Quotidian Light

The Job Shadowing Incident

2011-02-27T02:59:00.004-06:00

Friday Great Scott (The Husband) took The Younger Daughter to school with him for her job shadowing assignment. When his first class walked in and inquired about the new kid, he told them, "She's the new student from Juvenile Hall. She has to sit next to me because she has a history of stabbing people with scissors."

The believed him completely. The Younger Daughter was thrilled.

Killing the Writer

2011-02-27T00:50:00.006-06:00

Teaching is not conducive to writing. I have come to this conclusion after three years of in-depth research, research that was entirely unnecessary but which, having been completed, bestows on me the authority to say that teaching is most definitely not conducive to writing. A good friend of mine reminded me of this fact last week when he wrote concerning a recent decision I've made: "What do you need an MFA for? You want to teach? Cyril Conelly once said that teaching had killed more writers than alcohol had--no small feat." Alcohol having never really been my thing, I suppose that leaves me with death by teaching, an option that I find entirely plausible, though not preferable. I'm not quite ready for the writer in me to head to that great used book store in the sky. I'm not done with her yet; that's why I've applied to an MFA program.

Part of me says that this scheme is entirely laughable, after all, I'm forty-three and have been out of school for nineteen years, I'm working a full-time job that requires more than full-time hours, and in one more year The Older Daughter will be filling out her own college applications. Nevertheless, there are reasons to try, as well: I have to have a certain number of professional development hours each year to maintain my teaching certification, hours which might as well count toward a degree; an MFA will allow me to teach per course or eventually even full-time at the college level should I ever change my mind about teaching high school; and I feel rusty and definitely lack discipline in my writing habits, so the challenge and accountability of a graduate program will be good. Ever since I have known there was such a thing, the MFA has been the degree I've wanted badly enough to be afraid of, even if it might kill me.

The application has been dispatched. Now I wait. We'll see what kills me first.

Quote of the Day: On Learning

2010-10-12T15:15:00.002-05:00

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
--Thomas Edison

Procrastination Aid: Writing Style Analyzer

2010-07-14T22:50:00.002-05:00

I'm having a lot of fun playing with this particular procrastination aid. All of the following were results for various samples of the blog writing right here on Quotidian Light.

I write like
Vladimir Nabokov

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
George Orwell

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
Douglas Adams

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
J. K. Rowling

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
Margaret Mitchell

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
Edgar Allan Poe

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
Arthur C. Clarke

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Just for giggles, here's the last one I'm posting tonight, although tomorrow I'll probably try running some of my poetry through. First, let me post the text I entered:

"Once upon a time there was a little bunny rabbit who ran out in the road and got squashed. The End.

Once upon a time there lived a tiny flea, and when time fell back because of Daylight Savings time the flea fell into the void. The End."

Now, the result:

I write like
Margaret Atwood

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Writer's Meme

2010-06-28T00:23:00.003-05:00

Call it inspiration, call it guilt, but the end result is the same. I've not been writing much of late, so when I read this meme at Stick Poet Super Hero, I knew right away I'd have to try it.

1. What's the last thing you wrote? - A comment on my husband's Facebook status.

2. Is it any good? - Of course.

3. What's the first thing you ever wrote that you still have? – Written down? A long poem chronicling how my siblings and cousins and I were sent to my grandparents' basement every year at Christmas while our parents had a business meeting upstairs with all the food. There are a couple of earlier pieces that I still have memorized, however (poems...of a sort), and my mother has numerous bits of things I scribbled in school.

4. Favorite genre of writing? - Poetry or creative nonfiction. I do more of the former but have been told I'm better at the latter. Both scare me.

5. How often do you get writer's block? - I live in writer's block.

6. How do you fix it? – I don't. I withdraw from it and from writing, more often than not.

7. Do you save everything you write? – I save most of it, yes, since college. I did burn 6 years worth of journals--the first 6 years I kept them. Since then, I have almost everything, and my desk looks like it, too.

8. How do you feel about revision? - Absolutely 100% necessary. I don't trust writers who say they don't revise. Rather, I trust that their writing is probably horrible. I've heard too many people get up in church to read their "straight from the Lord" poems to NOT cringe when someone tells me they never revise.

9. What's your favorite thing that you've written? -- Probably the poems "Night Augur" or "A Second Birthing" or one I'm still revising: "Winter Seduction". Possibly an essay parody of Walden, if you want to talk prose.

10. What's everyone else's favorite thing that you've written? -- This seems to be "Mania," oddly enough.

11. What writing projects are you working on right now?--Theoretically lesson plans. (Ho!) I've got snippets from a fiction piece inspired by my brother that I've been adding to for a few years. There's a CNF essay that I would really like to see where it goes, and "Winter Seduction," which I'm about ready to give in and start sending off. My journal would probably fall under this category, too, since it's a perpetual project of sorts.

12. What's one genre you have never written, and probably never will? - I would be quick to say horror, save that one of my poems was actually nominated for inclusion in a "year's best" horror anthology awhile back, to my surprise, and that Great Scott tells me he finds many of my poems pretty horrifying. Romance is probably the genre I would be least likely to write (as well as being the genre I'm least likely to read). I don't think I would be any good at writing science fiction, either, although I'm a sci-fi fan (Down with the Alliance! Browncoats forever!).

What I Deserve

2010-05-28T00:33:00.001-05:00

Conversation:

Setting: Home after a very rough day, hugging The Daughters gratefully.

Me: You are the best daughters in the whole world! I have done nothing in my life to deserve such great girls!

The Older Daughter: We know. That's why God made you a teacher.

Closing out Year Two

2010-05-27T23:54:00.006-05:00

School is out for the summer. Scores for the state End of Course (EOC) exams are in, and my grades are finalized and posted. I have turned in tutoring logs, professional development hours and inventory. My room has been straightened and labeled and locked.

It has been a year.

When I checked out today, my principle told me that she was very glad I had stayed, had come back a second year. It was a small thing to have said, but it meant a great deal to me.

The first year was rough, now that I look back on it. Staying until midnight wasn't uncommon. Staying until 3 a.m. happened more than once. It was the first year of our state's EOC exams. I had to prep for 5 different classes a day (7 different classes for the year, all told), I had 50 extra hours of eMINTS training to complete, and I was sponsoring or helping to sponsor 3 different extracurricular groups plus the freshman class. Being hired two weeks before school began (with only that much warning) and being totally unfamiliar with the curricular materials was another factor, although this one was "helped" since I was also assigned to be on the team to write our school's curriculum right away, as well. One of my fellow communication arts teachers (who is one of my own former teachers) told me last year, "I don't know how you're doing it; anybody else would have quit at semester."

I had forgotten all this, much in the same way that the details of childbirth are often smudged in a mother's mind, I suspect. So when my principle told me today that she was glad I had come back, I stared at her blankly for a moment. Why in the world wouldn't I have come back, I wondered.

Human beings are remarkable. We often have no idea of what we can accomplish until we have done more than we ever imagined we could. I despise being pushed--more than I could possibly convey to you without physical violence and perhaps regurgitation. In fact, I will NOT be pushed by anyone...but myself.

This summer I hope to write a lot of lesson plans down and create some new ones. This last year I had 80 students, all told. Next year I will have a little over 100. Next year I will push hard again, but for now I'm going to sit for a bit and reflect on the two years behind me.

Friday Quote: On Meaning and Escape

2010-04-02T10:49:00.002-05:00

"For the true writer...there is some distance, some remove, that allows for the shaping of the work...Every reader can sense the difference between a writer who embodies meaning through the events he describes and the writer who seems simply mired in those events. It is that struggle for meaning that lets the writer escape the tyranny of what really happened..."

---Sue Miller

Thirteen Things I Need to Remember When My Students Drive Me Crazy

2010-04-01T09:34:00.005-05:00

1. Some of my students didn't sleep last night.

2. Some of them haven't eaten anything since yesterday's school lunch.

3. Some of them are trying to find the right balance of anti-depressants and/or anti-psychotic meds.

4. Some of them are seniors and are beginning to feel a bit crazy about getting to leave school and having to leave school, and they can't decide whether they love or hate these things.

5. Being cooped up in a computer lab when it's 80 degrees and sunny outside isn't anyone's idea of fun.

6. Some of these kids know a whole lot more about livestock and motors than I could ever dream of knowing.

7. Some of them are taking care of mentally ill parents at home and may not get to class on time because they had to wait for the ambulance...again.

8. Some of them are so smart that they're bored out of their minds and coming up with trouble to keep themselves entertained.

9. Some of them look scroungy because they had to get younger brothers and sisters ready for school this morning, and they put little sister's hair in ponytails instead of brushing their own before catching the bus.

10. Some of them laugh and joke because they're afraid of anyone figuring out that they care very much that they're failing, and they're covering up.

11. Not all of them HAVE to like me or like my class.

12. I can love them, anyway.

13. Crazy isn't such a bad state of mind if you're in far enough.

NaPoWriMo 2010 Begins!

2010-04-01T07:52:00.003-05:00

I have a horrible track record when it comes to any kind of regular writing, and teaching school the past two years has only exacerbated the situation. Nevertheless, better to try than not to try. At least, that's the line I feed my students. I don't have time for revision, however--at least not now. You'll have to settle for rough drafts splattered down on the page.

Let the scrawls begin!

Orchids

Fat buds wing into full bloom and float
in arcs above my monitor. Students drop
their shove and scuffle, stoop to touch trembling
petals, one slow finger at a time. I've watered them
for months, watched them stretch
new growth and now, although their roots
still tangle, gnarled amid dead wood
and sphagnum, they are opening
along their lengths, lifting
fragile faces toward the light.

A Few Minor Changes

2010-02-26T12:31:00.003-06:00

I am making a few minor changes to Quotidian Light for the purposes of preserving privacy. I do not think any of my students are interested enough to go looking for me online, but on the off chance that they might become so, I am changing my username and profile picture. Most of my readers know me well enough to not be phased in the least by this. I love you for it.

Perhaps with this added layer of semi-anonymity, blog entries will happen more often. I'm hoping so. I miss the writing and reflection that blogging provided for so long.

Who IS This Person?

2010-02-22T23:40:00.006-06:00

Tonight I have been sitting here updating my resumé to include in an application to the Ozark Writing Project's Summer Invitational Institute. When I finished saving the updated file, I raided Great Scott's desk for suitable paper--the really nice stuff--and printed out my creation.

It frightens me. It looks so official and...impressive. Who is this person, and what in the world am I doing impersonating her?!

Language and Listening

2010-02-04T10:05:00.005-06:00

For my birthday this year, Great Scott gave me The Best American Essays 2009, which was edited by Mary Oliver. The language in the chosen essays of this volume seems to me richer than that of most contemporary essays. Many of Oliver's choices echo the style of some of her own favorite writers, Victorians such as Emerson and Whitman, whose writing require readers to slow down and immerse themselves deeply in the flow of words rather than skimming merrily over the top of them. The Younger Daughter and I have been reading George MacDonald's Phantastes on weekend mornings and snow days, and here, too, I've been struck by the richness of the words and wording of the Victorians. My students--most of them--would never be able to follow sentences like these, sentences which wind and curl like vines up pillars or large-trunked trees, sprouting side branches and arabesque tendrils before finally growing into comprehensive maturity and blooming gloriously into full, many-petaled meaning.

As I was reading to The Younger Daughter earlier this week, I began wondering if she might be better prepared to read and comprehend such sentences on her own for having heard them read aloud by someone else. The human mind is a great recognizer of patterns. If, when it begins a complex task, it has some basic patterns in place, basic patterns that will aid in the comprehension and execution of the complex task at hand, that task will be accomplished much more easily and with better results. My students have all acquired the skill, the pattern knowledge, of word-calling; however many to most of the students in my classes have not developed an ear for written language. They don't hear the words in their heads as they read. The rhythms and melodies of the written word blow past them like so many dry, leaves; inflection and the subtle meaning it carries is lost. I wish all children were read to aloud. Written words are symbols for our quickened breath passing between tongue and tooth, for living human spirit shaped into transmissible entities leaving our lips. Expecting a child to read well without her having experienced the breath of life blown across the pages of books and into her waiting ear is like handing her a bird from the taxidermist and requiring her to comprehend and demonstrate flight.

Another Year

2010-02-03T10:58:00.000-06:00

I am still writing "2009" on checks and attendance slips.

Last Friday on my birthday an old friend and fellow Douglas Adams reader reminded me that I am now the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Age-specific ads at the side of my Facebook page tell me that forty-two year-old women wear Ug boots, buy iPads, and publish their own poetry. My students ask if I rode the pterodactyl to school or took the mammoth. Outside stars billions of years old burn so fiercely that their light still reaches us, and the patient moon grows old and young again. Why should I fear?

Friday Quote: On Resilience

2009-12-18T14:25:00.001-06:00

"In the depths of winter I discovered in myself an invincible summer."

--Albert Camus

Stasis

2009-12-08T23:52:00.003-06:00

Most of my blog readers will already know this, but I'll post here anyway: my grandmother died this weekend. Tonight was visitation; tomorrow is the funeral.

I feel very much as though time is suspended right now. As a family, we're talking and catching up, trading stories, taking care of details, and doing the things that need doing, but it feels as though we're in a strange sort of time between times...as, I suppose, we very much are.

Friday Quote: On Imagination

2009-11-12T08:15:00.002-06:00

"With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings."

--Robert Walser

Friday Quote: On Forgiveness

2009-11-06T17:28:00.002-06:00

"Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past."

--Alexa Young

Halloween Reflections

2009-11-01T21:24:00.003-06:00

After much research and deep reflective consideration, I have come to a conclusion: Halloween candy is the devil.

Consumed today in the name of scientific inquiry: Skittles, Tootsie Rolls, Nerds, Peanut M&M's, Hershey's, Butterfinger, Twizzler, Jolly Rancher, and a KitKat.

House

2009-06-10T20:25:00.004-05:00

No, not the television show.

Last week as I sat in my schoolroom trying to force myself to use my summer wisely by writing the curriculum that the state is going to review next fall, a tapping came at my window. Fairly sure that the tapper was most likely to be a family member or a student, I sent The Younger Daughter to go check the outside doors and let the tapper in, should my assumptions be correct. They were. It was my father. He had come to share with me the news that a house with some acreage had come up for sale near town, and he thought I might like to take a look at it.

We'd not been looking for a house, really. Oh, we knew that we really ought to before long, but we were thinking more in the time frame of 1-2 years, not 5 days.

"What?!" you ask, as well you may. Yes. Five days. It was going up for auction in five days.

The short version of this story is that Great Scott, The Daughters and I attended the first auction I'd been to since I was very small. My father did the bidding for us since we felt too inexperienced to do this well ourselves, and shortly after noon last Saturday, we had a house with a field and woods. We are still reeling in shock, even as we finalize preparations to (hopefully) close on the place next week.

I said in my last post that I needed to get Mrs. Lawson out of my system. Well, this should do it, although how in the world I'm going to find time to write curriculum now, while moving twelve years worth of stuff, I've no idea. It's funny, really, funny in the way that inspires one to run around in circles in the front lawn waving one's hands above one's head and screaming, "Aaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!" before falling flat on one's back and twitching slightly while watching the sky spin above one's head.

Seriously. It's all good. It will be fun.

Have I mentioned the barn? Yes. A barn. With a hayloft for The Younger Daughter to fall out of! Whee!

(Disclaimer: Please do not misread the tone of the above. I am very pleased with the place, and while moving will require a great deal of work, there couldn't be a better time to do it than right now, before school starts up again.)

Getting the Teacher Out of My System

2009-05-29T21:00:00.003-05:00

The first week of summer vacation is drawing to a close. I am not yet accustomed to it. To tell the truth, I still feel pressured and harried. Granted, I have things to do this summer, but none of them are of the daily deadline variety. Probably I need to start getting up early (I've been sleeping in) and taking walks again to get open skies and rustling green leaves back into my system.

It's odd how easily we adjust to new identities. I've been Mrs. Lawson for 9 months. It's time to reacquaint myself with Lucinda/Cindy again, time to get back in touch with who I am at the core of me.

That sounds like such a horribly INFP thing to say!

Official

2009-05-24T23:58:00.004-05:00

It's official. The teaching certificate from DESE is on my desk. I am a teacher.

Actually, I have always been a teacher. The moment my hapless younger brother was born, the teacher within sprang to life fully formed, like Minerva. Just ask him. I taught him lots of things. If you put tape on the bottoms of a cat's paws, it will dance; if you spray the hardwood floor with furniture polish and slide on it, Mom will, too; if you trust your big sister, you will end up eating rocks covered in mud after having been told it's chocolate.

Not all my early teaching experiences were as successful as the ones involving my brother. My first spanking in school (Yes, Virginia, there once were such things as spankings in school.) was on the occasion of my bending over another student's desk to help him with his first grade phonics. The target my posture afforded had evidently been too tempting to pass up. I recall being indignant: I had NOT been giving away answers; I had been explaining a principle! Mrs. Herman had remained unmoved.

This past year, my first bewildering, amazing, and utterly exhausting year of official teaching, I have doubted not only my own sanity but whether or not I had any business in the classroom at all. To my surprise, I think the answer is yes. Last Friday night was graduation, and as I sat in the nosebleed section at the back of the gym and watched our seniors crossing the platform and descending, diplomas in hand, I felt a tremendous sense of pride and accomplishment. Some of them were my students, and I know that a few would not have walked that aisle if I hadn't have gone above and beyond what the job required of me--if I hadn't mercilessly badgered and hounded them, cajoled and cheered, teased and encouraged, reminded and ultimately demanded more of them than they had originally been willing to give. The grins on their faces as they hugged me after the ceremony helped restore the faith that had been slipping in the face of the last grueling week of classes. Yes. I can do this. And for them, I will.

They're worth it.

Teaching Certification: Step One Complete

2009-04-23T23:16:00.004-05:00

Tonight an e-mail arrived in my inbox telling me that I have successfully completed the requirements for ABCTE certification; I can expect ABCTE's certificate to arrive within the next ten business days. This is not the same as being certified by the State of Missouri's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), which will require a few more forms and probably a blood sample of my firstborn. Nevertheless, this e-mail lifts a large weight from my shoulders. The school district in which I've been teaching on a temporary certificate this year has hired me for next year--pending the acquisition of a state teaching certificate--and as I gasp my way through the rapidly rising crest of end-of-the-year duties, forms and activities, it is a comfort to know that I'll be doing it all over again next year, the dry erase and SMART boards, filing cabinets, bookshelves, tables and bulletin boards having become familiar friends by now, friends that I will be seeing for years to come, God willing and the creeks don't rise.

On Green Beans and Household Appliances

2009-02-15T20:13:00.007-06:00

When I was a child, all my toys and stuffed animals had names and distinct personalities. What's more, they were all creatures of real being to me; they each had feelings. I used to worry about hurting them if I treated them badly or even if I favored one over the others. My brother and sister tell me they had the same sort of perception and that, like me, they were slow to lose it. Even today we occasionally have to remind ourselves that the last head of lettuce left in the produce bin at the grocery store is only a head of lettuce, that is doesn't really feel abandoned or unwanted. Even so, it is sometimes difficult not to take it home out of pity.

We lay this bit of dysfunction at the feet of our mother, partly because as everyone knows, that's where one lays the credit for one's dysfunctions, and partly because she's the one who used to wheedle us to eat all our vegetables by moaning sadly, "Oh, look at the poor little green bean! All his friends are gone down in your tummy! He wants to be with his friends! Don't you feel sorry for him? He's wondering what's wrong with him that you won't eat him. Pooooor green bean!" Part of the time we thought she was a little loopy, but most of the time it worked. Well, it worked for awhile. Eventually my brother discovered that if he held out long enough, she'd offer him money to eat the poor little green bean. As for me, my initial eagerness to cooperate quickly turned into obstinate opposition when I figured out that there would always be another green bean, another bite of spinach, another bit of something to feel guilty over. My sister, eleven years younger than I, traversed the distance between sentimentallity and logic without my observance, and although she has obviously done so with success, I do not know by what path she traveled.

Last month our new washer and dryer were finally delivered. As I stood in the utility room looking at them, I realized they were looking back at me hopefully, eager to please, wanting to be liked. I patted the washer awkwardly on its top and ran my hand over the dryer's door gently. Nothing is quite so charming as an appliance that can't wait to be helpful. The Younger Daughter walked into the room and gave me a cheerful hug. "What are you going to name them, Mama?" she asked.

"I don't know," I replied, somewhat surprised. I've tried not to play the Poor Green Bean card with my children, and the fact that they persist in naming inantimate objects and treating them like people casts serious doubts upon the theory that personification of the inantimate is entirely my mother's fault. "What would you name them?"

She thought about it a minute. "Claudio and Hero?" she offered doubtfully, her brow knitted in thought.

We discussed a few more options, and after a short synopsis of the tale of Odysseus, we settled on Syclla and Charybdis.

Scylla and Charybdis have been working for me in the back room for a month now, and I have to say that they seem to work better for having been named. Certainly I've heard no complaints, and when I answer the urgent beepings that signal the ends of their cycles, their red LCD screens beam proudly up at me. Maybe there is something to the theory that inantimate objects can have some form of sentience.

But I'm still not eating cooked spinach.

Resurfacing

2008-12-20T21:56:00.006-06:00

Yes. Second semester finals are over, and Christmas break is here. The school year is halfway complete.

Friday night I staggered out of the car for the house, the sacred laptop and my trusty bag of ungraded papers in tow (we don't have to report final grades until the fifth of January), in a state of shock, weariness, holiday cheer and reckless, heady glee. The Older Daughter was spending the night with a friend; The Younger Daughter had a friend spending the night with us, and ahead stretched two blessed weeks of Christmas break. I was finally going to get enough sleep (no more 16 hour days at school!), be able to leave a pencil or ballpoint pen out on my desk without someone borrowing it interminably, and make headway on the pile of laundry threatening to swallow the cats.

Today I discovered that the washer is broken. I squeezed water out of the clothes and threw them in the dryer, blessing my husband for having brought home a new drying rack this afternoon and wondering if everyone has enough clean underwear to make it until someone can fix the poor washer. Great Scott complimented me on my calm reaction to the discovery that the spin cycle is now nonexistent. Truthfully? That washer has worked well for seventeen years (save for the time it ate a baby sock and got indigestion). It's had fewer breakdowns than I have. It deserves a few days off, too.

I suppose if I need to visit the laundrymat, I can take the opportunity to journal while I'm waiting. Oddly enough, I've not been journaling, although not for lack of material. Like blogging, journaling has been difficult to find the time to actually do. My head has been full of students (I even dream about them or their assignments, often), but many of the things I've observed or experienced or had shared with me, I've hesitated to write down, even in my journals. I struggle with determining what things belong to me to write about and what things should forever belong simply to my students. According to a great many writers I've read, this excludes me from writerhood most absolutely, since writers should supposedly respect no one's experiential privacy when good material is concerned. I do not know if I can go along with that. I suspect I can't. Several times a week I pick up a pen or come here to post, consider the things my students share, the lives they live, the people they are and are becoming, and I lay the pen aside or sigh and delete the half-written post. (Blogging, of course, presents a particularly complicated ethical dilemma, since some of my students know about Quotidian Light and occasionally check in.)

Plenty of quirky things go on everyday that are perfectly bloggable, however; I just need to take the time to write them. Hopefully the break will help. Thanks to those of you who wrote comments or e-mails of encouragement, letting me know Quotidian Light's posts were missed. You were welcome reminders that life outside Mrs. Lawson's classroom still exists.

Overcast

2008-10-07T13:00:00.002-05:00

The skies this morning were deeply overcast and grey. They're clearing now, but I am not.

The light is dim.

Attack of the ROUS-es

2008-09-08T21:50:00.004-05:00

Two and a half weeks into teaching I have already been thrown to the mercy of the ROUS-es (Ridiculous Oratory and Uncomfortable Shoes). The first encounters happened quickly. School began on a Thursday, and by Friday afternoon, I had broken blisters on the backs of my heels. Lesson learned: Do not break in a new pair of shoes at school, no matter how comfortable they may have felt in the store. As for the Ridiculous Oratory...well, let's just say I've heard it at length from someone whose job it is to deliver it, and, no, I'm not speaking of any of my administrators or colleagues. Of the two, I would endure the broken blisters any day. Lesson learned: There's a perfectly appropriate time to lock yourself into the French teacher's room and engage in unauthorized multi-lingual...expression.

The teaching is a mixed sort of experience. I teach 7 class periods a day, three of which are the same course. This means I have five different classes for which to prepare, and herein lies my struggle. I am a depth person, a person who values quality over quantity. In the past two and a half weeks it has been becoming abundantly clear that this is a path to sure burnout when it comes to a teacher's job in the public education system, at least for the first one to three years (the time estimate is based on input from other teachers). I stay late most nights, go back to the school to plan on Saturdays and sometimes Sundays, and most of the time I hit some point at which my mind balks and simply closes down at the sheer amount of information I'm expected to convey and the information I absolutely must assimilate, myself. This is the bad news, the struggle.

Teaching does have its upside, too. My personal upside the past couple of weeks has been the debate--actually a communications--class. I didn't expect this, but the five students who are in it are more good natured and willing than I ever might have expected or even hoped. They don't strike me as particularly likely to hang out together in a general social setting, but they work (and banter) well together in class and with me, and I am very, very grateful for them. The creative writing class is usually fun, again good natured, and is small, also, which allows us to do more experimental types of things like going outside to write or watching the kindergarteners' very first gym class for character sketch material. I'm hoping the small size will allow us to workshop as a class, as well. The folklore class at 8:30 in the morning is more of a challenge due mostly to the time of day. We've covered fool tales and riddle tales and lying tales and story tales so far, and I think we're going to dive into fairy tales next. Because we live in the Ozarks, I would love to look at some specifically Ozarks folktales, but the only ones I have acutally studied were in a course at MSU entitled "Bawdy Ozark Folktales". The course was a hoot; we used Vance Randolph's book, Pissing in the Snow and loved every minute of it. Unfortunately, I don't think that would fly for a high school class. Maybe I can get my hands on a copy of Who Blowed up the Church House instead.

Some of you reading this are familiar with the kind of stress related issues with which I tend to deal. If you are, let me just say that prayer would not be inappropriate at this juncture. I'm dealing, but barely. Enough said.

In the Woods: Part Two

2008-07-27T00:20:00.005-05:00

I do not answer naturally to the name "Mrs. Lawson." For substitute teaching purposes, I learned to do so last spring, but it wasn't a quick thing. Mostly I was used to being called, "Hey, [The Older Daughter]'s Mom!" This will change. A lot is going to change.

A week ago one of the high school English teachers resigned unexpectedly from my daughters' school. This last Friday evening I was approved by the school board for the position. In three weeks I will be responsible for seven classes every day. The final schedule is not yet in my hand, but the preliminary one has me teaching creative writing and folklore/mythology as well as multiple sections of sophomore English and a couple of other classes.

Thus, it is settled. I have looked into the woods and there I have seen my fate: great looming grizzlies of state requirements, acres and acres of towering stacks of papers to grade, ROUS's (Ridiculous Oratory and Uncomfortable Shoes) and in the deepest, darkest depths of the educational forest, Julius Caesar himself lurking sulkily in a cave while Brutus lumbers about with the conspirators making reassuring and flattering noises to draw him out.

Someone hand me the bag of breadcrumbs. I'm going in.

Into the Woods

2008-07-24T00:21:00.006-05:00

Funny, isn't it, how lives are lived in chapters, how changes can be effected in a matter of weeks or days, turning the order of our comfortable (or excruciating) lives around, flipping them upside down and leaving them resembling nothing we would have ever anticipated? Sometimes our own actions precipitate those changes; sometimes they're entirely out of our control. Either way, there's no going back. Things have been altered permanently. Even if we try to undo whatever action opened the chapter--such as getting a divorce or giving the child up for adoption--we're now someone we weren't when the first page was turned. We can't write it over; we have to go on as the characters we've become.

Here at Possum Box Lane, big changes are afoot, changes we (mostly I) set into motion, but certainly not changes I ever expected to come about as quickly as they are. It's dizzying. At more than one point I have found myself blinking in stunned confusion somewhere beyond not only words but also comprehension. By next week the plot will almost certainly be set in its new direction, although whether I'll find myself in an enchanted forest or a thorny maze remains to be seen. Either way, it's into the woods.

(Disclaimer: I might add here that neither my marriage to Great Scott or the familial status of our children are in any way at risk. Not even a jot.)

Corvus Moon

2008-06-25T15:28:00.004-05:00

The artists I admired most last year at White Hart Renaissance Faire were from Corvus Moon Ceramic Arts. They made various pots, vases, pipkins and other pieces on site; everything from shaping the clay to firing was done before one's eyes.

I fell in love with several pieces, of course, but one had to come home with me. Its glaze gleams with coppers, blues, golds, greens and purples, and the ginko leaf is the perfect finishing touch. Full of Queen Anne's lace, it makes a perfect centerpiece.

White Hart Renaissance Faire 2008

2008-06-25T14:31:00.006-05:00

Lately Quotidian Light has been getting hits for people searching for information on White Hart Renaissance Faire. Well, I've got good news.

YES! It's happening again this year! Come one, come all!

June 21-22, 28-29 and July 5-6, 2008
Saturdays 10:00am-7:00pm, Sundays 10:00am-6:00pm

A map and directions can be found here. We've not been yet this year, but last year's faire was wonderful.

There were arms demonstrations:

A magician who captured memories of the faire straight out of your ear:

Cavalry demonstrations:

Falconry education and demonstrations (one of my favorites):

And Queen Elizabeth herself, presiding over the festivities:

There is nothing quite like White Hart. Highly recommended!

Reconnecting

2008-06-22T20:38:00.005-05:00

We're in a busy stage of life, Great Scott and myself. The girls are old enough to have begun after school and summer activities; Great Scott works long hours; I've begun subbing when school is in, and last month I began ABCTE's teacher certification program to obtain a certificate to teach English in Missouri secondary schools. While this route to certification is going to save us a lot of money and a lot of time, while it allows me to do work online and here at home (save for the tests and the student teaching experiences, which will come later), the work still needs to be done, and I'm doing it while keeping up with the girls' activities and my grandmother's medical appointments. Summer has given us a bit of a slow-down, yes, but Great Scott is still taking a graduate class four days a week in a city an hour away, working on two degree papers and finishing up the yearbook for the 2007-08 school year where he teaches. It's easy for each of us to forget what the other looks like.

This weekend my mother took the girls to Steal Yer Dollar City (a.k.a. Silver Dollar City) all day Saturday, leaving Great Scott with a sizable gift certificate for Borders bookstore. The temptation was too great. Off we went, tra-la-la, here-we-go-round-the-mulberry-bush.

It had been a long time since I've spent time alone with my husband being silly, and silly we were. We made smart remarks, played at being cynics, played at curmudgeonry, played at obliviousness and simpletonry, played at making the other laugh--lots of this. We browsed the bookstore, laughed in the parking lot, got frozen custard at a place we used to frequent when we were dating and first married, laughed on the way home, and we laughed after we got home. We picked on each other mercilessly the entire time, and we loved every minute of it.

Sometimes it's very difficult to remember a time when my mind and identity weren't entirely tied up with responsibilities, schedules, censored motherhood and things-to-remember-so-that-no-one-starves-and-the-electricity
-stays-on. This weekend I remembered.

Today we spent the day at Great Scott's father's farm, where we celebrated both their birthdays and a belated Father's Day. Sometime after lunch I slipped outside to look at the lilies and hollyhocks in the yard and joined The Younger Daughter in the hammock. After a bit The Younger Daughter went off to learn to shoot a gun--she turned out to be amazingly good at it--and I was left alone under the light-dappled leaves, a cool breeze stirring the hem of my gypsy skirt about my ankles as I lay back and closed my eyes. I drifted off amid the wind and whispering grasses, and no one came to call me back. It was utterly restful (rest full).

This next week will be a busy one again. The "Little House" play practices are upping the times from one practice a week to two, both five hours long; my grandmother has a doctor's appointment, we're taking the girls to see Cats! one night, and I have another section of my English/Language Arts course to complete. I've tucked away this weekend, though; I'm keeping it deep within, ready to bring out and enjoy in stolen moments. It was very, very good.

Friday Quote: On the Home Library

2008-06-20T23:41:00.004-05:00

"The library is a room that contains human wisdom. Call it a room that reflects our relationship with knowledge. Because knowledge is like anything else--when you love it, you want to do something for it. Sometimes you want to build it a beautiful room, which is exactly what the English did, with steadfast elegance, for centuries."

Akiko Busch
Geography of Home

Thirteen Marriage Tips for Bibliophiles

2008-06-19T13:10:00.003-05:00

1. Budget for books the way you do for food and electricity...or you won't have food and electricity.
2. Read each other's books.
3. Keep separate accounts at the used bookstore.
4. Books are paper. Paper is good insulation. Line the walls of your house with bookcases. Fill them. It's the environmentally responsible thing to do.
5. Read aloud to each other.
6. Keep stray dishes, flowerpots, etc... handy to throw during arguments, lest you be tempted to throw books.
7. Respect each other's differing literary tastes.
8. To communicate with a spouse who is reading a book, replace his or her bookmark with a note.
9. James Fenimore Cooper is your friend.
10. Work out a shelving system together to ensure both of you can find the books you need when you need them.
11. For the sake of your financial stability, do not often shop for books together.
12. A bookless parlor is a howling wilderness.
13. Buy only one copy of books you both love. The thought of having to buy replacement copies is an excellent divorce deterrent.

Wind and Windows

2008-06-06T02:39:00.000-05:00

It is drawing nigh unto two in the morning, and here I sit (again) in front of a computer screen. Outside the windows the wind is winding itself up, scattering my papers across the table behind me and throwing small twigs from the trees into the yard. Soon full storms are supposed to erupt. Not to worry, the weatherman tells us, the tornadoes that are likely to form tonight should be small ones. Both girls were downstairs moments ago complaining of the heat. When I went to check, they'd turned off the fan and closed all the windows upstairs. No wonder. I opened the windows, plugged in the fan and tucked them back in, reassuring them that I'd come shut the windows again when the rain begins.

I hated closed windows as a child. My attic rooms were always hot and stuffy, the indoor silences thick around my face, stifling. I needed wind across my skin and the sound of peeper song and insect chants to lull me to sleep, reminders that the world was a bigger place than my bed, my little room, my parents' house. Some of my favorite nighttime memories are of sleeping outside under an open sky and waking to watch the treetops dance wildly as the wind picked up, and faint rumbles and flashes of distant light in the west announced the approach of more powerful weather.

I grew up attending stuffy churches with shut windows, but the faith I somehow stumbled into anyway remains. I don't know why I still believe, given the effort I've undergone to abandon that faith and the often excruciating difficulty of the journeys I've had to make to reclaim it. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the story rings true to me with a deeper truth than fact alone. Like fairy tales, it carries something I need to survive: adventure, beauty, strength, hope, a wind that blows from beyond the edge of the small world I've known, a wind that throws my life into crazed disorder and makes breath possible.

Faith and Faerie, I've been told, are incompatible. One cannot believe in both miracle and magic. One should not open windows in the wind.

Phooey.

The Carcass Chronicles: Part One--On 'Possums and Lawn Mowers

2008-06-04T00:22:00.006-05:00

The low for the night is 72 degrees F, which means the daytime temps here are considerably higher, higher and humid, to boot. Somewhere in the yard something is dead. It could be something small (or part of something small) that the cats have killed and so very thoughtfully left under the window for us, or it could be something big that is in the field. Either way, leaving the windows open on the west side of the house is a mixed sort of blessing. The breeze is nice. The smell is not.

When I was a girl, we used to have a dog that was covered in curly, white, fluffy hair, poodle hair. Happy was an exclusively outdoor dog, but even if he hadn't have been all year, he would have been in the summer. There was very little he loved more than to find dead carcasses and roll in them. He'd go out in the woods or the field and come back with dark greenish brown patches in his fur, smelling like he'd been picking up vultures in bars. Poor thing! He never understood why my brother and I refused to pet him or play with him when he'd obviously gone to all the trouble to make himself more enjoyable for all concerned, from a doggy point of view. Sometimes Happy would even bring home a nice ripe one, so we could have it for our very own.

My sister wasn't any more appreciative of Happy's offerings than were my brother and I, but she was more creative than we'd been when it came to dealing with them. Evidently one of Happy's 'possums (his favorite flavor) hit optimum ripeness the same day my father decided it was time my sister learned to mow the yard. "It was big and round and ripe," she later told me, "and I looked at it and thought, 'I wonder what would happen if I ...'"

Yes. She did.

This is why everyone in my family can authoritatively testify to the fact that dead 'possums and lawn mowers don't mix. Just a bit of wisdom to share with the rest of you.

Thirteen Reasons To Love Fairy Tales

2008-05-29T21:39:00.006-05:00

I have an inordinate fondness for fairy tales and mythopoetic literature. This evening I've spent several hours at SurLaLune, pouring over annotated fairy tales and their histories, not to mention many, many absolutely gorgeous illustrations. It's an incredible site.

If anyone knows of a graduate program that focuses in on mythopoetic lit or fairy tale lit or literature of the fantastic, drop me a line. Until then, here are thirteen reasons to love fairy tales.

1. Magical powers.

2. Wise women.

3. Brave princes and princesses.

4. Unbearable suffering.

5. Perserverance.

6. Long, flowing hair. (Yes, I know it's terribly girly, but...I'm a girl!)

7. Scary monsters. (See here. If you get this joke, I will write a poem for you of your very own.)

8. Small children being eaten.

9. Good overcoming evil.

10. Forests and thickets and rivers and lakes and thorns and flowers and mountains and castles and cottages.

11. Otherworldly kingdoms.

12. Talking beasts.

13. Journeys of the exterior and interior.

On Mother's Day...and Easter

2008-05-21T22:00:00.003-05:00

Someone I'd consider a cyberfriend of sorts asked what I was given for Mother's Day this year. That would be these teacups. I've got a thing for hot tea, and Great Scott is kind enough to indulge me.

For Easter, he gave me the coolest apron ever.

Hidden Vision

2008-05-09T09:23:00.008-05:00

"The virtue of those [respected literary] writers is precisely that they have refused to do what their imitators do so humbly. Each of them has had a vision of the world and has set out to transcribe it, and their work has the forthrightness and vigor of all work that comes from the central core of the personality without deviation or distortion."

--Dorothea Brande
Becoming a Writer

What one has to bring to one's writing, to share with the world, is one's own way of seeing. Especially in my blog writing I usually hide my vision, my way of seeing, rather than drawing my readers into it with me. Instead of honesty, I present a false vision, a substitution, a deceit. It is possible, I suppose, that the masking vision is born of the self that serves most often in my interactions with the outside world. (Ah, the joys of being an INFP, whose deepest convictions and being are most naturally held in reserve!) If so, then the word "deceit" may not be entirely accurate, since my public self is still a genuine, a true representation of my whole. Isn't it?

The other night I began looking over the language arts courses of the online certification program I've begun. I took the quizzes over the various sections, cold, to try to get a sense of where I am in terms of what I'll be expected to know. It's been 18 and a half years since I graduated with my BA, sixteen since I left graduate work. My quiz scores were not as high as I'd hoped. In spite of the fact that my scores had been higher than the average scores of people who take the quizzes after having worked through the courses, I went to bed discouraged and worried, and I woke up feeling worried and overwhelmed.

Out of irritability that morning I scolded The Older Daughter over something inconsequential and caught myself on the verge of tears. Then on the way to school the girls and I were laughing together when a wave of premature nostalgia hit me, choking me up, and I also got sentimental about the terrapins that are beginning to cross the highway, an annual occurrence.

When I realized what was going on and stopped to consider, it struck me that the underlying cause of both the morning's irritability and predisposition to tears was fear. Surprised, I began considering some of the most emotionally volatile periods of my life--high school, college, early marriage, early motherhood. How many of those wild moodswing rides originated from the same material: fear of failure, fear of not measuring up, fear of finding myself utterly unequipped and inadequate for the task at hand?

True vision, it would seem, is not only hidden from others.

Friday Quote: On Poetry and Plastic Flowers

2008-03-07T10:43:00.001-06:00

"The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers."

---Lewis Thomas

Thirteen Things in My Desk Drawer

2008-03-06T10:59:00.003-06:00

Yesterday I came home and swiped at the wide, flat drawer beneath the center of my desktop, intending to open it and grab a pen. It budged, but wouldn't open. I had to drag it open, to my wry displeasure. The reason? Too much stuff crammed in it. Here's a sampling.

1. Umpteen million pens and pencils: ball point, gel, and mechanical. (The fountain pens are set apart, well-nigh sanctified, in fact.)

2. Two pairs of sissors. One for me and one that the children are allowed to use. This is not due to safety factors. This is due to me wanting a pair of sissors that haven't been used to cut industrial grade cardboard to make castles and French log homes.

3. Empty Whitman sampler and Altoids tins. You never know when these will come in handy.

4. Enough mechanical pencil refills to be a lead poisoning health hazard.

5. A stapler. This is not always in residence, as Great Scott and The Daughters borrow it with regularity.

6. Umpteen million erasers, but they're apparently the wrong kind, as I am regularly asked to buy more.

7. Flathead and phillpshead screwdrivers.

8. Coconut brittle.

9. Two miniature screwdriver sets, neither of which are the right size to fix whatever pair of eyeglasses has broken this time.

10. Boxes of staples, brads, two or three different sizes of paperclips, and a box of butterfly clips.

11. Two or three different kinds of staple removers, regardless of the fact that I almost always just use my fingernails. This would explain the shape of my fingernails, I suppose.

12. Occasionally a stray M&M or Skittle. Finding these is just like Christmas, no matter how old they are. Hey, who am I to ask questions about age?

13. Two freerange, vampiric thumbtacks that attack and then scurry away to hide beneath the pens or in a far corner until they feel the need to feed again.

How I Got into this Business and Where It Went Thursday

2008-02-29T10:12:00.004-06:00

I didn't intend to do anything but start a writing club at our school. In November I was given permission to do so for the Jr. High and high schools provided I find a certified co-sponser on the current staff and that I obtain a substitute teaching certificate myself. I didn't even have to sub. You know the outcome of the substitute certificate (see the last post). Here continues the story of the originally intended writing club.

Thursday was our first meeting. I knew we'd have 9 students or so. I hoped we might get as many as 12-15. Before the afternoon's club schedule I went into the tiny half-room at the back of the library where we were to meet and waited to see who would arrive. To my amazement, 37 kids managed to cram themselves into that little space. The tables were quickly filled. More lined the walls, standing. Others leaned in the doorway or sat in what little floorspace existed. What's more, they are excited not just about starting a club, but about writing itself. They want to compete. They like the idea of running in-house writing contests not just for the Jr. High and high school, but for the elementary students. Mostly, though, they want to workshop papers with each other, to read each others' work and comment, to have feedback and find ways to improve their writing. They listened to our ideas and hopes for the club; they shared their ideas (good ones) and listened to each other and were in agreement about their goals. They wanted to have after school meetings to workshop, and then someone said, "What about over the summer? Can we do something this summer?" and was echoed.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I was stunned. Stunned and utterly humbled.

The Plan...or...Am I Out of My Mind

2008-02-27T09:47:00.002-06:00

Lately a question one of my readers asked a long time ago has been haunting me. Seeker once asked if I would ever walk the halls of academia again. My answer was a pretty definite no.

I'm reconsidering.

The last week of January I began substitute teaching in a local high school. While I thought I might survive it pretty well, I did not expect to enjoy it past a vague satisfaction, so I was taken entirely by surprise when after subbing for our French/English teacher for three days running, I found myself bewilderingly and entirely in love...with the kids. This was not supposed to happen. This was not in The Plan.

The Plan, as much as there is ever a plan in my INFP life, was to eventually go back to school to finish a MA or if I was very lucky and somewhere found the energy and self-confidence, an MFA, and acquire a job teaching per course for a college or university in the area, maybe even landing a full-time job with a community college, perhaps in a writing center. Teaching secondary school was not even a consideration. Notta. Notta. Notta.

Yet here I am with an application to admittance to a teacher certification program sitting in an envelope on my dining room table, check enclosed, addressed and stamped. Granted, I put a note on it this morning--"Wait until after Friday to mail this, you fool!"--just in case my four day sub stint in the Family and Consumer Science room this week changes my mind about exactly how much punishment I'm able to take. Nevertheless, my instinct, that deep down knowing at the center, tells me that, yes, indeed, I am going to do this.

I am going to do this, and it will change my life, and there will be no end to it. It will be difficult and hair-pullingly frustrating and utterly exausting and shatteringly glorious beyond my wildest imagining. It will be good.

Friday Quote: On Darkness

2008-02-01T22:56:00.001-06:00

"Sometimes I forget that even though the darkness whispers my name it does not tell the truth."

--Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens

Forty

2008-02-01T21:24:00.000-06:00

In my blog wanderings and perusals over the past three years, I've seen many lists of "Forty Things to do Before I Turn Forty." By the time I thought of composing my own, my time was seriously running out, and I was faced with either making a list of "Forty Things to Accomplish in the Next Nine Minutes" or of finding a creative alternative. (Allow me to offer a small bit of advice: given a choice between Lots of Potentially Emotionally Unhinging Work or a Creative Alternative, go for the latter.)

My alternative to the "Forty Things to do Before I Turn Forty" list? It needed to be something positive, something affirming, something that would help me appreciate the life I've had already and the one I have now rather than laying on the pressure to do more, accomplish more, be more. I needed not a list of things to do, but a list of wonderful things I have done in my first forty years, a list of appreciation and celebration. Therefore...

Forty Things I've Done Before Turning Forty

1. Learned to see God as a very real and compassionate Person rather than a Lurker with a Big Board.

2. Convinced my brother to willingly eat mud.

3. Slept in trees.

4. Jumped out of a barn loft.

5. Earned a writing degree, had success with creative pieces, publication, readings, two Pushcart nominations and served a week long term as Poet in Residence at Bryan College.

6. Been proposed to or seriously co-considered marriage five times.

7. Had a sixth man fall to his knees dramatically before me in a public place, spread his arms wide and sing loudly, "Besa me! Besa me mucho!"

8. Promptly married him.

9. Stayed married 17 years to the above to date.

10. Gave birth to two children with a midwife presiding and no meds.

11. Learned to enjoy poetry. Learned to detest poetry. Learned I can't live without poetry.

12. Enjoyed mathematical theory.

13. Pieced and hand-quilted a quilt from dress scraps.

14. Found out what happens when one puts one end of an electrical cord in one's mouth while the other end is still in the outlet.

15. Learned to cook, yea, even unto a complete Thanksgiving meal for company.

16. Played the piano and the oboe.

17. Walked barefoot through snow.

18. Danced.

19. Put my brother in a tractor tire, rolled him down a hill and survived my mother's wrath afterward.

20. Attended wonderful Renaissance festivals.

21. Played the lead onstage in "Once Upon a Mattress."

22. Sang a solo in Handel's Messiah.

23. Learned to live without medication for an affective disorder--something a diagnosing doctor said I would never do.

24. Lived amid a passion for learning.

25. Discovered a passion for teaching.

26. Learned to live in the midst of prayer.

27. Made peace with an ongoing and difficult relationship from my past.

28. Learned where I fit in my family.

29. Read thousands of astounding, wonderful books.

30. Tutored and taught writing to amazing people.

31. Moderated for the beautiful ladies of LHM's Lighthouse and Covenant Women for several years.

32. Given up an addictive and self-destructive way of "coping."

33. Found the courage to keep/enforce my own boundaries while remaining unruffled.

34. Learned jewelry making.

35. Mentored some incredible young women.

36. Learned to recognize and name flowers, trees and other native plants.

37. Taken up yoga.

38. Kindled a love of books in two children.

39. Laughed nearly every day.

40. Been a student of grace.

A Review: Goblin Fruit Winter 08

2008-01-14T11:33:00.000-06:00

So many of the poems in this issue were excellent in either storytelling or wordplay, and so many excelled in both, that I hardly know where to begin in letting you know what I like. Where to start?

JoSelle Vanderhooft's two pieces were, as hers always seem to be, strong. I very much liked "The Explorer's Daughter," but it was "Death Enters a Mother's Service" that had me crouched in front of the monitor scrolling up and down and up again to read and reread. Elements there of Walter de la Mare and Rosetti, strong images and rhythms, heartbreak and beauty. Lovely work.

Robert Borski's "The Bashful Young Swain at the Ogre's Cotillion" made me raise my eyebrows and laugh aloud with pleasure.

Sophanny Marin's "The Choke-Damp"...ah, what a poem. This is definitely one of my favorites, and I need to find a way to let her know. I think that by which I am most struck in this poem is her adeptness in bringing the world of faerie and the modern world into such graceful, frightening and heartbreaking juxtaposition. Well done.

Maureen McQuerry's "Selkie" is a study in wonderful line breaks (always tricky and potentially awkward!) and language that sings in both sound and sense. McQuerry is someone whose work I will be watching in the future. If all her poems are as well crafted as "Selkie" and "Chesire" (another poem I loved in this issue), I can't wait to read her books.

Jennifer Crow's "Twelve Swans" also was exquisite and exceptionally wonderful technically as well as lyrically and narratively. She has a skill in poetic construction that shines as she spins the familiar tale of the twelve swan brothers into a new poetic form with each section. Brava!

And finally, I couldn't comment on Goblin Fruit's Winter 08 issue without mentioning "Revisiting the Maiden's Tower" by Stacy Cowley, a piece that gave--and continues to give--me chills, with its images both beautiful and horrific.

These were probably my favorite pieces, but the other poems were wonderful as well and deserve a read, especially by anyone with an appreciation for mythopoetic literature. Old fairy tales spun in new directions, silk kimonos, ravens, seals, cherries and snow and a saint... It is easy to become lost here. Tie a string to your wrist as you enter, to be sure of finding your way back out.

Publication: Goblin Fruit

2008-01-10T17:39:00.000-06:00

This morning a wonderful email waited impatiently in my inbox to be discovered. The Winter '08 issue of Goblin Fruit (which I wrote about earlier) is out at last, and in it, "Night Augur", a poem of my "own pure brain." To my surprise and deep pleasure, the Editors Who Shall Be Adored have even used it as a prologue to the issue, may-their-names-be-praised-forever.

Seriously, I am very happy and very grateful.

(There's even audio!)

Someday You'll Have Children Just Like You...

2008-01-02T21:27:00.000-06:00

The Younger Daughter is the liviliest of our bunch. Great Scott and I are, as The Older Daughter likes to remind us, aged and slow, and her sister, as Great Scott and I like to remind her, is energy conservative (save her father prefers the briefer, 4 letter word in all its simplicity). This means that The Younger Daughter often finds herself wandering about the house forlornly looking for something interesting to do while the other three members of the family are preoccupied. Christmas break has evidently been especially hard on her, but ever the innovative child, she managed to entertain herself with pen and pencil. The results are telling.

Once upon a time there was a little dragon. Now she was a good little dragon. Her family hoarded not gems but books. The little dragon got on nerves a lot. Though she tried her best she always got on other dragons' nerves.

One day she was bored, and she'd read all her Humanology books. So she went to her sister who was reading.

"Leave me alone. I don't have any ideas. Now go away!" her sister snapped. Then she burned the little dragon's backside very fiercely, and the little dragon left her sister to the book.

So the little dragon went to her mother who was also reading.

"I'm bored. Do you have any ideas of what to do?"

Her mom was not in a good mood. "Youngling, you are taking your life into your claws. The only things that stands between you and my snapping sanity is this book!" her mother answered and gave her a good whack with it.

Sadly the little dragon left to find her father. Suddenly her father flew in the lair and removed the umbrella from over the book he brought.

"Daddy..." the little dragon began.

"I'm reading. Leave me alone, Child!" and he lashed her with his tail.

By now the little dragon's backside was hurting miserably, so she made an ice pack and lay down. Then she drew. She drew dragons killing with flame, diamond spear and tail. The her parents came in with her sister and saw the painting and realized the suffering they had caused her and asked for forgiveness, and the little dragon gave them just that, and her family learned to think before they acted.

Friday Quote: On Coffee and Women

2007-12-21T00:00:00.000-06:00

"I like my women like I like my coffee: scalding, dark and bitter."

--Great Scott
(whose Christmas gifts are under reconsideration)

Friday Quote: On Poetic Cultivation

2007-12-14T10:22:00.000-06:00

“Travel broadens the mind, but great poetry is often the product of narrow obsession, the neurotic cultivation of a tiny plot.”

--Stephen Moss

Friday Quote: On Bibliophilia

2007-12-07T11:26:00.000-06:00

"She is too fond of books, and it has addled her brain."

--Louisa May Alcott

Procrastination Aid: Classic Movie

2007-12-06T11:14:00.000-06:00

Gee. And I thought I was doing pretty well lately.

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

So Far This Week...

2007-12-05T11:29:00.000-06:00

I replaced the modem.

The Older Daughter threw up twice at school and came home early.

The Older Daughter ate tortellini two hours after arriving home, and two and a half hours after that competed in an Academic Team competition (her team won both their games).

My grandmother had her 91st birthday (Yay, Grandma!).

I was approved for substitute teaching in our school district.

The Older Daughter won not just the local but the district Patriot's Pen essay contest for her age division.

And...my dryer broke (I am awaiting the repairman now).

Oh, yes! And Dad put an extra hard drive into my computer.

With a coathanger.

Which is still in the computer.

And it's still only Wednesday!

Spotted

2007-11-30T15:53:00.000-06:00

I know today is Friday and that I should be posting a quote, but my modem is down (again!), and I don't happen to have my quote journal in the library with me. Hopefully Dad and I will get the electronics working again this evening. I'm coming back into town after feeding Great Scott and the girls, and we'll work on the thing then.

The real reason for this post is to celebrate. Today on a walk a barred owl flew across my path and landed in a tree just across the creek. It let me cross and approach close enough that I could see its face and eyes clearly before it flew to a tree a little more distant. The eyes of barred owls are hauntingly beautiful. I've heard that if you look down a deep well in daylight, you can see stars. If the same were true of those black, black eyes, I would not be surprised. I could look at them for hours.

Overheard

2007-11-27T22:11:00.000-06:00

It must be hard to be the child of two writing oriented parents. One day last weekend The Younger Daughter's evening prayer went in part like this:

"Dear God...please forgive us for our sins and our improper English."

Thanksgiving Eve--Surprise Me List

2007-11-21T18:55:00.000-06:00

Infamous for his War on Whining gratitude posts, Randy of Everyday Thoughts Collected asks for Thanksgiving lists of those things for which we are grateful but which are a little unusual. Skewed, in fact. So here it is, dear twin, the Quotidian Light list of Thanksgiving peculiarities.

1. Dirt. (For repotting the orchids.)

2. Socks with individual toes.

3. Benadryl for when the children are too crazy.

4. Alcohol for when the husband is too crazy.

5. Morrowind, for when one simply MUST live life as a lizard in a dress robe.

6. Children who want cooking utensils and badgers for Christmas.

7. Wormer.

8. Small dead animal carcasses on the front porch. (As opposed to in the house.)

9. The word "no." As in, "No, we're not going anywhere for Thanksgiving."

10. Individual cups in bras. (Great Scott seconds this one enthusiastically.)

Quotidian Light Reading Level

2007-11-20T12:36:00.000-06:00

And...

Once more unto the quotidian light, dear friends, once more.

Which work of Shakespeare was the original quote from?

Kudos to Seeker, from whom I unabashedly yonked both of these.

I Just Did WHAT?!

2007-11-09T17:42:00.000-06:00

This week I went to the superintendent's office at school and after a meeting with her and the Jr. High principal, took home an application packet for a substitute teaching certificate and position. What's more, when I arrived home, I immediately got online and made an appointment to have fingerprinting done for the required background check. Immediately as in before I could change my mind.

What could possibly drive me to do such a thing? I, who swore I would never teach (especially at the secondary level, not to mention Jr. High) and could not foresee a return to "walking the halls of academia" ever again? I, who cringe at mispronounced words, bad grammar and misplaced commas--my own and everyone else's--and grimly remove myself from the vicinity of mouthy children in public lest I be tempted to "help" their parents? I, who am familiar with the discipline plight of the public schoolteacher, who hear about it and see its result every night when Great Scott arrives home, head bowed, shoulders slumped, dragging his six foot three inch frame over the threshold, his soul nearly sucked from his body? What, indeed could possibly entice me to enter that world, even on an intermittent basis? Especially on an intermittent basis, without the authority a full-time teacher holds over her own classroom?

Passion. Something I don't talk or write about very often or very much. I am passionate about the written word, and I am passionate about helping others find in themselves some good, some hidden potential previously unrecognized. Substitute teaching will very likely NOT give me the opportunity to indulge either of these passions, I realize. However, a substitute teaching certificate will enable me to begin a writing club for the high school and jr. high school in our district. The one condition I was given was that I find a full-time faculty member to help sponsor it, and this afternoon a quick conference with horror writer and H.S. English teacher, Matt Cardin met that condition, may-his-name-be-praised-forever.

We shall see where this goes. I anticipate beginning substitute teaching in early December and beginning Writing Club meetings in January after the break. I am more grateful than I can say to Matt, who is already staying after school several nights a week, and I am both excited and apprehensive about the venture. Wish it luck.

Call for Submissions: Guerrilla Ink Press

2007-10-29T11:04:00.000-05:00

Guerrilla Ink Press is currently accepting submissions of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction manuscripts, as well as photography and digital artwork for a new literary, arts, entertainment, news publication, GiP. This magazine allows Guerrilla Ink Press to continue providing dynamic publishing opportunities for new, emerging, and established writers in both electronic and print formats. Deadline is December 10, 2007.

Send Submissions to:
Attn: GiP Magazine
Guerrilla Ink Press, LLC
1956 E. Chestnut Exp.
Springfield, MO 65802-2235

If you have questions or would like more information, please contact GIP@guerrillainkpress.com with the subject ‘Attn. GiP Magazine.’ We look forward to hearing from you soon.

I've known Will LaPage, the founder and executive editor for GiP, for a good many years and can say without reserve that he is one of the most dedicated people I have ever met in terms of commitment to the literary world. He himself has a definite gift for writing, and reading his pieces in workshop has always been an act of appreciation as well as critical review on my part. His input on my own work has been more than notably helpful (those of you who enjoyed "Mania" have him, in part, to thank). What's more, GiP is offering book deals to each of of the contributors to its first issue. You can read more here.

Please pass this information on to other writers who may be interested. I'd love to see GiP flooded with quality work, and I know many of my readers and their acquaintances can make it happen.

Observations on Motherhood: Those Kinds of Days

2007-10-24T20:12:00.001-05:00

Some days I feel much better prepared for what motherhood requires than other days.

Some days it all comes together quite well, and the bills are paid, and all the batteries work, and the children play happily together and have shining teeth. Other days nothing gets done, and it rains in the windows, and the cat leaves tongue prints in the grease in the unwashed pan on the stove, and the children look like prime candidates for the cast of “Oliver!”

Then, of course, there are all the days in between, which probably look from the outside more like the first kind of day but which feel from the inside far more like the second. The trick is to navigate these with all the aplomb that comes naturally when one is having the first kind of day and knows it. It helps to remember that many famous and successful people have had parents who probably had days of the second kind, too.

1. Albert Einstein’s mother didn’t always get his hair combed before he got out the door.

2. Emily Dickinson’s mother couldn’t get her to come out of her room and play with visitors’ children every time they had company.

3. Jonathan Edwards’ mother couldn’t have counted the number of times she demanded, “Will you just get on with it and kill that spider?!”

4. Thomas Edison’s mother was sure he would ruin his eyes reading in the dark.

5. Henry Ford’s mother told him to go play in the street at least once.

6. C.S. Lewis’s father despaired that his son might live in a fantasy land forever.

7. Benjamin Franklin’s mother worried that he didn’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain.

8. Louis Pasteur’s mother once despaired of ever getting him to wash his hands.

9. George Washington’s mother warned him time and time again to brush his teeth.

10. Mark Twain’s mother....Oh, Lord, that poor woman!

11. Edgar Allan Poe’s mother got sick of cleaning up after all those birds.

12. I can just hear Christopher Columbus’s mother saying, “It’ll be a whole new world when I let you do that!”

13. Leif Erikson’s mother threatened to ship him off so often he took her seriously and did it himself.

In Spite of Myself

2007-10-20T19:59:00.000-05:00

I am not the most joining kind of person. I tend to avoid social activities like the plague. I'm not particularly shy; merely a little antisocial. "I'm not afraid of people," I'll be quick to tell you, "I just don't like them." (This is a bold-faced lie, but it sounds so fun I can't resist typing it.) Nevertheless, I know social activities are good for me. They get me out of the house. They force me to interact with people I might otherwise never get to meet. Once committed, I dread them and bemoan my fate up until I get in the car, but I nearly always have fun in spite of myself.

Thus it was when a friend from Ozark Mountain Players called this week and asked if I could possibly help judge a costume contest for the Douglas County 150th year celebration, I said yes. After all, I've been assistant costume mistress for OMP's productions of "Laura's Memories" for three years now and listened to the costume mistress (my mother) talk about period costumes for a good 13 years prior to those. When I told Great Scott, he said, "Well, that's very civic minded of you," a comment that immediately brought to mind The Civic Minded Five from the old 90's cartoon The Tick. Indeed, as I headed toward Douglas county this morning, I was feeling a lot like The Carpeted Man (click on link and scroll down), which is to say hot and itchy just thinking about it.

Of course, I enjoyed myself. The costumes were truly wonderful, and the three of us judging had a very difficult time of it. There were several pioneer ladies; a whole pioneer family complete with little boys in buckskins; young ladies in gorgeous, hoop skirted, ringlet-curled glory; a mountain man with handmade leather boots, clothes made from period patterns and a hat that some mother animal used to love; a widow whose black veil covered her from hat brim to below her knees; a stunning green fancy dress and matching hat with feathers; and the first place prize, a grey dress with a hoop skirt almost as wide as its wearer was tall, its skirt ruffled in layers, each trimmed in black ribbon, the matching bonnet period perfect, an unassuming outfit whose wearer looked like she'd stepped straight out of a civil war picture. I loved the costumes; I loved working with the other judges; and the ladies who were running the whole kit and caboodle from the grandstand have my utter admiration for their organizational skills and good humor.

The day was, in short, a good one, a good one in spite of the self-image I sometimes try too hard to maintain: that of a somewhat snarly recluse. It was good to remember that I DO like people and to remember how much, something I suspect I need to do more often.

Friday Quote: On Learning

2007-10-19T12:15:00.000-05:00

"A process is always a learning process if we let it be."

--Dr. Maribeth Impson

Tonado Weather

2007-10-17T19:08:00.000-05:00

This is it. Spring and fall, April and October are our annual times for tornadoes. Tonight's storms are being tracked from the local newsroom. So far the area has lost two houses, a barn and a lumber mill, and the evening is just beginning.

Guess who's staying up late tonight.

The Sunday Situation

2007-09-22T19:18:00.000-05:00

We've recently begun going to a new church, which is helping--a bit--with some of the tensions and ambivalence I've had toward church for a long time. Still, there are Sundays when what I really need is space, when the thought of stepping into a church building and facing church people is more than I can bring myself to tackle.

A couple of Sundays ago was like that, and Scott graciously took the girls himself. He came back chuckling, saying that when the pastor asked about my whereabouts, he (Scott) had told him I was staying home, that I was Emily Dickinson. "Oh, we all have days like that," the pastor replied.

"I didn't even try to explain," said my husband. "What could I have said? 'No, you don't understand; her nickname among her college professors was Emily Plath. She really is Emily Dickinson...on a good day.'"

Great Scott also tells me that the pastor was making noises about coming out to visit. Maybe I can stay upstairs and send down little scrappets of cryptic poetry until he leaves.

Friday Quote: On Courage and Poets

2007-09-21T14:17:00.000-05:00

"The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness."

--Christopher Morley

Goblin Fruit

2007-09-16T21:13:00.000-05:00

An online poetry webzine, Goblin Fruit specializes in poetry '"of the fantastical", poetry that treats mythic, surreal, fantasy and folkloric themes, or approaches other themes in a fantastical way.' Working from three different continents, editors Amal El-Mohtar, Jessica P. Wick and Oliver Hunter (who is also responsible for Goblin Fruit's wonderful artwork) have put together a quarterly web publication that made me cry and laugh at once in a surprised sort of painful joy when I stumbled across it.

"Find your own images," a much loved mentor told me once, "and write them." My public personal images have been rural and home based--trees, field grasses, birds, garden flowers, cups, my daughters' hair--and these I've woven into poem and essay as I was taught, finding meaning in the ordinary, making the commonplace new. What I have been careful to keep out of any writing I intended for publication, though, is the mystical, the fantastic, hints of deeper and often darker things that even as a child I knew lay beneath the ordinary. This summer I began giving myself reading permission to return to my first literary love: speculative fiction. By July I was searching for mythopoetic markets, which is when I found Goblin Fruit through a link at Endicott Redux. I've found several other markets that I like, but none quite so well as Goblin Fruit. If you've got a few moments, an interest in poetry and a secret fairy tale fascination, go check it out. I do not think you will be disappointed.

In Memoriam: Madeleine L'Engle

2007-09-13T23:53:00.001-05:00

November 29, 1918 ---September 6, 2007

A great light has gone out of this world.

Friday Quote: On Pacing Oneself

2007-09-13T23:40:00.000-05:00

"I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once."

--Ashleigh Brilliant

Snakes

2007-08-30T23:05:00.000-05:00

We live surrounded by fields and creeks. The occasional snake through the yard is neither a great surprise nor a great alarm. Nor is finding, as we do, the occasional shed snake skin. Were any of the snakes we've seen poisonous, we'd surely feel differently, but so far they've all be speckled king snakes or black rat snakes or ring-necks or ribbon snakes or a particularly fetching brown mottled, friendly little variety whose name I've mislaid for the moment. All good neighbors, if a bit startling to encounter unannounced.

I thought nothing of it, then, when The Younger Daughter came in after playing outside the other afternoon, and announced that she'd found another snake skin besides the one her father had found the day before. Two was unusual, but not necessarily shocking. I went with her to examine the new treasure. Sure enough, it was a second skin, nearly as long as the first: three to three and a half feet or so in length and still in one piece. You could even see where the eyes had been.

While The Younger Daughter examined her prize more closely, I stood gazing up into the tree above us. The trees in our yard are Paradise Trees or Trees of Heaven. They are huge and wonderfully shady, but these trees are short lived and most of them are at least partially hollow. Snakes have used them for homes before, one particular fellow one summer grew to nearly five and a half feet long: my own height. I was looking for snakes on the branches, but what I saw was another skin dangling from the limb several feet overhead. I pointed it out to The Younger Daughter, and she danced a happy little jig. "Three!" she exclaimed, "There are three of them!" She watched the skin swaying gently in the breeze, head over one side of the limb, tail further up, then went back to her two skins on the ground.

I walked around the other side of the tree, still looking up into the branches by the trunk. The lowest limb was now brushing the top of my head with its leaves. I didn't see anything and was about to go back in the house when a drop of water fell past my nose. I looked up to see a fourth empty skin directly overhead within inches of my face, dripping with the last bits of the afternoon's rain shower. My heart beat a bit faster, and I stepped a little to the side. I like nature, mind you, but I'd rather it not happen on my head, and this was getting a bit eerie. Four snake skins. That meant four snakes, all around three foot long, judging by their cast-off suits.

I was about to call The Younger Daughter to see this latest discovery when she yelled from the other side of the tree. "Mom! Here's another one! Right up there in the branch! It was right over my head!" She was right. There it was, waving languorously in all its ghostly reptile grace. Five.

We didn't find anymore, although I circled the tree warily several more times. I did see a slender black head followed by the rest of a slim black body emerge from under the cover of an old well in the backyard a couple of days later. I cannot describe the grace of it, although I can describe the caution with which I've been walking in the yard of late, especially under the trees: extreme.

Orchids

2007-08-30T22:03:00.000-05:00

Two or three years ago my mother went through a period of giving me potted orchids. This one was blooming when we bought it, blooming with three or four blossoms on one stem. It hasn't bloomed since. Not until now, that is. Some days I sit beside the window with my pen and journal and just stare at it rather than writing. I am a rich woman.

The Tooth Saga

2007-08-23T19:26:00.000-05:00

Monday evening: The Younger Daughter pulls a tooth. She's been going through a stage of shedding teeth like a little shark this year, so all seems fairly routine. The Tooth Fairy confiscates it, leaving much coveted cold, hard cash in return and then gives me the tooth, as she almost always does, to hold until she's got enough to build her castle with.

Tuesday evening: I notice The Younger Daughter's gum above the now-missing tooth seems a bit red. I attribute it to the fact that she's just pulled the tooth, and make a mental note to watch it, just in case it might be true inflammation.

Wednesday evening: The gum still looks a little bright to me, although not badly so, and it isn't sore at all--a good sign. Nevertheless, I get out a flashlight and look at the empty socket, and... EGAD! There is a dark red fleshy thing protruding slightly from the socket! Either The Younger Daughter has just been infested with some tiny, exotic gum leach, or that is the pulp/nerve of her missing tooth! Is this normal? Is it supposed to be there? Is there an infection?! Has she pulled it prematurely?!

DID SHE PULL A PERMANENT TOOTH FOR MONEY?!?!?!?

I can't call the dentist at 9:30 at night. It doesn't hurt her at all, not even when she rubs a finger over it. I shudder and tell her to rinse and go to the living room for stories and prayers. I try to not worry about it. I will call in the morning. I will not worry. I put my head down on my desk and say a short prayer. I will not worry. Feeling faintly nauseated from anxiety, I walk into the bedroom to fold some laundry. I will not worry. Finally I call my sister. We have one of those conferences that only sisters can have. I feel a bit better. We will wait and see. Great Scott doesn't get home until 11:00 p.m. from the night class he's teaching. I will tell him in the morning.

Thursday (this) morning: "Oh," he says nonchalantly as he gets a shirt out of the closet and pulls it on. "Yeah, those are always there when you pull a tooth. It must've just detached lower down than most, that's all." He buttons up the shirt and meanders out of the room to go find his good friend, Coffee.

The Younger Daughter swears she hasn't pulled a permanent tooth, that this one was still a baby tooth. She may just be afraid The Tooth Fairy will want her money back, but I'm going to believe her. She is confidently, blissfully carefree. I want to grow up to be just like her.

Workspaces: Donald Hall--a Slide Show

2007-08-21T22:59:00.000-05:00

This past week has been...wearing. Tonight, exhausted, I should have been long ago in bed, but I ran across this slide show of 13 pictures taken at the farm of Donald Hall and have been smiling contentedly at my computer ever since.

The Anniversary 2007

2007-08-16T11:33:00.000-05:00

We exchanged cards in the morning and spent the day in different towns. We met at the Jr. High for The Older Daughter's registration/open house in the evening, then went home in separate cars. It sounds terribly unromantic, but the truth is Great Scott gave me possibly the best card ever (he wrote personal stuff in it--my favorite kind); we had Rosewood Farms' chocolates to celebrate after dinner, and we'd purchased a mutual gift--a DVD: "The Merchant of Venice" with Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons--which hopefully we will find time to put to use this weekend.

I was given some excellent celebration suggestions from both my Blogger and my Facebook readers, and will probably put them to use the very next weekend that The Girls to to their grandmother's. Steak it is, and a quiet night together, and candles. Right. Thank you all for your input.

Celebration Ideas, Anyone?

2007-08-12T18:55:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday Great Scott and I will be completing our 17th year of marriage. We'll also be attending Jr. High Open House with The Older Daughter. Ah, wedded bliss!

I'm taking suggestions about what might be some ways we could celebrate at home, since that's where we're going to be for awhile, what with Great Scott beginning teachers' meetings and then full-blown school next week.

Open to romantic suggestions, especially from male readers, 'cause often enough I completely miss the boat when it comes to doing things that make occasions special for Great Scott.

Procrastination Aids: Simpsonize Me

2007-08-12T18:03:00.000-05:00

Ok. I'm not a huge Simpson's fan, although they are occasionally funny, yes. However, this afternoon I stumbled across a ridiculous site that yields downright hilarious (and frighteningly accurate) results. You plug in your picture, and in return are rewarded with a full-fledged cartoon version of your charming self. Wondering how accurate these things might be? Check out my results below. Just be sure to post your own cartoons if you try this.

Friday Quote: Personal Ads

2007-08-03T12:59:00.000-05:00

"They call me naughty Lola. Run-of-the-mill beardy physicist (M, 46)."

"My only academic achievement was contaminating the water supply in class 2C by sneezing over the beaker tray. It caused the biggest outbreak of conjunctivitis ever known at Sutton Primary. I wasn't sorry then and I'm not sorry now. Bitter PR exec. (F, 34) WLTM man to 40 who enjoys living on the edge (of Putney). Box no. 8370."

"Don't send me any poems. Woman, 34. Fed up of getting poems. Box no. 4253."

"You are going to be alone this Christmas. That's because nobody likes you. I, however, will provide you with a basic meal and some pleasant company on the understanding that you do not criticise my collection of antique medical implements. Tidy man, 51. Size 9 slipper. Box no. 7314."

"Romance is dead. So is my mother. Man, 42, inherited wealth. Box no. 7652."

--from They Call Me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads from The London Review of Books

Procrastination Aid: Online Magnetic Poetry

2007-08-02T16:26:00.000-05:00

Oh, the fun! Magnetic Poetry now offers online composition. What's more, you can pick from ten differently themed collections of words, including "Shakespeare", "Genius" and "Artist" kits. Woo! Woo!

My favorite, though, is the "Inuendo" kit.

On the Whole Self, Being Real and the Better Part of Valor

2007-08-01T11:37:00.000-05:00

This summer, returning from one of my rambles in the fields, I met our orange and white cat out in the weeds by the old barn. Understand that this cat climbs into my lap to take naps, that he demands to be picked up and nibbles on my neck with some regularity; we are very good friends. On this occasion, though, he nearly leapt out of his skin. Wild-eyed, his tail bottle-brushed to twice its size, he humped his back, then dashed for the cover of a brush pile to keep an eye on me until he could be sure of who I really was. Sometimes I wish people had as much sense.

Not to say we should run and hide when we meet someone out of the context in which we know them, but all too often we assume we know the whole of a person, effectively putting them in a conveniently labeled box and attributing any behavior outside that box as deviant, when actually it may be key to a deeper comprehension of who that person really is, the whole of their identity which we, to date, have only seen in a limited context. My cat had known me as an indoor being who could occasionally be found outside near the house. Meeting me at the edge of the field rocked his furry little world. His response? To give me room to be what I was going to be outside the context in which he knew me, even if it didn’t fit the box.

(Disclaimer: Whatever reason this cat might have had to assume that an unfamiliar factor in my character might prove in any way dangerous to himself or his dignity is entirely coincidental. Totally unfounded. Utterly speculative. Pure chance. You’ll never prove anything.)

Friday Quote: On the Coupling of Words

2007-07-27T14:33:00.000-05:00

"Every new poem is like finding a new bride. Words are so erotic, they never tire of their coupling. How do they renew themselves? In their inexhaustible desire for combinations and recombinations."

--Stanley Kunitz

I'd never thought of words as lovemaking when they join their separate meanings together in order to make a new one that is, nevertheless, derivative of each of their own. Of course, the metaphor breaks down if carried too far, but still, how beautiful.

Ooooh! Pretty!

2007-07-26T21:45:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning I was in the kitchen mixing up a batch of scones for the girls' breakfast when I heard, "Bzzzt! Bzzzzzt! BZZZZZTTTT!" Looking down, I noted bright golden light flashing through the oven window and then several showers of absolutely gorgeous sparks cascading down the inside of the glass. I have to confess, I'd never heard an oven make that noise before, but it didn't sound like a particularly happy oven-noise, so I turned it off.

After 15 minutes or so, I opened the door a bit and peeked in. The top element was glowing bright red around one spot, and while I watched, it threw some more sparks off. I shut the door again. Obviously the poor thing was having some sort of breakdown and needed some privacy. It seemed unkind to intrude.

Three hours later I gingerly cracked open the door again. No sparks this time, and the glowing red spot had burned three quarters of the way around the curving length of the element. I wasn't surprised to find this morning that eventually the element burned itself in two before giving up the ghost.

The appliance repair and supply shop we use had to call their supplier to see if the replacement element could even be ordered. The stove is that old. It also looks like I'll have to do some wiring to get this thing fixed, since the element is soldered onto the wires instead of simply plugged into something. Maybe there'll be more sparks! Ooooh, pretty!

Contact

2007-07-25T13:59:00.000-05:00

Yes, I'm still breathing. In fact, there's been quite a bit of breathing going on. There have been lots of other things going on, too.

1. Play practice twice a week, dress rehearsals for a week and then at last, opening night and completion of the first weekend's performances.
2. Finishing up another journal volume and beginning a new one.
3. Visits to the doctor and errand running with my grandmother.
4. Visiting a variety of churches. (We're looking. Again. Or, rather, still.)
5. Getting sunburned at the White Hart Renaissance Faire.
6. Celebrating the birthday of a dear family member.
7. Keeping theater and graduate student hours-- the girls, too.
8. Researching and finding mythopoetic literary venues.
9. Great Scott finishing up ENG 600 (Methods of Research and Bibliography) at MSU in 4 weeks instead of the usually scheduled 16 weeks.
10. Having The Older Niece (11 yrs.) over for a weekend.
11. Losing 10 pounds.
12. Walking down paths lined with field grasses higher than my head, many in bloom.
13. Taunting The Older Daughter with the newly arrived, seventh Harry Potter book while she was still in the shower just for the amusement of hearing her scream.

Friday Quote: On Poetry and Enticement

2007-07-06T18:10:00.000-05:00

"What enticed me about poetry was being able to hold in my hands and in my heart these small pieces of meticulous and beautiful meaning. It was like reclaiming the soul, or giving the soul a voice."

--Joy Harjo

Friday Quote: On Beauty

2007-06-29T12:26:00.000-05:00

"I'm after something that will make some sense of the chaos in the world and within us. The result should be something that is, well, 'beautiful,' but beauty isn't merely the pretty, or harmony or equilibrium. Rilke says beauty is the beginning of terror."

--Frank Bidart

Green Garnets and Silver

2007-06-29T11:56:00.000-05:00

I am inordinately proud of finishing this. I've been alternately fiddling with it and ignoring it since last winter. Completion! Huzzah!

The Wonders of Technology

2007-06-29T11:19:00.000-05:00

My first memorable experience with the wonders of technology occurred when I was two and began with a phrase I'd heard at my father's feet, where I often played while he studied at his desk or worked with a soldering iron and circuit boards: "I wonder what would happen if I did this." My father's mantra firmly in mind I sat behind his chair one evening with an admittedly pilfered X-Acto knife in my chubby little hand and considered a wall socket. "I wonder what would happen..." That night I learned one of the hard facts of life: technology can bite.

Forward twelve years. I have a boyfriend, a boyfriend who is three years older than my fourteen-year old self, a quiet boyfriend, it is true, but one who is kind, has a good sense of humor and how loves Star Trek even more than I do. What's more, he's fascinated by computers, and my father just happens to have built one himself from the ground up. The boyfriend comes over to visit. Whether he's visiting me or visiting the computer is a moot point; he's in the house, and my father isn't looking at his watch and asking loudly if "he's" still here, something Dad will do often in the years to come. I have learned another of technology's wonders: it attracts men.

Twenty-five years after this I'm crawling over ceiling joists, running cables and joking with Dad about networking my PC's and Great Scott's Mac, something that we both know makes my husband's hair stand on end. I'm not sure why he doesn't trust us. Just because we've spent some long nights trying to recover significant memory loss on one of my computers or had to wipe hard drives and start over, just because Great Scott sometimes comes home to find one of the PC's lying on its side with wires exposed and me up to my elbows in its innards, just because he knows my father has a penchant for working on electrical lines during storms without turning off the power first, is hardly reason to not trust us. Right? I'm thinking this may be technology's most wondrously utilitarian as well as entertaining value of all: making the husband nervous.

The Poser Snarl

2007-06-24T19:10:00.000-05:00

I am not a poet. I am not even a writer. What I am is a pen and ink and paper addict, a word addict, someone who scribbles in compulsive spurts and who, honestly, is about as happy to write a letter or a list of random words or to copy out a nice bit of someone else's writing as she is to write her own. Maybe more so. Often, most definitely more so.

Lately pen and paper mock me. I pick them up, and they whisper snide things beneath my pen strokes. What I need is to write utter nonsense, equally snide patter that has little literary value but that is a relief to write just for the sake of its smart-alek-y-ness.

So. Give me topics upon which to snarl, topics about which to be sharply witty and ascerbic. I need the excuse.

Friday Quote: On Therapy

2007-06-01T10:38:00.000-05:00

"Therapy is expensive. Popping bubble wrap is free."

--Unknown

Friday Quote: On Indolence

2007-05-25T12:15:00.001-05:00

How beautiful it is to do nothing and then to rest afterward.

--Spanish Proverb

Yesterday we ran errands like our lives depended on it, braving both a factory outlet mall and Stuff-Mart in one fell swoop. We came home exhausted and cranky. Ok, I came home exhausted and cranky. This morning we have done nothing but laze around like beached sea slugs (but without the slime). It has been wonderful.

One moment of excitement did rouse us to a flurry of phone calls. The cast list for "Laura's Memories" came via email this morning. Two of the girls' friends tried out also, so there has been much heating up of the phone lines in mutual congratulations and discussion. Rehearsals begin June 5. We'd better pack in all the sea slug time we can in the next two weeks.

Comics

2007-05-22T22:36:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite cartoons ever.

And a close runner-up.

Journal Excerpt: May 1, 2007: On Choices and Ambivalence

2007-05-22T00:59:00.001-05:00

11:57 p.m.

All day I have been forgetting that this is the first of May. All day time has meant nothing to me save that it touches upon the necessity of picking up the girls after school and eventually feeding them.

I have been playing with fountain pens and inks tonight, foolish ink-stained wretch that I have become. I form letters, loops and backloops, humps and dots and swirls, as if they matter, as if they have meaning there upon the page. "Noodler's Burgundy," I write, and, "Diamine Royal Blue," "Private Reserve Purple Haze" and "Unknown Black." I write them over and over, some with fine nibs, some with medium. Some I write with flex nibs, adding unnecessary flourishes and scrolls until, impatient, I begin to write too quickly, and the flowing lines turn into scrawls and worse-than-scrawls. Afterward there are pages and pages that mean nothing, that say nothing save that I was restless. Nowhere on the pages do the words "conflicted" or "dissatisfied" appear. "Unhappy" is not among the eloquence of looping lines, nor "discouraged" nor "slipping," "dark," "falter" or "lost." Only the objective and the cheerful names of inks: "Apache Sunset," "Purple Martin," "Sapphire Blue,""Claret."

A power line was down across the road in town this morning. I had to back up and turn into a parking lot, then turn around, go back the way I'd come and try a different route to my destination. What if the destination is unknown? What if one finds oneself in a parking lot three times a day? Four? Five? Six? Turning and heading back up the path already traveled? Without direction, without a goal, one loses the way. There is no coming or going save only to keep moving, long for rest as one may well do.

The rain is falling outside, pattering on the walk. It, at least, knows its own direction, single-minded, enviable phenomenon of nature.

"...when we choose
the way by which our only life
is lived, we choose and do not know
what we have chosen, for this
is the heart's choice, not the mind's;
to be true to the heart's one choice
is the long labor of the mind.
He chose, imperfectly, as we must,
the rule of love, and learned
through years of light what darkly
he had chosen: his life, his place,
our place, our lives..."

(For whole poem, click quote and scroll down to Thursday, Aug. 26, 2004.)

Wendell Berry's words strike home both as a sharp blade and as a life preserver that having been thrown, hits the person in need of it and gets his attention. I think of choices I have made, choices I repeat weekly, sometimes daily. I think of how, unknowing, I first chose, how knowingly I continue choosing, a life in which I am so restless, how still that life is full of love and how choosing against it would betray myself far more deeply than I have yet to do, even traitor that I am. "We live the given life and not the planned," writes Berry in another poem, and I believe these words, too, believe that they are not in opposition to the others, believe our hearts in making their own choices, result in given lives, lives far different than anything our minds would have ever planned.

Perhaps it is an exercise in humility and discipline at last, to subjugate the lofty mind to the inexplicable and single-eyed determination of the simple heart. At least there is in it for me this consolation of choice: "...his life, his place,/our place, our lives." It lightens the weight of doubt to consider that my own choice of the rule of love is a choice that has resulted and continues to result in the places and lives of our two daughters and perhaps to some lesser degree, Great Scott's, too. I do not choose perfectly, but I choose. I choose.

What's in YOUR Refrigerator?

2007-05-22T00:21:00.000-05:00

Today was supposed to be The Younger Daughter's party for the gifted program after school, but her teacher called and had to cancel.

Too bad. I had already made something to take.

Guess what greeted Great Scott when he opened the refrigerator upon his arrival home.

Thirteen Recent Moments of Serendipity or Sheer Amusement

2007-05-17T22:03:00.000-05:00

1. Finding a given-up-for-good earring on the school parking lot this evening as we left the girls' spring concert. It was one of my favorite pair, one I lost Wednesday afternoon.

2. Seeing three deer in the field last night, while walking. One leapt out of some trees rather near me and ran, making startled deer noises, across the field and into the woods. The other two studied me at length before running halfway across the field and then stopping to study me some more. They did this so long that I expect they will present their theses at the end of this semester.

3. Finding purple salvia at the local grocery store's parking lot greenhouse.

4. The Older Daughter's deciding to forgo the school reward field trip in order to do something alone with me that day for a treat.

"Are you telling me you'd rather do something with your family than with your friends?" I asked, astounded.

She looked at me as if I was utterly brainless, "Well, yeah!" I am still reeling in befuddled wonder.

5. Sitting at my table with my father soldering phone wires and fastening them to receptacles and talking or not talking, as the mood struck us.

6. A working internet connection.

7. And phone lines that don't buzz in our ears.

8. Walking down to the creek in the rain while we were under a flash flood warning and watching the water tearing past at four times the width of the normal stream bed.

9. Looking out the window during last Friday evening's slumber party to see the younger daughter and her two best friends in the driveway having an all-out mud fight .

10. Hosing them down afterward. In well water.

11. Overhearing the younger daughter tell her father over dinner, "I like 'Red Green', even if it is a show for middle-aged men!"

12. Participating in the napkin fight that erupted as a result of the above comment.

13. Lying on my stomach across a made bed in the middle of the day, watching a steady rain soak the earth outside the window and listening to it on the leaves and grass. Luxury.

Blogging Complications

2007-04-27T10:21:00.000-05:00

My apologies for the lack of blog entries. Several complications have arisen that have prevented posting.

The good news:
None of us here at home are sick anymore. Huzzah to that!

Difficulties:
1. My father had a heart attack.
2. Our phone line is entirely on the fritz. I've had to do all internet things from the library (where I am currently). This will continue until the lines are fixed, so future blog entries will be few and far between until then.
3. The end of the school year means an increase in busyness. Sewing costumes for a school play, getting The Older Daughter to rehearsals and attending the play kept me busy for a week (right on the tail end of Dad's hospital stay, too).
4. Attending The Older Daughter's reading of her winning essay at the local VFW last night after three days of frantic attempts to find said essay. Her teacher finally located a copy, may she live in sunlight forever.

More good news:
Dad is home and a little restless, I think, at being cooped up. He came over yesterday, and we made plans to totally rewire the phone lines in the house for/with me. :) This should be fun.

Sick

2007-04-08T20:45:00.000-05:00

Fever. Chills. Sinus pain. Muscle aches.

I feel so bad my chocolate bunny has not even been licked.

NaPoWriMo efforts on hold.

(On the other hand, lots of great poets have written on drugs. Just think what a bottle of Nyquil might do for one's verse!)

Friday Quote: On Being Exceptional

2007-04-06T22:28:00.000-05:00

"The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely."

---Lorraine Hansberry

Thirteen Things That Drive My Husband Batty

2007-04-05T16:32:00.000-05:00

1. My cold feet against his bare legs in winter.
2. I wear crop pants.
3. I have a neti pot...
4. ...and use it.
5. I prefer to mow the grass in fun designs (think Indian or Celtic knotwork) rather than doing a complete section at a time.
6. If a book is very boring or very interesting, I have no problem with turning to the back (or the middle) and reading there for awhile.
7. I am chronologically challenged (read, oblivious). Dinner gets started when the sun begins setting, a problematic issue in spring and summer.
8. I dislike wearing shoes.
9. I forget to turn off the stove burners and oven...
10. ...and to shut the windows when the heat is on...
11. ...and a couple of times, to pick up the children after school (Children? What children? Whose children?!).
12. James Fenimore Cooper amuses me.
13. I think trees talk.

Rediscoveries--The Writing Process: Time of Day

2007-04-05T01:02:00.001-05:00

Many writers and writing coaches I know or have read say that morning is the best time to write. When I was in college, I used to stay up all night, writing into the wee hours of the morning but didn't get much done in full daylight. Partial cause was, indeed, procrastination and looming deadlines, I'll admit, but I also simply thought better at night; the flow of words and images was stronger and clearer. Maybe it was the silence, my roommates all asleep, outside traffic practically non-existent in our little residential neighborhood. Or maybe it was the assurance of no interruptions, the security of isolation in my basement chamber at a time of day when I knew no one would need me; no one would call.

Nineteen years later, I still write most easily late at night. Yes, maybe procrastination is still a factor (my NaPoWriMo emails have gone out after the midnight deadline two days in a row, now), but even that aside, night is still my favorite time to write. Great Scott! and the girls are asleep, and the house is a small one, so no housework can be done without waking them, thus I'm relieved of the obligation to attend to the practical household matters--the omnipresent bane of any sort of creative concentration I might attempt. No one calls. No distractions present themselves. The night is mine.

I've tried writing in the morning (i.e. Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way recommendation), but there is never enough time, and mornings demand a great deal of concentration as it is. There are two girls to get up and feed, errands for which to prepare, sometimes meetings to attend, and lots and lots and lots of things to remember. There are pressures and insanities in the morning, and while insanity may have inspired a great many writers, this one thinks it's highly overrated as literary motivation goes. Unless one is writing about large, overcooked oatmeal monsters, that is. Mornings are excellent motivation for large, overcooked oatmeal monster works. Angry large, overcooked oatmeal monsters. Angry, large overcooked oatmeal monsters who can't find their car keys and who have 8:30 a.m. appointments with the school speech pathologist. Oh, yeah.

One of the books I've been reading about organization (You! Yes, you! Quit your snickering!) advises its readers to consider what things they do that work well for them already and to build on those things rather than chucking everything out the window and trying to adopt someone else's system, whether that system be for time or environmental organization. Perhaps I need to stop trying to write on someone else's body clock, to stop feeling guilty for my wee hours production. Because, it's working: I'm four for four in rough draft turnout, a totally unheard of thing.

Pondering.

Unexpected Swing

2007-04-03T10:51:00.000-05:00

It could very well be the sunshine, or maybe it's the sound of birdsong wafting through the open windows with the breeze. Whatever it is, I've awakened the last two mornings feeling more alive, lighter, even (brace yourselves) happier than I've been in a long, long time. Despite allergies and a wall of dishes to be washed by hand and a yard that in in desperate need of mowing and three tabards to make for The Older Daughter's school play, I feel wonderful when I open my eyes in the morning!

Know what I think it is? Not writing, no. Having written! Yes, thus far I'm two for two on the poem-a-day effort. (Well, two poems and a bit of horrible doggerel, actually, but who's counting?) I go to bed satisfied. I wake up...happy. The word is alien in my mouth, but sweet. Happy... Happy... Happy...

It's like living in a whole new plane of existence. Nirvana must be like this--only maybe with the dishes washed.

NaPo(RoDra)WriMo

2007-03-30T11:47:00.000-05:00

Write a poem a day for the month of April (National Poetry Month). Madness. Sheer madness.

All right. I'll do it.

I do have terms, though.

I don't write poems in a day. I take--literally--years with each poem before I consider it ready for publication. Therefore, I personally will undertake NaPoRoDraWriMo (National Poetry Rough Draft Writing Month).

Furthermore, I am not crazed about the idea of posting online all the nonsense that will erupt from such a frantic pace. I do, however, recognize my need for accountability. If you desire to subject yourself to a LuPoRoDra (Lucindy Poetry Rough Draft) a day, drop me an email, and I'll fire off a daily group update. I'll be grateful for the impetus to hold to my goal in semi-privacy , and you...well, we all have a little bit of the masochist in us; this should indulge it for you.

(I would be thrilled, BTW, to recieve similar updates form other NaPo(RoDra)WriMo attemptees. There's nothing like thrashing around in the mire of creativity in company.)

Friday Quote: Reality

2007-03-09T00:35:00.000-06:00

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

---Phillip K. Dick