pomegranate

The Untitled Leap -- Chapter 1

Mary told her it was like baseball.

“I can't sit down and watch it any more. I've got to be moving. I have to listen to it.”

She told her it was about a rhythm that got in her head, that even though no game was the same, even though there was no clock and always surprises, there was a pace, a motion, and when that game was on in the background, nothing, it seemed, could ever go wrong.

She told her this while she cradled the phone in her hand, the TV set on with the game in full flower, but no code was broken, as she was talking on the phone. She was imparting important information.

“Why is that man crouching?” her friend asked, her eyes on her TV at home.

Mary paused a minute, digesting the simplicity of the question.

“He's the catcher.”

The batter hit the ball back into the net. Silence.

“Do you know about foul balls?” Mary asked. “Do you know about three strikes?” “Okay,” she said,  “We'll have to start from the very beginning.”

Mary had met her friend, Laura,  twenty years ago in Berkeley, in a church basement on a Sunday morning, at one of those meetings that you go to, because if you didn't, you'd be face down in a box of doughnuts at best. Yes, she was there, because she had been humbled by doughnuts, and the only difference between that day and a year ago was that now she had no illusions about it. So she sat on a cold, metal chair holding a styrofoam cup of weak ass coffee that did nothing to hold back the headache that haunted her. She sat in that chair as a tiny woman with long, curly hair stood up and introduced herself, and proceeded to speak.

If you asked Mary today, she couldn't tell you any of the words that Laura said.

“My head hurt too much,” she'd say.  “'I could hardly stand sitting there.”

She said, “I thought about walking out, but instead at the end of the meeting, I walked up and talked to her.”

She said, “it felt like I didn't even know that I was doing it.”

She said, “I just meant to say that I liked what she said.”

She said, “I never talk to anyone at those meetings.”

She said, “I never talk to anyone.”

But Laura thanked her. Then she looked her in the eyes and  said, “I was going to walk around the lake and look at the geese. Do you want to come?”

Mary closed her eyes, felt the pain in her head, and said yes.

Now, on the telephone, she told her friend, “Maybe this isn't such a good idea."

She said, “It might not be a project that you want to undertake.”

She thought of what she would like to do if she had a terminal disease. Learn how to speak Italian.  Play the mandolin. Walk every day. See every possible bird she could. Watch them fly. Learning the A, B, Cs of baseball would not be high on her list. If she thought about it truly, the rhythm in her head that comforted her came from years of fandom. It seemed instantaneous to her now, but it was no quick fix.

She could hear her friend tiring.

“What if we talked tomorrow?” she said.

The Dickens Challenge

I'm going to be participating in an writing activity, instigated by writer Tim Hallinan, http://www.timothyhallinan.com, called the Dickens Challenge. A number of writers will be posting one chapter a week of a project a la Dickens and his serial novels. My work will be called "The Untitled Leap." Please pardon the rust.

Here is a list of the other writers involved in this Challenge, and where you can find their work:

John Dishon, newly married and newly out of college, is a beginning novelist with special interests in Asian culture and literature, who sees the Challenge as a way of getting one of his ideas for a novel out of his head and into written form. His book will begin Monday, December 17.  It’s called Country Snow and it can be found at www.johndishon.com

Nadja (NL Gassert) is working on the second book in her gay romantic suspense series set on lush, tropical Guam: When a vengeful STALKER seeks to punish Mason Ward for the sins of his past—and present—the security specialist needs to fight to save himself and those closest to him. Nadja will begin to post on Monday, December 17 and you can read her at http://write-experience.blogspot.com/

Timothy Hallinan is a novelist who lives in Los Angeles and Bangkok, Thailand.  The Fourth Watcher, which is the next novel in his Bangkok series, will be published in June 2008 by William Morrow.  (The first, A Nail Through the Heart, is out now.)  His Challenge book, Counterclockwise, will start Monday, December 17 at http://www.timothyhallinan.com/blog/

Steve Wylder is an Amtrak ticket agent and freelance writer living in Elkhart, Indiana and Bloomington, Illinois. His most recent published work is “Time Passages: Reflections on the Last Train Home,” in Remember the Rock Magazine. His contribution to the Dickens Challenge is tentatively titled “Things Done and Left Undone” and will begin Monday, December 17 at : http://ontheslowtrain.blogspot.com/

Lisa Kenney is a telecommunications industry account executive and beginning novelist who lives in Denver. She’s tackling the Challenge with a Dickensian themed story with the working title Foundling Wheel and will begin posting excerpts Monday at Eudaemonia.  Lisa, bless her brave soul, will begin to post on Monday, December 17.\

Usman is a businessman and writer who lives in Pakistan and has recently completed a book, which is now in revision. His work for the Challenge will be a mystery/thriller for which he’s still gathering ideas. (Welcome to the club.) It’s not titled yet but when he publishes, beginning around January 1, 2008, it’ll be at http://reality967.livejournal.com   

On the Whole Writer Thing

The other night, A friend told others about my writing credentials.

It feels awful just typing those two words, but he told them that I had a masters in creative writing, and then they all turned to look at me with these open, questioning faces.  So, I didn't mention my blogs.  Too immediate, too something that they could actually look up.   I told them that I had also taught creative writing.  It seemed like the best of those automatic responses like the doctor's hammer hits your knee and you kick.  And they kept looking at me, and so then I told them that when I attended grad school, I had a part time personal assistant job where I had the wrong temperament.  If you're a personal assistant, part of the whole deal is that you do a wide variety of errands for someone, and I just have never liked doing that, even when I like my employer, and I had a great employer.  But the first day on the job, my boss did hand me a box of tapes and said, "Can you do something with these?"  And I said, "I think I can," and that started my career as a transcriptionist.  Fortunately, it turned out to be a big part of this job, and it paid my way through graduate school and the years beyond.  I'm still a transcriptionist to this day, and it's a much less glamorous job than being a writer, but there's something meat and potatoes about it that I understand.

Part of it is a lot of writers make me cringe.  They talk about their characters and creating in this elevated tone, as if they've invented penicillin, and I just want to run out of the room screaming.  There was one such person on "Car Talk" the morning that I had this evening conversation with my friends.  The woman said she was a writer and she wanted her character to have certain car skills and she thought the Car Talk guys could help her figure them out. One of them told her his son wanted to be a writer.  "He works at Starbucks," he told her. "And you?"

I told that story to my friends, too, and the subject then changed.

Today, on this holiday, I thought about writing more, but spent the bulk of the day researching products that would help me become a better transcriptionist.  On this holiday, where it rained until it didn't, and then I walked and wondered if there would ever come a time when I would admit to writing with comfort and ease.

The Big Idea

I told my friend, Miriam Engelberg , today why I liked her writing so much. "It's because it's personal," I said, "but you connect it to a big idea."

Miriam has a book coming out in 2006.  She's a Harper Collins writer now.  It's one of those infinitely cool facts that should be burned on a wall somewhere.  And if I was good with a torch, I'd be the woman to do it.

I had come to this realization after feeling burnt by personal essays lately.  My favorite form, but the thing about is if there isn't some grand notion attached somewhere, it just reads like somebody else's notes to themselves, and I end up often feeling like, "Why are you telling me this?  What's the point?"

But Miriam,when she talks about her work, she'll present it as an idea.  And it's often a concept slightly askew but so right at the same time, and then in the next sentence, she'll attach it to her life.  And it's like as natural as breathing to her, that one-two step, that gene that so many of us, perhaps myself included, certainly on many occasions, seems to lack.  She's got it down, and it's just the most awesome, gracious thing.

You can see her work at her Web site   I am so lucky that she's my friend.

On Boundaries and Tone and Meaning

I read this column  today in Salon, and it made me think.

I didn't like the piece.  It made me question blogs and personal essays and think of my creative boundaries yet again.  You see, I have these rules in my head regarding writing.  They're rules that have evolved over time, sometimes over lessons hard learned, sometimes out of inner decisions made on how I want to live my life.  So, I have these guidelines in my head.  Here's one--it's very rare now that I will mention a person in my life by name.  You will see some generic friends in my posts, and even before I write that, I think long and hard about it, because these are people in my life.  They are not characters on my page.  They have their own stories.  They are not my stories to tell. 

I didn't like the piece in Salon, because I felt that Waldman is still being cavalier about her children.  That they are still being looked upon as basis for material.  Anne Lamott, a writer who I like very much, and will talk about again in a minute, also writes often about her child.  I recently read an article about her, and she said that she and her son have an agreement about what's written about and what isn't, and to some extent, that feels kosher.  It certainly sounds like more than what Waldman has with her children.  But are children old enough to make these agreements?  I don't see either of these writers writing about things their hustand or boyfriend say.  Why are those interactions apparently private and the children's words are potential text for publication?

But I still love reading Anne Lamott, and I think it's primarily because we share a feeling that faith is a foundation that has helped us in life, and we both tend to look at religion in unorthodox ways.  I mean, she attends a church regularly, which I don't.  I just have this relationship with God that I rarely talk about, but which is important to me, and I like Lamott's work because she chooses to address this connection, and it resonates with me.   I also really enjoy David Sedaris's personal essays, and I think it's because of his tone.  He's a very funny guy, and when he writes of situations that have happened to him, there's a lot of warmth and love around his words.  In Waldman's piece, I was interested in hearing about manic depression and suicide, but it was written in such a way--and then I felt this and I wrote that and I shouldn't have done it that way--that I couldn't really stay in the story.  I didn't want to.

I thought about Tennessee Wiliams today and how even when he was in true emotional pain, he refused to go a therapist, because he thought it would destroy his work.  I thought of Truman Capote and how his society friends dropped him after Unanswered Prayers came out and they discovered he had used  their lives for his stories, and he said in bewilderment (and this is paraphrased mightily), "What did they think I was doing all that time? I'm a writer."

Sometimes I worry right now that what I'm writing here is as mundane as a grocery list.  But I want to feel respectful of others and of myself.  I want to hopefully communicate something large and good and interesting through ordinary moments that maybe some of us can understand.  Good writing to me is not just transcribing what other people around you say.  I do that at work for money so my bills get paid.  To me, real writing is some sort of elixir of the personal and the general that morphs into something that could be universal and hopefully meaningful.  I'm kind of sifting my way through the seeds here.  I don't have the answers.  I've certainly made my mistakes.  But it seems every day I get more of a sense of what writing means to me.

On the Nature of Blogging

Earlier this week, a friend asked me a lot of questions about blogging.

She's known that I've blogged for as long as I've blogged.  She used to read my blog, in fact, one Christmas, she bought me a CD specifically from something I wrote on my blog.  That was pretty cool.  Then she stopped reading my blog, and I never knew why.  I never asked.  I just assumed she got bored.

But earlier this week, she told me why.  She said that even though I knew she was reading my blog, and that  I had her full permission to read my blog, it felt too personal for her to read it.  She said that perhaps blogs would best be read by strangers.

Then she asked me a lot of specifics about blogging.  How many times a week do I blog (Monday through Thursdays, I try to get at least five posts written, and they can be in either of my two blogs), what do I blog about (one's specifically on DVDs I watch, the other one is on anything), how do people know about my blog (few people know about my DVD blog, this one gets a lot more traffic because it's been around longer, and it turns out that people google for pomegranate.  There's something healthy about drinking pomegranate juice.  I don't know anything more about it than that.  But people will search for that and find me and sometimes they'll choose to read what I write.)  So, she asked me these questions, and I just answered them in a distracted manner, because we're at work, and there are these holiday deadlines that need to be addressed.

Then the next morning, I came in, already grumpy because a job was waiting for me that I didn't particularly want, and my friend said to me, "I started a blog."  And she sounded so happy and excited that I tried to transcend my grouchiness--I think I was about 60% successful.   I said a few "Good for yous!" and then I asked her for her URL.  I said I would be one of her readers.

And she said, "Oh, I'm not going to give out my URL."  She said, "I don't really want anyone to read it.  I just want to blog."

It was such an interesting idea to me, to blog without wanting any sort of a readership.  I could understand it somewhat.  At one point of this blog's life, I stopped writing for a while.  I needed to rethink why I blogged.  I was having some issues with spam comments, and I really didn't like that.  And I appreciated other people commenting, which is part of the traditional notion of being part of a blog community, but I realized that wasn't really what I wanted either.  I didn't want to write things and have people comment.  I liked to hear from people through email where we could have our own conversation.  That's the way I liked to converse the most.  And so after a while I started writing again and just closed the commentaries, and later I started another blog and did the same thing there.  But when I was thinking about what I wanted to do, I did think, "Why don't I just have my own writing practice?  Why don't I just write in a notebook once a day?  I don't need the blog."

But there's something about making the public commitment even when you have privacy limits.  There's something about saying "I have a blog" even if you're like my friend and you really don't want anyone else to ever read it.  There's something, even though everyone seems to be getting one these days, very special about having a blog.

The Dilemma

I'm having a dilemma right now about writing.

It's about the public/private domain--what is personal, mine, and what I want to write. The first, the personal, mine, seems to be expanding, and the other shrinking. The dilemma is: I care about writing. I care about my life. I want to care about what I want to write about, but I also want to keep a lot of things private.

If I was a smarter person, if I had more of an analytic, knowledgeable mind, I would write straightforward nonfiction pieces. Or I would write pure flat out fiction, if I was a more imaginative person or I could outline out a plot. I think if I can ever break down the blocks and return to fiction, i would base my story on another story--have a formal structure, like Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres. This is not to say that I think I have an eighth of the writing chops of Jane Smiley. It's just to say that if I ever could write a novel, I would most likely base it on another source just to give me that plot structure right from tjhe get go.

In thinking of pieces lately, the word that comes up is "no." I could write about--no. Or how about--no. Too personal. Someone else's story. No.

I'm trying to figure it out. I'm trying to write pieces here that mean something to me that also fit my code. I'm thinking that I want a big project on the side, one that doesn't fit the shape of blog, but would matter to me.

I'm thinking a lot right now.

Writig in Time and Space

Today was one of those days where I had some free time.

I had work, then two errands I needed to do, and then I needed to go meet some freinds. 

In the morning, when I got out to my car to go to work, I realized I had forgotten a book or a magazine or any sort of reading material.  Books to me are essential in days like this, where there will most likely  be times between errands and friends, and so I'm going to want a book.  And I have buckets to read right now.  I almost went upstairs to get something, but then I would have been ridiculously late for work, and I coudln't justifiy that, not even for a book.

It turned out that I did get everything done, and I had a good 45 minutes before meeting my friends.  The time loomed large.  I thought about going to the drugstore and buying some magazines, but I didn't want to drive any more and I couldn't bear just buying something for the sake of reading, when I had so much that I really wanted to read at home.  I thought I should just start traveling with a spare book in the trunk for these types of emergencies.  Then I remembered I had a little notebook in my backpack.  I decided I'd  write my blog piece in the notebook and transfer it to the computer later.

It was a humbling experience.  I realized that I've grown very used to writing in a certain way.  It's as if I'm so accustomed now to typing it on a compputer and seeing my familiar Pomegranate screen in front of me, that a notebook feels like an alien tablet.  It was a strange feeling lke I had the whole piece in my head, but I couldn't communicate it out on the page.  But there was nothing else to do, and so I hacked out what I thought, and knew I would never refer to it.  I wrote the piece on my other blog later, and it contained most of the same ideas, but writing it felt really different to me.  And I'm not sure if that's a blessing or a curse.  I wonder if I made a habit of writing in a notebook again as well, if I would eventually feel as attuned there as I do now sitting in front of a computer.  And would the writing be different?  It's something I wonder.

The Call of the Ducklings

So, I was thinking about the ducklings the other day, and I reailzed that I had actually been thinking about them long before I met them.  In truth, I was thinking about ducks.  Specifically I was thinking about ducks and writing.  This September, it will be two years that I started writing in blogs.  The first one I thought would primarily be about music and baseball, and they were ingredients in the soup, but if I look back at that blog now, I would say it evolved into a place where I could write about the process of watching an animal that I love die.  This one started off with the idea of:  So, what do you do after the animal you love dies?  I've had many answers to that, and some have been:  you listen and another animal calls you and then you decide whether you want to open your heart again.  You get new wheels.  You move.  You watch over some ducks, often imperfectly.

When I first began writing in blog form two years ago, I didn't know if I could do it.  I set this goal of writing five pieces a week, and it seemed daunting to me.  To make it comfortable, I would outline them.  I would write them in advance.  If I had an idea for a piece, I would write it down in a list I kept for ideas.  And I would think of ducks.  Specifically, I would think of five ducks swimming in a row, the way they do.  And when I couldn't think of what to write, I would think, "What are my ducks doing?"  And I would imagine them straying off, having fun, playing, and calling them back.  "I've got to get you in this row.  I need you here."

After a while I grew more comfortable wiith the process.  I stopped outlining.  I began writing right in the blog.  I no longer conjured up ducks.

But when I moved into this place and early on heard the ducks outside the window, it was as if part of me was surprised and deeply happy,  and part of me knew they would eventually come, because we had this relationship already established somehow.  It was a base that I had forgotten.  It just seemed right to want to see them, to respond to their quacks and peeps.  And then all of a sudden the memory came  back.  That's right.  I remember you now.

On Pain and Art and the Nature of Brains

I subscribe to many of the Powell's Books's newsletters.  I've never ordered a book from Powell's, I'm sorry to say, and I should rectify that error sometime in the near future.  But I love their Web site--they have wonderful interviews on it and essays.

This particular piece caught my attention and held it.  I loved the notion that books sprang from curiosity, not pain, because if it was from pain, there would be a great many more books.

Now I'm intrigued to read The Time Traveler's Wife.  Once upon a time, I worked on a novel entitled The Fiddler's Wife, hardly as intriguing as a time traveler, based upon a band I saw frequently during that era where the fiddler wore robes over his clothes, and actually managed to look quite good doing it.  I wondered what it would be like to be married to him and started writing.

Unfortunately, I didn't finish it.  I seem to have a short curiosity span.  Blog entries cover about the width of it, at least for the moment.  I keep thinking that will change, but I'm begining to wonder if it will.  And it's the same for reading fiction and watching DVDs at this point.  I'm slogging my way through Larry McMurtry's The Last Child, because I had it left over from my recent trip.  I like to read McMurtry on vacation.  He's just a good literary friend, I think.  I'm comforted by his voice.  I like that he often writes series, so I can read multiple books that span the whole story.  He's from Texas, and I would like to reclaim Texas.  My Texas belongs to Larry McMurtry, Joe Ely, Buddy Holly, Butch Hancock, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore.  From my artistic point of view, these are (or were, in the case of Buddy, R.I.P, the man who could write so simply and profoundly in that beautiful structure called a pop song) some of the coolest guys on the planet.  I know many people just see that state as the land of Bush and the  Dallas Cowboys, and there's this great other thing there that usually is ignored, and that I like to focus on.   Anyway, I'm reading The Last Child, because I read its prequel, The Desert Rose on my last road trip, and I had to find out what happened to the characters, although I'm very disappointed with what he's done with them.  So, I'm reading it late at night for 15 minutes or so and grumbling.  And I'm watching "Prime Suspect" in 30 minute intervals.  But I coul d listen to NPR for a long time.  See, I'm a lefthander with a highly developed right brain.  My left brain is crying to be used more. I'm trying to feed it.