"Nothing is wasted on the writer."

Are you a real writer? The sure way to find out...

It's 9:24 a.m.

I have to leave at 10:00 to drive a deeply depressed friend to her therapy appointment. I am in the middle of writing one of my long, thoughtful, typical essay-type posts, which my friend Ronni Lundy calls "blongs." I left it, and began writing this instead.

I have a bowl of Irish oatmeal beside me, cooked with diced apples, which melt to creaminess as the oats cook, studded with pieces of medjool dates, which also soften to caramel-like bits, added in the last few minutes. The bowl, brown and grey pottery, with visible finger-rings, was thrown by my late husband. If I lifted it up I'd see, on its bottom, his scratched-in signature: Ned Shank, 1971. Stirred into the finished Irish oatmeal is a heaping teaspoon of almond butter, and a drizzle of maple syrup, from the trees tapped by my nearest neighbor, here in Vermont.

I am going to see if I can write an actual short blog post, and get it done before I hop into the car to do my mission of mercy, which I both want, deeply, to do, and am slightly irritated at having to do (I have been hanging in there with my depressed friend for many months now. It's getting old. But I am ridiculously loyal, to my friend, and stubborn;  insistent, internally, that I know this is part of her life process, and mine, and that she and I will get through it, and that it will someday have meaning).

I am trying to finish this because nothing in the universe, that I have found, makes me feel as "God's in heaven and all's right with the world," as writing, particularly when I finish a piece. (I accidentally wrote, and just found and corrected, "all's write with the world.")

I have 50 published books out: all with name, traditional publishers: HarperCollins (Harper & Row when they published me), Simon and Schuster, Macmillan (now also part of Simon and Schuster), Charles Scribners (now defunct), Workman. And I have one coming out with Little, Brown (leading at times to peculiar, hilarious, but truthful statements like, "I'm going in to have lunch with the Little Brown people tomorrow.") 

But I don't believe, in my heart of hearts, that I am a real writer until I have written that day. That day, being each day. Being today.

It's the holidays. Should I go to a party that is large enough so that I don't know everyone and strike up conversation with a stranger, it is likely at some point he or she will say, "So, what do you do?"

And I will say, "I'm a writer."

"Oh," he or she will say. And then that subtle shift in tone. "Published?"

Meaning, are you a real writer or an amateur, just futzing around. Meaning, where do I put you on the one-up one-down scale. Should I be impressed (are you famous? have I heard of you?), interested and slightly respectful (oh, you write a column for the Brattleboro Reformer which I may have read) or merely polite (how interesting, excuse me while I get another deviled egg).

I say yes when so asked, because I am a published writer, after all. Yes. True. But if I haven't written that day, I feel, in my heart of hearts, like a hypocrite.

The outside world, in the form of real and imaginary people at cocktail parties, teachers, parents, and siblings, will tell you, directly and indirectly, that a real writer equals a published writer.

Except every writer was at some point an unpublished writer. And even every published writer returns periodically to being unpublished, during the time they are writing.

This is so obvious. Except, evidently, it isn't.

Twitter is a medium I use (I'm @cdragonwagon) and simultaneously like and loathe, in part because the same limitation of characters that forces you to be succinct and pithy also forces you to write "U" for "you" at times.

Here's the one sentence version of this post, as I put it on Twitter a few days back:  "Act of writing makes U 'real' writer. O,U thought it was publication? In his lifetime,Van Gogh sold O paintings; was he a 'real' artist?"

I said above, vis a vis the location where I feel like a phony if I haven't written on the day --- any day --- when I'm asked about being a writer if I haven't written that day, "in my heart of hearts."

By which I mean, in that interior True North by which one steers; to which, if one is true, one feels in alignment, living life with purpose and integrity.

Veer a few degrees from that compass point, and one becomes a hypocrite in one's own eyes, whether or not the world notices (and it usually won't, until the degrees are so many that the degree of offness is blindingly evident).

At least I feel that way if I deviate by even a couple of degrees.

But not today.

For now it is 9:50 a.m. And though I have not finished my oatmeal, I have written.

Like one of the ads for one of the airlines used to say, "We earn our wings each day."

Today I earned my wings: I wrote. Therefore, I am a real writer.

It's a relief.

9:55 a.m.

All I have to do is hit "publish" and I will both a real and a published writer.

Again. Until tomorrow.

uncovering: a yak, a six-year-old, and some witches walk into a post...

The little girl who asked me the question was a first-grader then. Assuming she is still alive, she's 36 or so, probably with children of her own.

But our paths crossed just the one time. That was in 1982, in Atlanta, Georgia. I came to her class as a visiting writer. So I know her only as a six-year-old, and only from one interaction. In my mind she is today exactly what and who she was then: an adorable, very solemn little girl, with light brown skin and black hair caught back with pink barrettes.

The reason she's in my mind today has to do with children books and their illustrations. I have a new children's book,  All the Awake Animals (Are Almost Asleep), coming out about a year from now, which will be illustrated by David McPhail. I am so delighted with what I have seen of the pictures so far that I have posted a few of them on Facebook. Which prompted a comment that reverbed me back to that little girl's question.

All the Awake Animals is my first new children's book to be released in almost a decade (for reasons I describe on a video here, made at a talk I gave about a week after the book was accepted by Little, Brown... and in which I slip up in a ridiculous way at the end).

I am loving working with Little, Brown's Andrea Spooner, Senior Executive Editor of Books for Young Readers. She is one of the most attentive and respectful editors I have ever had; even when the discussion runs to, say, at what time of day and in what manner a vole, otter, lion, yak, walrus -- shown here catching "forty wet winks" after "wading into the waves"--- or an urubu actually sleeps. (An urubu is an African vulture; few animals start with  "u".)

The book begins:

My little one,
Lay down your head
It's time for sleep
It's time for bed

You tell me,
"I'm not sleepy now,"
"Just try," I say.
You ask me, "How?"

After a few more exchanges, the mother takes the child on a slow, dreamy visit to 26 different animals, all in various stages of snooze or near-snooze. They go animal by animal, one for each letter of the alphabet, from Antelope ("asleep all the way to his antlers" ) to Zebra (who "just zzzzzzzs...") before returning to a final dozy reiteration of rhyme.

Andrea took a lot of time finding just the right artist, and she is taking a lot of time working with him, and me. In 40 years of working with different publishers, I can remember no other children's book editor who has ever involved me quite so much in the selection of the artist, and has engaged me so thoughtfully in discussing the pictures and my reactions to them.

Nor, for that matter, has that happened with any cookbook editor/art director (for non-photographic cookbooks, too, have 'spot art' and 'chapter openers' and while they are less essential than in a children's book, and though the reader may be only aware of them peripherally, these illustrations either do or do not enhance the words and recipes).

Yet this indirect collaboration I'm now experiencing with David is so good! It's so easy! It's so much fun! I wonder why, in general, there seems to be, in many editors' minds, a separation-of-church-and-state thing about writers and illustrators?

At any rate, I am deeply grateful. And, as I see the watercolors David  is doing, I am delighted; exhilarated, even. Though perhaps that's not quite the right word, for the pictures are sleepy, cozy, dozy, soporific. You can hardly look at them and not start yawning, like yak is doing here: just what you want in a goodnight book.

Yet their perfection does exhilarate me. They are luminous and tender, but not anthropomorphic or cute. The textures --- of the animals' fur, feathers, hides, tusks --- are so vivid I can imagine children stroking the paper to feel them, and growing puzzled that they can see but not touch the softness or roughness. The backgrounds are soft, impressionistic dreamscapes, suffused with soft light; light which makes shadows,  refracts on water, or pierces clouds.

As I say, I am so delighted with these pictures that I have been sharing a few of them, as they progress, on Facebook. First the sketches, now the almost-finished drawings / paintings. And my Facebook pals --- many of whom are readers, parents or grandparents, or artists themselves --- are also enthusiastic, and many have been commenting on them too.

It is in this context that Cathy Smith, who blogs marvelously at "Growing Curious", and who farms, cans and preserves at Curious Farm and sells at local farmer's markets in her area, just outside of Portland, Oregon, asked me

what is it like to have your story brought into the visual realm by someone else? since you're so comfortable in this publishing world, do you just go with the flow at this point, or does it stop your heart sometimes?"

Let's leave aside the fact that I don't think I or anyone else is exactly "comfortable" in the publishing world. Which is not only changing at this moment with dizzying rapidity technologically, but which has always been at least anecdotally on the verge of collapse, for as long as I can recall.

I still remember my mother, the writer-editor Charlotte Zolotow, who was active during the period which, we can say in retrospect, truly was children's book publishing's golden age, muttering darkly and scornfully about Harper & Row being taken over by "the Harvard MBA's" and "the eleventh floor" --- synonyms for management.

"Can you imagine?" she said once at the dinner table, indignantly, when I was young. "They want me to do something called an ROI!" "What's an ROI?" I asked; I was maybe 10 or 11. "I didn't know either, honey," said my mother. "It's --- " she could hardly splutter it out --- "It stands for return on investment!"

"Well, what's that?" I asked.

And thus, in what was said and the tone in which it was said, and what was not said, I learned business 101; and that it was implicitly in conflict with art, beauty, and purpose. I'm still trying to undo the imprinting on that one. I would like to break the paradigm/archetype of the impoverished artist or writer who lives in the garret. I would like to think that Mammon and the Muse can sit down and have at least an occasional cup of amicable tea, and some hot buttered scones, together.

Don't worry, I'm getting back to that little girl in Atlanta.

My fourth or fifth picture book, Katie in the Morning, was given to a very young artist who had never illustrated a book before. This was in 1982/ Full-color illustrations were rarely done at the time; instead, colors were made using transparent overlays, a very tricky business, and in the hands of someone who didn't know what they were doing, could very easily result in muddied, unsatisfying hues. This artist's inexperience showed, and did not, I thought and still think, do justice to its text.

But justice... who are we, finally, to say what it is and isn't? For, here's a remarkable thing about the present era's access to information: I'd forgotten the name of the woman who did those illustrations, so I went downstairs to get a copy of the book (and, yes, the pictures seemed every bit as unappealing to me as they always had).

But... I Googled her. And there she was: Betsy Day, Illustrator. And my-oh-my has she ever matured as an artist! Take a look at those dancing chickens, for example, on her website. She does gallery work, too, and she's written and illustrated one title, Stefan & Olga, left and above.

Assuming I had written something with the right fit for her current style, I'd be delighted if she was to do one of my books today.

But, though I didn't care for her work on Katie in the Morning back in 1981, on reflection it is good that Harper & Row (this was before they were Collinized, as I like to say) took a chance on Betsy. Their doing so helped enable her to develop into the artist she has become. That is, one might say, a truly good ROI, with, perhaps, a whiff of "justice" in a cosmic sense. Yes, I wish they'd asked her to redo Katie, or ... Well, but I've lived long enough, now, to know that I haven't a clue as to the really big picture. I've kissed the dream of understanding why fully, about much of anything, goodbye. 

Here's a slightly expanded version of how I answered Cathy Smith, on Facebook: I told her that when I had disliked the art that had been chosen for me, and about which I'd had no say,
      
... it was, and sometimes is, pretty unhappy-making. Some editors ask for and welcome feedback which they transmit, politely and kindly, one hopes, to the artist. Some do not. If I  can have a beneficial effect and help improve, from my perspective, the fit of the art to the text, I do... If not, and I truly dislike the art, generally what I do is get very disturbed and unhappy about it, cry some, and then live with it. I get over stuff pretty fast. There are only a couple of books where I feel the pictures were truly disastrous;   after all, the publisher, too, wants the books to be good as a whole and they do try hard, if sometimes misguidedly, to get the appropriate illustration. There was also one in which I really didn't like the mood of the pictures, though they were good --- just so not what I would have chosen.

That book was Bat in the Dining Room, well-executed by S.D. Schindler in a funny, cartoony style. These pictures are charming in their own way, I think now; I probably would have enjoyed them in someone else's book, or even a different one of my own. But in this one, I so wanted the mystery and wonder of night, such as Jerry Pinkney had created so rapturously in my Half a Moon and One Whole Star, and later, in his own recent retelling of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Though I never truly loved the pictures in Bat, I eventually came to peace with that one more easily than I did those of Katie in the Morning, which made me wince, and still do.

(If you should read this, Betsy, I'm sorry. Truly, I am. But I'm guessing you wince, too, as I do over some of my own early work. I hope we both accept these things as part of the process; impersonal, implacable, difficult, with exuberance and disappointment in something like balanced measurement. We must, though maybe it's presumptuous of me to say so: but we're both working artists, who've been at it awhile. And if we didn't get that this is how it is, often uncomfortably, we would've surely given up, no?)

Katie had come out around the time I paid the visit to that first grade class in Atlanta. Though I think children in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade get much more out of a writer's visit than those kids in earlier grades (who still aren't too clear on the whole concept of "author" generally --- and why should they be, they're in the psychedelic, improbable mystery of being so young that anything... could turn out to be anything!), of course schools always want you to at least pop in and read a book to the youngest students.

And of course I always ask if there are any questions; though at that age, there usually aren't. It's more like, "Does anyone have any questions?" and a small face will look up earnestly and say, "I have a cat."

But that particular morning, that little girl in Atlanta did have a question. A real question, and, as I have said, she asked it with solemnity and gravitas. Her manner  made me wonder later if she, literal as all children are, had perhaps been puzzling over it for weeks, as I remember puzzling over why "witches" were in the Pledge of Allegiance. ("And to the Republic, for witches stand...")

"Do you believe," that little girl asked me, "that it's true that you really can't judge a book by its cover?"

This was a question I had never been asked before, or for that matter since. 

I thought about it.

"Well, " I finally said, thinking of Katie, "I wrote a story once that I really liked,  but I didn't really like the pictures. So I guess, if you picked up that book, and you looked at the cover, and you put it down without reading the words because you thought the cover was ugly, I think you would have judged the book by its cover and made a mistake. So, yes, I think it is true that you can't judge a book by its cover."

Judging. These days I try to replace judging, and certainty, both of which are fixed and static, with curiosity and inquiry, both of which move, change, and flow. As life itself does, and with it, our perspective.

I would have sworn, based on those long-ago illustrations of Katie in the Morning, that Betsy Day had just called it quits. I am so deeply glad that this not the case, that she has grown into her talent, and her talent continues to grow.

And I am glad that I tell students in Fearless Writing that every piece of writing is essential to the writer, regardless of whether it works as a piece or not: because this is true. Seeming unsuccess is as important as seeming success in our lives, as artists and as human beings.

And I love the mysterious fact that somewhere, out there, is a 36-year-old woman who has no clue, no clue at all, that she lives forever as a child in the mind of a woman of whom she almost certainly holds not the faintest memory.

And I am glad my mother, now 96, who has now completely forgotten Harper & Row, was once so deeply passionate about books and art.

And I am glad that I neither accepted nor rejected her scathing views on ROI's, but continue to wrestle with them (a match I think is now taking place on the international level, with the Occupy Wall Street movement, by the way; in essence, can there be enlightened, good for people-planet-and-profitable capitalism, or not? "People" presumably including artists and writers and those who self-nourish from seeing or reading their work.)

And I am glad to be witnessing David McPhail's illustrations move from sketches to completion: more flow and process. This is the best part of "what is it like to have your story brought into the visual realm by someone else" --- the art doesn't just 'illustrate' what you've put there but expands the story, in a way that is both compatible and surprising. I am amazed and delighted to see David's insertion of what my mother used to call "a visual sub-plot" --- in this case, the animals creeping to the now-sleeping child's bedroom window and peeping in.


Why are they there, those animals? To listen to the story the mother is telling, about them? Because, to them, a little boy is exotic and strange? Or perhaps they are not "really" there; perhaps the sleepy child is "only" imagining them. Who knows? I don't, and neither will the book's young readers. And this isecond story is what the artist has added, layering what I wrote with his own, subtly mysterious and charming. 

And what expression is on the faces of those animals as the gaze into the window of the sleeping human child, jaguar hanging upside down to do so? Perhaps they gaze with longing? Perhaps curiosity? Maybe.

But, I think, certainly not with judgment.

You can't judge life by how it looks and feels at any given time; that is only its cover.

You have to open it up. 

"fixing to" ... and a message via indigo bunting

The original inventers of twittering have been coming and going from the feeder all day today. Whenever I look out, from the bathroom window upstairs or the french doors in the kitchen downstairs, different visitors are at the cafe. Finches yellow as canaries,  finches as reddish-purple as if they'd bathed in grape juice. Sparrows, in tweedy brown-gray-black-white. Black-caped chicadees. Grosbeaks, with their rosy-red neckerchiefs set off by the chic understated black, gray, and white, the bright slash of their busy yellow beaks. All those dear active feathered bodies, at work, play, feeding, in flight.

And then, twice ---  at midday and then again in the late afternoon --- a rarity at the feeder. An indigo bunting, its turquoise so vivid my breath caught in my throat. (photo, courtesy of Thundafunda)


Which reminded me.

About six years ago, I was fixing to teach my first Fearless Writing in Vermont.

By the use of "fixing to" you can tell, if you didn't already know, that the majority of my life has not been spent in Vermont,  but in Arkansas.

"Fixing to" has elements of "getting ready to" or "about to" , but it's more elastic, less definite. This indefiniteness has to do with time and preparation. One could be fixing to do something in a year or in 15 minutes. And while this could involve doing a particular task in a timely manner (if you're fixing to go a potluck, for instance, you might be making a skillet of cornbread, or cutting up and transferring it to a basket), it --- fixing to --- also, to me, also implies a kind of thoughtfulness, a mental preparation or pre-preparation. You're deciding less what, than how, you'll go about whatever you're fixing to do. You're rolling it over in your mind, meditating on it, cogitating on it, considering it.(Left, one such basket I did take to a potluck, here in Westminster West, Vermont, in 2010; photo by David R. Koff.)

The fixing to I was doing around this particular Fearless Writing had elements of both thought and action.

Not only was it the first Fearless I was going to teach in Vermont, it was going to be in my own home, not a conference center or similar facility. Not only was it going to be in my home, instead of being a quick one-weekend intensive workshop, the way I most often teach it, it was going to be one full-day Sunday every other week for six months; twelve sessions, in other words.

We would go more slowly. The group would get to know each other very well. The seasons would make a half-circle. We would change, individually and together, with and through our writing and our shared time. I knew this, though I had no idea exactly how the particular students would all mesh together with each other and with me, only that they would, in some unforseeable way.

The fixing to was given further depth by the fact that I was still fairly new to my Vermont life. It still felt like a still largely unknown after, filled with question marks --- to the before that had been Arkansas, period.

The Arkansas life: as many readers of these posts know, I'd assumed I'd have for the duration, but had been abruptly exiled from it by the sudden death of my much-loved husband, Ned Shank. His death that unspeakably large domino which knocked over almost all the others constructing my old life.

Ned's before-and-after happened within the space of four hours. BEFORE: a tall, handsome blue-eyed guy in early middle age, with disgracefully long eyelashes; a writer, an artist, an innkeeper, an historic preservationist, an imperfect but loving, affectionate husband, and an all-around sweet, funny guy. Don't know who took this picture of him, laughing with my Aunt Dot on the side porch of what was then Aunt Dot's Vermont home, and is now mine... I believe it was a visit we made here in September, 2000, just a few months before his death. Now both Aunt Dot and Ned are gone from this world; but strangely, he, at age 44, before her, at age 100 + nine months. This picture always twinges me, but i love how it shows the fondness these two had for each other, their good humor in each others' company, and their relative sizes and ages.)

THEN --- which I guess is the "and" in every before-and-after: he, on his finch-yellow bicycle, on his tri-weekly ride, flew through a pick-up's windshield. The impact, on 62 West, just past the Lake Leatherwood turn-off; the ER doctor at St. Mary's in Rogers, Arkansas, wearing black scrubs with an incongruous pattern of bright fruit, coming into the "family room" to say to me, "We lost him."

AFTER.

My own after was not a literal death, of course. Only the death of an old life.

Call it, more accurately, an amputation. One that took place with agonizing slowness and only gradually dawning awareness. Pyschic gangrene just about had to set in before I was willing to say, "Okay, cut it off" and hobble the hell out of Dodge; which is to say, the town that had been my home for 33 years, Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

And move on to the slow, incremental creation, or perhaps revelation, or unfolding, of my new life, begun so tentatively. But one I have now been living, in Vermont, for the past eight years.

It now seems to me that in part I got through all this loss and change because writing itself had taught me a lot about uncertainty.

Showing up, working, walking and writing the same way, one foot after another, without much idea of where I was going. But somehow arriving somewhere that was often surprisingly good: despite unknown, unguaranteed, uncertain outcome, and swimming in the tidal rise and fall of anxiety with its unpredictable, lethal-feeling undertows.

Teaching Fearless Writing (a misnomer, because fear is always part of the process) had deepened my abstract and practical understanding of this. Each time I watched students get it, I got it again, too.

"It" being: that increasing one's ability to tolerate anxiety is the price of admission to writing, creativity, and finally, life itself.

This is something one never stops learning. Like all the big, important stuff, you don't learn it once, but over and over again. And each time it feels both familiar and like a shockingly new revelation.

So. There was a lot of "fixing to" as I approached this first extended Fearless Writing. Given a death, an emotionally unclean and needlessly cruel severing from a non-profit organization I had started back in Arkansas with my late husband, the sale of one house, the purchase of another (that second house being Aunt Dot's former home, bought, as I always say, "...with financing, so creative I should have gotten a Macarthur.) Then, a cross-country move to a part of the country with so different a geographic, political, and civic climate from that in which I had lived for the prior 33 years, that I could as well have moved almost to another planet --- a lot of "fixing to." Right, the day of the great loading of the moving truck, on my then-front porch in Arkansas. I got by with a little help from my friends. Make it a LOT. Here, embracing and being embraced by Cheri Wright, Charlisa Cato, Starr Mitchell, & George West. Ah, the poignant problem of a late-in-life move: you can make new friends --- I have, and I do --- but you can never make old friends. (I believe the South is so much more easily friendly on a personal one-to-one manner than the North, yet remaining unbelievable harsh on a civic level, while the North is the exact reverse. But there are exceptions, and I digress.)

But I had done most of the fixing to by this particular Saturday, before the first Sunday of this extended Vermont Fearless Writing. And I was surprised to be... happy.

It was early May, as it is on the day I write this: miracle greeness after the long cold white winter. The one after which I gave that extended Fearless must've been my second or third in Vermont; now I have been through eight, to my own astonistment.

Non-New Englanders always imagine winter to be the biggest climactic challenge; this is not so. It's Mud Season, which follows winter: incredibly inconvenient, mussy, muddy, mucky, unwalkable, undrivable, sloppy.

But then. Spring.

Now --- both as I write this and the "now" of the day before I taught that first Vermont Fearless --- the white snow and wet brown mud had retreated. Almost everything was green or becoming so, a green pale and yellow-tinged, as if trees and grass, so long covered and sodden, now thirsted for and feasted on sunlight to excess, imitating it, exuding it. A greeness omnipresent, almost palpable, and impossible for human eyes to get enough of.

And me? That day I too was beginning to green-up and grow golden, in a new, double-barreled way. First, I was filled with anticipation about the class, jazzed, psyched. Second, on top of that, just astonished that I had it in me to be happy again.

One does not understand life's own hunger to live, quite apart from individual will, and the resilience it brings, until one has experienced it. While for several years after Ned's death, my own life felt to me like a long prison sentence, a non-negotiable term that is served with grim endurance, because it must be, that resilience was there, as improbably alive beneath the inner snow and cold mud as is spring beneath the outer.

That Saturday, I was cleaning the house. ("Thank God we have people over," Ned used to say, cheerfully, running the vacuum, "Otherwise the house would never get cleaned!"). David, my present and, in so far as I can see, for-the-duration partner, did not yet live here full-time. So that day it was just me and the two brother-and-sister tabby cats, asleep in the room we use for work-outs and DVD-watching.

Like everyone in Vermont, we "zone" the house in wintertime, so as not to heat the whole tresidence, only the parts we're using at any given time. The room where the cats were asleep, and the guest room next to it, have no central heat. Instead, there's my old Ashley Automatic woodstove, which I brought all the way from Arkansas. In the winter, when David and I want to watch a movie of an evening in  that frigid room, we crank the Ashley up, and pretty soon it's cozily tropical in there.

In addition to the Ashley, the house has two fireplaces, one in the living room (where Fearless would be held) and one in the dining room. Counterintuitively, we shut the damper of the fireplaces in winter and do not use them; more heat gets sucked up the chimney than even a blazing fire puts out into the room.

But in spring, when the days are pleasant and somewhere on the medium to warm continuum, but the nights still nippy usually well into May, ah, those fireplaces, and the fires we light in them, are perfect.

As part of my clean-up, I swept the fireplace free of ashes, and began laying a fire. I am a great and devoted fire-builder. It's kind of a Zen thing. The way each fire goes together slightly differently, because the exact pieces of wood vary. It takes being  very particular in stacking, layering kindling, selecting and placing just the right branch or log in just the right order and position. I should be good at this, and I am; wood was our sole source of heat all those years in Arkansas. But beyond all the shoulds, I love building a fire. And then lighting it. And then, watching as it catches, mesmerized --- as humans have been since prehistoric times ---made happy and warm by the flames.

That Saturday, I saw that one particular log was a little short for the fireplace. "Oh," I thought, "I might as well lay a fire in the woodstove too, while I'm at it." The short log would be perfect for the woodstove, and so I carried it in there and lay it on the hearth.

I heard a small unusual thump which I couldn't identify as I came in the room with the woodstove. The cats, utterly sacked out on the orange couch, did not stir. I opened the woodstove and there was another sound, and a small puff of ash floated out. Cautiously, I leaned over and peered into the woodstove.

And there, at the far end of the oval shaped stove, was an indigo bunting cringing among the ashes, its feathers slightly puffed. I heard myself say out loud, "Oh, I know we can do better than that for you, " and I closed the woodstove door.

First I got the cats (drugged with sleep, oblivious to the indigo bunting) out of the room, carting them upstairs and shutting them in the bedroom. Then, I went to the kitchen and got a rag. I even remember the rag: blue flannel, with small white fleur de lis on it. The rag had once been a sheet, in use at the inn my husband and I had owned back in our Arkansas life. When it had gotten too ratty for the inn, we had used it on our own bed. Finally, it became rags. It is strange, what lasts and what doesn't.

With one of those rags, I returned to the woodstove, opened the door and yes, there was the indigo bunting. I imagine it must have been terrified, but what human knows, really, what a bird feels? But it was crouched in that far corner still, its feathers dulled with ash, its head tipping one way and then the other, its eyes still bright, alert, very wary.

I reached in and tossed the rag over the bunting, and, just like that, reached in and carefully picked up the rag from below, the back of my hand in the ashes, the bird inside. I carefully carried the small rag-wrapped bundle out to the lawn on my palm, hoping deeply that the bird inside was in no way injured. But expecting, I think, that it would be a little dazed.

There, in the sunlight, I lifted off the rag. And that tiny bright blue bird was not in the least hurt, or dazed. Instead, liberated from stove, rag, and human hand, it simply and immediately flew away and up.

"Took flight" makes it sound more dramatic than it was; there was no burst of feathers or sudden flapping of wings, as if it was in fear. It was wholly natural. I'm here, I'm gone. Just up and off. I followed its its blue with my eyes, up and to the maple tree by the stone wall. I watched until it flew away again, on whatever errands were on its things-to-do list.

Brilliant indigo bunting, trapped in a dark cavernous place filled with ash; then, liberated, back to air, sun, flight, its own nature.

That day, could my life, my starting-to-be-new life, have felt to me any more like that bird's? And my students, who would come at noon on the following day --- would I be helping them open a door to some cast-iron place, so that some imprisoned part of themselves might flutter out and back into its own nature?

Do we not each have, and need, a dark place? Maybe it's a prison; maybe it's a stove. It can trap us, warm us, burn us; it can, if we are a small blue bird and it's May and we perhaps tried to make a nest in what seemed like a good place but turned out to be the stovepipe of a then unused stove, keep us cold, isolated, and in ash and shadow.

As humans, we need containers in which to create warmth. But we, no more than that indigo bunting, are not meant to live imprisoned, in a woodstove or anywhere else.   

I can still remember the names of every person who attended that long class, which ran from the longest days of the year through the shortening fall and early winter. I can see the faces in my mind, where each person sat, the sunny day we met inside and just outside the opened french doors on the lawn facing the garden. The breaks where we ate, or sometimes ran down to the pond for a quick, chill dip. I can recall some of what everyone wrote, read aloud, said, and how often they surprised themselves and me and the class.

The one who said, at the beginning  "I want to write, but I'm afraid I'll be revealed as a phony." "To whom?" I asked. He blinked in astonishment, as if this was self-evident. "To myself, of course."

The one who said "I wish that every time I start to write, all of these negative thoughts wouldn't rise up in me." "Define 'negative'," I said. "Oh..." she said, pausing. And then, wonderfully, "Introspection gone ballistic." (Something I quote occasionally, with attribution to her, in Fearless workshops to this day.)

The one --- a lef-wing management consultant to non-profits --- who discovered, in some of our practices, that some of what he was writing might be poetry, and that he could write sympathetically as an out-of-his-depth George Bush. Discovered that he could write with transparent brutality about a well-meaning conversation in a restaurant with his young daughter, in which he tried to explain the divorce from her mother.

I looked at that indigo bunting today and remembered all that. It happens to be a challenging time in my life and David's right now. My mother is 95. My brother and I disagree about her care. David, his mother, and his brother mirror, in a fun-house sort of way, that same sibling/eldercare dynamic at play in his family. He has issues with his old life, and property he still owns in it. Time is doing its relentless tick-tick-tick number, asking us both at every moment, "Is this really what you want to be doing with me? I'm infinite only to myself, you know, not to you, you mere mortal." The industry with which I've been connected my whole working life --- publishing --- is undergoing tectonic changes due to various forms of online publication, all of which affect my financial life and future and demand new responses and decisions from me. Risk and uncertainty at every turn. Anxiety's causes are always current, yet it is also, again always, the same-old same-old.

And yet. And yet. Sometimes the door of the dark prison opens, and, with as much seeming randomness as one was got in there, one is suddenly free. Free, if one is an indigo bunting, even of the memory of ash.

And free, if one is a human writer, to remember and recall both entrapment and freedom, to consider them both part of the "riot of opposites" as the Gita puts it, the tidal turning that is life. Free to use the happenings, the mishaps, the happinesses, the mysteries in creating narratives with which we can live. Experience and its utility: the same old ticket to whatever is next, beginning and ending with the creative invention and reinvention of meaning. For nothing is wasted on us, we writers, and in that, we find our greatest luck and purpose.

creative discontent: lasting father-wit, & a writer/innkeeper's ex-files

I used to be an innkeeper.

I used to be a daughter with a living father.

I am neither of these things now.

Yet both reside within me. Both come into my present life at unexpected times. They did today, a moist, misty day, one in which I felt slightly out-of-sorts.

Perhaps this very out-of-sortness is what brought to the surface these past lives (daughter, innkeeper). Yet, one more time, they yielded some truth to me. One more time, as I weeded the garden in the late afternoon in Vermont today, and then began to write about it here. 

One more time, this all led me to understand that feeling out-of-sorts is in a larger sense always very much in sorts, for a writer.

Which is what I was, and am still.

As was my late father, the Hollywood biographer Maurice Zolotow. (There he is below, in this 1972 photograph with John Wayne and Ann-Margret. Wayne was the subject of one of my father's biographies, Shooting Star. Photo, David Sutton.)

Thinking about Maurice isn't unusual for me. He's there almost always when I think about writing, which I do daily. 

More surprising was thinking so deeply, and in such detail, about the innkeeping period of my life. Despite the fact that I spent eighteen years of my life at it, it's not that often in my thoughts.

Possibly part of the reason for its coming to mind today is because I recently have finished putting together the next Fearless Writing workshop. This is less a workshop than "the whole enchilada" (as I've actually called it on the event's website, as well as captioned photo album). It's going to be held up here in Vermont, in part at my home (left), over Labor Day weekend, and has involved organizing lodging, glorious meals and activities, as well as the core program, Fearless.

All this has called on more of innkeeping's organizational skills --- being fiendishly, compulsively detail-oriented about "stuff" while being wholly easygoing and go-with-the-flow about people --- than I've used in years. 

So. There you have the ingredients of this post. My father, innkeeping, writing, gardening. Feeling a little off. Recognizing this, finally, one more time, as an unavoidable part of the ultimate on.

Though the vigor of my weeding equaled the vigor with which I was, seemingly, putting off writing, it turns out --- ever-new discovery! ever-powerful, and humbling, marvel! --- that nothing is wasted on the writer.

I never stop learning this.

(Last year's garden, on a misty day in June, by David Koff). 

recalling the hyphenated life

In retrospect my innkeeper phase, those eighteen years when I was not "just" a writer, but a writer-hyphen-innkeeper (and for six of those years, writer-hyphen-innkeeper-hyphen-chef), seem to me now to border on insane in terms of overwork. The inn, co-founded with my late husband, Ned, was  Dairy Hollow House (here we are, high-fiving in front of the inn's sign); the town, hard in the Ozark Mountains, was Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

Though insane, those years were not without moments of joy. And they were formative. And they gave me much I couldn't have learned elsewhere.

And it was a period when I was fond of saying "I don't have writer's block... I don't have time for writer's block." 

At least in memory this was more or less my schedule, for years: I'd wake up anywhere between 6:30  and 9:00 am, and, after breakfast with Ned (if he got up at the same time), I'd go to work, writing, fueled by copious cups of hot, very caffeinated tea.  9:30 am to noon, daily or almost, I was at it, solitary,improbably hermit-like given what the later part of my day would be.

Around noon, I'd eat lunch, occasionally with Ned, but more often on my own.Then I'd nap, wake up, and work out, starting still too sleepy to talk myself out of it: clicking a tough video (the early Firm  series was my favorite, but I also liked Step Reebok) into the VCR, and dragging out my array of exercise equipment from the corner and the front porch. There were dumbbells, ascending pairs, 2 pounds (wrist curls) up by increments to 20 (for lat rows and pec flyes only). There was a sturdy plastic Step, and its risers, too, just like you see at gyms. (I still have, and use, this equipment. But the work-out DVDs I use --- VHS? What's VHS? --- these days are not nearly so hardcore. At 56, I use one riser, or none, on the Step, where I used to use two. It's hard for me not to feel like a wuss, but it's work out at lower intensity or don't work out, and the latter would make me feel like even more of a wuss, and so...)

Back in the inn days, after a post-work-out shower, if there was time, I'd walk to the inn, a few minutes away. If there wasn't time, or if I suspected it would be a late night, I'd drive: returning on foot, in the dark, through the woods, after a long night's work, would not, I knew, have much appeal at 1:00 am. But whether I'd walked from my little writing studio, or just from my car in Harmon Park,  as I approached the inn's door, I'd feel my other, non-writer life, as an innkeeper, kick in.

By then, it would be about 4:00. I'd greet Becky or Paula at the front desk, check to see how many reservations we had that evening, and walk to the back. I'd usually be alone in the kitchen then. I'd start cooking, often with Miles Davis's Kind of Blue as a soundtrack: its slow, mellow start and crescendo-ing glide into high gear were perfect for slipping calmly into hard, soon-to-be frenetic work. I'd check the task-list I'd left for the morning cook, and I'd start preparing dinner.

We did one seating most nights, at seven, so those three hours between arrival and dinner service were carefully choreographed. I knew exactly when to put the game hens in to roast, when to glaze them with whatever fresh fruit was in season --- plums, peaches, blueberries I'd transformed into chutney. I knew when the roasty-toasty carrots, onions and potatoes would have their turn in the oven, and when to start the cornbread, skillet after skillet of it, golden suns framed in their black cast-iron pans.(I'd later devote several years of my life to writing a book called The Cornbread Gospels). I knew when to start warming the plates, when to put the gratin of vegetables du jour in, mince the soup garnish, start the dessert (the homier fruit desserts: apple crisps, rich biscuits for strawberry shortcakes, would be baked as the main courses were being served) . By 6:00 pm, with an hour to go, I turned the music off.

The restaurant sat 40 people; I could solo up to half that; with numbers any higher, I'd call in an assistant, who'd arrive around 6:00 usually, followed by the waitstaff. Ned was due in for front desk at 5:00, relieving whoever'd been there during the day; he perennially ran late and was slightly frantic, and, for him, grouchy. I learned to ignore him at that moment, to try not to take it personally, to call myself lucky if he even managed to stick his head in the kitchen, blow me a kiss until midway through dinner service. That's when he became friendly again, but at that moment beforehand --- running to catch up before show-time, he was often (uncharacteristically) downright unpleasant.

There was a the moment when, all at once, guests were arriving and dinner was beginning. The choreography of waiters, tables and food began and it all began clicking, a beautiful synchrony. Sometimes, gazing out at the well-dressed people arriving in every expectation of a lovely evening, I would have a moment of being moved to my core: what a privilege, to feed trusting strangers good food, often grown not five miles from the room they were entering, guided to their table by Ned, who himself radiated such a welcoming glow! At that moment, the kitchen was the only universe I knew, and it was a good one, as absolute in its way as writing had been.

The evening progressed, the waiters --- John, Carolyn --- communicating the rhythm of each particular night to me. The dining room and its service was an elaborate and connected dance, invisible to the guests, who were serenely enjoying what I was told --- often --- was "The best meal of my life." This couple, I would learn, was lingering, wasn't ready for salads; but that four-top, the one that had all chosen the asparagus soup, was already through it and two baskets of bread and wanted their entrees now. Could I divide an entree in half? ( See if you can divide a roast Cornish game hen neatly and attractively; doing this was what our waiter, John Mitchell, wittily and accurately called "a splitting headache.").

I kept the music off, remaining focused in that manner recognizable to anyone who's worked in a good restaurant, where the world becomes, briefly, the particular beef tenderloin being seared, the  side-plate of half a dozen vegetables being arranged, the shower of mixed minced herbs on the edge of that particular pink-rimmed plate.

After dessert went out, it was time for what Ned called "making the rounds."' I always started out resistant. It required another layer of energy, and a psychic switch: to move from the solitary focus writing or cooking, each, in their way, required. With a clean chef's jacket; always, I put on my socializing, getting-to-know-people self, removing the self-contained self. Ned was by this point usually also relaxed and happy, which made it easier. Once I actually got out to our pretty dining room, candles glowing, the twig lattice on the walls, flowers (often I'd done them myself), on each table, happy people replete with a good meal, I enjoyed this phase, too. But, consistently, I always resisted it beforehand. 

As I relaxed into this phase, the waiters and Ned boogied in earnest: getting checks, making change, bringing coffee or decaf or teas, wrapping extras for people to take home. Behind the scenes, dishwasher Roy slammed trays in and out of the Ecolab, billowing clouds of steam. Very nice things were often said to me by guests, some surprising ("I have never once liked broccoli until tonight!") ; I was always so pleased to have been part of giving people a memorable evening. But I knew my work wasn't completed. As the last few guests said their goodbyes in the front desk area, it was back to the kitchen to complete the fixing of staff dinner.

All of us --- the waitstaff, me, Ned, Roy, whoever was assisting on nights I had someone with me --- we were all tired. And it was too late, really, to eat. But we needed to, anyway. And to decompress. Catch up on how the night had gone. Feel the shared sense of a job well done, a we-pulled-it-off-again joy. It was solid esprit de corps, time for catching up, general how-are-you check-ins, eternally fascinating Eureka Springs gossip. And somehow it was at that point that Ned and I managed to reconnect as a couple, too, instead of just tag-teaming co-workers.

Vigorously tossing tufts of grass into the weed bucket in the garden today, I found myself thinking about those staff dinners in great detail.

Audrey, then in her sixties, who assisted me some nights when we were busy enough. When we all finally sat down together at staff dinner, she invariably said, at some point, with a long sigh "My dogs are talkin' to me." Meaning her feet hurt --- to which everyone who has ever worked in a restaurant can relate.

And Carolyn telling us about the Native American-style funeral of her late, estranged husband, the father of her sons, and how her young son, Shaman, participated (I believe he took part in the ritual placement of sacred objects in the coffin; tobacco was one, I think dried meat another).

And happy, goofy times. If there was a birthday, I'd have made a cake; Steve Colvin, a long time friend who used to call himself both the world's only gay red-neck, and the world's only fat AIDS patient, and who sometimes acted maitre d' on nights when Ned stepped in as a waiter, had a favorite: banana cake, with a peanut butter filling, if memory serves. (But did he prefer chocolate icing, or cream cheese? I can't remember, and it bothers me. R.I.P., Colvain, as I used to affectionately call him. It was to Colvin, when he was ill, that I dedicated Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread: "For Steve Colvin, with whom I hope to share the bread of life for a long, long time.")

I also remember that often as we were eating we'd hear the pleasant, slow, old-fashioned music of horse's hooves: the clip-clopping (there is no other accurate verb) of the horses, no doubt as weary as we were, as they turned off Spring Street and down Dairy Hollow Road, after their evening of drawing tourists around the historic loop, heading home to their stable on the other end of the Hollow.

As I picked at staff dinner (I wouldn't be actually hungry until some time after I'd arrived home, where  of course there was very little food; I can see the restaurateurs among my blog-readers nodding ruefully), in and around the conversation, I'd update the detailed list I always left for prep cooks. It had to be ultra-complete and accurate: it was what would allow me, if I did it thoroughly enough, uninterrupted time the next morning so I could again become, briefly, a writer: otherwise, there were calls like "How much of the green part of the scallion do you want me to cut up?"

On a non-holiday week night, I might be able to leave by ten; weekends, festivals, would see me there till 11:00, midnight, or sometimes 1:00 (if a dishwasher didn't show, Ned and I would stay, doing the work ourselves. One Jazz Festival the dishwasher told us, at midnight, "This job is interfering with my social life," took off his apron, and walked. Ned and I did the dishes. I believe every plate, glass, cup, bowl, saucer, implement, utensil, pot and pan were dirty. When we left, it was after 4:00 am).

Once home, I'd bathe in our wonderful antique clawfoot tub, so long I could actually submerge my aching five-foot-four body in it. I scrubbed under my nails, rinsed my head: begone, garlic, roasting chicken, seared beef. Ned came to the house later, because after dinner service he "cashed out" the register .  At home, bathed, I'd wait for him to to arrive, so we could have a little time together, however tired we were. It wasn't much, though. 

Midnight, 1:00 am ish: bed. Ned would fall asleep instantly; me, not so. Often I was too tired to sleep. Tired-and-wired, dog-tired, horse-tired, but lacking that sweet sleepiness that presages rest. Often I lay beside Ned, reading.

It exhausts me now, just thinking about that life. Of course, I was between age 30 and 40 at the time: I'm just past the middle of my fifties now. Still, it's amazing how vivid those memories are to me when I turn my thoughts to them, and how much I miss and do not miss (more of the latter) about that overfull time. And there were often extras I have not mentioned. If we had any guests who were leaving too early in the morning for our full breakfast, I needed to provide for them.

"Our bountiful breakfast in a basket," Ned used to describe our usual morning repast on our answering machine, his voice radiating satisfaction, pride and pleasure. His enthusiasm was genuine: he loved breakfast in general and he loved our breakfasts. And they were good, truly, and bountiful, fuller than full --- "delivered to your door at nine each morning!"as he also said.

But for those leaving early, I'd fix, towards the end of those long restaurant nights, a "Go-Basket." Sometimes those Go-Baskets would frankly send me over the edge, though I kept it to myself. These were smaller baskets, some components of which the guests would stash in their in-room fridges: typically, homemade granola and "Would you prefer yogurt or milk?" assorted fresh fruit, our own in-house blend of freshly squeezed citrus juices and various organic bottled juices. There'd also be slices of a sweet bread, and a ramekin full of a homemade spread of butter, cream cheese, and honey, flavored and colored with a few pureed strawberries pr blueberries, maybe with a touch of grated orange or lemon rind.  The rooms each had their own coffee machines and electric tea-kettles with of course terrifically good assortments of teas and New Orleans Community Coffee... whatever else we did, we truly took good care of our guests. I still hear from many of them, all these years later. (Left: breakfast, on the front porch of the farmhouse, the smaller and more isolated of the two homes that made up Dairy Hollow House).

(I remember once jiving with a mid-sixties-ish couple from Baton Rouge or Shreveport, at the inn for the weekend. The husband was mock-curmudgeonly in the way older men, especially Southerners, sometimes are with younger women, which I always find quite fun to spar with. It was mid-afternoon,  a Saturday. They were hanging out by the front-desk, visiting with Ned, who was very visitable, and they explained they'd be leaving early Sunday to get a jump on the long drive back. I said, "Now why do you want to do that? You were just telling me how much you liked breakfast this morning. Just stay an extra hour and a half and you get the whole thing!" He said to me, in mock-outrage, "Well, we would, if it wadn't for all your damn Arkansas two-lane roads!" I said --- ah, when the rejoinder comes right to you when you need it --- "Yeah, but Louisiana's the state that named a university after 'em!" Laughter, all around. Yes, those were sweet days. Difficult, arduous, but sweet).

And long-gone.

procrastination & its creative discontents

Just as when I set out to write about one event / insight concerning love and loss and found myself, instead, writing about my beloved cat Beanblossom, a few posts ago, I have wandered afield from my original intent. "Start out knowing what you want to write about, " I tell my students, as I've mentioned here before. "But expect, and allow, that to change. The story has a life of its own. "

Here was my original intent in this post: to write about the uncomfortable, loose-end-y feeling that one has, almost invariably, in the middle of a longer piece of writing. A feeling I in which I spent most of today. Where it's happening but not quite. Or, as today, sometimes it comes when one big phase of a piece has come to completion (yesterday, I finished the introduction to the non-fiction book I'm working on, which frames the whole thing and marks the beginning of the end of writing that book) --- but there are still large blocks to go. I find, and evidently I am so not alone, that one needs to go into neutral for a bit at that point. But this is usually in conflict with one's conscious intention and heartfelt desire to press onward. 

Today, instead of moving on to the next phase of the book I'm at work on as I felt I should have been, I've been sort of meeping around. Not that it hasn't been productive. It was overcast this morning. Good time for transplanting! I had three or four meep-around sessions, to the garden's benefit if to my writing's deficit.

I transplanted several dozen beautiful little Winter Density lettuces, from Seeds of Change (good lord did those seeds germinate --- that picture shows one corner of three beds worth of transplanted seedlings).  That was meep session one, ended only because I was driven indoors by the mosquitoes, which seemed to view both the DEET and the organic stuff as a condiment.

Later in the day I returned to the garden, this time transplanting some sweet little bulls-blood beet seedlings. The next meep session, it was the Chantennay carrots. Somewhere in there I napped (part of the time, I am happy to report, with David). There was another meep-session in there somewhere, too.

And then the last, late-afternoon meep-session, which, after I'd checked on how all the seedlings were doing (fine),  was devoted to weeding.

Which, I could not but help be aware, meant I was into major, serious, writing-postponement.

"papa-ganda": Maurice & me

Out in the garden, particularly in the weeding phase, I found myself thinking of my late father, Maurice. (Here's another picture of him, interviewing the director Billy Wilder for the book below).

It is common (and, I think, rarely true) for adult children who had or have a good relationship with their parents to say, "He" (or she) "is" (or was) "my best friend." Maurice and I adored each other and almost unfailingly, once I grew up and he sobered up (I turned 16 the year he joined AA). But we were  not "best friends." We were a lot of other things, though. And one of them was colleagues. Writing colleagues. I think we  shared and understood what the nature of writing was for each other with a perfection I have never, and probably will never, have with another soul. And this went both ways. We never read or critiqued each other's work pre-publication. To both of us, I think, that would have felt over-intimate, intrusive, and disrespectful of the writing process.

It's a process, we both knew, that has moments of pure consummation, and those moments are not in  publication and the questionable glory that sometimes come with it, but in the writing itself. "Sometimes I get deeply depressed, " Maurice says, rather matter-of-factly, even cheerfully, in a videotape of a talk he gave at Mills College in the late 80's. In a tone of wonder he adds, "And just putting my fingers on the keyboard is enough to bring me out of it!"

At those moments of consummation, we both knew, the writer is not even there; the writing is just taking place. Come out of an hour or two of that --- of what I once heard Maurice describe, in one of his AA talks, "that transcendent vocation" and you long above all else to return to that state. It's unparalleled freedom. It's being released from your own petty life, body-surfing the perfect wave of story with no effort.

The effort comes in the meepy times, in just getting through them. Times when you feel restless, discontented, a little uneasy. When. It's. Just. Not. Happening. No matter how often you've been through this out-of-phase phase, no matter that you may recognize it as part of that process, and know it as the coin through which, mysteriously, you are able to purchase the transcendent aspect, it is still uncomfortable.

This uncomfortableness brought me, first in thought and now here on screen and keyboard, to recalling the inn days. Partly because to some extent I outsmarted the uncomfortable aspect by leaving myself so very, very little protected time for writing that my unconscious just leapt into what was available, knowing how limited it was (at least, this is my best guess).

The uncomfortableness also led me to thinking about Maurice, dear colleague as well as father, as well as brilliant, insane sui generis goofball, and one man museum of contradictions.

Maurice was a compulsive reader of poetry (he especially loved T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, and was able to, and frequently did, recite both) and fiction (he so loved James Joyce that he named his son, my brother Stephen --- now, improbably, a poker champion, pictured left)  --- after Stephen Dedalus, a character in Ulysses). Maurice read Latin; he was fluent in French, yet his personal patois include slang from the beatnik and hippie era: he could travel from "Let us go then, you and I/while the evening is spread out against the sky" to "Groovy, baby!" in five seconds.). He was in love with popular culture.

He was obsessed with magic; one of his two published novels, The Great Balsamo, was based on Harry Houdini (who he'd seen perform on Coney Island as a boy); he was friends with with Ricky Jay. He adored jazz, and gave Duke Ellington his first national review, in Billboard, in the early '40's. He is the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question: "Who is Marilyn Monroe's first biographer?" (His eponymous biography of her would be published in six languages, and reissued with a new introduction some 25 years after her death. Right, the cover of the British edition; left, the paperback French edition).

Though Maurice imagined, early on, that first he would be a foreign correspondent, like Ernest Hemingway, and then go on to life as a novelist (probably living on the Left Bank), for most of his professional writing career was as a  show-business biographer (at the time of his death, in 1991, he was working on a memoir to be titled "Famous People Who Have Known Me").

During the hyphenated years, I had a phone number that was unlisted, for emergencies only. No one, and I mean, NO one, was supposed to call me on it for anything short of a major inn or personal disaster during writing hours; that is; until 1:30 or 2:00 in the afternoon. The front desk had the number, but they knew never to give it out, and they knew, as well, how to deflect the typical writing-work interrupting calls ("Yes, she does give talks / do keynotes / donate books to charitable auctions / do school visits. If you'll mail your request in writing with all the details, she'll get back to you...")

And they knew never to give the number to my parents, whom I was trying to break of the all-access-all-the-time-habit (my mother, particularly, was not at all respectful of boundaries in those days). I would have preferred to not have a telephone at that point, but even I couldn't go that far. Besides, I sometimes needed to call out, and I did also include conversations with my agent and editors as acceptable, sometimes, during writing hours.

Well, one day --- I don't know who did it, none of our front desk staff would ever confess --- and I don't know how, Maurice wheedled the secret number out of someone.  This was before caller ID, and I think even before digital phones; the phone was still connected to its base by that curly pig-tail of plastic-covered cord.

I was mid-writing, and the phone rang. I answered, in my snappy, serious, no-nonsense, this-better-be-important, businesslike (as I then thought of it) manner, "Dragonwagon."

There was a pause. Then Maurice's unmistakable voice: "Yes, ah, is this the, ah, the writer's suicide prevention hotline?"

I gazed out into the treetops from my desk. Maurice knew very well he wasn't supposed to call, that he wasn't supposed to even have that number, and that (though he would have denied it) he was irresistible.

"Maurice!" I said, "What is it?"

He said, "I've been working on this goddamn piece for five days now. I can't get anywhere with it, Cres. It's 60 pages, it needs to be twelve. It's shapeless. It's flabby. I've transcribed the interviews --- there are 37 pages of them --- but it won't cohere. It won't take shape, I'm completely disgusted, I..."

I interrupted him. "Maurice! " I said. Did a little quick addition in my head. "Maurice, in approximately ... 48 years of professional freelance writing ---" I started laughing " ---has this ever happened to you before?"

Another pause. Then Maurice said, "Yes. Yes! Thank you, Cres! I get it, I get it! Thank you! Thank you, Cres! Goodbye!" And he hung up --- bang. I don't know that he ever replaced a receiver gently in its cradle. It was always - bang! Decisive. Maurice was there, with you; then, he wasn't.

I shook my head, as I am remembering this --- I'm smiling, too, as I did then. I looked out at the trees, and went back to work.

Quotations from Chairman Moe; fierce boilings

This kind of advice-giving and cheerleading was never one way, as I have said. Maurice went by the name Broadway Moe for a few years (during his go-to-the-racetrack-with-Walter-Matthau phase, which resulted in the book shown left, one of his few non-show-business books... and no, that is not him on the cover). He would often take the role I played the particular day of the Writer's Suicide Prevention Hotline call.

And his advice was always solid. There were some Quotations from Chairman Moe, as I came to call them, that he returned to over and over again.

"A writer writes."

"Write your way out of it." (Said when I was confused or depressed.)

"Laborare est orare." (Latin for "to work is to pray.")

"The editors come and go, but the writer remains!" (Said whenever there was fuckwittage with an editor, with the last phrase exultant.)

Maurice was a dedicated sender of clippings in those pre-Internet days. Sometimes they'd be from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker,  Nation, New Republic,  American Spectator. Sometimes, they were political (Maurice had been a communist in his youth, a "middle of the road anarchist" for much of his life, and a free-market Republican late in life --- and was obsessed with politics for all of his years... as if magic, the classics, and pop culture were not enough). More often, though, they were profiles of writers, pieces about writing, or simply  essays that he thought particularly well-written. He scrawled a quick message across the top of all of them, usually just a single word, in red Flair pen --- "Papa-ganda" --- then a dash. a line of xxoo's, and his initials or first name. 

He gave me a used copy of "The Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his Family and Friends", inscribed thus:

to Crescent Z.
Dragonwagon,

on her 19th birthday -

May you find in these
pages, darling, a
spirit, kindred to your
own, beyond the differences
of time and culture and politics ---
with the deepest love
your father Maurice
Nov. 17, 1971.

Astonishing though it may be to consider a father who thought his daughter a kindred spirit to Dostoevsky, it's more astonishing when you know that this gift was given in the same year I had sold, to Cosmopolitan, a profile of a rock groupie named Sweet Connie (immortalized in the Grand Funk Railroad song"We're an American Band" in the following lines: "On the road for forty days / last night in Little Rock left me in a haze. / Sweet, sweet Connie was doing her act. / She had the whole show, and that's a natural fact.")

Maurice read the story --- in the magazine, of course, as I've said we never read each other's stuff pre-publication. As I've said, profiles were his beat; this was the first of mine he'd read.

He said to me, collegially, "So how many interviews did it take for you to get this, Cres?" (Only, and I mean only,  Maurice could get away with calling me Cres.) "One," I said.

He gave me a long, long look. Maurice's face was incapable of dissembling. I watched a parade of emotions cross it; the first, to my surprise, was jealousy. I watched jealousy duke it out with curiosity, appraisal, admiration, thoughtfulness, and finally the winner: fatherly pride.

"You know what, Cres?" he said. "Give up the children's books. Stop messing around with cookbooks. Write profiles."

And yet, somehow,  though I had just written a profile of a rock groupie, I was Dostoeyevskyian to him.

When I was about 26, my book The Year It Rained was published. It's an autobiographical novel in which the father character does not come across particularly well (the book dealt with the years when he was still a practicing alcoholic, and he and my mother were getting a truly riproaring divorce, one higlight of which was his getting shock-treatments, from which I was supposed to, and did, pick him up afterwards). Desoite this, when he read it, he loved it.

And he said, "You know what, Cres? Give up the children's books and cookbooks. Don't mess around with magazine work. You were born to be a novelist. "

Given how dedicated he was to the belief that I should focus on just one genre of writing (I have worked, almost since the first, actively in children's books, cookbooks, magazine articles, poetry, and fiction) you can just imagine how opposed he was to my hypenated life.

 "Innkeeping! " he'd snort. "Innkeeping! For God's sake, Cres, you're a writer, why are you wasting your time with innkeeping?" 

But he eventually he made his peace with it... helped along, no doubt, by the fact that he could come to visit in Arkansas, and stay at the inn for a week or two twice a year (The Iris Room, right, was his favorite. He liked the shades of blue, and the fact that it was quiet, looked into the garden, and was directly across the way from Ned's and my little house).

He also loved eating at our restaurant (gratis, of course). He adored the food. I remember once, him looking up from a plate of chocolate bread pudding with raspberry sauce. He said to me, "Wow." He was then speechless --- a rarity, as you may have gathered --- for a few moments. Then he took another bite and shook his head. "Cres," he said, gazing up at me with his large blue eyes (he was seated at a table in the inn's dining room, I was standing, I'm sure in a chef's jacket.) "On a scale of one to ten, I give this five thousand."

After he died, we renamed that dessert "Chocolate Bread Pudding Maurice." I wrote his initials, M.Z. , in script, using raspberry sauce in a squeeze bottle, hundreds of times, covering about 2/3 of a dinner plate, before spooning the bread pudding in one corner, dolloping it with whipped cream, adding a fresh raspberry or strawberry, and a mint leaf. It pleased me, though in some moods it occasionally made me cry, when John or Carolyn, the waitpersons, would buzz from the dining room on a busy night, land at the station in the kitchen, and call out, "Three Maurices!" or "Are my two Maurices ready?" But we all knew --- the inn staff, too, for they had all met Maurice and come under his incorrigible, irascible spell, that there was really only one Maurice.

Besides learning to enjoy the benefits of the inn, there was another way Maurice made peace with his hyphenated daughter. "Look, I was wrong. You should do the inn! You should! Probably you must! You're one of those writers where for some reason something else feeds your writing! I couldn't do it, but you can. Clearly! Lots of writers are like you --- they have to do something else. Chekov --- he was a doctor! And William Carlos Williams! Wallace Stevens, one of our great poets --- he was an insurance executive, lived in Hartford, Connecticut!"

I think, though, that Maurice would probably be relieved that these days I am "just" a writer. I think that he would find David --- an intellectual, with a love of and encylopedic knowedge about the movies, a Los Angeles background (MZ lived the last twenty years of his life in LA), and the political obsession they both share --- a much more easy-to-relate to mate than he did the somewhat otherworldly Ned. I think that he would have wept endlessly, though, at Ned's death, both for Ned and for me, and that he would be proud that I was resilient enough to come through, write again, love again.

(Ned, me, Maurice, photograph by George West, circa 1985. This is on the porch of the innkeeper's house. The windows you can barely make out, in the little house across the way, look into Maurice's favorite Iris Room.) I think he would be surprised and pleased that I ended up living in Vermont, on the farm (which he knew, because, though it belonged to my Aunt Dot, we spent part of each summer here when I was a kid). But I think he'd be horrified by the very idea of my spending a snowy, icy Vermont winter here. 

But who knows what he would have thought or felt?

For it is a strange rebellion, and a delusional one, when we say with such authority, "He would have..."

These are only our guesses, our suppositions. Questions sent out to a universe that does not and cannot answer, any more than the vanished one can.

We fill in the side of those who are no longer able to keep up their end of conversations, otherwise the dialogues that were once so important to us are, unbearably, monologues. We do it, in part, by saying, "He would have..."

In the poem "Chickpea to Cook" by Rumi, a poet to my knowledge Maurice never read, the chickpea protests its torturous simmering. The wise cook reminds the chickpea that he, too, has simmered. "I was once like you, fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time, and in the body, two fierce boilings."

No one escapes such boiling.

Today, at the well-known to me but still uncomfortable place of sixes-and-sevens with writing, as I pulled up the cinquefoil and wild sorrel vigorously, I thought about that time Maurice called me on my secret number.

I thought about that conversation with Maurice, and many others which preceded and followed it.

I was in just the kind of mood, and it was just the kind of day, when I would have called Maurice, were he still among the living.

Instead, I heard the Maurice who now, despite all boiling, resides in me.

So I came inside, and, instead,  wrote my way out of it.

Part 1: love / dead cat

I sometimes tell my writing students "Start out with a clear purpose, but be willing for that to change in the course of writing. "

Well, case in point. In this post, sparked by an e e cummings quote, I set out to explore the idea of how one becomes lovable... and wound up writing, mostly, about a dead cat. (Disclaimer: not  the "lovable" that's the usual saccharine, adorable puppies-and-kittens-pansies-and-plump-faced-babies; a much grittier one --- becoming able, finally, to give and receive love.)

The course-correction probably began this morning. I was halfway thinking about the post, having started it last night, but not yet being at all satisfied. I was also making breakfast.

I cracked two eggs into a small stainless steel bowl for an omelet. I began to beat them with a fork. This, of course, makes a certain sound, a light, distinctive rhythmic metal-on-metal clang. And as I heard the fork strike the bowl, I also heard myself calling, "Beanblossom! Bean-Bean-Bean-Bean-Bean!"

Now Beanblossom, my first cat, has been dead more than twenty years now. It's not that I've forgotten this. But I habitually call the name of that small dear calico when I beat eggs in this way. It's as automatic for me as unscrewing the caps of the small brown extract bottles and raising them to my nose and inhaling the vanilla or lemon or orange or anise, another habitual gesture. Whether it's sniffing the vanilla or calling the name of a dead cat, in my view, you take pleasure and joy where you find it, and never miss an opportunity to do so. Eventually, some of these opportunities become habits. 

For Bean is, and isn't, dead. Yes, she's buried (in the back of my old house in Arkansas, under the mimosa tree; the daffodils Ned planted when he buried her are probably already blooming). But in memory as in dreams, where time and embodiment have little or no sway, Beanblossom is alive whenever I think of her. She is as quick and immediate as was her spry scamper to get to the egg bowl. Licking the little bit of raw egg inevitably left in it was one of her great delights.  Even as I would call her name, the clang of the fork in that stainless steel bowl would already have brought her running, however deep her sleep, from whatever part of the house she was hiding herself in. One favorite haunt was the top of the armoire, from where she could look down on us, blinking in surprise, as if to say "Oh? Who are you again? And what are you doing here?" Another much-loved Beanblossom place, in winter, was wedged into the small space between the end of the wood-stove and the brick chimney into which it vented. If you touched her hot tricolored fur while she laid there, you wondered why she didn't simply combust --- and indeed, one December she did actually singe slightly, sizzling the edges of her whiskers so that they curled comically into great rococo curls.  (I love that picture above left, taken one winter morning by our friend George West. Two great early lasting loves of my life, neither with me in form any more: Ned and Beanblossom. The picture was taken outside the little cottage that was my home for years, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.) 

Although I've called Beanblossom's name when I beat eggs for years, it's always been automatic; I only really thought about it today. I guess that by calling her name in the same way I did when she was alive, I call all this --- the curled mustache, the quick feet --- up in memory. And there, quickly, I can revisit our adventures during the years we were both alive in the physical sense simultaneously, and in connection with each other --- in whatever mysterious way a cat and a human being are in connection.

As I've said, Beanblossom was my first cat. She lived to be 18 ... a period that paralleled, in my life, the years from age 18 to 36. No one else on the planet knew me so intimately in a daily way that long, that closely, over that period of time. Though life is one change after another (why do we continue to cling to the illusion that someday it's going to settle down?) I think we can agree that for most of us, in young adulthood, the rapidity of change is stepped up.

Though I have had cats since her death ---  first another calico, and then two tabbies from the same litter (the current feline residents) --- Beanblossom was, and I think always will be, the cat of my heart.

One night, alone (as far as human company goes), lonely in my bed in the little funky cabin Beanblossom and I shared, I fell asleep with a backache, my last conscious thought, "Oooh, I wish I had someone to rub my back." This would have been, oh, 1973, 1974, which would make me about 21, 22. The next morning, I woke up on my stomach. And Beanblossom was walking up and down my back, kneading my spine with her four small paws, and purring loudly. 

Beanblossom used to go on hikes with me; not on a leash, but following or leading, a few steps ahead or behind. She also went camping out with me, both when it was just the two of us and at times when I went with friends. On one latter occasion, several of us were skinny-dipping in an Ozark creek, and someone called out to me, "Crescent! Look at your cat!"

I looked up to the shore and there, standing on a rock, was Beanblossom. You might not think that a cat's face would be capable of expressing distinct feelings of distaste and resolve, but that's what I saw on hers. She stood there a few seconds longer, looking towards me, gazing at the water, sizing things up, possibly screwing up her determination. Then it was: "Well, if I have to, I have to."

And she jumped into the creek and cat-paddled to me.

Her dear resoluteness. The way she elongated her neck above the water.  Her head canted up and back, her nose tipped up, as if she couldn't bear even the smell of the disgusting substance in which she found herself. 

And yet, and still, she kept paddling to me.

When she reached me, of course I swam back to shore with her. When we got out, I tried not to laugh as I toweled her cat body, ridiculously tiny with its flat wet fur, especially silly because poking out of that almost rat-like wet body was her dry, normal-sized head, with the v of caramel-colored fur that slanted down to her nose.

For how could you laugh at a creature, so loyal and willing and brave and peculiar as that?

I remember these things; and that when I fell in love with Ned, Beanblossom did too. Though a generally friendly cat, she took to him truly exceptionally. So much so that when Ned... Well, Ned then worked for the Arkansas State Historic Preservation Office. He was hired to write a how-to book for use in the Quapaw Quarter district of Little Rock,  and he did. It was called Fixing Up Your Old House, and it was published, as he never failed to say, by the Arkansas prison system.

He threw himself a publication party for it, and everyone from his office was invited, including Wendy, a woman he had dated a few times, not seriously, before meeting me.

We were then living in Little Rock in a rental apartment. I can still picture that living room and the dining room next to it, that night: filled with gaiety, people, food, friendly noise, laughter, the requisite old beige uncomfortable given-away couch, with which young people just-out-of-college (as Ned was, and as I would have been had I gone to college) invariably furnish their first living rooms. Now that I think of it, he proposed to me on that scratchy old couch.  Beanblossom gloated in all the activity, more or less making herself the center of attention: making the rounds: lap to lap, person to person, socializing and being petted by all.  All, that is, but Wendy, who arrived about an hour late.

And this is what happened: Wendy walked in, Beanblossom jumped down from whatever lap she was perched on, faced Wendy squarely, gave a single gigantic, dramatic hiss, and fled the room. There was a moment of awkward silence, and then the party went on.

Later that evening after everyone had left I came into the bedroom and there was Beanblossom curled up with Ned. He was stroking her between the ears and sweet-talking her, sotto vocce. "Noooo, Bean, it wasn't like we were even serious. Nooooo. You could have been a nice hospitable kitty, yes you could have been, yes yes yes, you could..."(Scroll back up and look at the picture above, of the two of them nuzzling each other. When I look at this one, what is so clear to me is a tenderness that was part of Essential Beanblossom and Essential Ned).

To think that all this story, it turned out, lay in the beating of some eggs this morning! I could have made and served omelets for a dozen people in the time it's taken me to recount this.

And as I say, I didn't even set out to write about Beanblossom.

Or Z-Cat, another calico (equally feisty but much less sweet-tempered) who eventually followed Beanblossom. Here's Z, pictured on a couch cushion in a 2003 picture taken by David Koff.

Or Cattywhompus (a neutered male tabby, who embodies an almost dog-like mischief and playfulness), who eventually, with his sister,  followed Z-Cat into my life. See his portrait below, also taken by David. I must add that the Whomp and his sister made short work, alas, of the couch on which Z is pictured.

Though Cattywhompus and Z do figure into the story I want to tell.The story I planned, and plan, to tell. About becoming lovable.

But I should have known that such a vast and audacious topic, deserves, at the very least, a couple of posts. Even if you're not writing abstractly, but specifically, as, in my view, you must, if you want to write well, about love or anything else.

As the Native American writer N. Scott Momoday once said, "The events of one's life take place, take place." It is this second emphatic  place, which in my understanding is not just geographical, but personal, sensual, historical, and spiritual, not just accurate and contextual, but above all truthful, which gives writing about any topic life.

This is why nothing is wasted on the writer: let the world in, be porous to it, and then, so long as you actually write, as opposed to think about writing, everything becomes the specific material of the place Momoday describes. There is no waste, all utility. (Cattywhompus, current resident, left).

I promise you Part 2, the post I thought this one was going to be, will be up no later than April Fool's Day.

For you can't hurry love, as Diana Ross told us, any more than you can the true disclosure of place.

And for me, it turns out that becoming able to love insists on beginning with a calico cat who had a v of caramel fur that tipped to her nose.

buffalo girl: adventures in children's book writing & publishing/non-publishing, screwing up, & being inspired by one very fearless child

It's not quite a month now since I came back from Little Rock, Arkansas, where, among other things, I met the Buffalo Girl. I will probably never know her name, but I'll remember her for a long, long time.

I went to Little Rock, this time, for several reasons. As y'all who read this blog regularly know, I now reside in Vermont, but I lived in Arkansas, mostly in the off-the-wall little town of Eureka Springs, for 33 years. But at this point, whether I leave Vermont and arrive in Arkansas, or leave Arkansas to return to Vermont, it feels like home on both ends of the journey.

So what brought me back to Arkansas? First off, I was to address the Arkansas branch of the Young President's Organization. Secondly, I'd lead a Fearless Writing workshop. And third, I'd give two presentations at Historic Arkansas Museum, one to those who work in and with area museums, and one to a group of 80 third-graders, from e-Stem Charter School.

First, just to set the background scene: of this trip: I was three weeks out of arthroscopic shoulder surgery (the necessity for which had become apparent long after I had already made my speaking and teaching commitments, which I was not about to break, being a the-show-must-go-on girl down to the nuclei of my cells). So there I was, wearing a sling, still needing painkillers to sleep partway through the night, but basically boogeying along in game fashion. And why not? Darling David (boyfriend; filmmaker) came with me --- I still couldn't drive, plus he and my agent had conspired and decided I really needed to have some of my talks on film, and DK was going to film them. All this was good enough, but we were ALSO staying at the home of two of my dear, dear long time friends, George West and Starr Mitchell. (Also present in their home was Scratch, George and Starr's very mellow old gray cat, who did everything he could to make us comfortable. Picture: here I am in George and Starr's  guest bedroom, just woken up, snapped by David, slung in the sling, with Scratch cozying up.)

I cannot tell you how much I prefer staying with friends to staying in a hotel. And when those good friends live in a welcoming comfortable home, complete with amiable cat, and when one has the chance for the odd late or early bit of easy, natural, catch-up conversation with either or both of said people, so much the better. In this case, so very much the better: these are two interesting, funny, kind people who are intellectually vibrant, loving, and deeply committed to justice and understanding (to get a sense of this, check this article, which touches heavily on George's work with Central High students and bringing the institution's difficult, meaningful history alive and into a very different present). That they are my loyal long-term friends is my great good fortune. That they loved my late husband, Ned, yet have welcomed David, as well and as compatibly, is almost miraculous.

How, under these benign circumstances, could things not be basically good, even with a shoulder that hurt like hell?

But back to Buffalo Girl, and my talks in Little Rock.

Now, any time I give a talk, anywhere, there's one question that I can be almost certain someone in the audience will ask me, whether that audience consists of YPO members, third graders, museum keepers. Well, actually there are two usual questions: "Is that your real name?" and "What are you working on now?"

A freelance writer's life being inherently unstable and unpredictable, this last can sometimes be a painful one to answer. But this time, thankfully and  happily, after a somewhat difficult and dry spell, I had a nice, gratifying three-fold response. Because, to my own joy and wonderment (for reasons that will become clear) I was working on, and actually under contract for, three new books.

The first of these is a cookbook, The Bean Book (actually a wholly rewritten version of a book I first wrote in 1972). It will be published by Workman later this year or early next year. (Left, you can see some of my hands-on work for The Bean Book.  This is what we had for dinner the night before last; a close-up of a plate of feijoada completa: Brazilian-style black beans over rice, with sliced oranges, cooked greens, and farofa, toasted tapioca flour --- that's the white powder which looks a little like Parmesan, sprinkled on the beans. Molho de vinagrete, a sort of chunky, non-spicy vinaigrette salsa, rounds out the plate. Not pictured: the tiny, beautiful piri-piri --- very red, fiercely hot little peppers on the side). I will just mention here in passing, that, quirkily enough, Little Rock has an extraordinarily good Brazilian restaurant, Cafe Bossa Nova, which had spiked my interest in that particular cuisine. If you happen to be in Little Rock, eat there. But I digress. 

The second book I'm at work on is a new genre for me: how-to/inspirational. It's Fearless Writing, about the writing process as I understand and teach it ... how I infect  (in the positive sense), others with it. This book will be published by Ten Speed Press in 2011. As I mentioned, I was also teaching a workshop on it, while in Little Rock. (Pictured right: most of our wondrous, energetic recent Fearless group in Little Rock, at the end of our time together).

The third book I'm working on is a children's book.

Now it happens that when I was answering the "what are you working on" question at "Ordinary Miraculous", the talk I was giving to the museum folks, I screwed up big-time in the part of my response where I was talking about this children's book, which will be published by Little, Brown (I don't know when yet; they have to decide on an illustrator, and publication date will depend on the illustrator's scheule). 

And of course, because David was getting tape, it's on camera. In that remarkable way the Internet makes possible, I'm going to include a link to a You-Tube clip of this actual hilarious, and completely unintentional, screw-up ... my story, inspirational and nominally informative at the start, eventually going very, very wrong. Watch, please, before we continue, or what happens next will not entirely make sense.

(Have not yet figured out how to "embed" a video here, though I've diligently tried... sorry.)

Okay, by now, hopefully, you have finished laughing at, and with me. 

And now let us fast-forward --- through the YPO talk, Fearless, and "Ordinary Miraculous." Let us come to the morning when I talked to the 80 third-graders from e-Stem (unfortunately, this was the only one of my presentations David did not tape, because by then he was understandably jonesing to be back online and working at his real work, which is not taping his girlfriend giving talks). So while I was with the kids, he was back at George and Starr's, with Scratch, working on his laptop while I did this final talk. It was on a Friday morning; that Friday, in the late afternoon, we'd fly back to Vermont. (Although I wasn't there, obviously, the scene may well have looked like this one George had photographer earlier in the week, with Scratch supervising David at work).

So, back at Historic Arkansas Museum with the e-Stem students, a morning not documented in pictures... so from here on my description will have to suffice.

When the third-graders asked me what I was working on now, I skipped over the cookbook and Fearless Writing and spared them the whole story about the long ten years of non-children's book publication. I just told them that I had just finished writing a children's book.  

     "What's it about?"

I told them, much as in the taped clip above, that a parent was trying to get a wide-awake child to go to sleep. I quoted the same bit of verse, and the same two animals, Antelope and Baby Bison. 

     "What's a bison?"

I started to explain what a bison was, but then asked  "Well, does anyone here know what a bison is?"

A hand waved wildly in the middle of the room. "It's like a buffalo!" said a young man, excited to know.  "Exactly so," I agreed.

     "Does it look like a buffalo? "

There was a large flip chart at the front of the room. Though I am not a visual artist, I might have made a stab at trying to draw one had not my right arm been in a sling.

Now it happened that my friend Mary Springer had driven down from Eureka Springs, the little town in which I'd lived so long, with three other dear pals for dinner the night before (at Cafe Bossa Nova, naturally). They'd stayed over, and we'd spent time that morning, and they were sitting in the back row of the auditorium behind the 80 third-graders.

Mary (pictured left), who is an artist, is also, like me, pretty much always up for anything.

"Mary, " I called to her, "Could you come down and draw a bison for us, please?"

Mary called back, holding one arm up, "Remember I told you last night I had carpal tunnel surgery? I still can't draw either!"

So I looked at the 80 e-Stem third-graders and said, "Can anyone here draw a bison or a buffalo?"

Many hands were waving.

But there was one little girl, right in the center of the front row of the auditorium, who caught my eye. She wasn't waving her hand; she had just shot it up and held it still; she seemed to almost be pulsing with confidence and conviction.  "Come on up,"I said to her.

With great self-possession she rose from her seat, walked right over to the giant flip pad, and picked up a green Sharpie.

And she turned to me, and looked up at me, and, in front of everyone, said --- earnestly,  sincerely, neither whispering nor especially loudly, but in a let's-get-down-to-business tone ---  "Now, what does it look like?"

I was, for a second, speechless. She waited, gazing up expectantly at me, clear-eyed and with complete trust. She demonstrably believed that we were, at this moment, partners. Her belief was numinous: her belief that I had the ability to describe, in words, so accurately what this animal she had never seen looked like that she would easily be able to render it on paper. Her faith in all this seemed absolute and complete. It was faith in both of us, and in our ability to instantly and perfectly collaborate. Faith that moves mountains is one thing; but faith that can draw a bison, never having seen one?

Calm, purposeful, utter fearless, she looked up at me, waiting.

"Well..." I said, "I guess its shape is a little bit like a bull..."

She uncapped the green Sharpie and began to draw. Not perfectly --- this is not a story about her being wildly gifted with natural drawing talent --- but te shape she made was definitely bullish, and drawn swiftly and confidently.

Mary, by way of help, called from the back of the room, "It has a hump."

Immediately the little girl put humps on the bull, two, like a camel.

"Just one hump," I added.

"Oh, now I got it," she said, nodding. Deftly she changed the double green humps into a single hump.

And she did get it, sort of. The four-legged horned green humped barrel-chested bullish-buffalo-bison looked amazingly like what it was supposed to be. It had pretty much the shape of a bison.

She completed the outline, capped the Sharpie, put it down, and turned to go back to her seat.

"Thank you," I said, and everyone, including me, applauded.  

Later Mary said to me, "She really did very well."

"Unbelievably well, "I said, and repeated to Mary what she had said to me. "Now, what does it look like? "

I shook my head in wonder, as I have several times, writing about this interaction, which took place in far less time than it takes to tell it.

As I said at the beginning of this post, it's not quite a month since I've been back from Little Rock. But I remain dazzled by that little girl and what she embodied.

She didn't know better than to suppose she couldn't do it. Or, more truly, she didn't know worse, the worse most of us carry around, the usual fictional parade of bad possibilities, what if this, what if that,  that goes on and on inside our overheated, overactive, fearful brains. That child was heedless of failure. That she might do it wrong in front of a large group, maybe be made fun of, never even crossed her open, fearless small mind.  

"We shall not cease from exploration, " wrote that most unchildlike poet, the cerebral T.S. Eliot, " and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time."

I think that arrival, which is both the beginning and the end, probably looks a lot like the gaze ---  bright eyed, certain, open, ready --- of that little girl.

fearless French toast

Yesterday morning I was making French toast, and thinking about my upcoming Fearless Writing workshop, which will be in Little Rock this coming January: two seemingly unrelated tributaries of thought and action joining together.

First, the French toast. Here in Vermont, there are lots of good artisanal bakeries. When I'm short on time, or don't feel like  mucking up the kitchen counter in that singularly messy flour-and-sticky-dough-bits post-kneading way (inevitable when baking bread at home), the choice of good local breads is abundant. When I purchase, rather than make, bread, our current household favorite is the crisp-crusted, texture-y  "Mad River Grain" loaf from Red Hen Baking Company, in Waitsfield, Vermont. How can you not like a company that describes this particular loaf on their site as "A veritable orchestra of grains and seeds! (Or maybe a 70's funk band is more your style?). " The Red Hen breads are made with levain, a natural, moist slightly soured leavening which helps them keep very well, for at least two days, right in their nice brown paper bags.

What was on hand yesterday was a part of a loaf of Mad River Grain that was four or five days old. We are talking hard. Not spoiled, not moldy, way too good to waste. But hard. Seriously hard.

French toast was in order, if I could saw through the loaf. 

Now, the day before, I had done sawing of a different kind. I had --- I think --- solved a consistent problem about set-up on a workshop I teach,  Fearless Writing (which will also be a book, to be published by Ten Speed Press in 2011). 

See, I just love teaching this workshop and I have infinite confidence in it. It substantively transforms the way people write and think about writing. It makes sense of and utilizes the feelings of anxiety that inevitably arise in creative endeavors. It works for writers, would-be writers, and even people who don't identify themselves as writers at all. Many people take it for the fearlessness, using the writing practices as a tool for personal development (though they, too, often find themselves better writers by the end of the workshop). There are always breakthrough moments (and pieces of writing done in session) that take my breath away: surprising, moving, strange, fascinating, funny, unpredictable.

And I get to witness all this! I even, as the teacher, get to "facilitate" it (quotes because the word "facilitate"  is too manager-speak for me). The process energizes us both: me and the students.

But even though I am the teacher, and a good one, I am also, at the same time, forever and always a student of that process. 

Fearless is, after all the same map I follow when I write (48 published books and counting, though the unpublished work is equally important to the process of growth as a writer). It's the map I use when I take on almost any challenging life-endeavor. And each time I teach it I get a refresher course, for, as psychologist Richard Price once said, "You always teach what you most need to learn. You are your own worst student." 

But when I was also the one who was responsible for organizing the workshop --- registrations, confirmations, promotion, and so on --- the experience was not energizing, but frustrating. 

Naturally, I want registering for the class to be impeccable and simplified. But this isn't easy when an individual, rather than a sponsoring institution, does it, and in a wildly varied number of locales. And when that individual is me, whose real work is teaching and writing, well, handling this aspect is like  speaking in a second language, one which I can understand and function well in, but only with effort, only if I pay attention to every word. Since each possible venue had different physical arrangements, parameters, expenses, directions, add-ons, and options, there seemed to be no way to make it systematic: each time I did a workshop independently, the registration-wheel had to be reinvented.

Besides being time-consuming for me, it wasn't simple and easy for students. I wasn't set up; I didn't take credit cards. Poor old Fearless Writing students had to go through low-tech high-bother shenanigans: printing out a registration form, filling it out by hand, writing a check, putting it in an  envelope, sealing, stamping, and addressing that envelope, getting it to the post office, etc: things that once might not have been a big deal but are now dinosaurish ways of communicating and transacting. For sure, though, my students, being willing to go through all that, were always a very committed bunch.

Doing this type of administrative organization was, for me, possible ... but as hard as the five-day-old loaf through which, yesterday morning, I was trying to saw. Which is why in the past few years I've mostly taught Fearless only when there was a sponsoring organization or institution (like Rowe Conference Center or The Studios at Key West, to name two of my favorite recent hosts). 

I did finally succeeded in getting through the very hard loaf, using a serrated knife and much determination. Thin, even slices were out of the question, but yes --- there would be French toast. And this was the point at which it and Fearless Writing began merging in my thoughts.

Because the day before I had finally solved the organization/registration problem, this, and problem-solving in general, were on my mind as I began the next step of the French toast: whisking together  eggs, milk, dash of salt, and a good healthy pour of Tahitian vanilla (first opening the small brown bottle and sniffing it, an automatic small kitchen reflex, simply for extra sensual pleasure).

Because how did I solve the registration? The same way, at least at the start, that I had just sawed through that boulder-hard bread: with frustration and determination. First, I'd gotten annoyed enough to think "Oh, for crying out loud! There has to be a better way to do this!" (I wonder how many good discoveries, small and large, have begun this way. Probably about as many as books written by former non-writers, who, reading something they were partially engaged with and partially irritated by, said to themselves, "Hey!  I could write better than this!" And then did.).

The Red Hen folks kindly offer a page they call "our favorite uses for day-old bread". French toast is not on it, presumably because everyone knows how to make it. But in case you happen not to know, basically what you do is beat everything listed above (except the bread) together. Then you put the dry bread in this mixture, allowing it to soak it up and soften. And then, after awhile,  you brown the soaked bread in a hot buttery pan.

About softening: bear with me for a second here.

Back when I used to live in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, I'd go to a remarkable physical therapist / healer, a sweet,  smart funny guy named Michael Avenoso (pictured, unflatteringly blurrily, left) who eventually became, and still is, a friend, as is his wife, Jae. (I've mentioned Michael before, in the post Blue-Ribbon Silliness. ) Back then, Michael did a kind of bodywork called myofascial therapy.

(He'd still be doing it today, were he not himself --- so unjustly! --- nearly crippled by advanced Lyme Disease, which he got when quite young, and which went undiagnosed for many years. Why this should happen, to someone who gave so much, and still had so much left to give, is one of those mysteries that stick in my craw big-time whenever I hear people say things like, "Everything happens for a reason." But now I am digressing).

Michael examined, with eye and hands, my left trapezius (upper back). There, for years, I'd had intermittent, sometimes debilitating spasms which could last days, even weeks, and for which I had tried every type of mainstream and alternative therapy I knew of, with no success. Michael was going to be my last last attempt at treating a pain I'd come to view as inconstant but chronic. "Hmmm," he said, "I think we can get it healed in ten, maybe twelve sessions." And we --- he --- did.

Now myofascial therapy hurts. Fascia, in case you don't know, is a type of connective tissue. If you've ever cut up raw meat --- how weird is this for a vegetarian to say? --- you've seen it. The red part of the meat is the animal's muscle fiber; the white, its fat. Now think of those very thin, translucent stretchy strands of connective tissue,  called, by chefs and cutters-up of meat, "silver-skin," for it is a sort of bluish-silver.  Silver-skin is fascia. And what Michael did was somehow, without actually breaking the skin, was to somehow reach beneath it and manipulate the fascia, ripping up the adhesions that presumably kept the dysfunctional muscles in place.

And I mean ripping.

It all hurt, but there were certain especially painful manipulations. When Michael was about to do one, he warned me. We had to work together, he explained: for him to get in there and do his thing, I had to unclench, relax. This --- in the face of pain I knew was about to be inflicted on me --- was about the most active, willful, focused relaxation I've ever been called on to do.

And here's what Micheal would say.   

"Soften. Soften to my fingers. Soften."

Somehow, I did. He was able to heal that injury, which has thankfully not been part of my life for more than a decade now.

Over the years, when I find myself tightening into resistance --- resisting getting down to work (or resisting finishing work for the day. even though it's one in the morning and time to go to bed), resisting listening to something I consider asinine, ill-informed, unfair or downright loony, resisting hearing news that I know I won't want to hear --- over the years, as I feel the quills rising and the tightening shell of anticipatory defense, I say to myself, "Soften."

I say to myself, "What does it hurt to listen?"

I say to myself, "Just start, set the timer for 15 minutes, do it, and then see how you feel."

I say to myself, "Listen, Dragon, strong people can stay open to anything. They stand on their own two feet, they know where there integrity is and they don't need anyone else to validate it. They know they're not going to fall over if someone disagrees with them, so they're not reactive, just open. They can just quietly take in whatever is being said to them, and then decide what, if anything, they want to do with it. They can afford to listen. Don't you want to be strong that way, CD? "

I say to myself, "Soften."

(Above right: a recent picture of me, taken by Walter Fogg, of the Brattleboro Food Co-Op. I'm the December cover girl for the Co-Op's monthly magazine, Food for Thought. They've named me Producer of the Month, though what I produce is not honey or wine or vegetables but books, though many are about food. When I looked at Walter's photograph, in comparison to earlier photos of me, I thought, yeah, I have softened. And no, I don't mean just around the jaw line. ) 

As I put that good but extremely hard bread, in its big chunky ungainly slices, into the egg-milk-vanilla mixture, I thought about the process of softening.

About how it had taken frustration to saw me open, and "There has to be a better way" to make me consider the possibility of finding some kind of new, workable approach to the registration problem.

Of course, I'd have to find the ingredients in which it would make sense to soften. Something which would be worth absorbing. ("Solution": both the answer to a problem and a liquid into which something has been dissolved.) 

That's where research came in (and where the analogy falls apart; obviously the Mad River Grain bread slices didn't decide to soften and then go out and research milk and eggs). But so what? Though the bread was still so hard it really didn't want to absorb, it was sliced and in the liquid and I I had it in my sights now, just like I had, the day before, the conviction that a potential Fearless admin solution existed.

Research is an incredibly easy, even fun, adventure, thanks to the Internet (I am of an age to have researched in libraries using card-catalogs; you still had the thrill of the chase, but it was clunky, slow, and full of dead ends). As I turned the bread pieces so both sides could bathe in the eggy vanilla liquid, piling the dipped slices on top of one another, and repeating the process, I reflected that at the research point, you could say that although I was still hard, I had been sliced, literally opened, to possibility. 

And it turned out there was a solution.

With a little persistence, Internet research is remarkable. It's one whoa! There are options! A lot of them out there! experience after another. And as I'd done it, the previous day, I began, like the bread, to soften in earnest. There were conference registration services!  This service does this? And this? You mean I wouldn't have to... And I'd be able to find out if... Research moved into analysis, comparison... I was absorbing, in short.

Gloating, and still in some wonderment at what I'd been able to do the day before, I left the bread in its egg-milk bath alone for a few minutes, while I began slicing some good Vermont apples of several varieties (Black Oxford, Macoun, Cox's Orange Pippin) to saute with brown sugar and cinnamon for the topping.

After the slicing, I visited the bread again. It was at last starting to absorb, sufficiently softened so that I could poke each piece, gently, with the tines of a fork, allowing it to soak up more.

On the previous day, I finally choose an online company called, logically enough, regonline. It does only conference and workshop registrations, hence A) has a system, B) it has it down.

By now, back in breakfast world, I had a little butter sizzling in two skillets. Into one, the apples. Into the other, the finally tender slices of egg-soaked bread, fragrant with vanilla.

Heat is the magical alchemist in cooking, changing one thing to another, in countless tiny increments. The apple slices soften, then brown; their juice, sweet and autumnal, cooks down and concentrates, its water turning into fragrant steam on the way. And because heat solidifies protein --- the eggs in the milk in this case --- the soaked bread, now sizzling in the buttery skillet, becomes firm and golden brown and a little crisp on its exterior, and moistly tender inside. Quietly, but automatically, given the right set of ingredients, techniques, elements, and just a little knowledge, transformation  happens. Hard bread becomes French toast.

The heat of finally focusing and taking action yesterday had firmed and changed me. My action, once I'd decided on the site, was the flame, the dynamic change element. Inputting the data, writing the descriptions, learning the program, spending some time on the phone with the amazingly helpful and available tech support folks. And then wow! No more reinventing the registration wheel for Ms. Dragonwagon! 

So now I can teach, and Regonline can do registrations (you can see what I did here if you haven't already). I am happy to pay Regonline a percentage of workshop fees for this service, which is not just registration, but full details,  payment, location (Little Rock, January 11-14, 2009). Everything is now there, even directions to the Historic Arkansas Museum, where it's being held. There's even the ability to take credit cards (but without my having to mess with them. for which, hallelujah --- it was a prospect that filled me with horror). 

But suddenly, it was figured out! Suddenly it was easier for everyone! As the Staples people say, "That was easy."

I flipped the French toast in the pan. I  stirred the apples, which were ready for a small handful of brown sugar now, and a bit of Saigon cinnamon. I called out to David and asked him to set the table. He did, and made tea.

Then we sat down to eat, in the dining room of our house (the short end of its L shape pictured left, about two months ago). By now the trees are leafless, and the ground dusted with snow, beauty still present, but subtler and chillier. But the dining room still faces out the two downstairs windows visible in the picture, and though it was a winter day, there were a few patches of blue in the sky and just a bit of sun shone in. And the French toast pieces, which at last had softened properly and browned nicely,  lay overlapped and golden on the blue plates. The fragrant apple slices, translucent and shiny with their glaze of brown sugar, barely holding their shape, were in a pile beside the French toast. The whole was topped with a dab of exquisite honey-flavored cream-colored Greek yogurt, and a sprinkle of chopped pecans. Veggie soysage, too, and half a pink grapefruit for each of us. Ah.

"I'm really impressed by what you did yesterday with Regonline," David told me. "It's really good." I smiled. "Thank you," I said. "I'm pleased too." And of course, I was.

Later that afternoon he and I would go for a walk, way up into our neighbor's maple-sugaring lot. For awhile we walked rhythmically, enjoying the crunch of the icy snow and the way it sometimes alternated with the shh-shhh of the leaves underfoot. "One-two-cha-cha-cha," called David, and we cha-cha'd our steps noisily through the woods. We agreed, panting, that dance-walking was not only much more musical but considerably more aerobic than just walking. 

But that was later. After we finished breakfast, David did the dishes and I went upstairs to my office (the two windows on the right, second floor) and went online.

And discovered that my first Fearless student had registered.

Eleven places left now. Maybe one of them is yours!

P.S. on December 24: only eight places are left now. Maybe one of them is yours!