It's All Good

July ATB Reading at Wonderments Wine Shop, Findley Lake, NY.


I'm on Jekyll Island at the moment, and it is a mess. Heavy equipment zips across Beachview Drive to complete The Great Dunes Park in a timely manner. There is planting of palms and pines galore, and our very small shopping district is being torn down to make way for a newer, classier one. The entry onto the island is being re-routed in a semi-circular fashion, and the shops, businesses, and our local P.O. are being stuffed into mobile, metal housing for the duration of our progress. At least they face the ocean.

For as much grumbling as we may do, we all trust that every bit of improvement will be well worth the wait. It will live up to the new slogan for Jekyll's siege of construction: It's All Good.

Right now I'm feeling much the same way about Around the Block. The dust is flying around us, too, at the moment. Except for that brief wondrous week or weekend when we come together and meet up with real live students, Liz, Tracy, and I are always in three different places, doing three different things in three different ways. This fall Tracy has taken on a very special teaching assignment in California, and Liz and I will be doing our stints of Around the Block without her. Which requires a little shifting around, a little moving, a few more orange construction cones.

Here's the plan: Liz will have the month of September to work with you all, and I will have November. In October, Liz will spend the first two weeks with what she calls her Digging Deeper Project -- encouraging you to look at your work in a new way. In the last two weeks, I will encourage you to loosen up, to write in short, fast, bursts before we move onto to longer pieces of work. We think it will be fun.

We look forward to having Tracy back with ATB in the Spring, and --before then-- to spending a fabulous week in Jamaica with you, our real live students. Just take a look at these happy faces from our July Reading in Findley Lake and tell us it's not ALL good. We dare you.

A Week in July

Here's our daily schedule for Around the Block in Findley Lake:

Please note: The following classes meet at Hazen Manor from 1 to 3 p.m.

Monday, July 19th with Tracy Robert
Confession: Creating Drama in Your Narrative

We’ve all committed crimes of a greater or lesser nature. (Oh, come on. You know you’ve at least contemplated them.) Learn how confession makes for compelling characters and narrative tension, and don’t worry. What happens at Hazen Manor stays at Hazen Manor.

Tuesday, July 20th with Sara Kay Rupnik
The Natural Approach: Using Nature in Memoir and Fiction

As readers, we expect memoir and fiction to include a visual world of trees and flowers and maybe a birdsong or two, but as writers we struggle to decide when the description of nature is too much or simply not enough. What bearing might an old elm tree, for example, have on the story you are sharing with your reader? Today we will discuss nature writing before slipping touches of nature into your own narratives.


Wednesday, July 21st with Liz Abrams-Morley
Honing the Image: The Process of Discovery

Many terrific poems and stories begin with a moment or picture that haunts us as writers and as human beings. We learn what we are thinking and feeling about that picture when we write it down, write from it, and see where it leads us. We'll work today from image to awareness, practicing a process which will help us to stay loose, to let the work unfold and to subvert the tendency we all have to cut off possibilities by over-controlling the movement of a poem or story.

Thursday, July 22nd with Tracy, Sara, Liz
Wooing the Muse, Part I

Do you have trouble getting started or being inspired?
Learn how Ad Copy, Words of Wonderment, and Writing What You Don’t Know can lead you into the composing mode. You may attend one or both of the “muse” classes (see below).

Friday, July 23 with Tracy, Sara, Liz
Wooing the Muse, Part II

Inspiration is tough; you need all the tools at your disposal.
Tools like Books of Questions, Epigraphs, and Greeting Cards are surprisingly complementary to the writing process. You may attend this class in addition
to Part I (see above) or exclusive of it.

In Defense of Keepsakes

Watching A&E’s reality show, “Hoarders,” is precisely like watching the proverbial train wreck. It is gruesome and gory and filled with pathos, but I cannot turn it off. The premise is always the same: we hear the traumatic history of the homeowner as we tour the house, every room crammed to the ceiling with incidental, useless articles of furniture, clothing, printed materials, outdated food, odd bits of machinery, and an occasional dead animal. Often there are collections such as imported beer cans or Peanuts comic strips, and, in some of the more unsavory habitats, garbage is strewn everywhere. With no passageways through the mess, the hoarders climb like mountain goats to venture from kitchen to bedroom. The one cleared seat is invariably in front of the television, and the bathrooms are universally appalling. Then the therapists and the clean-up crews arrive, and the real drama begins.

What turns the tale and rivets me to this program is the revelation that hoarders are generally well-educated professionals, men and women who are successful and intelligent and yet have the compulsion to save every iota from their lives. To save what they have and also buy more to add to their stash. I myself am a saver, the keeper of my family’s past, and I relate totally to those tearful individuals who cannot part with a greeting card or a teddy bear or an article of clothing because it is associated with a particular memory. “But you have the memory,” the therapist always says to the hoarder clinging to her grandmother’s quilt or her daughter’s first baby shoes. “You don’t need to keep this.”

I’m not so sure. What has become of the notion of preserving memories through items passed on to us from our ancestors: the lock of hair or the pressed flower or the letters of a loved one? As a writer, I worry that we are becoming too easily dismissive of the very things that spark our senses, our imagination, our wonder about people who lived in different times and different places. And what of the next generation of writers, bereft of tactile prompts like hand woven fabrics or handwritten letters or even so much as an email to hold in their hands? What will they have to say about us?

I admit that “Hoarders” has made me a more cautious saver, and while I feel virtuous with every bag of old things I haul off to Goodwill, I have also begun to consider the merit of labeling what I keep. By recording the name of the quilter and the year of her creation or the significance of the people and the place in the 1942 photo, I will be saving an artifact rather than a mere piece of trash. I will be leaving a legacy for tomorrow’s storytellers.

Sick of Winter

It has been a long, cold, wet season, and Tracy, Liz, and I are looking forward to summer. Thanks to little help from our friends Jennnifer TeWinkle, Jennifer Mills, and Barb Coryea,
here is an enticing little package to welcome you to summer in Chautauqua County.

COUNTRY RETREAT FOR WRITERS

JULY 18-23, 2010 in beautiful Findley Lake, NY


Includes:
• 5 multi-genre writing workshops to amuse your muse with 3 well- published, highly experienced writers/teachers, Liz Abrams-Morley, Tracy Robert, and Sara Kay Rupnik
• Lodging, breakfast and lunch daily, plus one dinner with entertainment from the Good for Nuthin’ String Band at lovely Hazen Manor
• Tai Chi and energy alignment classes, & a lake cruise also included
• Acres of rolling tranquility in which to write & a renewing week in the company of other writers
• Package price only $560 inclusive.
• Writing Workshop only rates are $90/week or $20 per individual class.

Winter Writing Retreat in Jamaica

I traveled to Jamaica over Christmas break to investigate a guesthouse as the potential venue for a warm-in-winter writing workshop. I expected the location of Treasure Beach to be picturesque, and Calabash House to be the same. I did not, however, expect to fall in love with the place.

We landed in Montego Bay several hours late because of air travel delays, and the rental car dealer warned, “I do not advise you to make the journey to Treasure Beach at night. It is dark, very dark, and winding.” We booked a hotel with a surprisingly good restaurant and bar, ate curry, drank rum punch, and motored to the south of the island in the morning.

Waiting turned out to be wise: the drive, even in daylight, was treacherous, but the scenery exquisite. Photo ops rewarded hairpin turns and stomach-lurching ledges. When we arrived at Calabash House, our cook, the lovely Suzette, and her assistant Euonie, fixed us sandwiches, even though lunch had not been part of our two-meal-a-day agreement. Elizabeth Seltzer, the owner and host, made sure we were taken care of, though by no means pestered or hovered over.

The town of Treasure Beach has much to be enjoyed and explored: a reggae club, a stylish spa, shops (including Elizabeth’s wonderful on-site Mermaid Art Gallery) and restaurants. It is not a shopping mecca, mind you, but it has commerce and nightlife. Our first evening there we walked down the road to the club, South Jammin’, and bounced to a band featuring drummer Joe Isaacs, who played with the legendary Jackie Mittoo way back at the dawn of reggae. On New Year’s Eve, a concert at Jack Sprat’s required the mediation of traffic police. Glowing miniature hot air balloons, close to a hundred of them, were released gracefully into the sky to usher in 2010.

The grounds of Calabash House are not grand, but are sweet and impeccable, groomed daily by staff member, Michael. Anyone lucky enough to stay there walks the twenty or so steps to the shore amid a delightful array of butterflies and flowers. I did not have sphygmomanometer handy, but would bet my blood pressure lowered by significant degrees every time I took the garden path. There’s a hammock to inhabit at the beach’s edge, in case a body becomes too relaxed.

And then there’s the water. Our group had at least three reluctant ocean swimmers who were nonetheless coerced by the bathing pleasures of Treasure Beach. The sea is calm and clear, varying shades of blue-green, and a temperature neither too warm nor too cold. Jusssst right. It refreshes you from the 80-85 degree heat; I swam and was renewed by my dips into the ocean a minimum of 2 hours a day.

The rooms at Calabash House are large and artful, graced by themed wall mosaics created by the owner herself. I wanted to lurk through the house and photograph each one, but refrained. At some point I realized the journey to Treasure Beach was about being there, not simply photographing it, and subsequently decided this was a wonderful place to conduct a writing workshop, a place to be.

Anyone interested? We would build into the workshop package 7 nights of lodging, van transportation to and from the airport so you wouldn’t have to make that wild drive, 12-14 meals, a nightly literary salon for those who are so inclined, and a boat excursion up the Black River and to the Pelican Bar. (The bar is pictured in the photo, and is only boat accessible.)

We are thinking about Presidents Week 2011, Feb. 19-26, or an earlier week in January. If you relish the thought of a writing retreat in the warm embrace of the Caribbean, let’s talk.

Solstice: In Praise of Hibernation

Winter solstice. Tomorrow we in the northern hemisphere will experience our shortest day, or longest night. Yesterday, last night, into early this morning, a record-breaking snow storm ripped up the east coast and dropped nearly two feet of snow on Philadelphia, grounding planes, chasing last minute Christmas shoppers indoors. The city was hushed. Walkers took to streets where few cars rolled. My husband's planned trek to Cape Cod-- a "guys weekend" with a close friend-- was canceled. My courtyard neighbors, all of whom have plans to scatter for the holiday, postponed their travels for a day or two. Today as the skies cleared and the sun sparkled the snow banks, all of us came out in mismatched layers, boots, mittens--warm and dry trumps fashion on a day like today--and we chatted as we shoveled, catching up with each other's lives in small flakes of conversation, stopping, each of us, frequently, to marvel at the beauty of trees or to grin at the sight of children sledding down usually busy Third Street.

I have been thinking this week of hibernation, of all the ways that these days of shortened light and increased cold signal me as a mammal that it's time to rest, restore and listen to the stillness. Last Thursday, the sidewalks still bone dry, my yoga teacher told the class that the winter solstice is a good time to get quiet. Only when we get quiet, she reminded us, will we find solutions to problems, will our creativity be able to bubble to our surfaces. She was talking, as a yogi, about finding my "true self," but I thought immediately of my writing process, about how when I am too busily engaged in my "mental manager," I rarely get a creative piece going, but sometimes, often, on a quiet walk or when I'm soaking in a hot tub, an idea, a line, maybe just an image or a word or two, will float into my head. "Let go of the question," the yogis say, "and the answer will follow."

When my children were little, I let go control and learned humility. It didn't happen all at once; the idea wasn't native to me or consistent with my upbringing at all. But bit by bit, I began, at least occasionally, to operate according to the dictates of what I referred to as my "snow day theory of life." To wit: The day you plan to get done all those errands you've been avoiding, or want to edit that story or need to return a dozen phone calls, it snows, schools are closed, kids are home, bored and needy, and your plans are shot to hell. Slow down. Give up on snapping through the to do list. It was my "turn lemons into lemonade" moment the first time I thought "I'm not just ripping my hair out one strand at a time. I'm becoming flexible." The snow day theory blanketed all sorts of frustrations-- sick days, flat tires, phone lines down.

I woke yesterday and found both cats stretched out at the foot of the bed, sleeping the sleep of the redeemed. No cat nap edginess; I stomped around and they did not move. I hovered over each of them to assure myself their breath was still making their bellies-- ever so gently-- rise and fall. Usually they are rammy first thing in the morning, in search of food and attention, still wired from their nocturnal house explorations. Outside, the snow fell in fat, steady flakes and the wind blew drifts sideways. Whatever we had planned, we were going to have to unplan. "What the hell," I thought, "mammals that we are, we should all be out cold," and I crawled back in beside them and, in the stillness, my mind happily wandered.

Helicopters, Santa, and Family

I work at a school where Santa arrives in a helicopter on the soccer field at this time of year. The children shriek and wave, Santa and Mrs. Claus throw broken candy canes, and the hullabaloo is more confounding than exhilarating.

But I’m not going to write another piece on being miffed about the commercialism and pageantry of Christmas. I want to recognize what one of my young students said this week, which just might get me through the season.

During an assignment that had not much to do with the holidays but was about community, I asked a group of bright second graders to describe a place in their neighborhood that is very important to them. Most of their answers zeroed in on favorite restaurants, parks where sports were played, and the school itself. The last child to volunteer said that his family was the most important place in the community. The rest of us paused, blinked, and tried to digest his answer.

“Without my family,” the boy said, undeterred by our silence, “I would wander around the streets with no place to go. I wouldn’t even have a name.”

The teacher in me had to breathe and reconsider my urge to say, “But a family is not a place.” And I am so glad I had the presence of mind to keep my mouth shut and think for a moment.

Because family is a place. It is where we go to be completely known, in all our goodness and failing. It is the comfort zone in which to erupt with laughter, or weep because there’s nothing else that can be done. It is where we break down, and where we find the strength and shelter to put ourselves together again. A family may not be one of origin: it is often what we build through years of friendship and association. But it is always where we go to be ourselves.

The child pictured above is not the boy whose remark made my classroom pause this week. This child is my brother. He’s a middle-aged man now, experiencing a rough patch, and I hope he knows that he is a place to me, a reason why I belong, and proof we are not nameless. Look closely at the picture and you’ll see in him the bewilderment Christmas produces in both of us. It must be a family trait.

May you all be in the place you call family this holiday season.