Recently in Writing Category

Stretched too thin, lots on my mind but no time. Nerves are rubbed raw. Feeling the need to pull in and conserve.

I'll be back when I have something meaningful to share. 

With all the excitement of the week, I blew it and missed a day. Oh well. I'm not a good "post a day" person anyway.

Better luck next year.

Meeting authors is one of the best things about conferences. We are meeting Pat Mora right now, a  Pura Belpré Honor Award Winner. I'm in awe and am looking forward to listening to her. She is a petite, warm lady and our speaker tomorrow during lunch. One of my partners in crime (Katie) here thought, for some reason, that she was a man.

HER: Is Pat Mora a man or a woman?

ME: You are thinking of Pat Morita.

HER: No, I was picturing a fat Hawaiian man.

ME: Definitely not Pat Morita. He's dead. And Japanese.

Turns out Pat is a very nice, not fat, not Hawaiian LADY. :)
 


They sat behind a caped crusader this morning and she has a lot of aggression..... she just sat down in front of us!! EEP!!! She is offended by my laptop!! I just got a look! There is no way this lady is a librarian ... she is so very imposing.

Front row on the right, first seat ... man or woman??  It's Pat!!

Whew, I'm punchy. The cookie pushed me over the edge. I need coffee.


Why write picture books?? To reach children when you can still influence them.  I MUST read Dona Flor and her new haiku poetry book.


Lee & Lo Books??

Contact ESL program and talk to them about Dia.

" I can not imagine my life without books and how bereft I would feel."

One of my heroes, Norman Mailer, has passed.

An amazingly intuitive writer, brazen, brash and bold, he was honest in a way that made him enormously unpopular and revered at the same time, often by the same people. I only wish I could someday possess a glimmer of the genius that possessed him until the day he died.

As the article says, beautifully:  "We have only started to miss him."

I have just finished an extraordinary book and I had to share it with you. As a children's librarian, naturally, I am exposed to more childen's lit than anything else so I spend most o my time reading that. There is more to my attachment, however.

When I was a child, I was alone quite a bit. My brothers and my sister were much older than I was and they had their own, teenage lives to lead. They had friends houses to escape to when the fighting between our parents got too tumultuous. Indeed, it only seemed that on weekends, when my brothers and sister were off with their friends, that my parents would get into the worst of their rows, having come home more than a little tipsy from the bar or one of our neighbors houses.

My mother was always ready for an argument, sensitive and passionate, insecure and always jealous of the attention my handsome father would get.  My father, ever the narcissistic cruel jokester, would goad her on, detailing what this lady or that lady had whispered to him behind my mothers back, amused by her increasing rage. Eventually the slamming doors turned into broken glass and, mercifully, someone would call the police to calm them down.

I would lie in bed alone listening to the escalation, waiting for it to end, grateful for the intervention when it finally came and dreading the day it didn't. In those days, I had a hard time differentiating between shouts and laughter ... to me, the harsh volume of it all sounded threatening.  I would burrow under my covers, clutching the book I had fallen asleep with as protection, as if it were a doorway to another world that I could easily escape to, if only I wished hard enough.

While the storm calmed below, I was left awake. I would turn on the light on my nightstand, open my book, and begin reading. I had several books that I read and reread, touchstones that would ease my mind when I was distressed. The Hundred Dresses by Estes, Tico and the Golden Wings by Lionni, The Little Mermaid by Anderson and, my favorite of all, a collection of Fairy Tales by The Brothers Grimm. These stories told of a little one, a weak one, an outcast, an outsider, apart from their family, without friends, who imagines great things for themselves in the face of the ugliness of greed and sheer human stupidity.  Through all of these stories, a great love is what sustains them.  Their connection to the earth and their cunning and will to stay alive sets them even further apart from the flawed humans around them yet, they still give int he hopes that these humans will learn from their sacrifice.

To say that I identified with the heroes and heroines of these stories is a massive understatement.

As I grew, I never forgot these stories and, even now, as a teacher, I read them to my students, teaching them that fables and fairy tales have large life lessons for us all to learn. The question that I was always left with, however, is what becomes of the characters in those stories I loved. Do they live happily ever after? How could they, damaged as they were by the horrors they had seen as children. How on earth could Hansel and Gretel grow up to be well adjusted adults, marrying and having children, without being overprotective to the point of smothering, convinced that some nameless threat would come along to lure their children away and devour them?  How did Little Red Riding Hood not grow up to be paranoid, agoraphobic, paralyzed with fear, trapped by the certain knowledge that every creature she met from the moment she escaped the wolf on that she was being lied to and deceived?

Yet every story ends with "...and the evil was banished and they lived on happily ever after."  In my house, I had to believe that was true. I had to have hope to get out.

As I grew older, my need to believe that grew even more desperate, as my damaged childhood led me down a path of abuse and despair. My happily ever after had turned out to be yet another pipedream and I found myself alone in the wilderness, this time with two children to care for and protect. The stakes were higher, the reasons to fight more noble than just selfishness. I had a purpose and I began my long journey which would lead to my own happily ever after.

It's no wonder that when a book offers me the answers to the questions I was left with as a child, I would be drawn to it. Such was the case with Birdwing by Rafe Martin. I remember reading the story of the Six Swans and wondering what happened to the poor 6th son, the one that was never truly turned back to being himself. The description of Birdwing brought that story rushing back to me and immediately caught my imagination:

"Once upon a time,  a girl rescued her seven brothers from a spell that had turned them into swans.  But one boy,  Ardwin,  was left with the scar of the spell's last gasp: one arm remained a wing.  And while Ardwin yearned to find a place in his father's kingdom, the wing whispered to him of open sky and rushing wind.  Marked by difference,  Ardwin sets out to discover who he is:  bird or boy,  crippled or sound,  cursed or blessed.  But followed by the cold eye of a sorceress and with war rumbling at his kingdom's borders,  Ardwin's path may lead him not to enlightenment,  but into unimaginable danger."

I found this book to be a satisfying conclusion to the Six Swans.  The happily ever after aspects are neither trite not are the easily won. His battles are not only with the one that cursed him but the ones that try to love and heal him. Ardwin is an imperfect hero who, through intuition and sheer will, determines his own future. He takes full responsibility for every choice he makes along the way, even the ones that lead to disaster. When things do go terribly wrong (and they do several times), he is human enough to admit his mistakes and noble enough to try to make things right. There is nothing more satisfying than that.

Now if only someone would write conclusions to Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty that were more realistic, maybe I could begin to believe in happy endings again. Until then, I will continue to question conventions, challenge stereotypes and fight my own childhood dragons.




 

Thinking about why I'm unable to write has had a peculiar effect on my writing ... it has become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Gone are the days when I thought of myself as a good writer, when I would revel in the absolute abandonment of conventions, pouring words out on the page like so much water without a thought of how I would wrap it all up in one cohesive piece. Was I a good writer then? Probably not, but I was prolific and I enjoyed it.

The day I learned about form, about how to write well, was the day I stopped just writing and began to feel the self-induced pressure to produce polished pieces. The day I felt overwhelmed by that pressure was the day I lost my freedom to just write. Knowing I have a limited emotional wellspring from which to draw has made me stingy with my words. While writing was my emancipation years ago, expecting myself to be good at it has slapped on a new type of fetter, one whose key I have not yet found.

This is where I blame my OCD tendencies coupled with an insistence on perfection, my all-purpose excuse ... but I do feel that I have transferred them to my writing, where each word must be the perfect choice for the moment. Each word must be precise, not be repetitive, mundane, or, God forbid, average. If I'm not careful, I'll begin counting my words, sorting them into neat little piles of nouns, verbs and dangling participles and storing them in jars in my closet.

Beyond this increasingly disturbing resemblance to Melvin Udall, I've also found that the harder I strive to make my thoughts clear, to try to explain my thought process to others that don't know me, the harder it has become for me to actually make a point. Because I am so afraid that I will face scrutiny and be found lacking, I am not able to write anything indisputable enough.

Are these just old insecurities rearing their ugly heads (my personal emotional Chimaera) or have I, accustomed to being argued with and constantly frustrated by my own inadequacies, grown an entirely new, all-purpose one? Am I over-analyzing again or is this a necessary (read normal) thought process? Is it just the mechanical efficiency expert in me wishing I could parse my thought process down to a concrete algorithm, one that could be applied to anything I am trying to say? If only I could use it as a litmus test before even trying so that I don't feel like I have to try so damn hard to explain myself to people that will never get it and don't really give a rat's ass?

As usual, I end with more questions than I began with. All I really was trying to do was to explain myself and I end up creating a little job security for my inner shrink.

Just questioning/wondering aloud about my writing has helped me break through something. Talk about your lightbulb moment.

What have I been doing for the last 3 weeks? Data manipulation.

What part of my brain have I been using lately? The precise librarian/cataloger/computer geek left half.

Why can't I write? Anyone? Anyone? Beuller???

Well, DUH, the kind of writing I try to do uses the OTHER HALF OF MY BRAIN! Maybe I need to write some code or, oh, I don't know, an analytical review of a video game *cough*Darwinia*cough* to restore order.

Ok, I needed to be off of work for a day to figure that out. Thanks to Tim for letting me talk that one through.

Other people's writing, since I can't write. He is talking about the movie Sideways (which I have yet to see, BTW). From the effect it has on him, I can see that I should maybe hold off seeing it until I am feeling very VERY emotionally stable.

He is relating to his familiarity to the place that the character Miles finds himself in when, after sitting at a crossroads, he turns and drives himself away from a screw up.

I so relate.

That is me. That is I. That is the author of this blog. Sitting at the crossroads forever.

I feel that pain. Pain of fucking things up, of… not being the right person. Not being the person you wanted to be, or thought that you could one day become. Whom you thought you had the potential to be as a kid, smart and witty and always saying the right thing, reading the signs properly, making the right moves, fluid as a cat, graceful as a gazelle, sleek, hungry and accurate like a leopard. Sure-footed, that’s the term. A natural. Before the bastards wore you down, before you lost your sense of humour, your sense of perspective, became hunched and angry. Knowing that you probably will never be that person. Not being a writer, for example. Drinking and dialing. Running away. Not saying the right things. Not saying anything. Saying the wrong things. Aceepting the failure and being resigned to having to live with it, because what else is there?

Talk about being able to relate. E@L, you said that brilliantly. My hat's off to you, sir. Oh, and I still lurk, too, just been too. damn. busy.

I used to enjoy it so much, the thrill of it. Once a phrase or an image got in my head, it would rattle round and round until the need to espress it was bigger than I was, bigger than I could hold, and it would explode onto off the ends of my fingers and out, into the electronic aether. My words had wings then. As they flitted away, I was left trying to fill the void with more, better, clearer images until I finally found the right way to express myself.

Only they never were right enough. I would revisit and rewrite, reworking my words until all passion was squelched and I was left with syllables, letters, periods. A desire for perfectionism destroyed my creative writing as surely as it killed my urge to paint anything less than perfect. I read my writing now and I am embarassed. Just as I only saw the flaws in my artwork, I only see the amateurish awkwardness of my poetry, my blogging, my forever unfinished novel.

Now I sit for hours, trying to wish the images back, trying to force the phrasing, and it feels empty, passionless. I don't know what happened, how I let this happen, but I have a sneaking suspicion I lost control of this long ago.

I can't call it writer's block. I would have to be a writer to do that. I don't think it's a block, either. It's an absense of ability, a drought.

I've got nothing. And it's my own damn fault.