saturday morning, as the wind finally settles

When I used to write letters, I would stop at six full pages of script, fearing I might overwhelm the person to whom I was writing, and of course I was right to fear. I go long, often, when I describe. When friends wrote me back, I would carry letters around in my pocket, reading and rereading, feeling the companionship of that particular friend, that hand, writing on that page, to me. I miss those days. No post online is the equal. But I try anyway.

In effort not to exhaust you, let me sketch a catch-up list:

• Google my full name and you should find my new website.

• Moved to a rental house on The Great Marsh in Ipswich, last year. Unless something marvelous comes along, we will live here for the next five years.

• Surprisingly at home at Christ Church. I am done teaching church school—done for a long time, though I do think The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd might have saved my life in my time at our beloved St. Mary’s.  

• Kids: I love parenting teenagers. They still love us so openly, which is a gift. However, I’m posting less public writing about them, as their need for privacy grows.

• Scott is well and busy, enjoying sixteen years of teaching junior high students. Happily distracted by baseball season. He is also writing for the alumni magazine of his school, and he’s good!  

•  Money is an ongoing question, while parenting, teaching part-time, and writing. While this question gnaws at me, this seems like this is the moment in which we live. So many people are wrestling with mortgages, income, student debt. I hope I can write into this, in a way that other people can embrace. 

• I love teaching my two sections of incoming students each fall semester. I felt I was at my best, as an educator, last fall.

• Temped full-time in the editing department at a gorgeous corporate publishing headquarters in January, February and March—great company, but the work itself was so dispiriting. (For the last three weeks, I inched away at a 500,000 item spreadsheet of date formats that needed corrected. Hell. Just hell.) We were glad for the money.

I am writing, revising, working on stuff for publication, thinking about the future and thinking about loving this place where we live. I need to put in a garden, soon. I need to unpack from last week’s trip. I need to be a more disciplined lover of God, but God is very patient, very present with me. In six weeks, kids will be out of school for the summer. I am applying for a summer school teaching job, and they are applying to be volunteers at a day camp for four weeks.

This is the point in the letter when I would become bored with the natter of talking about myself. Will it surprise you if I say I’m taking a notebook outside to write by hand, now? Saturday morning, and the wind has kept me awake for two nights, whistling through windows, shaking the walls. Kids are sleeping late, because they need to. Coffee and sunlight and a notebook, my friends. And maybe a novel, too? So much good in the world.

Clothesline window

the clothesline over my desk

8:20 a.m. 

For my 50^th birthday, I asked for the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing. Now I am home and back at my writing desk, distracted by the thank you notes I hope to write, blissfully interrupted by memories of good conversations with people who love books, people who write books.   

I return freshly determined to submit my stories for publication in literary journals. One of the challenges to story submission: it’s important to know the publication, to see a sense of “fit” between the story and the journal. And the differences between journals are subtle. I invested a few hours at the festival visiting booths sponsored by literary journals, leafing through pages, trying to get a sense of each publication. 

I could aim my work to smaller publications with more likelihood of success. Or I could aim for exquisite journals, where my story will be added to the slush-pile of unsolicited work, where the submission guidelines say I should not expect to hear from the magazine for six months or longer.

I need a visual record of what I’m doing, where I’m sending stories. I could easily spend a day crafting a lovely bulletin board, the dream board in my imagination. But the need to get started is far more urgent. I rush through the morning house, ignoring the mess and disorganization. (Why are the pliers in the pencil jar by the phone? Is there an unpaid bill hidden in this stash of old mail? Don’t look in the frig, don’t look in the frig, don’t.) 

I return to my writing desk with a length of yarn and two pushpins I wrenched from the wall. I make a clothesline across my window. I write the name of a story on a 3 x 5 card, along with the name of a journal, and secure it with a clothespin—the clothespin still bearing the crayon marks from some long ago rainy day project. Two cards pinned. Now I must riffle through more story files for two more stories that are ready for final edits. My goal is to submit four stories by Friday morning, though some submissions require hard copies, envelopes, post office visits, and I am not good with the US Mail.

11 a.m. 

Now eating my forgotten breakfast of rice with golden raisins and cinnamon, now wishing for another cup of coffee. I have a clothesline. Cards are pinned to it.

Story 1 I will send the hard copy without looking at it, because I remember it as perfect.

Story 2, Smoke Rings, begins with two boring sentences. Printing a hard copy so I can do some final edits. Still wondering which publication.

Leafing through files for stories 3 and 4, and I found a gem! Already published on Catapult magazine’s site, An Un-Quiet Existence. If you go look at it, look at the current edition of Catapult, as well. 

Now I’m off to look for more unpublished stories in my files. 

 

happy 2012!

I shall return!

I enjoyed teaching this fall, then enjoyed Christmas break with kids. Much to talk about.

Soon.

Denise

one last note from Eureka Springs

I ran out of coffee beans two days ago when I invited Chere for a lunch of mushroom/cheddar omelettes, in the culinary suite at DairyHollow. Her suite has a practical electric stove, whereas my KitchenAid Dream Kitchen has a six-burner gas stove, pans, and everything a cook could wish for. So we cooked and brewed coffee, and sat in the wicker chairs talking—like it was my fabulous living room.

So today, I found some old ground coffee in the canister above the KitchenAid coffee maker, and it will do. Made a big bowl of oatmeal as my final “hurrah” breakfast (hours ago) and now I’m cleaning up the fresh cherries and blueberries. In a few minutes, I will walk to the Grotto Spring down the road, and the lovely silence of morning will be broken. When I return, I must clean and pack and look at the instructions for checkout and leaving. I will need to go downstairs to the office and talk with people. I’m surprised how much I long to keep this silence for just a few hours more, even after eight very quiet days.

What this writing residency has given me is just that: quiet, for reading and writing and hearing myself think, and a quieting of the soul. I’ve written dozens of pages, and I’ve revisited some work from the past few years. I’ve enjoyed research about cooking writers MFK Fisher and Robert Farrar Capon—I hoped to come away with a draft of a book about these two, but I’ve only ever written much about me and my life, so I’m still learning how to approach a long project about other people’s lives and work. I’m certain this is a problem I WILL solve, over time, and meanwhile I’ve been nurturing my love of the two books I’m comparing.

(I picked up a biography of Fisher at the library, and it told me some of the details I wanted to know about her life, but these details were stuffed deep into a veritable encyclopedia of facts and family maps and awkward reading. Okay, I invested a day and a half in that fat book, to find out three or four important things, but I’m saying it was worthwhile research.)  

Some part of me wishes I could hold up a finished manuscript to show for this stretch of days, but the finishing will come later. This has been a time of renewal, a reminder of my calling to write. It’s been a rest, a Sabbath from my other kinds of work. A Sabbath from people needing me. Whatever I’ve accomplished or not-accomplished, I will return home restored by this quiet, clean temporary home, and restored by this vibrant little city in the hills.

I could tell you more about how much I love this town, but I’d better walk before the day heats up, and I’d better pack, so I can relax, read and write a bit more this afternoon.

Thanks for sticking with me, my friends. I will be far from the Ozark hills when next I write.

the long ride from Sleepytown

My father could lift me like a feather, with his whisper, “go back to Sleepytown” lulling me. I mumbled about my teddy. “Your mother has it in the car.” In the car, then. Vacation, worth a smile before dozing.

My bunk was the back window of the sedan in a nest of blankets, my back against the glass, my teddy shading my eyes from the streetlamp. Next he would lay my older brother Burl stretched along the bench seat, already dosed with Dramamine and gone to the world. My younger brother David fit in another nest of blankets in one well beneath the backseat, with his knees propped up over the hump. When my parents settled into the front, David would feel the rumble of the engine through him, and he wouldn’t hear another thing.

And I could choose, as we left our driveway in the true Sleepytown of Farmland, Indiana. I could choose a delicious sleep, with the sounds of late night radio drifting in and out, or I could choose to concentrate hard on my parents’ quiet conversation—I was an excellent spy. Or I could watch the night stars once we were away from the lights of town. Every option seemed almost too good to be true, in the romance of vacation driving.

The romance would break when the sun began to heat the car, our limbs unable to stretch. By then we would be miles away from our humdrum lives, navigating by the spiral bound atlas, looking for a breakfast diner. The first day’s goal: a motel in Effingham, Illinois. We would arrive too early to check in, but my father could park in a shady spot and sleep while my mother took us to the swimming pool. By the time my father hauled our suitcases in, we’d be sunburned and water-logged and ready for a nap in air-conditioning.

On some years, day 2 included a tour of the St. Louis Arch, which I loved. On some other years I watched the Arch from the distant interstate, and I pined to return to its heights. Either way, we were bound for the Missouri/Arkansas border, to visit my Grandpa Ruby and Grandma Mae, in a place even hotter than Indiana in summer, and we needed to arrive by the end of day 2, so we could avoid more hotel cost.