On a Foolscap Errand

Women who write and men who go down to the sea in ships are both drawn to a dangerous vocation. Success can be very lucrative but many many more toilers are tossed on a wave or swallowed by the enormity of it all.

My daughter is a writer. She has imagination, discipline, and craft. She has a wee novel now afloat on the seas via the internet. It has been scunnered on a sharp rock named "not commercial." A lot of good books and stories have foundered on that reef. If I were ever to be stranded on a desert island, I'd like something to eat and a place to sleep and then for it to be down stream of this reef of non commercial writing. I'd let the tides bring me --as it chose them--all those wonderful stories.

http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=2353

Now I like to think that I am not a language snob (Yes, yes of course no snob ever admits it, do they?), but I feel that those who hold themselves up as an arbiter of what should be published should have the highest standards for language themselves. From the reviews I read on authonomy, I got an unnerving image of Fagin with the purloined handkerchiefs assessing their quality or of the mother superior in Kate Chopin's story who allegedly knew what things cost.

Whose character was it that so coveted the little red rosette in his lapel ? Oh, that is the kind of thing my daughter knows. She reads, she remembers, and she can make those connections between precise language (those who give the rosette are the same arbiters of the correct use of the French language) and characters and characterization. We live in complex times and we need writers and writing that can help us make those connections.

We don't need the sleeked down narratives that move through our brains like a river in spate. We don't need books that follow lock step the same formula for success of the latest blockbuster. We don't need language that is prepackaged to be easily digestible. And sadly that is what we are getting.

It is Christmas Eve day. If you have one more present to buy, make it a book. A real book, not a celebrity bio, or a rehash of a movie, or a scandal revealed. And if you are lucky enough to have a real bookstore close by where you live, buy your book from them.

Re-Writing a Life

I believe in the power of writing to help us make sense of our world or to see more broadly into the world than our single perspective allows us to see unaided. I could wax lyrical about that in the language of the academy that granted me an MA in English, but now that I am a farm wife I have a more pragmatic perspective.

Someone I love has lost his memory. More like it has been stolen from him. The mysterious plaques and tangles of Alzheimer's have blocked the pathways to the file cabinets where his memories are kept. Our minds, I am convinced, are vast unkempt libraries where nothing is lost, but the path may be obscured. For most of us, we can wiggle around and find another way into the file we want when we want it--or shortly after. In my brother's case, the pathways to the memories are more overgrown than for the rest of us. Also, the flexibility of mind to seek out other paths is encumbered. Something dumped out the card catalog to the library of his mind.

On bad days I think that Alzheimer's is the cruelest disease. It can turn someone into a real life zombie. It can destroy not only the person but also those around him or her. It can create a black hole where a person used to be. But my loved one has the good fortune to be loved by several hard headed women. They look after him and refuse to let him go. One of the things to keep him in this world with us is to provide an external route back into the file cabinet of his memory library. That is a convoluted way of saying writing down the memories we share. The stories have been a hit with him and they have also helped to give him back to me. When I remember the stories, I remember. And remembering no matter how or when we go about it is a good thing.

A Wee Voice from Little America

I have a room on the third floor of this rambling old farm house that I have dubbed either "Little America" or "my playroom." It has a transformer so that I can play my old mini stereo. I listen to books on tape up here, and, on a good day, I listen to some of my 200 CDs. I meant to put them on an iPod before I moved and thought that I could be tidy and hip. I should have known better. I have never been tidy or hip and it is much too late for such a personality transformation now.

I was in Little America last night until time for the last antiviral of the day at 11pm and then again today as soon as I could get back here because I was up to the very last instant of a deadline that meant a great deal to me personally. I am a chronic procrastinator, but in this case I can legitimately plead shingles as a genuine excuse.

Whatever else defines shingles, one of the worst parts of it for me is a woeful lack of energy. Last night was a last ditch effort to see if I could even make a passable attempt at the portfolio. I was delighted that I could work for three hours--up to yesterday anything more effortful than daytime television had proved too much for my virus-laden system. The past week, however, has been full of come and go energy spurts, so that effort might have been a flash in the pan. I did not get a chance to come to the playroom until late in the day.

I tested the possibility of meeting the deadline by writing first the dreadful 100 word statement: "Why I want to attend the masterclass." You know from previous posts how excruciating I find those. Next I did the cover note and by then, still upright and typing as in the old days of deadlines for other people's desires, focused and productive. Next I began putting all the pieces together and praying that my old dial up connection would hold.

Fantastico: "message sent". Now it is in the hands of the three blind sisters of fate--OK, let's blame the hyperactive rhetoric on shingles, too, shall we?

And then as if to assure me that I was ascendant over the microbes tap dancing along my facial nerves, I put on a CD of Klezmer music and danced to Mazl Tov dances. The pain in my face could scarcely keep up with my approximation of a dervish. I danced to Maxwell Street Klezmer band and thought of how I had visited Maxwell Street and celebrated the melting point ideal of America. Sadly my first country all too often falls far too short of its multicultural ideal, but here in my own little piece of America I rejoiced in the best efforts of madcap idealists and homesick writers everywhere.

Verities in a Smoor

Eskimos (Aleutians) do not have 400 words for snow. This was one of those unexamined truths that is passed along without being examined. Scots, however, probably have that many words for different flavors of precipitation. I won't make a prounouncement until I have counted them all.

I dragged myself off the sofa Wednesday evening to go to my writer's group. My feet were heavy even before I saw the weather--an odd mixture of foggy-rainy-drizzly coolish air that confounded the darkness of the rural road for the 10 miles into town into a flat grey horizon with ghost lights emerging and disappearing in an eerie silence and a shoulder obscured in mist and wet-shine. This murky perspective pulled my routinely competent left-hand driving experience back into the awkward self-consciousness of the looking glass experience. Thus, I was doubly pleased to arrive safely at my destination and see my friends and fellow writers for the first time in nearly three months.

"Weird weather tonight," I offer into the conversational mix.

"Aye."

"We call it a smoor."

"Smoor?" I try wrapping my mouth around the new word trying not to think of "Smurf" or schmear. "Like a har?"

"Och aye, but faster moving."

And then the definitive answer for those already familiar with basic weather words:
"Och, a drookit misty swirl of rain."

Over cups of coffee or tea (more coffee drinkers than tea drinkers in case you wonder about the British stereotype), we settle slowly into the business of the group. Christine tells about a class that will be offered at the local college on writing for drama. I have learned that in order to ensure that things happen up here, it is a question of numbers. I say yes right away. I explain to the rest that I have adopted my own personal campaign to overcome Caithness reticence: "Say Yes first. Then figure out how to make it happen." We all have a good laugh to steel us for the hard work to follow. Some time during the evening each of us will read from our recent writings. It sounds easy, but it is not. First, you have to have been writing rather than thinking about it or talking about it. And then you put yourself on the line. The group is friendly and supportive and we are all fellow writers, but the stark terror of reading those lines out loud is as daunting now as it was when I was in the Bluebird reading group in first grade.

The only thing worse than those grim, sweaty palmed, quaking voice moments is the thought of never having written all the things in my head--that means the rubbishy ones, and, hopefully, the good ones.

George, a real writer and the group's leader, reminds us of the verities of writing, which in my paraphrase mean that you face the sweaty palm moments, the I would rather lie on the sofa than drive through a smoor moments, and the long hours alone writing because that is what it means to get to the brass ring or exorcising the voices in your head, whichever metaphor you feel is more apt.

As always, I test my newfound knowledge on Morris when I get home. In response to my question about a smoor, he describes it as a swirly snow that gets inside your nose no matter what you do. His expression suggests many times caught in a smoor. I count my blessings that all I had to do was drive through it.