an ode to a new pen: or, the joy of everyday objects

In terms of joy office supplies can bring, a new pen is second only to a new notebook. And oh, the thrill in a day that brings both a new pen and a new notebook: I would burst with the writing possibilities, if that were possible.

The new pen that I got today has that smooth, roller-ball ink flow that makes everything you write look important. The first time I put it to paper, my hand practically twitched with a desire to create something that would last generations.

And yet what I was writing was my to-do list for the day, and it was full of words and phrases that wouldn't make sense to anyone outside my company, let alone someone ages and ages hence. What I was writing with this new pen would just end up crossed off and thrown in the recycling bin at the end of the day, but I'm telling you, it was the boldness of the ink that made me want to switch to writing poetry or a letter to a long-lost friend. In the scratching of the pen on paper, I could almost hear a story beginning.

Why is it that things—and having the right thing to do a task—makes us feel like we are better able to do that task? I've thought of this before: What is it about having the right pen that puts me in the mood for writing?

Why do I feel like it has to be a certain kind of notebook, with a certain kind of line, before I can settle in to a writing mood?

This is all bordering dangerously on a self-judgmental tirade about how I use excuses for not writing. That's not where I intend to head.

I'm more aimed at this idea: I am what Laurie Colwin calls a "domestic sensualist," someone who drinks in the beauty of everyday objects and realizes that a pen, just an ordinary pen, can hold so much more than ink. These objects that we surround ourselves with can tell stories about the most normal, uneventful days of our lives, and that is why getting a new pen, one that writes so smoothly, can feel so momentous. It is a thing of beauty and possibility that we can touch every day.

That is also why I set the table for even weeknight meals with my grandparents' wedding china {a Noritake pattern with a pink rose and gold leaf} and why I use a demitasse spoon and a white cup and saucer for my morning coffee, even though it's just me and even though I'm in a hurry. Living with and using pretty, meaningful objects brings delight to even the dullest of days, and it helps me remember to look for beauty on those days when nothing seems to shine.

The new pen I got is just an object; it is just a utilitarian thing that I can use to craft my to-do list and write notes to myself. But it also creates a daring, bold line that seems to want to declare something, write something, live something.

Even though it's just a pen, it can remind me of this: Sometimes, we do the most mundane, routine things with the most mundane, routine objects—and we are flooded with joy at the mere ordinary beauty of it all.

life changes fast: thoughts on Joan Didion

It was the moment when I realized that I'd had my workout pants on backwards the entire time I'd been at the Y that I thought: Well, that's about enough for today.

I'd spent 31 minutes biking furiously on a stationary bicycle, although "furiously" is the wrong word for it. While I biked, I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, about her grief in the year after she lost her husband very suddenly to a heart attack, so I suppose you could say I was biking "grievously," a misused word here, but one that makes me smile with the word play of it.

And now inevitably, I'm thinking and writing in the voice of Joan Didion, one of those writers I admire so much that I've written about her before. She has this chopped but lyrical style, a way of conveying so much emotion in these scattered phrases {and really, isn't that what all writers are going for?}.

She writes:

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

and

In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare. There was the journal of CS Lewis kept after the death of his wife, A Grief Observed. There was the occasional passage in one or another novel [...]. There were, in classical ballets, the moments when one or another abandoned lover tries to find and resurrect one or another loved one, the blued light, the white tutus, the pas de deux with the loved one that foreshadows the final return to the dead: la danse des ombres, the dance of the shades. There were certain poems, in fact many poems. [...] The poems and the dances of the sades seemed the most exact to me.

It's in Joan Didion's repetition of phrases that I could get lost—that I did get lost, pedaling as if her grief depended on it, as if my grief depended on it. By the time I finished those minutes on the stationary bicycle, I had gone 8.21 miles, and my legs ached.

Read this book, and you will hear echoes throughout of that "Life changes fast" idea.

Read this book, and you will want to absorb grief literature right along with Joan Didion, sinking into poems by Auden and ee cummings, wrapping yourself in words by others who have found a way to write about something we all feel but can so rarely describe.

Read this book, and you will start to think in Joan Didion's voice {if you are lucky}, and so even when you have a realization about how your workout pants are on backwards, it will be in her clipped but soaring take on life.

You'll hear it in your head, and you'll laugh at how you summed up that moment. You'll think then: Thank the Lord for this ordinary moment, this ordinary reason to smile because life changes fast, life changes in the instant.

5 things that prove I love Garrison Keillor

My love of Garrison Keillor has finally paid off, in the way only an English major raised on a steady intake of A Prairie Home Companion would consider a pay off:

As a promotion for his new CD, My Little Town, he's doing a "submit your favorite story about your little town" contest, and he picked this thing I wrote to publish on his site. {I'll tell you more about the thing in a minute.}

  Note several things:

• I keep saying "he," as if Garrison is there coding the submission form. {You can see it for yourself and admire his handiwork. Such a renaissance man, he is.}
• Or as if he's staying up past his bedtime reading submissions from people around the country who are trying to make their town sound like Lake Wobegon.
• I mean, I realize that Garrison probably didn't actually read my poem, but I'm going to pretend. After years of listening to him him spin tales about a town that seemed so familiar and home-like to me, I'm going to pretend that he read about my little town—out loud, obviously, in that deep, nostalgia-creating voice of his—and thought to himself, 'Well, oh my, I'd like to go to this town this Kamiah girl is from. Maybe the next time I'm doing my show at Ravinia, I'll pop out to Glen Ellyn and visit her. We'd get along like gangbusters.' I just know he'd use the word gangbusters.

Yes, I'm going to pretend that my poem has now become one of Garrison Keillor's favorites.

In my mind, he's going to read it on that Writer's Almanac podcast of his someday {which I just wrote about yesterday. Garrison and I are already displaying best-friends-who-think-alike behavior}.

Please don't take my fantasy away from me, but give an NPR nerd her moment in the pale Minnesota sun that's shining down on Lake Wobegon right now.

A Little More about This Thing I Wrote

All you had to do was tell a story about your hometown, and I, in a rare moment of turning my back on Iowa, submitted a poem about Glen Ellyn that I wrote about two years ago. The carnival comes to town every year, and there is nothing like the smell of corndogs to put me in a poetry mood. {That's just the kind of statement Garrison would relate to.}

You can read the poem here on my blog.

Or, if you'd like to see it in its Prairie Home Companion glory, you can see it here. {You, sadly, have to scroll down to the bottom. I need to call Garry and get him to put my poem on the top.}

So, there you have it: Garrison Keillor is, I'm sure, going to visit Glen Ellyn soon in order to meet me. If he comes during the carnival, I would most definitely buy him a funnel cake.

The following list may help really convince him that he should come.

5 Things that Prove I Love Garrison Keillor

1. I own this t-shirt:
   
   It is, for those of you who don't know {I scoff at you}, the shirt for the Professional Organization of English Majors, this group that Garrison made up and sometimes does sketches about. If it were real, you know I'd belong.
   
   If you're an English major and you'd like a shirt, too, you should order one from Garrison.
2. I once met him—at Tanglewood. My family, we're kind of Garrison groupies, and we went out to western Massachusetts to see him do his show live one summer. Afterwards, we stood in line to meet him. When he heard my name, he said, "Kamiah. Kamiah. That sounds like a name that belongs in a limerick," which is not something I've ever had said to me before, nor is it the conversation I envisioned having with him, but that is all right.
3. When I was in middle school, someone asked what I liked to listen to on the radio. I said, "A Prairie Home Companion," before I realized that I should've said, "Really awesome music that kids my age would know."
   
   That experience mirrors the time in elementary school when we were asked our favorite band, and I said, "Peter, Paul, and Mary."
4. My parents go on the Prairie Home Companion cruises almost every summer. I realize this doesn't really prove why I love Garrison, but it clearly shows that it's in the blood.
5. Someone once told me, "Your stories sound like something Garrison Keillor would tell. You're like a 30something girl version of him." I had just recently met the person, and I wanted to hug them. That is the 3rd best compliment I've ever received.

french enough for me

A few weeks ago—no, over a month ago now—when I was in Quebec, I picked up a French book at the airport. This may have been a desperate attempt to keep my French self happy as I left a cobblestoned, francophone area, headed back to the suburbs and the dare-I-say-it harsh tone of our wide-mouthed American English.

{If you disagree with me on this harsh tone point, please just watch any period piece from England and tell me if you don't wish you had a mellifluous accent like that.*}

I found a book by Philippe Delerm and snatched it up immediately, as if there weren't 10 other copies. Philippe is one of the French writers I can understand without too much thinking. He is, I mean to say, a writer I can read as if he were writing in English, and when I read his books, I sometimes have to stop to think: OMG, I might be bilingual. {If I'm really immersed, that might even come out in French.}

But really, it's Philippe Delerm bilingual, but I'm okay with that. I live in the middle of America and go to French-speaking areas, on average, once every year. In other words, my French brain doesn't get much use, although I'm forever telling myself that I should watch more French movies or read more French books or join a French conversation group.

That doesn't happen, though, when I get caught up in my very English life here, and so I use Philippe Delerm to make my French self feel better: At least you can still read this, I tell myself.

The thing about Philippe Delerm {besides that he's from Normandy, where I used to live} is that he writes in French about stuff I like to write about in English: brief snatches of every day life. Little descriptions of how the sun played off the roof on a walk. What the first sip of a coffee is like.

We are surrounded by insignificant-seeming moments, but Philippe Delerm shows them to us and gives them a glow of great significance. That's what I try to do in {some of} my writing and maybe that's why I can understand him so easily: we speak the same language, of a sort.

My new book by him is Le trottoir au soleil: The Sidewalk in the Sun.

Just listen to this:

On arrive là en fin d’après-midi, on fait une grande balade autour des champs qui encerclent le hameau. Le soleil commence à fléchir quand on revient vers la voiture. Il y a une petite terrasse de café. On ne resiste pas au plaisir de s’y installer. […]

La lumière est en vous aussi. Chaque seconde qui passe vous rive advantage à ce miracle. Un soir d’été. Comment partir?

Beautiful, n'est-ce pas?



*My gosh, I am so classist, but I'm trying to hide it in a footnote. When I watch English shows—Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility or of course Downton Abbey—I wish for the mellifluous accent of the upper classes. I would also like someone to bring me tea in bed every morning, but I would be demanding/unusual and request coffee. I would also be unpredictable and sometimes want it from a French press and sometimes from an Italian press.

quebec in pictures

Place Royale on an early morning run: It got that name when they installed the bust of Louis XIV there. It apparently wasn't enough for him to have Versailles and to be called the Sun King; he also needed this square—considered the cradle of French civilization in North America—to be named after him.

Samuel de Champlain saying to Quebec, "I totally discovered you and claimed you for France. Why is Queen Elizabeth on your money now?"

He's probably also, from his perch on that plinth, thinking: What, the governor's house I built back in 1620 on this ground high above the St-Lawrence River wasn't good enough for you? You had to build the Chateau Frontenac, a fancy hotel, here instead?

Un bol de cafe au lait, s'il vous plait: Coffee in a bowl. I'm going to start offering this to people when they come over for coffee: Would you like an espresso, a Waffle House mug, or this bowl from Ikea?

In France, you can have cafe au lait in a bowl with breakfast—the better for dunking your bread and jam in, you see. But here in Quebec, I discovered you can get it any time, even with lunch, and they won't look at you funny. Bonus points for Quebec.

The only fortified city left in North America: Quebec has also left its cannons out and pointed in various directions. They are ready, should anyone ever try to take them back from the British.

Unless it's themselves: there is a separatist movement here in Quebec, much like how some people in Texas would like to secede from the United States. I'd say if the Quebecois want to be their own country, they can all just hole up in the fortified city, drinking their bowls of cafe au lait, and putting those cannons to good use.

Problem with my plan and why I'm not in charge of countries: The cannons don't work any more, there are no longer doors on any of the gates into the city, and even though the French had the high position and the fortifications, the British still beat them on the Plains of Abraham in 1759.

I would most definitely go to church there, assuming it's an Anglican church, which is a big assumption here in what was once the seat of a Catholic diocese that stretched all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Actually, there is an Anglican church in Quebec—Holy Trinity. It was the first Anglican church built outside of the British Isles, and did you know that it has a section set aside specifically for members of the British Royal Family? No one else can ever sit there, which makes it even more exclusive than the Royal Box at Wimbledon.

Un autre bol de cafe au lait: This one at brunch at Le Clocher Penche in the St-Roch neighborhood. I'm reading the book The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food by Adam Gopnik, and should you ever want to really enjoy eating alone {as I often have to do on work trips like this one}, bring that book.

You can read about the glorious social history of the restaurant and the recipe, all while eating. It will make you appreciate where you are, not feel like the odd (wo)man out in a restaurant of people enjoying conversation and each other.

Later, when you're back with people and you don't have to eat alone, you can dazzle them with trivia about what the French Revolution has to do with the restaurant.

Le Sang des Saints: My meal at Le Clocher Penche, and fyi, that translates to "the blood of the saints." It was boudin noir, a poached egg, pears, and caramelized red onions served over naan with a balsamic reduction. If I purposely forget that "boudin noir" is blood sausage and if I purposely forget how it's made, I love it so much. It makes being forgetful worth it.

The most photographed hotel in the world: That's what they say about the Chateau Frontenac, so I thought I'd add another picture to the count.

quebec: so french and yet

Quebec City truly is a slice of France in North America, although there are these—almost jarring reminders that I'm not actually in France.

I can be walking down a cobblestone alley and it seems so much like I'm back in France, from the just-washed streets in the early morning to the sidewalks that never seem to give enough room for two people to pass each other.

And then I can turn a corner and run into a shop selling hockey jerseys or even football jerseys: this is not France, I have to tell myself. Not France, not France, not France. Repeating it helps me remember.

Seriously. Outdoor cafe. Flowers. Cobblestones. How is this not France?

Plus, the cars are all wrong for this to be France; French cars are smaller, and of course there's the whole different makes/models thing. Here, it's all the same cars as in America on streets that look very French.

This morning on my run, I passed a Jeep Liberty, a Ford F-250, and a Land Rover. Where are the Opels and Renaults? How does an F-250 navigate the back alleys? Not France, not France, not France.

Also on my run this morning, I saw the Chateau Frontenac and plotted ways to move there permanently. This is a diverting way to spend a run when you're doing more hills than you, a person who lives in Illinois, has seen in awhile.

I go back to France every other year or so and the French part of me gets to come out. That's the part that knows what it feels like to have my powers of language stripped down. It's the part that feels triumphant for making it through small talk and the part that knows that if you need help, you have to ask for it, even if you don't know how to say it.

The French part of me knows that loneliness will hurt but it won't destroy you.

And my French side is, in some ways, my writer side because I did so much of it when I lived there—perhaps a by-product of having lost my main form of communication.

That simultaneous feeling of panic {what if I can't get the words out?}, triumph {I did!}, and a need to document it all {what a world we live in!} is something I very much associate with France because that's where I was the foreigner and that's where I tried to make a life, if only for a little while.

To come to Quebec, then—where it looks so much like France and where they do, indeed, speak French {with an accent, although I, of course, also speak French with an accent}—but to have so many things double-signed in English and to hear English so frequently...well, it feels a little topsy-turvy to my French self.

It feels like I've stepped into a blend of France and home—but maybe that's a good place to be.

Chez Temporel: where I had dinner tonight. There was quiche, red wine, chocolate cake, and espresso. I chit-chatted with the people sitting next to me, and they complimented my French, saying I sounded more French than American in my accent. I then asked to be their best friend/if they could call my friends in France and repeat that.

dinner alone with annie dillard {part 2}

And who wouldn't want to learn about writing from Annie Dillard?

In other words: what I gleaned about writing from the book Holy the Firm—and then put into a book report for my summer writing class.

Read the beginning here.

----------

Write in the Voice that Works for You (Syntax Can Go by the Wayside)
I get the sense reading Holy the Firm that I’m reading Annie Dillard’s journal.  She’s writing in spurts; she’s writing in half-sentences and quarter-sentences, and she’s writing, at times, like she’s praying.

Holy the Firm has the feel of Virginia Woolf’s or James Joyce’s best stream of consciousness:  there is the feeling that these thoughts are tumbling out of Annie Dillard’s brain, and this propels you to keep reading, to keep going, to tumble with her until she ends up making a beautifully profound point.  And you feel that the only way you could’ve gotten there is through her breaking-all-the-rules syntax.

Now, normally, I’m all for rules, but in a book as personal, reflective, and spiritual as Holy the Firm, breaking the “rules of good writing” is perfectly appropriate. It gives it a raw quality that is part of what drew me in so deeply in that Argentinean restaurant in Houston:  who cares about steak when there are words like this to read?

For outside it is bright.  The surface of things outside the drops has fused.  Christ himself and the others, and the brown warm wind, and hair, sky, the beach, the shattered water—all this has fused.  It is the one glare of holiness; it is bare and unspeakable.  There is no speech nor language; there is nothing, no one thing, nor motion, nor time.  There is only this everything.  There is only this, and its bright and multiple noise. (pp 67-68)

Or what about this?

Hoopla!  All that I see arches, and light arches around it.  The air churns out forces and lashes the marveling land.  A hundred times through the fields and along the deep roads I’ve cried Holy.  I see a hundred insects moving across the air, rising and falling.  Chipped notes of birdsong descend from the trees, tuneful and broken; the notes pile about me like leaves.  Why do these molded clouds make themselves overhead innocently changing, trailing their flat blue shadows up and down everything, and passing, and gone?  Ladies and gentlemen!  You are given insects, and birdsong, and a replenishing series of clouds. The air is buoyant and wholly transparent, scoured by grasses. (pp 72-73)

Following these phrases can be dizzying, but by letting the thoughts twirl, Annie Dillard invites us in.

I have so much underlined in Holy the Firm—words and phrases that stuck out to me—but as I went back to find examples of her free-flowing, unstructured voice, I discovered that often to get to the root of why I underlined a word or phrase, I had to read back a few paragraphs.  I had to start the journey again to remember why the ending place was so significant, and I like feeling that I’m along for a wordy adventure with a writer.

The Routine of Writing
I don’t have specific excerpts from Holy the Firm for this lesson; it’s more a lesson from Annie Dillard’s life.  I have yet to read her book The Writing Life, but from her works that I have read, I know that she is a routine writer:  she writes whether she feels like it or not.

Getting across your message—those nebulous thoughts in your head—is not always an easy task.  In fact, it rarely is, and the writing advice that seems the most useful and most mundane is:  write every day.  Be in the practice of writing—even when you despise every word coming out of you.  You sometimes have to write ugliness to get to the prettiness underneath; you sometimes need to start down one path to realize that the story you need to tell is actually a path taking off from that first one.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard talks about taking the same walk every day—to the point that she is so in tune with nature and the changing world around her that it almost seems like an extension of her.

This is how, in part, we should see writing:  as something we do every day so that we can feel more connected to the world around us.  Annie Dillard teaches me this, just in the way she writes.  It’s as if she’s saying:  pay attention to the world, and you will have things to say.

In Short, I Wish I Were Friends with Annie Dillard
I felt like, in a way, I had dinner with Annie Dillard in Houston.  Reading Holy the Firm while sitting at my table for one—fending off the waiter who asked if I’d like to stay after close and open up a bottle of Malbec with him—I forgot that I was in a strange city.  I forgot that I’d been gone from home for five days.  I forgot that my head was spinning from all the meetings I’d gone to.

I was in Annie Dillard’s world—seeing the moth, smelling the air on Puget Sound, looking for God in the small things.  And that, for me, is good writing:  when it takes you away from where you are, and when you close the book, you start to see the world around you in a new light.

dinner alone with annie dillard {part 1}

In my summer writing class, I get to write a book report. This is, in fact, the third time I've taken this class, so for the past three summers, I've been able to delve back into that particularly primary school-sounding "book report."

Two years ago, I wrote about the book Nothing Remains the Same.

And last year, it was Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo? And Other Questions I Wish I Never Had to Ask.

Don't get the wrong idea here: these are not five paragraph essays about character, setting, and dialogue. We're supposed to choose books in genres that we write in, so I choose personal essay books, and then use the book report to work out my aggression toward the author.

About how they're funnier than me.

Or sharper than me.

Or had a book published by the time they were 30.

Or say things that I have most definitely thought before—but they have said it better.

My book reports are really more about catharsis and working through my issues, so when it came time to do this year's report, I thought—why change that approach? It's working so well!

My target this year: Annie Dillard. Darn her and her Pulitzer Prize.

I've written about Annie before—I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek while vacationing out West with my parents a few years ago, and it's hard to be surrounded by so much expansive nature, be reading Annie Dillard, and not write these reflective, searching for meaning essays.

Hiking in Zion National Park and reading Annie is basically the perfect set-up for a nature essay about seeing beauty everywhere {you can see me attempting this here}.

Earlier this summer, I picked up another Annie Dillard book at a Friends of the Library sale: a quarter for Annie? Oh, yes.

And look what I got from my quarter: a book report and a chance to work out my envy of Annie Dillard. Money well spent, I tell you, money well spent.

What I Read This Summer: Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard

I was in an Argentinean restaurant near the Galleria in Houston, but that’s not where my mind and heart were.  I had come in from the heat, the oppressive, pushing heat, into this cool, dark place with red accents to catch the eye.  Come in to the hostess asking, “Just you tonight?

A table for one, please, and I held my held my head high and my Annie Dillard book tightly as the hostess—a tall girl made taller by her black heels; she should be dancing a tango in the streets of Buenos Aires—took me to a tucked away table in the back.

I chose to sit not facing the wall as the hostess had offered, the chair pulled out for me so I could easily sit down and then avoid eye contact with anyone who might look with pity on the girl eating alone.

Instead, I told her I’d rather sit facing out, facing everyone, facing the eyes.  I am not bothered to be eating alone, I wanted to convey.  This is what happens when you go on business trips alone, but I’m not lonely.

The waiter made a show of removing the other setting at the table, and I made a show out of opening Holy the Firm after asking the waiter to recommend a good glass of Malbec.

And then.

With that first crack of Holy the Firm, my mind and heart were elsewhere.  I was no longer worrying about projecting the careless, independent air of the nonchalant solo diner—I was on Puget Sound with Annie Dillard, rejoicing in how the act of stringing together words can bring meaning, beauty, reflection, and the ability, for just a short space of time, to be elsewhere.

Annie Dillard’s writing is transcendent; that’s the best way I can describe it.  When I read her, time slows, my breathing deepens, and that thin veil between us and the eternal is pulled up just enough to make me aware that this side of the veil is the temporary one, a mere blip in time, a shadow of the other side.

How does Annie Dillard do it?  I’ve been wondering this since I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek while in Zion National Park and wanted to award her, if I could, a million more Pulitzer Prizes for it.  Holy the Firm is shorter—but not less dense yet ethereal in true Annie Dillard style—so it gave me a chance to study her craft (over a glass of a good Malbec in Houston).

I’ve come up with three lessons on writing from Annie Dillard that I hope to apply to my more reflective pieces.  When I write about nature and really taking notice of it, I’m invariably thinking of Annie Dillard.

Notice Small Things
This lesson reminds me of that gift/self-help/encouragement book you often find in the checkout line at Barnes & Noble:  Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and it’s all small stuff.

This is:  Notice Small Things…and it’s all small things that make up big things.  By paying attention to the little things in her day, Annie Dillard is really saying something about the bigger things, about that thin veil, about how every tiny created creature is just that:  a creation.

For example, she writes about a moth.  An ugly, drawn-to-the-flames moth.  More specifically, she writes about the death of a moth she once witnessed while camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held.  I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all.  A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke.  At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. […]

And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick.  She kept burning. […]

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning—only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled […]. (pp 16-17)

Reading this, I am watching the moth’s death with Annie Dillard.  I am drawn in like (forgive me) a moth to the flame, and in two short pages, she conveys the fragility of life and the beauty and dignity possible in death without saying:  Now, here, I will talk about death.

She’s just writing about a moth.  She’s just opening her eyes to the small things that make up the big things, and she’s writing.

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There are two more lessons from Annie Dillard that I learned by reading this very thin book.

If you're eager to learn from Annie, too, you can jump ahead to the lessons here.

on a new notebook

It's an ironic shame: to write the first words in a new journal. To mar the page with ink and unformed thoughts seems a harsh reality compared to those moments before you put pen to paper.

Then, faced with a white expanse, you anticipate.

Or no, even before that, you anticipate.

Standing in the store before a rack of notebooks, you ponder which one should be yours. Pick one up; weigh the heft; run your fingers over the pages; is it the right size?

Choosing the notebook—black cover, college-ruled, three sections—you can't help yourself: your mind trips down literary paths, through poetic fields {if they were truly poetic, they'd be called "leas"}, across the ocean of discovery and words.

It's in this notebook, you sense as you stand in line to pay, that you'll write Worthy of Notice Things.

With a calling like that, it seems ridiculous that you should be forced to stand in a line to buy this—behind a man buying milk and next to a magazine rack stacked with salacious celebrity gossip.

Handing over bills and coins for this notebook: a business transaction. You scoff at that but hand over the bills and coins anyway, of course.

The clerk smiles at you—forced, required—and you smile back out of habit, but inside, you anticipate what you'll write in this notebook that's now swinging in a plastic bag, just hitting the back of your knee.

edith wharton, get out of my life

This must've happened to you before: you learn a new word or hear about a TV show or read an article on an obscure-sounding topic on page D13 of the Chicago Tribune—and then suddenly, that word or TV shows or apparently-not-obscure topic is everywhere in your life.

Did you simply glaze over all of it before because you weren't familiar?

Or, in some odd universe coalescing way, is this word/show/topic now being served up to you on a silver platter, ready for your consumption?

That second question holds a twinge of conspiracy theory in it, and I apologize for sounding suspicious of...the universe.

{Parenthetical Justification for Suspicion: In a world where Google dominates and tracks our every {Internet} move, it's hard to avoid going down the conspiracy theory/someone is stalking me route sometimes.

Example: at work today, I looked up a news story about Senator Mark Kirk {R-IL}, and not too long later, the ads on my Grooveshark were all about asking for donations for Rick Santorum. I hit re-fresh, and they were about donations for Newt Gingrich. In my Google-why-do-I-let-you-know-everything-about-my-life distrust of the Internet, I'm convinced the ads were a direct result of the search.

End Parenthetical Justification for Suspicion.}

I ask all this because I'm going through this experience with Edith Wharton right now.

It's not that I recently heard of her—oh, no.

When I was in middle school, my parents took me to visit her house in Massachusetts, the Mount. I remember seeing her big writing desk in the upstairs sitting room—big windows, lots of light, overlooking the gardens—and thinking that I'd never stop writing if I had that kind of set-up. Or maybe I'd just have very literary-looking photographs of me taken.

The Mount: I would also throw excellent garden parties if this were my house.

Through high school and college, I read several things by her, including her short story "Roman Fever," which has such a twist of an ending that you actually gasp and sit dumbfounded for several minutes afterwards.

If you lived in the Mount and you read that story, you would be forced to take a walk in the gardens {carrying a parasol}, focusing all the time on your breathing and how beautifully blue the sky is, in order to recover from reading it.

So, Edith has been part of my life for some time, but she'd been relegated to the back recesses of my mind, the way things that you did in middle school often are.

Last week, though, she came back.

I was sick and had just finished a book. Standing at my bookshelf with my head tilted, reading the titles to try to find something, anything, that would take my mind off the thumping headache and my self-diagnosis of tuberculosis, I came across my Edith Wharton section.

Edith Wharton? Images of the Mount and me gasping violently {to the consternation of my roommate} after reading "Roman Fever" while curled up in my dorm room bunk bed floated past.

Yes, I could go for some Edith Wharton, I decided, but not any of these that I already own. The next day, when I mustered enough energy to make it to the library {I live half a block away from it, but getting there did involve me changing out of my sweatpants}, I checked out The Buccaneers.

Should you be a visual person who'd like to know what kind of book you're dealing with, here's what it looks like. Now stop judging a book by its cover.

{Parenthetical Downton Abbey Disclosure: This book was recommended for people who like Downton Abbey, and as we know, I'm way beyond like when it comes to Downton.}

In the little sick nest I'd built for myself on the couch—out of Kleenex, antibiotics, pillows, a cuddly pug, and a wool blanket from PEI—I remembered why I like Edith Wharton so much: She makes you feel as if you were in on a delicious secret. And that secret is well-dressed and has a house on Fifth Avenue.

I couldn't stop reading Edith all weekend. The Buccaneers is about American heiresses who go to England in the 1870s to use their Papas' wealth to buy themselves a husband and a title. I assume you're all thinking of Cora Crawley in Downton Abbey now; if you aren't, I obviously haven't done my job of talking about Downton enough.

Yesterday, I made it back to work, and this was waiting for me on our office's Book-a-Day Calendar:

Look closely. Or, you know, click on the image and it will be blown up. Not in the TNT sense.

The Book-a-Day Calendar was telling me to read Edith. I'm way ahead of you, buddy, I told it. Or would have, should I be the kind who talks to paper products.

And then today, Twitter taught me this: Edith Wharton was born 150 years ago today.

Okay, I get it, universe: You want me to pay attention to Edith Wharton.

Or marry an English duke, since she often wrote about that.

I'm sure the message will become clear by tomorrow, when Google will start showing me ads that have to do with visiting the Mount or buying a writing desk to place in my sitting room. {Joke's on you, Google: I don't have a sitting room.}

In conclusion: Happy birthday, Edith Wharton!

comfort in the dark {a poem}

Winter begins
not with a blizzard or a flurry
but with darkness and
temperatures below freezing.

It's the solstice,
the very word speaking of
light and dark
and how our lives intertwine with both.

On this, the longest night of the year,
my kitchen smells of
sauteed mushrooms and onions
and of red wine—a kind of holy trinity
of comfort in aroma.

Standing over the white stove,
I stir the risotto, my face flush
in the steam that pirouettes from the
cooking rice.

Out my window, it is cold and it is dark,
but I do not notice.

Instead, I notice how risotto
all of a sudden
becomes creamy
as it drinks in the wine.

I notice how risotto
is about both patience
and action.

We long to categorize:
light versus dark
good versus bad
black versus white

But more often
we live in a messy blend
of looking for the light in the dark

of stirring the pot and waiting
for the risotto to transform.

That moment will come.

It always does.

choose your own adventure {kind of}

In a fit of nostalgia, I pulled out an old writing journal over the weekend.

This one was from the creative writing class I took my senior year of college, and as I read through it, I through two things:

• I wish I could go back to college. Life was so simple back then. {Name the musical I'm quoting!}
• I was overflowing with stories to be told back when I was 22. Not that I've stopped telling stories now {I'm not sure how this blog would exist if I didn't have stories to tell...}, but I mean more the fiction kind of stories. In this class, we were challenged and encouraged to write way beyond our comfort levels, and so I had to do fiction, even if I didn't think I had stories and characters to share.
  
  That, by the way, is mostly why I wish I could go back to college: okay, partly it's because I want to be able to wander into a cafeteria and have a plethora of choices for food that I didn't have to make.
  
  But I also want to go back to college for that daily challenge thing. For that thing where you have to stretch your mind to do chemistry and analyze a modern poem and write a well-researched paper on who the best president of the post-World War II era has been—all in one week.
  
  And to be in a writing class where you're told: come up with 15 different ways to start a story. Now. Yes, for that challenge, I wish I could go back to college.
  
  {Here is where someone will insert that if I really wanted that challenge, I could take classes or do a self-study or something. But let's all just own up to this fact: there is nothing like having your only job be attending class and learning.}
  

Speaking of 15 different ways to start a story, I came across a list like that in my writing journal. And in a silly little effort to feel like I'm in college again, I'm going give myself an assignment.

{Actually, for this to really feel like college, it would help if a professor/teacher gave me the assignment. So if any of you fit the bill, please comment and assign me this. Ooh, and maybe create a syllabus for me.}

Assignment: Choose one of the following opening lines and finish the story.

Stipulation: I'm going to let all of you, dear readers, vote. Please take a glance at the list below and then let me know which story you'd most like me to finish. Voting closes Wednesday, December 21, at 5pm CST. {Doesn't that sound so official? Maybe I should have poll workers, too.}

Deadline: I'll do this over Christmas break. Okay, I also wish I could go back to college because I still got a Christmas break back then. Now, I get one federally-mandated day and any vacation days I want to save up for Christmas. But in any event, I'll work on this when I'm not at work.

Which of These Opening Lines Should Become a Full Story?

{aka, the time Kamiah pretended to still be in college}

1. She woke up, looked out the window at the snow, and thought, 'Who said it could snow today?'
2. She looked at the map, then at the street signs, then at the map again before she started crying in frustration because everything was written in a squiggle of Arabic.
3. Holidays were a treacherous time for the family, and this one was no exception—it was, in fact, more of a shining example.
4. When the sun got too hot for his dreams, he opened his eyes and realized that he didn't know why he was in a field of fall grass.
5. The little girls splashed in the pool, not knowing what had almost happened yesterday.
6. I stared at my computer screen and pretended to type so that I'd fool my boss, but in my mind, I was already in Venice on a gondola with a man who looked like Cary Grant and Tom Hank mixed together.
7. She thought about how everyone had said, "Don't worry, it'll be okay," when they were obviously ignoring the fact that nothing is ever okay and that worrying is how she remembers that.
8. Running away is too hard when your tires are flat on your pink Huffy bike and you're still six years away from even thinking about which pedal is for the gas.
9. The Midwest, unlike some people think, is not the most boring part of America. And I could prove it.
10. Her face always looked like nothing important was happening behind it, which is how I knew that she was a people watcher, too.
11. The fight last night had been over the dishwasher and bowling, but both of them had a suspicion that there was more to it than Joy and strikes.
12. It was only in small, orderly spaces that she felt comfortable enough to relax, which is why she often had to escape into phone booths. There were two problems with this one: it had graffiti everywhere, and someone was already in there.
13. I had laughed at his jokes, even though I hadn't understood what he meant and had thought that maybe he was mocking me.
14. I didn't like Halloween, but I didn't tell my friends that. They were just starting to think I was cool.
15. I hated that I was always the one who had to leave and that I was never the one to cry.

Happy voting! All you need to do is leave a comment with the number of the opening line you'd like to see a full story for.

{Or, you know, you don't even have to think of this in terms of what you'd like to see: if you want to make me write a really, really hard story and you think one of those opening lines will be harder than the others, you can vote for that. That seems a little mean to me, but you can do whatever you want, just so long as you vote.}

i am a crazy pug lady

When I write in the early morning—I've been getting up at 5:15ish to write before going to the gym—Miss Daisy, my little pug, sits just next to me in another of the kitchen chairs.

It's as if we're an old farm couple, sitting here having coffee. Ours is the only kitchen light on for miles, and the cheery yellow glow is an oasis or a beacon in the dark. It's the only thing, besides the hope of a good day, pushing back against the darkness.

But we're, of course, not an old farm couple. We're just sitting in a square of light in the suburbs.

Miss Daisy sits so patiently in her chair, and she sits so observantly. Her eyes follow my hand as I try to fill the paper with words that are worth leaving, with words I don't need to claw away, to scratch out.

When I look up and smile at her, happy I didn't cross out a word in the last sentence, she looks woefully back at me. She's a pug; woeful is her typical face, particularly when she's just waking up from a night's sleeping and snoring.

Her wrinkled brow seems to say, "Are you sure you want to write that? Are you sure you're happy with it? It's all right if you need to keep trying. I'll stay right here next to you."

And then she looks hopefully, not woefully, at my coffee cup, sitting in an NPR mug on the table in between us. She's perhaps suggesting that she have a sip or two of that as a reward for her encouragement.

I scratch her behind the ears, tell her that pugs shouldn't have coffee, and get back to scratching on my paper.

that's the way you spell success

Earlier this summer, I decided I needed a challenge, something to liven up my days, keep my mind churning and productive.

Faced with the heat and the feeling that said heat was mushing my brain, I needed something that would be the equivalent of sticking my head in a freezer.

Or something that would be like having multiple mojitos every afternoon on the verandah, which sounds refreshing but also slightly bordering on alcoholism.

In short, I needed a challenge that would keep me writing and wouldn't make me turn to drink. {Contrary to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, we don't all need to drink for creativity and memorable prose.}

Enter the 41 Day Challenge: Post every business day on my blog for 41 days. This had a lot to do with the number of followers I had at the beginning of the summer, and a somewhat desperate plea for more.

You can read the thinly-veiled desperation here.

And you can see me throwing down the gauntlet as a challenge to myself here. That's what knights did to issue a challenge, right? They threw down a gauntlet? Or maybe they hit somebody with it? Or poked somehow with a spear? Also, I thought the gauntlet was an obstacle course that could kill you: as in "run the gauntlet." I should move on from showcasing my appalling lack of Medieval knowledge {and I should consider re-watching First Knight, I say: any excuse for Sean Connery!}.

Here as summer is turning to fall—I refuse to acknowledge your presence, Indian Summer, should you come—my challenge is over.

And I won.

I didn't really think through the prize thing, so if you have any suggestions, I'll take them. I just got a new car, so don't suggest that; I won't go allWheel of Fortune jumping up and down on you for that as a prize.

I made it through all 41 days, and like any self-respecting person who sets seasonal goals for herself, I've thought through the lessons of this challenge. I need to come up with a catchy phrase for this: Self-reflection after achieving a goal is crucial to making better goals next time. See? That's not catchy at all.

Lessons I Learned Over Summer "Vacation"

1. There is always something worth noting in a day. When you have to come up with a blog post every day, you start to pay better attention to what's swirling around you. Suddenly, an interaction at Walgreen's with the photo desk clerk can enlarge into a story.
2. I don't always have something to say. Even if there's something special about every day, which sounds decidedly like an Anne of Green Gable's sort of idea, that doesn't mean that I'll be able to come up with something just right—or even halfway right—to say about it.
3. And it's okay to not always know what to say.
4. When you don't know what to say, poetry is usually a good fallback. Please note, though, that this lesson may apply only in the writing world; it might not work to go about quoting Mary Oliver when you're not sure what to say on a conference call. I'll try it out and let you know.
5. People actually read what I write. And sometimes, they even feel compelled to share something from their life with me. This continues to astound me and make me grateful. Thank you for reading.
6. You can always find time to do something that interests you. This has the ring to it of something your mother would say to you, but it's true, which is why it sounds mother-like. There were days when I didn't know where I'd find the time—for this silly, self-set challenge that maybe no one cared about but me—and I'd think, 'So what? It doesn't matter if I miss one day! Who would point that out? Who would notice?' {More on those questions in a moment.} But I'd find the time, little slices here and there, to get something out. To meet the challenge.
7. Personal challenges are more personally rewarding. Lack of a self-set prize aside, this 41 Day Challenge was worth it—if simply to test my commitment to writing.
   
   Those whiny questions in my lesson above have a deeper, less whiny root: Why do I do what I do? Why do any of us do what we do? Is it to win accolades from others? Is it to scratch and grab our 15 minutes of fame? How much of what we do is focused on gaining attention? If a blogger posts and no one comments, does that mean the post {and the time writing it} were in vain?
   
   I will admit an un-pretty side of me: when one of my best friends didn't know that I was doing this 41 Day Challenge, I was saddened. Offended a little. Hurt for sure. I don't talk about my blog too much in my outside-the-computer life, but I think I needed this summer's challenge to help me face an expectation I had and wasn't even aware of: I wanted people to become hooked on my writing, and there were certain people in my life that I expected/internally demanded to become hooked.
   
   But that's unfair—to me and to them. It means that I'm writing just to get attention, and it means that I've put some sort of blog reading requirement on friendship, which doesn't sound like a fun friendship to me, nor does it sound like a fun blog.
   
   Writing that's focused on accolades and notice and people fawning is more likely to be writing that doesn't ring true and right. It's more likely to come off sounding like an infomercial for a product no one would buy unless it was 3am and they couldn't get to sleep.
   
   So I had days when I wondered if it was worth it, this self-set challenge.
   
   And I realized that yes, it was worth it: it was worth doing for me. Not for anyone else. Once I fessed up to that expectation of accolades, I could more easily squash it and put it in its place.
   
   Don't you find that that's true? That if you try to ignore an emotion or a thought or some part of you that you'd rather not admit, then you suddenly find that that's all you can think about. If only you'd face it, full on and with gusto, then you could say to it, "You're not right, and you don't get to control me."
   
   The 41 Day Challenge was worth it for me. I proved to myself that I could keep up a steady stream of writing, even when I didn't feel like it. I broke down that desire for attention {for right now—attention tends to be a life-long problem}, and I wrote.

book report lessons

Confession about the last two days' posts: they were pulled from a book report I did for my writing class.

A book report! When was the last time you did one of those?

Don't you kind of want to do one now?

Although the more grown-up word for it is: book review. Then you sound slightly knowledgeable and like maybe the New Yorker is going to come to your door.

So here is part 2 of my book report/book review: in which I describe what I learned from the book.

{Read part 1 here.}

-----


From Jancee Dunn's family-centered memoir Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo?, I learned several things.

Culling from Your Life Is Entirely Appropriate, But People May Start to Get Nervous Around You
My brother-in-law once said to me, after I'd rhapsodized about fall and the transition into winter, “You're going to blog about this, aren't you?” {You can read the resulting blog post, if you want.}

It wasn't in a complimentary tone, but it showed me that other people are aware that I'm watching them and watching my life for stuff I could write about. Apparently, I'm not sneaky enough about it.

You have to do this; it's kind of the point of a memoir or of my particular form of creative non-fiction—the kind that tells daily life stories with a zany spin. You need to pay attention because even the smallest events can be worked into essays.

Jancee Dunn does this very well: she blends multiple stories so well that it’s not until you get to the end, after following all these strings, that you realize they do go together and demonstrate a bigger lesson that the individual stories by themselves could.

Case in point: Chapter 12, “Don’t Be Weird.”

The main point is that Jancee is sometimes socially awkward, so she meshes all these little vignettes of dinner parties and speaking without thinking. She jumps to how because she’s a writer, she’s in her own head all day, so interacting with the outside world can be challenging—and her husband’s reaction to that.

There’s a story of the two of them eavesdropping on other people in a café {that’s not weird, right? Besides, if I'm making people I know nervous by eavesdropping on them, don't I have the right to make other people nervous, people I don't know? That just seems fair.}. There's a digression to how she buys the ugliest treats at bakes sales so that whoever baked it won’t feel bad, and it all wraps up with a day-in-the-life-of-Jancee sort of story.

What about all of that goes together? But it doesn’t feel disjointed because you realize by the end that the string through all of this is: we’re all weird, so embrace it.

Lesson: Find the string in your stories and pull. Also, ignore looks of suspicion from family members and friends. When you're on The Ellen Degeneres Show promoting your book, you can mention them or their business or whatever, and they'll probably forgive you. Probably.

It's Not All About You
There’s this tricky, almost contradictory, thing about memoirs: they have to be about you, but they can’t only be about you.

In memoirs, you sort of have to be self-centered, but for a memoir to really work, it has to expand to the universal. You need to get yourself out of the story as much as possible so that people can see how they relate to it.

But take this into account: for people to want to read your memoir, you have to be interesting. People need to like you and be invested in you before they can even get to the “here’s what I have to say about life in general” ideas.

So memoir-writing is about finding balance—talking about yourself enough but not too much. Jancee does this well. She gives very specific details about herself so that we can get to know her, but she also expands all of her stories beyond herself.

For example, when talking about how she prepares for trips, she says, “Truly, I was my father’s daughter. We both loved making folders and filing them in neat rows inside pristine file cabinets with color-coordinated labels” (25).

See? Enough detail to make you get something new about Jancee, but it doesn’t turn into a treatise on organization and how wonderful she is at it. Although, truth be told, that is a treatise I would read. I'm the girl who just travelled to France with a binder full of notes, printed bus schedules, and train reservations, all of it in sheet protectors.

And an example of how she can expand to the greater picture, from her essay on watching her parents deal with their parents’ deaths: “It was difficult for me to grasp, in an age when no event is too small to be videotaped, the blunt finality of never hearing your father’s voice again. It was harder still, as a member of the most analyzed generation in American history, to imagine shying away from questions that didn’t seem remotely personal to me” (102).

See? In an essay on her family dealing with grief, she helps readers question their own approach to grief and finality and mortality—that takes a soft touch, let me tell you.

Lesson: Be personable and chatty, if that works with your personality, but remember: it’s not all about you. You may have the most exciting things happen to you every day, but what’s the bigger picture you can show through your writing?

I’m no longer angry at Jancee Dunn. I do appreciate her book and what she can teach me about my own writing. I just wish her mother hadn’t gotten a tattoo.

{But note to my mother: I actually never wished that you hadn't gotten a tattoo, contrary to my incredibly vociferous reaction to your tattoo.}

you know who you sound like?

I hate Anne Lamott.

Not really.

But isn't that a dramatic beginning?

Here's the non-drama truth: People often tell me that my writing reminds them of someone else's writing.

“Oh, do you know who you sound like? Anne Lamott. She had the funniest story...well, yours is funny, too. You're both so sharp about your faith.”

And that's why I hate her.

I also get: “You're just like David Sedaris, only maybe less bitter and without the slightly frightening ability to impersonate Billie Holiday.”

I take these comments as compliments because I'm sure the people saying them mean them as compliments. Besides, if you have to be compared to someone, Anne Lamott is pretty good company.

I also choose to take these as compliments because if I don't I will scream. And maybe cry, although I'm not known for that. I will cry and scream and wail and generally gnash my teeth because when I read writing that sounds like my own—but better and published—the inevitable question comes up: so who cares about what I have to say?

That's an unfair question, mostly because it's based on comparison, which, if you ask me, is the root of all evil. {Adam and Eve wanted something God had, so I may be on to something there.}

Comparison never gets you anywhere but frustrated. I tried to remember that when I showed my mother the piece I had written on her tattoo, and she said, “Oh, I read the most hilarious book called Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo? And Other Questions I Wish I Never Had to Ask. That's just like your story!”

Yes. Just like my story but with a snappy title that encapsulates everything I ever wanted to say about my mother's tattoo, and in fact my working title for my story was "A Question I Shouldn't Have to Ask."

I decided to face my nemesis, Jancee Dunn, this woman who had stolen my writing and my specialness {if I can't be known as the straight-laced girl who over-reacted to her mother's tattoo, what can I be known as?}, head-on: I checked out her book from the library. And I laughed my way through it, but also grew in my hate for Jancee. Her stories all sounded so...familiar.

She wrote about parents who send newspaper clippings with short notes attached; I've written about that, too. {Twice, actually! Once in relation to my mama's new iPad and once just yesterday when I talked about some of the articles I've gotten from my mama.}

She talked about her parents moving out of their home—the one she was raised in—and how she fought that; I've been mulling over a story on the same theme. {Not that my parents have left my childhood home, but the threat of it a few years ago, along with the promise that they're retiring to Canada, was enough to upset me.}

She talked about an obsession with bad-for-you-food; I'm known for my obsession with hot dogs.

Basically, I love Jancee because she's familiar, but I hate her because I can hold her book in my hands. But I did realize that Jancee's writing could be a good role model for me.

Reading good writing makes it easier to write good writing {that isn't a very good sentence, but you get the idea}.

And whether you want to write poetry or a novel or a memoir, you should be immersed in good writing from that genre. It'll teach you, both subtly and overtly, what works well and what you want to avoid.

Coming tomorrow: What I Learned from Envy. Or Jancee.

{You can jump ahead to part 2 here.}

two things. not related.

I have had two things in my head all day.

{No, I've had many things in my head all day, starting with: Why, oh why, is it 81 degrees at 5:30 in the morning? With a heat index of I don't want to know? I was not born for seasons like this in the Midwest.}

One Thing in My Head. I watched the leaves fall on a bright summer day.

That line came to me as I sat outside the Hotel de Ville in Aix-en-Provence. There were, in fact, leaves falling from the plane trees above me, just as if it were fall, and the whole idea seemed quite poetic to me.

Ephemeral summer. Change. How you can't predict even one detail of one day {that the leaves will stay on the trees in the summer}.

So perhaps a poem will come from that.

Second Thing in My Head. Jane Austen died on this day in...oh, I can't remember the year, and I only know this fact because of Twitter. Twitter teaches me random things like this all the time, which is one of the main benefits I can find in Twitter: it fills me with dinner party trivia.

So Jane died ages ago on this day, and now I'm thinking of a quote from Persuasion: It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at 29 than she was 10 years before.

I am not saying I'm handsomer now than I was at 19, but it's a good quote and now I want to re-read Persuasion.

These two thoughts: they are pretty all right thoughts to have with you throughout a hot summer's day.

the poetry home repair manual

I'm reading this book right now by Ted Kooser called The Poetry Home Repair Manual. It has a picture of a toolbox on the front, which serves to remind me that poetry should be a practical thing, built on a solid framework that people can relate to.

At least that's what I go for in my poetry. I know there are other kinds of poetry. The kind where you get to the end and say, "You must be much deeper than me, dear poet, because I understood about three words in there, and one of them was I."

But then I think of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, that lengthy poem by TS Eliot that I tripped into in 8th grade and immediately adored. I didn't understand much of that poem then—I understand a modicum more now and I think I will always be re-reading it to find new layers—but the flow of the language entranced me.

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

and

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

and

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

I didn't even drink coffee in 8th grade, but I read that line and knew it was right. I heard in it: the world is one empty social obligation after another.

Oh my. Such drama and such falsehood. My social obligations at that age amounted to showing up to school on time, doing my homework, participating in a sport, and going to youth group. How empty! How vain! How unfulfilling! How my life was going nowhere!

But I was 14, remember, and at 14, you have perfected world-weariness, an ennui with all you find around you, even though, in coffee spoon terms, you are still in the womb.

So Prufrock goes against everything I go for in my own poetry.

It's dense.

You have to be very well-read to catch all the references, these asides that are practically inside jokes for the literary elite.

There's this thing in Latin at the very beginning, for Heaven's sake.

But I still love it. I read Prufrock, and I am somewhere else. I am someone else. I am in someone else's head, and it turns out he has the same ponderings about the world as I do, as we all do: Am I special? Where do I fit in? What am I doing with my life? Am I significant to anyone else?

And TS Eliot managed to convey all of that in this lyrical, flowing style—in this poem that, if it were a house, would be a country estate in Berkshire, complete with a butler and staff of 40.

That's what good poetry, good writing, should do. No, I don't mean it should imitate a country estate, or even a shack in the country. Good writing should help you connect with the universal.

We all find ourselves in this world, and what does that mean? Good writing helps you start to put your finger on it, whether that good writing comes wrapped in Prufrock or in Ted Kooser.

Whether it's practical and creates an image you can relate to—driving through traffic, say—or whether it's symbolic and creates a feeling you can relate to.

That's what good writing does, and that is why I keep reading. And writing.

41 days: an update

41! 41! 41!

I got two more followers, thanks to my somewhat whiny plea. {Please like me. Please.}

Note to self: Whining works. Do it more.

Note to self #2: First of all, you probably shouldn't call it "Note to self #2." Then it's like you have two selves, and people will start to think you're crazy. Or they'll start to wonder which of you is writing or talking to them. Maybe go for "#2 Note to self" next time, self #2.

Second of all, now you have to follow through and post for 41 business days.

I solemnly swear to you, my 41 followers, that it won't be 41 days of, "Hey, so, um...what to say? Well, I had this really good salad today for lunch. Peaches, mozzarella, and basil. Yummy. You should try it. Byeeee!"

If it ever gets to that point, please unfollow me. Heck, if I could, I would unfollow me at that point, but that sounds tricky. It also makes me sound like I have two selves, which as discussed above, I don't.

I also solemnly point out that I'm going on vacation to France in a week. So those business days may not exactly be consecutive, but let's face it: being in France for nine days will give me more than 41 days of material.

The light! The language! Me trying to speak the language! The trains! The wine! The food! The connecting with my French self!

Finally, I had this conversation with my mother last night:
Mama: You don't know where they got the gold?
Me: Who got gold? Did we get gold? Is there a treasure?
Mama: The Israelites. You really don't remember where they got the gold?
Me: Oh, the Bible. You're talking about my desperate plea post, aren't you? See, I was confused because just two seconds ago, we were talking about family news stuff. And then you mentioned gold. You can see how it makes sense that I jumped to the conclusion that our family had found a buried treasure.
Mama: Yes, I'm talking about how the Egyptians gave the Israelites gold on their way out of the country. You don't remember that?
Me: Well, now, yes. But it'd probably be more helpful if you re-told this Bible story using a felt board and felt people and felt pieces of gold. That's how I learned all my Bible lessons back in the day.
Mama: But not this one. {Look of consternation about my Bible knowledge.}
Me: Apparently not. {Look of shame, with a side glance to my sister, who most likely remembers this part of the story because she was the queen of Bible quiz.}

So to set the record straight:

• I will be posting for 41 business days, with a little break for France. We all need more little breaks for France.
• I do not have two selves.
• The Egyptians gave their gold to the Israelites as they fled, and then the Israelites used that to make a golden calf. I apologize to all my Sunday School teachers for not paying enough attention to the felt board during that lesson.

40 days: a challenge

39 followers.

I saw that this morning, and I suddenly had a very true—and very obvious—statement run through my head: 39 is close to 40. Like, just 1 away.

Yeah, you can't deny numbers skills like that.

And then this other thought came: 40 is one of those biblical numbers, along with 3, 12, and "more numerous than the stars."

Jesus spent 40 days in the desert being tested by Satan.

The Israelites spent 40 years wondering around the desert, waiting to go into the Promised Land once they stopped whining about manna and worshiping golden calves that they'd made from their own jewelry.

{Side note: how much jewelry did they have with them? Wouldn't it need to be a lot to make an idol? How did these former slaves get so much gold? Although I guess the Bible never spells out the size of the cow. It could've been the size of your thumbnail.}

So on the biblical scale of things, 40 is important. And I'd like to be more like a person in the Bible. I mean, I'd like to be more like Jesus and all, but I'd also just like to do something that involves the number 40. Seems very holy.

And that's why I'd like to get 40 followers. I've already bypassed 3 and 12, and I think "more numerous than the stars" is a little too lofty for me.

So I've got my Bible-sized goal, but I need you—really, just one of you, as my awesome math skills proved before—to help.

And what do you get for this, for helping me?

I don't know if this is a benefit {um, I hope you see it as one}, but I decided that when I get 40 followers, I'll commit to posting every day for 40 business days.

Business days, yes. I know I sound like UPS, but I need to cut myself some slack. And I figure that since I'm a business person, I can use the phrase business days and get away with it.

So you, person who's been lurking, reading my blog but not following, I'm talking to you: Please help me be like a person in the Bible and do something related to the number 40.

{And if a bunch of you lurkers decide to follow me, I'll post for that many more business days. So if I get 45 followers from this, 45 days it is for me, even though that's not biblical.}

I do love a good self-proclaimed challenge, especially one that involves:

1. the Bible
2. the ability to use the word "lurkers"
3. a chance to show off my math skills
4. writing more, even if it's just snippets that came to me one morning
5. the number 40
6. business days
7. berating people I know—or don't know—into proving how much they love me