Mandatory End-of-the-Year Blog Post

According to the gazillion blog feeds I check every day, I should be doing a year-end post -- a top ten best books, worst books, best films, best moments, worst moments -- pick the list. I should be listing it. I'm not gonna make a list, though. Just like I'm not gonna use Twitter (see earlier blog post!)

I'll say this:

Thank you to those of you who read this blog, whether you comment or not, lurk or linger. I am grateful for a readership.

Tomorrow is a new opportunity, but not because it is January 1, a randomly assigned, illusory "fixed" moment in the constantly moving river of time. Each moment presents you with an opportunity to let go of something you don't need. See something you haven't noticed. Love someone all over again. Turn your soft gazes inward and say, wow, small intestines -- you've been rocking the house for 40 years! Keep up the good work! Take a picture of the first quarter moon. Wiggle your right pinky toe. Click your heels together and go somewhere. Enjoy a cup of real hot chocolate. Don't stack yourselves up against the weight of resolutions that are destined to crush you. Instead, open your eyes. Hold your gaze on what is beloved to you. Hold your gifts in your hands and find ways to use them to help others.

Open your eyes and just say, wow. That is more than enough for a life.

I'm Listening

Twas the night after Solstice
And all through the townhouse
Not a creature was stirring
Not even a mouse.

The notebooks were hung
By the chimney with care
In hopes that Big Mama Muse
Soon would be there.

The kitties were nestled
All snug in my bed
While visions of novels
Salsa-danced in their heads.

______________

Not to worry. I won't continue turning a bad poem into an even worse one, even in the winter darkness. Snow is everywhere. It's in places where it shouldn't be and places where it should. In Prescott, snow is still on the ground from last week's storm. The heavy gray clouds are dropping lower over Thumb Butte as I write this. More snow tonight.

One of my favorite things about teaching is the time off. :-) Seriously. But if I had my way, I'd teach in the spring and summer, and take off during the fall and winter. I love the darkness, the yin time, the shedding of the old so the new can burst forth. I'd just as soon be inside when the sun shines brightest.

Solstice is a time of change. It's a time to listen. To let the distractions fall away. To be quiet, still, and connect with what is important inside of you. The winter is my time for listening. I try to stay open for the characters to come and visit. I try to leave milk and cookies by the metaphoric fireplace so they'll stay awhile and sustain me during the semester. I look for the ghosts in the bare tree branches. Who's still here from another time? Who just showed up, looking for a voice? Who is stuck, scared, and waiting?

Beginning a new novel is kind of like e-harmony for the spirit-world. Who's a perfect match for me? Who can help me mine my own darkness? Who can I help to release? Who can help release me? Sometimes I get a match the first time out. Sometimes there are bad dates, false starts, a hundred pages going nowhere. I get frantic sometimes. Panicked when I can't hear the voices. Fearful there will come a day when I can't hear them. When I get frantic, my head gets loud, and I try to quiet it down with distractions -- e-mail, internet shopping, telephone conversations. Of course, that only feeds the chaos. I am intensely lonely when I don't have the ghosts with me. No matter what is going on in my life, if I have a gaggle of ghosts following me around, I feel connected. I know I'm part of something I don't yet understand. I know that once again, I have shown up and the characters have shown up. But it's hard to remember that during the waiting phase.

Anybody out there hanging onto the alligator juniper outside my door want to come inside? I've got a Newman's Own oreo cookie and a glass of organic milk. Hunker down and stay awhile with me.

Please. I'm listening.

A Night at the Roman Forum

for Jeffrey

My friend has lost his bones.

First, they collapsed out from under him,
the marrow pulled from their centers with needles.
Next, they compressed.
His spine, once a stretched slinky,
became a huddled mass of vertebrae
rubbing against each other for heat.

We love bones, my friend and I.
We love all things skeletal.
We hold Day of the Dead celebrations together.
We dance costumed down Market Street in San Francisco
on a full-moon-Halloween.
We love ghosts, and on my fourth-to-last visit
with him before he lost his bones
we pressed against each other on the sofa,
watching the armoire which bumped and opened
by itself.
Of course, what else?
A ghost.

The package arrived this week from San Francisco,
not even three months
since he died,
my name written in his handwriting,
a combination of lower and upper case letters
on a tiny white label
on the back of framed artwork of the Roman Forum at night,
a place where our bones had held each other.

We visited the Capuchin crypt off the Piazza Barberini where monks
made sculpture
from the bones of one another.
We stood in darkness looking at the insides of our own bodies,
absorbing the inscription at the last crypt:

Quello che voi siete noi eravamo,
quello che noi siamo voi sarete.

My friend has lost his bones.

The cancer ate them from the
inside out, leaving
only a piece of artwork
of a shared memory
to haunt my spine.

As I am now,
he once was.
As he is now,
I soon will be.

My friend has lost his bones.

Today, I use my fingers to squeeze
My femur.
My shin.
My wrist.
My skull.

Today, my bones still dance, and next year,
on the Day of the Dead,
I hope my friend's bones will find me.

Cat Wants OUT

I am a wanderer. I want to gnaw my own leg out of the steel trap of my life every six weeks or so and go somewhere else. I have fantasies of having enough money to just pile the cats and the laptop into the car and take off, letting road turn into road until the routine I've carved out for myself dissolves.

My mother, in true Lutheran fashion, raised me to be responsible. To be worried about having enough money, enough food, enough to do. She raised me to be self-reliant. Her voice doesn't allow me to call into work when I'm sick (really sick, not faking sick). Her voice gets me up in the dark to grade papers (stacks upon stacks of them) so I can return them quickly. Her voice would be impossible to outrun on a road trip.

I am aware enough, also because of her voice, to know that I will not quit my job and take off for the hinterlands. I will not cash out my bank account and take a whirlwind road trip. I will not forgo the illusion of stability for the illusion of freedom. I know freedom needs a structure. I know, frankly, that freedom needs money. But I have to go somewhere, and if I don't go somewhere soon I'll be in the leg-gnawing stage.

I love Prescott, the tiny mountain town where I live. But it is not home, and it is not a place where I can stay day in and day out, year in and year out, without atrophying. Best I can tell, I have two homes -- North Carolina and San Francisco. Not surprising -- a rural home and an urban home. My dad was the product of rural North Carolina, my mother of Brooklyn, NY. Both factions duke it out inside my body, especially after a few months of being in Prescott.

I am beginning to dream of San Francisco nightly. I can see the cracks on the sidewalks on Geary Street. I hear the clanging of the trolleys on Market, the percussion of trash cans in Union Square. I physically need the anonymity of getting on the train and hurtling under ground to a different place. I need to be crushed up against overcoats and ipods and messenger bags during rush hour. I need to see the steel landscape of a city press its fingers to the clouds. I need the self-reliance of the urban environment. The spontaneous art on convenience store walls. The needled men curled into themselves in parks. The stimulation of the voices, the neon, the loneliness, and the humanity. These things are like water to me, and right now, I am dehydrated.

Conversely, the rolling green hills of North Carolina make me cry. The dogwoods and the azaleas and the dotting of crosses, even though I don't believe in them, live inside me. The brick houses with wooden shutters. The tiny creeks that meander throughout the state. The cardinals. The orange birds. The green snakes. This land pulls the fleshy landscape of my body back, ever and always back. North Carolina has claimed my body. San Francisco my heart.

I live most days on this edge -- half of me pulled west and half of me pulled east. I joke about driving up I-17 to I-40 and turning left (or possibly turning right) and following it to the end of the road. Most of the time, this tension is OK. I have a good life here, an easier life than I would likely have in either San Francisco or North Carolina, and besides, what good is a writer if she's not feeling exiled?

But today, this week, the end of the semester blessedly in sight, I feel the howling growing stronger. My Lutheran obligations of work will be gone for a few weeks. I can disappear. Get moving. Get out. Get going while you can. See everything you can see before you can't. Experience everything -- sunrise on the east coast to sunset on the west coast.

Go, Laraine. Go.

Why It Matters

This week has brought much upheaval in publishing. Houghton Mifflin instituted an acquisitions freeze on all new properties except children's books. (Can you say YA anyone?) Pensions have been frozen in several large publishers. Editors have been sent packing. Salaries frozen. (Was I the only one who noticed the overuse of the word 'frozen' as we approach winter?) Long standing independent booksellers closed their doors. Newer publishing houses have ceased to exist. It's been a busy November. It's almost too much for me to read my daily Publisher's Weekly and MediaBistro blogs. Too much information.

Rather than bury my head in the sand, I take this opportunity to be even more vigilant with my work. I need to take even more ownership of my writing career. Where can I present? What areas can I position my work in that I haven't thought of? What audiences do I currently have access to? And then, of course, what is in me to write at this moment?

Turns out, lots of things in lots of areas. (That's all the info you're getting on that!)

But the bigger question, and one that I've heard over and over in classes this semester, is why write now? No one's buying. No one's reading. No one's working. Yeah, well, whatever. I don't mean that flippantly. I just mean ... whatever. You can't control any of those things. Let it go. Now. Ask yourselves why you read (because of course if you want to write, you must read). Think about the times in your life when books really mattered. I don't mean sort of. I don't mean the books you were assigned to read that you ended up loving. But when was a book everything in a particular moment? That's who you must keep writing for.

For me, books were everything most of my childhood. Not just sort of anything. Everything. The library was the most magical place of all, and when we had a Scholastic Book Fair at school and I was given $5 to purchase a book, wow, the heavens parted. I read during recess when everyone else was slamming each other with dodge balls. I read in class when everyone else was finishing the assignment. I read in the cafeteria when everyone else found their cliques. I never found one. I never found the cool lunch table or got picked for a kickball game. But I found everything that has ever mattered to me within the pages of a book. No hyperbole. Everything that has ever mattered to me I found in a book. I either found it first in a book so I could recognize it in the world, or I saw it in the world and had it verified in a book. Stories hold me up.

What was it for you? Why did reading matter to you? That's the answer for why writing matters. Yes, when Barnes & Noble sales are plummeting, when Borders loses its line of credit, and when amazon.com is threatening to take all our royalties away, you still must write for that little boy or girl.

Write directly into the heart of the moment when reading changed you. Writing matters. Stories matter. You have a gift and a desire to tell a story. Rather than be fearful of what you might not be able to accomplish, instead be grateful for the gifts of language. Don't let the fear of the distribution (or not) of those stories get in the way of the telling. Your burdens will become greater by remaining silent. Perhaps especially in economic times like these.

Write what you were given to write and let the rest go.

This Thanksgiving, consider giving thanks to that little girl or boy who first found the joys of books. Welcome him or her back into your life. Let him or her guide your hand across the clean first page of a new story. Speak directly to your heart. Your heart before it first got broken. Your heart before it knew of suffering. Your heart before it knew that no matter how much you might want something, you may never have it. That heart knows the peace in silence and space. That heart knows the dance of words into sentences into paragraphs into lives. That heart doesn't know about the economic collapse. Or the wars. Or illness. That heart is just open.

My wish for you this Thanksgiving is that you visit that heart. Look at it with soft eyes. Then pick up your pens and write.

Warning: I'm About to Sound Really OLD

Dear Technology Gurus/Gods/Goddesses/Masters/Mistresses/Dominatrixes:

Stop already. Please. I was with you on the Macintosh computer. I was with you when Mac launched its fabulous OSX system. I was with you with high speed internet (which I don't think is a series of tubes, honest). I was with you with RSS feed (which, I admit, a friend had to explain to me -- but he was right! He was!) I was with you on cell phones, and I was really with you on GPS because I can't find my way out of my driveway without a map (written in English, not pictures, please). I love YouTube and iTunes, and I even surrendered to Facebook, and was glad I did because it helped me connect with friends of my late friend Jeffrey.

But really. Twitter? Really. Now I know you're just sitting around up there in Guru-Heaven toying with us like marionettes. Maybe having a conversation (or should I say convo) among yourselves.

"Let's make this silly tweety-twitter-bird program for them! They can talk about their day to day moments!"

"They won't do something this lame. Why do they need to know Billy brushed his teeth?"

"They don't need to know it, but they'll think they need to know it. Trust me. They will. We'll call it something cool, and we'll get all the cool people to do it and start talking about it. They'll sign up faster than Ted Stevens can say 'NO!'."

"You think?"

"It worked for flat screen TVs and SUVs didn't it?"

"Why, yes! It did!"

"And it'll work for Twitter. The name alone will do it. It's great branding. We'll put a cute little bird in the graphic and they'll be all over it."

"I get it! Yes, yes! We'll tell them they can connect with people better. We'll tell them that by knowing the inane details of their friends' lives (oh! Marc is running late!) (oh! Suzy just dropped the dog off at the groomer!) (oh! Joseph is off to another meeting!) (oh! Kathy is watering the plants!) They'll feel like they've got real friends! Real, fleshy, smelly, laughing, crying friends. They'll take up any possible space in their lives for silence with twittering. Then they'll lament the lack of silence."

"So then what ..."

"They'll Twitter and text and maybe watch a YouTube clip all at the same time!"

"By George! It's a winner!"

And on and on ye gods will go, playing with us mortals from the branches of your twitter-bird trees.

Enough people I respect have told me I need a Twitter presence. I believed these people about blogs, and they were right. I believed them with cell phones, and they were right. But no one needs to know my cat threw up today. (Ooops!) I shouldn't waste blog space telling you that. I should Twitter it. If I would Twitter. But I won't. I don't care if they're right. I don't care that John Lithgow now Twitters about his latest Broadway production. I don't care. Really, Technology Gods, I'm putting my cyber-foot down.

And here's why.

I've lived alone almost my entire adult life. I enjoy solitude. I enjoy my own company. I enjoy the space in my brain when I sit and meditate, or do yoga stretches, or just lie on the bed with the cats. I also enjoy people. The fleshy, smelly, laughing, crying kind much more than the cyber-kind. I know cyber-friends are sometimes necessary, and indeed, we can connect on certain levels with these types of friends. I know that when our fleshy friends live in other parts of the world, the cyber-world helps maintain that connection. I do, Technology Gods, I do, I do. (See, I'm blogging! I have three e-mail accounts! I even check them!)

But my mind is cluttered enough without the clutter of others' lives. It's cluttered enough without feeling obligated to follow someone else's chatter (uh, twittering). I only have so much time in a day.

I'm tired of reading student discussion board postings written entirely in text-speak. I'm tired of reading student stories where they cannot develop an idea or follow a thread (gee, perhaps because they're limited to corresponding in 140 characters on Twitter?) Oh, I know, I'm old. I'm 40. I don't get it. Things are different. People thought Elvis was going to bring about the end of the world.

But Elvis didn't bring about the end of Western Civilization. And Twitter probably won't either. Sigh. I'm a fossil with a flair-y wardrobe. Sigh. Twitter and the things we've twittered will outlive us all.

I love stories. I love language. And I do want to connect with people. And I'm willing to read a post longer than 140 characters if the author has thoughtfully presented his or her ideas. I'm willing to have a phone conversation (even a land line one!) with a fleshy friend. And I love going out of my house, away from my computer, into the sunny world of fleshy people. I love to have coffee with them, or alone in the presence of them. I'm not ready for my world to consist only of zeros and ones.

Please, Technology Gods. Enough. You've won.

Give us a fighting chance to find our own voices among all the senseless twitter.

The Ghosts of Writings Past

I've been thinking a lot this week about where our writing comes from and where it goes. I have been thinking about the characters feeling trapped within the pages of a book -- bound, as it were, by the spine, crushed by the cover. Dead until a reader cracks the spine and breaks the chains, allowing for the merging of her imagination with the lives of the characters. Maybe there's a connection. Maybe there isn't. Inevitably, the book must close, the characters sprawled and pressed flat like dried flowers.

As writers, we give the gift of impermanence to our readers. We allow them to step into a world for a few hours or a few weeks, then step out, changed. We allow them to practice loving fully the people who dance in the sentences. We give them the practice of letting them go. Each novel a reader enters in to teaches detachment.

Each novel we write gives us these same gifts. We open our lungs, livers, spleens and listen to who speaks to us. We notice the ache in our femur and stop to talk to whoever is stuck there. We loosen our jaws to speak what we have been afraid to speak, or unwilling to speak. We relax our wrists, position our fingers over the home row keys, breathe in and exhale out with the sound of stories. We listen more deeply when we begin to get in the way. We find ourselves writing things we didn't know we felt, things we didn't know were possible. These characters, once awakened, swirl in our dreams. They influence our outward behavior, our interests, our hobbies. They pull us into unexpected shops or towns. We follow because it is what we who write do.

And then, these relationships, longer perhaps than many of our "human" ones, dissolve. They have spoken what they have to say. We have listened to what we can hear. We have built the bridge of letters between them and the rest of the world. What happens to them is no longer a part of our lives. We detach from them, or perhaps more accurately, they detach from us and we wander a bit lost for awhile missing them, wondering why we are missing them, wondering why they didn't want to stay longer. We haunt our own hallways searching for them.

But then, if we have practiced detachment, a new tickle appears at the base of our spines. A sudden obsession with peaches, or the Industrial Revolution, or ant colonies. We follow the breadcrumbs until the sound cracks through the surface once again and our fingers sing.

Among the countless reasons writing matters, this is the most important to me. It is impermanent. It shows us how to move with ease from one chapter of our lives to another. It is practice for our ultimate transition. It is the embodiment, on the recycled flesh of trees, of what is most beautiful, most holy, and most possible within us. Open the book covers wide and let my characters move. Open the book covers wide and let your hearts and minds expand. Open the book covers wide and step back with awe and gratitude for the part of all of us that creates, that risks, and that ultimately, bids us a most fond and joyous farewell.