In The Garden Living an RPG Life

That is the name of the comic book text book.  It is also what I think I’ll be doing this year for NaNoWriMo.  I seem to have let go of everything that keeps me from being happy with a coloring tool in my hand.  Spent a while today coloring in a friend’s coloring book. Working out the shading for the princess’ dress.  Getting the shadows on the faces right.  Choosing the right colors.  Checking out what the mark-making effects of crayons are when I use the drawing signature of DaVinci and Gorey.

What does this have to do with novel writing?  Well, the main characters keep drawing journals as part of their work practice.  A lot of my character creation has been through illustrations in old children’s story books.  I’m just realizing how much keeping a journal figures in my novels.

In the first novel, the journal full of visual ideas, sparks the consequences, literally.  In the second novel, it’s both journals (the ones belonging to the same person as in the first) and children’s books.  In the third, hmmm.  I don’t remember having journals but now that I think of it, why not?  The fields of music and knitting both have journal keeping as their practice, if not exactly as we think of them.  In the fourth book, its those journals again plus another person whose work requires them.

Whew!   I thought the retrospective didn’t occur till after one was dead, and then not for a long time!

I don’t know if I will be making pictures while I’m writing. I will wait and see what happens.   The one thing I’ve learned from my own renewed attraction to drawing is to not push it.  Most of the re-acquaintance came from my conversations with Gretchen about her own relationship with drawing.  I got to feel lonely for drawing.  Mind you, I haven’t let it go completely.  My journals are organized around making some kind of pictorial mark.  I make a rectangle on the top right corner of each new page and put a nice border around it.  Only after I write the date next to the frame do I start my entry for the day.  There are still blank frames on some pages.  I’m not committed to filling them up.  I just acknowledge that there is a place for drawing in my writing life.

Between my Catrina figure and my desire to build a fabric design practice, I’m realizing the perhaps I have really only thought of drawing as a tool and not something to do just for the heck of it.  I am not, even though I might like to be, someone who loves drawing.  Just as I am not a musician.  Or an electronic technician.  I may not even be a writer, for all that I write.  I am a person who can do all of these things toward some other end.  Or because of some other inspiration.  I don’t know how to talk about it any better than that.  I am expecting things to come together though, as I age a little more.

Something about how the spirit moves or can be perceived to move through all my interests and endeavors, seems to bring me peace.   There are people for whom all those activities are roads to spirit.  For many practitioners, art, electronics, music and the like are their path to something much larger than themselves.  This something gives them comfort when their Adventures take them deep into dungeons where they need to find their way past familiar and unfamiliar monsters.  I think, for me, writing is the Way.  The other activities seem to be just a way to see into the Mystery through eyes that are only partially focused through music, electronics, drawing and the like.

Fine.  Now I’ve gone and got deep.  Not to worry.  It’s Day of the Dead eve and these are perfectly good thoughts to have tonight.  The souls of those who know more about these things are about to be let loose to visit in our dreams and desires.  Might as well get things properly lined up.  Who knows what gifts of insight my Mae might bring me, what experiences of the other side I might receive from Ricky or Darryl.  And mom and dad and all the others behind them might have stories I can use to clarify my purpose.  Sam, dear Sam, might even bring me closer to the forge and show me how the center of the earth creates, what the Earth Dragon dreams about.  I can use that in my story tomorrow night.

Night all.

Blessings on us all.

Spoonflower did a really cool thing recently. They invited the community to get something for nothing.  They invited us to get free samples of our designs one day and, if we wished, we could send the usual fee for the samples, anyway.  What happened to the money and why is “not quite free” good?  They sent the money we paid to The Heifer Project!  I love that idea.  It’s how I want to do business also.

Since this was my first real sample experience, I decided to get images printed that would do two things.  First, I would get 8-inch square panels of single images to use for a project.  Second, I would find out how the images I wanted to use printed.   Unlike many other people using the service, I just want the prints however they come out.  That’s pretty much how I work.  I’m so perfectionist that I deliberately just letting things go and working with what I get.  That’s the artist in my saving me from myself.

So, what did I get?

On the left is the text of a post card my grandmother wrote to Langston Hughes.  On the right is an experiment using Inkscape to create a portrait of my niece, Morgana.  I don’t know what I’m going to do with either of them, yet.

Yeah…I’ve been negligent.  So much of life has been captured in Google Notes on the fly and then acted on or left to be sorted till another day.  Twitter takes much of my time sending me off in directions subtly hinted at by some part of my not-linear brain.

Just got a comment on one of my earlier posts about my grandmother.  Wish I knew what to do about it without waiting for input from the writer.  While looking to see which post she was referring to I noticed one of my National Poetry Writing Month poems about her, Roachie.  I wrote that?  Whoa.  I was just reading a post on the Study Hacks blog about Steve Martin.  I’d been reading a similar post at All Japanese All the Time.  Both were about how to be focused on one pursuit in order to achieve… what? Competence?  Excellence?  Ahh… Fluency!  That’s the word I want.  The other two are perfectly good words, but they don’t represent the sensation I want.  The feeling I want at the end of the process, as Martha Beck puts it.

Oh.  So you noticed.  Yeah.  That’s the effect of spending so much more time looking things up on the internet, following links that people who do things I want to do suggest.  Why am I doing that rather than becoming fluent in one thing?  Because the one thing I want to become fluent in is retirement.

oh.

didn’t really know that till now.

Somewhere in that insight is also a vague understanding of how all the different pieces are really one thing fragmented by being in the present and not in the future, where they are whole.  Huh?  OK.  Let me put it this way.  Say, you are a writer.  Right now you know you are a writer.  You have a published book and all that goes with the title “writer”.  That’s the whole thing.  Before that whole thing you may have been really good at looking things up, an excellent researcher.  Before that, or at the same time, you were also good at being a good listener and even gave really good advice to people whose lives were made infintely better by it.  And, you had a full-time job that gave you access to all kinds of opportunities that fed your soul.

Each of these, at the time, may have seemed like “the thing” to be doing.  But, in the end, while you were writing in your journal, looking up things that would help you be more helpful to those you knew, practiced skills that helped you stay good at your job so that you could feed your soul as well as your body, you felt fragmented.  You felt anything but being a writer.

Then you started writing, taking it seriously. And you found that each of those fragments, that seemed to be its own universe for you to occupy fully, was only a single stream from a deeper source.  You found it easy to build, reconstruct, and ignore metaphors.  The creative imagery and resolutions of narrative situations that come from juxtapositions of context excited your readers and flowed from you effortlessly.  Writing for you was a delight, a joy, without the blockages others reported.

I’m not saying that my retirement is as a writer.  Nope.  Not saying that.  The same way I was “not saying” that I would be a nurse.  That “not said”… Only time will tell what the final completed piece will be, what my retirement will look like.

Back to web surfing…

(For Roachie - Mae V. Cowdery)

A brown aesthete writhes under the glareof historical texts.

No Poe.  No Keats.  No Cullen or du Bois.

Only soaring into paths not travelled across galaxies

Light years to go before sleep

What did it matter that Death kept its eyes on my skin

its hands on my heart.

You had gone first.

I was an unknown shadow on your horizon.

Only now do our separate events approach each other.

Guess not if you are a hibernating bear!  And I’m not so sure I am not.

So… where have I been?  Writing actually.  And making my mind up that I am a writer and not a knitter.  All that means is that the needles get dropped and left behind for the pen more than the other way around.  It also means that the pen gets picked up for other things that the needles don’t.  Like drawing.  I think.

I had high hopes of making a writerly space there, but something else got in the way.  Yet another writing pursuit in the form of an online technical writing class.  That has been more troublesome than I thought it would be.  I think it’s because the universe of technical writing has nothing to do with what I actually might right about.  OK, so that’s a bit of exaggeration, but still.  I don’t work in a field where office memos are part of my everyday speech pattern.  As it is I had to create a Second Life project for one assignment.  I also ended up using the Comic Kazes blog for another.  And somewhere along the line I discovered that it might do me well to learn Adobe Acrobat for real.  Something about on-demand publishing.

Which of course sent me running back to my NaNo-novels to see how ready they might be for publishing.

Only if by publishing you mean getting someone to put them into print for me so that I can use them like I would any novel I would want to analyse.  Only this time I would be quite critical and tell the author how she might improve the story and the obvious typos.  I think that would be quite satisfying since I know the author would listen to me.  Nothing like talking back to an author knowing you will be heard!  Gives reading with a pencil much more impact.  More power.

Now, I want to shift the blog to where it was heading anyway. Shift it visually away from knitting.  And I just got something.

I wrote a couple of comments in response to a couple of my grandmother’s fans.  In one of them I was remembering reading Mae’s book of poetry and I wrote that I was sitting in her mother’s chair and my mother was sitting nearby knitting.  That’s the connection and I never saw it till now.  My mother didn’t write. Neither did my great-grandmother.  Granny crocheted and Mommy knitted.  I suspect, though, that Mommy knitted instead of writing.  I suspect a lot of women did needle work instead of something else they wanted to do more.  Which makes Mae’s book even more remarkable.  I know that my mother had the desire to write and to make other kinds of art.  For one reason or another, she didn’t.

So much for returns and revelations.

Why do we keep turning away from home to feed our desires?  Perhaps because they get buried at home.  More revelation.   I am looking outside myself for source and sustenance.  At the moment, I am also looking at what appears to be some Granny wrapped in a lace shawl. It’s just photos of my first lace piece draped over a chair.

Proof that I can follow directions as well as finish a complex task.

I think I’m doing battle with ghosts here.  Letting them out so they can go home and leave me to play.  I know this lace thing is good.  I also like the practical stuff, like sweaters and socks.  I just don’t know how to put it all together with the writing and drawing and the rest of my life’s tasks.

Oh well.  That’s what Second Life is for!  Taking me away from all this.  You can’t really knit in SL.  And besides, I get to be a Shaman Bunny.  Can’t do that in Real Life, and while a bunny

can write in Second Life, it can’t in Real Life….

So there!

OK… done venting.  Will be back with more about the Shaman Bunny or another story.  Meanwhile, I’ll be changing things around a bit.

Just received copies of letters my grandmother wrote to Langston Hughes, “Lankie” to her.  I didn’t know my great-grandfather played piano.  I knew he was a caterer so I imagine getting a home-cooked meal at the Cowdery’s was a treat.

I only know my grandmother from her book of poetry.  Among the letters is the one in which she tells Langston of her manuscript being accepted.

I’ve such a loneliness for her.  She was all I wanted to be and didn’t know how to become and here she is talking to someone else.  It’s not fair!  She should have been mine!!

I decided that I would post the text of the Cast On essay, today, my birthday.

MOOD

Today, I darned a sock and made a bed…

This is a line from a poem, written by my grandmother, Mae V. Cowdery. It is from a slim volume of poems– We Lift Our Voices. — she published in 1936. Whenever I spent time with my mother in Philadelphia, I would search out the volume and leaf through the pages until drawn to one title or another.

I’m an occasional poetry lover, preferring science fiction and fantasy, my mother’s entertainments. And yet, for some reason, this line lingers, still, creating a ghost image of what my grandmother must have felt about the minutiae of keeping house. Looking around at the chaos I call home I wonder what she would really think of it.

Not one bed made. Not only unmade, but covered in unfolded laundry. I don’t even know where I would find the makings even if I chose to make any one of them. As for socks. I’d rather make one than darn one. In fact, when I recite the words in my head it’s usually, “today I made a sock and darned a bed”. Except I don’t make socks. And I like bed too much for even such a mild swearing as “darn”.

All that being said, there is still something that lingers, that calls to me from those words. It came to me while I was working on a piece of lace knitting. Nothing special. Just a collection of thread and holes to find out how this stuff works. Of all the knitting I’ve done, knitting lace is the most satisfying. I only discovered that last month with my first lace knitting project, finished. It satisfies me with its requirement for focus on making each stitch. Even the plain rows require attention lest I miss one of the yarn-overs of the previous row.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been reacquainted with my grandmother within the same month, that I’ve come to associate lace knitting with poetry. Over the last five years or so, I’ve found references to her and her poetry on the internet. And last month I made contact with a woman who is writing about her for an anthology of Harlem Renaissance poets. The image I have of her now, wearing a suit and tie, emphasizes my imagined inheritance of housekeeping ennui. And yet…

For all the chaos, I have friends that would rather be here than at home. They say, it looks like me. The walls are painted the color of sunlight through leaves and glow and move with leaf shadow in sunlight. The walls are hung with quilt explorations. The windows are edged with tiny Buddhas among even smaller animal totems: horses, rabbits, rhinos. A small blue glass holds three coccoons. When the fan is on the flat rings with the chimes of an Em7th chord.

Ok. So I’ve decided we don’t like housework. There is more to keeping a home, a home where poetry grows anyway. And I realized, sitting and knitting lace, that this is a home for poetry and other makings. Lingering after all the other voices on proper living have had their say, the poet’s voice prevails.

As for me…today, I leave a sink full of dishes and the eggshells unmulched. I’m rushing to catch the cone of gold cotton, to photograph it glowing in that deep sunlight way it does, nestled there between the bookshelves, against the green wall. And then, I write how knitting lace is making poetry, and how making poetry remakes the world.

Leaving the dishes may not be a kind of home keeping that Mae Cowdery would fully approve of, yet, it could be one that she would recognize as right and good.

The poem:

Mood

I am a strange creature
Of precarious moods
More changeful than the weather…
Today I did a simple task
(I darned a sock and made a bed)
And now my heart is singing…
It will not last—I know too well
How soon some straying thought
Will grow into a sullen cloud
And brood across my sky…
So I will sing the while
This errant sunlight glimmers
Through my day.