Tag Archives: Writing

The Novel is FINALLY Being Published!: Everyday Magic, Day 196

Posted on February 1, 2011 | 8 Comments

How many years have I been writing The Divorce Girl? On paper since Forest was a creeping critter (now he’s a giant), and in my head for about 37 years, give or take a few months. It’s the fictionalized version of the outrageous story I lived in my teens: a household divided in the middle of New Jersey, the 70s and an ethnic hodge-podge of eccentric characters. Basically, I took the outline of my own story, inserted all new characters, and saw what could happen.

How long have I been trying to publish it? I plead disappointment-induced amnesia on this front, but roughly for the last 5-10 years. There have been little mountains of hope and big crashes into the muddy or ice-covered earth repeatedly. I’ve worked with three agents along the way, all of whom loved the novel (at first, at least), asked me to revise some core element in it (all for the good!), and then eventually — because the crumbling publishing industry or simply losing interest — said, “No thanks.” I’ve mailed queries here and yonder. I’ve sat on bookstore floors, taking notes from various publishing guides to figure out what to do and then did it. And I did incantations, rituals, journal prayers and excessive deep wishing.

What kept me going is this: I knew it was a good story, and that it was written well (particularly after a decade of revisions). I also knew that beyond whatever little accolades there are to be had in getting it published, it is simply part of my life’s work to put this story out in the world. Not surprisingly, the novel mirrors my publishing journey: a girl has to find her place in the world against shifting odds and through the power of art and community.

So now I’m thrilled that the book and my main character — young Deborah (who is between 15-18, depending on what character you’re reading) — will be stepping out into the world in the summer of 2012, thanks to the superb publishing excellence and magic of Ice Cube Books. May Deborah and the other characters travel to wherever they can do some good and come back with new tales to tell.

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Why the Arts Matter: Everyday Magic, Day 181

Posted on January 15, 2011 | 8 Comments

The arts matter because when I felt all out of sorts this morning, my itunes suddenly started playing a beautiful Swedish waltz that brought me home to myself, calmed my frenzied mind and opened my heart.

The arts matter because the paintings of Paul Hotvedt, photographs of Jerry Sipe, paintings of Joan Foth and so much other visual art showed me how to see the earth and sky.

The arts matter because a child in a fifth grade class who didn’t think she was good at anything discovered one day that she was good at writing poetry, making me remember how I discovered the same thing when I was in tenth grade.

The arts matter because my friend rose from her chair at the dance symposium and started dancing to illustrate how dance belongs to all of us, showing us what it means to live in, to be a body with its own grace and beauty despite age and change.

The arts matter because an elder woman with her walker managed to get down the long hall and sit at the round table where, writing about her first kiss 60 years earlier, she rose above the pain she had felt lately, and lifted us with her.

The arts matter because an old friend just sent me a poem she wrote, the first in years, to convey the depth of feeling she had about what stories of her life are held in a specific old house.

The arts matter because Eileen Stewart, a self-appointed angel in New York’s Greenwich Village, cared enough about theater that she started LaMaMa theater, and then made costumes, promoted shows and even swept the stairs to bring us the likes of Sam Shepherd, Harvey Fierstein and many other theater greats.

The arts matter because a woman living out her last months with lung cancer could dress herself in something bright and come to a writing workshop, where she was able to put into words her life’s most precious stories for her family.

The arts matter because tonight I heard a young man stand up and read something he wrote that helped us all understand what mourning as a community means.

The arts matter because when it comes to learning to speak civilly with each other, shorten distances between polarized communities, and find a common vision, there’s no stronger bridge when the one made of art: a song, a painting, a shared experience mediated through the lens of the arts, gives us new language, courage and understanding of how to listen to each other.

The arts matter because tonight we sang our prayers for Friday night services, knowing what the Talmud affirms: singing way doubles the power of prayer.

The arts matter because the world in day or night, summer heat or winter ice, is so expansively mysterious and powerful that we need all the help we can get to open up our wide vision and see — through music, writing, art, dance, theater, and other arts — what it means to be alive.

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The Magic of Brave Voice: Everyday Magic, Day 172

Posted on January 6, 2011 | 2 Comments

On the first day of the year I brunched with the BVDs — the Brave Voice Divas & Daredevils,  people who attended past Brave Voices, the 6-day retreats Kelley Hunt & I have been offering in the Flint Hills of Kansas since 2006. A bunch of BVDs had come to our fair city to dance in the new year the night before when Kelley played Liberty Hall with her band. As way of catching up, of course we ate and visited, but mostly, we sat in a circle and sang, read, made up poetry, drummed and jammed together for several hours as is the way of the BVDs.

When Kelley and I started designing the Brave Voice writing and singing retreat about seven years ago, we envisioned a clearing, a place where people could gather and have enough solitude and community, enough spaciousness of being, enough inspiration, humor and tenderness so they could create what called to them freely. What happened surpassed our imaginations. As we head into our sixth Brave Voice retreat — May 8-13 in the Flint Hills of Kansas — we bring with us layers upon layers of witnessing magic.

Yes, there is the magic that can come when writing, singing and songwriting workshops are well-designed and facilitated, but there’s a magic that met us both at the site of the retreats and in the souls of those who come. We do the retreats at White Memorial Camp, which is located on an arrowhead-shaped peninsula in the middle of Council Grove lake, surrounded by rolling hills in all directions and held in very big sky. The location of the camp is also where tribes from throughout the plains would meet in council (thus the name “Council Groves) for hundreds, probably thousands of years.

The people who came are drawn to immerse themselves in Brave Voice from near and far. While we often have a contingent from Kansas and especially our hometown, Lawrence, we’ve had people come from British Columbia, Florida, California and Vermont too. BVDs are writers, singers, musicians, artists, yogis, ministers, community leaders, and people who’ve lived quietly while creating wildly in their lives through homemaking, parenting, contemplating and reading. I’m sure if you could look up the phrase, “the ones who show up are the ones who should be here,” you would see a picture of BVDs at the end of a retreat, falling into each other while laughing and hugging. The community that emerges each time is so rich and life-giving that it cannot help but to support everyone in taking creative leaps in their art, writing, music and lives….and it cannot help but continue over distances all year long.

So here’s to the magic that we create together when we open our voices. Thank you, Brave Voices!

Thanks to Julanne and Danny for the photos!

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What I Learned In 2010: Everyday Magic, Day 168

Posted on January 2, 2011 | Comments Off

2010 is toast. Here’s what it taught me in a nutshell:

  • With a cheap, plastic sewing machine under hand, I can still sew…..and to my surprise, I can sew wabi sabi quilts.
  • I love to play a video game (who knew?) — Typer Shark — although Ken says my typing all those sharks to death could have environmental repercussions.
  • It wasn’t devastating to have my daughter leave home. And between texting, facebook-messaging, phone-calling and skype, it’s kind of like she didn’t leave.
  • It’s very cool to have sons taller than me, and in the case of Forest, much taller than me.
  • I’m blown away by the compassion and community I saw gather around one friend who lost her son, another who lost her wife, and a group of us who lost mutual friends. Death is hard (understatement), but being here for each other is what makes the unbearable bearable.
  • I can sleep easily with a purring cat on my chest for hours.
  • If need be, I can lift our 80-pound lab-mation and get her into the car and onto the table at the vet’s.
  • True but a little sad: I am MUCH healthier without wheat, dairy or sugar in my diet.
  • True and delightful: I’m most in love with the world and alive — even when not feeling my best — when doing yoga everyday.
  • “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World” is a great movie, and I’m glad to have seen it twice.
  • There only seems to be one television show at a time that I like/love, and this time, it’s “Bones.”
  • Sky Islands are singular mountains dotted throughout the Sonoran Desert (and beyond) where the altitude changes creates complete changes in climate.
  • All estimates for most climate changes I know of were vastly understated, and although my family rolls my eyes when I say this, I don’t think much of the coasts will survive beyond my lifetime (and maybe not more than a decade or two).
  • Bluebirds in winter, Indigo Bunting in summer, and all of life is good.
  • I actually like brussel sprouts when chopped finely into stir-fry.
  • I’m better than I thought at wasting time.
  • French farce in theater, when done well, is wickedly funny.
  • Mopping can be magical.
  • Warmed up enough, I can touch my toes without bending my knees, but I still can’t meditate worth a damn.
  • Whimsy rules.
  • Cats are the ones who taught humans all about lying (as in, “No one has fed me for days” ten minutes after they got fed).
  • Minneapolis and St. Paul blur so seamlessly into each other that it’s easy to lost in the Twin Cities vortex.
  • There’s nothing that can’t be made better by playing some Laura Nyro, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Kelley Hunt, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Joni Mitchell, Greg Greenway or Louis Armstrong.
  • I seriously don’t want to know what or how much my kids drink at college or all manner of other things that happen late at night.
  • Without pressure, and with family I love, I actually kind of don’t always dislike Christmas so much.
  • Macaroons: the wonder food. All manner of squash too.
  • It’s always this question: “How to live?” and it’s always this answer, “With kindness.”

Best wishes to all for 2011!

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Writing Your Year Anew: Arrivals, Departures & Your Own Best Life: Everyday Magic, Day 164

Posted on December 29, 2010 | 3 Comments

Listen to a live podcast of this column here!

As 2010 dwindles down, I wanted to share a column I wrote for The Magazine of Yoga on what we want to invite in, release, mourn and celebrate in light of a new year. Please check this out, and also look at other inspiring articles in this lovely (free and freeing) on-line journal

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Sizing Up the Writing Life: Everyday Magic, Day 133

Posted on November 29, 2010 | 5 Comments

Last night, Danny and I were talking about rereading our old journals, and joking about how big our collections were. “Mine are this big,” I said, spreading my arms out to full wing span. “Well, mine are this big,” he said, doing the same with longer arms. So I decided to actually measure my journals to see not just how big they are, but when I occupied the journals most in my life, which I suspected was in my 20s, coinciding in the 1980s.

Turned out I filled up 24″ of journals during the 1980s in self-examination, stabs at poetry and stories, agonizing over what seems utterly silly to me now, and deep questing for understanding, spirit and guidance. From the 1970s, I only have 3 inches of journals, but my journals didn’t start until 1976,  I used very slim notebooks and was quite young those years. My writing life compressed mightily in the 1990s when I was popping out babies and a dissertation between sharp turns into new jobs, leaving me with only enough time to fill about 11.5″. Come the 00s, the writing life had expanded again to about 16″ filled with far less worry, doubt and confusion than previous decades.

All in all, my journals fill 54.3 pages, almost a foot shorter than I am. They’re where I learned to write, and especially, how to live. I have no doubt they will not only out-live me, but out-grow me as they continue to lead me to the much-larger world of the story behind the story behind the story of my initial thoughts.

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I Love My Work: Everyday Magic, Day 99

Posted on October 25, 2010 | Comments Off

Just had a wonderful phone conference with my students, calling into this giant dark room (what phone conferences feel like to me) where we sit around an invisible round table, talk about our work, struggles, breakthroughs, questions, ponderings, reckonings and findings in their studies. Calling in together from up and down the Eastern Seaboard and from here in Kansas and a few places in between, we share the weather, and then the weather of everyone’s studies. Considering my students this semester are looking at overlapping circles of creativity, the sacred feminine, memory and time, voice, the role of the artist, right livelihood, sound and healing, writing with intention and power, and liberation, the conversation flows down wide banks into the personal, the political and the everyday life in between.

Because of the nature of the student-teacher relationship, that’s all the detail I can share, except to say, and yeah, I love my job!

Picture: The actual room we met in at Goddard in Vermont, and our beloved round table.

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The Book Is Done (Mostly, Kind Of, Pretty Much): Everyday Magic, Day 87

Posted on October 13, 2010 | 2 Comments

After an open arm’s length of Holocaust books, a pile that would tower over my cat of Holocaust movies, dozens of hours of interviews, and over 700 pages of transcripts from those interviews — not to mention four years of work — the Holocaust book is done……mostly, kind of, pretty much. I add those qualifiers because when writing any book, there’s never a solid completely-done place to arrive until after the book is in print, and even then, there’s usually little tweaks in the second printing and so on. Yet there is a turning point when I can say to myself, this puppy is done, and this is where I’ve arrived.

I started this book without any idea of how I would get it researched, let alone written, given my full-time gig, other obligations and everyday life raising three teens at the time. Like all books, it turned out to be much more work than I imagined, especially as I immersed myself in research on the Polish Resistance, the mechanics behind the Holocaust, German and Polish history and culture, tales of survival and liberation, and moments of horror and overwhelming loss. There were many times when I began to doubt that I could pull together all the research with all the oral histories I’d been recording into a coherent book, yet something told me to keep putting one paragraph in front of the other, one more piece of research into the pile. Last night as I corrected the formatting on endnote #204, the last one, I realized that despite the impossibility of it all, my instinct served me well.

My hope for this book is that those who read it will see not just the history of what two men — Jarek Piekalkiewicz, a Polish Resistance fighter and Lou Frydman, a Holocaust survivor — went through, but in their stories how we might better understand how to live with the enduring traumas of our history, especially those we carry within us. So while the book is done, where it may go from here is just beginning.

Pictures (from top): Some of the books and other company for the journey, and the subjects of this book: Lou and Jane Frydman, Jarek and Maura Piekalkiewicz.

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Write From Your Life: September & October

Posted on October 1, 2010 | 1 Comment

To make up for forgetting to post a writing prompt in September, I’m posting 15 prompts below. A podcast comes soon!

1. Write about the life you would be living if you weren’t living this one: invent another job you would enjoy, another place you might live, and other activities you might engage in, and write about a typical day in this life.

2. Remember a school you attended (elementary, high school, even a college), and describe the school, starting with the outside of the building, then walking into the building, finding your way down the hall, entering your classroom, sitting in your seat, and observing all that’s happening. Pretend your writing is a movie camera that follows you into the classroom.

3. Go to a photo album in your home, and find a photograph that really grabs your attention. Write about what was happening when that picture was taken, and also, about the story behind the story.

4. Find an object in your home that has great meaning for you – a gift, or something you found or bought at an important moment in your life. Write the story of this object: how it came to you, what it meant to you then, what it says to you now.

5. Write from the point-of-view of a piece of furniture in your home or in the home of a close family member. Tell what you’ve experienced and witnessed from the viewpoint of a couch or refrigerator or bed or piano, etc.

6. Take a favorite greeting card you received, and write about what the picture on this card, or the words within, mean to you. If the picture is of a landscape, place yourself in that landscape, and write about what happens. If it’s a picture of an object, person or animal, imagine that object, person or animal is near you, and write.

7. Make a list of all the things one or both of your parents regularly said to you (i.e. “Pick up your shoes,” “A penny saved is a penny earned,” etc.). Take one saying from your list, and write about what this first meant to you, and what it means now. How have you found this saying to be true or not so true for you?

8. Using the phrase, “I used to be……but now……” fill in the blanks. Feel free to either just write the phrase one or twice, seeing where it leads you, or write it repeatedly, letting it lead you to many possibilities.

9. Write the earliest memory you can recall. Tell as much as you can remember – or conjure up – about what you saw, felt, hard, realized at that time.

10. Write a letter to someone you love, living or passed on. Tell this person about your life now, and what you want him or her most to know about you.

11. Describe yourself as a landscape: a forest, a mountain, a prairie, a swamp, an ocean, whatever comes to you. Wander through this landscape in your writing, describing what you see and what you discover.

12. Write about a favorite childhood toy or book. Describe yourself first receiving this gift, and then tell the story of how you played and lived with this gift over time.

13. Imagine your life as a river. Tell where you started, and share where you flowed, paused along the way, merged with others, found deep water, ran fast or slow, until you arrive at where you are now.

14. Make a list of everything you believe in or enjoy most, focusing especially on what you know through your senses: what you can see, touch, taste, smell or hear. Get as specific as you can (not just hot chocolate, but hot chocolate made with cream served in a thick, warm mug).

15. Write the story of your life as a garden. What’s planted there? What grows wild? Who works in the garden, and who plays and naps in it occasionally? Tell of what plants, animals and people live in or visit the garden. And write about how the garden is tended.

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Twin Cities, Two Dreams, One Family: Everyday Magic, Day 47

Posted on August 30, 2010 | 2 Comments

This morning as I walked through Dinkytown, where we’re staying at the fabulous Wales House bed and breakfast, I realized every time I visit these cities, something happens. The first time in Minneapolis was for a conference, which I had to leave early because my long-suffering grandmother finally died, propelling me to re-unite with a cousin and aunt I hadn’t seen for 35 years because of my parents’ crazy divorce in 1973. It was healing for all of us.

The next time I came to Minneapolis to attend a conference, I ended up blowing off most of the sessions and wandering the city, traveling the light rail without any sense of where I was going, and recommitting myself to get my writing published despite years of intense rejections. I ended that trip leaning into the small opening of 18th floor hotel window with a Cuban fiction writer and Domician poet, all of us dropping tiny pieces of paper out the window with our writerly wishes written on them.

Last fall, one of my granted writerly wishes — to have my memoir published — led us to St. Paul for both the Midwestern Booksellers Convention and for Natalie to check out the McNally Smith College of Music. Signing books for a long line of people (even if my publisher was giving out the books for free) was a delight, and we were all smitten with the college.

Now I’m back to move Natalie into that college today, and last night, I received word that after 10 years of trying to find a literary agent, a very good one is going to represent my next book.

While I continue to live my writer dream, Natalie is here to embark upon her singer dream, in the twin cities where earnest wishes, hard work, surrender to the forces of chance and karma, and catalysts for true healing seem to always find me. I wish for her to find her own dream large and generous, unfolding for her as mine unfolds for me all life long.

Photos: even the houses here are twins!

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