Inspire.

"Our job is not to suffer more so that others can suffer less.  Our job is to express our divinity to its fullest.  The world needs inspiration more than it needs another suffering servant." 

-- Neusom Holmes, October 16, 2011

Aunt Helen, who inspired me.

Dispatches from the Millay Colony

"Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer."
– Louise Glück

Edna's house at Steepletop

Edna St. Vincent Millay, the wildly famous American poet, cultural icon and sexual pioneer, died in 1950 — not from a heart attack as was reported at the time, and maybe not even by accident, though this is never talked about: she pitched backwards down a flight of stairs after first carefully setting her glass of white wine on a ledge.

Edna’s will left her estate, Steepletop, to her older sister, Norma Millay Ellis, who moved into the house and lived there until her own death in 1986. For thirty-six years, Norma treated the house as a museum, carefully preserving all of her sister’s things — every book, paper, picture, article of clothing, even Edna’s toiletries — exactly as Edna had left them. Norma allowed nothing to be disturbed. She became, literally, her sister’s keeper.


"What lips these lips have kissed" -- 
Edna's bed, shared sometimes with her husband,
sometimes with a lover; her bedjacket and bell.

Edna

In her later years Norma established the nonprofit organization that continues to preserve the house. Norma also established the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Throughout Norma's years at Steepletop, the only part of the estate she claimed for her own was a small outbuilding, to which she added a screened porch.

Norma's cabin

We are told, the artists and writers and composers who come to the colony to work, that Edna was a generous woman. Of that I have no doubt. But it is Norma I want to thank.

Dispatches from the Millay Colony

"Poems are perfect.

Picketing sometimes is better."

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1927

Dispatches from the Millay Colony

Would a mountain have meaning, would goldenrod,
if there were no one to write about it?

Dispatches from the Millay Colony

Edna in Autumn

Those brazen nights before the Fish

rose numbly from the sea,

before the fires of summer died—

remember them to me.

I wanted to believe that love

could ripen without rotting,

and candle-yellow evenings

would not burn down to nothing.

Tonight I sit in supper-robe

before an empty plate;

I’ve eaten but I am not full.

The room is dark. I wait.

photographs: gate, Edna's writing cabin at Steepletop 

Why to write, or not

"If I don't feel that something really needs to be written, I'd rather not write it."

-- Suzanne Vega, Solo

Sentence of the day

"Slowly, and with a concentration that totally cancelled out my presence, she slit the tape."

 -- Julia Glass, I See You Everywhere

Reliquary

Day Minders for 2009 and 2010 with nothing written in them.

An emery board.

A cuticle pusher.

A small pair of scissors.

A box of Bandaids.

A mirror and comb.

Tweezers.

A lipstick, coral, ordered from Bloomingdale’s.

A tissue blotter with a coral imprint: her thin, creased lips.

A pouch of coupons, all of which expired before her estate could be inventoried.

A wallet with three twenties, a ten, two quarters, two dimes, a nickel and five pennies, because it’s important to keep cash on hand, which is what the Clerk of Court’s form calls it: “cash on hand.” $70.80.

An unfilled prescription.

Five pens and a pencil.

Pictures of children: great-nieces and great-nephews who, even if they knew her, won't remember her.

Keys to a climate-controlled storage unit full of framed prints, record albums, songbooks, and boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of unused stamps the Post Office won’t buy back.

Credit cards from the department stores where she liked to go shoe-shopping on her way home from the beauty parlor.  Every week, even after the cancer, after her fall, when she was on oxygen and had little stamina, she managed to get her hair done.  When she went out, she stayed out as long as possible, shopping until she was exhausted, leaving the caregiver to deal with her invalid partner.  Now her closet is full of shoes, many never unboxed.  They could be sent to tornado victims if the Red Cross took shoes but they don’t, it’s money only.

Hand lotion.

Hand sanitizer.

A safety pin.



My Eudora Welty year

Lately I've taken time away from my writing practice to care for elderly family members who live out of town. Most days I'm hovered over by the characters in my interrupted novel.  They're like guardian angels, making me feel at home no matter where I am.  Sometimes they nag me for not paying enough attention to them.  I say to them, well, Eudora Welty spent fifteen years taking care of her parents, and the characters in her stories didn't suffer one iota.  They smile, all angelic and amused, and say, ah but sweetheart, you're no Eudora Welty.

Small world

Joni Mitchell on Emily Carr:  "I love her . . . . It so helps to find a writer whose style I love and maybe it's because she's a painter . . . . I've read a lot of great writers and I go 'Oh, this is a great writer,' but I don't love it. I can't explain it, it's just the way Emily Carr creates a sentence . . . like a songwriter's sentence.  She's extremely gifted at condensing a lot into a very small space. She visually saturates her sentences in a way that's beyond compare to me."   (Quoted in Michelle Mercer's Will You Take Me As I Am.)

I fell in love with Emily Carr's art during a trip to British Columbia years ago, and only recently discovered her writing.  The Book of Small, first published in 1942, is her memoir of early childhood, a portrait of the artist as a minutely observant young girl in frontier Victoria.  Joni Mitchell is right about these sentences: they're saturated with sensory detail.  Rich, fresh, startling. 

From "Sunday":  "Dr. Reid [the Presbyterian minister] had very shiny eyes and very red lips.  He wore a black gown with two little white tabs like the tail of a bird sticking out from under his beard.  He carried a roll in his hand like Moses, and on it were all the things that he was going to say to us."

From "The Cow Yard": "But it was in the Cow Yard that you felt most strongly the warm life-giving existence of the great red-and-white loose-knit Cow."

From "Mrs. Crane," about a neighbor who cared for Small (Carr's name for herself) and her sisters when their mother was ill: "Mary Crane and our Alice were shy little girls.  They sat on the sofa with their dolls in their laps.  Their eyes stared like the dolls' eyes.  Mrs. Crane would not allow dolls to be dressed or undressed in the drawing-room; she said it was not nice."

From "The Bishop and the Canary": "Small had earned the canary and loved him. How she did love him! When they had told her, 'You may take your pick,' and she leaned over the cage and saw the four fluffy yellow balls, too young to have even sung their first song, her breath and her heart acted so queerly that it seemed as if she must strangle. She chose the one with the topknot. He was the first live creature she had ever owned. 'Mine! I shall be his God,' she whispered."

The book flies by and is over before you know it.  Like childhood.

Why I'm glad I went to AWP

What Would Judy Blume Do?

The Amtrak conductor who wished everyone a "Happy Groundhog's Day."

Woodley Park, one of my favorite DC neighborhoods.

VCCA's opening-night party at Open City.  A sweet welcome.

Free stuff at the bookfair. My treasure: a “What Would Judy Blume Do?” pencil from Nieto Press.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s keynote address, in which she read a short memoir of her writing life, a piece as graceful and moving as any of her stories. I sat on the front row, mesmerized.

Junot Diaz (“Great art is made in the elsewheres.”)

Holding in my hot little hands the new Painted Bride Quarterly with my story inside. Meeting the lovely & spirited editor, Kathy Volk Miller.

Discovering new presses.  Discovering old presses that are new to me.

The Gang of Four: previously unacquainted women writers from North Carolina. We commandeered the dance floor at the Marriott Friday night and didn't leave until the DJ fell asleep.

Panels, panels, panels: The Intimate Detail (Alice McDermott, Mary Kay Zuravleff, Carole Burns), Raymond Carver in the Workshops (Carol Sklenicka, Brett Lott, Douglas Unger, C.J. Hribal), Putting the Story in History (Ron Hansen, Philip Gerard, Debra Brenegan), Short Story to Novel (Alan Heathcock, Heidi Durrow, Eugenia Kim, Marie Mockett, Alexi Zentner, and Tea Obreht), and The Craft of Historical Fiction (Robin Oliveira, John Pipkin, Kelly O’Connor McNees, Anna Keesey). And these were just the ones I loved.

Old friends.

New friends.

Pets & peeves



"Insomnia in a small town," Duncan, BC, 2007 © Len Langevin

Pet: the word “clean” to mean “empty.”  Last night our train made an unscheduled stop in Weldon, North Carolina, so the crew could manually set a switch. It had been raining, and the town was darkly shiny, pink-amber from sodium vapor lights. A woman sitting behind me showed her daughter. “Look it,” she said. “The streets is so clean. They’s nobody out, not a single body out there.”
---
Peeve: when a writer, of all people, uses “verbal” to mean “oral.”
---
Peeve: stories about children who disappear never to be found again and the narrator knows what happened to them but withholds the information in order to build suspense. This is what Raymond Carver called a cheap trick.
---
Peeve: stories about children who disappear never to be found again and not even the writer knows what happened to them.

Why I'm going to AWP

An editor talked me into it. She said, "The first question to ask yourself isn't, can I survive on 4 hours' sleep, can I afford this, what about my real job, etc. It’s, do I like cocktails?"

I have my warm coat, my comfortable shoes, and a new journal. I have business cards and a pocket full of hard candy. I'm a midlife writer ready for adventure.



AWP Conference schedule

Happy without cause

What you can't tell is, there's glitter in her lipstick.

Byrd, chapter one

Dear Byrd,

This is how I told your father.

We climbed up on his roof — he lived at the beach; we could see the ocean, wrinkles of light in the distance. I was wearing a billowy cotton skirt. I wanted to look soft, unthreatening, unselfconsciously pretty.  I wanted your father to love me.  My legs were pale, not used to sun in February. I had painted my toenails lavender.  I wanted him to be a little sorry he hadn't loved me all along.

He had a mustache and his hair was cut in what we called a mullet — short in front, long in back. He was tanned and lean. Long arms, long flat fingers. He was glad to see me, he said.  He didn’t ask why I’d come back so soon.

The roof of his apartment was flat, asphalt.  All grit and sparkle.

He unfolded an orange blanket from his sofabed and we laid out our picnic, a lavish spread: smoothies, crinkle-cut fries from his favorite stand on the beach, canned peaches from his kitchen, and barbecue I’d brought from home, packed on dry ice in a travel cooler.  So much food.  I had to make myself eat.  I chewed slowly, counting to thirty with each bite, the way they say you’re supposed to.

There was a warm breeze blowing. It ruffled my skirt.

Your father offered to spike my smoothie.

No, I said, and covered my cup with my hand.

I wish I could tell you we were young, inexperienced, not yet grownups or ready to be.  That's the story you're expecting, isn't it?  In fact we were thirty-two. We’d grown up together. Everything about that afternoon — our picnic, the roof, the sun, the salty air, your father's pilled orange blanket, him sitting beside me close and warm — had been coming all my life.

After we’d eaten, when I couldn’t put it off any longer, I told him my news, the news I had carried across the country to deliver in person. I’d thought if I could see him when I told him, I would know what to do.

I was delicate, telling him. Artful, as I’d practiced. So artful he didn’t understand at first what I was saying. He blinked like the sun was hurting his eyes. The big white California sun, dazzling, warm even in February, constant, as if it knew already, and forgave, as I never will, everything that had happened between us, everything that was about to happen.

painting: Anna Podris

Arthur Rimbaud

He did not change my life the way he changed Patti Smith's or Bob Dylan's, though after reading A Season in Hell and Illuminations I was inspired to write some prose poems. I was getting into a rhythm, writing prose poems like I'd invented the form myself, when I came across an interview with a journal editor who said she'd been getting so many prose poems she'd decided to quit publishing them altogether.