Why do I Blog? Or Tweet?

Why We Tweet.

That title on the cover of an old Atlantic (October 2012) was enough to make me read the article. Frank Rose based his conclusions on a report published by a couple of neuroscience researchers at Harvard who suggested that humans may get a neurochemical reward from sharing information, and a significantly bigger reward from disclosing their own thoughts and feelings more than reporting someone else’s.

 

Sometimes the why’s of my whole puzzling existence can be explained in one sentence from an old magazine. Why did my four-year-old Will have a melt-down/come-apart (alternately referred to according to one’s age) on Sunday at a birthday celebration here for my older sister? Let’s start with the fact that he’d already been to one birthday party and arrived at his usual naptime, sugared up. Given that, and the fact that the older folks at our party had not seen him or each other in a while, there was a lot of talking to be done all around.

I heard this loud wail from Will. He had pulled out the wooden blocks and was surrounded by various groupings of stacked blocks. When I inquired what was wrong, he wailed again, by now in the arms of his grandfather: “Nobody listens to me!” More crying and wailing. The entire party was alerted and gathering. His dad advised in a stern voice, “Will, 99% of the population has felt that same way at some point in their lives.” I pleaded, “Will, come and tell your gran what’s wrong. “No,” he said, emphatically. “I want Papa.” So it was not just anyone he wanted to listen, but very specifically his grandfather who, by the way, never says no to him.

Why have I decided to write a memoir? I’ve written enough unpublished work to completely wallpaper a few large homes, maybe even a small town. After first writing a ton of poems and personal essays, after three published poetry books, a first novel that hadn’t fit anyone’s list, a collection of short stories with only a few published, and upon completion of the MFA, I returned to the second novel started in the 90s, and its 200 completed pages. Simultaneously, I began writing a few stories, since shorter pieces are much easier for me. I had read Olive Kitteridge. I would write a linked series in the manner of Elizabeth Strout. So, I charged back to the short stories with renewed vigor. My character was already named in two Christmas stories that had been published. Clyde. One of those stories was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Still after writing a couple more stories now and then, I decided I must get back to that second novel and finish it. I’m not one to leave things unfinished.

When I finally stamped the novel done, again, for maybe the 998^th time, I started a round of queries. While some NY editors found parts of it they really liked, my agent was unable to sell it. I grew sick of the sight of its sheer bulk; I chunked it behind the doors of a bookcase already bulging with aging manuscripts until...

... along came WELD and its founding editor, Glenny Brock, a fellow alum from Spalding University. WELD would publish a hard copy weekly newspaper with an online edition all the time. Truly ambitious. I submitted an essay for the first issue on the potential demise of cursive writing and Glenny used it as the whole inside back page. That started a marathon of writing essays/blogs that were published by WELD, and I was right back where I was in the pre-fiction days when I was interviewing folks, writing essays, and pairing the essays with poetry. Happy as a mudlark!

How I jumped from that to writing a memoir is not totally clear. Reading Nabokov’s Speak, Memory may have contributed to this latest folly. I knew that I wanted to take a workshop in Creative Nonfiction, so I signed on for Paris with Spalding, 2012. Still wary of my reason, my submission to workshop included a piece in which I ruminated about whether or not I really wanted to write a memoir. During that time in Paris, the decision was clinched. Nicholas, my oldest grandson, and I stood in the Musee D’orsay and could see Sacre Coeur on its distant hill through the hands of a wall-sized clock. Looking through time. This metaphor I couldn’t shake. I would write the memoir looking back through time in small chunks of writing. In essays—the form I was so happily producing regularly.

A year later, this memoir is still on going.  Last spring at Spalding’s homecoming, I found myself sidetracked and pulled back into the novel after being asked about my writing by a new (and very kind) faculty member who suggested a literary agency that I might try for the novel. Hope welled up and pooled in my throat, and I could hardly express my gratitude to D.M. for his interest.

Why has the need to get the novel out there returned? Well, for one thing, I have a renewed passion for the novel as I’ve discovered new things about my protagonist Libby during this revision. Not long ago in reading the introduction to a collection of poetry of  Yeats, it occurred to me that Libby is part Irish—a thing I’d all but overlooked—so she blames everything on the moon. 

Truth to tell, both my novels have dealt with loss and women and their need to be heard within a friendship. The first novel had to do with the friendship of two sisters and the death of their mother. The second has a lifelong friendship threatened by a deathbed confession regarding an illegal abortion. This “neurochemical reward” we humans get from sharing information must truly be greater for the female gender. My girlfriends along the way have been so important to me that Libby, is an amalgam of all my best girlfriends. She and her lifelong friend, Clara, have begun to reveal their truest nature in this 999th revision.

Rose makes a good point. All of us—writers and their literary creations, Will, et moi—would be heard. In the Atlantic article he offers, “by telling stories effectively, we gain status, obtain social feedback, and strengthen our bonds with other people.” And aren’t all writers happy to hear this?

Rose continues, “And on the flip side of all this nattering—or tweeting—by our fellow humans ensures that we don’t have to discover everything on our own. We have no end of people telling us what’s what. Hence the real paradox of sharing: what feels good for me probably ends up benefitting us all.”

That’s what I’m counting on. It feels really good to get this written down. 

And, by the way, my MFA graduation lecture was “Death as a Fictive Technique.” I may write a similar lecture based on this blog. The epilogue of my novel indicates that Libby had been telling her stories through journals, and now that I’ve just revised the prologue, it heralds, as it should, that journal keeping.

My next lecture?  “Tweeting as a Fictive Technique: What Feels Good for Me.” What do you think?

Birthdays, Snakes, and Bleeding Hearts

Tuesday July 16, 6:08 a.m.

As if three score and ten were not enough, along comes another. I’m not too good with math, but even I can figure out the cap on how many are potentially left to go. Ah, but they are as inevitable as the Bleeding Hearts just outside my office window, just starting to blossom out, and as certain as the hummingbirds that will soon follow to thrust their long bills into the tiny red folds, sipping nectar, wings aflutter.

Birthdays.

This one will be one of the most unusual I’ve ever had. In about an hour I’ll leave to drive to Tuscaloosa to visit my oldest sister, Ann, 88, in the hospital. Now just by my saying 88 you will presume she has difficulty walking around (and she has slowed) and that someone is usually pretty close by in case she needs help. Not if she can help it! Yesterday she decided she would go out to her flower garden and loosen up the soil with a hoe and then push some of the dirt around the base of the hostas she started from one rooted from my house in Prattville in the 80s. I’ve seen her do it a hundred times, so I can see the scene. This part was new: she felt the bite before she saw the head of the Copperhead dart back after his strike.

We only have two other poisonous snakes in Alabama—the rattlesnake and the cottonmouth, if you don’t count the more southern coral snake. Frankly, I’ve never seen a coral snake and I’m not certain I could remember the jingle in time if I did. Red on black, friend of Jack; red on yellow, kill a fellow.

Ellie Bryant inspired the first line of my snaky story “Envenomation” in the Lectorium at Spalding with her comment: “I’m an e-mail slut.” So my first line of this story became “My daddy handles snakes, and my mama is an e-mail slut.” But, you know, now that I’ve remembered this incident, my story begins in humor and ends in tragedy. I remember Lovie and the demise of her Radio. I don’t like the ending of that story this morning. Lovie fares somewhat better because she still has Silas—named after Silas House, the good preacher from the snake-handling church. Still...

My brother-in-law, a doctor, and my consultant on snakebites for the story, assured me last night that a copperhead bite is less dangerous than a rattlesnake bite. He also said that the antivenin has improved some and is not so apt to trigger an allergic reaction now that they use sheep instead of horses—oh, but not to get into that process. It was good, he said, that they were observing her overnight at the hospital.

As unlikely as this snakebite strike was the gift I found on my kitchen counter this morning, a typed sheet of paper. You read that correctly, typed as in typed on the Smith Corona typewriter, borrowed from this same brother-in-law whose dad gave it him to use in college. This typewriter has been sitting at the end of my kitchen table for a week as my grandson Nicholas has typed on thick paper for an art installation.  This is his “creative summer” following his freshman year at Syracuse University in architecture. He hopes to have a complete art show before his return to Syracuse in late August. That familiar sound of striking keys against paper has lulled us to sleep nightly. It calls up my eleventh grade typing class at Montgomery High, and a more recent memory, Jessica pounding out stories on “Murder She Wrote” when our children were young.

My birthday poem.

I read it three times through before crying. Nicholas has been the inspiration for many of my poems, and is the subject of the title poem of my full-length collection. The realization hit home that in poems it is okay to just lay bare our hearts. It is the only place we can do that without seeing our words grow fuzzy and too precious.

He has given me a sweeping overview of the installation-in-progress. It is filled with all the darkness teenagers experience in relationships in a divorce situation, situations that even the adults involved can’t fully understand. He has typed nearly a hundred pages of words this week spilled from the gut and recorded in his notebook over the past year. He is still toying with an arrangement of these words. Always eager to help with ideas, I’ve pointed out to him the light and dark in Bruegel’s print that hangs in my powder room, “The Fight between Carnival and Lent.”

This newest poem, a glorious song beaming from my refrigerator, may be the start of balance for arranging his installation, adding that warm, sunny side of healing.

On Writing a Novel

Don’t talk to me, Edward Albee, about writing a novel. Don’t tell me that each writer has one genre in which he writes best. Don’t tell me that you “committed a novel once.” I won’t hear it. It’s too late. Instead I’m guilty of turning my ear the other way, listening to the provocative lies of those who have PUBLISHED a novel, those who have forgotten all the stinking years it took in a lifetime to concoct that first one, those who have found their voice, those whose characters speak to them with regularity and guide them down the primrose path to the Best Sellers List, or to becoming a faculty member in a brief residency MFA program, or to be introduced as a writer by their unsuspecting-up-to-this-point friends. Those writers are the ones responsible for hiding the truth of the matter from me, but like the dogged stubborn bluebottle fly I am, I’ve learned it on my own: writing a novel is a disease.

Thank goodness, in most cases it’s not terminal. At least not yet. Nor does it seem to be congenital, so maybe my grandchildren will never try it. It is, however, viral. You write a short story. You submit it to workshop. It’s so bad the participants don’t know what to say. So they say, oh, this would make a great novel. You need to write more about this. Or the workshop mentor will say of what you perceive is clearly a literary novel, oh, now this would be a great travel book—a Laverne and Shirley kind of top-down driving into the sunset. Duh. Once you’ve finished extending that short story into a blasted first novel-length thing; and every agent and editor of promise whose name you can choke out of every writer you know tells you what a talented writer you are but; or tells you the plot would be fabu except that; or tells you how sorry they are, duh, that what you’re writing doesn’t fit their list, those lists, those precious, highly sought for lists...

...well let me just say, thanks a lot to the whole lot of you. 

I’m working on the umpteenth revision of the second unpublished novel that has taken so long to compile that people I’ve mentioned have published and died. Or maybe not. I read Germaine Greer’s name in my ms. this week and tried to remember why in the world I included that allusion. Two days later I was eating lunch with my grandchildren who’d been to art camp at Space One Eleven and they wanted to go into What’s on Second, a store of things looking to be re-purposed. Call a spade, a spade: a second-hand store, for heaven’s sake. Each of us found an old book we wanted. The oldest with a year of architecture under his belt from Syracuse chose an old encyclopedia held together by a metal clamp. It was not the intrigue of the clamp but the paper itself that was of interest. He is going to paint over some pages for a collage. The ten-year-old chose a song book, The People’s Choir by E.S. Lorenz, to emulate the older cousin. That one cost me $2. In 1918, the year of its publication, it was a mere $1.25, postage extra. I discovered a paperback by—guess who—yes, some of this process is scary: Germaine Greer. Not that I need any help now getting through menopause. That’s a done deal. But maybe if I read it, just maybe, I thought I might remember the smashing idea I must have had for the plot of the novel when I included her name.

While I’ve been writing this novel, plants have been planted, bloomed, and disappeared entirely—so long ago that I didn’t even remember the name of the milk and wine lilies given to me by my sister until I ran across them in my novel.  The name alone though prompted more: they were lush with blossoms too heavy and sweet to stay upright, but threatened to drip right off the plant. Where were you Edward Albee when I started this novel? Why didn’t you stop me from gushing with your little provocative lines, so clean, so precise in their little jaggling, jarring conversations? Strike out all descriptions. Get rid of adjectives. Absolutely no adverbs. Better to be barren altogether like the spot where the lilies used to grow. Better to forget writing a novel.

I’m feeling a smidge better this morning. Sleep doth indeed knit up the raveled sleeve of care, thank you, William. My daughter reads O. She read me a quote from her latest copy, July 2013. The Best Books of Summer. “By the time I was 14, the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled on it. I replaced the nail with a spike and kept on writing.”

Ah, misery, how you do love company. Thank you, Stephen King. Now, where did I leave off in that revision...?

A Mother's Day Prayer by Reverend Emily Freeman Penfield, Pastor, Woodlawn United Methodist Church

When Associate Pastor Emily Freeman Penfield was leaving Highlands United Methodist Church for her new post as Pastor of Church of the Reconciler, she presented the congregation with a gift--a small booklet of her prayers, Praying Through the Year.  I interviewed Emily last week for  my article about her and her work, "All in a Day's Work," posted now at www.weldbham.com. Her comments to me during that interview about what she always prays for on Mother's Day reminded me of this very poetic and sensitive prayer she had used at HUMC:

May 11, 2008
Mother's Day

Gracious God who dances in our lives and hearts
as Holy Spirit--you are always present, always abundant
and always calling us to yourself. Awaken us this hour to
what can be--encourage us in the vision you have created
for Highlands. We long to be faithful, even in our 
disobedience. We long to be pleasing, even in our 
shallow and selfish moments. We long to give back to 
you, even in our desert and dry seasons. Rain down upon
us, God, like the heavy rains last night. Drench us in your 
dreams and your breath that is life, that is purpose, that
is the very essence of what we are made for.

Today we give thanks for mothers--for our
mothers and for those who have given life and birth to us, 
for those who have cared and nurtured us, for those who
stand by our side and raise us up when we are low--
whether they bore the title MOTHER or not. We ask your
blessed embrace on those who are missing their mothers
today, for those who long to be mothers, and for those
who have no women role models in their lives. The
scriptures say you care for us as a mother hen does her
chicks. We need you, God, and your wings of grace--
sometimes for protection and sometimes to ride high, but
in all things, may what we do, be for you. In the name of 
Christ Jesus we pray. Amen

For more information on Emily's work at Woodlawn UMC and the upcoming fundraiser dinner theatre that will be produced at the church this summer, follow their Facebook page, Woodlawn UMC.
Here are a few shots I snapped around the church:

Stained glass from the original WUMC

Tree of Life in Emily's office

The Reverend Emily Freeman Penfield
Woodlawn United Methodist Church

Martin Luther King, Little Rock High School, diplomas

Apt verse for the desk of a listener

Wall in Cornerstone School cafeteria

Terrolyn, proud of her work--and rightly so!

School garden



To Write (or Not) in Paris

Nine months ago I took a trip and I’m still talking about it. Which is worse--this incessant chatter about my summer semester abroad with Spalding University, or bragging about my grandchildren?  When Mahala Church asked me to be a guest blogger at Lyrical Pens , a blog she shares with Marilyn Johnston, I was flattered, but what would I write about? Easy, peasy: I would write about Paris. Again.

The piece is divided into three parts, and if you’ve already heard more than you can stand about Paris, just skip this one and catch the second part this Friday that is a snapshot of how the Spalding University brief residency workshop actually works—the one I had in Paris in creative nonfiction with Ellie Bryant. (Sorry. Like grandchildren, this experience won’t go away, nor do I wish it to.)

I met both Mahala and Marilyn when we had short stories published in Christmas is a Season! 2008, and Christmas is a Season! 2009, twin anthologies edited by Linda Busby Parker, Excalibur Press.

Check out their archives at Lyrical Pens.

Mahala Church and Marilyn A. Johnston have co-authored the blog Lyrical Pens for five years. Mahala Church, R.N., B.F.A. teaches creative writing for teens and adults through her Barefoot Writing Academy. An award-winning, freelance editor and writer, she is the published author of short stories, personal essays, chapter in writing textbook, online and hard copy articles, ad copy, encyclopedic pieces, book reviews, newsletters, and press releases. She is the published editor of four anthologies, online and hard copy articles, blogs, websites, business documents, and marketing copy.

cj petterson (the pen name for Marilyn Johnston) is the author of DEADLY STAR, a suspense romance released in 2013. cj is an award-winning writer and poet whose work has been published in numerous anthologies and on-line.

            http://www.lyricalpens.com

No experience is wasted for the writer who puts on her readers and fixates on Nabokov’s “divine details.”  This summer I’ll be spending two weeks on the road in the wild, wild west. While Tommy tries to spot a grizzly that can outrun a buffalo (he saw that once already,) and re-lives all gunfights and  shootemup tourist spots, I’m going to put Paris behind me as we ride off under wide skies on an endless yardstick of a road headed into the sunset. YOLO. Hi-yo, Silver.