Part II, Day 42: Writing with Others

Dear readers,
A lovely former student of mine named Charlotte Boulay, an accomplished poet and editor at the Fiction Writers Review invited me to guest-post on their blog this week.  I'm going to play hooky today and include that post here.  It's called "Word Salad" and it's a writing exercise I've used in groups of people and also by myself by playing around with the dictionary.  It always helps the writing get more fresh and playful.

I'm working on a really juicy post for Friday; it's been a very full week and I have much to report.  I hope you are all enjoying your spring/summer gardens and walks and pets today.  Namaste!

Day 109: Summer in Winter, Winter in Spring

Dear Reader:
 
When my husband and I came back from our vacation in North Carolina with our dog, Zoe, last week, we drove home not to the last of winter, but straight into summer.  This week it was almost 80 degrees here, and now the trees are budding.  I saw purple crocuses in our yard that normally wouldn't arrive until the end of April.  Mosquitoes feasted on the sweetest among us, but not me.  And in the woods when Zoe and I walked this week, students were having barbeques.  She kept hoping someone would invite her to stay and eat a burger.

I thought of a note I'd received a couple weeks ago from my friend Sara.  She sent me this quote from Albert Camus:

"In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."

She told me she thought this was one of the themes of this blog, and I liked the quote so much that it's now up in the header as one of the two epigraphs.

Now it's going to be winter again: tonight, I heard, the temperature might go down to freezing here in the North Country.

I began the blog in December, when I was just completing a cycle of 108 straight days of meditating every morning and writing in my journal, which I explain on the home page here.

I was about to start again with another 108 days when my sister suggested (to be honest, it felt like a dare) that I write posts to the world, instead of journals to moi.  So you can blame said sister, Mira Bartok, dear reader, for all this folly.

I wrote about my sister often, especially on her birthday, on Day 76: On Sister Love.

When I was a third of the way through, and then two-thirds of the way through, I posted about what I have learned.  Rather than repeat myself, I'll hyper-link to those posts here and there.

Soon, I realized that while this blog is about time and about mindfulness, dogs and love, and finding the sacredness in everyday life, it is also very much about the writing life because I'm on leave to write this semester, and whatever I'm up to each day is fodder.  On Day 56, Gargoyles in Love: On Finding the Perfect Schedule, I landed on a good writing schedule that has helped me stay on track with my novel despite all the emotional upheavals that have taken place.

On Day 107 I wrote a post about the writing of this blog which encapsulated what I've learned as a memoirist in a new medium.  This was one of my favorite posts to write.

Zoe staring down her own shadow

Finding out a family member's days are numbered is heartbreaking, whether that loved one is human or, in this case, canine.  But numbering my own days has prompted me to live each of them more fully, and in many ways I have felt more alive than ever before.  Not just more alive: more like an animal.  More alert.  With senses primed.  And because I got so busy it took me a while to get a haircut, I was a lot more furry too.

My days with Zoe this past winter have produced some of the happiest memories I will ever have, even though they are tinged with sadness and the anticipation of loss.  I have found a resilience and a summer inside that has carried me through a long winter, and will carry my dog and myself forward into the next season, although what lies ahead is uncertain.

I want to thank some people for taking this wild ride with me.  Too many to name, and I know I'll leave people out and feel bad about it, but I'll try:  Mira, who made me do it.  Sara, Rebecca, and Marc, who read and commented on every single post!  Dr. Amy Thompson at Canton Animal Hospital who made the diagnosis and got us on the right track.  Dr. Peter Tropea, at St. Lawrence Valley Animal Hospital, who did the surgery.  The whole staff at Alta Vista, especially Donna, Willow, and Dr. Lena Bravo.  Tara Freeman, ace photographer of Zoe who also taught me how to take better pictures.  Veronika Hovathova's great pictures of Paris made their way into this blog, and I especially love her gargoyles.  Dawn R. and Cindy, friends since college and great writers and dog-lovers.  My nieces, Juliet and Fiona; my sister's step-daughters, Jya and Sianna; the inimitable Douggie Pee. Neal S, Becky H., Becky whose dog is Lily, Mrs. B's Sweeties, the Cleveland Baker Beauties: Mary Beth, Sandy, Herta, Stephanie, Cathleen, Eileen; hometown honeys Danielle, Cathy T (who drove us to Cornwall when Zoe became a tripod and gave me a beautiful photo album commemorating the day), Erin, and Eve; Dan S and his greyhounds, Macreena, Erik A., Chloe, Lukasz who shared from China, Jess W, Dennis, Josh S., Karen S (who took some great photos of Zoe) and her kids Andrea, Luke, and Luke's wife, Lisa, and their sweet dog, and entourage of Brittany and Emma; Olivia for soulful dog walks, Derek, Nancy, Judy, another Erin who subscribed, Chris and Iris, Patti L., Shaun, Diane and Fred, Margaret B., Mary H.,, Alex D., Scott R. Emma R. (who often shared on FB too), Susan and David, Pat A, Pat C and her whole family of dog-lovers, Jenny W in Montana., Kimi, Annalise, Nancy who subscribed, Writing as Jo(e), Brenda, Maddie, Ante, William B, Ned, Katie G, Sonya, Laura R., Lettie, Annie, Farmer Bob, Farmer Mike, Billie B., Sheri C., Janice G., James and Glenn and Milo and Emily, Jann S, Mackie, Alexis of the Adirondacks, Lizzie, my sister's facebook friends who started reading the links, Sadie the saucy dog cousin, Anne C.,, Jane N., Sarah B., Eliza R., Tom M., Dinty who just offered Zoe a "woof," Marina and John, Therese from Texas, and all the random people who agreed to be characters in these posts, sometimes after the fact, like Emma and Java in Ottawa, Milo the King Charles spaniel who thinks he's a greyhound, Max, Blue, Cooper, Maya, Sandra R. from Paris, Priyanka from New Delhi, and a dog belonging to a homeless man in Cassis and a dog named Rusty in a Post I had so much fun writing, 49:What the Dog Sees in Him.  There are other subscribers who are anonymous, and others who aren't but probably want to be, but I'm grateful to all of you for reading.

A special shout-out for Lettie Stratton, Erin Siracusa, and Rebekkah White, for agreeing to do guest-posts, all three of which were beloved by many. What great writers I have been blessed to have in my classes!

And I want to thank Shelley Kandola for designing the blog for me and helping me whenever I had an IT issue.  If you need someone to help you with your blog, she's available freelance and I'll hook you up!  And my sister yet again for helping me tweak the design and for tweeting.

I'm leaving with Zoe today for Vermont, then a visit with my sister.  After a few days off from posting, I'll begin a new cycle of writings again by next weekend.  I'm not sure, but I think I'll start up again on April Fool's Day.

Namaste, dear readers.  May you have a lovely, restful Sunday, and a good week, whatever season it feels like.

All best wishes,
Natalia

Day 107: The Memoirist as Blogger

A friend from work has decided to start a blog about gardening.  Her flowers are widely sought out around town.  I'm telling you, a walk through her flower beds is a sublime experience; the colors alone are dazzling.  Her readers who are themselves expert gardeners will bring their specialized knowledge to the reading of her blog, and they will become part of her extended planting community.  And then there are the novices who will read: maybe, under her cyber-tutelage, those of us who don't have green thumbs (I, myself, am known to be a plant assassin) will learn practical things we can try on our own.   But I have a feeling I will love reading the blog even if I never try to grow anything again.  In fact, I might not feel the need to garden after I read her posts and look at the pictures.  Perhaps I will have satisfied that craving.

We've been e-mailing each other about the nuts and bolts of keeping a blog, and our correspondence has given me the occasion to reflect on what I have learned from writing "Winter with Zoe" and why I want to continue, even though my original assignment to myself, to meditate and do a post for 108 straight days, is coming to an end this week along with the arrival of spring.

I should point out here that just as I have a black thumb my friend, the gardener, is not someone I think of as a dog person, or at least a Zoe person.  The gardener loves cats and horses, but the first time she came to my house, Zoe scared her.  Zoe was a lot more skittish then and she barked at my friend from the deck.  Plus there's that wolfy stare.  But my friend still reads the posts about my dog, which is deeply gratifying to me, and our exchange made me think about what writing is, who we write for, and why.

Blogs, of course, have the potential to reach people quickly because of the speed of the web, and that is partly where their power comes from: their immediacy.  But I'm really talking about using a blog to write creative nonfiction: how an individual blog post can function as an essay, or mini-memoir.  I'm writing most of these posts about my dog and her illness, but the dog is the catalyst for writing about a lot of other things: time, mortality, mindfulness, meditation, and love.  It's about me.  Which means, when and if it succeeds as a piece of writing, that it's about you, gentle reader, as well.

Like many of my colleagues who teach non-fiction writing to college students, I subscribe to the view, posited by the French Renaissance essayist and humanist Michel de Montaigne, that (rough translation) every man (and woman) bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

I just came across a great blog, Writing is my Drink, in which the writer quoted a memoirist named Clairer Dederer, author of Posing, who wrote:

“Thinking the event is the story is the biggest mistake of student writers,” she said. “The transformation of the self is the story.”

Vivian Gornick makes this distinction in The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative.  She describes the "situation" as the plot, the events we are narrating, the memoir (or in this case, post) about planting flowers or tending to a sick pet.  The story is how the narrator is transformed by those events, including the telling of the story.  The “emotional experience that preoccupies the writer" is the thing non-specialists will read for, and it's the part of the writing that people find nourishing.

And that's what I'm getting to in today's post.  If a memoirist is writing a blog, the story is never just the literal sequence of events: We tried this drug on Zoe, and it worked, but this one didn't. 

I would be so happy if I found out that anyone reading "Winter with Zoe" was able to use any information I provide in a practical way.  But others, the majority of readers, will come to a blog looking for nourishment they can bring to their own lives.  And those readers might not all be dog-lovers (or, in my friend's case, gardeners).

Although it has been a challenging assignment to write 104 posts in the last 107 days (there were three occasions when I had amazing student writers do guest-posts for me) finding something about every day that was worth turning into a mini-essay meant living far more thoughtfully.  I try to work stuff out as it comes up, gleaning its potential lessons.  So I feel like I'm living more richly, more fully as a result.

It's as though life were a series of meals, and having to make meaning of this life day after day, from moment to moment, allows me to draw on more of each meal's nutrients.

If you read yesterday's post, you know I got some bad news at the animal hospital.  I was in good form for the whole evening, but by bedtime, I was in tears. 

When I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, and looking ahead to the next day, I didn't know how I could tell the story of this setback.  I don't share my pain and sadness with people readily.  I hate whining.  I know that people have much harder things to deal with in their lives than sick pets.  I certainly don't ever want to depress people.  But as I wrote, I tapped into the goodness and kindness of all the people who have been part of the story, especially for the last 24 hours.  And I let that kindness and care enter my heart as I wrote.  And I located that kindness and goodness within myself as well.  And I felt almost elated when I pressed "publish." 

In other words, by writing and posting, and making myself vulnerable in this way to a lot of people I don't even know, the writing is oddly, paradoxically, less about me.  It's about us.  The big wide web of us.  When that us comes back to me, through the writing and posting, I feel more resilient and strong.  Not strong in a tough way, full of bravado and stoicism.  I feel a greater tenderness around what hurts, and an openness, and that becomes the entryway to the wider web of caring we all share.

Today when I meditated, I opened Your True Home, the Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh at random and found this quote:

You contain multitudes.  Every one of us is a miraculous flower in the garden of humanity.  If you look deeply into yourself, you will see that you possess everything.  As the poet Walt Whitman said, "I am large. I contain multitudes."  The one contains all--that is the insight of Buddhism.  If you practice deep looking, you will discover this truth, the mystery of inter-being: the one contains all.

Now, I know there are a lot of blogs out there that help us get specialized knowledge we need to get something done.  When you look at a woodworker's blog on how she built the bookshelf, you probably don't want to know how she felt.  You want technique, woods, measurements, power tools and where they can be bought.

My friend the gardener knows stuff.  She's also a scholar, a multilingual historian who brings intellectual rigor to everything she does.  Her blog will appeal to gardeners who want to know stuff too, like how deep to dig that bed, how to deal with being in climate zone 4, and how to get rid of the aphids.   It will be a blog of real earth substance. 

I have a feeling, though, that what will flower from this project will be far more than the flowers themselves. 

Namaste, readers and writers everywhere.

Day 92: Spring Melt

While I was a cave-dweller in a sick daze our world heated up.  The temperature rose 40 degrees in so many hours.
  

photo by Tara Freeman

Zoe likes a change if she's in the story, preferably as the protagonist if needles and drugs are not involved.  So my return to the studio to write becomes her return to the balcony to survey the back yard and make sure it's safe from encroaching groundhogs.

I write with a pen today in a notebook in one of my timed speed-writes to break through something that's been cold a while and needs to thaw.  When I play this game I go through the dictionary first with my eyes closed and point to a few random words I have to use without over-thinking them.  One of those words made me laugh when I found it.  Samizdat?  Really?  Okay.

I actually find a really handy use of this Russian word I didn't know before.  Sam means self, and izdatelstvo means publishing; the word refers to clandestine self-published pamphlets and other forms of literature produced following the death of Stalin as a revolt against restrictions on freedom of expression of dissident Soviet authors.  It actually has a purpose in the chapter I'm writing.  Who knew?  My character is Russian and the semi-WASP family she's visiting, in 1988, are fascinated with her ethnicity.  And the characters are all playing a game of Risk.

Maybe blogs are the samizdat of a different kind of self-publishing craze, but hardly clandestine.  I read a Joyce Carol Oates story once in which some artists are on a trip to Eastern Europe in the Cold War, and her narrator makes a case that trying to write what will sell, what will be commercially viable, creates another kind of censorship.  The characters under Soviet rule are not convinced.

photo by Tara Freeman

When the meditation timer goes off I'm still blazing away and I go for another half hour without lifting the pen off the paper except to turn the page.  It's a good day.  Then I hear Zoe hunker down closer to the sliding door of the balcony.  She's peering inside but doesn't want to disturb me.  And when I bring her in, she rolls around on the Indian rug and says she's glad that things are on an upswing.

Outside, on our walk, the earth makes a squishing sound.  We track through slush, mud, and rivulet, and everything that could be green is revealing itself to us, although much is still brown and greyish-white.  We walk for an hour but Zoe would like more of this, please.  Tomorrow, I promise, I'll be up for something longer.  As a compromise, I put her on the tie-up outside so she can tell off all the dogs parading past our house without a permit.

But still, before we give in to the changes we humans think we are due--and I think now of a pink-skinned girl I saw running down Main Street in shorts--I see that my conservative dog is in no hurry for a new season.  She finds every patch of snow left and walks with her head bent low, jaw scraping the ground to taste every last bite of winter with each step.

Day 88: On Artful Procrastination: Readers Forum Requested

It's an old adage that if you want to clean your house or your writing space, sit down to write.  When you're squirmy but still can't put words down, one after the other, the laundry beckons, or even the vacuum cleaner.

I'm not really like that, though.  When I go down, I let everything fall apart.  My writing studio looks just as messy when I'm so immersed that I don't notice that it's grown dark outside or the wind just blew more shingles off my roof as when I want to get that thing written but it's caught somewhere between my overblown idea of what it could be and my throat (odd, but it's true; writing strains my vocal chords, even if I'm not reading what I write out loud.)  When I finish something and need a real break is when I make a ritual of thoroughly cleaning up, washing the cups in the sink, putting the piles of books around me back on the shelves.  The ritual cleaning always signals to me that I've accomplished something that was hard-won.  Chances are the next thing will be even tougher, so creating a clear space/clean canvas helps me get ready for it.

One school of thought is that when you sit down for your two hours or three or twenty minutes (which is actually the perfect amount of time to get something small but tangible done if you go in with laser-like focus, my friends and I agree), you should not allow yourself to do anything but that project.  No dishes.  No laundry.  And definitely no e-mail.  You give yourself an ultimatum:  I'm either going to just sit here and stare and not move, or I'm going to write this.

A lot of people hate doing nothing so much that they'll get that thing written, almost out of spite.

This is very good advice, and I plan to take it sometime soon.

I have another approach.

I cheat on my project with another project.

I've been doing this for years.  I did it in grad school.  When I was supposed to be writing fiction, I wrote nonfiction and a play, neither of which "counted" for my degree.  When I had a paper due for a literature class, I worked on a short story.  When I had a short story due, I worked on my D.H. Lawrence papers.

Probably all that transgressive energy, the passion of ignoring my erstwhile responsibilities and putting them into the other thing(s) was what made those pieces work better, because the writing had urgency and freshness.

It's like having two or three husbands.  Or two or three jobs.

Take Friday, for example.  I had spent about 11 hours working on my novel for all of Thursday.  I was trying to get something done.  Except for one little chunk, it wasn't new writing, so I could work that long without getting too tired.  (For new writing, I do have a method I really like, with built in breaks that actually allow me to clean up a little as I go, which I adapted from Ellen Sussman. See Day 56.)

A while back I had decided that I wanted to enter a short-short story competition, just to make me start writing short fiction again, which I haven't done in this century, and the deadline was this past Friday.  I used to enter contests regularly, and I had some luck there.  And contests give you a deadline too.  I thought it would be fun to take the essence of my novel and turn it into a story 500 words long.

But I was too busy to work on it all these weeks since I read about the contest, so Friday came, the day it was due, and I hadn't started it.  (I sound like one of my students, don't I?)

So what did I do on Friday?

I lolled about in bed reading for a while.  It just felt good to bask in other words, other worlds, as a follow-up to an 11-hour writing day.

Then I took a bath.

While I was in the bath, a short-short started coming to me.

But it wasn't the story.  It was  . . . the blog.  I heard the voice and some of the images--the kite, the rat terrier--and realized that I was writing another post.

So when I was supposed to be writing fiction, I wrote the post for Day 87.  The one I put up yesterday.

I followed the voice that was dictating itself, the thing that needed to come out.  I had so much fun doing it.  More fun than I'd had in days.

And when I was done, it was 10:30 in the morning.  I sat down immediately and wrote the 500-word story, and was done with a draft before lunch.

And I actually liked it.  I made the deadline without stress.

Even as I write this, I cringe, because it sounds like I'm bragging.  Yikes!  Please believe me, I have many many days when I work long and hard and don't like what I produce at all.

I have the usual amount of manuscripts in the drawer too that I haven't yet found the temerity to burn.  I'm not where I want to be in my career, and I'm trying to make up for lost time.  But that doesn't mean that I'm self-disciplined.  I think it's more accurate to say that I'm just finally figuring out how to go with what I do and not fight it.

So this was just one of those extremely rare lucky days when the muse didn't spit at me or complain about the working conditions.  The reason we have to get our butt in the chair every day, even if nothing good comes of many of those days, is that we're there and have our muscles warmed up and our voice conditioned when something asks us to be its midwife.

It's not just writing that I cheat on via other kinds of writing.  It's physical activity too.

Although I am posting this on Sunday morning, I am writing this on Saturday afternoon.  At the moment, I'm procrastinating going on the dog walk.  As much as I love walking Zoe--it's the highlight of my day--the wind out there is fierce and wild, and it will feel like Siberia.  But I wouldn't dream of not going.  The only thing that keeps me from walking with Zoe is thunder or hail.  But at the moment, I'm trying to figure out where we can go where branches won't fall on our heads.  And just delaying that decision gives me fuel to write this post.

This week I'm hoping to get another 5,000 words written on the novel before my husband and Zoe and I set off for our spring vacation.  Which means that I'll enjoy writing this blog--my second sweetheart and guilty pleasure--all the more.

Before we say good-bye for today, I have a request.

Procrastination, tips for fighting it, or perhaps the basic subject of how we psyche out the things we do to trip ourselves up and come back with constructive strategies: my guess is that everyone reading this today is already an expert on the subject.

Zoe is waiting.  We're off into the wild as soon as I end this post!

So I would love to hear from you about how you handle procrastination, or the juggling of more than one project at once.  And it would be great if people agreed to disagree, and offered alternative views.

I dismantled the comments-step where it was funneling through my e-mail.  Now you just have to read that trippy/squiggly word the system gives you and reproduce it, to keep away the spam, I guess, and your comments--and your own strategies for dealing with procrastination--will appear in a nanosecond.

Wishing you all a delicious, restful Sunday, dear readers. And I hope if there is something you are procrastinating doing today, you will channel your resistance for that work into sending a comment below!  Namaste.

Day 83: The Watched Watchdog and her Person: A Day in the Life

Chapter One: The Writing Life

Monday morning I bring Zoe into my writing studio, even though she prefers a good nap after her morning walk back in the house.  I move my laptop out of my corner so that it faces her doggy daybed.  I watch her intently, and she watches me watching her.

This goes on for a while.

I am looking for signs that she's having  trouble tolerating the drug we started her on today, and she is looking for signs that everything is okay with me, which means that everything is okay in her world.  My job is to take care of her.  Her job is to take care of me.  And for her to feel safe, and to do her job, watching the house and watching me, she needs to know I'm okay. 

So now we are in one of those feedback loops.  Can I look for signs of distress, without distressing her? 

I've never been a good actor, never been good at playing it cool.

How do parents handle this?  Gentle readers: please report.  My experience with raising children started as a stepmother when the boys were a tween and a teen, and they almost always knew what I knew when there was trouble afoot. There must have been times when I had to exude calm and ease when I felt fraught, but I've forgotten those moments entirely.  What I remember most are those instances when the trouble I sniffed out was about the mischief they were getting up to (i.e., their party when we were out of town, where someone ran over the fire hydrant and created a gushing fountain, and the police came to the house, and a certain boy had to go to court).  Showing my concern right on my face was a way to show them love, which is to say, to show them I was watching, and that they couldn't fool us again, which was a way to show them love.   Another feedback loop, I suppose. 

To prevent myself from driving my dog and myself crazy I do what I'm supposed to do on a sabbatical.  I sit and type, and try to take myself to the landscape of my novel.  Although it’s mostly set in France, the narrator is remembering a Thanksgiving trip home with her college roommate in Amherst, Massachusetts.  (See Day 77: The Friction of Cooking up Fiction.)

There’s turkey in the oven there.  The smells of pies baking.  But today, under the influence of my dog-watching mission, I find myself adding something cloying and a little sickening to the pie ingredients.  The smell of cloves, and mince.  This was not something I had planned.

A sign of nausea in a dog is excessive licking of the lips.  She has been licking her lips on and off since she came home from her walk this morning.  I watch her tongue and her mouth as  I render a scene of people licking their lips waiting for the feast to come to the table.

I watch the dog, and the dog watches me.

I write about people in distant places and try to embody and inhabit them via the the world of the senses, especially smell and taste. 

Reading and writing literature are both ways to escape and ways to move closer to urgent matters at hand.

So here I am, giving my character the nausea I don't want my dog to have.  I'm displacing it onto a fictional human being.  While we're at it, she might even come down with the flu.  It would be very awkward to be a visitor in someone's home for the first time and find oneself puking in the guest bathroom after a beautiful meal had been served, would it not? 

This makes me wonder not about the big ticket autobiographical events from author's lives like divorce, death and bereavement, marriage, and birth that have influenced all the novels I've read and been transported by, but the authors' daily lives, the quotidian: the morning drives to work, the dog walks, the lunches made for the kids, dentists visited, pies eaten at Thanksgiving.   The real lives "measured out in coffeespoons" going on day after day as page after page is written.

Now I know something I never knew before.  Sometimes you have to give your character a belly ache because it's the best way to channel your anxiety and have something to show for the day.

And it's better than hovering too close to the dog and making her wonder what she did wrong to make her person start acting so strange.

Chapter Two: After That

I go out for a two-hour lunch with my dear friend Liz and her parents, who are visiting from California.  We talk about our shared love of France, dogs, literature, and teaching.  We talk about Derrida, who did the dishes at one of their Thanksgiving dinners, and about the paperwork you need to fill out to get a dog into France (which no one looks at, but if you didn't have it, someone official would demand it of you), and of their trips to Burgundy and Paris, and about Montaigne (and how he is not taught so much now in French classes, as he once was, but is now required reading in any essay class), and somehow, by the time I get home, I have stopped being The Sick Dog's Over-Protective Headcase of a Person, at least for now.

Zoe runs to greet me when I get home and begs to go outside.  She wags her tail when she sees the treat pouch go into the pocket.  We will leave soon to walk with Milo, the Cavalier King Charles who Thinks he's a Greyhound, and his person, a dear friend.

It was raining for a while, but the sun is out now.  Zoe sits in the snow waiting for me to finish this post so we can go.  When I look out the window, she is sniffing the air for something tasty.

Sometimes it's really a good idea to get out of the house.