Writing Tip

"Ole Golly says description is good for the soul and clears the brain like a laxative."

Harriet the Spy

Louise Fitzhugh

Morning

She opened the shutters. She hung the sheets over the sill.

She saw the sky.

A bird looked at her straight in the eyes."I am alone," she whispered.

"I am alive." She entered the room. The mirror too is a window.

If I jump from it I will fall into my arms.

Yannis Ritsos

translated from the Greek by Nikos Stangos

A Way of Listening

I step off the bus and look up, and there is Dee standing outside the cafe', waving. We sit at a long table, and I read her a short story of mine. "That's gorgeous," she says, "read it again." Dee has a way of listening. She brings all of herself to it. Like she is thrilled I have written something and she gets to hear it. I have never met anyone who listens to writing with such enthusiasm. I finish reading. "Ahh," she says, like I have made her year. "Send it out. You can't keep that to yourself."

White Soul Swans

Within the body are gardens,

rare flowers, peacocks, the inner Music;

within the body a lake of bliss,

on it the white soul-swans take their joy.

Mirabai

My People

Just got off the phone with my friend, Pat. Sometimes when I first hear his voice, I imagine spreading my fingers in front of a fire, just leaning in to the warmth in his syllables. "Hey, you," he says, or "Hi, friend" or "Hi, sweetie." I reminded him tonight of the British documentary that I talked him into going to that was so sad that at the the end as we were walking out, he said, "That was like going to a funeral." He laughed, a laugh I've known for five years yet it feels like forever. My therapist said to me once, "When you find your people, you just know."

Not a Nice Hotel

I don't even know where I go in my dreams anymore. But I awake up feeling like I have jet lag. Maybe I had a layover in Singapore. Maybe I went from there to somewhere else. The waitress on the plane over Hong Kong asked me twice if I wanted peanuts and 7-up because I was asleep the first time and didn't answer. A professor of literature from Oxford told me stories of medieval knights as we cruised down over London. I fell asleep again in a nice hotel with sheets so soft I felt held by them. That's what I would like to imagine my dream night was like. But I rather think, given how I feel this morning, that I was on foot, that I walked a long way through brambles.

Late Fragment

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

-Raymond Carver

Throwing Shoes

My RA, at one of several colleges I attended, had bad knees. She often joked that she was going to trade them in at the next Blue Light Special. Today, I'd like to trade in my biochemistry, all of it, for something sturdy. I'd become consistently cheerful, the sort of woman people turned to for recipes of whole-hearted optimism. Why can't I be her? Why is my shrink out of town when my anti-depressant needs to be raised? Mine is a finicky biochemisty. Like a horse, throws shoes on a regular basis.

Faces

Going to bed is hard. I start projects at 10:00 at night knowing I'm flunking Sleep Hygiene 101 but loathe to face the vast expanse of my sheets. Do I think I will get lost in there? Or am I most afraid of my dreams? That they will take my sadness and give it faces.

Then and Now

I was nineteen and staying in a cabin near friends of my parents, not close friends, and, thus, not close friends of mine. They picked me up at the bus depot, welcomed me warmly, and left me alone the entire week. Brought me food and water. I was in Canada, miles away from anyone I knew. Night and day, it rained torrents. There were a few books, a couple of Readers Digest Condensed. These friends of my parents were not what I expected. The visit could not have been called a vacation, more like some kind of weird punishment for something I had never done. Except that with the food, they brought me tapes of Liona Boyd, the exquisite Canadian guitarist. I am listening to her now.

Conveyor Belt of Warmth

Yesterday, at my agency, we put on a Thanksgiving dinner for several hundred people. I manned the coffee table. On the bus that morning, I had sat hunched around myself, quarrelsome with my life. "What are you doing to me?" Like that. As pleasant as hives. When I started handing out cups of fresh hot coffee, everything changed. Cold and wet outside and I was a stop on a conveyor belt of warmth.

Now You Know

"People always ask me, 'Were you funny as a child?' Well, no, I was an accountant." (Ellen DeGenerous)

Yes to Adventure

In the movie, The Mummy, an English officer has lost his way in the desert. More metaphorically than literally. Since his heroic days in the war, he has found his solace in sherry and in rambling rembrances of what happened long before. He longs for adventure, the wind in his face and death at his heels, but when offered it, hesitates. Easier to talk than act. He says yes. His last moments on earth are spent piloting a small plane which spirals to the sand in a sand storm. When the hero of the story, played by Brendan Fraser, finds the pilot in the wreck, he is dead but his face is blissful. All my adult life, I've thought, "This is my last large piece of work, the last ride in my recovery from many things." I wonder now if I'm wrong. Before he says, yes to adventure, the old English officer sits on his air strip with a servant holding an umbrella over his head--bored. Maybe I would be too if my life settled down.

White China

Yesterday, I discovered that the teller cashing my check was a song writer. The check was for an essay of mine, and the title was on it, and he noticed. Two seconds later, he shyly confessed he wrote pop songs. Earlier, I had used a word I like, and, later, he elegantly handed the word back to me like a baguette on white china. We smiled at each other, one writer to another.

The Luminous Ordinary

We are putting things away, Helen and I. She moves to the left so I move to the right. Hand her a dish. Wash a bowl. Another bowl. She turns on the dishwasher. I toss a paper bag into recycling. There was a time when I didn't think, how wonderful, how miraculous to put things away. But that was before I knew how quickly life could change. Now, sometimes, like tonight, I am acutely aware of the luminousness of the ordinary. To live in a beautiful house. To just have had a lovely dinner with lovely people, and now to be quietly and happily putting things away.

Just This

Sometimes the universe graces me with the smallest things: a clean pair of underwear when I thought I was out.

Back

Writing here is like coming back, after many months, to a restaurant I once loved. The waiter still knows my name and gestures me to my favorite table with an ocean view. Brings me bread. A candle flickers. "I'll have the chowder," I say when he returns. I inquire about his family. His youngest son has discovered that if he hops up and down long enough, his pants will fall down. We laugh. He leaves. Outside, the sun is falling too and the waves are iridescent. I imagine mermaids. Or sirens. But no one is going to sing my ship to the shoals tonight.

Princess Leia Was Braless

When Carrie Fisher modeled her now famous white gown for George Lucas for the first Star Wars film, he told her she could not wear a bra "because there's no underwear in space." How did he know?

The Night Before Easter

Yesterday, I bought boxer shorts covered with tiny Krispy Kreme doughnuts. A lot of sublimation going on. I'm two or three weeks off sugar. Not craving doughnuts this moment but keenly aware that tomorrow morning will bring no chocolate bunnies hopping in my direction. Not even a small one. Not even one missing a limb.

Sleeping with Cabbages

I cleaned my bedroom, and now I'm anxious, in fact, so anxious I didn't sleep well last night in anticipation of having to tidy. I likely would not have done it with the same alacrity and thoroughness if my landlord didn't have an appraiser coming tomorrow. He's remortgaging the house. So I cleaned. I have a slob history. Outrageous messes achieved seemingly effortlessly. I slept with a cabbage for several days once not knowing it was hidden under the covers. I think I was on my way to the kitchen to make coleslaw--then paused. After things fell apart in early 2001 and apart and apart for several years, my sleeping with cabbages habits became even more pronounced. I seem to have an idea that if I live with chaos then if chaos comes, it won't be such a step down, such a sudden steep slope to nowhere. I protect myself as I can even if it doesn't serve me. Tonight, I told my "itemness," as I call her, that I'm not just turning over a new leaf, I'm turning over a new tree. "Life is both boring and dangerous," Edward Gorey, the illustrator, once said. "It's dangerous because at any moment the ground can open up beneath you, and boring because that hardly ever happens." But when it does, sirens may never sound benign again. In 2001, on the plane, before I knew how depressed I was, the man next to me kept handing me kleenex and glasses of water. All the way from Maine to Seattle. I think of him. I think of what came after. My sister at the airport. The feel of her Norwegian sweater against my face. One step after the other. And now, I am here. Alive and well in this beautiful room. Beautiful clean room. Life is both boring and dangerous.

Fish Facts

This information may become useful, you never know. "It's best to cross piranha-infested waters at night, when piranhas typically rest. Swim or walk across the water quickly and quietly. Try not to awaken the piranhas." (From The Worse-Case Scenario Survival Journal by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht)

Long Distance

Before we say goodnight, we slip into a characteristic silence. I begin to hear her get sleepy. A deep breath. And then another. Sometimes she murmurs a few words. Then more silence, except it doesn't feel like silence. I listen to her breath, to her falling asleep. I press the phone to my ear so I won't miss anything. I slide into a state of being I can't even explain to myself. A kind of watchful tenderness. I will say anything to make it easy for her to move from the world of awake to the other world. The world that takes her from me night after night but brings her safely to the next morning. To the next time we speak.

Ark Made of Gingerbread

Another nightmare. Amazing about dreams. I try to crunch the images in them like numbers: "That means this if I add it to that or--." Then, if I stop trying so hard, suddenly, it comes to me, what everything means. The pain comes too if I can stand it, coal hot. Last night, the dream board (see 3/4/09) delivered an exquisite sequence of images. An ark made out of gingerbread with parts that needed to be glued together with frosting. Parts that kept falling off. A project that might not come together in time. A truth sayer. And more. In my early twenties, I read a seminal sentence in The Christian Science Monitor..."Beneath, even the most extensive of any adult incrustation, is, always, the child waiting quietly at the heart." I still love that idea even though I no longer entirely agree with it. My inner child does not wait quietly. My inner teenager, the subject of this dream, does not either. Except today. She is fragile enough to be seen through to all her inner organs, to the blue veins in her wrists. And only I know why. Only I can do something about it.

Night

Night is hard. Can remember few times in recent years when it hasn't been. The darkness feels dense. My night-lite does not shed enough light.

A Continent of Reasons

Today, this wonderful line by Erica Jong, The horses of the spirit are galloping, galloping. Have been wondering lately why I push things in relationship, am often the first to say the Love word, go galloping, galloping with sentiment and observations. I am romantic, honestly feel the words and want to say them. Still, I travel with a core and wildly illogical sense that if whoever it is and I reach a definition of ourselves, based on a declaration of love, I will be safe. She will not leave me. I am terrified of being left for a continent of reasons, divided into little countries, each with their own story.

A Little Oahu

I'm tired of all the pills, the smoothies and other stubborn colin remedies, the teeth guard, the back exercises, all the oil it takes to oil the jaw and joints of my tin woman body. I'm tired. I want a vacation like the brief one I had on Orcas in October, even though it took two buses and two ferries to get there. A pool. A condo. Water. Fish and chips nearby. Plenty of food hauled in. Books. A notebook. Oh, and a hot tub. That was good. I'm tired. The refrain here. Yesterday, Gregory and I gave a talk at an expensive private graduate school and were praised for our courage and forthcomingness, and I was tired of that too. Afterwards, we walked through the Market, and I bought half a dozen hot donut holes. The man who made them, threw the last one high in the air before catching it in the bag and twirled his donut grabber thing like it was a gun because that's they way they do things at the Market. The donuts were marveously warm on my fingers which were becoming pincherlike in the cold. I'm writing about it because it was like a little Oahu to be with a friend I so admire and am so comfortable with and have a sack full of the best small donuts in Seattle and just be walking around with no real agenda or place to be, talking about nothing in particular. A pesky Greenpeace guy had been trailing us for a while, partly because Gregory, who is nice to everyone, made the unthinking mistake of telling him his mother had a windmill so then the guy, who I realize was just doing his job, begin talking to us about solar energy. We entered the area where all the stalls are and I could tell, because I know Gregory, that he was trying (kindly) to lose him so, finally, I stepped in. It's what Gregory and I often do for each other, ballast each other's weaker parts. I said to the guy, "I have to tell you. We are speakers. We just spoke at a graduate school for two hours, and are kind of wiped out. So we are going to need to stop speaking for a while." Gregory said, "Thank you so much for what you are contributing to the planet." Because he's like that. Sometimes, I think Gregory is one of the reincarnate disciples or Buddha's half-brother. But my point is, as much as possible, for the next two weeks, until my job starts, I think I need to stop speaking. Need to at least have a faux vacation. Do all the tin-woman oiling mechanisms I'm required to do, and especially several I've gotten lax about, and spend my evenings making shadow-puppets on the wall.

If I Lived in Venice

I seem to be near the house of possible happiness. If I lived in Venice, my gondola would be a short distance away, and all I would have to do is pole myself there. To a house so full of light it dazzles me. A house filling with people, some known, some new, and one becoming intimate. Music spills from the windows. The clink of glasses. The scent of baking bread.

Girl in the Red Beret

Had a floater dream. Went to bed stressed about a job I really want and will find out about tomorrow. According to my friend, Sara, we each have a dream board, a committee, that sits around in the middle of the night on folding chairs at a table smoking, drinking coffee and planning our dreams. They select what images might be the most beneficial. For me, always a board member in a red beret. A girl. When she checks my mood-o-meter, she nods, and, inevitably, serves up a floater. My floater dreams are not quite nightmares but are close. They come from reality, long periods early on, mostly adolescence, when I floated outside of the spaceship of my family and banged on the windows. Inside the ship, my parents were eating peas, potatoes and steak and didn't notice. (That's how it felt.) Faces appear from that decade. I've seen those people more times in dreams then I ever saw them then, Sandy from junior high, Barb from my sophomore year, David from college. The worst part about my floater dreams is that I have no friends and can't make them. I am a ghost on the school bus, in the grocery store, the church aisle. I have no vocal chords. When I open my mouth, a cold mist comes out. I am alone. A state of being I don't question, a permanent assignment. Why the girl in the red beret keeps sending me back there, I don't know. All I know is I when I wake from such a dream, I want conversation, am desperate for conversation like an alcoholic might crave a drink.

Annoying Disciples

"I like Jesus and all but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples to instance. They annoy the hell out of me if you really want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down." (Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye).

Matching Socks

We were walking near her house, and it was cold so I had my fists jammed in my pockets. She sent daughter back to her house to get me a pair of gloves. The kind of thing she does all the time. I don't even think she thinks to do it. Her kindnesses are automatic. Tonight, I asked my sister why she fell in love with her second husband. She said, "Because I've taken care of people all my life, and he took care of me." I said, "Well, I knew he was the one for you when the two of you wore those dreadful matching socks last Christmas." She laughed. I suppose I could say the woman I'm seeing matches me, that I feel matched. I could be more prosaic and say, "She suits me." I don't have a word. I turned around and there she was.

Opening the Door

She's coming on Saturday. I sense we'll have chemistry unless she has a yen for polyester and unfortunate facial tics. Even then. I plan to say a few words about my past and present, mostly my present. I have rehearsed them. My lines are down, simple yet elegant. Of course, dry mouth could happen. I could lose my voice. I could lose her. In our first conversation, she said, "Face your fear." She didn't know how much fear I have. How I have had to talk myself into trying again with someone. To opening the door.

She Calls Me

She called me the same night I called her. I was still awake. "Hey," she said. I said, "It's 1:30 in the morning." "I know," she said, "I thought you might be worried about those calls." "Well, I'm just not good on the phone," I said (not true). She laughed. "It's okay." We talked for two hours. She told me later she saved the calls and listened to them over and over because she found me so "endearing."

I Call Her

Made a fairly spazzy call to a woman. Sentences that trailed off, nervous laughter, phrases that could be misinterpreted. Insecure about my first call, I made a second. Described myself as "an idiot" and "desperate" and "strange." Called a friend in a panic. Pacing. Swearing. "She'll probably think you're endearing, " he said. He was really nice to me about it. I could not listen to him be nice to me about it. Signed off and hung up. Realized how afraid I am. That she might still be interested. Which seems unlikely.

Mid-place

My friend, Rosa, helped me revise a poem and then sent me this lovely response to the revision. "You brought it where the heart is and where the soul can rest."

Tina Fey's Eyebrows

My friend Sara says the characters in the TV shows she loves are her "parasocial relationships." I guess I have one with Tina Fey, but more of a parasocial infatuation. I recently did a speech for my Toastmasters group entitled: Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned from Tina Fey. I was serious. I'd like to spend the night with her drinking drip coffee in an all night diner just to hear her talk. Hear her say things like what she told an interviewer from Esquire about her love life in high school. "I don't think we should discount the fact that unplucked eyebrows and short hair with a perm may not have been the best offering."

Harold Thurman Whitman

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Leaf Men

Woke up to the sun flooding through my windows. Actually felt happy and snuggly with none of my Monday morning job search angst. Until just now. Read a children's book last week featuring a squad of little green men (The Leaf Men) who lived in the garden. When the doodle bugs are confronted by the evil spider queen, they cry out, "Leaf Men! We are in need!" The Leaf Men came and protected the doodles--saved the day. I want Leaf Men.

Gopher Issues

A friend of mine says his issues are like that gopher game at the arcade. Everytime he slams one issue (gopher) down, another pops up. I told my therapist about it yesterday. "My gophers are winning." She laughed.

Loose Tooth Anxieties

"Cultivate a calm awareness and acceptance of the show" (Stephen Levine). The show. The things I get so wrapped up in. Last night went to see a delightful play, Blind Spot. During the entire first half, could feel the anxiety in me. Laughter all around, and I couldn't quite join in. Worried my lack of laughter like a loose tooth. Suddenly, in the third act, the play captured me, the plot and props so imaginative I surrendered myself, my loose tooth anxieties, to the adventure on stage. Why I love theatre. Plays dream me back to life.

Great Word

PREDILECTION: A predisposition to favor someone or something in particular (from the Latin, prediligere, to prefer, and diligere, to love.)

Too Small

"Instead we touch on the strength of the open heart which has room for it all" (Stephen Levine). My problem right now is my heart is about the size of a matchbox.

Luck Stays with Me

Read last night at an open mic at Richard Hugo House. Forgot to put a stick of gum in my jean's pocket in case of dry mouth. Big mistake. Made it through the first page and then felt the unmistakable. Knew it would only get worse. It did. Prayed to the Goddess of Side Effects that my lips would not begin sticking to my teeth. She answered my prayer. Still. Amazing what dry mouth will do to a writer's on-stage persona. Like talking through cotton. Grim. Luckily, my story was grim.

Dust-Bunny Farmers

Excerpt from an intriguing review for Blind Spot at the Annex Theatre: "Young Kirsty Vanderkamp [distracts] herself from the unbearable reality of her parents' separation by shrinking herself to the size of a match head to explore her home [...]. Pretending to be an intrepid journalist [...], Kirsty is able to spend time interviewing a family of dust-bunny farmers who live in the vast expanse under her bed, the effete folks who live high above in the china cabinet [...] and the freedom fighters who live in the drainpipes." (Kevin Phinney)

Sheep

Still depressed. Find myself lying down on floors, beds, and having locked-in-the-body panicked experiences. Much how I've heard sheep feel when put on their backs.

Lit Gore

I spent four hours today editing my nephew's horror story for a contest. He said, "Aunt Naomi, I'm so sorry it was so bloody." I said, "You know, after the first couple of deaths, I just kind of got used to it and then I didn't mind so much." I think he has a clever hand with literary mayhem. Hope he doesn't stick with it.

The Wrong Magazines

"There are days when it seems you've been subscribing to the wrong fashion magazines. A little bit of your world crumbles, maybe a lot." (Roberta Smith, February 23, 2009, Art Review, New York Times)

Capital S

"I was sort of looking for a story, not only with a small s but sort of with a capital S – something that would direct my life." (Yann Martel, Life of Pi, in an interview with PBS in 2002).

Bill and Steve

AUSTRALIA REPORTS RESCUE AT SEA OF TWO MEN ADRIFT IN ICEBOX...my top headline of the week. Two Burmese fishermen claim to have fallen off a boat and survived twenty-five days and a Category 1 storm living on rainwater and small fish regurgitated by two birds that landed on the icebox. Based on their minimal injuries, doctors are questioning their story. Hmmm. Imagine if their names were Bill and Steve. Bill says to Steve, "You know, I'm bored with my life and so are you. All we do is work and drink beer. I have an ice-box big enough for both of us. Let's see if it floats." The picture in The New York Times shows the vast blue of the ocean off Australia's northern coast, the tiny brilliant red of an icebox, and two men in it waving their shirts. Was it twenty-five days? Or three? Reminds me a little of The Life of Pi, a fantasy by Yann Martel about a boy and a tiger who, for countless months, cohabit a lifeboat. Frankly, The Life of Pi is more believable, but, maybe, these two men were desperate for an adventure--or a book deal.

Another Life

Yesterday, Gregory said if he could do a comedy routine about being single and lonely, he would say, "Today, I was so lonely I went with my lesbian friend to Fred Meyers and watched her pick out a pot for twenty-five minutes and I wasn't even bored." I called him over at one pint and said, "What do you think?" about the color of a particular pot, and he said sweetly, without even looking, "It's fine, honey." We both laughed. Once again convinced we were married in another life.

Less Than a Blink

"I find myself left with nothing but a few random thoughts. One of them is that from up here I can look back and see that although a human life is less than a blink of an eye lid in terms of the universe, within its own framework it is amazingly capacious so that it can contain many opposites. One life can contain serenity and tumult, heartbreak and happiness, coldness and warmth, grabbing and giving [...]." (Diane Athill, Somewhere Towards the End)

Up the Ladder

I'm sending the wrong message out to the universe. Will no longer catalogue my depressions with excruciating detail. Have a code. Black dog comes to mind. But that was Winston's. Dreaded playing the board game, Shoots and Ladders, as a kid. Hated sliding down the shoot. That's my code. I've slid further down the shoot. Two med changes. Optomistic I'll go up the ladder.

Teach Me to Dance

After watching his timber company crash to pieces, literally before his eyes, the narrator in the 1964 movie, Zorba the Greek, hangs his head for a few moments. Then he turns to his friend. 'Teach me to dance, will you, Zorba?'"

Our Own Wave

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance--

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave [...]

(From Rilke, The Walk)

Lullabies

Thought I'd found a job possibility this afternoon but the job turned out to be in Bothell. Then thought I'd found another job idea but you needed a car. Then I just sunk. Layed down on my bed and listened to the rain and sang myself lullabies and cried so hard I filled the wells of my ears.

All Over the Road

Ran today for the first time in eight months. Under strict instructions from my physical therapist to start at seven minutes. It was fantastic. I couldn't stop smiling. Rather blowy. Winnie the Pooh kind of day. I didn't care. Could have blown me all over the road. I wouldn't have minded.

A Glimmer of Koi Fish

How quickly I forfeited my pledge to try to make every moment count. Spent several hours last night obsessively watching YouTube. Have become keenly aware lately how much obsessive thought and action cloud my day to day living. This from Stephen Levine (Who Dies?): "Awareness notices each object as it passes through, but never forgets itself. Recognizing the spaciousness through which the mental circus passes. The lions and tigers, the clowns and high-wire acts are all present, but are seen as the mind's game only [...]. But because there is no identification, because the circus is not thought of as 'mine,' it is observed like any parade." Read the words after lying blankly in bed for yet another half hour...12:30 p.m. by this time. What if I related to my depression instead of from it? It's made a difference already. I feel lighter. Less like a block of concrete and more like a woman walking on ice. Ice she's walked on before. Knows how to walk on. Knows how to best slide her feet. Maybe if she looks down, she'll see a glimmer of koi fish. Even now. Relating to instead of from.

Boots

Sometimes the simpliest things comfort. The feel of my feet in my most loved pair of boots remind me that I can walk through this world even when I think I can't.

Balancing

Just realized I've been wearing the same chocolate-stained t-shirt for three days. Hard to keep my heart open to myself sometimes. Oddly heartened by the fact that Howie Mandel, despite meds and therapy for his OCD, still finds it difficult to shake hands. "Germs." He taps fists on his game show to avoid making full contact. We all balance our limitations. My goals today are simple: laundry, library.

Deals

“I’ve got ADD, I’ve got OCD. In fact, I’d like to buy some more vowels." Howie Mandel, comic, writer, game show host.