A Writer Afoot

New Years Eve

Waiting tonight for the ball to drop in Colorado, I'm availing myself of a pair of I-tunes gift cards that came my way on Christmas (have I mentioned that I am IN LOVE with my video Nano?).  Interesting to be choosing things from the past on the eve of the new year. 

Here are some of the things I've chosen: 

Beggar's Banquet, Rollling Stones.  Seriously--could you possibly call yourself a rocker without this CD in your collection?  Timeless, eternally perfect, especially (of course) Sympathy for the Devil.   This particular music has been on my mind because I've connected with an old friend and we loved Mick & the gang. We saw them in concert in Boulder....oh a long time ago. A massive highlight of my young life.

Downloading that led to (for no reason I can name)...

Lives in the Balance, Jackson Browne.  One of my favorite albums of all time.  I especially love the title song, partly for the words and the message, but also for the music and the Latin influence.  When I was a young mother, I'd play this song in my kitchen while I did the dishes and never could hear Lawless Avenue or Lives in the Balance without stopping to dance and sing.  I've heard this particular CD was his passion but it fared poorly in the market.   Speaking strictly for me, I'm very glad he made it anyway.  And now I've purchased it again.   

Thinking about dancing in my kitchen made me remember John Mellencamp's Pink Houses and another concert.  Uh-huh is a fantastic piece of work, and some of the videos were masterpieces.  Mellencamp gets the working class, and he is a master of telling detail. 

Now it's nearly midnight here and I'm going to watch the fireworks from the top of Pikes Peak, carried there by the AdAMan club, which I think I'd like to someday join on their trek.  Glad it isn't tonight, though.  It is very, very cold.   (And, considering it's probably 40 below up there, that's a silly comment.  But how cool would it be to be on top of Pikes Peak at midnight on New Year's Eve?  I wonder if they spend the night up there?)

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!  May 2008 be your best year thus far.

PS The fireworks are fantastic.  The snowy peak is illuminated against the darkness, making it seem like something stolen and magical.

Contemplation Week

This week between between Christmas and New Year's Day is one of my favorites in all the year.  It seems stolen out of regular time, when the glass on the windows is steamy with cooking and the breath of bodies, when there is a chance to take stock and think about possibilities and imagine with joy what fresh things might be waiting in the wings.   

One thing I'm working on this week is the new schedule for Voice and Girls in the Basement classes this year.  I hope to have the new website up for the classes by the end of this week, so if that's your pleasure, do check back.  In response to repeated requests, I'm adding two workshops to the schedule this year: Voice II and a special, fully anonymous workshop for published writers.

I'm organizing my travel schedule, as well, and I do believe I'm going to spend a fair amount of time in Australia and New Zealand when I go over for the Romance Writers of Australia conference in August.  I'm thinking strongly of renting a place in Melbourne for a month and exploring from there.  Maybe go to Tasmania, which has intrigued me for a long time.  Any suggestions are very welcome.

Of course, I have writing goals, too, and lots and lots of work, which I love. 

Do you have rituals of contemplation at this time?   What do you want to leave behind in 2007 and what new thing would you like to pick up in 2008?  I don't mean the idea of New Year's Resolution (I will lose 20 lbs, I will quit smoking, I will look younger, better, whateverish).   I mean, what would you like to LOVE more next year?  What would bring you more joy?

Play a little today

A couple of links for you today:

The Orange County Chapter of RWA is holding an ebay auction for a quilt signed by 100 romance and women's fiction writers (including me).   Might be a fun gift for a passionate fan. 

And for lots of writing advice from many different fiction writers, poets, non-fiction and children's writers, check out the new Santa Barbara Writers Conference website.  Highly interactive and full of information.   This is a long-term, highly respected conference and Marcia Meier is doing a great job moving it into the modern market.  Check out my page while you're there.   (I am teaching there again this summer, focusing on voice and creativity for fiction writers.  The setting for this conference is unbeatable, so if you're in the mood for something a little different, I'd LOVE to see you there.) 

Now I'm off to finish some shopping.  (Already did my pages this morning--am I the most devoted writer ever or what? :) )

Fox medicine

On Saturday afternoon as we returned from a little bit of shopping (too intense out there for CR and I), we saw a fox again.  He was trotting through the neighborhood in broad daylight, looking fat and sassy and perfectly comfortable. 

Last night, driving home from a meal out, another one in a different neighborhood. 

So that's three foxes, a coyote, and two major dog incidents in about ten days.  Too many for coincidence, and a rather emphatic wave from the Spirits, so I'm paying attention.  Fox medicine, particularly, but also dogs and coyotes.

Interesting to notice: what I feel when I think of each of these animals is a sense of wonder and wild love. 

Ian's Fish

I tried a long time ago to write this story into a picture book as a gift
for the boy who stars in it.  It seems it has emerged instead as an essay.
It's long for a blog, but I think some of you will enjoy it anyway.

Ian and the Blue Gill

        Three women, ranging in age from senior to ancient, are settled in
half circle at the end of the dock.  The chairs have been dragged down to
the pond from the main house, metal lawn chairs with woven seats in white
and green, and there are only those three, so Ian and I sit on the wooden
slats of the dock.  A little while ago, there were some bigger boys, young
teenagers in baggy shorts and skinny chests, daring each other to swim in
the murky water, but they're gone now, leaving this little circle.

         The old women wear cotton skirts and sensible shoes and soft cotton
hats to protect their good complexions. Gnarled fingers fix bait, and
fishing lines trail lazily in the water of the small pond.  The air is thick
and still, so hot I find it hard to breathe, and my son's pale cheeks are
flushed.  We are Colorado natives, and this is the countryside of the border
between Missouri and Illinois and I'd rather be almost anywhere else besides
this farmland with three old woman fishing.

         I hate fishing. I hate humidity.  I hate the heat.  I had been
excited about the family gathering with my husband's family, but the reality
is daunting.  It's hard to understand some of their deep south accents, and
I don't understand references to times and people I don't know. And maybe
they're not patronizing me, the much-younger, blond wife of an older
African-American man, but all the usual in-law negotiations of time and
fitting in make it feel like they might be.  I'm shy, which makes it worse.
I'm not even thirty and bookish and wilting in this heat they all take for
granted and I don't even know where I fit in the world I came from, much
less this one.

          But here we are.  My younger boy,  never still, running like a
banshee with his wild hair and wilder grin around the orchard with his
cousins, and he is a Williams, through and through, the spitting image of
his grandmother, sitting here on the dock in the dappled shade of
midafternoon.  Ian and I share a more pensive nature, and we have escaped to
the dock so Ian can fish with his grandmother, Lurelean, who is one of the
kindest humans I have ever known and will influence my life more than I can
even begin to imagine that day, on the dock.

         Even then, in all my bristling insecurity, I know for sure that my
mother-in-law loves me, and my boys.  She sees through to the truth of
things-this marriage, for all the differences in age and culture, is a
genuine love match, and she is overjoyed that her son, who wandered and
wandered, is settled at last, a kind father, a good husband.

         It gives me comfort to sit with Lurelean on the dock. Still, I'm
feeling slightly ill in the oppressive, inescapable heat. I can't return to
the house because, sitting with the old woman is one small white boy with an
earnest expression and his own fishing line, baited for him by his
grandmother, who is sitting with one of her sisters, and their mother,
Grandma Mag, past ninety, and wearing glasses so thick her eyes look
cartoony.  Grandma Mag, it must be said, has no patience left in her for
small children-she's raised or helped raise too many of them, and she's not
interested in caretaking any more.  Fishing is her passion, and she holds no
truck with conversation.  Ian promises to be quiet, and she grudgingly lets
him stay.

          Honestly, I have no idea where he got the idea that he wanted to
fish in the first place. I can't even imagine that he's ever heard anyone
talking about it.  We live in the city and none of my family have ever
fished.  We rarely go to the mountains or even to the reservoir, where he
might have seen others fishing.

         But there he sits with the old women, his fishing line in the
water.  He's five.  Surprisingly pretty, with a plump mouth and vivid,
changeable eyes and tumbles of blond hair which tends to be too long because
I'm forgetful and don't get it cut as often as I should.  He's so earnest,
sitting there, waiting for a fish.  The women comment on his stillness, both
surprised and proud, but I could tell them his tenaciousness is already
legendary.  His hands, which will one day be long and graceful and very
beautiful, are still a little plump. He focuses.  The old women murmur to
one another now and then.  They've caught some blue gills, which are kept
alive in a cooler.

          I sit near the back of the dock, drinking a soda, trying to stay
out of the sun, though it doesn't really matter.  In Colorado, just stepping
into the shade will drop the temperature twenty degrees.  Not so here, and I
have discovered it doesn't even get cool at night.  First thing in the
morning, it's still humid and still and thick.  Honestly, I'm miserable.
Trying to be brave and cheerful in such wretched weather-that doesn't seem
to be bothering anybody else, even though we will later hear it was 106
degrees with humidity in the 90s-and all I really want to do is dive into
the water where my tears will be hidden.  And yet, even that is not a
possibility.  I've seen snapping turtles in the water, the evil triangular
head of a snake glide by, silent and threatening.

        Suddenly, the thick dull silence is punctured by splashes.
Exclamations. Ian has hooked a fish! His grandmother leaps to her feet to
help him reel it in, and there it is, thrashing and splashing against the
line, a slippery, glistening blue gill.  It shines in the sun, and they land
it together, and put it in its own cooler of water. It stares wildly up at
us, and Ian squats down to admire it, beaming at the praise of the old
women.  Even the ancient one warms the slightest bit.

         And that's that. He declines the offer of another baited hook. He
isn't interested in fishing anymore, though he sits quietly and happily with
his grandmother.  His dad comes down to the dock and Ian shows off his
catch, and everyone fusses once again.

         As the day wanes, the children are cranky, and it's time to drive
back to St. Louis. Ian is anxious about his fish.  "How will we get him
home?" he asks.  "What will we feed him?"

        One of the men now on the dock laughs heartily. "Son, you'll eat
him, not the other way around."

       "What?" His eyes fill with tears.  "I don't want to eat him!"

       Everyone chuckles this away at first, thinking he's just encountering
the reality of eating what you've killed.  They think he'll change his mind
once he takes a bit of that sweet flesh.

       But his grandmother is looking at him in her careful way.  She puts
her hand on his back. "What do you want to do with him, baby?"

       Ian says, "I want to take him home."

       It dawns on me, finally, where he got the idea of fishing.  Every
year at the local State Fair, there is a display by the Fish and Wildlife
Organization, a giant freshwater aquarium, filled with big river trout
swimming in splendor for all to see.  Ian loves it, the coppery, flashing
fish, their long feathery tails.

         There in the cooler is a shimmery blue fish with ruffling fins.
"You wanted a pet," I say. "You thought you would get to keep him?"

         Ian, blinking hard, nods.

         Arranged around us are the old women, who love to catch fish and
eat them.  And men who've fed their families on the fish they caught, the
animals they killed.  They are not happy with boys who cry, and for good
reason.  In their old world, it served them to make men tough and stoic.

          But there is Lurelean, who gently shakes her head at the old man.
"He's as tender-hearted as his daddy," she says, and that daddy steps up.

         "We can't take him home, son," he says. "But we can let him go."

          Someone protests. "That's a good supper there!"

         "Leave the boy alone," Lurelean says, enfolding her gnarled hand
around the boy's.  His daddy carries the cooler, and together, the three of
them tip the fish into the water, where it dives into the depths and swims
away, traumatized but free to live another day.

          Finally, we are driving back to St. Louis in the twilight.  The
children are exhausted, and I sit in the back seat with them, one on either
side.  Lurelea sat in the front seat with her own boy, who used to take two
buses on a Saturday afternoon to go to shop for her hearing aid battery.  A
boy maybe a bit too sensitive for his environment who grew up and became a
man who could help a boy tip a living fish back in the water.  They're
talking quietly, peacefully, and I am enfolded in the tenderness and
coolness.

          We're passing little towns and bushes and wide fields of grass.
Where, suddenly I see stars.  In the grass. "Stop the car!" I cry "What is
that?

          My husband pulls over. "What is it?"

          "Are those fireflies?"

          Lurelean laughs gently.  "Isn't that a wonder. Child, you've never
seen fireflies?

          The boys and I stare open mouthed, shaking our heads.  They don't
live in Colorado.   In astonished wonder, we stand at the edge of the road,
watching light dance in the twilight, humidity enveloping us like arms, the
quiet of evening like acceptance, the sparks of belonging dancing in the
grass.

Red chile and pork tamales

In honor of the holidays, a beloved recipe for one of my required holiday undertakings.  Adapted from a recipe I found long ago in Martha Stewart Magazine--but I have served them proudly to anyone who loves The Real Thing and have been mightily praised, so you'll find them authentically wonderful.

Be warned--this is a time consuming process. Start early.  It is also very difficult to do the first step without a blender.  I once used a very small coffee grinder out of desperation, but I wouldn't recommend it.

RED CHILE AND PORK TAMALES

1 package dried corn husks (6 oz)

For the filling:
6-8 dried New Mexico red chiles
3 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1- 1/2 cups water
1 T olive oil
1 lb pork shoulder, cut into stew size pieces
1 tsp salt

For the batter
5 oz lard
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1- 3/4 cups masa harina mixed with 1 cup + 2 T hot water, cooled to room temperature
2/3 cup fresh chicken stock

1. In a large container, place the corn husks and cover with hot water.  Put a plate or something on top, or they'll float and won't be reconstituted when you need them.  Soak for an hour.

2. To make the filling, break off the top of the chiles and shake out the seeds.  Tear each one into four or five pieces, and put them into the jar of a blender.  Add garlic, pepper, cumin, and water, and blend into a smooth puree. 

Sear the pork quickly in a medium sized heavy saucepot, then pour the chile mixture over it, add another 1-1/2 cups water, and salt.  Simmer until pork is tender and the sauce is thick, about an hour.  Shred the meat into the sauce and set aside.

3. While the meat is simmer, prepare the masa.  In a bowl, mix the lard, baking powder, and salt. Beat until the mixture is very light, then add half the masa harina mixture and half the chicken stock, beat well, and add the rest of masa and stock.   Beat until very fluffy.   Refrigerate until ready to use.

4.  Assemble the tamales.  It will be easiest if you have a fairly large surface to work on--if not a counter, use the kitchen table.  Before you begin, tear one or two of the corn husks into thin strips for tying the tamales.

     Line up the corn husks, masa, and filling in a row.  Traditionally, this is done by a row of women, but you can do it yourself with patience and a lot of good music on the Ipod.  (Breaks to dance are definitely good for your shoulders!)

     This is my method:

Put the corn husk on a dry cup towel with the pointed end at the bottom, and dry with another towel.  Scoop about a 1/4 cup or a little less into the center of the husk and smooth with a large spoon to a depth of about 1/4 inch, leaving about a 1/2 inch all around the edges. 

Spoon a line of meat into the center of the masa, top to bottom (if you think of the way you like to eat tamales, meat in every bite is important).

Pull the sides of the husk to the center, and let the masa meet inside, then roll the husk around the filling until it feels nicely dense but not too tight.  Fold the bottom point up and tie it in place with one of the husk strips you tore earlier.   Tie another one around the top, about an inch down.

Repeat.

To cook, put the tamales, open side up, into the steamer, and steam for about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes.  You'll know they're finished when the husk pulls away from the batter cleanly.

Makes about a dozen tamales, so feel free to double it.

Variations:  are endless.  Use your imagination.  I absolutely adore plain, simple, traditional tamales like this, but I love to play with them, too.  I'm still experimenting with vegetarian forms, and CR will slay dragons for the duck and cherry version. 

I'd love to hear of any you've tried!

Practical writing tips

The holiday crush is beginning (or might be in full force for some).   Some ideas to keep you on track with writing goals through the crazy season:

1. Get your pages in early.  Do it before you check email.  Before you watch the morning news. Before anything, if you can.  Try it for a week, and you'll be amazed, I promise.

2. Limit email and Internet access.  I've been reading The Four Hour Work Week, and he's narrowed email to Monday mornings.  Since a good portion of my email is social outlet and relaxing, this wouldn't be realistic or even appealing to me, but I am making changes.  For quite some time, I've made myself do my pages before I let the world in, as Ray Bradbury says.  No email at all until I'm finished for the morning.  I notice when I travel that brief checks of email every few days is enough to keep up.  That's illuminating because I check a LOT more than that at home.  Like four or five times a day.  It's easy, right? Why not?

Because I'm using it to waste a lot of time.   I'm sure you have more discipline than I do, so you don't need to cut back, but I'm thowing it out there for what it's worth.  I'm checking only twice a day for one week, to see how it feels.  What I notice: I check and READ a lot, but responding takes a lot of time, so I end up only reading, filing emails into various files to be answered, then feeling guilty about how much I'm neglecting my correspondence, even with people I genuinely like and want to talk to.   

I'd like to get back to email-as-tool, rather than email-as-time-sucking-monster.

3. Set goals and reward yourself for meeting them.   Whether the goal is one page or ten pages per day, when you actually meet that goal each day, REWARD yourself.   Set aside some half-hour episodes of television you like to watch and use those.  Give yourself some time to read entirely for pleasure.  Have a truffle or a glass of wine.  (If you can keep it to one or two--otherwise, then you're on another goals-reward loop, right? )

4.  One of my favorite tools:  erasable whiteboards and calendars to mark your progress.  I use markers in many colors, as I've posted before, and recently, I found I love the reward jolt in seeing rows of post its in bright colors and shapes, like orange stars and neon green circles.

I had to start over on my hundred days, by the way, since I let outside events get in the way of writing 1000 words per day, every day (as per Carolyn See).   

Which is also a good lesson.  If at first you don't succeed, try 100 more times.

Anyone else have a good writing tip for this very busy time?   

Meeting coyote, or why I live in Colorado

Look at him!

CR and I were hiking in the fresh new snow this morning and saw this coyote walking through the trees.  He wasn't particularly worried about us, though a bit disgruntled that we might have cost him a squirrel for lunch.  He posed very regally for this shot.

(Click on any picture to get a bigger view.)

I'm still fizzing a little from it.  The hike, the coyote, the astonishing pleasure of the crisp, cold air, fresh powder, and views like this one:

And this one, a little later as the sun started to come out.  An old quarry on the ranch now made into a popular hiking area:

Finally, this one, just because the colors are so eye-splitting.

Will have to mull over what the universe has to say, since Fox, Coyote, and Dog have all been right in my face the past couple of weeks.   Loyalty, cleverness,  adaptability?   Hmmm.   

Friday night special dinner

Gotta love the food internet. The weather is so lusciously moody and foggy and now snowy (hooray!!) that I couldn't resist the urge to cook and cook and cook.  Last night's menu:

Roasted Garlic Soup
Yogurt Biscuits
Wine-Braised Pears

Happily, I found the exact recipe I'd been longing for--it was at an  Emeril restaurant and I found the recipe here.  I also made the chicken stock from scratch, though I used skinned chicken thighs in place of chicken bones. Deep, rich flavor.  I'm going to make another batch today for my tamales.

The crowning delight were the poires roties avec syrop de vin rouge, which I found on a food blog that's an absolute delight to read, Ms. Glaze's Pommes d'Amour.  Her photograph is ever so much more beautiful than mine, but I must say they were fantastically delicious and very easy and so pretty to serve!   

CR has been pining for duck tamales, so I'm going to spend this snowy weekend making a big batch to freeze, along with my own favorite traditional tamales, and a couple of experiments for the vegetarians coming to visit over Christmas. A cilantro-green onion sauce with almonds looks promising.  We'll see.

Garlic and Rosengarten

My uncle sent me a link to a wonderful e-zine he enjoys reading, and I'm sure many of you will love it, too.  David Rosengarten's Tastings. (I am probably the last person to know about it, as is often the case.)   One recent mailing included an ode to garlic, which is definitely one of my top five favorite foods  ( have lost lovers over my passion for garlic, but it seems to me to be a lack of lustiness to dislike the heady smell of garlic. Still, CR and I have a pact to eat it together.) 

Thinking this cold misty day of a roasted garlic soup that I ate in New Orleans.  I have been longing to reproduce it for years, and have not yet done so.   (New Orleans is one of the great food cities, or was.  How is it faring these days, does anyone know?) It might have been an Emeril restaurant, but time blurs these things, and at any rate, I'm betting some of you have good recipes for a roasted garlic soup.  I have a pile of beautiful organic garlic and the idea of the scent of it wafting through the house while I put up the Christmas tree is richly appealing.   So, recipes?

Food is such a powerful memory maker.  I'm thinking of my grandmother's recipes a lot lately.  Her icebox cake.  Her macaroni and cheese.  Her Waldorf salad and the holiday celery, stuffed with grated cheese, Miracle Whip, and onions.  I'm also shipping recipe cards to my ex so he can write out his special recipes in his handwriting for our boys, so those recipes are not lost to time.  (Many of them do show up in my books, of course, but better to have them in his handwriting.)

Do you have a food memory connected to a recipe that's lost, a recipe you haven't been able to reproduce, or one that you finally did get right after trying for a long time? 

And don't forget to give me roasted garlic soup recipes you love!

Canine trials

Been scarce, thanks to my dogs.  Sasha had to be rushed to emergency vet on Monday night, thanks to a very gory head puncture wound on her forehead after a scuffle with Jack over cat food.  Tuesday, Jack was slated for surgery on his torn knee, so I essentially spent 24 hours with vets.  We set up a hospital in the living room so the injured pair could sleep close by us (what dog-loving woman would fail to fall in love with a man who suggests sleeping with the dogs so they'll feel good?).   

Both are fine now, as am I. 

Left...there they are recovering yesterday, in our camping area.  I was reading nearby. Notice Jack's shaved leg.

Sasha's battered pirate face.  She was the winner, in the end, since she got the cat food.   

And here is Jack, post surgery, not feeling the best, but on his way to recovery.

Now to work for me, since everyone is fine, though I am working on a laptop downstairs so Jack won't climb stairs looking for me.

EDIT:  I realized that it sounded as if Jack injured his knee in the fight.  He didn't. He was scheduled to have surgery to correct a torn ACL.
 

The vanishing frontier

The New York Times Books section posted a list of six travel books for holiday gift giving ideas.  All six are by guys, and most of them are in the gonzo realm of bad boys going really far away places doing pretty extreme things.  There's a nod to traveling women in the opening paragraph, but not a single book.

Travel writing sometimes seems to be all about rough and tumble tough guys going to out of the way places (the more inaccessible the better) and having extremely grimy adventures.   While I have nothing against a good adventure, or even against bad boys eating snake innards and bugs, it really isn't about travel as much as the Young Man Testing Himself in Extreme Ways.   Which is fine, too.  It's just not really travel for the masses.  There is one on the list about a quest:  MISHIMA’S SWORD: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend (Da Capo, paper, $15.95), which looks a bit different, but it's still about a man's view of the world.   

The other craze in travel writing is the "I moved to Tuscany/Provence for a year and this is what I learned," and there is one of those books on this list, too.  The best one was Frances Mayes's Under The Tuscan Sun, and all the rest are doomed to fall short, I'm afraid.

There are some travel books by women, but often, they're doing the literary equivalent of women wearing power suits in the 80's--women doing male things in the travel world to prove that they can.  Adventure rafting on the amazon or running 100 miles in the Grand Canyon.  (Why?)

And maybe I'm just a bourgeois thing, wanting to read a different sort of adventure, but maybe I'm just more interested in the internal journey.  A trip doesn't have to take me far away or into an exotic realm to be fascinating--it is the journey itself that fascinates.  It is the observation of the traveler, her connection to what she sees and how that shifts her internal landscape.  What do you learn when you stand on a beach in Florida where the signs are all missing, and there are no traffic lights because there have been three hurricanes this season?  What do you see when you walk on a busy street in an ordinary Midwestern city on a Saturday in September?

My suggestions for travel books that will thrill the women on your list (and a good many of the men), are three:  EAT PRAY LOVE, by Elizabeth Gilbert is so madly, intensely, wildly successful because it is a travel book about the internal spiritual journey of a single woman who recounts her journey with honesty and insight.  UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN, Mayes's book, is slightly different, but also evocative and quietly observed.   Another of my favorites is Rosemary Mahoney's A SINGULAR PILGRIM. (And I know I've talked about all of those books before, but I'm offering a counter to bad boys eating bugs. )

What travel memoirs or essays or books would you recommend?

(PS  Someday, I'd would sincerely love to write a book that was so beloved that it gathered 731 reviews on Amazon. That is truly a book touched by grace.)