Saturday Stuff

Remember when we were doing a remodel at our house?
And then we finished it?

Well, because we don’t like inertia ’round here, we promptly started an addition.

Which is akin to hitting your thumb with a hammer so your head doesn’t ache so bad…

But honestly.

This project’s not as full of impact so far, what with the working stove, sink and washing machine.
Mostly we just have to remember that if we step out the back door we’ll plunge into a bottomless pit.
No biggie.

But this weekend is full of tasks that include emptying our current bedroom so it can be carved up into smaller, more efficient pieces.

I wasn’t going to post today because:

1. It’s a Saturday
2. I have all these tasks that include emptying our current bedroom so it can be carved up into smaller, more efficient pieces.

But then I decided that I was going to post today because:

1. I have all these tasks that include emptying our current bedroom so it can be carved up into smaller, more efficient pieces.
2. And I need something to procrastinate with.

So, here are a few random bits of life to share with ya’ll on this bright and lovely Saturday:

1. I am honored and psyched to be a member of this year’s Cybils’ Poetry Panel! (Not to be confused with Sybil, the movie with Sally Field about living with multiple personalities, I assure you.) THIS Cybils is the Children’s & Young Adult Bloggers’ Literary Awards, and I’m among very illustrious colleagues on the judging committee. Giddy, giddy — and that’s before I even have a stack of books in hand! Stay tuned… and thanks for the invite, Cybils Team!

2. Last night we walked to a dark and open spot in our neighborhood and watched as the International Space Station rushed by. You guys? The Space Station travels faster than 17,000 miles per hour. Seriously. That is crazy fast. It moves like an airplane but is high as a star and looks like one. Our youngest was last night’s spotter, and we’re going for it again tonight. Check out this page to find out when & where it’ll be in your sky.

3. I make my own kombucha now. Here’s the deal. When I quit caffeine, I felt justified in buying very delicious and expensive bottles of GT Kombucha, but I started thinking it would be a shame if my kids couldn’t go to college someday because I’d spent all our extra pennies on fruity-vinegary probiotics. So, I was given a live culture (it works sort of like sourdough starter in this way) and started brewing. Visitors think we’ve got our own organ donation program going — it ain’t pretty — but my first batch (dolled up with ginger and fresh raspberry juice) was mighty cheap and mighty fine.

4. If you live in Texas, these are the important dates to remember in regards to the upcoming election:

               October 6—-last day to register to vote
               October 20—first day of early voting
               October 28—last day to apply for a ballot by mail
               October 31–last day of early voting
               November 4–Election Day

If you live elsewhere, double check your own deadlines so you can line up and cast your ballot in 44 days. Don’t disenfranchise yourself!

That’s all folks. I’m going to pack up our shoes and bedding…
Happy weekend…

Poetry Friday — Norman Dubie

Mercy, we are in the midst of a storm.

Weekly hurricanes, and the market takes a terrible crash.

Political emails fall and pile up like a blizzard of snow.

The news sounds like one long weather report of natural and unnatural disaster.

And still, somehow, we’re supposed to carry on, reading and writing and eating.
Sending our children to school.
Brushing the dog.

We pay a bill and write a thank you note and unload the dishwasher.

It is amazing what we people will do in the face of it all.

The word ‘survive’ doesn’t begin to do it justice, do you think?
It’s really more like thriving.
Most days, most people will laugh at a joke or help someone move a heavy piece of furniture or give or receive a kiss.

It is amazing to me what we people will do in the face of it all.

Of Politics & Art
By Norman Dubie

Here, on the farthest point of the peninsula
The winter storm
Off the Atlantic shook the schoolhouse.
Mrs. Whitimore, dying
Of tuberculosis, said it would be after dark
Before the snowplow and bus would reach us.

She read to us from Melville.

(Read the rest right here. Really. Do. It’s very good.)

What’s a Gal to Do

For years now, I’ve been my own boss.

I mean, I have a dean at the community college and I have editors at publishing houses and I’ve been a hired gun, um, pen for more outfits and ideas than I care to remember.

But really, I’m in charge around here.
I decide how introverted or extroverted I want to be.
I decide which projects to pursue and how to divvy up my days.
I decide, when I wake up on an ordinary Wednesday, what to do.

Here’s an example.
Today.

Wake up early for a run in crisp, cool air.

Make oatmeal for girls, and pack lunches, and participate in long passionate discussion about mangos vs. peaches.

Bike with girls to school and hear long elaborate description of a tag game called Dragon Tails.

Come home to make beds, tend to breakfast dishes, feed dog.

Sit and breathe.
For 15 minutes.
Bloody near kills me but I feel sort of happy when I’m done.
And not just ’cause I’m done, I don’t think.

Open emails, one of which tells me about the launch & sales meeting for my next book.
This afternoon.
Fret about that for a bit.

Have a glass of juice and some trail mix.

Finish transcribing the beginning of a story from longhand to Word doc.

Read it aloud.
Read it again.
Tweak.

Read it again.

Break to blog, eat more trail mix and choose stack of books to take to class tonight.

Re-read notes for class tonight.

Tweak assignment for class tonight.

Re-print.

Go back to story.
Tweak.
Type more.
Tweak.
Read again.

Read very grim assessment of the publishing industry in New York Magazine.

Worry.
Breathe.
Eat more trail mix.

Tweak manuscript again.
And again.
And again.

Think about walking dog.
Breathe.

Still today is a stop at the bank, the post office and the office supply store.
An Arts in Education meeting at the girls’ school.
Their swim team practice.
My class.

And throughout, I’m tweaking or thinking about tweaking.
I’m writing.
I’m breathing…

What about you?

 

The Magic of Roald Dahl

My 2nd grader is really taken with Roald Dahl.
Addicted to, even.
Obsessed with.
Sweet on.

In the past two weeks alone, she’s read George’s Marvelous Medicine, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Twits and Fantastic Mr. Fox.

When I ask her what she loves about Dahl’s writing, she says, "He is hilarious!"

And then she launches into a story about Grandpa Joe leaping out of bed when Charlie finds the golden ticket, and this somehow segues into an antecdote about the absurd trickery of Mr. and Mrs. Twit and then she starts listing the books she’s reading next.

Charlie and Great Glass ElevatorJames and the Giant PeachThe BFG.

She has to stop to take a breath.
Her whole face is gleaming.

This is a child who is sometimes a tad bit blasé about school.

Discussing the relative merits of Dahl’s illustrators — Quentin Blake as compared to Lane Smith or Patrick Benson.

Discussing whether it’s sad — even a bit sad — that kids disappeared from Willa Wonka’s factory faster than you could eat a Hersey’s kiss.

And she would keep discussing various, interesting aspects if she wasn’t so desperate to get back to her book.

And I would keep talking about how delicious and compelling a fixation this is if I weren’t so worried about what’s going to happen when she runs out of Roald Dahl books? 

It’s going to be worse than a three-year-old giving up her pacifier, I’m afraid…

Recurring Nightmare

For some people, it’s being sorely unprepared for a final exam.

For others, showing up naked (or otherwise shamefully vunlnerable) in public.

For many, there’s nothing worse or more frequent than a work-stress dream — endless piles of paper, dissatisfied customers, botched projects.

I’ve had some of all of those.

In one memorable college exam scenario, I was handed a buebook with an F on the front.
And inside? I had apparently drawn countless woodland animals.
Nevermind that it was political science exam.

That was a bad dream.

So were the ones from my waitressing days where dozens of customers waited, but the kitchen didn’t turn out any food.

But my only real recurring nightmare involves an intruder and total disempowerment.
My limbs hang heavy so that I can’t run or wave or kick.
My voice grows either garbled or silent so that I can’t shout "No!" or "Help!"
Sometimes I can’t even control my eyelids.

The real horror of the dream is that
Worse than the intruder (though that’s definately creepy) is the sense that I’m completely disabled by fear.
The sense that I have no body, no voice and no free will.

I’ve had this dream since adolescence, and I had a version of it last night.
This morning, feeling more lucid than I did at 3 a.m., I think about what I can do to shake this puppy once and for all.

On a practical level, in real life, I move and act and write.
I have body, voice and free will.
In spades.

On the Jungian level, not so much.
The cure?
I don’t have the foggiest.

Maybe I oughta see if I can go back to waiting tables, or drawing woodland animals in my bluebooks…

 

Poetry Friday — Hurricane Ike

Friends,

Thank you, so many of you, for asking.
Ike indeed appears to pack a powerful punch.

We live in Austin, which is well inland.
We are apt to get some wind. And some rain.
And thousands of evacuees.

Storms have ripple effects, to be sure.

For example, our kids will get out of school at noon on Friday because the roads into and around our city are likely to become impassable with traffic from the coast.

Traffic.
Meaning: tired, hungry, worried people — looking for hotel rooms that are sure to be all booked up.
Their dogs & cats mewling from carriers in the backseat, their photo albums safe in the trunks of their cars…

Today I’m posting rain poems, mostly because that’s where my head’s at.
But also in the hopes that if we feed the beast he’ll turn it down a notch.

Take it easy on us, ol’ Ike…

(Like Rain it sounded till it curved)
       — Emily Dickinson

Like Rain it sounded till it curved
And then I new ’twas Wind —
It walked as wet as any Wave
But swept as dry as sand —
When it had pushed itself away
To some remotest Plain
A coming as of Hosts was heard
It filled the Wells, it pleased the Pools
It warbled in the Road —
It pulled the spigot from the Hills
And let the Floods abroad —
It loosened acres, lifted seas
The sites of Centres stirred
Then like Elijah rode away
Upon a Wheel of Cloud.

              

Poem (In the morning, when it was raining)
                    — Delmore Schwartz

In the morning, when it was raining,
Then the birds were hectic and loudy;
Through all the reign is fall’s entertaining;
Their singing was erratic and full of disorder:

 (Read the rest here…)

The Rain
        — Robert Creeley

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quite, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon

so often?

(Read the rest here…)

An Open Letter

Dear Mr. Sendak,

I am sorry for your sick heart and for your grief.

I am sorry for your vunlnerability and your regrets.

I am sorry about Norman Rockwell and Salman Rushdie and the fact that you think Catherine Keener may matter more than you do.

I’ve got nothing against Catherine Keener, or James Gandolfini, or Dave Eggers, really.

But Mr. Sendak?

You’re beyond compare.

In your work is the beauty and the despair, the exquisite and the blunt, the truth and the mystery.

In your work is the stuff of Mozart, Keats and Blake; Melville and Dickinson.

In your work is the stuff that ignites a passion in a lot of us.

Not just tomorrow, but yesterday and today.

I am sorry about the rubber bullets that never penetrated in the way that they were meant to, but I want you to know that in your work is the stuff that penetrates us all …

(Edited to add: This letter is written in response to a New York Times article about Maurice Sendak that was rather full of doubt and sorrow. When I look at Sendak’s life work, I do not see doubt and sorrow. I see Little Bear and Where the Wild Things Are and Night Kitchen and Higglety Pigglety Pop. I see insight, bravery, wit and vivid imagination, all in good measure. And I hope that somewhere inside Sendak’s tired, "curmudgeonly" heart, he does, too…)

The Chronicles of Narnia

Tall One: Has C.S. Lewis died?

Me: Yes, quite a time ago.

Tall One: Pooey.

Me: Why?

Tall One: I’d like to write him a letter. And tell him how good his books are.

Small One: Yeah. And how I want to be Lucy.

Tall One: And how our robes are like the coats in the wardrobe.

Small One: And how some people even call me Lucy.

Tall One: But they don’t!

Small One: But C.S. Lewis doesn’t know that. It’s just to show him that we really love her.

Tall One: That we love the whole book.

Small One: Hmm.

Tall One: I know. Too bad. Well. Read another chapter, Mama…

My Books: At Home on the Beach

This post is not exactly timely, but that’s what happens when you take the summer off
to kick around in the sand.

The piles you come home to grow arms and legs.
The plans you made grow fungus.
The lists you made grow long. er. and longer.

So, forgive my tardiness in congratulating editor Allyn Johnston on the official launch of her new imprint:
Beach Lane Books!

Some of you might remember that Allyn went through quite the professional upheaval last winter,
only to land herself firmly on her feet. Of course.

Since then, she’s been busy setting up shop — in a lovely, sun-filled space in La Jolla, with another former-Harcourt editor, Andrea Welch. Setting up shop, in this case, included the business of packing and unpacking a number of manuscripts she’d brought with her from Harcourt, including mine.

So, this serves as official notice that my books World and Wind will both be published by Beach Lane Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint.

The former, illustrated by Marla Frazee, is done, spit and polished and will hit the shelves next summer. Squee!!!!!

Poetry Friday — ABBA

I worship Meryl Streep.
And I get a huge kick outta ABBA.
And if anyone has ever had as much fun making a movie as the folks who just made Mamma Mia, I’d like to hear about it.

I mean, this was not the sing-a-long version that we saw and still, we were bringin’ the house down.
Whoa-boy, is it a hoot.
If you haven’t gone yet, I’ll go with you.
I want to go again.
Soon.

In the meantime, my Poetry Friday is of the Swedish pop variety.
Enjoy, my friends. Enjoy…

Chiquitita, tell me whats wrong
You’re enchained by your own sorrow
In your eyes there is no hope for tomorrow
How I hate to see you like this
There is no way you can deny it
I can see that youre oh so sad, so quiet

Chiquitita, tell me the truth
Im a shoulder you can cry on
Your best friend, Im the one you must rely on
You were always sure of yourself
Now I see youve broken a feather
I hope we can patch it up together

Chiquitita, you and I know
How the heartaches come and they go and the scars theyre leaving
Youll be dancing once again and the pain will end
You will have no time for grieving
Chiquitita, you and I cry
But the sun is still in the sky and shining above you
Let me hear you sing once more like you did before
Sing a new song, chiquitita
Try once more like you did before
Sing a new song, chiquitita


(Read the rest here…)

And go here to listen to ABBA, Bee Gees, Queen and soooo much more!
I dare you not to giggle. And groove. I dare you…