Stained

I want a cylindrical room made of factory glass, the door a piece of carved mahogany salvaged from the She-Wolf, Lord's old boat, the one that is sitting on a trailer in the backyard, the hitch supported by a stack of cinderblocks. Against the cool glass, set into block, the mahogany will seem rustic, warm to the touch. I will rub my hand against it before I enter the room, think of the times we went waterskiing or just bobbed around in the muddy waters of the Elk, my wet ass spreading a dark stain on the boat seat.

Even then that boat was a piece of shit. Lord wasn’t paying attention to it. He let it sit in the water all winter long. The varnish wore off, the gleam melted away. Every year he bought cans of teak oil, stacked them in the shed, and let them sit. Barnacles coated the She-Wolf's hull. They were rough against my hand, cut into my feet as I pushed against the boat into the heavy water.

So, the room. It is lit from within, white light/white heat. Even the ceiling is made of factory glass. The floor, too. It is empty. I will go inside, lock the door, and remove my clothes. I will press myself up against the glass. See if you can tell me what you are looking at, my blurry image refracted in each square. I will light a cigarette, will snuff it out on the rounded wall, again and again. You will see flesh, the death of ember, the end of the spark.

Lord is dead now, too, washed away, though not in the way you would expect. It had nothing to do with water. It was emotion. The dike broke, his water wings deflated, a big hole opened in his roof and the house filled with rain. You want me to tell you about it, to be more direct, but I won’t. I have his boat and my plan. Every weekend I sand down the mahogany, try to remove the stains, think about my cylindrical factory glass room. I picture Lord on the other side, horn-rims slipping off his nose, one hand marking his place in the book. I mystify him and he likes that.

Image by Vinje.

Tags: Round Robin, boats, writing prompt, sick kid, writing, existential angst

Here are the things I don't write about here:

My son's colds and coughs

Chores, like vacuuming up the fur, dust, and sand that accumulate pretty quickly in a house with three cats, a dog, and three humans

The laborious process of rewriting my novel (well, I may mention this in passing, but not in great detail, since that would send all of you to snoreland, but it is indeed laborious, like work-on-the same-three-paragraphs-for-six-or-seven-hours laborious)

The difficulty of writing something that is long-term, of continuing through it without the instant feedback of blogging

Cooking dinner whether I want to or not

How we're figuring out where the kid will go to school for kindergarten in the fall

Tips and tricks for keeping one's sanity after weeks of rain and afternoons inside with an energetic four-year-old

Coping mechanisms I use to see us through one of Mr. T's business trips

My political views

Natural disasters

The pros and cons of having another child

The perhaps impossibility of having another child

My anxieties about the quality of my writing and the wisdom of my current career choice

RIght now I'm stuck smack dab in the slog and drag of the humdrum. The novel is taking precedence over the blog and I don't feel like I have enough time to really shine up any of my short pieces of fiction for this space. I'm not sure that many people want to read the fiction anyway. It seems that most readers are interested in my personal pieces, either angst from the past or my depressive musings on current life. Not that my current stuff is all darkness, exactly, but I think my views are cloudier than the average person's, cloudy with a little patch of blue sky that expands as I examine it, which can make the whole process hopeful, I suppose, in a Jennifer Trinkle sort of way.

It feels as if my mind is preoccupied, that it is working on something. I just need a few hours with a keyboard to find out what it is. But who has the time? I'd rather work on the novel or maybe that just feels like the right thing to do right now, a necessity, a way to lose myself in words and justify my existence.

So I'm not sure what to put in this space at the moment, but I know my mind will crack open again and offer itself up for material. In the meantime, I may be posting more short writing prompts, or perhaps reposting some of the oldies but goodies. We'll see.

Image: Everyday me, as recorded by my computer.

Tags: blogging, writing, preoccupation, NaNoWriMo, preschooler, sick kid, school, National Novel Writing Month

But that isn't the point of this post. I want to apologize for being an absent presence in the blogging world. I haven't been up to visiting or commenting on blogs. Updating this one has become increasingly time-consuming. Because of the software I use, every time I have a new post I must export the entire blog and then upload it onto a server, a process that take about half an hour or more. It isn't simple or quick. Writing the posts takes a long time, too, sometimes five or six hours. I have limited writing time and have to start pursuing freelance work. There are a few reasons for this, including the fact that my husband is about to take the equivalent of an 8% salary cut through 21 furlough days in the next year. (Ahhh, California!) I would also like to chip away at longer stories and to deepen my writing which just isn't possible in the blog format.

I'll be a more present online presence soon, one way or another. In the meantime, please don't take it personally that I haven't been by. I'm trying to be present in my own life, figuring out a way to get beyond the longing to immerse myself in deep narrative. To move beyond the longing, I have to leap in or give up. I have no intention of giving up.

Image: Rainbow in Berkeley, June 2009.

Tags: Morphine, blogging, rainbow in Berkeley, writing, storytelling, blogging break, Pets, rapidweaver, california

Forgive me, fellow bloggers, for I have sinned. I did not intend to leave this blog for almost a month while I frittered away five weeks with my son. My mother visited for ten days and I did not blog. I had eight hours of babysitting one week and I did not blog. This past week -- my son's first back at school in over a month -- coincided with the visit of an old friend and I did not blog.

But during those eight hours of babysitting, I started to think about writing again, about tackling the never-ending story in some different way, fitting in time for as-yet-nonexistent freelance work, attempting to keep this blog somewhat current (all while finishing household projects). Good writing grows best in the dark (thanks, rcb!). What sees the light here in fragmentary form tends to stay that way. Or sometimes it embarrasses me later in its undeveloped melodrama and weak attempts at capturing reality.

It's tempting, really tempting, to put up little bits and pieces on the blog. There's nothing like instant feedback to keep one going, except that I don't keep going. The past -- meh. I've dug into it, and created stories out of it, have exposed enough. Now I'm looking to take the facts of my life, the weird experiences and characters as twisted and lively as wisteria in bloom, and make them fictional. I want to harness the crisscrossing metaphors of my subconscious.

Blah, blah, blah. I'm continually on the edge of something, a change, a new way of being, perpetually on the hopeful precipice. But I've come so far from the first days of this blog, typing in the dark and yearning for more.

Image: My mother and me walking in Muir Woods, August 2009. Photo by Mr. Trinkle.

Tags: dreams, blogging break, writing, Woody Allen, Muir Woods

Crew members in front of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb.

I don't want to be loosey-goosey on the details, because that would give it away, but I've been thinking a lot lately about the B-29 bomber, nicknamed the Superfortress. Boeing engineers developed the plane in the early 1940s as a long-range bomber, large enough to reach the shores of Japan, and it was a technological wonder. It also was a bit of a rush job, with early models especially prone to overheating. One 1943 prototype burst into flames on a test run when an engine fire quickly spread to the wing, destroying it. All ten crew members and another twenty people in a nearby meat packing plant were killed. By the end of the war, engineers had worked out most of the kinks, though the American public was most likely clueless about its defects (for example, this anti-Japanese government propaganda film on the bomber is all blue skies and heavy bombs).

Ball turret.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner: From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, / And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. / Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, / I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. / When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose. --Randall Jarrell

Stryker bed frame.

Really, though, what led me to ball turrets (bear with me) were thoughts on my grandfather's hospitalization. For the first six months, he was in a Stryker hospital bed frame (often used for patients in traction). From what I can tell, his mid-60s model was made up of a skinny mattress supported on either side by two mattress-width steel circles. Strapped in, he would wait for the moment when the bed would begin to move, to slowly flip his position from supine to prone. What would it have been like to be in that bed, sick, practically skinless, ears melted away and hearing almost gone, in and out of lucidity as his body fought off opportunistic infection? It turned him at least twice a day and he would often beg my grandmother to make it stop, to keep it from happening, in part because he associated it with the painful removal of his burn dressings, with debridement.

A man who avoided going overseas in World War II. A nation soaked in wartime propaganda, rah rah black and white newsreels, sanitized war stories of precision and heroism with an undercurrent of death and chaos. Twenty years later, fire, destruction, pain, and fear. Then, guilt and heroic fantasy.

Off to write. Slowly.

Tags: procrastination, preparation, writing, WW2, B-29 bombers, Stryker frames, Ball turrett gunners, grandfather, hospital, burn injuries

Butterfly in our backyard sour grass.

The February rains came. They cannonballed out of the clouds, burst against packed soil, strong-armed flowers and soft green leaves out of lifeless bushes. Our sour grass exploded. The backyard is now electric with it, lemon-drop yellow and neon green as it spreads over bare spots where the sprinkler didn't reach last summer. A few days into my blogging break the rains knocked out our internet service, though we're not completely sure how they did it. Water is wily.

Thanks to the wireless connections of two neighbors, we weren't totally internet free (I do not recommend sneaking onto someone else's wifi network, but desperate times call for such measures. It's a bit of an addiction, this internet thing.), but mainly we enjoyed the sudden stretch of time to fill. When the man from AT&T finally fixed the problem, he had to skitter into the crawl space, between the house and the mud, to put in a dedicated jack for the DSL. It was fixed just in time for my break to be over.

Here's what I did over my winter blogcation.



READ: I read Living with the Truth, by Jim Murdoch (I'm not going to write a review here, much as I would enjoy a chance for Aggie and Shuggie to discuss it on Jim's blog, but I suggest you order it); A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini (good, but brutal), and started Nothing to be Frightened Of, a kind of memoir by Julian Barnes (how have I missed his fiction?).

The shorter 'do.

TRIMMED: Is ten months too long to go between haircuts? I got my hair cut for the first time since last April, thinking of Karen, my blogging hair stylist friend, as I finally picked up the phone to set it up. The answer is, yes, ten months between haircuts is way too long. This time, I made an appointment before leaving the salon.

THOUGHTS ON WRITING: It's all about the questions and the quest. In the March/April edition of Poets & Writers, poet Lucia Perillo says she writes assuming there is no reader. Is this really possible? Is she being disingenuous or am I misunderstanding her point? If we assume no audience, I think it would be impossible to write. This might be worth a post, if I can liven it up a bit.

ACTUAL WRITING: I finished my stillbirth story and submitted it. While of course I am thinking positive, sugar-sweet, happy thoughts about getting it published on the second try, I'll probably have to keep on submitting. Maybe I'll need to give it another once- or twice-over, but I'll wait until I hear from this particular publication, just in case. Think good thoughts for me, please!

THE END OF THE BLOG?: Not yet. I won't be updating as much or getting as Entrecard-obsessed this time around. But I do want to get serious about my writing. That's why I've killed a chunk of the afternoon to write this post. Did I mention the internet is addictive?

Tags: blogging break, reading, The internet, haircuts, writing

White

Can you think of anything more bland? White bread, white rice, white collar. Something devoid of detail; the absence of pigment, of nutrients, of personality. Or perhaps you think of purity when you see the colorless expanse, a bride in her virginal wedding dress, the priest’s collar, the petals of daisy. What’s that all about? Then there’s a blank page or screen, waiting to be filled, the background to the rest of our lives, the tabula rasa. Let’s smudge it or spill the ink, write dirty words or talk about sex, reveal all our secrets. Let’s sully the white.

Dirty snow. Image from TreeHugger.

White is too much pressure. Don’t you cringe when you see the white pair of pants? The white shoes that must come out after Memorial Day and go back into the closet at the conclusion of the summer? Suddenly I’m picturing a pair of white shoes I had in high school. They were Mias, 80s fashionable, flats with pointy toes that beat my feet into submission. How long were they white? By the time I tossed them aside they were scuffed, grey. They smelled like sweat. Inside, dirty imprints of my heel and toes.

“Do we really need these details?” you ask. “Do we really want the dirt, the skinny, on your white shoes? OK, we can move to other formerly white things, can see how writing about something muddies the page, dirties a secret life. Underwear stained with menstrual blood; t-shirts with their half-moons of brown under the armpits; ring around the collar.

I’m actually thinking about lies, though, secrets, the kinds of lives we say we have and the hidden world underneath. Everyone’s hiding something, is afraid to reveal certain details, has some shame. I say show it to the world, let go of your lily white fantasies.

They are totally unrealistic.

Tags: sick kid, writing, writing prompt, secrets, colors, white, whitewashing, shades of grey

And in between the writing and the reading and the card-dropping and the commenting, let's try to "pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America." At least those of us who live here. It's going to take a bit of work, but we are up to the challenge.

Tags: friendship, Barack Obama, writing

When I started my stillbirth story, I was hemmed in by fact. I’d show it to my mother and she would offer corrections to misplaced fictions, give me her version of events. Some facts are important. It is not acceptable to totally make things up, to frame the innocent, or create character flaws or strengths where none exist. I wanted to be fair to my parents, which is a strange impulse when documenting an unfair situation, but why give fuel to the threatened?
 
Then I read poet and essayist Mark Doty’s piece on memoir, in which he describes his sister’s wedding dress. It was practical, a two-piece beige suit with matching pillbox hat. Did she choose beige as a rebellious stand against traditional white? Was the choice a result of parental pressure, the (barely) pregnant bride denied? Was it a beige suit after all? Why is his 45-year-old vision of the dress so strong? Memory is elusive, impressionistic, sometimes dead wrong. Facts are slippery. Doty questions whether these facts always matter in the telling of one's life story. Aren’t the impressions real in their own sense, the memoir a murky middle ground, a product of the "juncture of memory and imagination"? In the end, imagination wins out.

Or it does most of the time. When I found out that my mother's Aunt Ruth had a spinal condition and couldn't wear high heels − one of her legs was shorter than the other − I had to rewrite a scene (since totally excised) from the Florence Crittenton Home portion of my stillbirth story. The sound of her heels clicking against the linoleum floor, keeping time with my infant mother's screams was almost irresistible to me, a summing up of institutional efficiency and a baby's wordless pain. But I had to change it, especially once I discovered that my mother was a generally silent baby, calm, and apparently tearless. The soundtrack of nothing, no tears, no outward display of emotion, the image of Aunt Ruth limping as she exited the building with my stony-faced mother, was much more compelling than a newborn wailing against metronomic heel taps. Here was an infant who was already accustomed to being ignored, a child who grew up under a heavy coat of suppressed and private pain. This presentation of the silent child − from my mother's memory of stories her adoptive mother told her − deepened my understanding, explained the emotion underlying her explosive temper, the avoidance adapted early in life. Though, of course, this is all my interpretation informed by imagination and experience.
 
I’ve started to let go of the hard truth. I can’t recreate the world of my childhood, but can remember the feel of it. Does it matter if the house was truly cavernous, whether the bathroom had mint-green tile, whether it was Johnny Walker Red or tequila? It does not, but the story doesn’t develop without description, without a sense of the reality of place and time. Many facts don’t change, of course, and those facts are the bones of our life stories, fleshed out with language, given new life with words.

The events I write about here (outside of my fictional pieces, and even then the lines are blurred) happened. When I can't remember something, I take my impression and create a reasonable facsimile of reality.

And that’s the truth, Ruth.

***For thought-provoking writing on writing and a great Julian Barnes quote on creating fact out of fiction, please check out this post from Scottish writer Jim Murdoch's fine blog, The Truth About Lies.***

Tags: fiction, memoir, writing, Mark Doty, truth, reality, lies, facts, imagination

Candy Tothill of Inside Candy

I am officially jealous. Well, not exactly jealous, just dumbstruck with admiration. South African blogger Candy Tothill is a business owner, a mother to three, and one hell of a writer (who in her spare time is working on a book). Her blog, Inside Candy, is an enticing combination of poetry, rant, and keen observation.

Candy’s writing is evocative. Her poems dance around sadness and loss as she captures the elusive nature of a moment or a fleeting thought, the glimpse into someone else's window, a view into another way of being. In between the poems, she mixes it up with critiques on South African politics and thoughts about life. And while there's a lot of good stuff on her blog, she's written for several publications, too.

So, what are you waiting for? As Candy says, "Be not afraid. It will only offend readers to whom life itself is offensive."

Tags: blog of the month, Reviews, writing

Photograph by Jane Underwood.

Janine had been passing him on her way to the drugstore for weeks now. She never went into the diner – too much saturated fat, not enough green stuff, unless the dye they used in their mint chocolate chip ice cream counted – and, to be honest, she had other reasons not to go in, too.
 
Ever since returning home to pack up her mother, she’d been stepping inadvertently into the past. The town itself seemed stuck in a time warp, with all that neon and the thriving Mom and Pop stores (who would have thought that northern New Jersey was so retro?). It was the kind of  place where people stayed, aged in place. The pharmacist at the corner drug store was a high school acquaintance, a former football cheerleader who was brainier than anyone knew. The guy who pumped her gas was the brother of Janine’s best friend from elementary school. The clerk working at the library circulation desk was the person who introduced Janine to marijuana, that first secretive toke during a school trip into New York.
 
Janine was tired of going through the dance of friendly interrogation. Over time she developed a willful blindness and only saw the path ahead of her. That was difficult enough, considering the state of her mother's apartment, the tangled and rotting neurons clogging her mind. This time he saw her. “Janine! Janine Rickenbacher?”
 
It was Tommy. In the same job he’d had since high school, handyman/janitor for Zorba's. Some things never change, but Tommy had. He’d hardened, his eyes had darkened a shade, were brassy and brittle. He took off a glove and reached for her, his hand calloused, the fingernails bitten to nubs.

Tags: writing, Janine, fiction, New Jersey, hometowns

Mom, August 2008.

“You’re secretary material,” my grandmother used to tell her with more than a hint of contempt, trying to subdue Mom’s thoughts of going to college. Perhaps no one was surprised when she got pregnant and dropped out to become … a secretary, though she later went back and got a degree in English and Anthropology. Her family refused to see her intelligence, her need to be intellectually engaged.

So here I end up, writing about writing, and it morphs into writing abut my mother. This post took 12 minutes to create, though I can’t bear to let it go through raw: there will be some edits. Over the coming weeks I’ll put class work out here, polished or not, though I’m probably not going to post the bad stuff. Or maybe I will. That could be freeing, too.

In the meantime, I’ll remind my mother of her talents. She reads my stories, tells me I have a way with words. “It must be those Irish genes,” she says, alluding to my father’s side. The last time she said that, I came back with “Or my Polish?/German?/Swiss? genes!” (all theories of nationalities, since she is adopted.) We both laughed – doesn’t that mean I should be making watches or kielbasa or something? – but she knew what I meant. She’s got talent.

Tags: Mom, writing, self-confidence

and

Karen has another blog, Five Little Kids Named Larrow, where she writes stories about a very difficult childhood with an amazing clear-headedness, capturing the child’s innocent point of view. I think she's courageous, too, as well as a fine writer and photographer. Through the struggles of the past and present, she always finds a way to rise above. Thank you, Karen. You really are a good friend.

Also last week, Dori of A Yellow House in England passed the I Love Your Blog award along. Dori’s blog is about her adventures as an American expat married to a Brit. Written in a breezy conversational style with tales of little towns she visits and other stories from her life, A Yellow House is a fun read with some nice photography as well.

Finally, Susan Helene Gottfried of West of Mars not only received a bunch of awards (no shock there!), but she also gave a shout-out to blogs she enjoys reading, including writing to survive. Go to her blog to read her always-engrossing fiction, to peruse book reviews, or just to join in on the conversation.

I’ve been in a bit of a blogging slump lately, not feeling creative or chatty enough to leave comments. I’m getting tired of dropping my Entrecard all over the place. I haven't had much to post about. Even in my current ennui, I recognize that this virtual universe has helped bring me back to life. Blogging and the support of fellow bloggers can take a large part of the credit for connecting me with the world again, not only after a hard year in a strange place, but also after many years of keeping most people at a polite distance, years of sitting on my secrets and keeping my mouth shut.

This wasn't even the point of starting a blog for me initially. Building a community was far from my mind. I just needed an impetus to start writing. In that sense blogging has helped me connect back to myself, has helped the words flow.

I’m not sure where I’ll be going with this space. Starting next month, I will be taking a writing course in which will entail writing every day, including holidays and weekends. I hope this little push will not only help me find a local community but will also propel my writing forward. It doesn’t mean I’ll stop blogging or commenting, but it does mean that I will have to cut back. Or maybe I'll bring you all along with me on this new venture with updates and postings of my half-baked work. I don't know exactly how it will work.

What I do know is that I am grateful for my blogging friends. You have supported me on my journey and I look forward to having you along for the rest of the ride.

Thank you.

Tags: Awards, Comments, writing

This is where my power of description seizes up.

Really, I’m on the road to forgiveness, and I don’t want to rehash the past in angry diatribes here.

But – the inevitable but – I am in the midst of the never-ending stillbirth story, attempting to write about my time in the Little House, a companion piece to my biological grandmother’s experiences and as I try to get my mind around it I find myself asking: WHAT IN THE HELL WERE MY PARENTS THINKING?

When reality broke through, when my pregnancy became apparent and ended a month later in a stillbirth, in dramatic labor occurring in the Little House, when it became clear that I needed parenting, WHY DID NOTHING CHANGE?

These are not new thoughts, but the underlying feelings have changed. My anger before was mainly self-directed, anger at my family turned inward: what evil in me brought on their rejection? But now I am reaching a different conclusion: my mother and father had so little respect for themselves, for their power as parents, that they gave up, figured I was fine on my own, or maybe even assumed that they would only make things worse. My mother stopped parenting; my father never even started. They deserve my compassion. It's no use getting angry at those who don't see their own worth.

Now I have to work through the feelings, unpack the meaning of the Little House, dense with suppressed emotion, so much a part of who I am. I’ve left it almost completely out of most other versions of the stillbirth story because it feels like an emotional bomb. As I try to get back into that time of isolation, loneliness, self-hatred and anger, my self-protection (or something) kicks in.

It is time to control the explosion through language, to capture the shards of the experience on the page.

I'm scared. But if I don't go back, the experience controls me.

Tags: writing, existential angst, grandfather, grandmother, The Little House, the stillbirth, teen pregnancy

Tags: writing, New York, existential angst

Tags: storytelling, fiction, wasting time, writing

Tags: existential angst, storytelling, teen pregnancy, forgiveness, writing, the stillbirth

Tags: existential angst, forgiveness, Poetry, writing

Tags: writing, secrets, storytelling

Tags: writing

Tags: wasting time, writing

Tags: writing

Tags: teen pregnancy, writing, the stillbirth

Tags: writing

Tags: sick kid, housewife, wasting time, writing