Monthly Archives: July 2022

July 30, 2022 · 3:05 pm

On Writing

I love all of this lovely quote from Sharon Olds on writing, but especially the last sentence :

“I think that whenever we give our pen some free will, we may surprise ourselves. All that wanting to seem normal in regular life, all that fitting in falls away in the face of one’s own strange self on the page……

Reminding myself that no one else would ever see what I wrote—with my ballpoint pen in my wide-ruled spiral notebook—helped me be less censored and less afraid. Later, I could decide to show or not, because whether anyone ever read it was not the most important thing.

Writing or making anything—a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake—has self-respect in it. You’re working. You’re trying. You’re not lying down on the ground, having given up.

And one thing I love about writing is that we can speak to the absent, the dead, the estranged and the longed-for—all the people we’re separated from. We can see them again, understand them more, even say goodbye.”

– Sharon Olds

Writing in Paris

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July 19, 2022 · 12:22 pm

Literature Alive

July 2022 at our home in Nevada
     Jack and London, our pampered house cats, couldn't ignore The Call of the Wild any longer, and broke loose this summer. This is London meeting one of our regular visitors, a young buck that we call, you guessed it, Buck. You can take the teacher out of the classroom, but you can't take 17 years of sharing the work of Jack London out of the teacher!

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July 2, 2022 · 3:43 pm

Transitions

Photo by Caleb Oquendo on Pexels.com

The last three weeks have been busy with travel, family, grandkids, new friends, and the sudden summer blossoming of our quiet little town. I know a writer needs to live a life in order to write about life, and it’s nothing to feel guilty about. Slacking off a bit can be a good thing. That’s why people go on holiday, right?

But there comes a time…

The blank page usually doesn’t intimidate me much, but today, it did a bit. Perhaps this is because I’m still working on editing my 300+ page manuscript. Shifting from the manuscript to short pieces, often unrelated to the world I’ve been immersed in there, somehow makes me feel as though I’ve stepped off a solid granite mountain and found my feet negotiating the shifting sands of the desert.

I miss my characters, the forest where they live, all of their mistakes and longings—their journey! I miss the routine of our daily time together. It’s sort of like when you were a kid and school let out for the summer. There was the initial lift of spirit, the release from the multitudinous details of navigating between the academic aspects and the social ones, the waking up to a beautiful June morning, knowing it was yours. There’s nothing that quite compared.

At some point though, there may have come nostalgia for the kids who had populated your classroom, the lunchroom, the playground, the sports field, or the band room. Some of them were crushes, past, present, and maybe future. The wheel of time spun like the one on Wheel of Fortune; you never knew where your destiny lay.

There would be some kids you wouldn’t see all summer, some you would never see again (hopefully, those would be the bullies). If you had a teacher you loved, she/he would be getting a whole new class. You would no doubt be replaced by strangers who would occupy all of your teacher’s thoughts, and possibly, heaven forbid, even her heart.

And then would come the nervous excitement of the year to come. Part dread, part eagerness. Close at hand was the tantalizing possibility of meeting someone altogether new, maybe someone cute, or funny, or someone just meant to be your lifetime friend. That’s what wrapping up a long writing project feels like to me. It’s all of that and more.

Hoping all of your milestones, old and new, bring you joy and satisfaction. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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