

On Sunday came STAGE 2 of the jitters:
*mind calm
*painfully tense neck

Still no thought of book going out this week to editors.

Today, Monday: So far so good, which will likely continue. Working tends to distract me, which is a damn good thing.

Some Book News

My agent called yesterday and she's excited about the revision of my novel COBALT BLUE that I finished and Fedexed two weeks ago.

This was what I wanted to hear: serious enthusiasm. I feel and she feels that the novel is really working after this last five-month go-round (Lord, let it be the last go-round before a sale!)

So now she sends it out. Please send it selling vibes (much like healing vibes) to help wing it to a soft landing in the lap of the publisher who will love it and provide it an enormous promotion budget. Thanks!

Authenticity

One of my heroes, the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, said this about authenticity:

THE PRIVILEGE OF A LIFETIME IS BEING WHO YOU ARE.

Takes guts to let the truth show, though. Especially in a piece of art that goes out into the world. That difficulty, on the face of it, doesn't make a lot of sense. Because nothing is more satisfying.

Well, maybe a happy marriage; but that too requires being authentic. In fact, so do most things that are worth doing.

So, as far as I can see, there's really not a lot of reason to hide out in a false persona. Except for the cost in courage, approval, awkward moments, and sometimes cash. I tell myself these are all short-term problems, and I'm convinced that this is true. But moment by moment, damn, it can be scary to venture out unguarded, and without apology.

The Artist's Career at Lake Junaluska

Last weekend's 3-day workshop at Lake Junaluska was about artists of all sorts increasing audience, income, and time for creative work. The photos are some of the artists and this old Methodist mountain retreat in the NC mountains where we met.

There were a couple of dozen of us and we left there wildly excited, full of ideas, and each carrrying
one overriding lesson: set your goal as high as you can imagine, and then develop a detailed step-by-step plan for how you can use the resources you have to start moving yourself in that direction.
The big lesson was that simple. And yet how many artists of any sort put together such a plan?


The idea is that each small step you take toward your goal opens some new resources and wider possibilities. And when we run up on the inevitable setbacks and fits of nervousness: just STAY WITH YOUR PLAN.

I set as my goal to sell one million copies of Cobalt Blue and all my other books. I do have a plan--and I've begun. Will keep you posted.

Feel free to post here any similarly immodest goal of your own. (The workshop was run by Creative Capital and sponsored by the NC Arts Council.)

Hypnotic Exploration

A note to women in central NC: my mesmerizing husband, psychologist Dr. Bob Dick, is running a seminar at our house this Friday on hypnosis and women's issues: which of course always include creativity.

I attended one of these self-hypnosis seminars of his not long after we got married, and, because of a trance experience there, the next day started work on what would become my first published novel, Revelation. Bob's contact number is 919 929-1227. We live in a log cabin on a pond out in the woods of eastern Chatham County.

The photo to the right is of Bob and me on an Alaskan exploration.

Stunned by Wisdom, Ambition, and Fatigue

The fatigue is mine. The wisdom came from the Creative Capital workshop I attended in the NC mountains this weekend.

Over this past winter, I wrote a lot of posts here about the one-day class I took with this group whose purpose is to help all kinds of artists, especially the most experimental ones, learn how to make money at a professional level and have the time and independence to do their best work. The workshop was sponsored by the NC Arts Council.

I said this before, but I will brag again. My income increased 82% in the four months after that workshop in December compared to the same four months a year earlier.

So I went back for the 3-day class. It was extremely valuable strategic career planning. That may not sound sexy. But the income that these teacher/artists were making sure did. And it was pretty fascinating and exciting when I started working with some seriously high-priced planners on how to arrange for my just-completed novel COBALT BLUE to sell a million copies.

It was also intriguing to see a couple of dozen other artists show their first-rate work, and see their plans get bigger--and more do-able and detailed.

I'm hoping some of those folks are going to comment on this blog about their art and accelerating careers.

I'll have a lot more to say about mine, as you might imagine. And be back with some pictures too, once I get my mind unpacked.

Shipping the Manuscript

Just shipped my book to my agent. After first going all the way to the copy center without bothering to take it with me.

My first two novels--Sister India and Revelation--are stories about people daring to to be bold on behalf of what's most important to them.

This new one Cobalt Blue is my own act of daring. It ventures into some raw sexual territory--and into sacred sex. The scenes are absolutely integral to the story and the character; and it's a serious novel, has ambitions. Nonetheless, I'm a little worried about what my mama's going to think; and curious about what it will feel like to have this book out in the world. My agent, when she first read the first chapter, said, "This is quite a story, Peggy."

Final Copy?

Four minutes after midnight Good Friday; actually Saturday morning technically. I'm printing out what I'm hoping is my final copy of my new novel COBALT BLUE.

I just spent a couple of hours going through and getting rid of what I'm told is my excessive use of words including: now, again, so, and sardonic. What does that say about my book? I'm not sure.

I have great hopes, confidence, actually, in this novel. Long-term anyway. I do hope it flies on this time out, though. I'm eager to get it to my agent before the publishing industry slows down for the summer. She'll have it by the end of this coming week.

Maybe I'll follow the industry's excellent example then and slow down for the summer myself. I'm not really sure I want to. Guess we'll see.

Happy Easter, Passover, Holi (that's Hindu) and Spring.

Increasing Income of Writers/Artists

The weekend after this one, I'm going to a second event run by Creative Capital and the NC Arts Council on how writers and artists can make professional incomes.

Last fall I went to the one-day seminar, did (most of) the homework assignments, because the folks there said that if you did that, your income the next year would rise 20%. Well, in the first month mine went up roughly 250% over the previous year. This is a fluke, I cautioned myself. It was, but still...the first quarter of this year was 28% higher than last year. I'm happy. And I'm going back to learn more, and I will report here.

If you'd like to go back to earlier posts and look at some of the earlier homework assignments and tips, just do a search of this blog for the phrase "Creative Capital."

Knowing The Guts of the Story

At this late point in my revisions, the changes I'm making in my novel Cobalt Blue are small and huge.

SMALL CHANGES because:
*they're short
*they don't take long.

HUGE CHANGES because:
*the small additions, to fill in holes that my local reader/critics pointed out, are very high-impact
*I've worked on this story off and on for 18 years (while also writing three other books, etc.) and know all the off-stage history of the characters, can thus produce a highly relevant mini-scene pretty easily
*I know the story so well that I've grown more sure of each step I take, and each step is therefore stronger and clearer: BOLDER.

It's a very nice feeling, a real treat, in fact. It feels like a reward for a lot of groudwork, this rare ease.

Final Revision Mood Swings

I'm about three weeks from sending my new novel COBALT BLUE back to my agent. I can tell the end is near because I'm shifting from mood to mood in a most unsettling way.

END-OF-NOVEL MOODS SO FAR:
*relief, as if I'd already finished
*fear that this finished book is going to make trouble for me one way or another *exhaustion that makes me feel tremulous with any emotion
*indecisiveness about small, unrelated things
*feebleness as if I'm starting to come out of an illness
*anger, that it hasn't already won the National Book Award, and that it still isn't quite finished
*uneasiness about the peculiarly erotic nature of this novel
*sadness that it will soon leave my hands
*pride that it's so good
*excitement about what will happen next

So mid-morning today, I lay down on the rug in front of my desk and slept for an hour. It was an excellent solution. It's 8 pm. and I've been balanced and productive ever since. Now I'm wrapping up for the day. And soon I will re-encounter my peculiar emotional state in my dreams, at least that's the way it was last night.

I'm telling myself to cherish these interestingly tumultuous times. At least I've given up fighting off the turmoil.

Billy Arthur: Small and Bold

"William J. "Billy" Arthur, well-known journalist, newspaper publisher, legislator, businessman and dwarf, died Monday, March 27, 2006 at Carolina Meadows Health Center."

This is the lead to an obit in the Raleigh News & Observer. A friend e-mailed it to me and said: you don't see many like this. The list of accomplishments is impressive and then you get to that last descriptor: dwarf.

In North Carolina, this man was A STATEWIDE PRESENCE, THOUGH HE WAS 42 INCHES TALL.

He didn't hide. He "went all out."

He was a politician. With his wife, he operated several businesses. And he wrote a newspaper column that ran for 66 years. He also sang on Broadway and was, in his youth, head cheerleader at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The friend who sent me the obit said her father remembered running into him on the street in the '40s and '50s and if you squatted down to talk with him, he would squat down too. "Just to keep things equal."

A Wealth of Old Newspaper War Stories

One notable effect of a reunion of old newspaper people is that MOST EVERYONE LEAVES THE PARTY AND WRITES A STORY ABOUT IT.

The reunion at the new Raleigh Times Bar of staffers from the old Raleigh Times newspaper, which I've written about in the last few posts, has now turned into a print and cyberspace newsroom-nostalgia-fest.

Coming from a bunch of career writers, it's probably no surprise that the reminiscences make good stories: funny, poignant, and mostly well-written. Otherwise, the accounts are interestingly different from each other, and the coverage at the smaller newspapers is just as good as at the larger papers.

I've already linked to a couple of stories in previous posts. Here's A BRIEF RUNDOWN ON THE LATEST DISPATCHES:

At The Island Packet in Hilton Head, SC, David Lauderdale writes in both his blog and his column about the reunion: "Sharon Campbell remembers a reporter throwing a chair that whizzed right over her head. (Someone else recalled that) Dudley Price got tired of paper spilling over from the desk crammed next to his, so he set it on fire. With all the cigarette smoke in the room, it probably went unnoticed for hours."

David Lauderdale also quotes Arthur Sulzberger, now New York Times publisher, on his best and worst memories of his tenure at The Raleigh Times. The worst was when he called the home of a man and his son who had just been killed in a boating accident. The wife and mother answered, and Arthur learned that she hadn't yet been given the news.

Bob Ashley, now editor of The Herald-Sun in Durham started at The Raleigh Times the same week I did, both of fresh out of Duke, and both having worked for The Duke Chronicle. Bob notes how every detail of Raleigh was news for our staff; he once wrote eleven stories from one City Council meeting: no small morning's work.

Former Times editor A.C. Snow's column in the News & Observer remembers an angry call from a subscriber whose mother had been quoted all too correctly.

In The Apex Herald, Lynne Wogan conducts an interview with Gail Gregg, who was editor and the only writer of the Apex newspaper, then called the Western Wake Herald, while her husband Arthur, was working at the Raleigh Times. Apex was then a town of 3,000 and Gail, now a successful painter and freelance writer, was young, a self-described Yankee, ready to take on the world.

In the Clayton News-Star, editor Margaret Ritchie tells where a lot of old Times staffers are now, and says that what she has done with the newspaper in Clayton is recreate a paper a lot like the old Raleigh Times.

I'm still waiting for The Raleigh Times nostalgia piece to show up in The New York Times. Arthur, you're up.

More on Newspaper Buddies, Novelist Buddies

Here's another post from the recent reunion of people who worked for The Raleigh Times newspaper. In the previous post--where I told about this historic get-together of writers, editors, and photographers--I invited others to send in better pictures than mine. Well, a real photographer responded: these two vivid moments are from the camera of freelance photojournalist Karen Tam.

In this first, Sharon (Kilby) Campbell, retired editor of The Chapel Hill News is addressing the assemblage; with her are host and downtown redeveloper Greg Hatem (owner of The Raleigh Times Bar) and former Timeser Mary Burch, now executive director of a nonprofit, the Auditory Learning Center.

Lighting a celebratory cigar is Arthur Sulzberger, New York Times publisher, with News & Observer business writer Dudley Price inhaling.

These newspaper folks and I were covering Raleigh for the small and fiercely competitive Raleigh Times in the 1970s. Our being buddies helped us to do good work--after all, who would want to be the faltering member of the team?

I remember being part of the group that covered V.P. Spiro Agnew coming to town. My job was writing features from the hotel where he was staying, The Velvet Cloak. Security around the place was intense, and I was determined to find and interview his speech writer on this trip, a man I'm 97% sure was Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

I found out the room number and, coming out of the elevator, I scooted unseen past the back of the security guard. When he caught sight of me, I ran, heading around a corner and toward a door at the end of the balcony hallway.

I looked back only at the point when I was pounding on Moynihan's door. The guard was running toward me with his rifle held ready, as if he were advancing single-handedly on the whole Russian army.

The door opened. "A MAN IS FOLLOWING ME WITH A GUN," I said, appropriately breathless. The rather courtly Moynihan-most-likely ushered me in.

I was seated and near-composed by the time the guard got to the door. The White House advisor assured the man that all was well, not to worry.

He then, genially, gave me a few good quotes for my story, and I left him to his typewriter and his work-in-progress. The thing is: I don't know if I would have run down that hall without THE HONOR OF THE TEAM to uphold--or if I'd have stood in the bushes under one of the hotel's kitchen windows to interview people cooking for Agnew and his entourage.

MY NEWSPAPER BUDDIES FIRED ME UP TO DO MY BEST WORK then. Other "working" friendships, intensified by commitment to similar goals, help me do my best work as a novelist now. My office partner, and the fiction-writing critique group that I've been part of for 24 years, and other friends, including one from the old Times gang, all help me in this way. From them I get trustworthy criticism and encouragement, which is as important as any professional tool I have, and this includes my computer.

So--anybody got any more reunion pictures I can post? Or MORE WAR STORIES?

In the meantime, do go to the Times reunion coverage in the News and Observer written by columnist (and, as it happens, my sister-in-law) Ruth Sheehan, or to the report in The Independent by former Timeser Sylvia Adcock, who was later part of THE NEWSDAY TEAM that won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting with their coverage of the TWA plane crash off Long Island.

A Hundred Year-Old Writers' Group

Comrades-in-arts are crucial for writers, painters, and others working in fields that are often solitary and speculative. (I think I've said this a time or two before on this blog.)

Friday night I took part in A BANG-UP CELEBRATION of writer (and editor and photographer, etc.) SOLIDARITY that was so unusual--and terrific--that it drew a television crew, news reporters and people from New York to Florida.

The party was a gathering of "alums" of the now-defunct Raleigh Times. The invited guests included anyone who had ever worked for this little afternoon newspaper that was started just over a hundred years ago. The host was Greg Hatem, owner of the Raleigh Times Bar soon to open in the 1906 building that first housed the newspaper. The picture at the top of this post shows in the background the staff in the mid-70s.


This was not the first such gathering of Timesers--I've been to three other reunions. This is a bunch of people who have stayed in touch, stayed buddies even at a distance, and over so many years, so many decades.

I worked at this paper in 1970-1972--quite a while ago. The paper has been closed since '89. And yet, dozens of us still gather every few years. For any kind of enterprise, this is some unusual solidarity.

This tight connection came about because we were such a scrappy little newspaper. There were probably no more than 8 or 10 reporters in the newsroom at a time, and we competed daily against the magnitudes-larger News & Observer.

The work was intense. My beat was health, science, the environment and education, and that was the year the schools here desegregated. Busy? Whoa, baby!

When I first interviewed for the job, the managing editor Joe Harper asked if I was comfortable writing up to five stories a day; I assured him I was, though I doubt if I ever had done any such thing. We wrote for two deadlines, 9:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. Then we went to lunch together. Supposedly, we were off work at three.

The group was typically young and single. So people partied together, romanced, shared apartments, as well as working together.

Now those of us who worked there are bonded. Permanently. Sort of like we were underdogs together in the same battle.

And people have turned out pretty well so far: among those attending were a reporter from the St. Petersburg paper, an art gallery owner, several successful freelancers, an antiques dealer, a couple of painters, a journalism professor, a media consultant, the editor of The Durham Herald-Sun and the publisher of The New York Times. Those who had to miss this time include: an editor at The Washington Post, and the just-retired head of a university journalism school.

Karen Tam, a photographer, staged her slide show of "how-we-were" in the '70's--always a hilarious and poignant event at these reunions. The media consultant and I were an item in one of those "hippie" years; there he was in dashiki in one of the old pictures, with me in my pink velour bell bottoms.

A regular highlight of the slide show: a guy who is now a reporter for the News & Observer was literally caught with his pants down on some unnamed social occasion; it was a moment he will never be allowed to forget.

Also portrayed were various members of the gang: climbing a tree, playing at the beach, working in the newsroom, making faces, showing off a new baby, etc. That baby is an adult now. The rest of us are adults-and-then-some.

As you see, I tried shooting a few pictures at Friday's party. They didn't turn out very well. All the people are much more fetching than these pix would indicate. (I held back the real howlers, maybe they'll be in the next slide show.) New camera, low light, fit of shyness, dying batteries, and good conversations got in the way. But here are a few of them. If you happened to be at that party and have better ones, email me (ppayne51@cs.com) and I'll post those.

Again, let me say: it's a great thing to have such friends.

An Invitation to Promote Your Art

A lot of blogs ask people who comment to refrain from writing anything self-promotional.

I'm taking the opposite approach. I'd like to invite you to use this space to PROMOTE YOUR CREATIVE WORK. If you have a book coming out, or an art opening, a dazzling new invention, or a class or speaker to assist people in doing this kind of work: ANNOUNCE IT HERE.

Doesn't matter where you are. Even if readers can't get to the show, they can still learn where to find you and your work.

So if you have a product that you, as an individual, created, HAVE AT IT. Say, in the comments section of any one post, regardless of the post topic, what you've got going on--unless what you created is Viagra.

City of Literature

From the blog The Elegant Variation:


THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD

As part of its City of Literature push, Edinburgh would like to become a "city of refuge" for persecuted writers.

The Scottish capital could offer sanctuary to those unable to work and live safely in their home country.

If senior councillors give the proposal their backing on Tuesday, the Lord Provost Lesley Hinds will launch a consultation on the move.

Edinburgh would then look to bid for official status, aiming to be accepted in time for this year's book festival.

The idea has been brought forward by the Scottish branch of PEN, a worldwide association of writers committed to protecting freedom of expression.


Note from Peggy: I applaud the idea of a City of Literature. May all our villages have such aspirations.

Social Support for Artists

One of the best things I've ever done for my daily productivity as a writer is move my office into my good buddy Carrie's office building. That's her, just to the right--Carrie Knowles, both a printmaker and writer (The Last Childhood, Three Rivers, 2000.)

My office and hers are situated so that, with doors open, we can talk without either of us getting up from our desks. Or if we need quiet (hasn't happened yet) or have a client, then we can shut the doors.

Her visual art space--Free Range Studio and Gallery--is in the front room and in the big old-fashioned foyer of this 1910 house. In the picture she's setting up a piece of art just inside the front door.

So, not only do I get to my office through a small charming gallery, but she and I have an ongoing conversation as well as trading advice throughout the day. My question this morning: can I use the word "disingenuous" and not have to explain it?

More important than the advice is being able to have two minutes of conversation most any time. For a person who works in solitude, this is so valuable, because:

*The frustrations of the work are less frustrating.
*Work is more fun, and I keep going longer.
*Looking at her artworks in progress refreshes my mind.
*I have the sense that my daily work problems are shared and they are less serious than they otherwise would be.
*If I'm about to shoot myself in the foot by, for example, agreeing to a price or timeline that I shouldn't, she can see it more clearly in the moment than I can.
*I take five-minute breaks in the building, instead of the 30-minute go-somewhere kind that I would otherwise.
*And again, it's just fun.

Even if you sit and write together at a fast-food restaurant, it can be helpful to have a writing buddy.