A Writer Afoot

Matera...the sweet yearnings of travel

Matera, last morning.  In the moment.....

In the moment, I am sitting in the sassi Hotel Sant'Angelo (which I chose because my grandmother used to spend much time in San Angelo, Texas).  Christopher Robin has had a relapse of the cold we both brought home from Indianapolis, and is half-sprawled on the leather couch opposite me, his eyes dull and red as he listens to a book on tape on his Ipod.  We are awaiting out ride to the Bari train station, one day early, because we decided to see about spending a day in Rome.  So, that is where we will go tonight and tomorrow, then fly to England on Tuesday afternoon.  No idea if I can access a computer from there. 

In the moment, there are two young women cleaning up the breakfast dishes, chatting in a low, musical river of Italian.  The bells are ringing again, urgently and energetically--ring ring, ring ring, ring ring, ring ring, ring ring.  Sometimes they ring for hours, but not at every hour.  It seems more to mark medieval day, the names of which I have forgotten, but Matins and Noon and Evening.   I kept worrying that I had no alarm without my cell phone, but the bells woke me at seven each morning. 

Last night, we walked home from the gala and I felt as if it was the last day of camp. I tried to press th e sights and smells and soft crisp air into my memory--the worn slick granite streets beneath our feet which made anything but walking sandals impossible, though I carried nicer shoes to events, the little pack of pale, tan dogs guarding one turn on the road; the beacons of light shining on the hill of sassi.  The creepy cold quiet that spills from the abandoned, empty rooms still quite prevalent alongside the shops and apartments that have been redone.   I will post a little more history of the town when I bring my pictures, but for now, these are simply impressions.

As we walked last night, though the very busy Saturday night streets, I felt that sweet wistfulness of yearning equally for the powerful hug of my big son, and the fluffy feel of my dog's neck and the quiet of my garden, but also that seductive idea of abandoning the career and the life and becoming that earnest ex-pat who stumbles into learning the language and figuring out the new hours and the possibilities that might present for work, for creativity.....

Of course, I am very rooted where I am.  It is just that pleasurable fantasy, the sweet longing of imagination.  I have felt I could live in Scotland and the west of Ireland and now the south of Italy in this small and ancient city with its blue, blue sky and agreeable population and fantastical sassi.

Tomorrow, Rome!

Ambling to Bari and Matera

Ambling because that is what one does here, at least on foot.  Amble through the streets, through meals, through tiny cups of impossibly strong coffee, through lazy glasses of wine.   Not much time, since there is an American man waiting rather pointedly for this computer (and funny how much pressure his tidy shoes makes me feel) , but a few notes to keep you current....

---Bari is a small city on the east coast, decidedly un-touristy, though it appears there is a large port from which ferries and cruise ships sail.  We arrived by train (Eurostar, not the locals, which would have meant changing three times).  I felt quite cheered by navigating the purchase of tickets and accomplishing our transfer and the comfortable ease of the train itself, a chance to read and rest and observe the endless miles of valley through which we traveled, mountains to the north and to the south, and between, vast vineyards and olive orchards, with hilltop towns in the hazy distance like watercolors of wine labels.   

--we spent Tuesday meandering around Bari's old town in the gentle rain.  We had good umbrellas and decent shoes and the clerk at the hotel said there had been no rain for 150 days, to it was hard to mind it.  In truth, it lent the day a certain moody grace.  We ambled around the warren of medieval streets in the walled old city (which was notorious for pick pockets and petty crime until recently, when it has been cleaned up). There is an enormous old castle, remarkably well preserved, which delighted me for the dual wall construction (curtain wall and inner courtyard) plus the Norman keep.  It was not possible to see a lot of the inside, nor climb the tower, but it is remarkable nonetheless, with a now grassy and enormous moat.   

--Tuesday night (the man has left, exasperated that his sighs did not make me type any faster), we went to the book event at Feltrinelli, and that was quite an adventure.   A crowd gathered for the discussion of Il profumo delle Oro (Madame Mirabouàs School of Love here), where I met several gracious and interesting readers.  One in particular, a beautiful woman with a cloud of silvery hair and the elegance of a model, asked most intriguing questions.  An interpreter translated for us.  I signed some books and we drank some coffee, then a driver picked us up in the now pouring rain, and drove us south in the dark and we to Matera.   My first glimpse of the sassi will stay with me, as we rounded a narrow, twisting road and suddenly, there were the tumbles of pale yellow stone studded with lights, as fantastical as something from a half-remembered dream or a book read long ago, and across the ravine, a black darkness, vast and impenetrable. T We lugged our suitcases up a series of steps and across a cobblestone courtyard, getting soaked, and tumbled into bed in our long, churchlike cave....

---In the morning, emerging like children from ensorcellment, we came into the bright blue morning, and the ruined and renewing tumbles of the town of sassis, stairs trailing hither and yon, climbing into dark passages, emerging into dazzling sunlight, and churches upon churche upon churches.   A cathedral whose roof fell down last summer, cave curches carved into the mountains, and across the river rushing through the valley far below, an austere bluff with tiny ant figures on the top, staring back at us. 

I have eaten amazing food.  Orchiette (sp) with spinach and butter and tomatoes.  Rabiit (rabbit! me!) roasted to such savory tenderness it melted on my tongue, served with potatoes cooked to buttery perfection.  CR had lamb and sausages today, while I feasted on mashed fava beans and roasted cheese and drank a big hearty glass of red wine (which we shared) and came back to nap in the hot of the afternoon.

Oh, and one final note: last night, the cocktail party was held at a small cafe on minor piazza, facing a larger piazza (that backs up to another piazza).  Handsome waiters served white wine and proscuitto and two beautiful young creatures enacted the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet in Italian, she curving over the edge of the balcony above, he earnestly looking up to her from the square.  Old men leaned on the walls to watch, and the evening shoppers paused to smile tenderly, and it was piercingly, wildly beautiful, so much so that I had to look away and recite the words under my breath, for I memorized it entirely at the age of thirteen and still can whisper every word....But soft? What light from yonder window breaks?

Ciao!

A little bit about Napoli

Greetings from Bari, on the east coast of Italy.   Writing this from an Internet cafe what is painted a warm pumpkin shade.  I am happy to discover most of the keyboard is the same--not always true.

Bari is a rather tidy city after the madness of Naples.  We arrived here last night by train.  We spent four days in Napoli, which is a big, loud, arrogant and amazing city.  Crowded, intense, full of nepotism--it made me think of what Pueblo would be like if it were a million people and 2000 years old. 

On Sunday, we returned from Pompeii to see the archeological mu seum, but it turned out that they didn't take credit cards so we had to walk back to the hotel, down a long, long hill crammed with people who were evidently on their way to Sunday dinner at Nonaàs house or maybe Mama's.  Every person in Napoli must have been in those streets--mothers with strollers and high heels and bountiful cleavage, boys with tight button up shirts, girls walking five abreast in their sexiest clothes, all holding hands and giggling.    Entire families on mopeds--mom, dad, two babies in between--and a river of small cars and mopeds and motorcycles clogging every lane and alley and street, honking, swerving, pushing through.  One learns to take a quick look but also just keep moving; astonishingly, we did not see a single fender bender or even any evidence of such, though parking does seem to net a few scrapes.  Our hotel was right on the bay, a block or so away from Castel Dell'Ovo, which is castle of the egg.   It is a giant, largely empty Norman castle that was practically deserted except for the brides, all dressed in their frothy yards of sequins and tulle and net and satin posing against the keep, at the doorway, on the turrets.   We saw a genuinely bizarre number of brides---I am not exaggerating when I put the number at twenty over the course of the day.   Maybe it is that way every Saturday, or perhaps it is lucky to marry on the 22 of September.  I don't know.   

Anyway, when we walked back to the museum, the streets were utterly deserted.  Me. Neal, a couple of dogs and a few other tourists.  By the time we visited the museum (crowded with cruise ship passengers---1000 cruise ships stopped here last year, and they're well on the way to breaking that number this year) and came back down, people were trickling out again. 

The breakfast patio of the hotel overlooked the bay to Vesuvius, which is an impressive mountain next to a smaller one.  Both blue in the distance, not quite as tall as Pikeàs Peak, but tall enough to show tree line.  Turned out that it is only one mountain---that middle part is what was blown out in 79 AD.   

(I will write more of Pompeii, but it is a place a person should just see. There is no way to cut through all the things you've seen and heard about it to give you a fresh enough perspective.  It is enormous and astonishingly well preserved and haunting, with the mountain standing there in the background like a gruff troll.   

The people here are enchanting and engaging and delightful.  Our driver to Pompeii was called Mike, and he was nattily dressed in a suit and red tie, thick salt and pepper hair cut perfectly and brushed away from his very Italian face, a big nose and sharp chin and twinkling eyes.  We asked about guide.  He said over his shoulder.  °I know a guy.°  I laughed and nudged Neal, because in Pueblo the only way to really get things done is to know a guy, or have your neighbor know a guy who knows a guy.   Mike winked at me over his shoulder.  °We say here °guido.° he said  °guido.°   

And he was the one who drove us back through the parade to the museum and told us we should have something to eat because everything was about to close for the whole of Sunday afternoon, so everyone could go eat with their mamas.  Five courses, and really, you can't give up the fried fish, he said.

I eased into being able to say a few things in Italian.  Not so shy as with French,  mainly because it's so much easier and I can fake it by thinking first in Spanish.   Also, it's just not as intimidating to speak to Italians as to the French.   (Though I had a melt down this morning---everything was all mixed up and I had to have a booksigning tonight and I got the time wrong, which meant we had a long delay and I couldn't find the number for our ride to Matera, and.....and.....Little meltdown.   It turned out all right.  We scoped out the bookstore and Neal patted my shoulders and we found the cheerful, kind clerk instead of the mean one, and I got it all sorted out.  So now we're at this cafe and I feel better connecting to the world in some wordy way.)

Food: pizza, of course.  Naples is known for pizza, so of course we ate some.  A lot, actually.  One had a divine tomato sauce, DIVINE, and just fresh leaves of basil scattered over it, and three cloves of roasted garlic.

Running out of time now.    More later......tonight we head to Matera.

PS I'm editing some of these blogs a little, to add art and clear up some of the typos from posting in internet cafes.  True to the spirit, if not the letter, of blogging.

 

Of biscuits and Sunday mornings

Wandering around the internet last night, I visited one of my favorite cooking sites, Pinch My Salt (the American in Sicily who takes such fantastically gorgeous photos of food (and a volcano erupting).  She had a post about  biscuits, which linked to another post about the best biscuits ever, and the truth is, I've been longing for biscuits lately.  Not sure why.   I do love them--is there anything as tender as a biscuit fresh out of the oven?--and I've been thinking about the boxes of my grandmother's recipes a lot lately. I haven't had a good one in awhile. 

As long as I live, biscuits will be associated with the childhood of my boys and their father, making biscuits on Sunday mornings.  He liked cooking, and rituals, and early in our marriage, he established the habit of cooking on Sundays.  A full Southern breakfast in the morning, all according to his particular plan--country potatoes with the skins still on, first boiled, then grilled in a cast iron skillet with salt and pepper to a perfect combination of crisp and tender.   Bacon, always, which he carefully cooked flat on an electric skillet (which, intriguingly, I ended up with in the big Division of Things).  Sometimes patties of hot country sausage.  Scrambled eggs.  And buttermilk biscuits, of course, slathered with butter and my plum jam, made from scratch. Coffee, orange juice, milk if you wished, all of it piled up on the dining room table, steaming and fragrant. Other people had dinner parties.  We had Sunday breakfast parties--that's when we added leaves to the table and stuffed guests with all the special tidbits.      

He also cooked supper every Sunday--pork chops and mashed potatoes or the like in the winter, barbeque with his special sauce (the recipe for which you can find in No Place Like Home) in the summer, but breakfast was the marker of our family life. 

It's the biscuits I sometimes yearn for.  They're tangled in a thousand memories, and maybe it's that younger me I'm thinking about, a nostalgia for those days when I could protect my babies from the vagaries of life so much more easily, when the Best Dog In the World still walked the earth, when life seemed fairly simple and straightforward and Ram made biscuits on Sunday morning, listening to a special combination of blues and soul and rock and roll as he cut biscuits with a bottle from our wedding, a tradition he learned from his parents, and his own father, who cooked biscuits for his children.  He said that cooking on Sunday morning was his church. 

I don't actually have his recipe.  Perhaps I should ask him for it.  Pass it on to the boys, who will--because this is what children do--one day find themselves wanting to make Sunday breakfasts for their families.  I hope they do, anyway. 

Biscuits and southern cooking are somehow weaving themselves into the brewing new book.  The best biscuits ever.  I wonder what that particular recipe might be?  What makes best?   Is it Sunday morning light in early summer, slanting just so through that eastern window?  The sound of The Persuasions singing "People Get Ready?" while bacon sizzles on the grill?  The arranged faces of families and friends at a table drenched with light coming through lace curtains and two dogs pretending that they are not begging and two boys scarfing down biscuits--Ian with jam, Miles with honey?

This is what I know about R's biscuits: a pile of flour, baking powder (only half as much as you think you need when you deal with high altitudes), salt, a little sugar, butter cut into the mix (or use your hands to squish it all together if you're in a hurry) then buttermilk to make it all stick together, and roll it out on a counter and cut biscuits with something you like, that has some memories, and bake in a very hot oven for 8 or 10 minutes. Extra points if you're wearing cutoff jean shorts and sweat socks with little lines around the top and an apron somebody brought you from a trip. 

Mmmm.  What's your best family food memory?  Do you know how to make that dish?

Tidy Indianapolis

Last weekend, I traveled to Indianapolis to give a talk to the RWA chapter there.  Also, there are people there from my oldest writing group, the former Genie RomEx, which was a brutally difficult place to sign online, way back in the day before you could send email between services.   (It's bizarre to think about that now, that I'd sit on my text-based service, writing emails to only the members of that service, wishing I could send one to someone on AOL, or Prodigy or....well, you get the picture.  It's rather astonishing how far we've come in not very many years.)

Anyway. In Indy, I connected with Alicia Rasley and Brenda Barber and her daughter Bethany (a lovely tall lean girl with an airy grace, who wants to be an opera singer.  How cool is that?).   One of Christopher Robin's friends also lives there.  So I had a writerly meal with Alica and Co at Agio's an Italian restaurant downtown, one I will remember for the incredible Baked Apple and Gorgonzola Empanada, garlic puree, tomato-raisin chutney.  Bethany chose the wine, a great chianti, and I was paying attention to my diet, so ate "only" the vegetable plate for my meal.   Spectacular. If more restaurants cooked vegetables like this, it would be no trouble to be vegetarian.  The surroundings are hip and colorful, and the neighborhood obviously gentrified in the most elegantly funky sort of way.

I was surprised to like the city as much as I did.  I suppose I was expecting a weary post-industrial, post-family-farmland county seat, with grimy streets and lots of poverty. All those cliches.  (Maybe I was imagining St. Louis, now that I think about it.  There are humans I adore in St. Louis, but not so much the city, which always strikes me as slightly hostile and difficult to navigate.)  Indianapolis was not difficult or prickly.  I liked the orderly layout of the downtown, which was clean and tidy for the most part, with whimsical light sculptures at the street crossings.  CR and I walked down to the river, seeing first the tail end of what must have been a 5 or 10K by the look of the not-demolished runners who were finishing and walking away, drinking water.  Then we crossed a bridge and looped around the zoo and ended up going against an enormous wave of walkers engaged in a charity event.  Maybe diabetes.  Walked back to our hotel, skirting the university, had a coffee and showered before my talk.  Where I also heard the news that my eldest landed a position he most desperately wanted for next year.  (Hooray, Ian!)

I liked the graceful stone buildings downtown, the energy of the campuses right on the edge of the river, the old neighborhoods that are still incredibly affordable.   I snapped this photo of a doorway because there were so many attractive doors like this, and the most beautiful Borders store I've ever seen, occupying an old bank. The clerk was tidy middle aged man with a snappy white goatee, a refugee from Colorado, who said he liked Indy because it was like Denver in the mid-sixties.

In the evening, we met CR's longtime friends for a meal at Palomino's, which lasted nearly four hours.  We imbibed and
ate and talked and talked and talked.  Delightful evening, full of laughter and good company.  The next day, we met Alicia's husband, who will be leading a trek to Nepal next month, and I was fascinated by how one could manage walking for days at 24,000 feet.   He said it isn't easy.  CR, who loves altitude, was enchanted by the idea.

In all, a lovely city. I could live there, and I don't say that often. Everyone was outside, riding bikes and running and walking.  It was easy to move around in, and had plenty of universities to provide intriguing humans.   

Now, I'm getting ready for Italy (four days and counting).  I'll try to find some photos of the cocktail dresses I found.  Yummy!

How to be a fabulous 80 year old

Melanie Scott, an Australian writer who finaled twice in the Golden Hearts this year, posted something terrific to our voice class yesterday and I asked her to post it to her blog.   

One of the exercises we do is to picture your 80th birthday party and how you want it to be and what your 80 year old self would tell you to do. Which all the fabulously talented gals in my course have duly done and I was trying to come up with some comments but really, they all sounded fantastic, and all our 80 year old selves are brilliant and wise and I really want to get to go to some of those parties, so all I could come up with was this, which is my distillation of what everyone said and a reminder of what we have to do if we want to live to be grand old broads at 80. And with apologies to SARK, who's 'How to be' posters are fabulous and kind of inspired me.

HOW TO BE A FABULOUS EIGHTY YEAR OLD

Check it out--it's luscious.   And if you want to have some fun, try the exercise:

In a timed writing (ten minutes, pen to the page, write fast, no editing)  imagine you are at your 80th birthday party.  What are you wearing? Who is there? What's going on in your life?   Now, let your 80 year old self give the self you are now some advice.  What will she say to you? 

This is not just for writers, by the way.  Readers can have fun with it, too.  Our 80 year old self is the one who has a lot of answers for how to live our lives today.   Have fun with it, and let me know if you did it.

 

In a dither

Rushing through....not much time for blogging the past week or so.   I have some things to say about (lovely!) Indianapolis, but must finish working for the day first.    The good news is, I have shoes.   

Oh, the exhilaration of running!

My cousin Peggy said, "Why do you want to run?" with great bewilderment.  This morning, I went out for a very mellow jog in my new, heavy duty trail shoes and it was the first time in ages I just jogged along with no purpose but the running.   

And these are some of the things that happened while I jogged, so slowly, taking care with my knee until I could tell if it would bother me.  (It never did.)

All the cobwebs blew out of my brain, the dust washed away by hard sweat.

All the cells in my arms and legs and the marrow of my bones shook off their sloth and started humming.

The vague sense of irritation and impatience I've been feeling drained away.

The tension in my shoulders eased.

CR says he thinks while he runs.  I don't think at all.  It's like yoga in that way, for me--it makes the little girl in the back of my head stop talking and gives me a sense of peace and quiet.  It feels SO GOOD. 

Reading Jag

I've been reading about a book a day.  Gulping books.  Inhaling them.   Reading until my hands hurt from holding the books, until my eyes are grainy.  A few I've enjoyed, in no particular order:

The Jane Austen Book Club, by Karen Joy Fowler, which had such a non-descript cover on the original that I just didn't know why I'd read it.  An ARC with the new cover showed up on my doorstep and I put it on my desk to read next.  Shallow of me, I'm sure, to judge a book by its cover, but there it is.  I'm human.  And I now apologize, because this book is a delight--many of the conventions of group stories, following divorces and love affairs and deaths and dogs, and of course, Austen.  It is elevated by Fowler's bold tenderness for reading and readers, why we read and how seriously we take it, and how much pleasure we derive from it, and how silly it is to be snobby.

Local Girls, by Alice Hoffman, who is always one of my favorites. She has never written a book I didn't love madly. And it's all here in this loosely connected group of stories about Gretel Samuelson and her friends and family in a suburban neighborhood on Long Island--Hoffman's silvery magic, the lure of our longings, the darkness of lost lives and wrong turns balanced with the promise that magic and faith are--eventually--rewarded, that karma does out (even if it is in the form of a ghostly grandmother taking revenge on a cheating man by pouring butter into his food), and there is something powerful in moonlight.   

The Great Man by Kate Christensen is a witty, earthy, fast-paced novel about the women who loved a famous painter in mid-century Manhattan.  The pleasure in this novel, for me, was in the great richness of these women's lives, all of them past 70--still juicy, still ripe with surprises and friendships at an age when women (and men) are mostly invisible in fiction.  I've not read Christensen before, but now I think I must go find some backlist. Her use of the language is playful, rich, and never self-conscious. 

The only trouble is, I've now peeled through the pile I'd stacked up for plane reading.  So what's a reader to do?  I guess I'll have to just go buy more books! I have lots on my list, but of course, I'm always open to suggestions, too.

Playing with the girls in the basement

A new book is brewing.   Rather dramatically at times, as will sometimes happen.  My office is scattered with magazines and new CDs and paintbrushes.  I've scotch-taped a bunch of photos to the closet door while I'm letting it all brew.   To the outside view, this doesn't much look like work, honestly, and I can fall prey to the "just get busy" syndrome that can be so devastating to an idea that's winding its way through my imagination, sending out runners of silk to anchor itself here, there, all sorts of odd places.  This makes me think of the first trimester of pregnancy, when you're so tired and when you close your eyes for three minutes, you fall into that other world, the dreamer world, and it's hard to tell which is the real world.  There's a lot going on below the surface.  Hidden.  Quiet.  Gossamer.

This very morning, I was thinking, "I guess I should make a chart or something. So I have a plot. So I know what I'm doing."

 

And the Girls in the Basement, who've been playing Keb Mo really loud, and cutting things out to glue on the walls, and ordering CDs like Sonny and Terry  and Marc Broussard and getting SO excited about the storm map on the wall and practicing their accents, looked up and said, "Plan? We don't need a plan.  WE know what we're doing.  If you know, you'll fuck it up, so just mind your own business."

 

So I went for a walk with the dogs and listened to Lucinda Williams and smelled biscuits baking and remembered a really cool bit of woman-magic that always has intrigued me, and figured out the hero's name, and there is a big southern thread to this book, which has been missing from my books over the past few years.  Suddenly, it's just there again.   Maybe I am pining for my grandmother, or for my late mother-in-law.  They both passed in the autumn, two years and three years ago, and I wish I could have a chat with them.   Or maybe, the girls want to play with other material, taste new things.  Maybe I have no idea where books come from or why, but my job is to say, "Oooh, this one seems like it will be fun."

And I remind myself to play.  Just play.