The hypothetical conversation at dinner last night went something like this:

"What if they made you give up books or music. Forever. Which one would you choose?"

"Who’s ‘they’?"

"The bad people. Who were taking over the world."

"Yeah. Only bad people would make you choose something like this, Mama."

"And you have to choose. You have to."

Torture!
We all agreed.

But then, after much hemming and hawing, we also all agreed that we’d give up… music.

Partly because we worked in a little wiggle room.
We’d be allowed to hum.
We’d be granted music books, which would help us hear music in our heads.
And who can stop a girl from singing in her sleep, after all?

But books?
There was no way around it.
We need ’em.
The girls had looks of utter horror on their faces at the prospect of doing without.

It’s hard to believe that lots of people do. Without, I mean.

Which is why I think that this is as good a time as any to remember our friends at:

First Book

Ethiopa Reads

Inside Books

Kids in Need Books in Deed

and the angels at your local public library.

Because really, nobody should have to do without books.

Over a family dinner during Christmas vacation, we had one of those long, semi-heated discussions that touch on politics, the economy, media, civic ideals. It went way past the main course and the kids all asked to be excused.

The nut was this — with new media at the forefront, with online versions of newspapers becoming the norm, who will the journalists be? Who will pay them? Who will get the stories, and will they be trained, careful, objective, committed and true?

My undergraduate degree is in journalism, and I tend to err a little on the side of the idealist, so I say that a free and dedicated press is an intrinsic part of our nation’s fabric, and such a vital expression of our values that we will not abandon it — even if we don’t want to pay for a daily paper the way we used to.

I won’t pretend to have a crystal ball vision of the future, though. No doubt journalism is evolving. Local and global stories are being captured and shared in new ways. Journalists struggle, on one hand, to give their audience the stories they say they want to read and, on the other, to give voice to the stories that truly need to be told. Plus, they have to be responsive to the increasingly corporate framework they work within. It’s enough to make a person dizzy.

Enter the poets. The new voices. The unfettered observers of the human condition. Or at least that’s what this very insightful journalist (who also happens to be my aunt) suggests.

I think of poets like Carolyn Forche, who has written as a witness just as keenly as any reporter on the front.
And poets like Billy Collins, who offers up humor and breathing room in the midst of wars and banking crises and whatnot.
And poets like Robert Hass, who puts words to the praise and reverance and compassion in a person’s heart.

These poets observe big and little bits of life, report upon them, and connect us across what seem to be gaping oceans of differences until they become familiar — universal, in fact — in the form of a poem. Not unlike a good journalist, you think?

(Click here for the story my aunt, Jane Dwyre Garton, wrote on poets, journalists and Ted Kooser’s fabulous American Life in Poetry Project.)

In my world, there’s hardly anything better than a good school visit.

I get such a charge out of spending a morning with a bunch of 4th graders.

The voices, both eager and shy, are still (mostly) unselfconsciously unique.
Which is a beautiful thing.

Today, I facilitated writing workshops for two groups of kids and the gleaming moments were many…

The spontaneous hug from a girl named Jenna…

The line, "Fire outraged my head when I was born"…

The hands raised, over and over again, to read aloud…

We talked a bit about breaking rules, about joy and impulse, about the fact that some kids don’t like to write.
Some think it’s boring.
Others think it’s hard.
Many find it scary.

And who am I to tell them differently?
I mean, really.
It IS scary.

That said, there’s fun to be had and under the guidance of William Carlos Williams who said, "Anything is fit material for poetry," we wrote ourselves a collaborative poem full of outrageous untruths. AKA, lies. I think you might like it.

The Lie Poem
By the students of Baranoff Elementary

The ocean is home to the great possum.
The world has ten sides and my dog is blue.
Brussel sprouts were never meant to be eaten.
Birds can’t fly.

You can never die blue.

Both of my girls, in the last week or so, have been asked to consider their goals or resolutions for the new year. No surprise there, right?

I remember tackling the same tasks as a kid and coming up with some pretty standard stuff — make an A in math, be nicer to my sister, that sort of thing.

The piece of this that is new, though, is that they were both asked a follow up question:

How are you going to achieve your goals?

How.

Isn’t that dynamite?

I mean, how many of us still put grandiose goals on our to-do lists, things like Publish six books by next August without ever really considering the steps we need to take to get there?

Y’know, steps like write, revise, revise, revise, share, absorb critique, revise, revise, revise, submit, write something new while waiting, revise, revise, revise…

Instead, there is an inordinate amount of time spent bemoaning the fact that nothing has happened!
Well.
Um… duh.

By the time my daughters have creative/professional/academic/familial lives of their own, this whole process will be old hat. Lucky them.

I love watching evolution happen.

Well, suffice it to say that vacation did a mean little number on my marathon training.
I am slower than I was before the holidays.
And more afraid.

Still, letting bygones be bygones, I will look back just at this one single week.
Back on track.

Mileage for the week: 36 miles
Longest run: 18 miles
High point: Finishing the 18 mile run
Higher point: Going to bed that night at 8:45
Highest point: Not having to run 18 miles the next morning

Quote for the week:

It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop. — Confucius

And now, with proof that I do have a life (but still with a slow and slogging undercurrent), I am back deeeeeeep in a manuscript so I must run off.

I don’t mean run literally, though.

You understand.

Do ya’ll remember last year when a few of us bloggers with poetic leanings got together to write a crown sonnet? What an utterly terrifying endeavour that was! Except in the end when it wasn’t.

Nope.

In the end it was, dare I say, fun.
And satisfying.

Well.
The Princesses and I (we dubbed ourselves the Poetry Princesses during the sonnet process) have missed each other.
So lately we’ve begun collaborating again.

I can’t really say anything about the project except that our driving force starts with an s-e-s and ends with a tina.
If you get my drift.

It is entirely possibly we’ll break our vows of silence sometime soon, but in the meantime, this:

Sestina for the House
By Ronald Wallace

Just before the holidays, I took my girls to a great big National Geographic warehouse sale.
Maps… backpacks… gorgeous, lusty coffeetable books… all at a zillion percent off.
It was sort of a globetrotter’s dream.

And it was their day to find something special, for their cousins and their grandparents and each other.

It was crowded, but not in an overwhelming or offensive way, and it was in a convention hall so the ceilings were like 80 feet high. There was breathing room.

Still. There’s always someone. Y’know?

So we’re at the last few tables, upon which there are very small things — compasses and such — so people are clustering around and squeezing in a bit. The prices are hanging on the table skirts — right where people are standing — which is ill-designed but it’s a warehouse sale so whaddya want?

My Small and Tall Ones are pressed up against the table discussing the differences between thermometers and barometers when a sort of huffing woman trying to look over and past them says, "Girls, I’d like you to please step back from the table about 2 feet so everyone can see."

I hear her say it.
I absorb it.
I look around to see if my kids are really doing anything different or less socially cooperative than other shoppers.
And then I take a deep breath and I speak up.

"Please don’t scold them, ma’am," I say. "They’re actually just looking, happily and patiently, like everybody else here."
(Well, like most everybody else here, if you know what I mean.)

And then Angry Woman says, "I didn’t scold them, I merely……."

It got all blurry in my brain at that point and I didn’t want to have a throw-down at the National Geographic sale.
Plus, I’d already stuck up for my kids, which is all I’d wanted to do, so I was done.

I stepped away, with Tall One at my side.
Unbeknownest to me, Small One hesitated.
Just for a moment.
Just long enough to hear Angry Woman say, "If she was a good mother, she’d have told them to step back herself!"

This was repeated to me by my aghast little seven-year-old a few minutes later.
"She is very, very lucky I didn’t hear her," I said, pretty aghast myself.

And, really, I’m glad I didn’t.
Because I would’ve felt compelled to respond and instead, the girls and I played with some What If scenarios and then spent the rest of the day joking about what I’d do if I were a Good Mother.

It has stuck in my craw though, and here’s why:

There is no one such thing as a Good Mother.

Some good mothers hover and some give space… some discuss everything and some make executive decisions… some insist on frequent baths and some have a high tolerance for dirt… some are solemn and some are silly… some cook and some order in… some help and some ask for help…

And that, as you know, ain’t the half of it.

And pretty much none of this is going to be apparent at the small gift table at a National Geographic warehouse sale.
We don’t know the stories and inner lives of the people we pass on the streets and bump into at shops and airports.
But it seems to me that we’d do well to give most of them the benefit of the doubt, you know?

‘Cause really, the thing that matters is that Good Mothers love their children.
Right?
 

My more-than-a-decade-old, pre-kid bookclub recently dissolved.
To our credit, we tried resuscitation more than once but it was terminal.

I’ve grieved, but done pretty much nothing to assuage the pain or fill the void.
Until last week.

I arrived home from a really amazing vacation and all my books were:

1. sandy
2. read

The new year gaped.
What’s a girl to do?

Well. I’ll tell you.
I whipped off an email to a smattering of readerly friends and asked them what they’d loved recently. And here I am, less than a week later, with a handy-dandy list to take to the library, and a renewed sense of community around books.

It’s a funny, diverse little list and I thought I’d share it with you.
Y’know, just in case…
 

Middle-grade or Young Adult

Twilight, Stephanie Meyer

Paper Towns, John Green

Need, Carrie Jones

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing I and II, MT Anderson

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

The Eragaon series, Christopher Paolini

The Inkheart series, Cornelia Funke

The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman

Lament, Maggie Stiefvater

The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett

The Adoration of Jenna Fox, Mary E. Pearson

Novels or Short Stories

The Other, David Guterson

Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

The Hakawati, Rabih Alameddine

The Post-Birthday World, Lionel Shriver

Me and Kaminsky, Daniel Kehlmann

A Spot of Bother, Mark Haddon

Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones

Slam, Nick Hornby

Nonfiction

The Most Famous Man in America, by Debbie Applegate

The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson

Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama

The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama

3 Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson

Brother, I’m Dying, Edwidge Danticat

The Complete Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

Well.
It is 2009.
Or, as my good friend Barbara likes to say, two-thousand fine.

Fine as in "very, very sweet." 
Which I, for one, am ready for.

I’ll admit I’ve been home from vacation for a few days but I have, thus far, avoided blogland for fear of being swallowed up by virtual intrigue when the concrete intrigue of my fridge-moldy tofu has been more than enough to keep me hopping.

Tomorrow, though, the kids go back to school, the fridge will meet health department standards, and it’ll be me and my blank page, duking it out again for another year.

Never is the page blanker than at the new year, I think.
When we’re asked not just about this or that manuscript, but about the year ahead.
What do we hope to write, revise, submit, sell, publish?
How do we plan to write, revise, submit, sell and publish? 
When do we plan to start?

This year, though, I’m stepping into January thinking about my writing life rather than my writing.
I’m choosing to believe that if I attend to the life, the writing will come.

The truth is, I’m constantly making specific goals and then subverting them when a new idea grabs me by the tail and drags me off. So this year I’m not setting myself up for that sort of trickery. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to be working on in mid-January or early September, but I do know that I’d like it to look and feel like this:

In 2009, I plan to love writing more than I hate it.
I know this isn’t exactly a glowingly optimistic goal, but a tough day at the desk can suck the lifeblood out of a gal.
I’m going for more moments of groove and exhilaration this year.

In 2009, I plan to enjoy a balance between discipline and openness.
And, as counter-intuitive as this may seem, I’m going to schedule some time for the openness.
Taking the dog to the greenbelt in the middle of the dang day sometimes.
That sorta thing.

In 2009, I plan to be more confident and less needy.
I, um, haven’t worked out the details of this one yet.

In 2009, I plan to read as much as I write and learn as much as I teach.

In 2009, I plan to spend more time with my audience of children.

In 2009, I plan to celebrate little things, like losing myself in a day’s work or sending work to my agent.
And I plan to celebrate big things, like the release of my next book.

In 2009, I plan to stay connected with my community, for support and edification and fun.

In 2009, I plan to go with my gut.

In 2009, I plan to breathe regularly and smile often.

You?