best birthday present ever

This is a portrait of my horse, Keil Bay, given to me last night for my birthday. I was stunned - it is absolutely gorgeous and captures the essence of Keil, whose nickname is The King. He is powerful and brilliant and kind and wise, and oh so expressive. I see him every day, of course, but the photograph is very special and I will always treasure it.

Thank you, Matthew.

more metaphor

One of my earliest memories of the creative process at work was watching my grandma sew on her Singer machine. She wasn't a seamstress, but she had two Singers and used them regularly. I don't recall anything she made - mostly I remember her figure, seated, working the treadle with her foot and holding pins in her mouth.



The little drawers in the machine's table were like treasure chests. One held scissors and measuring tape and various other little tools, the oil can and oil for the moving parts.




One held her buttons, the drop-down drawer held a rainbow of threads. Another held needles and the red tomato pincushion so full of pins it barely showed through.






Well before she died, she gave me the table-top and its ancient instruction manual. I actually figured out how to work it and made simple things like pillow covers and curtains.

Later, she gave me the Singer in its own cabinet, with all the drawers still stuffed with the things I remembered from childhood.

Sadly, when my own children came along, I was not vigilant enough and many of those little treasures were spirited away and used in various and elaborate play scenarios. But a few things remain.

I have the machine in my writing office here at home. I frequently think of weaving silver or magenta or iridescent threads through my novels, and something about the treadle and the beauty of the machine itself, and those treasure chest drawers across the room is inspiring.

It also reminds me of my grandma, who I stayed with quite a bit as a young girl. She was wonderfully inventive. There are no photos of her sewing but there are photos of her swimming and posing and standing on her head, and inside my head are many cherished images I wish I had on paper: her long and pale blond hair catching on fire one morning as she burned the trash - and promptly put the tall cylindrical trash can she'd just emptied on top of her head to put out the flames. Carefully plucking very large garden spiders from their webs in an effort to show me they were harmless. Sitting on the edge of the old porcelain bathtub in her house after my grandfather died, crying, while I patted her on the shoulder. Mixing Tang breakfast drink and spices and black tea and calling it "Russian Tea," which she served in fancy china cups on her red kitchen dinette table.

She wrote postcards and letters but to my knowledge she never wrote a story. And yet she didn't need to - she walked around with stories draped across her shoulders like scarves. A treasure trove I have not even begun to tap.

One thing I intend to do this week: go to a sewing shop and buy a new rainbow of threads to fill the drop-down drawer, and maybe some notions to fill the empty drawers.

lying fallow

I've had a spell, writing wise, of lying fallow, rare for me and very uncomfortable. I'm much happier when working wildly on a book, racing to get down all the paragraphs that seem to collect inside my head.

Trying to view this a necessary part of the process - allowing emptiness and space, specifically for the work in progress which for the first time, I have let sit for months in first draft.

I got back to it this week, readied for it, and finally last night leapt back into the pages. It's exciting to see the benefits of letting it be, and fascinating that in the midst of the empty space (weeks back) there was a revelation that in some ways solves many of the problems of the first draft. It answers a lot of questions posed by three writing group members who read a fair portion of the ms.

I didn't plan it this way, but it occurred to me this morning that when I looked out the window, the fields seem to be washed lightly in green. The bulbs are up, beginning to bud and blossom. Somehow my timing has gotten in sync with nature and the season, the full-tilt buzz of delight that begins underground and works its way outward.

This is by far my favorite part of the writing process - when it starts to hum and bursts out wild and untamed. The deep revision is a close second, and comes just in time to restore order to the wonderful chaos.

passages

And all the names of the tribes, the nomads of faith who walked in the monotone of the desert and saw brightness and faith and colour. The way a stone or found metal box or bone can become loved and turn eternal in a prayer. Such glory of this country she enters now and becomes part of. we die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography -- to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth as had no maps.

-from Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient


Even in old age, she recurs. I still dream about Claire at least twice a year. How amazing for a thing as vaporous as desire to survive against all the depredations of time, becoming, at its worst, a sad reminder that life mostly fails us. In some dreams she is just a fragrance. Sometimes lavender and sometimes clove and cinnamon, but also another scent dear to my heart. During those two summers, Claire had the habit of absentmindedly wiping her pen nib on her skirts, most of which were dark blue, so the only trace of her habit was the faint odor of ink around her.

-from Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons


Later evening addendum: I just discovered that Michael Ondaatje has a new novel coming out in May: Divisadero.

And, Ian McEwan has one coming out as well: On Chesil Beach.

Things to look forward to, for sure.

grisaille

It is gray today, muted and soft, though thankfully not cold. I forget until this kind of day how much brilliance of color the sun offers.

This is a day for pulling books off shelves, fingering the pages for beloved passages, listening to Loreena McKinnitt cd's, allowing the smell of maple sausages to waft through the air, better smelled than eaten, even.

A day for mucking stalls to NPR while keeping one eye skyward for rain and the other on degrees Fahrenheit so the horses don't get both wet and cold.

A day for writing novel, not query letters, and getting lost in words and phrases, pulling the power of a grisaille day into the pages.

Sometimes soft and muted has more power than brilliant sun.