Monday, July 31, 2006

whisperblog

Blogging at the moment feels like a secret whispered into a room full of people. I don't get much traffic (can't even find the bloody thing sometimes when I put in the url) so this site is a hidden little corner, a delicious place to play with words, day-to-day experiences and emotions.

It feels like a mini-vacation, a magical slice of time to write, explore...and maybe someone stumbles into this little corner of words and takes a peep. That's part of the fun - not knowing whether someone's listening in on this out-of-the-way space, or if I'm talking into thin air.

And really I don't care either way, 'cos I'm having fun doing what's always been fun for me, I'm playing by myself in the sandpit of writing with a glorious array of pinwheels, trucks, cranes and bright blue buckets and don't care who drops by to enjoy the sunshine too.

Actually, I know there's one other person in the sandbox with me - my best friends since I was eleven, Daniela (hi Dani!) gets the automatic email alert allocated by blogger. And so it's kind of our secret club in cyberspace that no-one else can join except by accidental click and then you get to be part of this whispered conversation.

While other blogs rack up as many clicks as possible, I'm revelling in being a microblog. All my professional life subscription figures - for newspapers, or sales figures - for books, or articles in nationally-read publications, have been important. And this is the tails to that heads.

Are there other whisperblogs out there? Others who write publicly in private? Who are just having fun writing and insta-publishing?

Where are you? Who are you? Let me know.

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Downtown

Today took me downtown to the homeless camp along the Olentangy River, located across the railway tracks on a piece of undeveloped ground. As you drive along the tracks, paths lead into the woods. If you follow these paths you come into encampments - shelters made of tents, or skids, or plywood with tarps for roofs.

Scattered over the ground you see spam tins or broken glass, or plastic bottles with the labels worn off. It's 100F if it's a degree, and there's little shelter from the heat. People nurse beer bottles and cans to escape, but dehydration must be an additional hurdle in the summer, along with food and hygeine and illness and fights.

I've always felt a connection to homeless people, and put an encampment in Motherhunt, my first novel. I guess in those early days in London when I was two steps away from the streets myself, being thousands of miles from home and dependent on the good wishes of my boyfriend and his family, it hit home how easily I could slide onto the streets. All it would take was a fierce fight and losing my job and I'd be under a bridge with my stuff in a backpack.

As young as I was I wouldn't have possessed the nous to present myself at a welfare office or the US Embassy, at least initially.

Later, as I moved into reporting the Hornsey and Tottenham beats, I met young girls who'd become pregnant to get onto the welfare housing lists. Their stories contained foster homes or parents who hated them and kicked them out of their homes at 16. With no network of established friends or willing relatives they literally had no-one to take them in, nourish them, and help them get an education.

In overcoming my own fears about going forward in life, I've often wondered about those people who have much less support in terms of education and childhood development. If I've had bundles of fears and anxieties which create hurdles for moving forward, with as much priviledge as I've been given in a first-world country with a college education, then what happens to people who don't have that? What happens when they face the same fears and anxieties but have race or poverty or bad government to contend with?

Today I picked up a friend from the encampment, a friend ready to rejoin society and get back on his feet. We ate fresh-picked broccoli from the garden (steamed, it turned day-glo green with energy) and fresh-picked beans and beets, and corn-on-the-cob from Kroger. He drank Pepsi and called people to let them know he'd emerged, laundered his clothes, showered and shaved, and then another friend showed up to take him home.

I hope he's out of the woods now - literally and figuratively - and feels the surrounding arms of the people who care about him, lifting him up, helping him to a place he can love, and feel is his own.

Saturday, July 29, 2006

Agree

Swinging in a hammock in the hot sun today reminded me so much of our trips to Tuscany where my husband's father has a home in his ancestral village.

As we walked over the mountain meadows, we crushed wild oregano under our sandals, and its scent wafted into the hot air. We heard the shush of a snake as it rushed through rattling, dry grasses, into cool homes under shale rocks. I love being in those mountains. They feed me like the ocean does, like the waters of the bays in the Pacific Northwest, like the creak of rigging and smell of creosote in boats.

Last year, while inhaling Tuscany through my pores, I wrote this:

Agree to pick up the next puzzle piece
to step
into a quickened labyrinth of fear
to walk through the static fog
of anxiety.

Agree and you will see
as future unravels into present
and you stand in a pattern of your own
knitting
you will see

See the past, dropped stitches, burls
whorls and how

How this now is safe and cuddled
How this now can relax and unwind
How this now can be gracious and forgiving

Stepping through the weft.
Step through the weft.
Next step.

For all of us who are repatterning our lives at this very moment, who face extreme anxiety and fear as we confront old programming, remember our safety.

And for every being on this planet who is caught in war or torture or starvation and is not safe, my prayers go out to you, that you find safety and peace.

Friday, July 28, 2006

Grounded

Summer's suddenly got heavy. Whether it's the thunderheads outside my window, or the sweaty humidity of sauna Ohio in July, or this new moon, suddenly everything seems like a huge effort.

Everyone in the house is grounded - whether through misdeeds, or simply laying-on-the-couch with a good book, stomachs full of the muffins we baked as breakfast but ate as lunch. We got fresh blueberries from the store last night in a late, out-for-milk dash, and I broke up the muffin and ate it with the berries and milk in a big cup, like Peter Rabbit.

Sometimes the books I like to read aren't grownup fiction. I read Touching Spirit Bear yesterday. The author has raised his own 700lb black bear and his cover photo shows the bear - with a huge grin on its maw - giving the author an equally massive hug. It made me think about how important fiction was for me until college, when I had to read too much for work and couldn't justify it for pleasure anymore.

And going to England where I couldn't afford to buy books and let others convince me book-buying was frivolous and not a lifeblood thing. How long does it take sometimes to recover who we were and what we loved - and what would still nourish us if we could only remember?

It feels so good just to be in this house listening to the clock ticking and writing on my new toy. What's inside me today is a yearning for rest, and beneath that, a lovely sense of peace that's been occupying my chest since summer began. I would love for everyone to be able to feel this - although it was so disconcerting at first. What? Is nothing there? Who turned out the lights? Where's all that anxiety gone? I'd love for all people to feel this. Not just an absense of fear, but a unique sensation of goodness.

Blessings!

Thursday, July 27, 2006

writer's life

I'm having so much fun. A friend gave me a laptop and now I'm wifi. I think I just made my first internet error (at least one I know about) by subscribing to dadamobile.com for ringtones after seeing an attractive ad on my blog. Now I can't get through to the company and it looks like they're set to charge me 10bucks a month for a service advertised for free.

But I'm having such a good time! Choosing all those fun options (homestarr runner, the bhaghavad gita, the NYTimes) for my front page. I love how writing is evolving so rapidly that it's leaving traditional publishing spinning and shaking.

Really the industry now treats authors the same way they treat pop-star would-bes, and the author who builds a catalogue, progressing toward finer work and slowly building sales is non-existent.

This from The Author (journal of the Society of Authors, UK) in an article by Nicholas Clee: an author sold 18000 copies of a novel in paperback, not enought to cover the advance - but a respectable figure. 'The author's at work on his third,' the agent said. 'I haven't the heart to tell him not to bother.' The publisher had written him off and planned not to promote the second book (presumably, the author didn't know that either).

Can you imagine the bewilderment, the shame, humiliation, anger and even guilt that author will feel when he figures out the game that's been played? Books is the music industry now.

That's why I'm loving this tech stuff so much. In the same magazine, Danuta Kean talks about books-to-mobile phones - called iCue. But it's expensive. And the way publishers lag behind with websites. And the way they haven't figured out blog culture yet. Part of me reads that with a perverse glee. Part of me wants them to pay for being so short-sighted they see only the bottom line and not the glorious opportunities that exist for writers in cyberspace.

As a person who loves alternative culture, I'm excited about the ways that authors no longer have to play the big-books game. The cost of self-publishing is rock-bottom - and going down. You'd have to put your advance into publicity if you wanted another shot at the big cherry anyway, so an author who self-publishes and arranges professional publicity often makes more than with traditional publishing and all its middlemen.

We can publish instantly on the Internet. Turn up your noses - call us 'pajama writers', but look at how the music industry - wedded to vinyl, cassettes, and lps - lost out to the kids who dowloaded millions of dollars of music and sent those multi-million dollar musicians to rock bottom.

Will Barnes and Noble suffer the same kinds of shocks as the libraries did at the advent of dvds and vhs?

I love books. But I'm not wedded to books. I'm wedded to writing and the joys of writing. In The Right to Write by Julia Cameron she says: What if there were no such thing as a writer? What if everyone simply wrote? What if there were no 'being a real writer' to aspire to? What if writing were simply about the act of writing?

That's our future. That's cyberspace. There will always be room - and a need - for the person who's put in years crafting, making deadlines, and reporting responsibly. For the novelist who redrafts 16 times. But its an expansion that's taking place, a making room for many voices.

Today, we can all be writers.

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

airsoft for breakfast

I'm staring at an airsoft course of ten camouflaged plastic 60-gallon drums with boards and scraps of cardboard leaning against them. They're spread over two acres in tall grasses, and we expect about seven teenagers today to dodge plastic bee-bees and ticks playing capture the flag, before cooling off with drinks & pizza.
It's disconcerting to think that in some countries kids their ages would be carrying metal guns and doing this for real, but I know that's true particularly in Africa and the Middle East.
I don't like gun games.
My son tells me that some parents at his school buy their children real guns. The children save up their allowances and the parents take care of what little paperwork is required. I find this disturbing too.
Airsoft is a game, but it's a child's game that prepares for war and violence. I'm sure they're learning other things too - like how to organize a group, how to work together, and to create rules.
I never thought I'd be the kind of person who would allow playstation or airsoft. I'm a books and wooden toys sort of parent. But I also know the importance of being in the culture you are raised in, and this is part of his culture.
Although I'm a pacifist, I know that oddly, somehow, this is right for my son, and he needs to explore this part of his psyche, and this is a safe way to do that.
Still, I keep poking him and saying: 'tell me again you're not planning to join the Army?'

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Funky day

It's a funky old day. Hot, but rainy, as Ohio does to grow the corn. Working on a piece of scupture in the garage the sweat drizzles down the back of my legs. I'm enjoying this piece, in a soft stone, which incorporates a snake as an orobous in a figure eight.

It's an image that's been with me since my grandpa called me 'squitchicumsqueeze' after a nursery rhyme about a monster that swallowed its own tail. (The squitchicumsqueeze that swallowed itself...). I loved the story and would have him read it to me over and over.

After 35 years I can see why I chose that rhyme out of the whole book, and loved to be called the special name: 'squitch'. The oroborous represents the eternal cycles: birth, death and rebirth, the sacred spiral. In our DNA, in our galaxy. In the cycles that women have - outwardly spiralling during ovulation, inwardly spiralling up and through menstruation. The snake coils itself as the spiral.

This summer seems to be about peace and creation for me. While people around me go through tremendous upheaval, I'm experiencing peace from the inside out. I'm exploring the idea of creating my writing through peace and courage, play and joy, rather than through the fear-driven paradigms I learned in the newsroom.

Peace and play are the ways I learned to first write, in the long, boring summers when school was out. I wrote for my amusement, for emotional release, to have fun!

Summer's here again.

Thursday, July 06, 2006

The Cradleboard Story

It's very peaceful this summer. A few days ago, a friend and I were de-cluttering my basement. Everything moldy or mildewy worth keeping came up and we wiped it down with vinegar and sat it in the sun. We rescued the children's old toys and games, and a toy from my childhood - a cradleboard - and a toy from Paolo's childhood, a purple velveteen frog stuffed with millet.

The cradleboard had been a gift from Mr Bird after my father died when I was seven. Mr Bird, who we knew from church, could see my passion for all things Native American and thought I should have a toy that a father would make. He took brown vinyl from Hancock Fabrics and sewed it to a wooden backing with leather lace. He tacked the front pieces down with tiny nails, and stapled two straps to the back. It used to have a little leather belt to go around my waist. The wood looks like yellow cedar.

My daughter never showed an interest in my cradleboard. I suppose the wood feels to stiff on a back used to the flexibility of a nylon pack. And so it got tossed around the playroom for years, and finally ended up mildewy and gritty with sand on a basement shelf. I didn't know what to do with it, but my friend Susan told me: 'make it your's. Add beads and strips of fur and make it pretty and keep it in your room.'

We're going to a pow wow soon and I think I'll follow her advice. Buy a strip of beading, some fur, a few animal effigies and decorate the cradleboard for myself.

Mr Bird died of a stroke shortly after making the cradleboard for me. But I've always kept it, remembering the kindness he showed.