Write Around the Block

Here in Brunswick, Georgia, it is porch season. At last, the azaleas and the redbud trees and the dogwood draped in Spanish moss are in bloom, and, unless the no-see-ums chase us inside, it is warm enough to sit on the porch. We have a south-facing porch here on Prince Street, so it is possible to follow the sun from one side to the other throughout the day.

Growing lazy in my own patch of sunlight, I watch two geckos come up the porch steps. First a nice-sized green one darts over the brick, and then a tiny brown one skitters past him. Up the steps, up and down the porch post, and then across the grass green floorboards to park himself inches from my feet. There he methodically laps up the silver-winged insects emerging from between the boards.

I am mesmerized by his effortless consumption. With quick jabs of his head, he picks the creatures off one by one, and while I know I should call for Tom at once, any sound, any movement, would scare the little brown gecko from his feast. In less than minute all of them – maybe twenty – are swallowed whole. Beyond the porch, against the sunlight, silver wings of a dozen or so escapees flutter away.

When I go into the house, I still don’t say the word out loud, but speak instead of silver wings and the gecko. My practical husband understands at once that he must crawl under the house to check the foundation, to capture a specimen or two in a plastic paint jug, to talk to our neighbors about the life cycle of termites. Later, when he witnesses whole multitudes taking wing from tree roots in other neighborhoods, he learns they came not from the house’s foundation, but from the ancient oaks in front of the house. Not that such knowledge consoles him.

I would like to offer some Annie Dillard-like wisdom from my observation of the termites and the gecko, but the best I have is that there is beauty in the bizarre and you might not have to go far to find it. Perhaps in my July class, “Confabulation,” we will capture these extremes in new and interesting ways.

Writers from workshops past are already asking about our summer offerings at Hazen Manor (www.hazenmanor.com) this July. For starters, and so you can save the dates, our kickoff reading will take place Sunday July 19th at Megan Collins-Hed’s bookstore, The Last Wordsmith Shoppe (www.lastwordsmith.com), in North East, PA. Our Findley Lake classes will begin Monday, July 20th and continue each day that week through Friday the 24th.

Liz, Sara, and I will conduct one class apiece, and the last two days of our week we’ll teach together. (We pretty much always do, anyway.) Those two collaborative classes will be called “Wooing the Muse,” and explore different tricks you can use to prod yourself into writing when you don’t have us to do it for you.

My class, “Feast of the Forgotten Senses,” was conceived in bewilderment a couple years ago during the holiday season-it seemed crazy to me that the only mode of celebration was food and drink. And more food and drink. And then more. But of course, there I was, gluttonizing with the rest of them. I did, however, resolve to create an antidote, and the result was the class I’ll give this summer.

Sara and Liz will follow shortly with posts about their classes. Check again soon.

Writing requires that you spend a lot of time in your head-the Coen Brothers called it “the life of the mind” in their funny, frightening movie, Barton Fink. Sometimes it gets a little stultifying in there, crawling through the narrow openings and smacking into the walls of my own thoughts, and I have to find ways to clear my head out. I walk a couple miles on the beach, I do 45 minutes of yoga, I stage a symbolic cleaning of other cluttered spaces, like my T-shirt drawer, shoe shelves, or linen closet. Lately, I’ve added a component to my walks along the Balboa Peninsula: collecting beach glass.

When I scan the deposits of rock and shell for a certain shade or telltale glint of glass, I have an extra diversion from thought. All that goes through my head is, “Is that a piece of glass? Is that? Is that?” I suppose it transforms into a mantra after a while, the whole act of hunting beach glass a meditation. There’s the clink of the shards in my sweatshirt pocket, the heft of them, like coins with no value except that I’ve found them.

Home from my walk, I rinse the varied specimens, and lay them out on a paper towel to dry. I tinker with them, arranging them like parts of an inexact puzzle. They are ordinary objects the sea has broken up, tumbled, spit out and turned into art.

I’m ready to write again.

I think it was the socialist Emma Goldman who said she’d rather have roses on the table than diamonds to around her neck. I don’t know if I’d go quite that far, but the roses I brought home from the Philadelphia Flower Show last Wednesday, placed on tables around my house, have been nourishing my creative self. Our banks of snow have been melting slowly and the area’s dotted with that gray, ugly mush. The roses I chose out of the hundreds of bundles being sold in the market of the flower show are a buttery yellow that bleeds into orange and each blossom is rimmed with a deep red. I’ve never seen anything like them before.

The theme of the show this year is Bella Italia, so every display mimics a place in Italy–Rome, Venice, even a whimsical floral Atlantis complete with pieces from the mythology. My favorite was a smaller display, a created piece of Italian untamed parklands, lit low as if under a half moon. I forgot my camera, but I brought a notebook and tried to find some words for the scent of the varied narcissus blooms, the colors on the bougainvillea. I’d taken myself on what Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way) calls “an artist date”–deliberately went by myself so I could be with my own thoughts and senses. It’s a great way to feed your muse, an artist’s date. You can take yourself anywhere for just a couple of hours, and you don’t have to spend a dime. Try browsing in a yarn shop with all its texture and color. This weekend I can go back to the flower show with my husband. He’ll no doubt remember his camera and I’ll experience the exhibits through a whole different lens.

March has most definitely come in like a lion, and I’m staring out at what I hope will be the “last blast” snow storm of this season before spring arrives. Spring arrives to the city regardless of the weather in the form of the annual Philadelphia Flower Show at our convention center. I’m hoping to get over there later in the week and share the scents, sounds and sights. In the meantime, this past week has been rife with thoughts and memories of reading, first stirred up by the novelist/ journalist Anna Quindlen. She spoke last Monday.

Quindlen covered a lot of ground in her talk to a packed audience of several hundred in downtown Philadelphia, but she the place she started, and what she circled back to over and over, was her childhood love of books. When she mentioned that she was the kid whose mother had to shoo her outside to play or she’d spend even sunny days in a particular chair inside the pages of a favorite novel, I was reminded of the summer I spent reading and then rereading Little Women to the point that I could get myself crying over Beth’s death about a chapter and a half ahead of her actual demise. If you’re a writer, you probably have at least one tale of your own like that, a chair or a corner or a blanket on a beach that was your reading place.
What Quindlen said that really struck me, though, was that she believes her childhood reading taught her compassion for others, real empathy.

After a really crazed week of teaching, I ended the week as the same note was sounded in a different setting. A nonprofit in New Jersey concerned with preservation of waterways at wetlands, operating on the premise that the best way to sensitize the public to their mission is to say it with art, sponsored a photography exhibit and poetry reading Friday night. Check out the photographs if you get a chance (they make great writing prompts!) at http://www.drgreenway.org/ Twenty-five poems referred to waterways as places of refuge, of joy, of consolation, detailed plant, bird and animal life, brought back memories for all attending. The scientists present credited the artists with being true advocates. It was a new definition of a political poem to me; my poem’s about gather crabs and starfish with my little sister and not caring that we had food stuck in our teeth.

As if to cap off a theme, I saw the movie The Reader last night– great performance by Kate W for sure. I was less enamored of what the movie did with the book in some ways, but the notion, again, that being a reader means you enter a broader world than you have around you and therefore you can develop compassion– well, there it was again. So I’ve been hit over the head all week with the importance and pleasure of both reading and writing. This week I’m carving out time to do both!

One of the best rewards of working with people from all over the country is hearing their stories. In my writing classes this winter there were stories from Texas cafes, a Mandarin Chinese classroom, and a Brunswick, Georgia, farm. There were accounts of Depression-era Iowa and wartime London. There were chronicles of Sixties war protestors at the University of Wisconsin and murders near Vassar. There were ancestral legends of long, arduous journeys from England and Ireland and Switzerland and Germany. And ribald tales from Canadian logging camps and South Georgia bars.

Today is officially my last day of the spring term with Around the Block students, and Thursday was my last day for my Jekyll Island students. My next teaching gigs are in April with the University of Richmond’s Continuing Studies and Chesterfield County’s Lifelong Learning Institute. So while I have the month of March to work on my own writing, I will miss the stories.

It was a grand journey, complete with lush scenery, charming dialects, and strong-minded characters, both real and imagined. I look forward to April.

When I was in college, my Catholic roommates always gave up something for Lent. Terri gave up smoking and then suffered through nicotine withdrawal until the moment she could light up immediately following communion on Holy Thursday. Pam gave up sweets, but never survived much longer than a week before she caved in to chocolate. I came from a frugal Protestant family who believed in saving rather than giving up anything, so the concept of sacrifice was lost on me. My church spent the time between Ash Wednesday and Easter holding Lenten Lunches, Soup Suppers, and a Maundy Thursday Pot Luck, followed by worship.

In recent times I notice there has been a movement among all Christians to focus on giving or sharing or helping someone out during Lent, rather than sacrificing something we enjoy. I like that notion very much.

Tonight Tom and I are going to a Mardi Gras party on Jekyll Island hosted by our friends, Jerry and Carolyn. Jerry and Carolyn are true born Southerners, while most of the rest of us are Northerners, Yankees soaking up some sun before we return to colder climates. There will be food and drink and conversation and lots and lots of beads. “No one is leaving here without taking their share of beads,” Carolyn says. “I’ve got way too many of them.”

So we will wear our beads and eat King Cake with the little plastic baby inside. We will drink and laugh. We will enjoy what Carolyn calls our “gracious plenty,” because by Easter most of us will be gone from this little island. Our time is short and we want to share it in good company.

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Hugh Jackman did a lovely job on the opening number, and it was refreshing to see the homemade stage props instead of the tech-stravaganzas we’re generally treated to. But, alas, he flashed at the beginning, and by the time he did his song and dance with Beyonce, I was over him, and wishing for Jon Stewart.

Liz and I concur: we applaud the new touch of the old winners inducting nominees into the fold. De Niro was hilarious; it’s nice to see him being a human who doesn’t shoot people. Hard to imagine Sophia Loren, dressed like Scarlett O’Hara Italian-style, could be scarier than black-clad Shirley Maclaine in whatever life she’s living at the moment. But Shirley seemed pretty down-to-earth compared to Sophia, who may be a few facelifts over the top.

As far as presenters go: I loved Will Smith’s relaxed bearing, and how charmingly he handled himself when he misspoke. He is still the Fresh Prince of anywhere he stands. I give the Robert Raspberry to Ben Stiller, who made a fool of himself in his attempt to make a fool of Joaquin Phoenix, who doesn’t need any help in that department, thank you. And even though Joaquin has renounced acting for the time being, he could always act figure eights around Stiller, who has the dramatic depth of sheet metal.

Oscar, either being inflated or deflated. I leave that judgment to you.

Lest I descend into utter nastiness, I’ll stop now.

Left to right: Sara Kay Rupnik, Liz Abrams-Morley, Tracy Robert at Hazen Manor, Findley Lake, New York, in July 2008.

Because we are three different women living three different lives in three very different places, one of us is usually doing something of interest. Well, most of the time anyway. Wherever we are, we hope to share little bits of scenery, local color, and what we are doing.

Tracy is the California native. Liz lives in downtown Philadelphia. Sara is seeing out the winter in Coastal Georgia. We are writers and teachers. We love movies and a good glass of wine. We love travel and food. We love a good sale and good gossip.

We met at Vermont College’s MFA in Writing Program in the Summer of 1989 and established Around the Block Writers Collaborative in 2003. We hold January Writing Workshops in Jekyll Island, Georgia, and July Writing Workshops in Findley Lake, New York. The chance of meeting at least one of us is good, so stay tuned as each of us shares thoughts on her writing life.