I'm Giving Some New Workshops

It's once again time for a bit of boldly shameless self-promotion. Here's my flyer for one Saturday afternoon class and three separate Friday lunchtime sessions. If the Raleigh-Chapel Hill area is in reach for you, I hope you'll consider coming to one or more:


I'm offering a new half-day workshop for anyone interested in writing. This class -- and the lunch-time meetings described below -- are based on my experience as author of books from three major publishers, as well as articles for many national magazines and most of the major American newspapers.

Dig A Book Idea Out of What You Already Know

This four-hour Saturday class will focus on nonfiction books, and include:

*How to look at your expertise (hobbyist or pro) as a book resource
*How to formulate and develop an idea
*Basics of the book proposal
*Info on resources to help you proceed

The class will be held at my home (in the woods beside a pond) near Jordan Lake in Chatham County.

March 21 1-5 p.m. $65
Maximum of 20 participants



-- and--



Writing Business Lunches

During the month of March, I’m holding three Friday lunch-time meetings in my downtown Raleigh office, with up to seven participants in each. You’re invited to attend any one or two, or all three.

The topics:

The business of writing nonfiction books. March 13

Literary agents March 20

Getting started writing a novel March 27

Fee: $35 each

The format: Each of these is entirely devoted to a question-and-answer session. Bring your questions on the particular topic, and I’ll do my best to answer them on the spot. Other participants often have useful info to contribute as well.

The time: 12:30 to 1:30. Bring your sack lunch and drink with you, if you like. The office is smallish. It'll be cosy and companionable, which makes networking even easier.

Location: 410 Morson Street in Raleigh’s Oakwood.

My background: I'm author of the novels Sister India (a New York Times Notable Book) and Revelation, co-author of the nonfiction book The Healing Power of Doing Good (a Literary Guild pick). I also wrote a book on Tanner Companies and the Doncaster clothing company. My books have been published in five countries. I've written for More Magazine, Travel+Leisure, Ms. Magazine, Family Circle, Cosmopolitan, etc., as well as The New York Times, The Washington Post and most of the major American newspapers. I spent a semester teaching fiction at Duke as a Scholar-in-Residence, and given classes or talks at locations including the NC Center for the Advancement of Teaching, Auburn Seminary in New York, Banaras Hindu University in India, Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, Rancho La Puerta in Mexico, and others.

For more information on my writing and my manuscript consultation services for writers, please visit my website.

The fine print: For the Saturday workshop, I need check and confirmation in advance. I refund for cancellations only if I have someone waiting for the space. For the lunch sessions, I need confirmation in advance, and require payment for any cancellations later than 24 hours before the meeting. Do ask me, if you have any questions.

If you'd like to sign up now for the Saturday workshop, please mail your contact info and check to me at 410 Morson St., Raleigh, NC 27601. For the lunches, simply email me your confirmation. And if none of this fits into your schedule, do come back to this blog and visit again.

Thanks. I hope this is useful to you and/or any of your writer friends or students.

Peggy






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Extravagant, Generous, Bold Art

If you've ever felt you wasted time by writing ten pages -- or a whole lot more -- that didn't work, take a look at the extravagant generosity of this Zen-type artist and you may feel better.

Scott Wade reproduces Old Masters and does his own original work IN DUST on the windows of cars. Here's a man who recognizes the dust-to-dust situation we're in. I couldn't do it. I'm still working on what Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death refers to as my "immortality project." Making my permanent mark.

Though I'm not going to take up dust art (so much like the sand mandalas that Buddhist monks make and then destroy), I do find it curiously refreshing to look at what this man does and to marvel.





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A French Town with a Vivid Imagination

Don't miss the dazzling photos of the Menton Lemon Festival on the blog called Imagine from floral designer Kenju.

It sounds garish, but it's not: a house-sized Taj Mahal made of lemons and oranges, a castle, a towering lemon girl, and more.

I'd never heard of Menton or its lemon festival. And now I must go there. Il faux que j'y aille. (Je pense que c'est pres d'exact.) ). Menton is a beach town in France that has five times won an award for best garden city in that country of the fleur-de-lys. A beach, flowers, citrus fruit, and they speak French. It's now on my list.



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"Painting into Light"

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

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

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

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

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

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





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Fueling Fiction With Gossip

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

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

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

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

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





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Best Business Practice

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

Then what?

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

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

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



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Not Bold: Identity Theft

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

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

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

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

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

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




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House Guest Heroism

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

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

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

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

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



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Blood Done Sign My Name

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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You Gotta Be Bold to Be Old

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

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

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

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

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



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"Ordinary Courage"

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

Most of us haven't.

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

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

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

Me, too.

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




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Secret of Happiness (Bold Title, Yes?)

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

Quoted on The Happiness Project

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





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Deep Sea Explorer

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

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

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

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









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Hostess and Guest

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

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

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

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

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

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





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Rejection!

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

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

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

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

I was stung.

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

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

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

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







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About Creative Genius

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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Jump in Soul First

"The authentic self is the soul made visible."

Sarah Ban Breathnach

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



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The Kick of Giving

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

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

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

Here are a couple tidbits I particularly like:

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

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

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


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








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The Facebook 25: A Self-Portrait

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

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

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

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



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Bold Money Management in Tough Times

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

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

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

What do you think?






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