First Snow

By first light 

winter whispered itself white

onto the green grass like 

a woman whose beauty 

withers so soon and

as  you watch.

Something died in me today--

drowned in a sky of silent soup.

Do not search for it,

only sleep--

sleep and dream of 

sour springs and blood summers 

and shadows of cold words still-

born eggs like wishes broken 

in the growl of this fall storm.

PROMPT: Magnetic word tiles selected on the basis of what appealed to me that day. (I have LOTS!) 

Ladybugs

What secret of winter-to-come
makes them wander through my windows
in time for frost's curfew?

This house's hot smile fools me too sometimes.
Here, sun is a fiction that
warms our frantic sleep and
withers the easy play of fall.

Water is hard to come by then
and I find them waxed
still and stiff in the shadow of drink
like some climber who
judged his seasons wrong.

PROMPT: Magnetic word tiles selected on the basis of what appealed to me that day. (I have LOTS!) 

The 38th Signal: An Open Invite to Jason Fried

I'm more artist than entrepreneur, so my business manager (i.e., my husband) scans periodicals like the Wall Street Journal and Inc. in search of crumbs of information and insight I might want to link up with an idea from a book, poem, movie or experience and develop into a blog post.

Meanwhile, I try to slog through One Hundred Years of Solitude in time for a discussion group and gaze longingly at the unwieldy stack of other books I'd rather read (see photo at right) piling up on my work table. Chances are each one will become part of a mishap involving one of my cats (that's Katie marking them with a rub) at least twice before I get to them--IF I get to them. Some are fiction, some are nonfiction, some are poetry, and some are prose; I love them all!

I also love--okay, more accurately, really like--a lot of what entrepreneur Jason Fried says in Inc. magazine's November 2009 "The Way I Work" feature, which hubby flagged for me most recently. Fried is the 30-something co-founder of 37Signals, a Chicago-based tech firm launched in 1999. Here are some of his very cool statements:

"I don't believe in the 40-hour workweek, so we cut all that BS about being somewhere for a certain number of hours. I have no idea how many hours my employees work--I just know they get the work done."

"We rarely have meetings. I hate them. They're a huge waste of time, and they're costly...they chop your day into small bits, so you have only 20 minutes of free time here or 45 minutes there. Creative people need unstructured time to get in the zone. You can't do that in 20 minutes."

"After lunch, I get a little lazy between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. I don't feel that productive, so I'm usually screwing around, which I think is really important."

 "I like to read in the middle of the day, to give myself a break."

So far, so good. I especially like that last statement, because reading is a passion with me. But alas, my enchantment ends with the very next set of quoted words out of Fried's mouth: "I don't read fiction. I find it a waste of time. There are so many amazing things that are real; I don't need to spend any time on a made-up story."

Huh. So much for "screwing around."

I agree, there are many amazing things that are "real"; I just happen to think fiction is also one them. More than that, fiction is good for you. That said, Fried's attitude isn't unique. As a writer and writing teacher, I've heard many down-to-earth, upstanding folk say they think fiction is something untrue and they should neither read nor write it. But these views could use some reframing.

Here's how my teachers explained it to me when I studied fiction and creative writing in college: Fiction is something more true than mere fact, true in a "Yes, that feels right in my bones" way. It may or may not have been made up in whole or in part. Often it begins in something that really did happen. But then, as it becomes crafted or fashioned, it differs from an historical event. It is the story of something, rather than its history, but no less true because we touch it with our minds and our feelings instead of our fingers and our wristwatches.

"Fiction is about possible selves in possible worlds," says Keith Oatley, Ph.D., who with colleagues at the University of Toronto looks at how fiction affects people differently than nonfiction. What they found in a 2006 study was that reading fiction is associated with increased social ability and greater empathy. "Through stories," Oatley says, "selfhood can expand."

When we observe how scenarios work out for characters, we learn how we may or may not want to react if something similar happens to us. Moreover, we experience the ups and downs of what it is to be another person--even if it is a made-up character. If we can empathize with made-up characters who are different from us, maybe we'll do better with the flesh-and-blood ones we encounter.

One of the tests Oatley's team of researchers devised involved Anton Chekhov's story "The Lady with the Little Dog":

It is about Dmitri Gomov, and a lady, Anna Sergueyevna, whom he sees walking with her little dog. They are both alone, on vacation at a seaside resort. They are both married to other people, but they begin an affair. At the end of their vacation they part. But their feelings for each other grow, and both are shocked to discover how much more important these feelings are than anything else in their lives. They encounter many difficulties, and overcome some of them. The story ends with this: "...their hardest and most difficult period was only just beginning."

Researchers wrote a nonfiction version of the story as a courtroom report of divorce proceedings. It had the same characters and events, some of Chekhov's words, and was the same length and reading difficulty. Study participants reading each version scored them equally interesting, though Chekhov's version scored higher artistically.

But results showed that those who read the fiction piece had measurable changes in belief, colored by the emotions they felt while reading. "My colleagues and I believe that readers of Chekhov's story were taken out of their usual ways of being so that they could connect with something larger than themselves, beyond themselves," Oatley says. "This is an effect that goes beyond fiction. All art aspires to help us transcend ourselves."

I can't be too critical of Jason Fried. It's great in this age of multimedia distraction that he reads books at all. And what a person reads is so personal; everyone's tastes are just so incredibly different! It makes me glad for the public library system, where just about anyone can find something they'll enjoy at no cost as long as they return it on time so someone else can do the same.

The stack of books on my worktable waiting for my attention includes titles I got interested in because I found them referred to in something else I read, and I followed a trail--like breadcrumbs in a dark wood. The real thought I hope to pass along to Fried and others is not to rule out any type of literature: Try everything, then let this spill over into other aspects of life. Stepping outside our usual ways of doing and seeing is what keeps us vibrant--and creative!

Remember 100 Years of Solitude, that book of fiction by Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez? It's the one that at the start of this post I felt tortured by?  Well, along the way of writing this, I finished it and shared in a discussion about it with my book group. It was a tough read for me, and individuals' reactions ran a full gamut, which made talking about it all the more fun. Even though it will never make my list of favorites, the book disturbed me, and so I'm still thinking about issues it raised. One of its major themes involved the destruction caused by always and only seeing through a single lens.

I have no idea why Fried's business is called "37Signals," though it's an engaging name. I find myself thinking that maybe a reconsideration of the value of fiction could be his "Signal No. 38." Maybe, like Chekhov's Anna and Dmitri, the intensity of feeling about this "new thing" will surprise him. Because, after all, our future, like theirs, is apt to be hard and difficult at times. Best to face it all with a good story.

The Seven Wonders of the World

PROMPT: The title, of course! What are the seven wonders of YOUR world? Here are mine...

1.
The night sky:
The moon in all its phases,
even dark and seeming absent,
but watched by me
and a full complement of stars
shivering together
against a cold, clear night.

2.
The smells of what my garden holds:
rosemary or lavender needles
crushed between moving hands,
dirt when it opens it mouth to taste a new plant
and mulch fresh from the nursery's steaming pile
on a foggy summer morning
in our old red pickup.

3.
Birds: Percher or predator
because we need both.
I love their beauty, their
self-containment, their
song and chatter,
their grace and their determination
to live another day.

4.

Hands in all their friendships:
A husband's chapped ones as they cup a wife's wrinkling ones.
Knuckles as rings travel over them
like a loft in a country road.
Cat paws that tap, tap, tap,
each time more insistently to say,
"Look at me! Pet me!I'm important!"

5.
Eyes: Either ones that change color like my husband's--
gray to green to blue and back--
or ones that overfill with tears too often
like mine
sometimes.

6.
Heartbeats:
The thrum beneath cat purrs
as breasts heave and sigh devotion.
My own, which I feel in my palm
as it rests between pillow and ear.
Either one will carry me of a night
toward my dreams.

7.
Those dreams: Fierce and absurd,
confusing and demanding,
fanciful and transporting like
the night sky and
the moon in all its phases,
even dark and seeming absent.

We are a full complement of stars
shivering together
against a cold, clear night.

Me, You, Bullfighters & the Biscuit: Living 'All the Way Up'

PROMPT: A memorable quote from a book, movie or interview. See where it took me...

This Thanksgiving week marks the end of my dealings with doctors and hospitals for the year (I hope). The end of January, it starts over. This is the pattern of my life for the rest of my life. I can't change it, but I'm going to try in these few months off to learn to think about it differently. Maybe I'll get lucky and my feelings will follow my thoughts, because I want to live "all the way up."

In Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, one character says to another, "Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters." I want to be a bullfighter (minus the animal cruelty).

The gist is that bullfighters face death every day, and that makes them live differently. It's often been cited to explain why Hemingway's characters and Hemingway himself may have been so adventuresome and often reckless. If you can stare death in the face or even laugh at it, then you get a rush of some sort, and sometimes you get hooked on that rush.

I heard this Hemingway quote last night in a segment of American Experience on PBS about the legendary racehorse Seabiscuit and his hard-luck jockey Red Pollard. Both horse and man, linked, overcame incredible odds--and ridicule--to achieve grace and greatness. Pollard's daughter recounted how her father was someone who kept coming back, who lived his life "all the way up," like Hemingway said. I want to be a Seabiscuit or a Red Pollard.

It all reminded me of a passage in Anne Lamott's book on writing, Bird by Bird. When Lamott's friend Pammie was dying, Pammie's doctor told Lamott, "Watch her carefully right now, because she's teaching you how to live." To me, what Lamott goes on to describe is the true meaning of all the way up: "To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence. Time is so full for people who are dying in a conscious way, full in the way that life is for children. They spend big round hours."

I had a bout with thyroid cancer four years ago this month. I was never anywhere close to death. I had two surgeries and my surgeon hid the incision so well in the existing wrinkles at the base of my neck that no one, me included, could find it six months later. Most thyroid cancers grow slow and are easy to treat. They remove the gland, lace some iodine with radioactive material, and the patient drinks up. Thyroid cells suck up iodine like kids do candy on Halloween, so the radioactive part of the cocktail kills any cells the surgery missed--theoretically anyway. You don't lose your hair, the pain is mild and short-lived, you're only toxic to people and small animals for about a week (!), and most people never have a recurrence.

But there are downsides: (1) You become identified to both health-care workers and others as someone who's had cancer and is therefore more likely to have it again, and (2) finding a hormone dosage both you and your doctor can live with will become the scourge of daily life.

Once you've had cancer, doctors go into attack mode. I'm not saying I don't want them to look out for me; I just wish they could understand how the way they do it ripples through the rest of my life. They scrutinize labs and follow up any blip with various imaging procedures. A small shadow of something on one sort of scan calls for other scans and appointments with specialists to interpret results and rule out worst possible scenarios.

Days to weeks go by while you wait to hear those results. Weeks to months pass while you wait for an appointment with a specialist. Going back and forth to the hospital for tests lulls you into living in the zone of "worst possible scenarios" when nothing could be further from the truth.

Through it all, you try not to worry that some microscopic something inside of you might be trying to do you in. You don't feel sick, so maybe you start to mistrust your feelings as well.

Most people don't know what to say to you, so some will say things that, though well-meaning, make you feel worse. Other people find reasons to isolate themselves from you, as if they could catch what you had. Some of those will cling to reasons other than their own fear of death to explain their withdrawal--that is, they blame you, if only in a veiled way.

You worry most about the people closest to you--a spouse or partner--because of what "being strong" for you is doing to them. And you'll be cranky, because somewhere in this mix you'll be angry about pretty much everything--and that's normal.

These are stages experienced by most people with a chronic illness or a serious injury. What’s unique to thyroid cancer and nobody gives much thought to is that the thyroid gland is your body's furnace, except now you don't have one. Sure, there are pills to make up for it, but it's not the same, and no one prepares you for how this will impact your daily life.You spend a considerable amount of time either hypothyroid or hyperthyroid--never feeling exactly normal again.

Hypothyroid is where the doctors want you for treatments and some scans. You'll be very tired and have trouble waking up from sleep. Normal body functions slow way down, you'll be cold a lot, and all this will make you irritable.

Most of the time, though, they'll want you hyperthyroid, which is standard for deterring the growth of cells the nuclear cocktail missed. It's where you'll live most of the rest of your life. It will make you very tired, too, but this time, because you can't get or stay asleep. Body functions speed up, you'll be intermittently hot and cold as your body frantically tries to compensate for the swings, and all of this will make you--guess what?--irritable. Maybe even aggressive. It's a lose-lose.

In the midst of my last round of tests, which started in August, I dreamed I was a hostage in "The Thyroid Zone." Sounds like a plot for a sci-fi thriller, I know. In the dream it showed up as a title on the cover of a book. I wrote about it today to remind myself it’s okay to laugh about it. That's probably why I dreamed it. I needed to vent.

I should be glad I'm alive, you say, and believe me, I am! In the midst of the madness, I experienced fleeting moments of great presence: Moments when I watched simple things--like my husband undress or a squirrel nibble a crust of bread, and my heart pounded with the sheer beauty of it! They were moments I might have missed if not for "The Thyroid Zone."

Now that I've lived there a little, I want more. I want to live all the way up more often than not.

The small shadows that keep appearing and disappearing inside my neck reflect the nature of neck lymph glands, which are chiefly for drainage. Doctors will pore over mine the rest of my life, looking for anomalies. So far, all that’s turned up is my gaping need for perspective. I need to let the uncertainty I can’t escape teach me how to live those big round hours Lamott talks about because, as she so succinctly puts it, "the truth is we are all terminal on this bus."

The truth is, we can all strive to live all the way up without illness or injury or bad luck. As I see it, we are all bullfighters already. We are all Seabiscuit. We are all down-on-our-luck jockeys looking for our next best ride. The truth is, as long as we're here (and then some, I think), we always have at least one more chance and we may as well keep trying to get it right.

Wedding Day

Skies socked in clouds so bloated and gray they
looked like a week-old corpse.

Forty-mile-per-hour winds that made for
horizontal rain. It stung like a jealous friend.

And when the temperature kept falling,
snow peppered through

spooky flashes of sun.
All this in May, the month of flowers.

I wondered what it all meant for our life together.
An aunt told me luck

for we'd had a little bit of everything all day,
like my uncle and her.

I remember dogwoods through the window
clutching so tightly to their branches no petals were lost.

I remember cold outside but warm in:
Twenty years later: it's the same.

My aunt was right.

PROMPT: What's the most amazing weather you've ever experienced?

Witness to the Fire:Creativity and the Veil of Addiction

by Linda Schierse Leonard
This was an intriguing read for me because it bridges psychology and creativity. The author, Linda Schierse Leonard, is a Jungian analyst, which means in part that she works with clients through dream material.

As someone who counsels others, you'd expect her to have a wealth of material from which to draw. But instead, she offers up herself as a flawed human being, who after being raised in an atmosphere of alcoholism and co-dependency eventually became an alcoholic, and then a recovering alcoholic. That sort of honesty and genuine connection must go a long way in a therapeutic relationship.

I've read a number of Leonard's books, and I like her "literary" approach to the discussion of psychological problems--probably because I'm a writer as well and a reader, and if you tell a good story, you'll get me hooked. But what drew me to this book after Wounded Woman and Meeting the Madwoman was its particular focus on the lives of several writers wrestling with various addictions, the works they wrote, and how the lives and works were linked.

There's a whole school of folks out there who think writers' lives are irrelevant to an evaluation of their works. And I agree, certainly, that the work must stand on its own. But, as a writer, I also know my life experiences, and how I feel about things feeds everything I write. So it intrigues me to "listen in on" what that might have been like for someone else.

In this case, we get a peek into the lives of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who had problems with gambling, money in general and love; Jean Rhys, who early on was addicted to love and later to alcohol; Eugene O'Neill and Jack London, both alcoholics, and more. If you haven't read these writers Leonard discusses, not to worry. She tells you everything you need to know to understand her assertions. But you'll find her discussions of their works so compelling you'll soon be searching out titles on Amazon or your library's online card catalog.

In my own life, psychology helped me discover a deeper understanding of how creativity works. For instance, that it ebbs and flows, like the tides, and feeling like I have nothing to write about (i.e., "writer's block") is often because I need to recharge or go within. But I also have a problem with my creative practice. The writer Deena Metzger said in a workshop I attended that what's most important for any writer to develop are "calluses on your ass." She said you need to go to your desk every day and be present to the possibilities of writing. Why has this been such a hard thing for me to do when logically I get it?

Leonard not only speaks to this question by noting similarities between writers and addicts, but she examines productive writers who also struggled with addictions and, thus, links the two again. It's like the age-old stereotype that all artists are crazy or weird. While many may be, many also are not. She differentiates but explains why, perhaps, such a stereotype ever developed:

The relationship between addiction and creativity, as I see it, is not causal. Rather, there is a parallel process occurring in the psyche of the addict and the creative person. Both descend into chaos, into the unknown underworld of the unconscious. Both are fascinated by what they find there. Both encounter death, pain, suffering. But the addict is pulled down, often without choice, and is held hostage by addiction; the creative person chooses to go down into that unknown realm, even though the choice may feel destined. Artists who are addicted have a "double descent"--the one of their addiction and the other of their creativity; their situation is compounded and complex, and they respond in different ways. Some creative artists descend with the help of drugs or alcohol and continue to create. And others continue their addictions to the early loss of their creativity and/or their lives. But once in the realm of the underworld mysteries, they must eventually choose to find form and meaning from the chaos and to return to life and society....Many addicts fear they will lose their creativity if they give up the drinks or drugs, romance or power, that they feel takes them to the creative source. Of these, many who hold onto their addictions die an early death or find their creative spring has gone dry or soured. In contrast, many recovering addicts, after enough healing time has passed, find new energy and open spaces in themselves for a creative life. Both need to know there is a way down and back from the creative depths without recourse to addiction.

I also like Leonard's technique of creating archetypal characters to illustrate the psychological concepts at work in the lives of the creative people she discusses. I recognized some of them in myself and some in people I've known, just as you will. There's the gambler, the outlaw, the trickster, the madwoman, and the judge, to name just a few. Maybe, like me, you'll see that something of these characters in you gets hooked on something of these characters in someone else, and this is really what pulls you away from your writing.

"Every addict who recovers," Leonard writes, "chooses life and makes this existential choice daily." This hooks up nicely with the Metzger adage. It's that daily choice that's at the heart of getting somewhere with your writing. The results may or may not look like success as the world defines it, but the important thing is what you know.