the dollhouse and the landscape artist.
November 3, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
My friend Uke sent me Naomi Wolf’s The Treehouse a few weeks ago. This morning I woke before dawn to visit the bathroom, and returned to bed with stomach roiling and head full of tasks for the coming work day. After half an hour of that, I turned on the light and opened the book, to finish it, tears rolling down my face.
Wolf’s father, a professor and poet, based his life and his teaching on identifying, cultivating and cherishing one’s unique creative purpose. He defined that creative purpose as anything one has a passion for, be it house painting or oil painting, sales or science. As long as one loves it, and one devotes oneself to it.
I haven’t fully identified why yet, but even talking about the book makes me cry.
Last Sunday morning, I picked my mom up from the airport and drove her down to East Aurora, a town of 6,600, about half an hour south of Buffalo. My new apartment, which I plan to move into this coming Sunday, has one room big enough for a bed and loveseat, a rounded doorway into an eat-in kitchen with white cabinets, and a a claw-footed bathtub with flowers painted on it years ago in gold and teal. A little gas stove heats the main room. The windows look out on familial yards bedecked with autumn leaves and plastic slides.
While wiping out the cabinets and sanitizing the bathroom, she and I caught up on the past few weeks. I ran a sponge over the molding with the same care I used to paint small pieces of dollhouse furniture. After contemplating various ways of leaving Buffalo for the past two months, I had finally realized that the only thing I truly needed was my own space. This apartment, in a town with a Main Street that has managed to keep it theater open and showing current movies, represents that autonomy, an escape from Buffalo’s less-than-lovely landscapes, and a symbolic retreat from the pain I’ve caused and experienced romantically this year.
I gravitate to cities to find romance, that rapturous moment in the circle of light a streetlamp casts against the night sky and looming, shadowed skyscrapers. Fairly or not, I do not expect rapturous connection from a town where men in work boots eat their hash browns with ketchup at the local diner. And that’s part of the reason I’m moving there.
Finished, we locked up the dollhouse and drove back toward Buffalo. As the thruway wound into downtown, I described an episode in The Treehouse when Wolf and her father meet with a landscaper to discuss the overgrown property around the nineteenth century house she’s bought in update New York. Instead of taking the conversation for granted as many would when discussing a project with hired help, Wolf’s father catches a stray comment the man makes about the landscape’s potential. He responds as one artist to another, encouraging him to express himself. The next thing they know, the gratified gardener has tamed the scrub, uncovered the land’s beauty, installed a tiny mailbox outside their daughter’s treehouse, handing in a bill at the end that “barely covered his expenses,” according to Wolf.
I choked up relating the story, apologizing to my mom, who assured me it was all right to cry. Ordinarily I agree, but I felt disconcerted as I blinked away my tears. I needed to change lanes and get off the thruway, but instead I was sobbing about a man recognizing another man’s vision… of bushes.
I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a week and a half, struggling with my brother’s snoring from the other side of the room (as he does with mine), the animals hopping on and off my bed, the multitude of projects awaiting me the next morning at work, and the random aspects of a new venture, such as moving to the country, that only occur to someone at two in the morning.
Tomorrow I’ll turn twenty-eight still a virgin to car ownership, but moving to the country means I have to buy one, and soon. I’ve never driven in the snow, much less gone to the DMV to change a title, or bought liability insurance. But just when these sharp fears prick my thoughts late at night, I ask myself, Do you still want to do this? And the answer is, Of course.
The other night Dawn and I stood in a friend’s kitchen, in our Halloween costumes, hiding from the other partygoers and drinking beer from plastic cups. Leaning on the counter, I finally articulated my philosophy about this decision to move to East Aurora. This, I told her, waving my cup and teetering on my heels, is a constructive adventure. As opposed to throwing away my job, shipping my belongings upstate with my brother, and moving across the country, like I did when frustrated last year, I’m keeping my job, and carting my belongings to an apartment only half an hour away. The car is a responsibility that seems progressive, mature, all that practical stuff I rarely think about.
But until I find myself safely ensconced in that dollhouse, with a car of my own in the driveway, and a few trips to work under my belt, I’ll probably continue to lay awake at night. In those wee sma’s, I don’t know what I’ll read now that I’ve finished soaking up Leonard Wolf’s philosophy about creative individuality.
Maybe the next sleepless night I have, I’ll contemplate the tears that came when I described Wolf’s landscape artist. It sounds like a gloomy topic, tears, but like Leonard Wolf, I believe in a universe that helps those who listen to inexplicable tears. I’ve spent much of the past year trying to carve out a new life for myself and giving my mom some emotional support to do the same. And after a year of that, I’m crying on the thruway, envying the recognition another artist has received.
This is not gloomy, this is redemptive, and just in time. I’ll take myself to the dollhouse and make myself a cup of cider, while the leaves fall outside. I’ll have that long overdue talk with my inner landscape artist. She longs for someone to hear her vision of how to turn bracken and scrub into a rolling vista. And we’ll figure something out. We usually do.
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drill to my head.
July 9, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
Recently I dreamed about a generic fantasy dictatorship resembling a fundamentalist Muslim theocracy. In the dream, my cousin and I crept through the headquarters of this dictatorship, dodging passing minions, looking for a friend we were either supposed to meet, or rescue.
Sneaking down a dark, multi-floor stairwell, we found a large children’s birthday party the evil tyrants were holding in the basement of their HQ. My friend was supposed to be here, rescuing her son from brainwashing (probably filling the cake and ice cream with hallucinogenic mind-controlling drugs). But looking around, all I saw was a mutual comrade, who scuttled over to whisper to me that “They” had captured our friend, and this time, she was not going to be let off with a little torture.
I shouldn’t mock the fantasy elements of the dream because humor misleads readers about what’s to come. But, that is how the dream went, changing tone rapidly. One minute I was playing out a classic 1984 scenario in terms the Ninja Turtles would have felt comfortable with, with evil Storm Troopers feeding kids cake. The next, I was watching a man prepare to drill into a woman’s brain.
Her captors removed the scarves and necklaces she wore to cover the gouges and scars from previous torture, holding an old electric drill to her forehead. As I, in the dream, watched this, I knew that she was so angry with herself for failing to rescue her son, she had given in, spiritually, silently agreeing that she deserved to have a handmade lobotomy. Had she resisted within herself, I felt, she would have escaped with “minor” torture as she had in the past.
In the final moment, she had succumbed to their totalitarian morality, and would be a mental vegetable for the rest of her life.
I wish I could say the dream turned me into an activist for women’s rights in Iran or something similar, but all it did that morning, as I woke with a start from the image of the drill poised against her forehead, was shake me out of the obsessive analysis I’d engaged in all weekend regarding my relationship patterns. I went to work that Monday morning strangely invigorated, but while I brainstormed all day about what the drill represented, there were so few clues as to its relevance to my own life that it’s taken me a couple weeks to circle around to an interpretation that “sticks.”
Why share this with you? This dream-woman’s plight represents a part of my life I rarely discuss, because it involves paranoid theories, metaphors about brain-cameras, and what I fear will sound like an excuse about why I don’t write prolifically the way I did in the years immediately after high school. But, since I talk about sex, love and heartache, it seems silly to keep this to myself.
An over-achiever in high school, I graduated with no clue what to do with my life. Two unsuccessful months working in Seattle left me crying in the bathtub of my parent’s house in Spokane, in Eastern Washington. Angry with myself for not knowing how to conquer the world, I also had a deep internal resistance to participating in Spokane life, even turning down a “dream” job as the lighting tech at the theater I had volunteered at in high school. I seemed determine to chain myself to my parents’ house.
Six months later I was finishing the first draft of a kid’s novel when I realized that, torture myself as I might about my inability to find a “real” job, I was truly committed to this novel. To writing. Over the course of the next two years, I wrote and re-wrote that story, then the first draft of an adult novel, which I turned into a screenplay and followed with a second. I did so during incredible internal struggle, as I compared my expectations to achieve in the working world, with my intense, blinding need to write, write, write.
Meanwhile, my parents and brother supported me immensely, but my friends slowly disappeared into their college worlds, and my relatives looked at my writing as a mildly interesting hobby that they hoped I would soon abandon in favor of college or real employment. Sacrificing my social needs, independence and ego gratification in favor of feeding the hungry creative beast within, I had to slowly forge a new kind of self-esteem, one that depended more on how well I heeded myself than how others saw me.
At the time, I loved writing for the same reason I had read avidly since the age of seven: my inner imaginative camera rolled free and in Technicolor. Both my mom and I “saw” what we read or wrote in glorious detail, which made spending time with my imagination both a comfortable and entertaining experience. Writing about a houseful of geeks felt like visiting friends.
This is no longer the case. About the time I was finishing my second screenplay, I became aware that my brain wasn’t working the way I was used to. Always introspective and an active journaler, I was well aware of the ways in which my brain tricked itself, unfurled anxiety, reacted to allergens, low blood sugar, lack of sleep. I knew my head better than most twenty year olds, let’s just say that. But it wasn’t functioning the way I was accustomed: my short term memory was shot, I couldn’t concentrate, my thoughts did not associate creatively in their normal joyous ricochet.
Recognizing this, I remembered the peri-menopausal symptoms my mom had suffered through when we’d moved to Spokane a few years before. Describing my symptoms to her, she exclaimed, “That’s what I thought was menopause!”
My dad, meanwhile, was developing a disturbing habit of staring into space when we spent time together as a family. Instead of discussing the day’s events as we always had over dinner, he would gaze into the middle distance, returning moments later oblivious to the joke we three had just shared. His job was no more stressful than any he’d had in the past, he was finally living with us, and he was earning more than ever before, so his new distance seemed bizarre. His memory and concentration were fading fast as well, but he refused to discuss seeking diagnosis or treatment, then or later.
Researching possible causes for my extremely early-onset Alzheimer’s, I traced everything I and my family members experienced back to hormone issues. I discovered a trove of documented cases of environmental hormone disruptors that caused similar issues as we were experiencing. Alligators (crocodiles?) in Florida growing the wrong sex organs. Men in a European country showing consistently low testosterone levels, theoretically from the quantities of birth control medication in the water supply. Pesticides, plastics and hormones in our food could (and can) all lead to a range of hormone issues, from lowering existing levels, to actually replicating hormones in our body.
Before leaving Spokane, my mom and I developed a variety of theories about what was wrong with the town, some bordering on paranoia. Admittedly, our neighbors had notorious short-term memory issues, and most men we met in their early thirties who had grown up in Spokane had round hips and narrow shoulders, as though whatever we were experiencing had begun or reached its worst point in the early seventies. The boys I had gone to school with showed marked little interest in girls, one classmate recently moved in from Boise remarking with disgust after our senior prom that his friend hadn’t even kissed his date afterwards. Spokane was near a nuclear facility, was surrounding by farms and golf clubs, relied largely on an aquifer for its water supply, and our neighborhood itself was on a hill above three hospitals, several of which burned waste. The garbage facility also burned. There was a variety of possible culprits. But at the time, I alternated between doubting my perceptions and panicking at the concept of outside forces affecting the personalities and health of my family and neighbors.
My dad was so busy acting like a different person that my mom and I took it upon ourselves to scour the Northwest looking for another town we could afford to live in, eventually landing, reluctantly, in a town called Salem, south of Portland. This is where my parents bought the house my mom is trying to sell now. Once settled in Salem, I purchased a mail-order hormone test that reflected high levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that is part of the fight-or-flight response. If left high, cortisol can leave you with a moon-belly and all the mental issues I was dealing with. Your body will eventually stop producing cortisol if its release is triggered for extended periods of time, however, and by the time I walked into a naturopath’s clinic a few months later, I was producing almost no cortisol at all, and my progesterone levels, which I hadn’t tested before, were low as well.
I descended into depression, whether from the situation or from my internal chemistry, I still don’t entirely know. I reached a period where, going to bed, I would wish I wouldn’t wake up. Finally, I signed up for an antidepressant clinical trial, accepted objective suggestions from the psychologist about how to improve my state of mind, moved East, and moved on.
But I hardly wrote for the two years I lived in New Jersey and New York.
Dealing with the effects of hormone imbalance was a largely silent process for me. Always a fast reader, quizzed by my dad at nine to verify I really was absorbing the copies of Encyclopedia Brown and Ramona I kept checking out from the library, with a memory that made it unnecessary for me to do more than read a chapter through once in order to pass a history test, I now found that the words shifted slightly on the page, sentences formed slowly, my inner camera had turned off, and I couldn’t remember what I had walked into the kitchen for by the time I got there. But because it wasn’t a traditional ailment, I kept most of my difficulty to myself, only aware that I had to rely much more on my subconscious and instinct to function in public.
When I told my last boyfriend about this, his response was, “Oh, so that’s why you look to the left when you’re trying to decide whether you want to go into that pub or this one. You’re accessing another part of your brain.” He had already gently remarked, watching me stand in the bakery aisle of the grocery store in Exeter, squeezing a baguette with head cocked, that deciding which bread product to buy for breakfast the next morning seemed to be a major undertaking for me.
And it is. I can only describe it this way: until I was about twenty-one, I lived in the front of my brain. Recent facts were easily accessed in a filofax to my right, my attitudes about those facts to my left. I kept my mental to-do lists right there up front where I could see them. I saw clear images inside the front of my skull when reading or writing. After that point, the front of my brain looked like an abandoned office, and still does. Facts enter, but shuffle off to another room in the back. Opinions emerge from behind my left ear. To do lists are felt in my gut, as I squeeze the bread.
This is why I don’t drive. I literally forget to keep my eyes on the road.
It’s also why my instincts are strong, my compassion is deep, and my ego far smaller than it was as a child. I hated myself for two years because I couldn’t think; I didn’t crawl out of depression until I accepted that emptying the front office had forced me to become a “person” rather than an “achiever.”
But as I re-commit to writing now, I struggle with the fact that it just isn’t fun anymore, for the same reason it takes me months instead of days to read a novel. As surely as a one-legged man wants to run, I want to write but feel… lobotomized.
A sensation my recent dream savagely described. It was the dream’s discussion about giving in to dictatorship, though, and not the torture itself, that made me revisit those years in Spokane. Learning about hormones, developing my theories about what was wrong with my family members individually and perhaps with the town itself, I doubted those theories to such a degree that I exaggerated the entire situation and for a few months experienced panic several nights a week. The people here seemed messed up, but no one had ever talked about something like this happening before, it couldn’t be true, I must be imagining things, and so on. Looking back, I’m sure that panic and doubt exacerbated the stress-hormone issues I was already struggling with, so that my reaction to the problem probably made the problem worse. Deadlier still, I was so angry with myself for devoting myself to a craft that had left me powerless to help myself or my family, I began to hate writing altogether.
Angry with myself for being unable to rescue myself or my family (my child) I gave in to the hormone-damaging situation (torturers) and let it change the way my brain functioned (lobotomy).
Contemplating this last night, I found my thoughts descending to my gut, the space that decides what type of baguette I want for breakfast. As my consciousness stayed at that level, I saw a small mouse standing on a branch, glaring at something through binoculars. The mouse swung on a vine through the a blue sky, landing on another tree. He ducked a flying squirrel that came to a screeching halt mid-air at the sight of an owl, who swept the flying squirrel away. The mouse hopped out of the owl’s sight into a hole in the tree, where a fireman’s pole slid him down past floors of mouse-apartments to the ground…
To mix a few metaphors, my brain may have healed itself from the wounds of that rusty drill, and built itself a new theater… in my tum-tum. How many months or years have I wasted, creatively speaking, waiting for someone to move back into the office upstairs… unaware that the camera was rolling in the basement?
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it's all about the rabbit.
July 7, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
I’d lived in the New York area for a year and a half, shared intimate moments with more than a dozen men, including a fantastic night with a sailor in Hell’s Kitchen during Fleet Week, walked out of bars at three in the morning in the middle of the week high on margaritas, fled a job by getting on a train and leaving the conference without a word to my boss, hid a boyfriend in the basement of the house where I lived as a nanny, and repaired the bumper of my employer’s car without telling her I’d backed it into the retaining wall of her driveway, when I did the most shocking, daring, risky thing. I adopted a rabbit.
I should say, two rabbits. The first rabbit I adopted did not feel particularly daring. A fat Albino, Violet arrived with her owner, looked us over, and sat back in her cage as though content to spend the rest of her life shitting on hay. A week after finding her, though, I read an ad on Craigslist from a woman whose coworker had given her a rabbit for a Christmas present. Meanwhile my girlfriend, who had always loved rabbits, was mock-weeping over my cute li’l white bunny. I decided to chance it and get her one for Christmas. I met the woman from Craigslist at Astor Place, finding her holding a baby black and white rabbit in her purse. “He’ll eat anything! He loves cake and trail mix!” she enthused. “But I’ve been taking him to work with me every day because my roommate got so mad at him for eating his phone charger cord, he hit him hard enough for him to make a squeal.”
With a weakness for black and white animals, creatures who are being fed cake despite non-cake dietary needs, and unwanted Christmas presents beaten by roommates, I had no choice but to take the little guy. She pulled him out of her purse, asked me for thirty dollars, and got on the train. I carried him up to my office, empty in the last afternoon before Christmas Eve, and let this rabbit, who was going to belong to my friend, hop around my computer.
My chest was covered in red marks from his claws for a week after carrying him home on the subway. My delighted friend took him home, only to have her roommate tell her the apartment already had too many animal inhabitants. Jody brought the rabbit back to me and I found myself with one skinny baby rabbit and one fat adult rabbit hissing at each other, diving together with teeth bared, pooping in one another’s cages.
My parents arrived to stay with us for Christmas, emerging from my bedroom the next morning asking, “Did I see a… rabbit?” An owner, at times, of three cats at once, my mom calmly accepted my new pets while staying with me, but immediately began urging me to rehome both of them the minute I described their territorial battles.
“No, Mom,” I said, “I’ll see if I can find a home for Violet first…”
The little black and white bunny would leap across the living room doing a quarter-spin in the air, while the white one often “humphed” at us when we tried to pet her. Moreover, Violet would easily fit into any home, whereas Flip…
Named for his tendency to flip out, Flip ate any cord he could reach, crawled into my dresser drawers from beneath to chew on my clothes, and would shake the bars of his cage between his teeth for hours on end if left there.
My mom continued to suggest I find homes for both rabbits. But Violet went home with a single dad wanting a pet for his son, and Flip stayed. I bought him a little triangular rabbit litter box and set it, full of wood chips, next to Harley’s litter box. He immediately hopped into the cat’s box and used it from then on. We folded up the cage and stashed it under the bed, coating computer cords in plastic. When we moved, we found the TV and VCR cords nearly chewed through. How he’s survived the electrical charges I’m sure he’s exposed himself to without our knowledge is beyond me.
Flip is a high-maintenance pet. It cost three hundred dollars to neuter him, an extra hundred every time I fly with him, plus the months of frustration and mess he caused my brother, a dozen power cords I have spliced or replaced, and countless articles of knitwear, books and furniture legs marked with fierce, quick little bites.
He also hops up to, rather than away from, strange animals, sticks his head under the food as it falls into his bowl, and stretches out on a chair with his legs spread behind him when the house is at rest, a chic black and white canary announcing that all is calm and well in the house. He makes me smile in an unjustifiable way, not by protecting me from mice, purring on my lap, or providing warmth, but by diving into a bag of packing materials to tear them apart, jumping atop a rolled-up mattress pad to survey the room, and yes, biting the toes of lovers.
I knew nothing about rabbit care, feeding or manners when I adopted him. My only justification for taking on the responsibility of a strange pet was the desire I’d secretly nursed since petting my friend’s lop eared pets as a nine year old. My mom kept us in cats, who was I to insist, as a child, on an animal that required a cage and couldn’t be trusted to wander the house unsupervised?
Adopting Flip taught me that I still had a lot to learn about who I was and what I wanted. Among other things, I learned I was a person who took great pleasure traveling with a bunny as companion, a person who didn’t mind a few holes in my clothes or the occasional errant bathroom mess, and most importantly, a person who had wanted a rabbit for eighteen years without doing anything about it. Always encouraging the wild fantasies of others, I pay so little heed to the quiet wishes of my own heart. This rabbit taught me I deserved happiness, and in a way, triggered my going to Europe, laughing with toddlers on a trampoline, choosing a peaceful job in Buffalo over a stressful one in New York, and last week, buying myself a baby pink laptop that gave me so much pleasure just to hold, I finally sat down with it alone in my living room last night and put to paper the beginning of a story I had tried telling, with far less success, a bajillion times before.
He doesn’t even greet me when I walk in from work, yet I love him to bits. Maybe he taught me a little bit more about that “L” word, too.
I’m just suggesting that, next time you’re down, you close your eyes and think back to when you were nine. What did you want, then? What’s stopping you from giving it to yourself today?
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deep nights and calm days.
May 20, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
I’m sleeping deeply, and long, waking without identity or place, gathering elements of my life from the ceiling over my bed as my eyes blink open. My brother, at work, my mom, in the living room, my friends, in New York and Sydney, my family, in Seattle, my dad, in Portland, my rabbit, in the closet.
My mom leaves for Seattle in a week; my brother will meet her in Portland a week later. His belongings and cat are currently under our dad’s care; he’s working a temporary job that will probably not allow him to support my mom. The family renting their house in Salem moves out in a week as well; it is now up for sale for perhaps the fourth time in three years. If it sells, my mom could build a home for herself that does not hold associations of her thirty years as a housewife married to my dad. Until it sells, she’s not sure how she’ll cover the house payment and her own expenses.
I’m grateful her sisters and parents will be in Seattle to offer emotional support. I’m jealous she gets to attend my cousin’s baby’s first birthday party at the end of May- happy birthday, Luke, we love your smiling monkey face. I can’t wait to see you toddling around.
Ironically, I’ll be in Suckallo alone for most of June. The coming weeks will cast light on a great many shadowed possibilities: whether my mom and brother will want to (or have to) stay in the Northwest, whether I should follow them or take an opportunity in New York (more on that later), whether aliens will really land on my roof as I keep expecting them too.
I walk to work drinking tea and listening to Brandi Carlisle as the breeze ruffles the leaves overhead; I walk home to talk to my mom, watch a movie or play Soul Caliber with my brother. We drink too much, the cat rolls on the carpet; the rabbit stretches out in his pile of hay; the sun shines more than it did last month.
In my dreams I share a tempting moment with a man, but can’t act on my desires because I still want Marcus. In waking life, I feel like six months have passed since he and I were together, and yet I often have to remind myself that I’m free to admire or reach out to anyone else. The other day I described to my friend José the care packages of emotional energy I spent five months sending back to England; clearly I have yet to collect them all again.
I admit that a year after saying goodbye to my last full time job, I write no more, and perhaps less, than I did then. I certainly dread sitting down at the keyboard as much now as I did. I used to blame that dread on the isolation writing imposed, on my doubt that the work would find an audience, on a lack of self-esteem, but I find it more and more difficult to care why I don’t want to transfer words to paper. I’ve circled this problem for years; regardless of causes, I hate writing.
Present blogs excluded.
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running wildly after beauty.
May 16, 2009 by admin, under Fiction, Journal.
I love the spunky artwork printed on Threadless tees. Before moving to the East Coast, I collected probably a hundred rejection letters for various short story, novel and screenplay submissions to editors, agents and producers. This past winter I found I had recovered sufficiently from four years of rejection, to submit my creative output to creative forums once again. I’ve used Threadless as a practice ground, just submitting my third design.
Threadless puts accepted designs up for one week’s voting by its online community, of which you could be one. The shirt is ranked one a one-to-five scale by several hundred people, and if the score is high enough, Threadless prints it on a t-shirt and sells it. I felt my latest design had a clearer message and an “artier” style than my first two, and although I knew it wouldn’t get printed, I was sure it would receive a higher score. Instead, it scored lower than my earlier two.
I didn’t mind failing, but was dismayed and confused by not progressing. Instead of toying with ideas for new submissions, or ways I could improve this design, I looked for reasons and meaning in the score. How could this be? Surely the third try is always better than the first?
Unpacking boxes when we first moved to Anchorage in the mid-nineties, my mom found an old unused diary she’d had for probably twenty years. She handed it to me, a magpie for all blank paper. I felt this plain gray-greenish book, hoarded for so long by my mom, deserved special consideration, to finally be used. I had already tried keeping a traditional diary of daily events and found I usually stopped after the third sitting, but what if I recorded my feelings in this book instead? All the messy ideas I couldn’t clearly express could go in here, safe and undisturbed, until I had sorted them out well enough to vocalize.
That journal was my therapist, introducing me to myself. I attribute to it my self-awareness and sanity. I fill journals, consistently, productively and without frustration, because I have no expectations for their content, have no inner critic, live in a state of total acceptance of my lowest, messiest, most selfish, fearful, and weak moments. Giving myself this internal freedom allows me to express myself externally that much more freely as well.
I’ve often wondered why I’m not as productive creatively as I am filling those journals, and today I think I know why.
I love learning new media. I’m not afraid to switch from novels to screenplays, watercolor painting to digital. For a few happy weeks or months, I teach myself process and experiment with possibility. But I only allow myself a brief period to learn, before I slam the grade book closed, kick everyone out of class, and shut down the school. Starting today, this story or this picture must be professional, lovable, able.
At which point I freeze, unable to create to my own expectations. I can’t draw a portrait in pencil well enough to earn a living at it, today, so I put the pencils away and buy tubes of acrylic paints.
It’s only a matter of time before I decide I’ve failed to reach credibility as a digital artist and stop submitting designs to Threadless, too, even though most folks who have had designs printed submitted a dozen or more before finally winning.
Enjoying Writing Down the Bones today, a treasure of creativity and Zen (my two favorite disciplines) by Natalie Goldberg, I paused at the final paragraph of an essay about journal-keeping:
“… It is good to know about our terrible selves, not laud or criticize them, just acknowledge them. Then, out of this knowledge, we are better equipped to make a choice for beauty, kind consideration, and clear truth. We make this choice with our feet firmly on the ground. We are not running wildly after beauty with fear at our backs.”
I read and re-read that last sentence, recognizing myself, running from paint to pencil, short story to screenplay, fear of my own inadequacy at my back.
Ironically, the only creative project that both meets my own standards and has a bit of an audience, is this blog. I can only write this because I journaled for years, without concern for standards or audience. I didn’t care if I improved or not. Unconcerned with results, I practiced consistently, and time is the only investment we can make in improvement.
Which leads to explaining the experiment I’m about to begin on this website. I’ve changed all my categories to tags, and now have only two categories: Fiction and Journal. Journal will include all my customary blog entries, while Fiction will include creative writing posts. I’m writing fiction here to force myself to share my work more often, and to force myself to write more often. These stories will be short, experimental, and probably pretty crappy. But I will always appreciate any feedback, positive or negative, and your indulgence as I play with themes, styles and genres. I still have no idea who I am as a creative writer, and I hope you’ll help me find out… or at least not throw too many rotten tomatoes.
(PS I still plan to self-publish the Blook, but not until July, so that it neatly spans the first twelve months of Palmer’s Blog.)
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consequences: the greatest hits.
April 11, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
Big sisters are experts on consequences. Watching our younger siblings from the perspective of old age, we observe at three, four, five, exactly what the consequence of our little brother jumping up and down on one’s bed with a plastic sword is. Our favorite fairy painting, bent and lying under broken glass on the carpet, that’s what.
My consequential thinking is like a jackhammer. “I could go for walk- but then I might get low blood sugar because I haven’t eaten in hours- or I might waste time I should use to work on illustrations instead- or it might not really be as nice outside as it looks- or- or- or.” One of my English teachers introduced a phrase during a lecture on Emerson and Thoreau and threw it at us for the rest of the year whenever we looked particularly dumbstruck by his assignment or question. “Paralysis by analysis! Parallysis by anallysis.”
I could go for a walk, but it might break my fairy painting and Mommy will yell at me and my stoopid little brother will cackle with delight and start playing with an even bigger plastic sword.
This insanity cripples my creativity. I’ve spent years writing within existing genres and models- the Sandra Bullock romantic comedy, the comic anthropomorphic young adult novel- because I knew the consequences others had experienced following those forms. Success! Publication! Production! Names in print! Money!
But I don’t wear the boots Lindsay Lohan’s sporting on the cover of People, I don’t hit the theaters to ooo and awe over Spielberg’s latest blockbuster, I don’t do yoga because it’s trendy. Not only do I not want to fit within existing genres in my ordinary life, I can’t- I couldn’t “pair casual pieces with touches of luxe,” or understand Oprah’s latest book club offering if my life depended on it. It’s much easier, and safer for the world at large, if I stick to what I can do, and usually, that’s dress like Gonzo, watch bad sci-fi, and fling myself into the downward facing dog even when everyone else has moved onto pilates.
I get dressed in the morning calmly accepting the possibility I may be cold, overdressed, or discover myself the only person in the room wearing black with brown. If I approached my closet the way I approach my laptop, I’d spend my days naked.
Considering that I’ve written little besides blogs since returning from England, it may surprise you to learn that ideas for short stories, nonfiction and novels flit through my head all day long, every single day. Sure, probably very few warrant much attention, but I never give them any attention. I don’t sit down to write them because I immediately, and up until very recently, subconsciously, followed every concept with consequential thinking.
Curled up in bed one night, I think how fun it would be to write PDF zines about the silly little things I love: dollhouses, fonts, comics, small furry animals. “But what good would that do?” I think immediately after. “No one will read it.”
“A spiral bound journal full of exercises to explore your possible past lives!” Inspiration says. Consequences says, “Then I’d have to write nonfiction and SARK-y books forever!”
“Turn your shared experience with your mom all winter into an article to submit to a magazine!” Inspiration cries. Consequences: “I couldn’t make it funny enough.”
I unwittingly shoot ideas down so fast I hardly have time to notice they exist. Uke and I have joked about the most hilarious one: fearing that if you write a novel about deer, it’s naturally going to be published, hit the bestseller lists, and people will expect you to write about deer for the rest of your life. This from two women most of the world has never heard of. I’d put that one at the top of a “10 Greatest Hits of Consequential Thinking” playlist. Here are the other nine:
- No one will ever publish a novel about deer.
- If you had a doctorate in deerology, maybe…
- You can’t write dialogue well enough to capture a deer’s “voice.”
- In a world of mass murders, terrorism and rampant SUV-usage, do deer matter?
- No one’s ever written a free-association novel from a doe’s first-person semi-omniscient perspective before.
- People will laugh at you for writing about deer.
- Deer will be offended or hurt by your descriptions of them.
- What can you say Bambi didn’t fifty years ago?
- If that laundry doesn’t get washed tonight, you’ll have absolutely nothing to wear tomorrow.
I do have one advantage over Consequences; I know its Achilles heel. Consequences survives not only because we agree that people might laugh at our deer novel, but also because we assume we would die if people laughed at our deer novel. We assume we can’t survive the consequences, so we can’t afford to take the risk.
I’m pretty sure I’d rather be laughed at, stick one more unpublished manuscript under my bed, or fight the public’s demand for more deer novels, than live one more goddamn day as a writer who doesn’t write. Consequences doesn’t know this, but that is my worst fear… and I’m already living it.
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Palmer's Blog: the Book!
March 27, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
My grandparents do not believe in the internet. They do believe that a) stalkers can leech all your personal financial information from your computer by parking outside your house while you’re online, b) you have to be in the country of your desired website in order to find it, and c) life without Wikipedia, IMDB and Craigslist is worth living.
Imagine my horror when my mom recently related how “wistful” my grandma had sounded when she mentioned that she couldn’t read my blogs because she wasn’t online. No writer can bear missing a reader simply for lack of a few cables!
Thanks to Blurb, I have it within my semi-omnipotent power to print any number of 100-150 page, bookstore-quality, paperback anthologies of the (relevant) palmersblog.com entries of the past eight months. Considering that those eight months have carried me to two new countries, several US states, into the homes of countless strangers, the arms of a wonderful man, and through the turbulent family crisis that is parental separation, “relevant” also means “juicy!” and “action-packed!”
I would, of course, omit entries about graphic design, software, and other non-plot-forwarding topics.
Currently, I’ll be printing two of these puppies to send to my grandparents and another dear friend with limited web access. But it occurred to me that folks may have a variety of reasons for enjoying an ink and paper version of this blog, and, that every book I print in the first batch lowers the price. For instance, if eight more people sign up, I could ship each of you a copy for $10 out the door.
I’ll probably be bugging a few of you individually about this ego-fest of mine, but for now, please feel free to leave a comment if you’re interested in owning the Palmer’s Blogbook.
Palmer’s Blook?
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growing bigger by thinking smallerly.
March 14, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
When I graduated from high school I wrote a short story about two cats who got jobs to support their flakey owner. My mom liked the story. I had nothing better to do. I kept writing. I researched kid’s picture books and discovered my story was too long, yet too short for a young adult audience. I wrote some more. I lost the story when my computer crashed, re-wrote it from memory and a partial hard copy, and wrote yet more. This was my first novel, somewhere between 45-50,000 words, aimed at the 10-13 year old market. Definitely derivative from my favorite read as a kid, James Howe’s Bunnicula books.
After that, I attempted an adult novel that evolved into a much more entertaining screenplay, a format I used to tell stories for two or three more years.
My goal was to sell a novel or screenplay, earn a fortune, and move out of my family’s house with that income. Not to sell a short story or two, write a play for the theater I’d volunteered at in high school, win the fiction contest at the local paper, or do a reading during an open mic night at the coffee shop downtown. Those possibilities didn’t even occur to me until just now as I wrote this, seven years later. Nothing local mattered, it was “small time,” “beneath me,” “lame” to attract the interest of anyone who lived in my town. I was living in the bedroom I’d used in high school, had no friends left in town, no money, and knew no one in the movie or publishing industries, but I was going to write Sandra Bullock’s next hit or be on Oprah before I turned 25.
I felt that only a major publisher or producer could validate my talents. Looking back, I marvel at my stupidity. An editor in a corner office on the twelfth floor may decide to publish a novel, but only so that my fifth grade science teacher, the woman who sat next to me on the bus, and the kids sitting on a bench at the park can read it. If they don’t, the book doesn’t sell, and the author cries. At least, I would. I’m only writing so that someone will read me. So why the hell do I care so much about the big time when I haven’t even entertained the small time?
I remember standing as a kid at the foot of my grandparent’s driveway with three of my female cousins, talking about what we wanted from our adult lives: where we’d live, how many kids we’d have, what our first car would be. “What do you want to do?” the eldest asked me, and my eleven year old self said without hesitating, “Be a writer.” It was one of my earliest moments of self-definition, knowing it so clearly and feeling it so true once it had been said out loud.
But I’ve been trying to fly straight to the mountain on paper wings. Only one of those three cousins have ever read a story I’ve written. I can’t write a screenplay for the next Sandra Bullock if I can’t even write a short story a friend finds compelling enough to pass on to another friend. A first draft of a novel a family member can’t help but read through the night. Characters I want to return to, day after day, until their tale is finished.
I used to take pride in, and draw energy from tackling the crowds, pace and scale of New York, because I believed in the saying, “If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere.” But when it comes to writing, my eleven year old self is straddling her bike in her grandparent’s driveway, wondering what the hell I was thinking. If my stories can’t win a contest in a paper in a small town like Spokane or Buffalo, or survive a reading of friends, or flourish in the eyes of loved ones…
If they can’t make it here, they can’t make it anywhere.
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random old goodies.
February 4, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
I just re-encountered this PDF, The ReBlogger & McDoodle, now about one year old, and containing essays that are even older. It’s kind of a fun read, and I always like to showcase my brother’s artwork, but it’s also a good reminder of why PDF’s are not just for executives and writers of instruction manuals. We creative folk should consider their potential as a way to share our work with others.
It’s not a tiny file at 2.8mb, but it can be linked to and emailed as easily as a photo. You can make it as long as you want, whatever size you like, use as many colors as you like, link to websites. People can print them out if they want to, but you can also limit their ability to print, copy and save the content, making them extremely safe.
I also think, as a digital zine, it relates to the entry I wrote a few days ago on wiki-mess-art. Although it could be messier: my aim at the time was to take advantage of cheap stock photos and free fonts to make something semi-professional. My goal might be different the next time I make one.
All illustrations are my brother Ian’s.
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wiki thinking, or, feminism isn't feminine enough yet.
February 2, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
Uke emailed me four scanned pages from one of SARK’s books yesterday. I promptly became obsessed with the colors, handwritten text, and use of the words “juicy” and “succulent.” From what I can tell so far, SARK wants all of us to enjoy life and live our dreams, even if we have to break out the felt tipped markers and write our to-do lists on the cat in order to get things done. And, while I take issue with the inconsistent quality of her penmanship, I approve of the message.
I also just like any creative endeavor that informs and entertains while maintaining a handmade warmth.
My imagination began to race. “What if,” I wrote Uke, “Years from now, cultural historians will point to the late twentieth century as a time when women started creating the kind of decorated, illustrated, visual books that matched the way women think, instead of being strictly ‘words only’ the way ‘grown up books’ are ‘supposed’ to be?”
Not only was I obsessed with all the pretty colors in SARK’s work, I was obsessed with why, exactly, adult books aren’t always supplemented by drawings, charts, lists, collages… Is it possible or even necessary to convey a story completely without a single doodle or co-thought stuck somewhere in the margin? Yes, Dickens and Austen managed to tell beautiful tales without breaking out the markers, but if we expanded the novel’s form to include images and non-linear elements, could we tell richer, more complex, real, “messy” stories?
The thought process came a day after Marcus and I had chatted about wikis and my fantasy to some day write a novel on one. A completely non-linear story. I love wikis, I told him, and he remarked that that was how I seemed to think.
For those readers who aren’t familiar with the form, wikis are websites that can be edited and added to “on the fly.” If this blog was a wiki, I would write a link called muppets which would automatically generate a new page, titled Muppets, where I could continue writing about muppets. I could then write a new link on that page titled Miss Piggy, a Miss Piggy page would be created where I could write about her, and so on. The links are right there in the text and you never have to touch the source code. My grandma could use a wiki.
But I had merely told Marcus I liked wikis, not that I was a wiki. So I initially wanted to respond to his remark with a huffy, “Hey! I’m very linear! And like any other rational, intelligent person, I write books using only words!”
Instead, I decided to be grateful I’m loved by someone who already recognizes my mental modus operandi almost better than I do.
In most circles, however, wikis and handwritten books are not considered intelligent or lasting works. Lasting works are results-oriented, sequential, and logical, and each form of self-expression adheres to its own orderly limitations. Novels use words, movies use images, resumes use bulleted lists, “high fashion” and “fine art” are separated from “street clothes” and “pop art.” Even the most fictional of tales is expected to follow a plot, with no element included unless it emphasizes the original point or theme. A novel about soldiers at war does not also star a humorous anthropomorphic bird. Writers do not include their interview transcripts or handwritten notes, except perhaps years later, in a separate volume, when they’re really famous.
Lasting works make linear arguments, with no contradictory evidence, mess, celebration of process, or diversion from the straight line.
Lasting works do not include collages.
I take issue with this endemic and often unquestioned worship of linear thinking, however, because most women don’t think in straight lines. We don’t hold one thought’s hand and walk it all the way to the school, we let all our thoughts run to the school on their own different routes and expect them to damn well get to class on time. We bake, clean the microwave and talk to a friend on the phone at the same time. We go shopping for a red shirt but keep an eye out for anything else interesting. We consider motives, emotions and context in addition to actions.
While men view taxonomy and organization as tools to control or eradicate chaos, women view them as tools to aid chaos. It’s the only way we’re able to raise messy, noisy, weepy, hungry little children while maintaining our sanity and re-painting the living room at the same time.
We do not quantify until we have to. We turn left at the red house with the blue mailbox, not left on State Street. We remember “We moved into our first house the year our firstborn turned six,” not, “We moved into our new house in 1987.”
This type of thinking branches off in several directions at once, the results are not always easy to classify or count, and sometimes, the results don’t really matter to us at all. We get teased about being illogical, scatterbrained, slow-thinking, unfocused, but those jokes can smack of a nineteenth century white male joking about the “ignorance of primitive cultures.” We think differently, not less intelligently. We still find the post office, pay the bills, discover medical cures, choreograph masterworks and debate successfully. We just prep differently. We wiki.
Imagine what might happen if educators and society in general encouraged wiki-thinking instead of forcing everyone to learn, research and perform in a linear way.
And imagine what might happen if we, as women, not only asserted our right to think that way, but to synthesize disciplines, create original forms, and up-end systems in whatever way suits our purpose. Illustrated novels, political debates spent listening instead of talking, the musical Olympics, whatever. I think we’re doing well in terms of proving women can do anything men can do. Now let’s do what we want to do, and let the guys see if they can keep up.
Let’s wiki.
