I Missed My Birthday!

Oh no!  I can't believe it.  My blog's first birthday was not sometime during the first week of February as I had thought.  It was this past week, specifically 26 January.  How awful am I?

Well, looking back at that first posting I saw that I wrote about the mighty ellipsis, tried to claim that I wasn't such a nerd, and shyly introduced myself.  It was a very short posting and it makes me realize how much bolder I've become this past year, and how much wordier!

I didn't expect to be blogging today, and to be honest, I'm in a bit of a rush, but I couldn't let one more day go by without wishing myself and my little bog -- and all of my new friends out there - a very Happy 1st Birthday!

videoclip courtesy of Jools Scott. I stumbled upon this and I thank him!

The Things We Do For Love

Ahh, motherhood.  Full of trials.  Full of tribulations. You know the rest.  But the good news for all you parents of young children out there is...the little buggers grow up.  And when they do you get to do lots of weird and wonderful things that you probably would never have thought to do on your own.  Such as:

...last night's journey to the Royal Opera House to see the UK premiere performance of Korngold's Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City). Now, when it comes to opera I do believe that you have to let go of any hopes of a reasonable story line or lyrics and realize you are there for the music and the spectacle.  Korngold's 1920's inter-war opera has some beautifully lyrical passages, all of which were sung last night by incredible voices.  But I tell you, this was one book I just couldn't ignore for it's over-the-top sickness.  A man from Bruges has lost his young and beautiful wife. His mourning has driven him mad until he sees a youing dancer in the street whom he grows to believe is the reincarnation of his lost Marie. He invites her to his home.  She arrives.  He becomes tortured by his desire for her, falls into a nightmarish state and then wakes to believe, basically, life must go on.  The notes talk about the surge of works during the post WWI-period with the theme of wanting to bring the dead back to life.  Ok, I get it.  But really, as my husband said, "the guy needs to get back into circulation."  So why did we go?  Because No. 1 Son was on stage as an extra, playing a top-hatted dancer, riding on a float as a soldier of Christ, and even...yes it's true...dressed as a nun.  I couldn't have been prouder! (Plus he gets paid for it). My son the nun.  What will he come up with next? (Actually I know what he'll be in next, but I'll let the suspense build on that for a moment). Here for those of you who like this sort of thing, is an excerpt, but alas, without my son (actually, all teasing aside, it is beautiful music):

"But you have two talented sons," I can hear you exclaim.  "What's the younger one making you do?"  Well, next week I fly to Singapore to watch him play his cello in an International Honours Orchestra Festival. How lucky am I?  So I won't be around to blog very much next week, but I'll tell you about it when I get back. Oh yes, the things we do for love (not to mention art)....

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A Bifurcated Post

Bifurcated: now that's a word I haven't used recently :-0
So today I have two things I want to discuss:
I. New Year's Goal Number 3
In one of my New Year blogs I said I wanted to strive to have faith. What I mean is that I want to be able to believe, really believe, that without exceptional forcing on my part, things will fall into place. I especially need to believe this about my career. That is not to say that I won't be proactive to a point, that I'll just sit at my desk and never get myself or my work out into the world. But the desperation, the continual striving and pushing has to ease up. In other words, I'm trying to let life takes its own course a bit (I can already hear my publisher laughing hysterically at this, but its true...). But several things happened at the end of last week, without too much pushing on my behalf, that show me that things can happen even when I don't force them to.
* First, I've heard from the powers at bluechrome that there will be new and exciting doings over the next few months with Tangled Roots. Hate to be a tease, but as they say, watch this space.
* Second, I heard from the director who ran a week long workshop on my play last autumn (you can read about that here). He's now ready to start moving forward on the project and we'll be looking for a venue. By the way, the title has now changed, but more on that later as well.
* Third, a Swedish friend has said that he believes Tangled Roots would do very well among Swedish readers and he wants to do a translation of it and try to find a publisher. Now, I know this is a long shot, but how exciting, and how flattering.

I've been told that trust is built over time. Only when you can look back and say to yourself,"See? It works," will you really be able to believe. Well, I guess I'm on my way.

II. Blogging Etiquette and Other Technical Problems
* I've had a lot of trouble downloading photos I've taken on my phone into my blog. I press all the right buttons, do what I'm told to do, but then the whirling wheel from hell appears and goes and goes and goes, never stopping, leaving me and my blog in cyber-limbo. But then, other times, I press all the same buttons, follow all the same directions and it works. Don't ask. So here is the photo I wanted to publish with last Friday's blog. It's the notebook and accordian folder holding the manuscript of my new novel. Isn't it lovely? And now that I've shown it to everyone, I know I'll start working on it again. It will be just too embarrassing not to.

* Also, I realize that I've been rubbish in the past at responding to the wonderful comments people have left on my blog posts over the last months. As I approach my blog's 1st anniversary, I promise to be better.

So those are my two areas of concentration today. But before I leave I must send you over to Patricia Debney's blog. If you don't know her and her work, you should, and I urge you on to the pleasure of discovering her. But today she posted a video about the making of one of those new and terrific adverts that the British advertising industry does so well. It fills you with joy...yes, joy from an advert. Check it out here.

Is it a Block or What?

Maybe it's the end of the long holiday season.  Maybe it's the general air of doom and gloom (President Obama's inauguration notwithstanding).  But there's been a lot of talk lately, both virtual and non, about the problem of "writer's block":  who has it, what is it, how to deal with it.  Well, I'm here today to ask a different question, namely, "does it really exist?"  I'm not so sure.

Of course, all of us writers have moments when we sit blankly staring at the white page/screen.  For some of us those moments last, well, moments.  For others it can last years.  But I have to wonder if it is really true that during those "blocks" we  really can not think of one damn thing to write? I know for me, that's never been the case.  There are always things to write about. Ideas are always there lurking somewhere in the back of my mind.  Sometimes I've written entire chapters while in the shower;  sometimes an entire poem while walking down the street.  But these flashes of brilliance often remain in my head and never get to the page and that, it seems to me, is the real problem.  Very often these writing blocks are not failures of inspiration, but rather, failures of will.

I'm in the midst of one right now.  The combination of the holidays and my recent operation have stalled my work now for the better part of two months.  Over the past couple of weeks, I have been able to sit in front of my computer and accomplish some things.  I've organized files, taken notes, edited old poems, written blogs.  But the whole time, the notebook filled with the first draft of my new novel sits there glaring at me, not so silently asking me when I will open its pages.  Right now the new novel is the hard thing, the main thing, and I just don't have the will to get down to it.

But I've been here before and I have an answer -- actually two answers.  First, I trick myself. I do something pertaining to the task at hand, without it really being the task at hand.  This time I've printed out a new hard copy of the manuscript to-date and devised a new strategy for writing draft two.  I'm going to read the whole bloody thing as it stands now just to see how it reads, what's working and what's not, and I'm not going to let myself write one new word. And I know that within ten pages I'll be re-engaged and writing again. Of course it's just a mind game (forbidden fruit and all that). I don't mind admitting that I'm a head case when it comes to writing, but at least I now know how to make it work to my advantage.

My second answer is, I think, more interesting.  Work on somebody else's work.  Teach, mentor, offer advice to a friend, edit someone else's writing, do anything that gets those juices flowing, but don't do it for yourself.  The other day a good friend of mine came over with her brilliant new novel (you know who you are out there :-)) ).  It's ready to go; the world will be a better place when it is actually published.  But she needed a cover letter, a synopsis, a list of agents -- all that soul-destroying stuff you have to do to get that novel published once it's written.  Helping her write HER synopsis, HER cover letter, got me excited again about this writing world I inhabit and how I long to work within it.  And so I thank her for letting me help her -- because in the end it has helped me just as much.

A failure of will.....it happens to us all.  We're only human after all and we demand something quite difficult and often quite painful from ourselves.  But a "will" can be manipulated and rediscovered.  A "block" is something more imposed, external, artificial.  Maybe it's just a matter of semantics, but it's all about words with us anyway, isn't it?  

Poetry and the Presidency

Inauguration Day is the day in the United States when poetry and politics combine.  The tradition of poets speaking their words at Inaugurations is long and telling. The choice of poet tells us a bit about the new President's outlook, heart and sensibilities.  Or so we'd like to think.  I look forward to hearing Elizabeth Alexander's poem later today (UK time) and I wish her well on what must be an important and scary moment in her own life.

But as we have all come to know, Mr. Obama has no trouble finding beautiful words of his own. He is known to be an avid reader of poetry and has even admitted to writing and even publishing a couple of his own poems in the early 1980's.  Of course I'm not so naive as to imagine that Barack writes all his own speeches.   But the choice of speech writer is important as well, and no matter who writes the words, it gives me great hope to hear him choose to say such poetic statements as:

What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in

our own lives -- from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry -- an appeal

not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.

As a person who has chosen to live her adult life outside of her native country, and especially as one who came to political awareness during what I call "the age of assassinations," it is not surprising that my personal relationship with the US is complicated and volatile.  The past eight years has made it especially so.  But I will be glued to my television today as I watch Barack Obama take his oath.  I will be getting all dressed up to attend the Democrats Abroad "Inaugural Ball."  And I know I will be doing it all with a lump in my throat and a prayer that this hope that so many of us have newly found now in the midst of a world full of danger and threat, will not be a hope dashed.

Comparisons between Obama and Kennedy are everywhere.  I'd rather not look too closely at those similarities.  They are too dangerous, too unstable.  But as I was thinking about poetry and the presidency, I realized that although I always knew that Robert Frost spoke at JFK's Inauguration, I never knew what poem he read.  Shame on me.  And as it turns out, he didn't read one at all.  Although he had written a poem especially for the occasion, the sun's glare was too bright that day for him to see the paper it had been written on.  So instead he spoke a poem from memory, one he had written before, but one which was just as inspirational a choice.  I thought I'd share it with you now:

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

-- Robert Frost

Good luck President Obama.  Good luck to us all.

In Praise of Grandmothers and the Extended Obama Family

In just a few days, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the next President of the United States.  Well, you didn't need me to tell you that.  And you also don't need me to tell you about the high hopes we all have for his administration.  He has already made several appointments that have been dissected by his constituents and the world-wide press.  But there is one appointment (of sorts) that I particularly want to praise.

Last week it was announced that Michelle Obama's mother, Marian Robinson, would be moving into the White House on a trial run to see if she can help with the rearing of the young Obama girls.  In one interview, Michelle explained that she knew her role as First lady would require a tremendous amount of time and energy, regardless of how she eventually defines that role.  But her first responsibility is to her daughters and she knew that if neither she nor her husband could be available to handle the daily minutiae of parenting, the next best option was the children's grandmother.  

I was very lucky.  Although I never lived in the same house as my grandparents, they were always  nearby.  I saw them weekly.  They stayed with me and my sisters when my parents were away.  My grandmothers were my role models and my sounding boards as I navigated the choppy waters of my adolescence.  More than anything else, my grandparents were my living proof that I was not alone, I existed within an historical framework.  All that I learned, wondered at and experienced was seen within this perspective of time moving backwards before me and therefore, inevitably, moving forwards after me.  This inter-generational connection helped form me, and although all my grandparents are now long gone, I still hear their voices in my ears, feel their presence and listen to their advice.

I have tried to provide the same experience for my own children, despite the fact that I moved them thousands of miles away.  Again, I have been lucky.  Amongst us, we have had the disposable income and, more significantly, the good health to allow us all to be together despite the distance and time.  And when it was impossible to be together, there has been the telephone and now, email and even Facebook (much to my children's occasional embarrassment).

I believe that it is this interaction between generations, this feeling of comfort with our elders, that allows us to become fully ourselves.  I believe it is grandparents, sometimes even more than parents, that teach us the meaning of unconditional love.  By growing up with their wisdom, requested or not, accepted or not, we learn to respect perspectives different from our own.  We gain perspective, respect and, with any luck, tolerance.  The Conservative Right in America talks a lot about family values.  Their talk, combined with their own intransigence and occasional hypocrisy, has given the idea a bad name.  If the Obamas can make a step towards reinstating the meaning and importance of the value of family, then that alone will be a significant achievement.

Next week the eyes of the world will be upon Barack.  I for one want to go into that week also recognizing Michelle for her dedication to her children, her respect for her mother and her understanding of the crucial role she can play in the lives of her granddaughters.  I also want to recognize Marian Robinson herself, a woman with her own active life, a woman with her own responsibilities and identity. Up until very recently, she was working and even running the 100-yard dash in Illinois' Senior Olympics. She was not an old lady in a rocking chair sitting around waiting to be called. And yet now she is setting that life off to one side and moving to a new home.  Decades ago, John Kennedy challenged us all saying, "Ask not what your country can do for you.  Ask what you can do for your country."  I applaud Marian Robinson for realizing that the most important thing she can do for her country, right here and right now, is to help her grandchildren develop into the thoughtful, respectful, caring adults they surely can be.

Learning from Trollope

Ah, the joys of air travel.  It was a wonderful weekend in New York, a real reunion, full of family members I haven't seen in months and even some I haven't seen in years. I'm so glad I went, and my still reduced stamina wouldn't have given me much trouble if not for the return flight home.  We awoke early in order to get the 8 am flight only to find out at 10 am that it had to be cancelled due to technical problems.  So, eleven hours later, we boarded the dreaded overnight flight. One movie (Woody Allen's latest, "Vicki Cristina Barcelona"), one meal, 3 hours of lying there awake with my eyes closed, 2 hours of Heathrow nonsense and London traffic before I was nearly crawling on my hands and knees up the stairs to my bed for a couple of hours sleep.  And now here I am, attempting to compose a semi-coherent blog post.  As the members of the old Mickey Mouse Club used to say (now I'm really showing my age), "Why? Because we love you."

In my delirium, I did a lot of thinking.  First, I decided that I must, for my own sanity, stop spending so much of my time and energy thinking about how I'm going to sell my work, publicize my novel, produce my play, submit my poetry  etc etc.  2008 was a very big year for me, but in some ways it now feels as if I tried to squeeze an entire career's-worth of accomplishments into twelve months.  It's time to stop forcing, to start trusting, and get back to the joy of the work. (In a few months, somebody out there please remind me that I made this decision....)  And I started to think about how I was going to proceed with writing novel 2 now that I can feel myself getting ready to get back to work. The first draft of everything except the last chapter is written and I had assumed I would just persevere to the end and then go back to the beginning and do the first big batch of edits/additions/deletions.  But I think I'm going to do something very unusual for me.  I think I might leave that last chapter unwritten for a while and go back to page one now.  Somehow that feels right, and maybe it will yield some surprises for the end.  The idea of working in this new way is getting me excited about the book again, which is a good thing because I'm already finding myself casting my eye around for ideas for novel 3.  Too soon, too soon. 

All this wondering and thinking then reminded me of one of my favourite writers, someone I've learned so much from and have so much respect for -- Anthony Trollope.  Yes, I know, he's just an old Victorian with an overgrown beard who cared too much about fox hunting and was

 A-type compulsive to beat the band.  And yet, I love him.  I love his novels.  I love his voice, his characters (especially his women), his humour and his audacity.  And I remembered that this summer I finally got a chance to read his Autobiography, and the entire time I was reading it I was thinking about how I wanted to put some of his pearls of wisdom into a blog.  So here they are:

*About his mother, Fanny Trollope: She continued writing up to 1856, when she was seventy-six years old -- and had at that time produced 114 volumes of which the first was not written till she was fifty.  Her career offers great encouragement to those who have not begun early in life but are still ambitious to do something before they depart hence.

* ...I took in good part [the publisher] Mr. Colburn's assurance that he could not encourage me in the [writing] career I had commenced. I would have bet twenty to o

ne against my own success. But, by continuing, I could lose only pen and paper, and if the one chance in twenty did turn up in my favour, then how much might I win!

* About an early work, "La Vendee": I had, however, received £20.  Alas, alas, years were to roll by before I should earn by my pen another shilling.

* My novels, whether good or bad, have been as good as I could make them. Had I taken three months of idleness between each they would have been no better. Feeling convinced of this I finished 'Doctor Thorne' on one day, and began 'The Bertrams' on the next.

* More than nine-tenths of my literary work has been done in the last twenty years, and during twelve of those years I followed another profession. I have never been a slave to this work, giving due time if not more than due time to the amusements I have loved. But 

I have been constant -- and constancy in labour will conquer all difficulties.

There's much more, but this is probably enough for now.  All I can say is, "Thanks, Uncle Anthony."

Adding to the "TBR"

Every Christmas, we give each other books.  Lots of books.  It's actually become the best part of the gift giving, to see who came up with what, to see if any of us have given each other the same book (it's happened twice).  I got a good haul this year, so here's the latest additions to my "to be read" pile:

The Rebels, Sandor Marai

A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini

Home, Marilynne Robinson

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga (I always get the latest Booker Prize winner)

Dead Souls, Gogol

Taras Bulba, Gogol

Dreaming Iris, John de Falbe (the 2nd novel written by the fearless leader of my favourite bookstore, Sandoe's)

New and Collected Poems, George Szirtes (I actually got that for myself)

Not a bad way to start the year's reading.  Of course, the only problem is that I'm still working my way through last year's horde, not to mention the wonderful books published by my writer friends this year.  So many words, so little time.  Where do I begin?

Well,  the intrepid folk at bluechrome publishing have come up with a new way to help people like me make such decisions: The Bluechrome Review.  In the words of the site itself:

    ...a simple place where anybody involved with bluechrome is invited to

  plonk reviews they write. No great aims or ideals, just somewhere else to 

find out about good books you might like to read for yourself.

It looks good and is already full of interesting and thoughtful articles about all sorts of books from all sorts of places. Take a look, why don't ya'.

And now for a little boasting....imagine my surprise when Google alerted me that my name was posted on a blog I had never heard of before -- and all the way from Sri Lanka.  And not only my name, but it turns out the author has been reading my poetry play, Dreams of May, and quoted one of the poems she especially liked, in her January 7, '09 posting.  It's called "Upon Leaving" and you can read it here.  Thanks "Gutter Flower."

     

A Meme about Me, and an Award

Lookie, lookie: my new award, and given to me by my friend, the writer DJ Kirkby of Chez Aspie fame. It comes with a challenge, though, so unless you're interested in reading  10 honest things about me, look away now....

1.  Although I have played the violin seriously since I was five, I often neglect to tell people.I just forget to mention it.  There are friends I've known for years who never knew I played because I just never thought to tell them.  They often get angry at me when they eventually find out, one way or another.  (But maybe I've just remedied that).

2.  I've had a life-long and at times incapacitating fear of loud noises. Gun shots (even toy guns), fire works, back-firing cars, that sort of thing. When I started to have children I was determined to get over it so I wouldn't pass my fear onto them.  I'm not sure I succeeded.

3.  Like DJ, I have a real problem with telephones.  I don't like making phone calls, and the idea of actually calling someone even vaguely in an authoritative position (an editor, an agent, a director, a publicist..) fills me with horror.  I often need a friend sitting by my side to force me to do it.

4.  I have a real problem with self-confidence, in that I have to work hard to have any at all.  And yet...

5.  ....I fear I have a superiority complex at the same time.  Go figure.

6.  When I was twelve, my best friend died of leukemia.  That night, I saw his ghost in my room and spoke to him.  I've never seen a ghost since.

7.  Years of therapy, which started after my son died, have led me to understand that my greatest fear of all is that of not being heard.

8. I long to own and ride a Vespa, but my husband and sons won't let me.

     8a.  I allow them not to let me.

9. I long to go to an ashram in India, but am afraid what will happen to my life if I do.

10.  I often astonish myself with my naivete and innocence, although after 5 decades of life I've decided to just give up and embrace it.

And now, according to the rules, I'm suppose to pass this award on to 10 other bloggers, but either my subversive streak or timidity is stopping me.  So, I'll throw this open to everyone believing that we all need and deserve awards, and anyway, everyone's life is fascinating once you start digging.

A Call to Arms (Of Sorts)

There was a great item in yesterday's Guardian:

       "Wales has clambered aboard the Obama bandwagon with the disclosure

that one of the US president-elect's schoolteachers was Welsh. Bill

Messer, who left to live in Hawaii 40 years ago, can lay claim to preparing

   the 17-year-old Barack Obama for university entrance 30 years ago.

'He was completely normal and nothing about him suggested he would

one day be US president,' he told the Western Mail."

Well, I just loved that. Not only did it make me laugh on that dull early January morning, but it led my brain down all sorts of unexpected paths, mainly having to do with "you never know." No matter what things seem to be, no matter what you're faced with, you never know what the effect of your actions might be.  And this all led me to think about philanthropy.

I don't have to tell you that the whole world is holding onto their pursestrings for dear life.  Everyone is frightened about the state of the world's economy.  No one is sure what all this will mean for them personally.  But there is one thing I am sure of.  Despite our dwindling bank accounts and all the doom and gloom, we all, everyone, must continue to find a way to give.  If life will be tough for us, just think what will happen to that world of non-profits and charities and their beneficiaries if we use the scariness of 2009 as an excuse to turn our backs.  There are many ways to give.  It doesn't have to be money, although money, even in small amounts, helps.  We can give time, expertise, energy, ideas, resources both personal and physical.  Small businesses can help local charities by providing transport or computer expertise or printing. Individuals can dig through their closets, help plant gardens, write newsletters.  It doesn't matter how.  It doesn't matter to whom. But if everyone chose one thing they cared about and found a way to help, be it social, health, artistic, educational, we would make it through the uncertainties of the new year not just well, but perhaps even better than ever.  Maybe I've been living in Britain too long.  Maybe I've spent too many hours watching WWII documentaries on The History Channel.  Or maybe I'm still awash in the wonder of Obama's victory.  But this is my final resolution of the season.  Want to join me?