see how we almost fly

2011-08-01T19:48:00.000-07:00

What I am is a story-hearer. More than that, a story-elicitor. And sometimes, a story-composter, in that i take other people's stories, turn them over, and discover the little new potatoes growing voluntarily out of the mulch they threw away back there when they didn't know the value of it.

I zero in on people's stories. Hone in like a laser beam. Too intense. Too nosy. I want all the details. I was the kid who asked the inappropriate questions. Not just the sexual ones--the overly-personal, probing, sensitive questions. Of course in the time and place I was raised, a lot of things were considered inappropriate which have since become no big deal. But I'm interested in what is a big deal to people. the stumbling blocks, the obstacles, the overcoming, the worst moments, the best moments, the moments when clarity emerged.

This is what I do in my classes and consultations with people who want to write their stories. This is the thing that is effortless for me to do; ask those questions, look under those rocks.

It always amazes me, how much willingness I am met with by the students. I guess they are a self-selecting group. mostly they come to the classes because they want to tell their stories. They are courageous and willing to dig deeper.

I know plenty of people who either have written a book-length memoir, or are in the process of writing one. I look at my own life, and I don't see a book-length narrative there. What would the central theme be? I went in search of meaning, adventure, encounters with reality? There have been numerous small adventures, and I have written about them in small essays. My dad wants me to do a book of non-fiction. But I can't think of what the story would be. Perhaps my story is simply one of listening to other people's stories and perhaps that is enough.

As I write this, C is cleaning out his car. We are going to leave early for Ashland tomorrow, to see my dad and stepmother and to see plays. I have finished the Recruiter--now called Human Error--and sent it to a few places. I finally finally finally finished. it/ I had announced the final draft so many times no one believed me any more. My friends had received too many emails, with : this is the final version, followed quickly by another email stating, "No--this. No--this."

I lost face. I lost credibility. I injured myself, my shoulder, with too many hours at the computer. I lost track of how many drafts I put the thing through. I stripped it down to the studs, not once, but three or four times, eliminating major characters, adding other ones, completely changing the plot, the chronology--everything about the story changed except for a few essentials, which I held onto.

They were stories I had been told, which I felt responsible for, like stray animals that had shown up on my doorstep. One was the story my friend Bob, an organizer who worked at a center advocating for soldiers who wanted to get out of the military told me, about a young man who had been told that the only way he could come home would be if he agreed to act as a recruiter at his old high school. I've been holding that story for about 12 years.

The other story I heard more recently, at a writing retreat. A fellow artist who knew the subject matter of what I was working on told me a story about a soldier he knew who was about to re-deploy to iraq. He woke up one morning to see his wife standing over him holding a gun. "I was trying to figure out where on your body I could shoot you to maim but not kill," she told him. She was so desperate to keep him Stateside,. to keep him safe, she was willing to shoot him.

Those two stories form the basis of the play. Onto their skeletons I hung all that I have learned about marriage these last few years. I am so relieved to be done that it almost doesn't matter what happens to the play now. Of course I would love for it to be successful and for me to make some actual money. Actual money is a refreshing concept. But whatever it is, I did the best job I could and now I'm free to move on to the next thing. And that feels incredible.

2011-07-04T16:38:00.000-07:00

Independence Day, and we had our second harvest of lettuce from the garden. The leaves are so fine and light green like silk. I said to C, "How'd you like to have a dress made out opf this?" he said "Lady Gaga probably already does."

Thich Nhat Hanh says we should celebrate interdependence, not independence. i was raised in a family that valued independence, and given praise for doing things by myself, being a big girl, all that. oldest of four children, it was probably easier for my parents for me to become independent as young as possible. I think I learned a kind of fake independence in order to gain approval. Pretend you are independent. When i was single and dating this was a big deal. Independent women are more attractive. No one wants to be saddled with a clinging codependent vine.

The truth is I have never felt truly independent, although I do much of my work alone. Before Christopher I depended heavily on my friends and family; now I depend on him. Not to do things for me that I can do myself, but to be there. I like to feel people's there-ness. I've heard it said that you should (one should) depend on Spirit to fill those desires and needs for contact in those most intimate places where even a good lover cannot always reach. I've been reading Be love Now by Ram Dass and Meditation for the Love of it by Sally Kempton. Both great books.

Ram Dass depended absolutely on his guru in all things. His guru Neem Karoli Baba led him through the thickets of maya (illusion) to realization of pure love. It was a childlike relationship of absolute dependence. other cultures have very different values on independence than Americans do.

Kempton makes meditation accessible from the inside out. She teaches practical ways to focus the breath in the heart and to follow it through ever more subtle pathways. I am reading her very slowly and trying to practice, though I prefer walking meditation and swimming meditation to sitting meditation. I sit too much anyway, in front of the computer...

So far this has been a movie summer: we watched Hunger which came out in 2008, a stark, poetic look at Ireland's troubles and the martyrdom of Bobby Sands. Then Michael Collins, an over-produced bio-pic which taught us more about Ireland's history, It's funny, I grew up in the Boston area at a time when the Troubles were very prominent in the headlines, yet there is so much I didn't know--and still don't--about the English occupation of Ireland.

Then the past two nights I've been to the movies and seen bridesmaids--which was hilarious and fresh, except for one Apatow-inspired gross-out gag involving food-poisoning in a bridalwear shop--and last night we saw Midnight in Paris which was irresistible. I finally forgave Woody Allen for marrying his stepdaughter, it was that good. We both floated out of that movie on a fantasy-cloud of Paris in the 20s, although as Christopher pointed out, it was a pretty scrubbed and sparkling Paris, minus all the shell-shocked and wounded vets from World War I, the orphans and beggars, the TB and all the rest of it.

I am struggling through the last 15 pages of the last revision of The Recruiter--this time I mean it, I swear. Love Shack is done, done. done,. done, done. It's cooked. Put a fork in it. Somebody publish it. I love the poems in it, I'm proud of them and I am ready to move on. I am ready to move on from The Recruiter as well, I've got another idea for a play beginning to nudge my consciousness and an essay or two that wants to come through...

C was re-reading Richard Brautigan last night and this morning I looked through his book: The Pill vs. The Springhill Mining Disaster. Trout Fishing in America. there's some great poems in there.

And of course the whole point of Midnight in paris is, it's always easy to idealize a bygone era, but there's creative ferment going on here and now. These are the best of times if only we know what to do with them. Emerson said something like that. Emerson also wrote an essay called Self-Reliance. My dad was big on Emerson.

2011-06-19T18:31:00.000-07:00

I lucked out in the dad department. Lucked out big time. My father was born to be a dad. Impossible to think of him without beings to care for and nurture. Now that the four of us are all grown up he nurtures the hell out of his grandkids. He's there for birthdays, holidays, in the audience at their recitals, soccer games and school plays. And he nurtures his garden; patient, steady, attentive, on hands and knees, weeding, watering, transplanting.

What do you say about a guy whose favorite book is Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss? Who would himself sit on an egg for months if he had to because that's just the kind of guy he is?

My father is gentle and funny and thoughtful and smart. He loves books, flowers, bridge. He loves to make bread and soup. He never met a carbohydrate he didn't like. He has slowed down with time, but the truth is he was never very fast. his virtues are more about endurance and patience than flash or speed. He lives from a deep well of generosity.

These days he can often be found in an armchair falling asleep behind the New York Times. A working-class kid who loved the Brooklyn Dodgers, he aspired to read his way through the library, beginning with A. He has always revered knowledge and learning. We had many many family outings to the Science Museum or to Art museums. HWhen my youngest brother got a PhD in Science, Dad was so proud he cried.

There were four of us and we each got different things from Dad according to our different personalities. With me he read and talked about books. he taught me cribbage. We went to Art museums together, and we stayed up on election eve together, filling in all the little boxes of electoral votes in the chart the Boston Globe provided. We hiked the White Mountains of New Hampshire together--he'd wake me at 5 in the morning and we'd drive for a couple of hours, stopping at a diner for breakfast and continuing on for a long day in the mountains.

He took my brothers to ball games, and attended their sporting events. He played games with all of us. He loves jigsaw puzzles and crosswords. He timed my sister's sprints with a stopwatch. He took them on their own hiking trips and museum visits. He has breakfast with my brothers once a month, drives two hours to my sister's house to hang with her kids. The grandchildren climb all over him. They call him "Papa." He is putty in his granddaughters' hands.

There aren't really words to describe this man. He is basically a column of potent love with some skin around it. The light shines very fiercely out of his aging face. He has had some hard times in his life, but nothing has dimmed or diminished that essential sweetness. There aren't really words, and there are no gifts that can be given to adequately say thank you for this. It is a gift that has to be passed on.

2011-06-10T08:43:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's been forever since I've blogged, I know. Christopher mentioned it to me last night. And a nice reader wrote in inquiring if everything was okay.

Everything is okay. Everything is in process: bodies, manuscripts, work life.

Begin again. It's not quite nine in the morning, gray soft fog blanketing everything, the early birds done with their singing and C off to one of his last few days at work. I'm here with my cup of coffee working on the poetry manuscript again and working my way through what I swear to God will be the final revision of The Recruiter.

We put in a garden a few weeks ago--we were late doing it, but it has rained all the way into the month of June here, unseasonably late, so I think we'll get away with it. If I were more techno-savvy, I would post pictures of our raised beds with the chicken-wire fence around them to keep the feral cats from using it as a litter box. We have lettuce and kale and sunflowers, all started from seed, and a pepper plant and a tomato plant, started from seedlings. Every morning and evening C hangs over the fence and gazes at the plants. First they appeared as tiny green stars in the black dirt--pounds and pounds of topsoil, lugged in huge bags from Costco. Now they are recognizably becoming something. In a few weeks we'll be making our salads with them.

My father is an avid and patient gardener. I have been a notorious neglecter of plants. So many pots of lavender, purchased with high hopes, set out on the front porch and forgot to water. So many fragrant corpses, returned to the compost bin. I have managed to keep my potted ficus alive for twenty years. And grown a huge fig tree from a small sapling--just a stick really--in our front yard, and a big fruitful persimmon, also from a tiny start.

I guess the metaphor here is with creative projects. Some of them flourish, some of them don't. Some seeds stubbornly refuse to even poke their heads above the soil, and you are left staring at a pot full of empty dirt. others are eaten by unknown pests who come in the night and nibble holes in their beautiful leaves. Some seem to grow almost independent of me, like those fruit trees--stick them in the ground, give them a little water when they're young, and they give fruit for years and years. I don't know how it works, not really. I just know that this is what I do; I tend the work. I witness it, I futz with it, I obsess over it, I neglect it and come back to it--I always come back. And not everything that I tend grows. There have been some heartbreaking disappointments. But in the end, I trust that if I keep coming back, something bears fruit. And I want to be around to savor it.

2011-01-27T15:34:00.000-08:00

Clear, bright mornings; dazzling sun, bright blue skies, unseasonable warmth.

For the last week I have been drawn up to the hills again and again, walking the same trail I have walked a million times before. I meet dogs, lots of them, some with a muddy tennis ball in mouth, others just wagging ecstatically to be free. If a dog is outdoors, unconfined, bounding over hills, he or she is happy. It's that simple for them

I try to be present: oak and redwood and laurel and bay trees, bending for the light. the light! The hills unfolding all the way down to the bay. It never stops being magical, and yet I am capable of walking through it without seeing it if I don't stop and make myself notice and breathe.

I am almost almost done with this (I hope) final revision to the play. I have been uncharacteristically neurotic about it--I pride myself on a workwomanlike attitude about writing, "Just do it," a la Nike commercials, without drama or fuss or whinging about writer's block. That's how I like to see myself. But in truth, this play has brought up all my writing demons, including the ones I like to pretend I don't have: the dare-I-say-this? the who-am-I-to-write-about-this, the is-it-any-good, and is-it-even-worth-it demons.

Inside myself I am vowing not to do another big project like this. One-act plays from now on. Poems, the shorter the better. Essays. But not something book-length, not a full two-act play, not something where you have plenty of rope to hang yourself with in terms of structure, character development, etc. No, no, no. What are you, crazy?

At the same time I am making a big effing deal about how much I am suffering over this play another part of my mind knows that it is actually fine, that I'm just trying my best to be faithful to these particular characters, getting to know them better, neither demonizing nor glamorizing military service (hopefully), but presenting real human beings caught up in something bigger and more terrible than they had bargained for. And what they do with that. And I also am caught up now in having bitten off more than I could chew, emotionally or spiritually, and now I am having to chew it. Slowly and thoroughly. or at least try to. I owe myself that much--I owe these characters whom Ihave been working with for four years that much.

At the end of the day it's just work, I tell myself. Finish the thing and move on.

2011-01-08T18:46:00.000-08:00

And now I'm trying not to go into blind rage and hatred after the sickening shooting of Gabriella Giffords in Arizona today. Notice how I want to just blame Sarah Palin for her map with the addresses of Democrats targeted with bulls-eyes. And to see the video of Giffords talking about how it felt to be targeted that way, to hear her saying, "She (Palin) needs to realize that her words have consequences..."

I want to say some very ugly things right now. But I'm trying to be mindful that words have consequence, that every bit of hysteria or hate speech contributes to the nasty circus that American politics has become. I will say that I am going to continue to oppose Palin and her ilk with every breath in my body, but I will try to do it with a modicum of civility and reason. And that I have been driving around with Kirtana's CDs in my car stereo: Falling Awake and This Embrace, songs of the divine feminine, awakening, and compassion.

I listen to these CDs over and over because they are about the only things I can stand to hear. When I turn on the radio and hear the news of the day I so often feel sick at heart. Even the wonderful cultural programming that I normally eat up seems too "head-y" to me--my heart is really hungry for melody, for soothing, to be held in something greater than the political or social preoccupations of the moment. When i listen to kirtana's haunting lyrics and achingly-sweet voice, something inside me lets go. Something inside me can begin to imagine not being so identified with my opinions, my achievements, my thoughts. I begin to begin to be able to imagine what it might feel like to live in my heart...

Poems have been coming thick and fast the last couple of days, after a several weeks hiatus. I took a little time off from writing poetry in order to focus on the play some more. Now I'm in a new place with the play--more on that in a minute--and the poems are back. I notice the lines are longer, more complicated, and the poems feel thicker and meatier now (excuse me, vegetarians.) I started life as a verbose, overly narrative narrative poet and gradually weaned and edited myself down to a style that was lean and mean and honed. Then I began to long for a little more rope, the luxury of expanding, expounding, exploring. And lo and behond, it took a while, but these new poems seem to have become fuller in an organic way.

Of course it's too soon to tell yet, really,. I have to let their wings dry, as Ruth would say, and that takes at least a few weeks.

back to the play, I finally got the bright idea--actually I think it was Christopher's bright idea--to interview a military recruiter in the flesh. Looked on a web site called armystrong.com or something like that and found out there is a recruiting station right in Alameda, not that far from where I live. It's in a tiny strip mall on Blanding right off Tilden Way, a route I've taken a thousand times. The other day I just wandered in to the office and asked if I could talk with someone. The recruiter I ended up visiting with was a woman, petite, around forty years old, with a killer silver manicure. Nothing, and I mean nothing, like my character.

I don't feel comfortable posting all the details of the interview here--I will probably write about it later, after I've digested it-- but it was interesting. I felt like we were circling each other in a seduction dance. Not that either of us were trying to sexually pick up the other person, but we were both just trying to get a bead on each other: who is this woman, and what does she want (from me?) Since I am too old to join the military and have no kids to offer up, I didn't feel like I really had any leverage, that is, anything she wanted. Except, i guess, the power of the media, which in my case is pretty paltry. then again, wars are fought in the court of public opinion, and words are powerful. Sarah. Words are powerful. Let's just all remember that.

2011-01-02T13:05:00.000-08:00

Honestly? 2010 had some wonderful gifts--new friends, publications, trips--and I'm grateful, grateful, grateful. But --to take nothing away from the gratitude--this was a hard year.

Carla died. We knew she was going to, and she did, and she tied up as many loose ends as she humanly could before she went, and I still don't actually believe she's gone. I mean I believe it. I know she's not here. For one thing she hasn't called me in ages. But then I think she's just...away...on the road, or something. Busy. She was always busy anyway. But she made heroic, super-human efforts to stay in touch with me, and with her other friends--and now she doesn't. Call. I have tried to write about her many times, and failed. Maybe I captured a little something, the silver of her voice, or her white shoulders shining out of her dress as she performed, or her huge enjoyment of her own dirty and outrageous jokes--but no one could catch the goofy, heartbreaking, beautiful entirety of her. Maybe someday I will be able to write something that catches some of her galloping, galvanizing spirit.

There are so many times I think about her without being really aware that I'm thinking about her. Then I realize I'm having a conversation with her in my head about some little thing or another--a movie, a book, a person. Only her end is conducted in the invisible realm.

The rest of the hardness hardly seems right to mention side by side with Carla's death, since they are of completely different realms. But the bad economy and especially the cutbacks in education spending affect Christopher and me on a daily basis. Out of respect for his privacy I won't blog about his work situation except to say that the stress has been soul-crushing. And when the soul is being crushed out of your partner, it's hard to stay centered and joyful. And yet that is what I would like to be.

As for my own life, the stress comes from not having any--or having very little work, and for not being sure how to generate and sustain enough income. I'm getting by, of course. I always get by. But I'd like to be able to earn enough to give C a big time-out and that is nowhere near happening.

I have been able to write a lot. This past year I worked hard on the third poetry manuscript and published many individual poems from it. It's much stronger now. I worked on essays and articles. And I worked and worked and worked on the play. Three revisions, at least, and we're still in process. Oy. Oufta. Things almost always take more time to find their final shape than i think they should. A dear friend recently reminded me of the value of the four-year plan. Instead of thinking that every project I initiate should come to fruition within that year, it's better to consider it like a university in which I am doing an ongoing independent study. It takes four years to matriculate. It takes that long (and longer) for many of the best-laid plans to mature.

So: once again, in this new year, I rededicate myself to The Recruiter, to the book of poems, and to doing more essays. I also want to note some of the best things I read and saw during this last year:

Farm City (a book) by Novella Carpenter, an Oakland-based urban guerilla farmer. Read it! It's gutsy, inspiring, funny and well-written.

Plays: I read a lot of wonderful plays this year. Ruined, by Lynn Nottage (then I bought her book and read the rest of her plays.) Amazing. The Vibrator Play or In the Next Rom by Sarah Ruhl. Also amazing. And her Passion Play, ditto. August: Osage County, and Superior Donuts by Tracy Letts. And this year I finally read Naomi Wallace, a playwright I had been hearing about for ages. I read One Flea Spare and loved it. I read An American Play which everyone told me to read because of the similarity in content to my own play and I didn't like it as well as One Flea Spare. Maybe if I'd seen it I would feel differently.

I read some great memoirs: Lit, by Mary Karr, Just Kids by Patti Smith, Naked, Drunk and Writing by Adair Lara and To Have Not, by Frances Lefkowitz. All wonderful.

I discovered the Romanian poet Ana Blandiana, and her wonderful poem Magic Spell of Rain.

The best movies I saw this year were Winter's Bone, and The Fighter. I'd be happy if either of them got the Oscar, or if Christian Bale or Jennifer Laurence got nominated for Best Actor and Actress. I did see The Kids Are All Right, but didn't like it as much as I thought I would. We saw The Black Swan and I thought Portman's performance was incredible--she should also get nominated.

For 2011: I'm gonna study more improvisation, both Interplay and Bay Area Theatre Sports. I'll try one more time to keep a semblance of a garden alive (I've heard that watering is key.) I'll study Xi Gung. I'll do another revision or ten of The Recruiter, and keep writing other things on the side. Maybe I'll finally be able to write the essay about Carla.

I planned to go to Haiti in 2010 and then aborted the plans last-minute because of the civic unrest and the difficulty in communications with the base where I planned to land. I hope I complete that plan in 2011. And write about it. And have some faith as this next circuit round the sun unfurls.

2010-12-13T10:05:00.000-08:00

I feel this urge to apologize for not posting in a dog's age, but I'm going to resist. Just say that things have been full, and all the regular stuff of life continues: writing, teaching, reading, playing, working, thinking. And, very importantly, seeing movies.

We went to see Black Swan the other night, and it was over-the-top crazy-beautiful. natalie Portman's performance was exquisite and scary. She was like a rose, so delicate that just looking at her would make her petals fall off. An exquisite performance.

Right now, at my bedside, the following stack of books: Just Kids by Patti Smith. From Stones to Schools by Greg Mortensen, the three cups of tea guy. Passion Play by Sarah Ruhl, another amazing poetic play. She has so much to teach about having a light touch. I hope I learn the lesson someday. Positivity by Barbara Frederickson, a gift from a good friend, about how to court and nurture positive emotions.

I am completing the zillion plus one revision of The Recruiter (how many times have I written this?) I decided this play is like a bad boyfriend, the one who is not quite right, but you can't break up with. I feel like that woman who always tells her friends, "It's over," but then goes back. The friends are long since tired of the drama, they roll their eyes, under their breath they mutter, "Yeah, right." That's where I am with the play.

The book of poems on the other hand, really is getting better and stronger and closer to publication. (No! Really!) One of the poems, "Cathedral", was even solicited to be on a web site called www.architects.org. And they are even going to pay me for it.

Meanwhile, the cat is biting his nails and I worry--is this normal? Is he anxious? He's our problem child--shreds the curtains, attacks his sister, chases his own tail--which is probably why i love him best.

2010-11-08T09:50:00.000-08:00

Why do they call it Daylight Savings Time? I always think of it as Daylight Losing Time... after a week of indian summer, hot and balmy, we are now turning definitively toward the dark and cold. I know this time, like all times, contains the seeds for renewal. But this turning time is always a bit melancholy for me; the leaves are falling from the persimmon and the fig trees, the house is cold, my hands are cold as I type this, and I start counting down the days and weeks until Solstice. Six weeks. Not too bad.

And now it's also time to go back to the play, armed with all the comments and feedback I've received, to try to deepen it once more. In the meantime, I found a new name for the poetry manuscript, and sent it out again, to a bunch of contests. My father is amazed that I can keep doing this. I think it's habit by now, habit, stubbornness, doggedness. I am dogged even if I am dogless.

We went to see The Great Game: Afghanistan at the Berkeley Rep Theatre the other night. I had been so excited to see it, but I found the plays themselves somewhat flat. they seemed more issue-oriented than character-driven. I got: war is hell, Afghanis are suffering terribly, the situation for women is intolerable, and poppies are a cash crop... I already knew all that. What did I want? i was missing some kind of lightness, or humor, or theatricality, or...shoot me, whimsy. I remember seeing Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul, and yes, it was too long, but it was whimsical and crazy and funny as well as tragic, and it illuminated all of the issues I listed above. And it premiered in 2001, proving his prescience.

And now I hear my friend carla's voice in my ear: "Why are you sitting inside on a beautiful day? Go out and live, breathe, move! And so I will...

2010-10-31T13:27:00.000-07:00

I hope this link works! It's one of the Fetzer Institute pieces of video that they just published to their web site. If you go to the web site you can see and hear the other fabulous writers I was on retreat with last April: Jack Ridl, Naseem Rakha, Lauren Artress, Curtis Lumkin, Jennifer Louden, and others...big fun!

Fetzer Institute | Resources | Alison Luterman: Listening for Story | Alison Luterman: Listening for Story

2010-10-27T09:40:00.001-07:00

I came away from the brilliant movie The Social Network thinking, "Empathy is more precious than gold or rubies, it is the pearl without price, it is the only thing worth praying for."

Let me back up. In the movie, Jesse Eisenberg gives an amazing Oscar-worthy performance as Mark Zuckerberg, the genius who founded Facebook.He doesn't hit one false note that I could detect. He is every nerdy, hyper-intelligent, socially awkward, arrogant, isolated, pained Jewish boy I've ever known, rolled into one and heightened to an excruciating degree. The script is pitch-perfect. I have no idea how all this relates to the real Zuckerberg, but it doesn't matter, because the film is not a biopic it's a work of art.

The ending is of course, Zuckerberg as the world's youngest self-made billionaire--terribly alone. For all his genius he lacks that essential human quality of empathy which makes a human being whole. He might have a mild form of Asperger's syndrome--I don't know. It's not important what his diagnosis is. In many ways it is the illness of our age, the disconnection and subsequent narcissism that we all suffer from in varying degrees. (And yes, I'm aware of the supreme irony of blogging about this...)

The movie was produced by Trigger Street, which is the company that actor Kevin Spacey founded to promote quirky independent scripts. I think it's still operative at www.triggerstreet.com.

This has been a rich week for creative inspiration. Friday night we went to the Berkeley Rep and saw Compulsion, the story of Mayer Levin's doomed battle to stage his dramatic adaptation of Anne Franks' diary. Mandy Patenkin was beautiful in the lead role, and the play was structured in such an innovative way, with marionettes and double--and in one case quadruple casting.

Both Compulsion and The Social Network were in a sense morality tales about what happens when genius and ego get tangled up. The headiness of having a vision and then the cost of that to the people close to the visionary, the collateral damage to relationships and sometimes to the soul of the creator.

It's such a poignant conflict because the act of creation (whether one is a genius or not) is as compelling as giving birth--caught in its throes you feel like it's the most important thing on earth at that moment--you have to push, and everything else becomes secondary. But once you have pushed--and the baby is born alive and healthy, or damaged, or dead--then you look around and notice that bills haven't been paid, gardens have gone unweeded, relationships untended, phone calls unreturned.

The cost of even producing a minor thing can be high--depending on the degree of compulsion, or drive or whatever you want to call it--and I can't even imagine what it takes to be the creator of something truly great, to sense that you have the world by the tail in that way, at least for that hour. How could one resist the seduction of that impulse, and how to return to tending ordinary life after that?

Both these pieces speak to the murky underside of great success. When a work like Anne Frank's Diary hits the world, or, on a much less morally profound but equal in terms of impact--Facebook--a work that generates a tsunami of attention and fame and money and glory--then I think inevitably things backstage must get messy. Because getting something that big launched into the world can never be solely the work of one person, there must be collaboration, support, people who got on board with the project early, others who came in later--and how do you compensate them all? Who gets to ride on the back of the elephant as it parades triumphantly through main street?

And how can we, as individual creators, not have our egos tied up in what we create?

My friend who is taking some classes at Stanford says the younger generation is working more collaboratively and less egotistically than we ever did. She says they all pitch in and work on each other's projects and don't seem to care so much whose name is attached. But whenever you have something like Facebook, which generates so much money, I think those generational differences fall away and things are bound to get nasty.

I should also say that what both Compulsion and the Facebook saga have in common is that they both center on Jews and the very contradictory qualities of brilliance and prickliness and apartness and universality that shape our cultural personality. The huge drive to "break in" to a world that seems closed, the outsider status, which was originally imposed on us by society and which we continue to resist and sometimes reinforce by our own attitudes and behavior. This feeling of otherness which also somehow lies at the very heart of being truly human.

2010-10-14T13:13:00.000-07:00

I have been holding off on blogging for a bit because I wanted to brag on Christopher's Teacher of the Year awards night--and I have video to go along with the post, so it's not just idle chatter. But we have to figure out how to upload the cd to this blog, so I will save it for later. Suffice it to say that despite the fact that things are generally politically ecologically and economically going to hell in a handbasket, the younger generation is coming up, coming up, growing and learning and reaching and grasping, and there are wonderful teachers out there--not just Christopher, but of course, including him--who are meeting them with open arms.

By this I mean that all 18 of the teachers who were honored as Teachers of the Year from their respective schools were wonderful and inspiring. (And the special ed teachers seemed to love their work best of all.)

I had expected to be proud of Christopher; I had expected to eat high-fat hors d'oeuvres deep-fried and oozing with cream cheese; I had expected to put on some make-up and debate with myself about wearing heels (no, too uncomfortable.) I didn't expect to be so moved by everyone else's video presentation as well as my husband's. To see that even in this day and age when Obama's "Race to the Top" has replaced Bush's "No Child Left Behind" as a program that is supposed to look like educational reform but actually treats education more like a corporate business than a human endeavor, there are still men and women who wake up every day and spend their time listening, communicating, and inspiring young people.

And some of them have managed to hang onto their jobs even in this economy and are continuing to serve youth.

Some very good lives are being lived even in the midst of our current global mess; that is the good news. It's like the rescue of the Chilean miners, which was such an incredible high even to read about. See what we are capable of when we put our minds to it?

Now onto Franzen's Freedom. Spoiler alert: if you have not read the book and intend to, and/or if you are in the middle of the book and have not yet finished it, stop reading the blog now. Walk away from the blog. I don't want to wreck it for anyone. I like the book very much. It's not perfect but it's ambitious, big-hearted, sprawling, and in so many places heart-breakingly accurate about how we humans think, love, and act, that it definitely merits reading.

And for the record, I loved The Corrections. I mean, The Corrections was so good it was almost painful to read it. And I don't hold Franzen's arrogance against him. The man is brilliant, hard-working, and seems tortured. So he gets a little testy and is impolitic at times. There are worse sins.

But having said all that, I have to ask: why, when white writers write about characters of color are those characters more easily killed off than any of the white (central) characters? Why are the characters of color so... expendable?

In this book, more so than The Corrections, I felt like I could second-guess Franzen's personal prejudices. For one thing, the guy really believes in marriage. If two people get married, that's it. They may cheat on each other, but at the end of the day those are the bonds that will count. This has not been my experience in real life, so I accuse Franzen of being a old-fashioned and traditional and in that sense unrealistic. But whatever. My objection as a reader is that sensing this prejudice made the actions of the characters predictable in a way that I didn't want them to be.

But my main objection is with the character of Lalitha. I tried to imagine myself reading this if I were an South Asian Indian woman. We are expected to believe in Lalitha as a paragon of sexiness and drive (literally: she is always driving him everywhere), who is sexually and romantically besotted with her much-older boss, almost completely uncritical and patient and forebearing. Lalitha is a fountain of unconditional love and goodness until she is conveniently killed off (I'm sorry, I SAID spoiler alert) so that said boss can re-unite with his (very imperfect, fully-fomed character) (white) wife.

The white characters are allowed to be full human beings with flaws and warts. The Asian woman has to be perfect, and in the end she is sacrificed so that the dysfunctional white family can knit itself back together again in a more functional pattern.

Thanks Lalitha for all the great sex and all the good work; you can die now.

Um...so, putting myself in the shoes of the Indian woman, how do I feel about this?

Mad, I think. And tired. Hasn't this trope gotten a little old?

Please understand, I am not usually the kind of reader who goes out looking for politically incorrect things with which to crucify successful writers. I just couldn't help noticing, that's all. And unfortunately it's right in the center of this very ambitious, very successful, probably going to get nominated for the Pulitzer Prize winning book.

Just sayin'.

2010-10-04T09:08:00.001-07:00

I can hear the birds chirping outside the window, and feel the sun coming through the curtains. I spent the weekend doing a Voice Medicine workshop with Trish Watts, a beautiful singer and Voice and Movement Therapist from Australia. It's hard to explain what Trish does exactly because she has such a vast array of tools to draw on in her work. Sometimes we were singing in harmony, sometimes we were chanting or toning, and sometimes we were working individually finding the animal and human voices within ourselves who wanted to speak, sing, growl, howl, whisper or scream.

I discovered within myself a great bird of prey. Melinda said it sounded like an eagle; the image I had was even bigger, like a velociraptor from the movie Jurassic Park. Huge. Fierce. Frightening. I had big heavy wings and emitted piercing bird squawks from my tail bone up through my shoulder blades/wings and out my nose. My beak.

It wasn't a pretty or a soft or even a noble image to me, but it felt true. I felt the impatience of the bird, the big, muscular impatience--so similar to my own. Impatience is my bugaboo. But can you blame the eagle--or whatever-it-was? It's hard to be confined to a small domestic life when you are made for soaring and planing and hunting and diving.

Trish worked with every single person in a completely unique way--and each person's session was radically different than the others'. She has a vast vocabulary of musical styles and voices in her own body to draw from and she did. I would have liked to work more on connecting the voices and images I found to my work, to writing, to art--that is the bridge that I need to make. To bring all that energy and ferocity into a form. But there were a lot of people, and not enough time.

The question I am left sitting with is where is the morality and compassion in the great bird? (Where is the morality and compassion in America, land of the eagle?)

I watched Trish work with other people, some of whom needed great doses of gentleness and tenderness which she supplied. Outwardly i was patient and still and attentive, but I was aware that my deepest impulses in those moments were to squawk and fly. I felt like the bird who kicks her babies out of the next. Blame it on menopause. It is not that I don't have a deep well of tears within myself, not that I don't like to nurture in a mammalian way. But there is this other, much more yang side which has a more ferocious agenda. I did not feel like a full-breasted mammal in those moments.

When I got home, Christopher was playing music with himself, thanks to the miracle of modern technology. He has filled our living room/dining room area with pianos, an organ, a drum-set, a full set of vibes, and he had some electric guitars plugged in as well. He also has a sound system/recording devices which allow him to lay down tracks, and then play harmonies with himself. He had laid down some basic tracks and was soloing on top of them; the space was filled with music. It sounded like a whole band was jamming together.

I crept past him into the kitchen, whispering, "Don't stop, don't stop." I didn't want to interrupt his creative process as he has so little precious time for himself. But a few minutes later he found me in the kitchen and invited me to join him. I had described for him how Trish had divided us into groups of three; one person held a drone, the other did a simple bass part (vocally) and the third did some solo scat singing on top of that.

"Would you like to improvise with me?" Christopher asked. I was scared. He is an accomplished musician and I have imperfect intonation and often wobble trying to find the right pitch. But I said yes, on the condition that I could be bad and make mistakes. He set up a mic stand for me, and sat at the piano. And I realized (thanks to the workshop) that I could do a simple bass part of a drone, or even a high harmony/bass (does that make sense? I mean, not a melody, not a complex scat, but what would be a bass part, only in a higher register) and let him do the fancy solo stuff on the piano.

And then words started coming through me, the beginnings of a song, and we really were improvising together!!

2010-09-27T16:46:00.001-07:00

Back from an amazing weekend with No Nude Men Theatre..what is it? it's not exactly a company. It's more like a kind of federation. A loose conglomerate. A modular amoeba. Really wonderful thoughtful theatre people, so talented and versatile. Folks who can do stage combat, build a set, promote a show, light a set, figure out sound cues, write a play, direct--everything.

I realized that theatre is in its way a kind of religion for those who take it seriously. Not a religion in the God-sense--who would be the God or Goddess of Theatre? Shakespeare? Or some Greek or Roman deity?

But I don't mean religion in the sense of deity but of sacrifice and ritual. People come together to perform the ritual, night after night, of telling a story. If the story is great enough, if the intentions of all concerned are purified enough of ego and its attendant ills, then magic may ensue. The dead speak through us, the world changes a little; at least we who are doing it change, and hopefully the audience as well.

In that sense theatre is not so much about worshipping a God but of becoming a co-creator of a moment in time that stands apart. Whatever you want to call that.

And it does involve sacrifice, otherwise known as tech rehearsals, day jobs, not enough sleep, and junk food.

We were at a hostel in the beautiful Marin Headlands where it's uncharacteristically hot and bright. And on Saturday afternoon a bunch of us gathered in a big circle under an oak tree and read The Recruiter out loud.

Real actors. It was a trip. Of course as the playwright I was fixated on the lines and bits that didn't work. When one of the actors said to me afterwards that it was a great script I looked at her incredulously. But upon reflection...I think from seventy-five to eighty percent of what I had written worked. The other twenty, twenty-five percent I am revising. I got some wonderful, useful feedback.

Good actors never cease to amaze me. I think sometimes actors get a bad rap, and god knows the profession lends itself to some funny excesses. Actors have to be super-sensitive emotionally and at the same time have thick enough skins--or just plain stubbornness-- to endure public failure, rejection, and exposure. An odd combination of vulnerability and toughness. But what doesn't get talked about often enough is the emotional intelligence that borders on genius which good actors have. The ability to empathize immediately, deeply and physically with people they have never met--people who are not even real. They can believe in them so intensely they make them real.

Anyway, I got invaluable, honest, insightful feedback from at least half a dozen of them; not mere pats on the back, but ways to make the play better, mingled with appreciation for what's already there. And I can see the shape and the structure of it now, clear as day, emerging from the shed skins of all the innumerable drafts. This time I really think I've got it.

2010-09-24T10:58:00.000-07:00

That feeling of badness. That I am in some way, a "bad person." I know it's ridiculous but I can never quite shake it. A constant kind of guilt and shame for the crime of--what? Just being. Guilt and shame are the hardest monsters i have to slay and I am not sure if they are slayable. It may be that the best i can do is try to turn them into house-pets.

All this is probably why I find it such a relief to create fictional male characters who have actually done terrible things, like kill other people. It's probably what drives me to write so much about war, which brings out the terrible (and occasionally the noble) in people. I don't identify as a helpless victim. i identify with the perpetrators, with the villains. I know that if I had been born male I would have been tempted to abuse the power given to me; I know that I have abused what powers I have at times.

Years ago I was a featured poet at the Logan poetry festival, along with Jimmy Santiago Baca. Jimmy had done hard time himself, and the organizer of this festival, Alan Cohen, had us visit a men's group at the local prison.

First we gave a reading in the main auditorium. The place was jammed--talk about a captive audience--men were practically hanging from the rafters. And they were rapt, attentive. I felt them drinking in every word we spoke.

Afterward, at the group where we shared our work more intimately, and talked to the men, and listened, an inmate said to me that what touched him about my poetry was that I seemed to believe that people were fundamentally innocent. That everyone deserved a second chance, that everyone could be forgiven.

I was so moved to hear him say that. I didn't respond with what the other half of that coin is: except for me. I believe everyone is fundamentally innocent--except I have a hard time seeing it in myself. Maybe because I can't feel every throb of other people's hearts where all the mixed motives and unpretty emotions are lurking the way I can feel my own; maybe because of the intensity with which my mother struggled with her own feelings of guilt and shame and the way she passed that unresolved battle down to me. Maybe because of internalized sexism or internalized anti-Semitism, or the right and true knowledge that as a middle-class American i consume an unethical share of the world's resources and contribute an unspeakable amount of waste and pollution to satisfy my wants and desires. Maybe all of the above, in varying degrees.

I don't know. What I do know is that this feeling of badness persists. Prozac quells it, hard exercise mitigates it, love soothes it, community assuages it, but it never quite goes away. When I interrogate it back to its source I often find relatively small things, petty social blunders, an unkind word here, an unwritten thank you note there, patterns of laziness and selfishness and wastefulness which are offset by bursts of energy in the opposite directions; attempts to clean up my act, which are heartfelt but unsustainable.

I think of this in an unconscious way all of the time, but when I read Jonathan Franzen I become conscious of it. The main character of his new book Freedom is a woman named Patty, unlike me in most ways--she's a jock turned stay-at-home mom, determinedly apolitical, fixated on her kids, doesn't care for the arts. But what's at her core is the same thing as what's at mine--this conviction of her own badness.

Franzen makes me see another aspect of the issue; that this feeling of badness may be part and parcel of self-awareness, self-consciousness. And also that part of what women label as "bad" and feel guilty about--in Patty's case, her competitiveness on and off the playing field for example--is merely a human quality that has been declared off-limits to women.

Patty is married to a very "good" man, as I am (although thankfully, Christopher is a lot more well-rounded and human than Walter Berglund, and I was physically smitten with him from the start), and her "good" husband keeps telling her that she too is "good" although Patty never completely believes him. She knows better. She knows the darkness in her own heart, the cracked places which can be papered over when you're in your twenties, but which emerge and split the house down to the foundations when you are in mid-life.

This is why I read Franzen, although I find him almost unbearably sad. His work hurts me so good. He's singing my song. Even though his song is of middle America, the big flat Midwest, of which I know little to nothing, even though his characters have followed different paths than my own weird trajectory, he gets something about the human heart that is painfully accurate.

I don't get the sense that he has transcended these questions himself. I think he's writing from the same tangled knot of confusion and failure and pain that informs most of his characters' lives. He's no Rumi in other words, and reading him does not alleviate my angst, it increases it. His books leave me simultaneously elated and depressed. I'm elated because he's put a finger on some of my murkier emotions, he's named a portion of the unnameable. I'm depressed because it's all too true and where do we go from here and God help us.

But I'll take him over any of the novelists who bring their characters around to fake resolutions and pat cheery endings. Not because I'm a masochist, (well, maybe I am, a little), but more because fake, forced "enlightenment" makes me even sadder.

2010-09-23T19:44:00.000-07:00

The Recruiter is finished!!! At least--this latest draft is. I finished it three days earlier than the deadline, which surprised me. And then this thing opened up--time. I have time. I'm not on deadline anymore. I can talk on the phone. I can saunter and amble and loaf. I can think about getting a job--a real job.

I went and got it copied, ten copies, for this weekend. Bought a birthday present for a friend. Made lasagna for C--from a recipe even! Accompanied him when he took Trixie to the vet for her follow-up shots. (Poor thing, she hated every single minute she spent in the car and let us know with piteous wails. You never heard anything so pathetic.)

I hope all this work was not for naught. Rebecca asked me the other week if I could take satisfaction just in having done it, to the best of my abilities. You know, intrinsic value rather than extrinsic reward and all that. I knew what she was aiming at, I saw her point and it was a good one.

But I had to answer her honestly: I want this thing to be produced. If it doesn't get produced somewhere somehow I will feel disappointed. I won't stop writing. I won't jump off a bridge. But you know--I put in the time and the work--and I would like to see it go all the way.

OI've written other things that never saw the light of day, of course. A novel that is, even as we speak, collecting dust in the basement. And a good thing, too. It simply wasn't good enough. I'm glad it's not out in the world with my name on it, even though there were pages and whole chapters that I thought were pretty good.

Many writers have unpublished novels, screenplays, playscripts sitting in drawers somewhere. And poems. god, only a fraction of the poems I write ever go anywhere. Lots and lots of them are composted. I've learned to live with it. nature is wasteful. Think of the figs smashed on the sidewalk in front of our house, leaving dark stains. Think of the trees that fall in the forest and no one ever hears them. it's all right you know. It's all right for life just to happen without a big parade and brass band announcing it.

Still, I would like this play to have a production. A good one. And more than one. If I'm honest I have to say that I'd like this thing to fly, all over the place. I'd like it to take on a life of its own.

Two kids just came to the door selling newspaper subscriptions to get into college. Mexican-Americans. The older one did all the talking. His parents were deported so he lives with his two younger brothers in an orphanage in Tracy. The little ones are five and six. The parents had come to this country as babies, but were picked up by INS and sent back, six months ago. This kid talked a mile a minute, very intelligent, very well-spoken. determined. He wants to get his own apartment when he's eighteen and raise his younger brothers by himself. He wants to get them out of the orphanage.

His friend was younger and more shy.

Christopher chatted with both of them, offering encouragement and listening. He bought a newspaper subscription.

After we closed the door behind them we just looked at each other. What must it have been like for those parents to have to leave three young children behind when they went back to Mexico? Why couldn't they take them with him? Is there more to the story than what he told us? I didn't even know about orphanages inside this country. Could we...?

We have the phone number of the orphanage.

2010-09-20T13:28:00.000-07:00

We're in the process of adopting and taming another one of the outdoor feral kitties. I say "we"--it's 95% Christopher. He has sat patiently reading a book for hours in the musty garage, waiting for this new little one, (Wheat Thin) to trust him enough to come over and get petted. He's spent untold time rattling bags of kitty treats, tossing "crunchies" to the new baby, and gently scratching behind his ears. I went down there myself a few times. Once I saw him hiding in a cupboard atop stacks of old New Yorkers. Another time he was crouched behind the bicycles. Then again, he hides under the toolbench or in the laundry basket. The garage is full o' junk and he has a million hiding places.

Our thought is that this little boy will be a good playmate for Trixie who is currently Queen Bee of the household. The heartbreak is that the taming process involves separating him from his pal and twin shadow Dorian Gray. Dorian Gray is always going to be feral. She doesn't/won't allow herself to be touched; she's skittish and aggressive, while Wheat Thin is pliable and friendly.

Of course we think and talk about the kids Christopher encounters in his work. Those who want to learn and seem to have hope of turning their lives around; those who so far refuse contact.

People are more complex than cats (at least to me they seem to be; a cat person would disagree.) You can't predict what's going to happen with a young person based on how they appear at sixteen or eighteen; plenty of folks get their lives together after that. But you can say that there are consequences, and that these very early choices and decisions matter. (If they are indeed always choices, which I'm not sure they are. Sometimes it seems people are compelled to act out certain dramas before they have the freedom to choose another way. This is why a longer life can indeed be a blessing--sometimes you have to live out a certain amount of karma first.)

These early early choices can matter a lot. Especially if you're poor, if you don't have the luxury of infinite second and third and fourth chances. There are kids sitting in prison for crimes they committed at age fourteen or fifteen or sixteen. There are trajectories that are already set. There are young people enlisting in the military whose lives are hanging in the balance because of a piece of paper they signed.

The other night we were at a friend's house for break-fast after Yom Kippor (okay I wasn't fasting, but it's still fun to break it.) It was an intimate gathering of friends and family, including two teenage nephews. One of the boys was on the debate team and the conversation jumped from joy to grief to the nature of reality. Derrida was mentioned. True confessions: I only have a very vague sense of who Derrida actually is (one of those French philosopher guys, right?) But these kids knew. What's more, they knew the main thrust of Derrida's theories and could employ them, logically, in an argument. They could and did hold their own in a room full of opinionated adults. They could thoughtfully defend a point of view while at the same time acknowledging where other people were coming from; they could do this in the abstract.

In the midst of this lively intellectual melee, I looked over at Christopher. I knew what he was thinking. The kids he teaches have such small worlds, bounded by invisible ghetto walls and by the rules of the gang. It's uncool for them to show any interest in school, in ideas, in learning. It's uncool to read. He scours bookstores and sometimes toy stores for games and materials that will pique their interest. Sometimes he gets through.

But the kids whose company we were enjoying the other night are headed for Harvard or some other great college. They have a father who sings a blessing to them every night. They have had parental involvement and books and stability, good food, medical care and emotional support since they were born. They have never seen their father hit their mother, no member of their family has been arrested or murdered, they were not exposed to drugs in utero.

They were ahead before they even got started.

All kids should be able to have such a beginning. All kids don't need to go to Harvard. But the basics; food, medical care, freedom from fear--all kids should have those things before they're asked to learn. As a prerequisite for education. Do you hear me, Obama? Stop punishing the schools and the teachers and start looking at societal inequities.

Okay, it's much easier to ruminate on all this than it is to do my actual work. I have just fifteen or twenty more pages left of The Recruiter. You can do it, Alison, come on, you can do it...

2010-09-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

So I'm at my doctor's, and she's feeling my boobs, and nagging me to get a mammogram. I'm not begrudging her the nag, it's her job--but by way of a cautionary tale she's telling me about one of her patient's mothers who was perfectly healthy until she showed up with breast cancer at the age of ninety.

Wait a minute. Ninety?

Well, everyone's got to die of something, I say. And then a minute later: I'm not even sure I want to live to be ninety.

Oh me neither, she says, palpating my mammaries. I definitely don't want to live to be ninety. That's why I smoke one cigarette a day and have heavy whipping cream in my tea.

I nearly fall off the table laughing.

Are you sure that's enough? I mean, maybe you should drive without wearing your seat belt or drink brandy for breakfast or something just to guarantee that you won't outlive your retirement income.

I know it's ridiculous, she says. Now raise your arms above your head for me, and press the palms together.

2010-09-10T09:23:00.001-07:00

I wish all the people who are against gay marriage could have seen the wedding we attended last weekend, between two good friends of mine. S and E have lived together nine years. They've seen each other through medical crises (brain surgery, anyone?), the serious illness of family members, world travel, and job changes. Two very different people--one impulsive and mystical, the other methodical and careful--they've been a model for me as they demonstrate how to negotiate a loving relationship.

As I struggle with the $64,000 question, "How can I be myself and be married to someone who seems at times so different, so other," they have been my inspiration. I have seen them patiently, honestly, lovingly work through conflicts that at times seemed unworkable, negotiate, and come up with elegant solutions. I have seen them both grow as individuals and evolve as a couple for nine years before this ceremony. I have witnessed their fierce commitment to keep evolving.

As E's mother remarked afterward, "I don't think there was a dry eye in the house," when they said their vows. The love was palpable. Each celebrated the kindness, compassion, strength, and playfulness the other brought to their union. I have been to many great weddings, and none better than this. Their families were also so present and accounted for; E's young nephew brought down the house when he sang a song, "which some of you may know 'cause it's from the '80s," he explained, in deference to the ancientness of many in the audience. Both sets of parents toasted and officially welcomed their new "daughter" into the family. Families like these show what kind of world could be possible, for all of us.

Also, and not incidentally--everyone was having a hell of a good time. Dancing, singing, mingling. C took about a million photos and they also had an official photographer there, so it was a well-documented fest.

If anyone wants to put this marriage up against Pam Anderson marrying the latest guy to pay her gambling debts in Las Vegas, feel free. As for me, I'm going to continue to seek wisdom and inspiration from people who have done the hard good work of learning how to communicate, how to be independent and yet intimate, honest and kind, fully themselves and also fully engaged with each other.

2010-09-01T12:39:00.000-07:00

Lively discussion last night in my writing class about how "writing is hard!" I consider that when someone says that it means that they are doing it right. (Yes, I am a New England Puritan, why do you ask?)

I think writing is hard, the way marriage is hard., the way parenthood is hard, the way anything worthwhile is hard. Hard in that it throws curve balls at you and asks things of you and pulls things out of you above and beyond what you'd "rationally" give if you were not a thousand percent committed.

It's not rational to rewrite the same ten pages a hundred times, but sometimes you do it. It's not rational to keep sending out a poetry manuscript to dozens of contests a year at twenty-five dollars a pop for entry fees, knowing that your chances are less than one in a hundred, and it may take years to get accepted, and yet you do it. It's not rational to sit on your butt, inside, on a bright sunny day, with the wide bright world whirling around without you, and try to wrestle the lines of a poem into some kind of pleasing order.

And yes, all that is hard, but for whatever strange mix of reasons, some of them lofty, most of them not--you feel compelled to do it. Hard, but not doing it would be harder.

And of course writing is not hard compared to sifting through a garbage dump in Sao Paulo, looking for food or bits of scrap metal, as thousands of people have to do. It's not hard compared to wearing an 80-pound pack and sweating up a hill in Afghanistan, knowing that you could be shot at or blown up at any moment. Not hard compared to...well, you get the idea. It's a privileged complaint, and we all admit it.

The pleasures of reading and writing--when the writing is going well--are incomparable. I spent all day yesterday on the couch with a good book. Skipped my workout, didn't go to the post office to mail my manuscripts, just read and read and read deeply into another person's life. It can be like that. Addictive. then there are the days when it is like trying to shovel through an iceberg using only your mind as a pick-axe. At best you make only a few slushy dents, your mind gets awfully tired and sore, and at the end of the day the glacier is still there, as God intended.

2010-08-26T10:22:00.000-07:00

Run, don't walk, to go see Winter's Bone, if it is playing anywhere near you. Spare. Haunting. Bleak. Human. Humbling. The physical world, the hills and woods of rural Missouri are a brooding presence in this film. And the characters stayed with me long after the movie was done.

It's about--among other things--poverty in backwoods America, the kind we don't usually see. The hidden-away poverty of white people. Shooting squirrels to eat them. Frying potatoes in lard. Women all wearing the same beat-up jeans and flannel shirts. You can practically smell them. Bad home dye jobs. Bad teeth. Heavy women who can fork hay and split kindling and use a power saw and dodge a punch.

Their world is lodged in my gut right now like a piece of undigested squirrel pie. I don't know what to do with it. The fine bony faces, like Abraham Lincoln's. That's C's bone structure. Long thin hands fingering a guitar or a banjo, sitting on a woodpile. My people are urban, sociable, chatty, soft. These people are flinty and taciturn, full of hidden depths. I don't know the code, but I can see that there is one.

It reminds me of the month I spent living on an Indian reservation a lifetime ago, when I got thoroughly laughed at for my citified ways. When I learned to split kindling and build a fire in a wood stove, and haul water from a creek. A month of that and I was through. No books, no magazines. There was a peace there that remains in my memory. And the people, especially the women; tough, vulnerable, wounded. They scared me a little. They move me.

My computer is in the shop and I'm trying out C's Mac to see if I would prefer to get one of those rather than the PC's I have always had. I've been working obsessively on the poetry manuscript for a few days and now it's time to turn back to the play. If anyone has an opinion about Macs vs. PC's I'd be happy to hear it.

2010-08-23T22:41:00.001-07:00

The full moon has brought fullness--long intimate talks with so many people, old friends and new. Today, a walk in the woods with a friend of thirty years, from my VISTA days, and his wife. The sun hot and dry, insects making clicking sounds in the dessicated Queen Anne's lace, the sky a rich Delft blue. We walked and talked and sweated happily, and then went out and stuffed ourselves full of Mexican food at a little dive-y place a few blocks from our house.

Life is so sweet sometimes, when things come around in the fullness of time. This friend has seen me and I have seen him through more than one death: my mother, his mother, his former fiance, my ex-husband, and friends taken before their time. And here we are still alive, still walking around on strong legs, still drinking coffee and giving each other shit, still recognizably something of the young naive people we were when we met. And life is good.

Which makes today's announcement of a judge shutting down Obama's expansion of the stem cell research program particularly odious. If stem cell research had proceeded apace during the Bush years, my friend Carla might be walking around and drinking in this beautiful day. If stem cell research had gotten going, all the people with M.S. and ALS and cancer and diabetes might have hopes of a healthier life. How can that be bad? How can religious wing-nuts deny scientists the right to at least try to heal some of these terrible diseases?

2010-08-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

The first act of The Recruiter is solid at last, at last, thanks in no small part to my stalwart friend Rebecca, who not only read several drafts cheerfully and thoroughly, but commented on the lines in red font, cheering me on when I had hit the right tone, and chiding me when I fell asleep at the wheel.

If it takes a village to raise a child--which I believe it does--and it takes a city to assist a disabled and/or dying person, which I know from being with my mother and with Carla, it takes, I don't know, at least a soccer team to see a work of art through to completion. You need several kinds of friendly readers. At least one person should fall into the cheerleader rah-rah you go girl, I love every word that falls from your pen category. This is because writing is fucking hard and it also requires the writer to become solitary and occasionally delusional. A friend like this comes in at that delicate moment right after the birth, looks at the butt-ugly screeching hairless newborn covered with blood and mucus, and declares it the most gorgeous infant the world has ever seen. You can't put a price-tag on that kind of support.

But then--later--you also need critical-but-kind readers, people who are discerning and care about literature, and perhaps work in its minefields themselves, so they can be clear about what works and doesn't work without being catty or cruel. they are the ones who point out that your baby's arms are on backwards, or that it hasn't got a nose, and they manage to do this without shaming you. When after multiple drafts, you actually get the thing breathing--at least a little, at least through one nostril, they are as happy as if it were their own child who was going to make it.

I got lucky in my choice of family, as most of us are bookworms. My dad and stepmother are cheerleaders--they love almost everything (although Dad doesn't like things that are too dark or too overtly sexual, big surprise. Still, if he doesn't like something much he'll just mildly say, "It's not as good as your last one.") In general though, if I sneezed and sent him the Kleenex full of snot, he would forward it to all his friends with a proud note: Look what my daughter did!

My sister and my sister-in-law who are both raising young children and don't have time to sit around writing thesis-length emails are very supportive but not afraid to say when something doesn't work for them. I usually don't get lengthy critical analysis from either of them, but "This worked for me," or "Not so much. I didn't get it." A few non-writer friends also fall into this category: concise pithy feedback, supportive but honest so I know I can trust it.

Then there are the doubting Thomases, the devil's advocates, the supporters who make you work your fanny off. They might be called the sparring partners who make you better, the Tough lovers, the Worthy Opponents. Not to make too many sweeping generalizations about gender here, but in my life, these tend to be male. Gay, straight, it doesn't matter. I think this is how men have often been socialized to relate to each other, and so when they do it to you--to me--it's kind of a compliment, like "See, I'm treating you like one of the boys."

They don't do the soften-the-criticism-with-a-compliment-sandwich thing that women do; you know, "I really liked x and y, but z seemed problematic to me. overall though, I think you have a great piece!" We women have had that rubric so ingrained in us that it can be a bit shocking when the critic-friend just circles in on z. But I think guys--and women who are socialized like them--assume that you already know the stuff that's working and they don't--shouldn't--have to hold your hand about it.

I've learned over time, not to take this personally, and just to be grateful for any response. We're all busy and distracted and if anyone gives some of his or her valuable time and attention to my piece, that's a huge gift. And I am a social creature--I can't work in isolation. I don't produce without some kind of feedback.

I warned a new writer-friend that I suffer from premature ejaculation when it comes to hitting the send button on drafts that are upon reflection, still rough--but that's how I am. I don't mind people seeing my dirty laundry or my ragged line breaks or mushy plots. Some of my friends have said that this approach of mine gives them courage in their own creative process, to be imperfect and to allow others to see them that way. other people have candidly told me that they wish I could contain myself more, send out fewer drafts, learn to edit myself more on my own.

Which is kind of a metaphor for how I am in life, of course--I'm the driver who will pull up next to a pedestrian and ask for directions instead of consulting a map, which drives Christopher crazy. But--sue me--my eyes are weak and I like talking to people. I don't trust maps or GPS or any of that half as much as I trust living breathing humans and their wisdom which comes from all kinds of interesting places inside them. Basically I'm writing in order to be in relationship. So there.

2010-08-11T20:13:00.000-07:00

There's a recurring dream I have about owning another house--a house I've neglected, a house I've forgotten about. A house that might be sliding into disrepair, a house that needs tending. A house of many rooms.

I go to the "other" house and I walk around in it, exploring--oh look, there's a whole new wing I'd completely forgotten about! Maybe I will sleep here now. The rooms are big! The dreams are somewhat exciting, but also slightly disturbing. Im wealthier than I thought--two houses! But what a responsibility. I should have been taking care of my extra house, weeding the garden, keeping up with it. Maybe I owe taxes on it, maybe it needs a new roof.

Being a writer is like living in two houses at once, two lives at once. If you're living in the writing life, chances are good that you're neglecting something in your other, "real" life. If you're managing to work (a little), earn some money, go shopping, get some exercise, see a few friends, buy birthday presents for your family, keep up with the bills, your other house languishes.

You need both houses. Both require care. You can't afford to completely forget about either of them, and yet you can't spend your time neurotically running back and forth between them, either--that won't work. You have to move as gracefully and deliberately as possible between your two living situations as you can.

But of course it's never really all that graceful. Like a child whose parents are divorced, or a person with a lover in another city, you always forget a toothbrush or a sock or a pair of glasses. You always leave a little piece of yourself behind. And if you neglect either of them for too long, your dreams come back to haunt you.

2010-08-08T20:09:00.000-07:00

We went to Mendocino and I taught at the Mendocino Coast Writer's Conference, a sweet gathering of writers who congregate at the College of the Redwoods in Fort Bragg to read, write, and learn together. It was an intense time for both Christopher and me; we were both raw and emotional. The sea was wild, the fog thick. We wandered through the historic botanical gardens and when we stumbled across a tiny family cemetery--just a couple of weedy gravesites, including one for a toddler child--I burst into tears, which is not really like me.

By day I taught and grew close to my students. At night we ate big rich Mendocino dinners and drank wine. I had a blackberry mojito. Our hosts were an extraordinarily gracious couple who live in a beautiful house in the redwoods, full of art and fine woodwork and books. We had a wood-burning stove in our room.

Home now, and back at work on The Recruiter. I've had to tear it apart--really apart--abandon all hopes of retaining much of anything from my previous structure and rebuild from Ground Zero. I'm at Ground Zero now, again. It's a familiar place. I've had to kill my darlings. All my darling hard-won, hard-fought scenes.

I feel like the prize goes to the one who can endure this process, who can just keep coming back to the work "even though I fail and fail again," as poet Lucille Clifton says, "because I am adam and his mother/and these failures are my job."

That's it, exactly. These failures are my job. Bring it on.

2010-07-27T12:44:00.000-07:00

The visit with the parentals was very sweet, although the toilet issue was not satisfactorily resolved and we ended up with the old toilet back in place until a better fit could be found. But we had a great time--saw the movie, The Kids Are All Right, ate at Millenium, and hosted a musical gathering for them, so they could enjoy all our talented friends. We had piano, organ, guitar, bass, drums, viola, vocals, and when Bobby showed up, some dreamy sax. And barbecue, chili, and beer. Dad and my stepmother had a beautiful time, and were serenaded and honored.

And now it's back to work mode. I've been stressing about these workshops at the Mendocino Coast Writer's Conference--I taught there five years ago or so--maybe it was more like seven years ago--and it went fine, but sometimes I forget that I know what I know and I freak out and feel the need to re-invent the wheel. hence a 14-page lesson plan for one of the workshops, and a six-pager for the other. Hence some sleepless moments in the middle of the night.

I actually know that it will be fine, it always is, my workshops at Rowe were great this spring, but the people-pleasing co-dependent in me who thinks nothing is ever good enough is activated and on the alert. And all this over-preparing is taking me away from The Recruiter which is shaping up in really interesting, disturbing, and I think (I hope!) authentic ways.

We have also been watching the wonderful HBO series John Adams starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney--we finished it the other night after I insisted we watch all the special features which ended up taking us up to 1 in the morning. It's such phenomenal storytelling, and gives such a brutal, unsparing look at the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries--mastectomy without anesthesia anyone? What do teeth look like in a sixty-year-old who has had no real dental care?

The show raised more questions in me than it answered: I wondered especially about Thomas Jefferson who seemed a man of such great contradictions. Elegant, refined, brilliant--and a slave-owner. How could he hold the radical ideas about human rights and freedom which he wrote about and have the life he had? I went on-line and read a bit about him--six children born to his beloved wife, who died after the sixth birth--most of the children did not survive either. Death upon death upon death. The losses and trauma these people endured are incalculable. And this is our heritage. this is the basis on which our country was formed.

The Adams' also, were brilliant people but terrible parents. John's four children didn't fare well--two died alcoholic, his daughter died of breast cancer in her 40s after suffering the tortures of the damned. the son who became President, john Quincy Adams, described himself as a "cold rigid martinet." Two of his sons committed suicide in their twenties. Family patterns of depression and alcoholism, and cold, distant parenting ran through their descendants like blight.

It raises the age-old question, whether greatness is worth the sacrifices it entails? Would it be possible for a person to be happy and great, to attend to his or her intimate relationships, family, and some other worthy project without cheating anything of time or attention? They Adams', both husband and wife, put "duty to country" before their own children, with terrible results. But one could put "art" or "spiritual practice" or any other thing in there as well.

Meanwhile, we've been following with interest the Wikileaks revelations about Pakistan and Afghanistan. Does this mean we will pull out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later, and spare some service-people's lives? I hope so. I love Obama, (yes, I still do, I don't care if he's not perfect, and has been extremely disappointing in some ways, I still love him). But I have been concerned about his stance on Afghanistan ever since the campaign in '08. This is the wrong place to try to look tough or get tough. No one has ever beat the Afghans in their own country. It's a losing proposition. We should cut our losses and get out now before we sacrifice any more soldiers' lives to this futile war.

Also, Mr. Obama, while I have your ear, you need to soften up on the rhetoric around schools and "performance." A school is not a stock portfolio, or a professional corps de ballet. it doesn't "perform." It educates, nurtures, inspires, and provides a sustaining community for young people as they grow. At least that's what it's supposed to do. Again, this is the wrong place to try to sound tough. Save your toughness for those crazy Tea Partyers or something. Remember yourself as a teacher, and the societal problems they must address daily. Get back on their--on our--side, where you belong.

Love,
Alison

2010-07-14T15:39:00.000-07:00

Preparing for my father and stepmother's visit by getting and installing a new toilet...hmmm...perhaps this wasn't the best idea. Oddly-shaped guest bathroom, meaning most conventional toilets won't fit. Sweat and cursing. Christopher made a trip back and forth to the toilet store. I sit glued to the screen on a beautiful summer day, working on the revision of The Recruiter. Page by page, creeps on this petty pace. We have been watching a lot of historical dramas: the Lion in Winter, Becket, Man for All seasons, and John and Abigail Adams. I love history! But it's so hard to walk through it a page at a time, giving voice to every side. I'd say this writing business was like walking through a blizzard except murkier. Tomorrow night I'm going to see Restrepo with a new friend.

2010-07-07T23:12:00.001-07:00

Sadly, Blake/Belle (turned out he was Blake, being male) had feline AIDS and did not survive his trip to the vet. That leaves three of his immediate siblings, plus half a dozen adult feral felines in the back yard to deal with.

Roofers start tomorrow, tearing off our old leaky roof and putting on a new one with solar panels so we are bracing ourselves for a noisy few days.

Meanwhile, I finally managed to write the new opening scene for The Recruiter, and everything started flowing from that. It only took me four or five months to absorb and accept the advice I had paid Corey Fischer to give me. I was so attached to the opening as I had originally written it, and to my original structure.

But Corey was right; it's better to start the play in the middle of the lead character's conflict. I now have a revised first act that is halfway decent, but I'm still struggling with the problem of making the characters do things on stage, rather than just stand there and talk (although Tony Kushner certainly gets a lot of mileage from characters standing and talking--one of the main characters in Homebody/Kabul sits in an armchair and discourses for a full hour for the whole first act, for God's sake. On the other hand, that play wasn't considered his most successful, although I liked it.)

Today i got to go to a workshop conducted by Marie Howe, who wrote The Good Thief, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time and What the Living Do. It was extraordinary. What a great teacher she is, relaxed, unhurried, but precise and on-the-pulse accurate.

I am a pretty tough sell as a student; I want a teacher to take me somewhere I can't get to on my own, and I already know how to set deadlines for myself, stay motivated, and kick my own ass. It's got to be more than that. She exceeded my expectations. The exercises were rigorous enough to be challenging, yet she held us to being dumb beginners, which is the only way you get anything fresh. She was not just trying to give us "poem-products"--which is a great temptation for me when I am teaching, just to give students something satisfying they can take home and say, "here's what I made today"--instead she aimed deeper, she was trying to teach us a new way of approaching seeing the material we include in our poems.

Her focus was on direct observation, suspending judgment, interpretation and metaphor for as much and as long as we could. Some of what she talked about was stuff I also teach--the value of repetition in the making of a poem, for instance--but she had a powerful integrated philosophy behind her choices, and a great selection of sample poems, several of which were new to me. In all a great day and a tiring one. I feel like I ran a six-hour marathon when all I did was sit in a low folding chair in Laurie's living room and drink inky strong coffee and listen intently and scribble.

2010-07-02T21:02:00.000-07:00

I am reading Brian Turner's great book of poetry Here, Bullet, about war and soldiering, Iraq and Afghanistan, life and death and suffering, and it is instructing me and humbling me as I work on the umpteenth revision of The Recruiter. It makes me think of what W.C. Williams said: "You cannot get the news of the day from poems, although men die miserably for lack of what is found there." In this case, I do feel like I get important news from his poems, in a way that brings it home much more urgently and viscerally than the news accounts and even the very good, first-person journalism I've also been reading.

I'm also Novella Carpenter's funny, inspiring, well-written Farm City, adventures of an urban farmer, which is what I someday aspire to become even though I have a black thumb and have killed all but the most hardy of the house-plants (and porch plants) acquired over the years. My Dad has patiently taken me to a nice nursery, and also to Home Depot; he bought me some big planters, and some herbal starts and, well--let's just say that everything can be recycled. Right?

But we were given some beautiful pink heather as a gift, and after neglecting it for a few weeks I finally took it out of its pot and put it into the ground under the fig tree--it likes shade, the little pointy sign said--and watered it, and lo and behold, it has put forth some new bright pink spears! The sight of them makes me so happy that I here and now resolve to turn over a new leaf and start watering things, because what do you know? It really works!!

We are also probably getting a new addition to our household: Christopher is at the vet right now with another of the feral kittens--one of the more sociable ones, who let itself be caught. (Haven't been able to sex it yet, hence: it.)

After getting spayed or fixed, if it's possible, we'll take it in as a brother or sister playmate for Trixie. I got the honor of giving it a name: Blake if it's a boy, Belle if it's a girl. (Trixie-Belle--get it?) Inspiration for the name Blake came from a new novel that's just been published, Her Fearful Symmetry.

The title, of course, is taken from the poem by William Blake: "Tyger, tyger burning bright/In the forests of the night/What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" Since this kitty and Trixie are both dark-gray tiger-striped, (and both uncommonly handsome), it seems to fit.

It seems strange to be so excited about tiny things like a flower coming back from the almost-dead or a new kitty, when all around us there are the so-much-bigger things that like the Gulf oil spill, or the verdict on the killing of Oscar Grant (which all of Oakland is nervously awaiting), or the war(s) going on around the globe, or the recession (depression? when are they going to use the d-word?) going on. But these little bits of life which we can nurture and enjoy are made even more important in the face of so much we cannot control. And they teach us something important too--how resilient and fierce life itself is, how there is a whole reality going on behind and beyond the headlines which is bigger and stranger, and better than anything we read in the papers.

2010-06-28T22:48:00.000-07:00

In Wing It! practice today, we moved to memories of large bodies of water. We told stories of large and small mistakes we had made. We recounted times of cleaning up messes. All in attempts to break through the isolating pall the Gulf oil spill has cast over us. I mean for the first, oh, month the thing was happening, I would check the papers every day waiting to hear that the leak was plugged. Slowly, it dawned on me: no one knows what they are freaking doing out there. How do we live with this knowledge? Some of us turn away, because the powerlessness is unbearable. There are thousands of ways to turn aside.

Phil, our director, led us on an incremental journey into being able to just touch some part of this huge elephant that has been sitting in the living room of our national consciousness for--how long has it been now? More than two months?

Meanwhile, I read in Sunday's Times about how intelligent whales and dolphins are. (The article is by Natalie Anger if anyone wants to google it.) Human brains are three pounds each; the brain of the sperm whale is 18 pounds. Dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror and are interested in looking at the parts of themselves they can't normally see (apparently they check out their teeth and their "anal slits" according to Anger.)

It has been hard for me to really grapple with what is happening on the Gulf. I see the headlines like everyone else--I look at the pictures of marine life covered in black oil and tar, I feel sickened and I turn the page. Or click on something else, anything else, to distract myself. It felt good, finally, to be able to share that. And then to be asked to recall good memories of a large body of water.

I love to go boogie boarding on a tiny family beach in Bolinas. It costs hardly anything to rent a wet suit and a board and spend the day in the waves. I could easily recall the wonderful feeling of being tumbled in the surf--surrendering my body completely to the waves and the current, using my board as ballast and floating and kicking to a sandbar where I collapsed on my back and watched the sky. Heaven.

I also remember snorkeling (and one time, scuba diving) in Florida and once in Hawaii, and being completely immersed in that other floating world. I feel most truly myself in the water--it is impossible not to love my body completely there. in the water there is no such thing as too fat--you are floating, nothing is sagging or pinching or pounding. It is all softness and liquid grace, it's the back to the womb place, unbounded spiritual home, primordial bliss.

When I touch the tragedy in the Gulf from that place of remembering--maybe I am remembering my own origins, eons ago, as a sea-creature, before my first ancestress crawled up onto the land, then I can actually touch it, what is happening. It is no longer just a terrible news item, or an abstract political idea. It becomes my own salty blood and my breath, my own slick skin.

That is the politics I am interested in now. I know all the liberal-left positions; I hold them; I have opinions, I vote, I sometimes (rarely) write letters to politicians, or editors, and sometimes I even write essays. But fulminating on current events interests me less and less. My opinions, your opinions, assigning blame, prescribing pre-packaged solutions. We're living in an oil-based culture, I'm driving a car and buying consumer goods just like everyone else, and I know that we're all responsible. And it's an ongoing struggle to change and blah blah blah, and you know, we might make it--we might change in time--or we might not.

I think that what Interplay is searching for is a politics of embodiment. To reclaim feeling as a source of information, alongside the constant stream of news bits and bytes we are all swimming in. Feeling and movement versus overwhelm and talking heads. It's not in itself a solution, but for me it beats numbness and paralysis.

For example: in practice today, Phil had us tell each other the story of what happened with the BP disaster using gibberish, a made-up language. What a relief! I have already talked enough and heard too much in English about this thing. It was time to blow it all out with sounds--grunts, wails, whispers, mutterings. As Phil said, time for old-fashioned lamentation. Analysis has its place, but it also has its limits.

That's all I can say about it for now. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make our performance on August 3, because I'll be teaching. It should be great though.

The garden under the full moon smells like heaven. Jasmine and datura, and our tenant's little kitchen garden of lettuces, tomatoes, arugula and cilantro. Feral cats stalk our back yard like ghosts, coming and going, hoping every time the back door opens that it is someone (Christopher) bearing food. It isn't. It's me, come out to water the tomato plant.

2010-06-27T23:18:00.001-07:00

The photograph on the front page of today's (Sunday's) New York Times is one of the most poignant images I have ever seen captured by a camera. A soldier bound back for Afghanistan is slumped against the wall at the airport, his young wife dozing on his shoulder. He is holding his six-month old baby and gazing at him with such love and such sadness--you can see that it is killing him to leave his family. That picture is worth a thousand million words of anti-war rhetoric. It shot right through my heart.

Saying anything more about it almost seems obscene. I don't know how the photographer got such an unbearably intimate shot. If you haven't seen the paper, go find a copy.

2010-06-21T23:13:00.001-07:00

I am loving just being home these days. Even though we hauled out our calendars and made a few plans. Even though the wide world beckons and there are workshops to go to, and places to go and people to see. Even though life is short--no, because life is short, right now I just wanna be with the one I love best, learning to pick out "Summertime" on the piano, reading back issues of The Sun, and Stanley Kunitz and Anne Carson, working on 10-minute plays, watching Netflix movies and making love. The sense of the luxury of time is so amazing.

During the school year we rise and sleep by the alarm clock; it goes off at 6 a.m., and C is out the door before 8. He comes home and crashes down for a nap. We talk, of course, but there isn't enough time for the truly significant conversations. Sensitive topics are generally tabled to await the weekend when there will be time. The weekend arrives and there are errands, I teach a class, we read the paper, and it's over.

Now, in summer, the long gentle balmy evenings stretch out before us. And there's time to read and write and paint and play and stare at the moon and just be. And more and more I just want to be with C which scares the ever-living daylights out of me because I don't believe couples "should" be a world into themselves. I don't believe in putting all my eggs in one basket. What if he dies? He will die, someday--I hope many years from now, but you never know. I still love spending time with my friends. But C is not just my husband he's also a creative collaborator. He's the one I like to talk over new projects with, the one I like to go on nerdly learning dives, googling writers and films and Roman history or some composer or artist and learning everything we can about them.

More and more, we are holding each others' histories. A friend told me it took about five years of being in an intimate relationship to really re-wire one's nervous system and heal old old wounds of disconnection. We're three years in now. I also think that it takes seven years to be truly married. i don't care what the state says or does, what propositions get passed or overturned (although of course I want Prop 8 to be overturned.) But if you ask me the real law of nature is seven years.

I went and saw Giant Bones the other night, directed by my friend Stuart Bousel of No Nude Men theatre. It's based on a book by Peter Beagle. It was a beautiful, entertaining production, done in a small space with a dedicated band of actors playing multiple roles brightly and with total commitment. I particularly appreciated the metaphor of the giant bones themselves, the bones of myth and the old old stories which we artists and humans must digest and make our own in every generation.

I'm loving both classes that I'm teaching through Writing Salon, the personal essay and poetry. Next semester I repeat both of them and add a class in the 10-minute play which should be great fun as well. If anyone is reading this who lives locally, you can sign up at www.writingsalons.com.

We saw the movie about Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky the other night which was gorgeous to look at and to listen to. I'm not sure exactly what the point of it was, other than creativity and eros, which go hand in hand for me as well, but it was visually sumptuous and striking and made me want to go out and buy a bottle of Chanel Number 5 immediately.

2010-06-12T15:39:00.000-07:00

I am my own little creative mosh pit these days, new ideas and poems head-butting into each other. Last night I had a breakthrough of sorts, discovered a way to handle the line in a poem where every line became an entity unto itself, with its own complete music. I've been wanting that a long time--my lines have always felt awkward and choppy, but something shifted and finally came together at midnight last night after Christopher made an offhand remark and it triggered a little mental fireworks display in my brain.

Times like that, writing becomes wild and new again instead of a hard slog through endless revisions. Now I want to write more more more poems in this "new" voice I'm discovering, which is just my same old voice, only more nuanced and developed and cadenced. I can feel a bunch of new/old material that I always had but didn't realize was usable opening up its possibilities...

Sometimes the music inside my cells gets very complex. I'm juggling poems, and short (10-minute) plays right now, while holding the bigger play loosely at bay, plus teaching: two classes ongoing, three more slated to start later this summer, and vacation plans...

And reading. Anthologies of 10-minute plays, since I will be teaching them shortly if the class fills, the poetry of Marie Howe, Stanley Kunitz, Three Cups of Tea, and War and Peace--no, I'm not kidding--is sitting there fat and unopened as a whole long summer stretches before us. And Christopher's got The Girl with the dragon Tattoo which I may wrestle away from him. I don't read novels much because once they get their hooks in me I'm a goner. Nothing else gets done until I finish them, and there's too much I have to get done.

Christopher hates it when I use the word "calendar" as a verb, but that's what we've been doing. Sitting on the couch with our datebooks open, scheduling the summer away. We are thinking of going to Manzanar. I know it is the wrong time of year to go to the desert. Maybe we should just go to Yosemite and camp. I want to be out in the trees, sit in the dirt, look at the sky, cook over a little Bunsen burner, float down a river wearing an inflatable life jacket. That's all. That's enough. But it's so freaking complicated just to get our datebooks to align enough to do that!

I'm not actually working much, compared to a normal person--that's what I always think, not sure exactly what normal people i am referring to, since I don't know any, but you know what I mean, people who have 9-5 Monday through Friday jobs. I'm not working 40 hours a week. The problem is I work weekends and evening and other odd times. The problem is that my attention is all snipped up in little tiny pieces like confetti. I spend hours just trying to keep track of myself, or running errands while simultaneously holding lightly the starting line of the next poem, the way a kid holds a worm in his pocket all day in the hope that he might get an hour in the evening to go fishing.

I have flown across country three times this spring to various workshops (plus two local weekend ones), and it was not until just this past Thursday, when I was back in the pool swimming half a mile again finally, that I finally felt my body relax gratefully back into rhythm. This is what home means to me: 36 lengths of the pool, and the predictable warmth and good tiredness in my arms and shoulders afterward. This is where and how I land. Amazing how long it takes to get there.

2010-06-07T09:32:00.000-07:00

Carla's memorial was amazing. More like one of her benefit concerts than a funeral, complete with beautiful music by her "guys," David Rokeach, John Burr and John R., and by Kaila Flexer, and W. Allen Taylor, and two jazz standards sung by her brother Jason (who knew he was such a great singer!) plus one of her original songs sung by Maclen.

It's when Maclen was singing that I personally lost it. She had wanted her memorial to be more laughs than tears, and on balance, I believe it was, although who is holding the scales at a time like that? She'd also instructed her women friends to dress as if for the funeral of an ex-husband whom they were suspected of murdering, i.e. tacky and tawdry and sexy.

Her caregivers did their best, in red lipstick, tight dresses, and outrageous hats. They sat in a row together, sipping at bottles of Budweiser in brown paper bags and alternately laughing and sobbing in each others' arms.

I read a poem by, well, me, which Carla had asked me to do a few weeks before she died. Allen Taylor read a beautiful poem by Naomi Shihab Nye called "Happiness," which perfectly epitomized Carla's spirit and her unconditional joy.

Carla was a huge and serious lover of poetry. True, she had an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture and cheesy television shows, including The Mod Squad and 24. True she could recite many many SNL skits verbatim. But she also had read and deeply contemplated so many poems by Rumi and Hafiz and Naomi Shihab Nye and others that she could quote them at length--and of course she had memorized vast tracts of Shakespeare. I often inflicted "hot off the press" poems on her as I was working on them, and she was always enthusiastically receptive.

Here's the link to the news bit about her memorial. Only a tiny portion of her "farewell video from Heaven" is excerpted on the TV program. There's a lot of it that could never be broadcast on a regular station due to the language: ("Look! There's JFK and Marilyn, f*&%king on that cloud!") It makes me chuckle to think of the television execs viewing the footage and trying to find two minutes without profanity that they could actually use. I imagine (I hope) a complete version of the video will be made available on Youtube or on her blog at some point. But for now here's a taste:

http://www.kron.com/News/HighlightsandInteractions/KRON4MorningNews/tabid/320/Default.aspx

And here is the poem I read for Carla--it's one I had written about watching her perform way back in '08 not many months after she her diagnosis of ALS was confirmed. It's in my book, See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions.)

Tuesday night at Yoshi’s
for Carla, recently diagnosed

Onstage, your hair’s vermilion, your white
shoulders bathed in piano and saxophone.
Everything shimmers, even the jokes about dying.

Down in the dark, glasses clink.
Tuesday night
gleams and hushes to a halt.

We’re listening to you
bright bird, like you’re our last
drop of blood whispering the secret
we always wanted to hear. We’re on the edge
of what we can stand
to take in, and still leaning forward.

Even the stars overhead, bright
ice-chips melting on a black backdrop
freeze for a little moment. As if they knew.

2010-06-04T09:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday--skull splitting impervious-to-aspirin headache and every bone in my body ached from Death Flu. Thoughts of aneurysms (when I could think) danced through my disaster-lovin' mind. I think it was everything in this past month that had come crashing down on me; Carla's death, and all the ways it has been working inside me. Luckily I seem to have burned through the worst of the bug in 24 hours. Sleep, sleep, liquids, and more sleep, and the pain is miraculously almost gone.

Today: grateful for simple things, like the ability to sit upright and type this, a stack of chick flick videos downstairs, a working telephone, and a dear old out-of-state friend whom I haven't seen in years coming for dinner. To say nothing of nice pajamas.

I wrote a class description and signed up to teach a class on the 10-minute play at The Writing Salon. I love this little form, which is a bit like a long poem, an extended riff, a condensed little bonsai of a play. If you know of anyone who would like to play and experiment with this, please send them over to www.writingsalons.com to sign up for it.

And both the classes I am currently teaching there are going well. I like a good lively discussion in my classes, and I'm certainly getting that. I feel challenged--my opinions aren't always automatically deferred to. Is that okay? Am I exerting enough teacherly influence?

My students are adults--opinionated adults, adults who in some cases have taken many classes and studied with a lot of smart writers. I can pass along what I've come to know for myself, but I don't always automatically have the definitive final word critique on any given piece of writing--I have opinions, but they are only that. Works of literature which I disliked have been lauded in print by other people. One woman's meat, etc.

What I think I can do well is create a good container where people can grow intellectually and creatively into their own strengths. That's what I'm there for. Not to impose my own views--much as a certain part of myself would like that--but to provide a rubric for interrogating the assumptions we bring to the page. Encouraging folks to look deeper, look at the underside. What isn't there on the page yet?

Despite concrete feedback that the classes are going well--students have written me emails telling me as much--I still come home feeling insecure some days. Some days I am still in high school. This morning in fact, I woke up feeling that I had dreamed of high school, that time of belonging and not-belonging, frizzy hair, not the right clothes. Time when I swung between ecstatic discoveries--I am a sexual person! I have my own mind! I can create!--to absolute dejected despair--I will never be the most beautiful girl in the room, I won't get the guy in the end, I will always be in some ways an outsider.

And of course I think of Carla in all this. How the mostly girls' group that gathered around her was like a big wonderful clique--wonderful in many ways, challenging sometimes too...how, despite all our caring there were moments of her being on the outside, because the perspective of a dying person who is thinking of things like living wills, and what to do with their ashes, is so fundamentally different than the perspective of a person who is thinking about what am I going to do next summer and should I go back to school.

It was only when she finally connected with other people who also had ALS that she was able to find a place where all of her emotions were completely understood and shared. All those of us who were part of the process were both outside and inside at the same time, going so deeply into another person's life, returning, changed, to our own lives.

And of course that's the thing about high school that you don't know when you're young (or at least I didn't know it): that everyone feels to some degree outside. Even--maybe especially--the kids that look like the most insiders. When Frances and I saw the play "Girlfriend" about two gay teenagers in a small town, it was the jock kid I worried about. The kid who was identifiably gay--who was feminine and poor and never fit in--he was going to be okay. He knew who he was and could deal with it.

It was the kid who was athletic, whom no one would have suspected of being gay, who was expected to be a doctor and have a girlfriend--he was the one who looked like he might explode with everything he was holding in, holding up, holding onto. He was the one with the most to lose--his image, his cool, his illusion of fitting in, "making it" in straight society--and he was the one with the most to gain, an authentic self. The other kid, the uncool outsider? He had never lost his authentic self. For better or for worse he was himself, and that was his great gift.

2010-06-02T10:15:00.000-07:00

For the record: I do not believe that women who can't find good mates necessarily want to be single, or are too picky, or are otherwise sabotaging themselves in the search for love.

I don't believe that people who can't get a book published in today's marketing climate are secretly afraid of success.

I don't believe that the 10 percent of our population who is unemployed wants to be so.

I don't believe poor people are poor because it is a reflection of their inner poverty or an "out-picturing" of their negative thoughts.

I don't believe that people who have cancer or MS or AIDS or any other terrible disease are full of toxic emotions that made them ill or in any way want to be sick. (I think most of us are full of emotions, some of which are indubitably toxic. Some of us were lucky enough to be breast-fed and/or to have inherited strong constitutions. Others drew the short straw in the genetic lottery, and/or had environmental factors that affected them.)

I have friends and acquaintances who are wonderful people who believe we can control our reality by how we think, by diligently "doing our inner work," by going to therapists or life coaches and uncovering all our issues. But that theory--seductive as it may be with its promise of mind over matter control-- doesn't jive with my experience.

I was single for years and years and I wanted to be mated. It's damn hard for a woman over thirty-five to find an available worthy loving man. I had to work hard for fourteen years--and I did: personals ads, going dancing, getting "out there", all the usual and unusual stuff-- before I found Christopher. Even then, I believe there was a strong element of luck involved. For which I am deeply humbly grateful.

I think it's damn hard to get a book published or a play produced. (Even though I have done both, and again, it was a phenomenal amount of hard work plus that luck thing.)

I think it's hard to have a family, especially when you are an alternative kind of person, not employed in a job with health benefits, not married young, to your high school sweetheart, not living within easy reach of supportive family. Not impossible, but difficult. Some people surmount the difficulties, others, for whatever reasons, try like hell and still find themselves unable to. This truth sucks. It hurts. I hate it. Yet I prefer an unpalatable truth to a big nice plate of delicious steaming bullshit.

I don't know why some people have an easier time finding the things that will make them happy in this life. (I say this counting myself lucky and happy and very very grateful.) I wish everyone had what they most needed, and the time to enjoy it.

We humans can create meaning out of dirt. We can find beauty and lessons in deprivation and hardship; we can grow from (almost) anything. But that doesn't mean that we caused or wished for or even needed those difficult circumstances for our growth. I have grown tremendously in three years of deep unconditional love. It's been a lot more fun growing in this way than it was growing alone or dating men who were unavailable.

This is a minority opinion in the Bay Area, but it's my truth and I'm sticking to it. I say, Keep wanting whatever it is you truly want and keep working and trying all the real-world external things you can do to get it. It's worth making a fool of yourself, combing through personals ads, going on blind dates, enduring folk dancing or Sierra Club hikes, or whatever it is you have to put up with to find love. It's worth braving disappointment, rejection and heartache along the way, if that's the cost of the ticket.

Some of the things I once thought I wanted were not the real deal. When I was young and a voracious People magazine reader--all right, I still read it--I wanted very badly to be famous. But I've come to understand that fame is a difficult thing to manage at best and a monster that eats your life at worst. So I'm glad I didn't get that. Semi-obscurity is actually much more workable for a poet.

Love on the other hand has been everything it was cracked up to be and more. It has changed me more profoundly than years of therapy, church or synagogue attendance, or any of the worthy activities I undertook to touch that ache in the center of my soul. Yoga does the same thing for other people; or shamanic journeys, or service work, or even writing. And some people are better off on their own, single. I know that. You don't have to be married to be happy. Hell, for women the statistics say the exact opposite.

But for me, the personal, intimate, one-on-one, domestic, sexual, romantic, stubborn, sometimes frustrating and challenging human love I share with Christopher is what I needed to bring me home to the heart of life. Knowing what I know now, I would go through everything I had to go through again to find him, to make this. I would do it in a heartbeat.

2010-05-30T10:47:00.000-07:00

There was something extraordinary in the air at the Rowe workshop this year. So many incredible people, and the whole thing had a kind of blessing hanging over it. Even though, or perhaps partly because of the sadness of Genie Zeiger's not being there.

Genie was a beautiful poet and essayist who died last Christmas; she was a long-time resident of Western Massachusetts and had created a lot of writerly community with the workshops she held out of her home. She had also made the original connection so that The SUN could get in and do the workshops at Rowe, which have now turned into an annual tradition.

So there were toasts to her honor, and remembrances of her, and some tears shed. There was heartbreak, and it was an extraordinarily beautiful weekend. Both things were true. That is perhaps the most miraculous thing I've learned from being close to Carla in the last few years, that you can have sadness and joy at the same time.

The Monday following Rowe, I visited my 15-year-old nephew's classroom--at his request--and talked about poetry, read a few poems, and answered questions. I was pretty wiped out from the previous weekend, still I wouldn't have missed it for the world. How many 15-year-old boys would want their middle-aged weird poet aunties to come in to their schools--want it and initiate and arrange the visit themselves? Noah made all the arrangements; he talked to his teacher, met me in the lobby, held my hand and walked me to the office to sign me in.

Not to brag or anything, but my nephew is, I think, a new breed of young man--engaged, present, kind, funny, smart, and most of all, not ashamed to be human. I don't remember boys being like that when I was his age--most teenagers, myself included, adopted some kind of facade of fake cool, rolling our eyes and feeling simultaneously alienated and victimized and superior to the adults around us. He exhibits none of that. You can talk to him, one person to another. What a gift.

Then I came home. At the airport Christopher greeted me a little nervously: "There's been um, a new development." One of the feral cats--kittens, really-- had dropped a litter of her own on our front lawn--six babies--and then abandoned them because she was too young to care for them; a barely pubescent mother. She was later seen lurking around the backyard reading Cosmo and doing her fingernails while her babies starved loudly in the front.

Christopher said the sound of their piteous mewling was more than he could bear, he had never heard anything like it. A cacophony of soprano whistles and shrieking. He took them in, set up an elaborate system of two plastic tubs with air holes drilled into them, lay in a supply of towels and newspapers, went out and bought expensive newborn kitty formula, tiny bottles, a funnel, the works--and so I was plunged from minor poet-stardom into newborn kitty care in the space of a few hours.

It was not a graceful transition. Kittens are supposed to be cute. These looked like large rats. They were so frantic to feed they nearly knocked the bottle out of my hand. They scrabbled and climbed on each others' heads in their frantic attempts to survive.

And they had to be fed every three or four hours, and then diddled--there's no other way to say it--to make them pee. Apparently the mother cat, if she's a good mother, licks their nether regions to stimulate elimination. In the absence of a real mother, Christopher and I were reduced to tickling their hindquarters gently while wearing rubber gloves until we were rewarded by a few drops of golden showers. Sorry to be gross, but that was the reality of our situation; hunched over, sitting on an old toolbox (closed) with its handle poking up into our own nether regions, trying to get to the kitty poop before they could get it smeared all over their fur.

They had fleas. They were a squirming writhing mass of naked need. And we couldn't figure out what to do with them. Oakland SPCA won't just take all abandoned kitties automatically. C had to go to work on Wednesday and guess who had to do the daily feedings? He tried to spare me as much as possible, so he ended up doing the very early a.m. feeding and the late-night one--this in addition to setting out food for the seven other feral cats who inhabit our backyard and the one indoor one. Oh, and working full-time.

He was getting haggard. I tried and failed to be saintly. Then I got angry and desperate. I posted our plight on Facebook, and was rewarded with some sage advice, and we ended up surrendering the kittens yesterday at a no-kill shelter in another city. Phew! Last night we finally had our delayed, romantic reunion, and then Christopher slept for ten hours and emerged rosy and beaming.

Now all we have to do is trap and spay the remaining seven and get the four younger ones adopted so we don't go through this again in a few more months. And still the feral cat situation in the city at large continues to spiral out of control.

How did we get into this situation? We just live here. We noticed. Or, to be more accurate, Christopher noticed. He's the cat person. But once you see, are you then responsible to...respond?

"What should I have done?" Christopher asked me. It was a sincere question. He felt bad about turning our home into a feral kitty nursery without consulting me first. "What would you have done?"

The book (and movie, with kate Winslet!) The Reader hinges on this question. An illiterate woman, employed as a Nazi guard is later prosecuted for "just following orders" and continuing to guard a bunch of Jewish prisoners while they burned to death in a locked church. (Sorry for the spoiler, but the movie's been out for over a year.)

She is not exactly evil, but rather, morally blind. Morally illiterate, as well as actually illiterate; she can't "read" the situation, she can't figure out what is right and what is wrong. "What would you have done?" she asks the judge and the jury. It's an honest question, and it angers them. They don't want to think about it.

What would I have done if Christopher hadn't taken the kittens in himself? Would I have walked by them? called Animal Control (they never come, in Oakland.)

I took in a homeless girl once. Although now I sometimes--often--walk right past people begging on the street, there are so many of them. It was a disaster when I took this girl in--and it was also wonderful--just as caring for these kittens was disastrous and wonderful. To make the choice to love something that can't love you back. Like the world.

Working in our yard together last night, after the heat of the day had cooled off and the datura flowers were pouring out their fragrance over the moonlit grass, I felt the presence of wild felines occasionally stalking in the weeds, or vanishing in a graceful leap over the fence. I could see how these elusive profligate creatures make our landscape more beautiful, more alive; how this is also their city as much as it belongs to anyone.

2010-05-26T20:45:00.000-07:00

Nobody has had the heart to say it on their blog yet, so I will. Carla died.

She died peacefully, surrounded by people she loved, who loved her dearly, having been able to say good-bye to so many old and new friends. She died knowing that she made a huge difference in the lives of so many people, including mine. She died having done everything she could do on her "bucket" list (hate that term, but whatever.) She tied up as many loose ends and finished as much business as she could. No one could have used 47 years on this beautiful planet better.

She died way too soon, and she died of a disease that will be curable, or at least much more treatable five years from now, in part due to her efforts raising funds and consciousness to fight ALS.

I don't know why it had to be this way; I don't know why she's not here anymore, and frankly I have a hard time believing it. Even though I was one of the lucky ones that got to say a personal good-bye to her on Friday, May 14th, her last day of being fully awake before she slipped into a coma. She had a great time that day. Her beloved Maclen was by her side, and her caregivers, and good friends came and went. The house was full of love and light--and tears, as well, but plenty of laughter.

She set the bar very very high for living and dying with grace and purpose.

And I still can't quite wrap my head around it. And I still want to talk with her about the Anna Deavere Smith play I just finished reading, "House Arrest", and I want to tell her about my trip to Massachusetts where I taught with other SUN writers at Rowe and had an amazing time, and I want to brag to her about my nephews and nieces who are turning into such interesting and wonderful people, and roll my eyes with her that in my absence Christopher heard six (yes, you read that correctly six) abandoned feral kittens mewing piteously in the tall grass in our yard and felt moved to take them in.

(Their mother is True Dee, the barely-adolescent sister of Trixie who got knocked up the same time Trixie and her other sister My Sharona did. C managed to get Trixie and Sharona aborted and spayed, but True Dee would not be captured and gave birth and then abandoned the babies because she's just too young to know what to do with them.)

They take formula from a tiny bottle. They weigh 300 grams each and sleep in a pile all together--a kitty pudle of black and gray and white arms and legs and six tiny heads. They are gaining in strength and awakeness hourly and all are bent on survival and sucking down as much formula as they can. They all seem to be girls so far as we can make out, although who knows, maybe some of them are boys whose boy parts just aren't big enough to be apparent.

Anyway, we are now officially kitty grand-parents, and C is off to buy a heating pad for them, while I prepare to post photos on Facebook and Craigs List.

I could tell her about that and show her my lightly scratched hands and kitty-pee-stained new pants and she would get a laugh out of it. And even though she's not here, I do tell her, whever she is.

2010-05-14T22:57:00.000-07:00

For Carla

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Truly Great
Stephen Spender

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

2010-05-11T17:33:00.000-07:00

Years ago I saw the AIDS quilt--or part of the AIDS quilt. It's too big to be shown all in one place. How many football fields does it cover now? Anyway, just to see a piece of it was something. To walk around the squares and feel the depth of love and loss was overwhelming. Each of those squares represented a whole person's life. And each square represented the creativity of the families and friends of the person who had died, who cared enough to make a thing of beauty to commemorate their loved one. Some were very simple, with just a name and perhaps an image sewn on. Others looked like they had been designed by a team of theater professionals.

Individually, they were all beautiful. Taken all together...I wish there were another word for overwhelming besides overwhelming.

So it is with Carla's life right now. I know my little piece of it, the square I sewed with her, memories and conversations I will always cherish. But it's only a small piece in what is a phenomenon too big too colorful, too gorgeous and various and painful and shining and hilarious for any one person to take in in its entirety.

There are people all over the continent--and who knows, maybe all over the world-- who have bigger and smaller pieces of relationship with Carla, from all of her students to the mothers in her moms' group, from audience members and folks who only know her from her blog to her intimate family members. And it's all part of this enormous quilt of life that would need an untold number of hundred football fields to show.

The ripples go out and out. This is what it means to be an artist. There's no telling where the ripples end because...maybe they don't. Maybe the people you brush with your creativity, the lives you ignite, go on to ignite other lives and in the end the result in incalculable.

Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes." And so do we all, probably. Very few of us realize as many of our multitudinousness as Carla has, but they are there, even buried. And that vastness of life is available to all of us, heartbreakingly beautiful, shining in the dark...

2010-05-06T09:23:00.000-07:00

Christopher was awarded Teacher of the Year at the Juvenile Hall where he works!

It was recognition given him by his peers, his fellow-teachers, which is the best and truest kind, especially as he has such deep respect for his colleagues, many of whom have been teaching for longer than him. They see on a day-to-day basis the work and love he puts into the kids he teaches, the extra lengths he is happy to go for any of them who shows an interest.

He routinely buys books, magazines, learning supplies, etc for the kids out of his own pocket, and stands up and fights for their rights to a decent education all the time. He never expected to be noticed in a positive way for doing all this.

So the award comes all the sweeter for being a surprise. And of course I am teasing him plenty about it, wondering where the sash and tiara are, and what are the perks that come with this title for moi? Mrs Don't Mess With Me I'm Married To The Teacher of the Year at Juvie, and He's Got Sway?

I am seriously extremely proud of him. Talk about invisible work! Teachers do tremendous work every day for little recognition, and special ed teachers least of all. And teachers like Christopher who works with kids who haven't made it in the outside world and are being groomed to be the next generation of adult prisoners--when he can make a difference there, it's a life.

2010-05-05T12:23:00.000-07:00

I have been honored to see Carla lately. I know so many people are thinking of her and the ending of her blog and what it all means, and that some of them may read this blog as well, so my best report is: she is weaker and thinner--and still completely Carla. Still beautiful, salty, clear, lucid, loving. She is the most clear-eyed person I have ever known. Like a pristine stream running over gray-green pebbles, if said stream also had a proclivity to tell off-color jokes and make fun of Republicans.

I find it hard to look at death, to even wrap my mind around it. When I was five and my father told me "Everyone dies," I remember exactly that my thought was "Won't they all be surprised when I live forever!" Immediate denial, which I guess is how five-year-olds are.

But this. Carla. Her presence is still precious and real and vivid. And she is surrounded by love. The care-takers she has now are tattooed angels of grace.

Like a lot of people I semi-believe in reincarnation without having any idea of how it might work. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence out there that something of us keeps going after death, and I'm game to plant my flag on that.

But I'm not sure that that's the most helpful thing to say to Carla right now (even though she pretty much knows that's what I believe.) My denial of death, or open-mindedness about reincarnation, or whatever you want to call it--this mish-mash of spiritual ideas we're all swimming in. I think what is most precious and useful right now to Carla--and to all of us--is just simple presence. Being with what is. Which is definitely ebb tide, and an inexorable pull out to sea.

If we--if I-- can just sit in that--that and the beauty of this world--that's all we can do right now. When I went walking at dusk the other night in the hills I surreptitiously hugged a Redwood. I was by myself on the path, but then a young man came along walking his dog and I straightened up and pretended I hadn't just been doing what I was doing and he pretended not to notice anything. And we passed each other and nodded good night.

2010-04-30T11:40:00.000-07:00

Friday and the job-free blues are hitting. We saw Grey Gardens last night, not the famous documentary, but the feature film, HBO version, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore. Incredible performances by both women. Chilling. Courageous on their parts to get so deeply under the skin of these disturbed women, and to do it without judgment.

I slept badly and dreamed of--I don't know what I dreamed, exactly. It doesn't take much to swamp my little canoe. The movie showed how the mother's agoraphobia and passivity infected her daughter, and how the two lived out their lives together in a folie a deux. Maybe, maybe, maybe if the daughter had been able to separate--if she had found some kind of magic combination of support and tough love--she might have been able to make a life for herself. But she didn't. And probably couldn't. Although interestingly, she lived a few decades after her mother died and she did finally travel a bit, and even performed, which had been her girlhood dream.

The scenes of the old crumbling decaying mansion were frightening. C started teasing me about my own tendencies to ignore mess and let things go. I am one of those women who can walk in a room and not see dirt--I know this trait is more common among guys, but there are some of us ladies who are like this. I've been living with a slightly cracked car windshield for months and months now, just haven't gotten around to getting it fixed. There are coats that need buttons sewn back on, and bags of books waiting to be donated to the Library, as well as other bags standing around waiting to go to Goodwill. But everyone's life is like this--isn't it? Where's the line between laxness and depression and total stinking madness with 3,000 feral cats and raccoons crawling in through the busted windows and pissing and shitting everywhere? Or, conversely, Between a need for order and OCD?

I remember my 90-year-old grandmother, when we finally moved her out of her apartment, the two-bedroom rent-controlled place in Brooklyn she had lived in for 60 years. The place was so full of antiques and bars of soap that had never been used, candlesticks still in their original boxes, gloves, ditto, frayed velvet couches, knick-knacks and keepsakes and trinkets and treasures. And she was crying and crying about it all, the crushing sense of overwhelm she felt at her incapacity to deal with all her useless precious possessions.

But really the place was stuffed to the brim with loneliness. even the air molecules were fat with it.

I never want to be like that.

I fear what isolation does to a person. Neither Big Edie nor Little Edie ever worked. They came from a class background where women didn't expect to. (Which makes Jackie Onassis' decision to get a job in the publishing industry all the more remarkable, when you think about it.) They were functionally helpless and hardly left that house.

I have worked--a lot--but haven't had a regular job in years. Since the economic downturn poets-in-the-schools work has virtually disappeared, except for some very little pools. It's sort of like that scene in the movie "Fantasia" where the drinking holes for the dinosaurs are drying up because the climate is changing, and then all the dinosaurs die. Except in this case I guess the weaker, more short-sighted dinosaurs die, and the smart dinosaurs figure out how to get day jobs or grants or some other gig that keeps them going.

I have always thought of myself as a resourceful person--I found my first apartment when i was eighteen, and I've had many different jobs, but lately this element of doubt has crept in--can I rise to the demands of our brave new tech-driven world? Do I even want to? Yes, I'm on Facebook and all that and here I am, blogging, but there's a part of me that just wants to go off in a mud hut and chant my poems to the wind. I understand the word "work" in such a literal, primitive way. "Work" to me is washing a sink full of dishes. Making a pot of chili to feed twenty people. Setting off in the morning with a satchel stuffed with lesson plans and driving for an hour and teaching four classes and returning with the same satchel stuffed with a hundred student poems.

I miss Fetzer right now. Not the food--although the food was wonderful--or the gracious grounds. But the being-together with a bunch of other people who do this crazy creative thing as a main thing in their lives. I miss that community of peers. We never really got down to talking economics--Fetzer wanted the creative conversations to be about love and compassion and suffering, trivial stuff like that. But a big question for an artist is how do you support yourself and/or find support? Not just financial--although that's a very big question--but also structural. How do you build a supportive structure into your own writing day?

I came back from Fetzer last week determined to work more on the play. Instead I was hijacked by some poems and spent hours and hours yesterday fussing over the arrangement and re-arrangement of thirty-five lines. I also wrote a short introduction for a book of essays. I also spent some hours weeding--the weeds are up to my hips, I swear, I've never seen anything like it. Grass is cracking the asphalt in the driveway and the porch steps and threatening to take over the house entirely. This wet wet wild weather has yielded a harvest of bunch-grass and wild-ass Mexican purple sage, peppermint and fig leaves and peach blossoms and guava branches and feral cats. Everything swaying and proliferating. C has his camera out constantly, trying to capture it all.

2010-04-27T09:30:00.001-07:00

Fetzer was extraordinary. I'm still not exactly sure how I got to be invited, but there I was with Lauren Artress, the Episcopalian priest of Grace Cathedral in SF and leader of labyrinth journeys in Chartres, and Jennifer Louden, the "comfort queen", and Naseem Rakha, author of The Crying Tree, a book about forgiveness and the death penalty, and Michael Jones, a wonderful Canadian pianist and philosopher, and Paulus Berensohn a potter/poet/philosopher/child of God--I kept wanting to call him "Bacchus" instead of Paulus, which he said was a great compliment; and Kurtis Lamkin the poet and kora player, and Diane Seuss a great poet and distant relative of Dr. Seuss, and and and...

And we didn't have to teach, we didn't have to lead anything. We just had to hang out and talk, have "creative conversations," with each other (Fetzer's term), and be wined and dined. oh! and write too (almost forgot.) Which I did, although not as much as I'd intended. I do feel like the time "seeded" me for future writing. There was tons o' wine flowing freely in the evenings--I thought it was a lot, and then someone from Wing It! pointed out that the Fetzer money comes from their wineries in California--doh!

I didn't drink much because the last time I really indulged--a glass and a half--was Passover, and I inflicted Me and Bobby McGee at top volume on a bunch of lovely Jewish lesbians who had done nothing, really nothing to deserve it. So I thought I'd spare my new friends that experience until they'd had more of a chance to become old(er) friends. Instead I tried to revise The Recruiter (more on that later), and hiked in the woods, and hung out with people, and drank in the beauty.

Michigan in the spring is lovely. Flowering ornamental cherry trees, so stuffed with deep pinkness they look like prom gowns with corsages pinned all over them. There was a lake with deer. Kalamazoo, who knew? there is a lively. close-knit community of poets and writers out there.

I came to the retreat with the intention of tearing The Recruiter down to its bones, disassembling it and putting it all together again--in three days. I had read Suzan-Lori Parks' account of how she wrote Topdog/Underdog in three days--at least a draft of it--and I was determined to follow her example. Didn't happen. I did get some work done on it that I think was good, but the thing feels now as if I'd taken a big greasy engine apart in my living room. I have all these screws and bolts and thingummies and do-hickeys rolling around underfoot and not a clue as to what I'm going to do with them, how I'm going to put the behemoth back together. (Kurtis did tell me a story just as he was about to leave which I think I can use in the piece. And I got the insight that I have to allow humor to be a part of this story. War isn't funny. But people are, and my other plays are funny. There's no reason for this not to be.)

It took me until the retreat was almost over to realize that the point of the week wasn't so much to produce--although I am so very very attached to production--but to have the experience . Okay, it took me a while to get it; I'm slow. Also insecure. What I appreciated most was the chance to make friends with whom I could talk about the writing process as a peer--as well as all the other processes that make our lives. We were also all interviewed on videotape, presumably for Fetzer's archives--and I think they will send me a copy of my interview which I'll share here or on my web site when I get it.

Got back Friday night and Saturday night performed with Wing It! in our show Big Fat Lies. It was a great show! What a rich and juicy topic, just rife with possibilities. Because of course all performing is a "lie" in some ways--performers routinely go on stage feeling tired, stressed, nervous, or whatever, and step into the limelight and become more than they were a minute ago, offstage. Is this a lie, or is it what we'd call "transformation?" How do the "lies" in art serve the purpose of larger truths?

Today--rain, again, surprising for this late in the season, but not unwelcome. Last night I went to read to Carla at bedtime. But first there was parrot-wrangling--her bird, Ronnie (sex indeterminate) was not in the mood to go to bed. Five peanuts and several arm-nips later I tricked him/her into the cage and got the door shut. Then went in and read Billy Collins' latest, Ballistics (Carla's choice). His quiet whimsical, undramatic, but poignant voice was just right for the occasion. How many of the words we poets write are worthy of this kind of purpose?

2010-04-18T18:09:00.000-07:00

Packing for Michigan. Seems like I just did this. Wrapping hair conditioner bottle in plastic bag so it doesn't leak all over my clothes. Wrapping bottle of contact lens fluid, ditto. Yoga pants, grown-up pants, nice shirt, light shirt, T-shirt, warm shirt. A couple of copies of my books to give or trade. Big red journal, little black journal, plenty of pens, socks, underwear. I know I'm forgetting something. Earrings. Deodorant. Toothbrush. Socks. Something light to read on the plane...

2010-04-15T09:36:00.000-07:00

Whoosh! Do you ever have those weeks of things coming together, times when you can actually see and feel confluence, synchronicity, the divine pattern in the way things constellate? I'm in one of those windows right now. Don't know how long it will last--my life has been like that song by Ferron "Ain't Life a Brook," whose chorus goes, "It comes together and it comes apart." Right now is a moment of it coming together. No doubt it will all come apart in another moment, only to reconfigure anew.

We've had house-guests for the last few days, my friend Suzanne and her youngest daughter who is entering U.C. Berkeley in the fall. They were here for a student-parent orientation, and stayed with us. Suzanne is married to my friend Ted who was a VISTA volunteer with me back in 1981-82. Ted worked with Cubans, I worked with Haitians; we lived in separate tiny stiflingly hot houses with roommates and shared (and still share) a kind of Conan the Barbarian sensibility. When he slept over my house we would drag a mattress into the backyard (this was hard-core inner city Miami) and sleep under the stars. When I slept over his house I would lay down a sleeping bag on the floor between him and his roommate Jeremy, while they played a furious game of catch with a small hard rubber ball which always landed perilously close to my head. This was done to help cure me of my insomnia, which Ted also felt would be ameliorated if only I would take up drinking.

Ted is a big bluff New Englander whose family settled Connecticut. I also remember skinny-dipping with him on Miami Beach, within sight of the big fancy tourist hotels, and I remember him doing cannon ball dives from the third floor balcony of another tiny stifling VISTA apartment. We all lived on $75.00 a week, and ate a lot of rice and beans. You can't afford much in the way of entertainment on that kind of salary, so we just hung out and talked for hours. He drove a VW bug that was held together with spit and chewing gum.

So now it's almost thirty years later and Ted married a wonderful grounded funny woman who can hold her own with him, and they have three amazing kids. Suzanne is a nurse, and their whole family has been raised with service work, building homes through Habitat for Humanity. Their oldest daughter has a relationship with an orphanage in Uganda where she has worked several different stints, and their youngest daughter wants to be a doctor with Doctors Without Borders.

I've been in communication with Whirlwind Wheelchairs, and after I dropped Suzanne and their daughter off at the airport I drove out to SFSU to meet with people there and see if I could find a way to go to Haiti with them. As the 8-all would say, "Signs are promising." I met some great people who work in the office, and we talked about how I could serve in several capacities, as interpreter, and as a journalist. I connected with a physical therapist who is planning on going over there this summer; she wants me to tutor her in Creole. It all felt very "meant to be", in the way things do sometimes, where you can just feel the door opening.

I had had a big crazy idea a little while back about bringing Interplayers to Haiti and doing some playing and dancing and healing with survivors, especially kids. When I met the founder of Whirlwind Wheelchairs, who has been in a chair himself, for decades, I felt embarrassed to even mention it to him, as the "office" where we met was filled with different wheelchairs, from every era, and smelled of axle grease like an auto shop. I thought his emphasis was all technical, and that my idea about dance was way too hippie fou-fou. But when I mentioned Axis dance Company and Megan, who is a member of Wing It! who has worked with Axis for years, his face lit up and he said, "She was my teacher." He himself danced with Axis for a year.

It was one of those great moments when I could feel the connections circling round. He hadn't been involved with Axis for years, but he still had a glow when he talked about it. And of course no one who ever meets Megan can help but be transformed by the experience. She is so radiant that everyone always falls in love with her. He and his assistant started talking about my diea as if it were feasible, as if it were going to happen. they said I should start thinking about some other Interplayers to bring. Immediately I thought of Masankho, who only sleeps four hours a night, lives on airplanes, eats whatever is put in front of him, communicates through dance and the drum, and is generally the most adaptable adept leader I know, and of Enver, my Turkman brother, who would be such a joy to work with.

I need physically hardy, low-maintenance colleagues who travel well, and can improvise in intense situations. Both those guys fit the bill. I'll see if there are any women who would like to go also; a French-speaker would be good. But I can share a room with either of those guys and feel as comfortable as with a girlfriend. We're family.

They asked me what I would charge for this and I felt abashed and said my plane fare over and food and board. Then afterward I thought, Wait a minute. I've hardly earned any money this year. I need to start figuring out how to get myself subsidized. I have to get some kind of sponsor or something.

Meanwhile the other thing that's happening is a very tiny theatre group in New York --not in the heart of the city but about half an hour outside of it--is interested in Glitter and Spew and Hot Water. Nothing's definite yet, but I think I'll get at least a staged reading and maybe a small production out of it. The artistic director loves both plays. Again, the financial end of it is liable to be slim to none. I'll be very lucky if I get plane fare out of it. But this is the way things start to happen.

I talked over all of this with Christopher, and his response was completely supportive: "Go for it! I'm happy for you." I was so touched, especially as, if the situation were reversed, I might be feeling clingy and scared in his shoes. And I know that if/when I go to Haiti he'll be concerned for me. But he'll also be excited and interested. Truthfully, one of our issues has been that he's much more independent than I am. I am, as my friend Susan says, "a recovering barnacle." Only I'm not sure that I'm actually in recovery or not. Sometimes I wished for a partner who was more barnacle-like himself so we could nest in and be all inseparable and joned at the hp the way Alan and I were during the first years of our relationship.

But Christopher's response shows me how good I've got it to be with a partner who can handle being on his own (with the cat of course), and who has his own interests and passions separate from me. That gives me so much freedom, and for the first time in a while I feel like I have a good project on which to exercise it. I'll need his help in becoming a better photographer before I go, and perhaps in future we can collaborate on photo-journalistic assignments--in places where the health and sanitary conditions are more stable. He has to be a little more careful about his health than I do.

"You're tough," he encouraged me as we lay on separate couches and talked. "You can handle yourself." Precious words. Exactly what I needed to hear.

And I hope he's right. Although if this trip to Haiti happens, it won't be because of any of my vaunted "toughness" or braggadocio. It will be in the spirit of something bigger than me that is drawing these disparate elements together through me for some larger purpose. I myself am a big frazzled marshmallow who was challenged finding the parking garage. But I do appreciate his vote of confidence. And I believe with all my heart in the power of improvisation.

2010-04-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

This is a photo of me and Lisa Jones, author of the wonderful book, Broken. (Buy it!! Buy ten copies!!) Note the matching hairstyles and glasses, the beautiful aging hippie look. This photo was taken by an Irish poet.

Now I'm back from Denver. Yes, it was fun. Yes, I brought too many clothes (but a girl has to have choices.) Yes, it was overwhelming just to be around so many writers and so many books and magazines.

I'm sure that all the writers there, including people more famous and connected than me, were all probably feeling some version of the same overwhelm. You can just imagine how much Prozac and Ambien run-off was being flushed down those public restroom toilets. Oh and don't forget the Xanax.

There was a huge room with tables and tables and tables and tables for all the litmags and publishers. It contained more reading material than a hundred compulsive print-aholics could consume in a hundred lifetimes. And yet and still the books and poems and essays and plays keep coming. More more more more more. Fiction, poetry, non-fiction (memoirs were HUGE this year, every other panel was about some aspect of memoir. Which makes me glad that I'm not writing one. It seems like there are enough out there. And there's so much more money to be made in poetry).

Unlike 2001, I managed to keep some sense of perspective about the whole thing. Okay, I'm a tiny puny drop in a gigantic ocean. It's a little ego-deflating to contemplate that fact, but also a relief. I stand back and watch all the young, beautiful, brilliant, anxious writers scrambling after university jobs and grants in this bad economy and struggling to balance career and family and-- I take a deep breath. I'm not going to get one of those university jobs. I hope one of these days, someone dumps a little grant money on my head, but that's not going to create or destroy my happiness either. I'm just here. I'll just keep writing and sending things out and living. Nobody owes me anything. I've already had tremendous luck to be published in The Sun, to have two books to my name. Even though I want more--and I always want more, it's my nature--my cup already runneth over.

The SUN reading on Saturday was well-attended considering it was the fourth day of the conference and everyone was pretty well saturated by that point. Ellen Bass, Frances Lefkowitz, Steve Almond, Krista Bremer and Sy Safransky, and I all read--and everyone was terrific! This is noteworthy because more often than not poetry readings can be dreadful, but in this one the audience was fully engaged the whole time, laughing and sighing and applauding. I didn't sell as many books as I would have liked--selling books at AWP is like trying to sell snow cones in Antarctica--but I sold a couple, and I managed to zip up my suitcase despite the swag I'd picked up in the form of free journals and newsletters.

Frances (author of the forthcoming memoir To Have Not) and I had a great time rooming together, very easy, like old friends, and I met some writers whom I had known only from afar and reconnected with some colleagues that I only see every few years, like Cheryl Strayed (author of a wonderful novel called Torch, and a forthcoming memoir, which I think is called Wild), and Leslea Newman, author of Heather Has Two Mommies and millions of other books.

I met Lisa Jones in person, the woman who wrote the wonderful memoir Broken, about her time on an Arapaho reservation in Wyoming, with a remarkable Native American healer. We hung out companionably, again like old friends. There is something about other writers (especially women writers) that feels instantly familiar and intimate to me. We share many of the same characteristics of strong self-will and assertion coupled with almost equally strong self-doubt and tendencies to despair. Those women also know the manic-depressive cycle that writing puts one through, from excitement to desolation and back again, and how the rhythm of the work itself sustains you while the dreams of grandeur predictably elate and then disappoint you. We can communicate in a quick shorthand about the process because we've all been through our own version of it.

The best workshop that I went to was one on the 10-minute play, which is apparently the play most likely to get produced these days (in festivals, along with other 10-minute plays). I have long resisted this form because ten minutes doesn't seem like enough time to do anything interesting or meaningful onstage, but this workshop/panel persuaded me otherwise, and now I have some good ideas for 10-minute plays to write.

At another panel, I heard a young successful woman writer explain that she had made a rule always to have thirty pieces out at all times. that meant either five stories at six different magazines each or thirty different stories at thirty different magazines, or--I don't know. But she was serious as a heart attack and she was making a living (and had two small children!) so i thouhgt, I could do better in terms of having things out. the only problem is that it takes so long for my poems to find their final right form--years and years sometimes.

Another good workshop was called "Scars on my Heart", a presentation by Milspeaks, an organization that helps military people do creative writing in order to express the experiences they've had and heal from PTSD as well as offer the non-military world a glimpse into their world. I'm not a crier, but during the reading of poems by children whose parents were serving (or in some cases had died), I found tears rolling down my cheeks uncontrollably. Also when a retired Vietnam veteran read about things that had happened forty years ago--his voice shaking and sometimes cracking in contrast to his erect military bearing. The more I read and listen, the more I realize how much I have to learn about the stories of men and women at war. And talking to Sy and Frances about what we are willing to reveal versus what feels unspeakable to us, helped me understand better my own connection to violence and why I feel so compelled to write about it.

The Sun people had dinner together--I saw my beloved Angela and her husband Brent--and caught up a little. It was chilly, for the record, and I decided in the end to go with my somewhat dorky Land's End jacket because it is both warm and lightweight, but unfortunately not very hip or stylish. However I don't think anyone but me gave a hoot about what I looked like which is another great consolation of getting older.

Now I'm home, we have had the Church of the New York Times this morning which we worship with coffee and eggs and toast. Out-of-town friends are staying in the guest room and other friends are coming to dinner; I've got a big pot of chili on. It's raining again, a big soaking rain. Good for the depleted reservoirs--they must be rising by now--and the happy green hills, not so much fun to drive around in. I'm grateful to stay home and read and write.

2010-04-06T20:09:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm still here on this site. In fact I'm packing for Denver tomorrow, for the AWP conference. Christopher thinks I am a cool calm and collected traveler but this is not true. It's a myth I have perpetrated on him which in his naivete he bought. Actually it's not so much the traveling I'm nervous about as the prospect of what awaits me when I get there--50,000 writers. An aquarium full of killer whales would be less anxiety provoking. I just printed out the schedule and there are fifteen pages a day of workshops, panels, readings, parties, keynote addresses, etc. That makes forty five pages for all three days I'm there, which is the length of a one-act play.

I am a Libra. Forty-five pages of choices is completely overwhelming to me. I would be much more comfortable with three choices a day. And to have someone assigned to lead me around by the hand and sit with me at meals, and tell me what I should do next.

Of course I am also obsessing about what to wear. It's freezing in Denver right now--literally. Snow and sleet and all that. So do I bring my huge puffy down coat? What happens the next day when the temperatures climb into the fities and then the sixties? Will it be too big and bulky to carry home? I am traveling with about 25 copies of my books. What if I don't sell any and I buy or people give me copies of their own books, and then I have no room in my suitcase for my coat?

I'll have to walk from the hotel to the conference center where the thing is being held. Will it be snowy and slushy out? Should I bring my boots? I can't walk around in boots all day with plantar fasciitis. I need to wear either my sneakers, which might make me feel like a pathetic dork, or my ortho-Merrill's, which might be too flimsy and cold.

I don't want to blow this opportunity, but I'm not sure exactly why I'm going either. I don't have an MFA. I'm not in contention for the academic jobs, which are getting cut now anyway. And I wouldn't leave my house or my husband to take an appointment in Kansas or wherever even if one were offered to me. I might get to sell some books at the SUN reading. And I'll be on a panel with other SUN writers. Which is a good thing professionally. I don't mind reading--I love reading. It's just the milling around in a place that would make Grand central Station look de-populated that scares me.

I like people. Just in manageable numbers. It seems crazy to me to get 50,000 highly sensitive writer-types in one area together at one time. has anyone thought this through? There could be emotional meltdowns, relapses into dangerous addictions, extra-marital affairs, suicide attempts, drunk dialing, and worse. This conference grows exponentially every year. I went nine years ago after my first book came out, and I thought it was too big then.

Christopher is on Spring break, and so we had a quick overnight getaway to a hot springs place that was the scene of our first weekend away when we were dating. The smell of sulphur, the lovely sight of relaxed naked people (I'm a voyeur, I admit it), hills lush as green velvet after the rains, trees on fire with spring--red-tipped, green-tipped, pink. Buds, branches, blossoms, and some still bare and witchy. We passed grazing sheep, goats, cows and horses, bare-twigged almond orchards, and walnit groves. Ate mlunch in a little hole in the wall place in a town of 3,000 people--Esparto. There was a boar's head--a real one--mounted high on the wall.

I started reading Lit by Mary Karr. It's good--of course it's good--but I confess I'm a little weary of addiction memoirs. She's one of the best writers around and if anyone can enliven this subject it's her, but I'm just tired of reading about people with their head in the toilet. I understand, I feel your pain, I too have wasted way too much time on destructive behavior. Now let's just say, okay, we did bad things, and get on to doing better things and write about that. Maybe I need to read Greg Mortensen's Three Cups of Tea instead right now.

Easter Sunday I went into the city, in a deep downpour, to attend a reading of Beckett by Jean Anouilh in my friend Stuart's apartment. I love being around all these drama nerds--and he has actor friends who are fantastic--and reading a piece of great literature together. When I got home, we put the movie Becket onto the Netflix queue along with Man for All Seasons and The Lion in Winter. I am getting my English history this way, in bits and pieces, through plays--a dubious way to get it, since playwrights are known for manipulating facts to suit their dramatic purposes.

As we hiked along a muddy lane at the hot springs place I told Christopher that the English countryside is magical. It's no coincidence that this is the country that has given birth to stories like Lord of the Rings, and the Narnia series and Harry Potter. You just expect a talking rabbit or something to pop up from behind a bush or a hedge. At the risk of sounding like some of the people I make fun of, there's an energy you can feel coming from the land itself.

"Yes," said Christopher. "And those talking rabbits are more attracted to some people than to others."

"Namely?"

"Poets are known to be talking rabbit magnets. That's all."

He brought his camera, of which he is much enamored, and I brought my small one and we took a lot of pictures of trees, bushes, flowers, rocks, and each other. I hope at least some of them come out. It's real Ansel Adams country where we were--the trees were beautifully gnarled and twisted like that--but you need to be Ansel Adams in order to capture them.

2010-03-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, forgive me, but I've been obsessing over names. What's in a name? Everything and nothing. Especially for a writer, whose job it is to give new names to things, or to arrange the names of what is already there so as to peek behind the labels.

When I was a child, my parents had one of those What To Name Your Baby books. I pored over it until it was dog-eared. I named and renamed each of my twelve imaginary children, six boys and six girls. Sometimes, I regret to report, I gave them all names that started with "J" a la that reality show TV family who have 300 children and are still hoping for more pregnancies. In my own defense I will just say that i was ten years old at the time and not even menstruating yet, so I wasn't much of a threat to the planet's overpopulation problem. As soon as I hit Junior High I wised up.

Anyway, I have been thinking about The Blind Side and how sadly appropriate that name was. And how the Sandra Bullock thing is sobering not just because of the men-can-be-such-faithless-dogs-sometimes-and-why-do-smart-women-fall-for-them, but also, just along the lines of anything can and does happen. You think your life is going in one direction, but you were wrong--in an instant it all comes undone. A car accident, a bad diagnosis, a marriage, a divorce. Shit happens.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the title to Love Shack, which was conceived early and stuck, but has never seemed quite right. For one thing as everyone and their brother have pointed out to me, it's the title of a B-52s song. I am so out of it I didn't know that song. Everyone else does though, and from what I understand, that's not necessarily a good thing.

So I've been thinking of what to call the book, and thinking about renaming this blog, because face it, I've been blogging under this name for four and a half years and four hundred and one entries. That's a lot. That's enough.

I thought about Judith-Kate Friedman, a singer-songwriter-activist I know, who calls her production company Patience & Adventure. That's a great name. I wish I had thought of that. I meditated this morning and the names that came floating to me were Clarity & Mischief. I was a little uncertain about the mischief thing, because that can get you into trouble. Mischief can sometimes be malicious, but I do have more than a little Coyote in my nature. And "mischief" makes me think of my ten-year-old nephew with the perpetually dancing brown eyes. Eli is a little entrepreneur and my sister reports that he has set up his first lemonade stand of the season. For fifty cents, you can buy a cup of his elixir, and for an additional quarter you get the "secret recipe." But, Emily reports, he makes it from a mix!! She doesn't know what, if any, the secret ingredient is.

I thought that was hilarious, but when I proposed Clarity & Mischief to Christopher he didn't like it that much. What about "Heroically Annoying"? he asked. Now this is a shameless bid for recognition of his own wit as last night we listened to KPFA while we were doing the dishes. (This was Christopher's idea because he loves Music from the Hearts of Space and Joe Frank--I personally boycott KPFA until they get rid of that whiny creep Dennis Bernstein.)

Anyway, we were waiting for Joe Frank, and there was an earnest young polyamorous woman on explaining how she was a "love warrior," how she loved everyone and everything, how she was going to bring peace on earth by making love with everyone and so on, blah blah blah. I know this is what saints do and where we all aspire in the end, but this lady had such a tone of self-righteousness in her voice that I was torn between laughter and smashing the radio. I said to C, "She's just so full of her own self-importance, she's so self-righteous, she's so KPFA, she's so so so..."

"Heroically annoying," he supplied. Exactly. But not for my blog title.

So then I thought of some overblown titles myself: Divine Fool, which was the name of the very short-lived press Alan and I started a century ago, and which I love because how can you not love the divine fool? And then God help me I thought of the Divine Feminine, which is what I actually worship, but you can't say that, it sounds way too pretentious. In fact, scratch anything with Divine in the title, that is heroically annoying right there.

Then one thing led to another, and I started fooling around with my poem Manifesto, and added the line, "Luck at the eleventh hour." And that seemed right. It reminds me of a book title by Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute which leaped off a bargain table in Harvard Square into my hand thirty-five years ago. I bought that book just because of its title, and met one of my all-time favorite writers.

So I like "Luck at the eleventh hour," both as a title for the new book and as the new blog. I'll start it up within a day or two. It's the full moon, it's Passover, it seems auspicious.

2010-03-28T13:59:00.000-07:00

Carla was wonderful, composed, engaged, and fully present, speaking with the help of a microphone as her voice is weaker now, but still clear. In the midst of her presentation she paused and said, "I can hear the sound of the babies"--there were a lot of young babies present that night--"and their parents soothing them, and the sound of Megan's respirator." Megan is another young woman who is dying of ALS. "And all of those things are life. It's like a symphony," Carla said. And she herself has gone from being a lover of poems to being the poem itself.

Later she went on to quote Rumi, "In the slaughterhouse of love/They kill only the best." She recited the whole poem from memory--it is in what Kim Rosen would call the fourth chamber of her heart. Maclen was there and he acted seamlessly as her voice, taking questions and being charming, informative and thoughtful. It's as if she has transferred all her considerable powers of articulateness and wit and grace over to him, and young as he is, he has picked up the mantle.

Meanwhile, the tiny little flame-tips of green on the tips of the fig tree branches have opened into delectable fans, the color of the inside leaves of Romaine lettuce, a tender light green. And little tiny hard green fig fruits have also appeared--when did that happen?

And we finally finally have a health care bill, not a perfect one, but a huge step nonetheless. Why did it take so long and so much fighting? Was it because it galls the Republican "base" so much that Obama is a competent president? A black man, in strong alliance with some powerful women (Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi) and a gay man (Barney Frank)? Is that what has made these senseless attacks so vituperative?

That's one hypothesis put forward by Frank Rich of the New York Times today at any rate. I can't think of any other reason to be so vociferously hateful about a President trying to take care of uninsured vulnerable people who live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world and can't see a doctor when they need one. I just don't get it.

Meanwhile, I confess, I've been following the story about Sandra Bullock's marriage imploding. Okay, I know this is not about serious literature, but maybe it is--bear with me. I know other beautiful strong generous talented admirable women whose faithless partners betrayed them. I have also been betrayed. It is one of the most insidious forms of pain; you grieve as if for a death, but you are also wracked with self-doubt--why didn't I see this coming? What's wrong with me that this happened? How will I be able to recognize it in the future? How can I protect myself?

(And of course the answer is you can't. You can't protect yourself and still stay open to love. You have to open to the possibility of getting hurt, even that badly, all over again. The only thing you can do is build up your arsenal of self-love, and love your friends and family and animals and the world as hard as you can in the meantime.)

I can't help thinking of the title of her movie The Blind Side. How she herself was blindsided while making it--the metaphorical resonance of that is just too much. You couldn't make this shit up. (We saw The Blind Side the other night. Bullock was very good--I wouldn't have given her the Oscar for it, but she is immensely appealing. The movie was disturbing, though. The young black man was like a formless piece of dough who could be molded to the desires and needs of the white family. There was something more than a little quease-inducing about the way he was valued for his football talent and not really given the chance to be a whole person. And there were virtually no functional black adults in the film--they were all drug addicts and poor and hopeless. The only people with any wholeness and power and strength were white. Yuck!)

I don't know what this latest infidelity scandal has to do with anything, really, except that the cruelty of the way people can and do hurt their intimate partners is breathtaking. I have cried a river and carried on about men who wandered off to sleep with other women after a few months of dating, men who technically owed me nothing. Now I realize they did me a huge favor by showing their true colors early and allowing me to cut my losses and move on. And my losses were nothing compared to what they cost the women who married these grown-up babies and took care of them for years.

In its own way, I think this story has the proportions of a kind of female Shakespearian tragedy: the need for self-protection vs. the need for love. The need to be able to trust vs. the very real disincentives for doing so. This is the story of so many brilliant women. It has been telling itself for centuries. Maybe the problem is not only with men and women, but with marriage and monogamy. Maybe the majority of people--the majority of men anyway--aren't cut out for it, and shouldn't do it. Because you've got to wonder, looking at James, at Tiger Woods, at Bill Clinton, at John Edwards--why did these guys even get married in the first place? Was it for image? For fantasy? What did they imagine they were agreeing to when they took their vows? Were they thinking anything at all?

I'm immersing myself in Sappho these days--rereading her through the eyes of Willis Barnstone's translations. I love her opening prayer to Aphrodite. I want to memorize it. I'm borrowing words and phrases from her and using her as a 2700-years dead collaborator. It's wonderful and a little scary. She has so much power, her words just burn on the page.

And I'm continuing to slowly add layers to the essay on war and violence. Once I'm done with it I'll send it out and turn again to the play.

More cultural things: We saw Humpday, which is a hilarious, sweet, brilliant little film. Rent it! The actors improvised the wonderful dialogue themselves. I'd be interested in following anything director Lynn Sheldrake does. Her approach is fresh, innovative, relaxed, intuitive. And the results are so dead-center honest.

I went yesterday and saw my friend Colleen Tane Nakamoto's show "Soft Tissue" (along with four other solo women performance artists of color.) I've been following her one-woman show for four years watching it get better, deeper, richer, more powerful as she grows along with the material. I've been privileged to have a front-row seat to observe the blossoming of art and artist. Yesterday's version was the most realized yet. And the process continues.

I also just finished reading Nina Wise's book A Big Happy Free Unusual Life or whatever it's called--wonderful book. Just confirms stuff I already know, but I got a couple of good ideas for teaching writing from it.

I also read a memoir Falling by John Taylor who is married to Jeannette Walls who wrote the bestselling book The Glass Castle. Taylor's book is about the demise of his first marriage. He's a good writer as far as description goes--I copied out the opening paragraphs to several of his chapters in order to use them when teaching essay writing--but as a narrator, he comes across as selfish, bigoted, arrogant and unlikeable. I think that's interesting--flies in the face of what we're taught in creating memoir, that we should always make ourselves out to be an appealing narrator. And of course most writers, like most people, want folks to like us. But you know, when you tell the truth, you run the risk of people not liking you. And from the way Taylor presented his side of the story of his marriage in his book, I conclude that I don't like him. But he can really describe a New York neighborhood.

I did feel like I liked Jeannette Walls, very much, after I read her book and google-stalked her, so what does that say? Another brilliant woman with another less-perspicacious man? Or maybe he is better than his book would suggest.

It is the calm before the storm right now--a lazy Sunday morning with Christopher, the cat and The Times. Trixie always tries to steal food off his plate, and sometimes has to be locked away in the kitchen so that he can finish his toast. I am enjoying this peaceful weekend because it will be disrupted soon enough: I'll teach a weekend workshop in Pleasanton, and then go to the conference in Colorado, and then come home and then go to the writer's retreat in Michigan, and then come home and go to another conference in Massachusetts.

And all the while, a trip to Haiti--a long trip, three weeks at the very least, and more I hope-- is simmering on the stove of the possible. I have feelers out to two non-profits, both of which are possibilities. I'm much more excited about the idea of being in Haiti again and doing something, however small, that could be helpful, than in going to all these writing conferences.

And a propos of The Blind Side again, I'm thinking of changing the name of this blog. I named it after my book which just came out this past September. It took years of sending it out before it finally became reality. Now I'm feeling superstitious about the power of a name. At its best See How We Almost Fly suggests not getting off the ground, not soaring. At its worst, maybe crashing, which, since I'm about to fly around the country in the next few months, is a little scary. The poetry manuscript I'm sending out now is called Love Shack. Maybe I should change my blog name to that...

2010-03-17T11:26:00.000-07:00

My friend the incomparable Carla Zilbersmith will be giving a talk about living in gratitude even under totally crap circumstances on Tuesday night the 23rd from 6:30pm - 8:30pm at the Novato Seventh-day Adventist Church, 495 San Marin Drive, Novato, CA. You can email ANightOfGratitude@gmail.com to reserve tickets. If you live in the Bay Area and can go, you should; Carla is not to be missed!

Last night Christopher and I talked about Beethoven while we ate dinner and listened to a CD of his Pathetique and some other works. When Christopher was sixteen he taught himself the Pathetique using sheet music and a recording, practicing over and over. It's a fiendishly difficult piece. There are portions where the pianist's fingers go by in a hummingbird blur. Where did Beethoven get the courage to strike out in such a moody, personal, naked, wild direction that was so different from what had come before? And where did Christopher get the chutzpah to think he could teach it to himself?

"It's the kind of thing only a sixteen-year-old would be insane enough to attempt!" he laughed. "Not at fifty. At fifty you think, 'I'll just do something a bit easier. This thing is going to make my head explode.'"

I am so madly in love with that sixteen-year-old who would go out on a limb for Beethoven. Who had so much passion inside him that no lesser piece of music would do. It reminds me of what I have been re-living as I edit the transcription of the Kim Rosen interview: how, memorizing the work of a genius, learning it by heart, unites your mind with that genius mind. Kim does it by learning great poems by heart. Christopher did it by learning Beethoven.

When I was in my early twenties I lived for six months with dozens of Shakespeare sonnets inside of me because I was in a production called Crooked Eclipses, a theatrical meditation of Shakespeare sonnets. Walking two miles to work over the freezing Mass Ave. bridge in the dead of winter, or shopping at the grocery store, or hauling my wash to the laundromat, lines from the sonnets would arise spontaneously into my consciousness. I miss those days. Most of the sonnets I knew then have frayed away in the past three (!) decades, but the one that is in the fourth chamber of my heart, as Kim puts it, is "Let us not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediment." I have that one till death do us part. The others I greet as old friends when I encounter them here and there.

2010-03-13T10:16:00.000-08:00

I have jokingly said to my students that you need to have a bit of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) in order to be a writer. I actually think this is true of the artist temperament in general. The same glitch in my brain that had me addicted to Web Sudoku, is the same quirk that keeps me knitting like a madwoman for hours on end, is the same mechanism that allows me to obsessively move words around for days on a poem is the same thing that now gets me to the piano to practice.

It took a while to kick in with the piano, mostly because I didn't have enough of a vocabulary to make it worthwhile. And even now all I can do is Louie Louie and a piece of Randy Newman. But it's enough--I begin to sense how music is a huge puzzle and even if I just have a few pieces in my hand, I can turn them over and play with them and I'm itching to possess the next one. Christopher has regaled me with music theory, most of which goes in one ear and out the other, but some of it is sticking. What I love most is using this other part of my brain, the non-verbal part, muscle memory and instinct rather than the sentence-making vocabulary-chewing part I generally dwell in.

I have printed out the lyrics to "Hallelujah"--Gerry asked me what I thought the words meant and I said "No idea," some combination of Leonard Cohen's erotic-Biblical-spiritual shtick--but they are beautiful.

The other night we had some excitement in the neighborhood--seven, count them, seven cop cars on the street outside our house, and a helicopter with searchlight beams circling overhead while a voice on a loudspeaker ordered someone inside the house across the street to "Come out with your hands up." We had been watching The Fog of War--sue me, I felt bad for Robert McNamara. I know that had I been old enough to understand what was going on during the Vietnam Era I would have hated him. I remember the anguish and horror of that war, the daily casualty count in the newspapers, the scenes of napalmed children howling in pain on the evening news.

What I saw in the film though was a man in anguish about the possibility of nuclear war, haunted by how close we came on more than one occasion. One could argue that knowing what he knew he could have and should have done more to stop Johnson from escalating the war in Vietnam--but Johnson was a stubborn man and hindsight is always 20/20. Maybe it's because I'm older, maybe because I still love Obama despite the fact that he seems bent on escalating our military involvement in Afghanistan which I think is a terrible mistake--but I can now hold the concept of fundamentally decent people making bad decisions which result in horrible things happening.

So anyway, there we were pondering the paradox of McNamara's character; meanwhile on the street, a posse of cops were focused on our neighbors. We stepped out on our porch to see what was happening. The mother came out eventually. It was a cold night--I had my down coat on--and she was dressed in a tank top and shorts.

They told her to walk backwards with her hands up, towards the cop car. Talking and arguing. She seemed to be saying, "My son is in the house!" I wondered which son it was. I remember her older son from when he was a teen age boy who would offer to cut our lawn. Her younger son has sickle cell anemia, is small for his age and developmentally delayed.

Another neighbor across the way came out and stood on their fire escape, wrapped up against the cold, silently bearing witness. I knew this family. There was an uncle who had done time in San Quentin who threatened to burn down my house because I wouldn't give him ten dollars once when he rang my bell in the middle of the night. That was one of the reasons why I stopped hanging around with the children, who are all grown up now anyway, with children of their own.

The mother waved at us and called "Hi neighbor!" I think she was glad to have witnesses, in case a Rodney King incident of police brutality developed--which it didn't. At least not that we saw, not that night. After about twenty minutes of standing around, a little blustering on the bullhorns, some cars tried to make their way up the street and were blocked by the phalanx of police. Then, slowly, the mother was let go back into her house (at first they were going to take her away in the cop car and I wondered for what? Child abuse? Or was it a drug bust? There are a lot of drug busts in our neighborhood.)

Then the cop cars left finally, and we turned back to McNamara and the sixties and the seventies and the Vietnam War.

2010-03-10T08:41:00.000-08:00

Trixie has recovered remarkably quickly from her feminine operation. When you compare the time it takes for a woman to heal from a hysterectomy...she's already leaping up after her toy and scrambling over the couches and hiding in the cupboard, less than 48 hours post-surgery. Of course it helps that she's not even one year old yet.

The day is bright and clear and beautiful, the buds on the fig tree are just beginning, like green flames, the peach tree is beginning to flower. Pink blossoms everywhere. Scotch broom not out in full yet in the hills, but it will be soon. Weeds are waist high in the back yard, and no matter how many I pull, ten thousand more grow.

My ideas are like the weeds. I want to teach Shakespeare sonnets in prison, I want to go to Haiti, I'm trying to coordinate poetry at this middle school although my contact is not calling me back, I'm writing new poems for another book and there's another draft yet of the play to do. And upcoming trips: the AWP conference in Denver (a little scary), the Fetzer Institute thing in Michigan (I have no idea what it will be like, but I'm intrigued), the SUN conference in Massachusetts in May. (fun!)

Christopher is patiently teaching me piano, and now that I have mastered Louie Louie, we have moved on to Randy Newman. I'm learning one of my favorite songs, You Can Leave Your Hat On. It has a very repetitive right hand, and a left hand that consists of two or three phrases. I've learned one phrase on the left hand so far which I can play while Christopher does the right hand. I'll progress to the full left hand and then learn the other hand and put them both together.

Something wonderful happens when I am concentrating hard on the music; my brain shuts off. You can't exactly "think" the melody and the rhythm at the same time, everything's happening so fast. You just get it into your muscle memory and trust that and feel it. After a long day focusing on the keyboard it's the best medicine in the world. Gerry is burning a CD for me with k.d. lang's version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah on it so I can learn that too. The lyrics to that song kill me.

2010-03-08T10:42:00.000-08:00

Okay, not that it matters, but I am psyched that The Hurt Locker won best picture and that Kathryn Bigelow won best director, a breakthrough for women in one of the more male-dominated industries. I'm psyched because of all the movies I saw (and I didn't see every picture that was nominated) The Hurt Locker was by far the best. It had real content, it made me feel a range of emotions, some of which surprised me, it put me in the shoes and hearts and bodies of characters whose circumstances are very different from my own. It felt true on an emotional, spiritual and physical level. It brought the war home.

And of course it was technically challenging--without calling attention to itself. I didn't think, "Wow, how did she get all those explosives to go off in that way?" I was so deep inside the reality of the film I wanted to dive under the seat in front of me to avoid flying shrapnel.

And I am proud as hell that a woman pulled this off.

Of the nominated films I saw "Avatar" (beautiful visual effects but the story was...problematic,) Up in the Air, (some very nice moments, and I liked the idea of the story--I liked the structure but the plot had some holes in it that bothered me, and I didn't think it was Oscar-worthy), District 9, (this one was good, they should have a separate award for cheekiest upstart made on a shoestring, plus it was probably the most creative, well-thought-out idea with great metaphorical and political resonance.) Last and least was Inglorious Basterds, (hated it hated it hated it and Quentin Tarantino you do not have permission to use the Holocaust as a prop to jack off to your own disturbed fantasies.)

I plan to see Precious and Up! and Crazy Heart, and maybe The Blind Side as well, if not in theatres then on Netflix.

Meanwhile I got to interview a veteran, an acquaintance of Christopher's, for my play The Recruiter, and I'm up to my eyeballs in a new essay. I dreamed the other night that the third book of poems, Love Shack, got accepted for publication. Wouldn't that be great, if it only took a year or two to get it published instead of eight?

2010-03-06T10:13:00.000-08:00

Last night I dreamed I had a sexual affair with another woman, and rode a motorcycle out to a meeting in order to tryst with her. When I woke up and told Christopher about it, he had three questions: Were you wearing a helmet? (No.) What kind of sex did you have? (Subtext: can I watch? No.) And: what kind of motorcycle was it? (How should I know?)

Such is life at the old homestead.

We figured out that Trixie's peeing the bed might have something to do with the fact that she is furiously and seriously in heat. She humps the floor, Christopher's leg when he stands there mixing cat food, his shoes, anything she can get her little furry body around. She hunches up her back and assumes the position at random moments throughout the day. We can hear Whiny, the big gray tomcat, prowling and yowling out in the yard. I swear they can smell each other through the walls.

So yesterday Christopher brought her in to have her lady parts fixed and right now he's picking her up, poor thing. I still have mixed feelings about what we've done, making her tame and domesticated and dependent on us--and now neutered. On the one hand, being a feral cat in an urban neighborhood is no picnic. I've seen many dead cats on our street over the years, hit by passing cars. It's cold and wet out this winter, and there are a lot of pit bulls, crazy drivers, kids on skateboards, and other scary things. Plus I have no idea how they eat if not for people like Christopher who feed them.

On the other hand she often perches on the back of the sofa looking out the front picture window at the street, as cats do, and I wonder if she is missing her lost freedom. And while there is no percentage in letting her answer nature's call and produce a new litter of feral babies, it also seems cruel to cut off such an essential part of her being. But maybe I am just projecting here. Maybe I am grieving my own fertility and my own lost wildness.

For the last two days we've been hosting one of my oldest friends and her almost-eleven-year-old son. She remembers dinners with my family when we all lived at home, she remembers my mother when my mother could walk, when my mother was a force to be reckoned with, and she remembers me when I was a thirteen-year-old bundle of insecurity and originality, my head a frizzy dandelion full of dreams.

2010-03-02T11:43:00.000-08:00

I hate it that they are referring to the Chilean people who are so desperate for food and water that they are breaking into stores as "looters." A looter in my mind is someone who takes advantage of a catastrophe to steal video games, or fancy electronic gizmos or high-end luxury clothing or something else non-essential. If people are hungry and thirsty and supplies are not being distributed to them, then that's not looting, that's survival. What if some of those people have young children or elderly or sick relatives and they are trying to get food and water for them?

Christopher has been sick for the past two or three days. I made him a big pot of chicken soup with elephant garlic, fresh dill, fresh ginger, carrots, onions, sea salt and the juice of a few limes. I am sure that this will cure the dead. He's been drinking it, as well as reading a memoir by a physicist who became obsessed with the idea of time traveling.

I just finished reading a witty play by my friend Stuart, a drama about the goddess hera set as an English drawing room comedy. I'm beginning to reread Aline Kaminsky-Crumb's autobiography Need More Love. She's the wife of cartoonist R. Crumb, and a brilliant cartoonist in her own right. Her book is plainly-written, funny, poignant and ultimately inspiring because she's a little bull terrier (is that even a real breed?) By that I mean, she's not afraid to be mouthy, gauche, ambitious, lazy, horny, sensual, greedy, determined, and everything else. She completely owns her shadow--maybe even over-owns it. And she is persistent. I find her brave and inspiring.

In other news, our recently-adopted formerly feral kitten Trixie peed the bed the other night. Yes, that would be our bed, the king-size human one. She jumped onto the end of it in the wee (pun intended) hours of the morning, did her thing and jumped off so softly I never heard or felt a thing. In the morning there was this suspiciously-shaped stain down at the bottom of the comforter that smelled muskily of kitty-pee. I rubbed baking soda into it, we soaked it in the sink and I think we got it all out.

Now, the question: why did she do it? As far as I know, cats are fastidious. They only do this kind of thing when they are, you should excuse the expression, pissed. But she's got the life of Riley here. Four square meals a day, kitty toys to play with and tons of stroking and attention. What is going on? Does she miss the great outdoors, the backyard with its rain and snails and tall weeds and her family to play with and fight with? Is her situation as an indoor cat privileged or tragic or both? And how much do cat psychiatrist cost? Oy.

Right now I am taking a tiny break from writing up a "Letter of Interest" about the Haiti idea for my friend Enver who works for an international refugee organization. I've never written a Letter of Interest before and don't know what one is exactly, so I'm just stumbling along, doing my best.

2010-02-25T14:26:00.000-08:00

I wrote the following letter to some friends and collaborators at Interplay (www.interplay.org; www.bodywisdom.org) today:

I look at the New York Times online every morning and the other day there was a picture of a young Haitian woman who had had one leg amputated. The caption said she had been a professional dancer. There are many such new amputees in Haiti now, thousands and thousands of them.

And I started thinking... about how Interplay knows a lot about dancing with physical limitations. How great would it be if a group of Interplayers were to go to Haiti, perhaps bringing prostheses and other supplies to make life easier for a disabled person? What if we were to dance and play with survivors of the earthquake, especially amputees, especially children?

When I was in Haiti years ago, disabled people were carried around on their friends' or relatives' backs, or sometimes they were pulled in little rickety wooden carts. I don't think I saw anyone in a wheelchair the whole time I was there. I wonder if anyone is working on super-affordable low-tech equipment for the thousands of newly-disabled people there? I'm sure someone is, but who?

I don't think this is an idea for right now. Right now the needs there are for food, water, and housing. I am thinking a year or a year and a half from now. I would like to go over earlier, maybe with Habitat for Humanity, or maybe with the Haitian support organization that exists here in the Bay Area (I forget their name, they spoke at my synagogue the other week.) I think I could act as a liason and scout out contacts to see if this idea would be even feasible.

I stayed in Haiti for two weeks back in the early eighties with a friend. We traveled on the Tab-Tab's (local trucks which are used to transport people, and are usually loaded to the gills and running on unpaved, rocky mountain roads,) and rented rooms with mud walls and cots and a toilet down the hall for about two dollars a night.

I don't know what exists there now, but my sense is that things have not improved in recent years, and the earthquake destroyed a lot of living spaces. So whoever wanted to go would have to be pretty hardy and up for sleeping conditions that might resemble camping more than a hotel stay. There could also be a health threat from multi-drug resistant TB, since the main hospital where TB patients were housed collapsed and many of the patients who could walk simply left without taking their full course of meds. That is a real danger. (Read Tracy Kidder's excellent book Mountains Beyond Mountains for more on TB and AIDS in Haiti, and on Dr. Paul Farmer.) It would be a more rugged experience than our trip to Malawi, although the plane trip would be a lot shorter.

I wouldn't want to bring a large group, just a couple of very strong, very flexible Interplayers who had skills in rhythm, dance, music, and healing. I'm fluent in Creole and could provide translation services plus the other stuff I do; including storytelling facilitation. Once upon a time I used to know some Haitian folk songs--my students taught me--it's been so long I've forgotten, but I'm sure it would come back.

I know Interplay and Body Wisdom are pretty broke right now and my personal financial picture isn't that strong either. Thanks to all the cutbacks in education, I'm more under-employed than usual. That's why I was thinking a grant might be a good thing.

So...anyone else interested in this idea? Wanna brainstorm? Wanna jump on the bandwagon? Feel free to forward this email to whomever you think might be interested in collaborating. As I said, this is for 2011 or 2012, not this year. But great things could come out of it.

Love,
Alison

2010-02-24T08:41:00.001-08:00

Woke up way too early--before 5--and couldn't get back to sleep so here I am, all coffee-d up and pretty tired, at my desk. I swam three-quarters of a mile yesterday, at 6:00 p.m. You'd think that would make for a good long sleep, but sometimes exercise too close to bedtime has the opposite effect. I'm not losing any weight from this either, because I'm still eating sugar--but my shoulders are looking muy buff.

Yesterday I drove an hour through the pouring rain to interview Kim Rosen, the author of Saved By A Poem. It was so worth it! We spoke deeply about the role that poetry plays in different cultures, how learning poems by heart can align people physically, emotionally, and spiritually, the origins of poetic language, poetry and Bernie Madoff, dreams of poetry-diplomacy, poetry in Kenya with Maasi tribespeople, poetry in Ireland, in Uruguay, poetry at the Superdome in New Orleans a month after Katrina and so much more.

Even though editors at The Sun were somewhat lukewarm on this topic when I first proposed it, I think they will love it when the interview is typed up. At least I hope they will. I loved our conversation, and I felt lucky to be part of it. The best part of being an artist for me is the conversations you get to have before during after and through the art. And the connections and the relationships that grow out of it.

Today: send Love Shack to the remaining small presses on my list, buy apples and beer, write introduction to the interview while it is still fresh in my mind, take a nap. And the rain goes on...

2010-02-22T18:02:00.001-08:00

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the phrase "inner work"? It's a term one hears a lot around the Bay Area, usually in a thinly-masked judgmental way, such as "he or she is or isn't doing their inner work." As if the person pronouncing this diagnosis could know what was going on inside another human being!

Or, "If you are doing your inner work, you'll be okay when the big earthquake hits/you receive a terrible diagnosis/your pet/parent/lover dies/leaves." (This, by the way, is bullshit. No matter how much you meditate or eat tofu or visualize little green people, or whatever it is you do, dying is still scary, losing things is still painful, and people leaving you still sucks. Even for the Dalai Lama, who, I think we can all agree, is someone who has Done His Work--for many lifetimes. You don't get out of being human. Not if you were born in a body.)

I hate, hate, hate this expressions, which is almost a byword on the lips of most of my dear sweet super-conscious friends. When I hear someone talk about "inner work" I want to reach for the Ding Dongs and beer--and I don't even like beer! I want to watch World Wrestling Federation on TV. I want to go disrupt a seance.

Fuck "inner work." Just live your life and be as kind as you can. Reflection? Sure. Seeing where you are the author of your own problems? Bring it on. Apologizing when you've fucked up and hurt somebody? Absolutely. People have been doing this stuff all along. It's nothing fancy. It used to not be called "inner work." It used to be called "being a mensch", or, more negatively, "trying not to be too big of an asshole."

This is the philosophy I subscribe to. Try not to be too big of an asshole. If you make a mistake, apologize as quickly as possible, and make amends wherever you can. Repeat as often as necessary. That's it. The rest is commentary.

Calling your life "inner work" implies some kind of special spiritual heavy lifting that only the initiated few are special enough to participate in. There's something self-serving in it, as the implication is always that the person talking about "inner work" is of course doing it. It's like giving yourself a gold star. It implies that the guy who goes to work and comes home and watches a ball game and loves his family and is reasonably nice most of the time is somehow lacking. And that the New Age self-appointed prophet whose ethics and relationships are a mess has some kind of corner on integrity because they sit on a meditation cushion, or collect crystals, or get their chart done.

Personally, I'd rather hang out with the woman who picks up garbage at the side of the road than any "inner work" guru. I'd rather hang out with an eight-year-old. Or a gerbil. Or a pine tree, or a feral cat.

2010-02-19T11:57:00.000-08:00

We went to hear Eve Ensler speak last night, at a benefit for KPFA. She was completely inspiring--in fact, she was not just inspiring, she embodied inspiration altogether. What a privilege to witness someone who is really in service to an energy greater than herself, a servant of the Divine Feminine. As she puts it, "Vaginas took me over and had their way with me." Now she is devoting her life to ending violence against women.

She speaks out ceaselessly about the rapes and torture going on in the Congo--rape as a weapon of war, and also about the wars women wage against our own bodies because we have been so deeply inculcated with unattainable images of perfection. (For more information on this, if you go to nytimes.com and type Nicholas Kristof into the search engine, he has reported extensively on this. Or go to the Huffington Post and search out Eve Ensler.)

I got to meet her for a minute backstage and she is also really pretty! She is in her late fifties but her skin is fresh and rosy like a young girls'--she glows. And she was totally present and warm and gracious even though there were hundreds of people lined up waiting for her to sign their books.

I was pleased and touched that Christopher accompanied me to hear her speak. There were a handful of men in the audience, but of course it was very estrogen-heavy. There were a bunch of girls from Berkeley High who had been involved in a production of The Vagina Monologues there--certainly no one was doing that kind of theatre when I was in high school! Ensler spoke about giving up security, or the illusion of security. I find her inspiring and terrifying. The terror is like the terror of standing at the edge of a high mountain. Part of me wants to jump off and fly the way she does, the other part clings to home.

Her latest book is called I Am An Emotional Creature. It is a poetic defense and support of girls, and their emotional lives. Their (our) passion, depth, empathy and intensity. Many of us have had to learn to tone these things down as we grew into adult women. Some of us (me) have even learned to shut them off. Yet I certainly was a tearful, passionate, boisterous, humorous and intense girl in my day. And somewhere that girl lives on inside of me.

I wish to report on the status of the kitty names in our family. We are adopting Trixie (yes, Christopher won that one.) Her little black sister is My Sharona. Her big white and black sister is True Dee (Trudie, for Gertrude Stein--I wanted Trudie and Trixie, get it?) and the mother cat is named True Dat--homage to The Wire. The father cat, who is enormous, is named Tiny, and the other male cat who prowls around and may have fathered some of the other strays is Whiny, because he yowls all the time.

It's true that I lived here for ten years before Christopher and there were feral cats the whole time but I didn't take much note of them, because despite the fifty cans of cat food which I lugged home from Trader Joe's the other week, I am still officially Not A Cat Person. But I have to admit Trixie is very cute, with her tiger coat and white diamond chest. And to see her cuddling in Christopher's arms and hear her purr and witness his joy is to see true love in action.

2010-02-18T11:07:00.000-08:00

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Seven hours in an underground office in S.F. yesterday at a training to learn to interview other people involved in the artist-in-the-schools biz. I'm interested in this study, which will gather data from artists, principals of schools, program directors and use it to hopefully validate the contributions resident artists make, improve working conditions for us and perhaps institute a credentialing process for our profession.

I think many poets and artists in the schools are like me, somewhat anarchic spirits who have a hard time fitting in to institutions. (Of course most human beings have a hard time fitting into institutions so I don't know what makes us so special...)

I do know that while I can be very dogged in pursuing goals and staying the course, I have "spurt energy" when it comes to hard work. That is I can be very intense, learn a lot, work hard, go all out on one day--and then I can't get out of bed the next. I wish I were not like this. I admire people who can pour it on, day after day after day. But after seven hours in said basement room and then another four or so hours at Interplayce, I found that the car was driving itself back home. luckily it knows how to get there. I ate some salad at 10 p.m. with Christopher and crashed into bed, beat, winded spent.

2010-02-14T22:07:00.000-08:00

Picnic today at the marina. Yellow wildflowers covering the hills and all kinds of people out flying kites. Little kids furiously pedaling their bikes and trikes, chihuahuas and poodles, mutts and Labradors, sheepdogs, retrievers, Huskies and pit bulls sniffing out the ground squirrels and the gophers and being tugged away from the owls' special protected area. The sun came out and burned off the fog and folks were in t-shirts and tank tops. The kite-seller sold kites from his truck, and we lugged a picnic under a tree and ate overlooking the water.

When we were first dating, before we'd even had any sleep-overs, we had a series of picnics by Lake Merritt. We'd meet early on Sunday mornings by the Grand Lake movie Theater. C would be carrying a shopping bag with a thermos of steaming hot coffee, half 'n half, cheese, salami, hard-boiled eggs. I'd bring good bread and fruit and dark chocolate. We'd sit on a bench and eat and people-watch and then walk around the lake, talking. That was our courtship. After he moved in with me it was easier just to spend Sunday mornings with The New York Times spread all over the living room floor, but today we resurrected the old ritual.

I don't like the obligatory holiday thing and both of us were preoccupied and not in a mood for present-buying or receiving, so that was our present to each other; just a sweet picnic and the luxury of time. That's enough. Also, I gave him a challenge. He's recently fallen in love with photography and I suggested he take a picture a day for a year. I said I would try to write a poem a day for the same amount of time--starting now.

I read somewhere that e.e. cummings wrote a poem a day for fourteen years. I have no idea if that's true or not. I know Robert Bly did something similar, and of course William Stafford was famous for getting up at 4 a.m. and writing poems every day while the sun rose. The idea of making a commitment like that scares me which is why I think I should do it.

So I offer this Valentine's day dare to anyone who wants it: do the thing you love every day for a year, whether it's yoga practice, making a picture, writing a poem, singing a song, or whatever your thing is. Just do it every day. See how that shapes your year.

And I found this poem by Andrea Gibson today on the Huffington Post. Enjoy!

Say Yes

when two violins are placed in a room 
if a chord on one violin is struck 
the other violin will sound the note 
if this is your definition of hope 
this is for you 
the ones who know how powerful we are 
who know we can sound the music in the people around us 
simply by playing our own strings 
for the ones who sing life into broken wings 
open their chests and offer their breath 
as wind on a still day when nothing seems to be moving 
spare those intent on proving god is dead 
for you when your fingers are red 
from clutching your heart 
so it will beat faster 
for the time you mastered the art of giving yourself for the sake of someone else 
for the ones who have felt what it is to crush the lies 
and lift truth so high the steeples bow to the sky 
this is for you 
this is also for the people who wake early to watch flowers bloom 
who notice the moon at noon on a day when the world 
has slapped them in the face with its lack of light 
for the mothers who feed their children first 
and thirst for nothing when they're full

this is for women 
and for the men who taught me only women bleed with the moon 
but there are men who cry when women bleed 
men who bleed from women's wounds 
and this is for that moon 
on the nights she seems hung by a noose 
for the people who cut her loose 
and for the people still waiting for the rope to burn
about to learn they have scissors in their hands

this is for the man who showed me 
the hardest thing about having nothing 
is having nothing to give 
who said the only reason to live is to give ourselves away 
so this is for the day we'll quit or jobs and work for something real 
we'll feel for sunshine in the shadows
look for sunrays in the shade 
this is for the people who rattle the cage that slave wage built 
and for the ones who didn't know the filth until tonight 
but right now are beginning songs that sound something like
people turning their porch lights on and calling the homeless back home

this is for all the shit we own 
and for the day we'll learn how much we have 
when we learn to give that shit away 
this is for doubt becoming faith 
for falling from grace and climbing back up 
for trading our silver platters for something that matters
like the gold that shines from our hands when we hold each other

this is for the grandmother who walked a thousand miles on broken glass
to find that single patch of grass to plant a family tree 
where the fruit would grow to laugh 
for the ones who know the math of war 
has always been subtraction 
so they live like an action of addition 
for you when you give like every star is wishing on you 
and for the people still wishing on stars 
this is for you too

this is for the times you went through hell so someone else wouldn't have to 
for the time you taught a 14 year old girl she was powerful 
this is for the time you taught a 14 year old boy he was beautiful 
for the radical anarchist asking a republican to dance 
cause what's the chance of everyone moving from right to left 
if the only moves they see are NBC and CBS
this is for the no becoming yes 
for scars becoming breath 
for saying i love you to people who will never say it to us 
for scraping away the rust and remembering how to shine 
for the dime you gave away when you didn't have a penny 
for the many beautiful things we do 
for every song we've ever sung 
for refusing to believe in miracles 
because miracles are the impossible coming true
and everything is possible

this is for the possibility that guides us 
and for the possibilities still waiting to sing 
and spread their wings inside us 
cause tonight saturn is on his knees 
proposing with all of his ten thousand rings 
that whatever song we've been singing we sing even more
the world needs us right now more than it ever has before 
pull all your strings 
play every chord 
if you're writing letters to the prisoners 
start tearing down the bars 
if you're handing our flashlights in the dark 
start handing our stars 
never go a second hushing the percussion of your heart 
play loud 
play like you know the clouds have left too many people cold and broken 
and you're their last chance for sun 
play like there's no time for hoping brighter days will come 
play like the apocalypse is only 4...3...2 
but you have a drum in your chest that could save us 
you have a song like a breath that could raise us
like the sunrise into a dark sky that cries to be blue
play like you know we won't survive if you don't
but we will if you do
play like saturn is on his knees
proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that we give every single breath
this is for saying-yes

this is for saying-yes

--Andrea Gibson

2010-02-11T11:47:00.000-08:00

Don't hate me snow-besieged East Coast friends and family, but Spring has come to the Bay Area. The cherry trees have popped out in their pink pom-poms, like a bunch of raw young cheerleaders. It's still overcast and threatening to rain--and may it rain more and more! we need it--but buds are budding, things are flowering, and in the moments when the sun shines it's clear that it's spring.

I celebrate every New Year possible, Jewish, Roman, pagan--but Chinese New Year always feel like the most appropriate one, because the days are finally recognizably longer, sap is running, and the new year has really begun. On January 1 we are still in the underbelly of the dark, shooting off fireworks and trying to have faith.

I got to see Carla for a few minutes last Saturday--first time in weeks. I told her about Trixie and about how someday I want to have a little dust-mop of a dog and name him Chekhov, and she accused me of trying to ruin dogs. "Dogs are supposed to be light and fun and uncomplicated," she said. "By naming a dog 'Chekhov', you are invoking darkness and layers of subtext. Dogs are not supposed to have subtext. They're just supposed to wag their tails and lick your face."

Okay, she has a point. But it's totally moot in any case, as 'Chekhov" is a future conditional tense kind of dog. Right now what we have is a still-skittish kitty--although she now lets me pet her before and after administering treats--and her sisters, the feral cats outside. I wonder if Trixie misses the great outdoors, as she prowls around our house exploring and crying. I wonder if her mother and sisters wish they could be her, trapped in comfort with three squares a day, or if they'd rather take their chances in the wet wide wonderful world of the backyard, where they leap fences, chase birds and brave the hazards of outdoor city living?

I also saw my Little Sister this weekend--it was a good visit. She was scared of the new cat at first and held my hand when we went down to the garage to say hi. Then she painted a picture and made a card for her church auntie, and we played checkers and Monopoly (world's most tedious game.) She was sweet and funny and fun to be with (although she hella cheats!) She has a grand disregard for money. When I landed on one of her properties, she wouldn't charge me rent, and when she had to pay me for anything, she'd say, "Keep the change. I don't want your money." On the other hand, when she landed in jail, she would redo her steps stopping short just before the jail cell, or jumping over it.

Last night I went to Interplayce to hear a presentation by Dr. Ginny Whitelaw who is an astrophysicist who used to work for NASA. She has written a book called Move To Greatness about the four energy types--in Interplay we call them Thruster, Hanger, Shaper and Swinger, although she has renamed them The Driver, The Visionary, The Organizer, and The Collaborator.

The Thruster, or Driver type is just what it sounds like--very focused, driving ahead towards a goal, looking neither left nor right, tendency to be impatient, tendency to run over other people, gets the job done, protective. The physical base for this type is at the bottom of the belly, I guess what yogis would call the first chakra, to mix a metaphor or two.

The Hanger, or Visionary, which is my primary type, is in some ways the Thruster's polar opposite. The movement style of the Hanger is non-repetitive, non-patterned, sometimes frustratingly inconsistent or elusive. "Marches to his or her own drummer." Big picture, connection to all that is, not so good on details. Ease, support, flow. Sometimes low energy or spacey.

(I should have said that while we each have a primary, preferred energy type, we embody all of them. Although my primary type is Hanger, my secondary strength is Thruster--that's how I get my manuscripts out into the world.)

Then there's the Shaper, or Organizer, which is what I think Christopher is. Does the right thing, loves order, pattern, rightness, ethics. Exceedingly conscientious. Hard on self for any perceived mistake. Needs a lot of affirmation. Needs to know what the rules are--the right rules--or the recipe, or the map. When C moved in with me, he made a blueprint of the house and made little paper cut-outs of his pianos and he measured everything and figured out where it would all go. Before he even moved. I was beyond impressed. Awestruck is more like it.

Our differences drive us crazy--I don't cook with recipes, he reveres them, and you can extrapolate from there--but they are also instructive. I would like to be more like him. Even though I chafe at routine, his ability to create a ritually nice environment by arranging flowers in a vase, lighting candles, putting on the right music, creates a safe cozy home for us. And I trust him down to the ground. His ethics are impeccable.

The fourth pattern is The Swinger or the Collaborator. This one's center of movement is side to side, lateral--think figure eights, think swing dancing. Lively, fun, upbeat, relational. Can juggle many tasks, people, activities. Hand to hand to hand, like a monkey swinging through trees. This one has the energy I wish I had, the energy I would like to cultivate, light, lithe, delicious. On the other hand I guess the Collaborator could get overwhelmed, and have problems with boundaries. or with having to be alone, or with standing against the group. Maybe it would be hard for the collaborator to pull off a solo project of their own vision. I don't know. I suspect they have the most fun, though.

2010-02-08T14:41:00.001-08:00

Today, Christopher and I went to a memorial service for a former high school student of C's who was killed in Iraq ten days ago at the age of twenty-four. It was held in a Catholic church out in Clayton. We drove past green rolling hills, and the views of beautiful mountain ranges to get there.

Friends and family members spoke; as we entered the church the young man's former scout-master was speaking about the boy as an eagle scout, the badges he earned, the trouble he got into. He choked up as he was speaking, and at several points had to stop and cry. There were a lot of tears. I don't know how you begin to mourn for a twenty-four year old, someone barely on the cusp of adult life.

The Army sends a superior officer to each funeral of a fallen soldier to speak. This sergeant was a woman. I was impressed (and surprised, I admit) by how sensitive and thoughtful she was. She quoted Joseph Campbell and spoke about heroism. The part that felt creepy was when she thanked the family for their "sacrifice." If it had been my brother, son or husband, I would have screamed, "It was not my choice to sacrifice this beautiful man for this stupid war!" But I'm not in their shoes. I held Christopher's hand and the whole congregation stood up to honor her.

They presented the mother and widow with two posthumous medals. All was done formally and stiffly by officers in full dress uniform, in silence broken only by muffled weeping. The reception afterward was hosted by Blue Star mothers, women whose children are serving in the military. When a soldier is killed his or her mother becomes a Gold Star mother. I talked with one of the Blue Star mothers and asked so many questions that she asked me if I had a child in the military. No, I said, I am writing a play about soldiers and their relationships with their mothers.

She lit up and said I could come to a meeting. I said I wouldn't want to intrude and she said, Oh no, we would love to talk to you about our experiences. For my part, I am excited and a little nervous --in a good way. The nervousness of crossing an important threshold.

2010-02-04T11:03:00.000-08:00

I am trying to compile a simple list of poems published in the last seven years plus the magazines and dates and serial numbers of the magazines where they were published. Simple clerical work for the NEA application which a dear friend is helping me with. I am procrastinating doing this task by blogging about it.

I've got a pile of colorful journals which no one ever reads except the people who publish in them, at my elbow, balanced between a mug of hot water, stray pens, address books, post-its, small spiral notebooks, dental floss and vitamins. It doesn't matter much to me whether I published this little poem or that little poem in 2006 or 2007, in Kalliope or in Hanging Loose. The artful little journals, which occupy their own shelf in the wooden bookcase in the hallway, are beginning to overflow a little now from the long accumulation of publishing cred, poem by poem, essay by essay. It's necessary to building an identity as a writer, but does not do much towards building a life.

I paid for and got a rigorous critique of my play The Recruiter (yes, another one.) My critique-r had good specific things to say which made me hungry to go back into the work. Meanwhile, I need to apply for this grant and think about jobs. The problem is this: I already have work. I have bunches of little poetry gigs and teaching-writing gigs, and a few weekend workshops, and-- And they don't add up to enough money to live on or adopt a child on or anything, but they took a long time to get and build and cultivate and they require administrative energy to keep going.

And I really enjoy, for instance, my Monday evening essay class at The Writing Salon in Berkeley. Those students are delightful, we're having a great time and learning a lot. So what am I complaining about? Well, not complaining exactly--alright, kind of complaining--but it's like I'm the monkey with his hand caught in the jar of peanuts that is this ring of the teaching-creative-writing world. I don't want to let go of what I have, and yet it's not really sustaining me either.

In my alternate-life fantasies I have a Master's of Public Health and work for Doctors Without Borders. I do something truly useful, something which demands all of myself. In another alternate life I am a truly successful playwright (is there such a thing?) who gets to play in rehearsals with brilliant actors and directors.

I mentioned in an earlier blog how impressed I am with Lynn Nottage's work. I haven't seen it on stage yet, but I am good at reading a play and seeing and hearing it in my imagination the way some people I know can look at blueprints and imagine the finished building.

Nottage is the best I've ever read--and that's saying a lot. I went to her web site and saw the schedule there and she has things opening everywhere, here a new play, there a revival of something older. And of course her newest play involved visiting women of the Congo and hearing their stories and writing them which seems like it has some social benefit as well, not just creative narcissism.

Anyway, yesterday I got my copy of Tony Hoagland's latest book of poetry Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, and he's another one whose social commentary is worth the trees that were chopped down to make his books. (Incidentally, I have no idea what the title means. I combed all through the book, read every poem, laughed, cried, grunted, chuckled, and sighed--and never saw any mention of a Honda Dynasty at all. As someone who struggles with titles myself, I wonder: was it part of a poem which didn't make the final cut? Is it a reference to those of us who drive Hondas? What's the deal with the mysterious title, Tony??)

But the poems are wonderful. He deals very explicitly in this book with the bloatedness and loneliness and selfishness and privilege and irony and pathos of being American in the twenty-first century, and he mostly does it with compassion and a gentle fury in which he implicates himself first. In his earlier books I felt he was the best poet of the contemporary male experience I had ever read. He still is, but in this book it's more explicitly about his and our Americanness. There's less sexual seeking in this book, and more about Nature which I really love. I think he might be my favorite poet.

Here's one from an earlier book:

Wasteful Gesture Only Not

Ruth visits her mother’s grave in the California hills.
She knows her mother isn’t there but the rectangle of grass
marks off the place where the memories are kept,

like a library book named Dorothy.
Some of the chapters might be: Dorothy:
Better Bird-Watcher Than Cook;

Dorothy, Wife and Atheist;
Passionate Recycler Dorothy, Here Lies But Not.
In the summer hills, where the tall tough grass

reminds you of persistence
and the endless wind
reminds you of indifference,

Ruth brings batches of white roses,
extravagant gesture not entirely wasteful
because as soon as she is gone she knows
the deer come out of the woods to eat them.

What was made for the eye
goes into the mouth,
thinks Ruth to herself as she drives away,
and in bed when she tries to remember her mother,

she drifts instead to the roses,
and when she thinks about the roses she
sees instead the deer chewing them—

pale petals of the roses in the dark
warm bellies of the sleeping deer—
that’s what going to sleep is like.

--Tony Hoagland

2010-02-01T12:11:00.000-08:00

My Husband's New Girlfriend

Christopher has a new love. She's gray-and-black tiger-striped with four little white sock feet. Of all the feral cats, she is the most aggressive, curious, and willing to come inside and be tamed. He has been courting her for weeks with greenies and canned smoked oysters, so that she now consents to live under our roof--in the garage still, but she has ventured upstairs and started exploring the kitchen, living room and dining room.

She even rubs against his leg and purrs, although when I come into the room she runs away. This despite the fact that he took her to the vet, (which she's already forgiven and forgotten in her tiny pea-sized cat brain) while I have never done anything bad to her. Not that I'm jealous. Not at all.

Her name, I regret to report, seems to be shaping up to be Trixie, who was a character on The Honeymooners and is also the name of one of the nicer whores on the HBO show Deadwood.

I was voting for Maggie, as in Elizabeth Taylor's character in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, but I was voted down. She was Mollie for a day or two, which I also liked, but which Big Daddy also ultimately vetoed. I also thought Eartha would be good (Eartha Kitt? Get it?) but no dice. And my original name for her, "Jane Austen" was nixed on the grounds that she doesn't look like Jane Austen. Well who does?

Now he's trying to get around my objections to Trixie ("It just doesn't have any gravitas." "Well, what do you expect? She's a feral cat!") by saying that the name just "came to him from afar" which I think is Christopher's best bullshit approximation of New Age speak and which I am not buying.

But I think she will ultimately end up being Trixie, because despite the fact that I bought and hauled forty pounds of cat food back from the store the other day, and despite my best efforts to curry favor by also offering greenies and clucking my tongue, the truth is, he is the cat man and all the kitties know it. He speaks their language, understands their mysterious and nefarious thoughts and is generally the go-to guy in the leg-rubbing and purring departments. I'm the red-headed stepmother. Ah well...

A few nights ago I saw It's Complicated with a couple of girlfriends. This movie establishes once and for all that Meryl Streep looks good in Eileen Fisher clothing.

What struck all three of us was the unrelenting gigglieness of Streep's character and the way she never really stood up to Alec Baldwin's assholic ex-husband. She would say "No," and then he would override her boundaries and she would roll over. Again and again and again.

It was distressing to watch that, but more distressing to address the deeper issue of how many times have I done that in my own life? For many years I felt that sex with a certain kind of man was Kryptonite for me. It drained me of my power and depleted my wisdom and independence. By the time I was in my mid-forties i was exhausted and ill from affairs gone wrong. I decided I needed to become celibate for a year or two in order to regain my own sense of boundaries and dignity and begin to make better choices.

It was a good choice for me. I regained my health and began to feel whole again, and ultimately met Christopher. But each woman is different in what she needs when. The Streep character in It's Complicated has been celibate for so long she's drying up, and now she just needs to go over to the wild side in order to balance out her psyche and re-open to her own sexuality. At least that's the assertion the movie makes. Her life is perfect but lonely, she needs to rough it up a little, or--and this is where I have a problem--just step aside and allow Alec Baldwin to bulldoze in and rough it up for her.

I know it's a fluffy "fun" movie, I know this may be putting too much analysis on what is basically meant to be cotton candy, but what if she re-connected with her sexuality by buying herself a dildo, learning to ride horses, going on a wilderness adventure, or initiating her own affair, say with someone much younger?

On the other hand, many of us--and I include myself in this category--do exactly what her character does in the movie--we allow some high-testosterone man to have his way with us for awhile. We enjoy some aspects of the sex, we enjoy feeling giddy and carefree and young and desired, and in exchange we betray our own values, and end up with our head in the toilet the next day, either literally or figuratively, trying to puke the experience out.

As a writer I was missing the scenes in the movie that weren't there. I would have liked to have seen a more substantive session between Streep and her shrink. I would have also loved a scene between Streep's ex-wife character and the younger current wife character (I think it was Amanda Peet) in which they discovered some common ground.

It's great that this movie showed an older woman looking and feeling wonderful without plastic surgery. It's great that it depicted the after-effects of divorce--that it takes years and years to recover equilibrium and that the effects on children are also long-lasting. The beautiful relationships among and between the young adult siblings were also a joy to watch. And of course, the Eileen Fisher. Can't beat that with a stick.

2010-01-27T09:30:00.000-08:00

Relaxation and rigor. Those are the two things I need to do what I came here to do. The writing can't flow properly when I am not relaxed. The joy in the process doesn't happen when I am not relaxed. But rigor is the other half of the equation. The rigor to keep going back and refining the thing until it is right. I am constantly humbled by how long this process takes me. Perhaps rigor is another word for patience. The rigorous patience it takes to wait and work and rework and have faith that it is all adding up to something.

Yesterday I received a rigorous critique of my third (more like 300th) draft of The Recruiter. The critiquer was a friend and brilliant theater director, actor, and playwright whom I trust. I was grateful for his blunt words even though of course what I wanted to hear was, "It's wonderful! Let's stage it right away! I'm sure it will win a Pulitzer!"

I was also grateful that my friend didn't have time to read it for a week or two after I sent it to him, because had I received the critique when the umbilical cord was still throbbing and pulsing with fresh blood then I might have had a harder time digesting it. By the time he got back to me, I had moved on to obsessing about something else. Such is the nature of obsession, writerly or otherwise.

Last night I read my poetry at Good Vibrations in San Francisco, in a group reading with some other writers. We each just had five minutes to read, and the store provided wine, sparkling water, and dark chocolate truffles (there are advantages to doing a poetry reading in a sex shop). It went well; I felt present, much more present than last Sunday when we did the same reading at the Berkeley store. At that reading I wanted to sell books and to that end had schlepped in a Trader Joe's shopping bag full of 'em. I sold two and then of course was disappointed and left the reading lugging my heavy bag and queasy with ego.

I realized that I felt embarrassed at Sunday night's reading--not because of the sexual content, but because of the narcissism, my own as well as other people's. The yearning for attention, "Look at me! See how sexy, brilliant, provocative, bold, daring etc. I am!" I saw a middle-aged woman whom I think had had some work done (plastic surgery) and another who was wearing too much make-up and I realized I didn't want to be a woman like that.

Ever since I was a young 18-year-old poet I've been doing readings, dressing up a little, nothing too fancy, but definitely showing my body to best advantage. Nothing wrong with that, but there was something a little bit of the marketplace about it, "Buy me! Buy my poetry!" In a capitalist system, you're always selling something, yourself, your image, your work, your words, your time, your worth. I accept that this is the reality of trying to make a living, but it's the opposite energy from the place where poetry comes from, which is a much more quiet, receptive, humble place.

At 51, I'm dealing with how to let go of the sexy girl I was and embrace the woman I am now. It's hard to age gracefully! Some women chop off their hair and wear elastic-waist pants and sensible shoes and just call it a day. others dye their hair, slather on the cosmetics, and if they can afford it, start to have procedures that make them look like unnaturally startled deer caught in the headlights of onrushing time.

I want neither. Which is the middle way?

At the reading last night I wore jeans and a nice loose-fitting top--no cleavage-- brought no books, wore a little mascara and some lipstick, and just concentrated on the task at hand, to experience my poems as I read them. And I enjoyed it and so did the audience and that was enough.

2010-01-25T11:36:00.000-08:00

What to Remember When Waking
by David Whyte © 1999 Many Rivers Press

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

2010-01-19T17:00:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking about Pat Robertson.

Yeah, I know, he’s an asshole, and he gives religion a bad name. Okay, that's obvious. That's shooting fish in a barrel. The thing I've been thinking about that makes me uncomfortable is how there's a part of him in all of us, the part that seeks to blame the victim, to find “reasons” for terrible things happening to innocent people, to make God over in our own image.

It makes me uncomfortable because it indicts me and my friends and all those who claim to be on a spiritual path, who search for reasons in the face of mystery.

Sometimes I’m as scared of what’s going to come out of the mouth of some New Age people I know as I am of the far-right fundies like Robertson. At least you can smell the right wing preacher-types coming. You don’t expect any better. But I think what he’s expressing is just fear, the fear that many of us feel when we’re confronted with the unfairness and seeming randomness and arbitrariness of the way suffering gets handed out in this world. The not-knowing when you and your loved ones kiss each other good-bye what will happen before you meet again. If you meet again.

In the face of this great dark cloud of not-knowing, in the face of our terrifying vulnerability, it is tempting to make up stories especially stories which have as a theme how we are better and different than those who suffer. Or how we would suffer better and differently than them--or better yet, how we would find some magical means of escape. Child's thinking. Sometimes it gets expressed as theorizing that said sufferers must somehow must have brought it on themselves, or how it's "karma".

Pat Robertson revealed the ugliest side of himself in public in the media. I’ve sometimes heard people say equally odious but more carefully-couched things in private, and I’ve also witnessed myself making ignorant judgments. It seems built in to the human psyche to look for cause and effect, which is fine--that's what brought us the discovery of gravity and keeping our fingers out of the fire, and ultimately to a moral code. But from there it's a slippery slope to thinking we can explain away all phenomena, that we can somehow reduce Life to a series of neat little theorems.

So while I agree that Pat Robertson is an asshole, I think most of us are at least partly implicated in this kind of reductive thinking as well. Which means we are at least part-asshole too. At the very least we have assholes, and perhaps the best we can do is learn not to talk out of them but use them for the purpose which God intended.

On another (hopefully more elevated) note, I did a little research and then gave my money through Partners In Health, Paul Farmer’s organization which he started with Ophelia Dahl twenty years ago. I chose them because they are already set up in Haiti, luckily in the provinces and not Port-au-Prince, and so their health clinic is intact and they have doctors already working on the scene. Plus I wanted Ophelia Dahl being interviewed by Katie Couric last night and she definitely knows what she is talking about.

Haiti is a complicated place and it really helps to have deep and expensive knowledge of the place before you go in and start helping. I think PIH will be able to deliver aid quickly and effectively and with cultural sensitivity. That said, if I didn't give my money to them, I would feel comfortable giving to Doctors Without Borders or Yele Haiti, or the International Red Cross.

It’s hard to focus on finishing a revision of The Recruiter—in fact it’s been impossible to focus. All I want to do when I’m in front of the computer is tune in obsessively to various news channels and read or watch interviews about Haiti. In my spare time I obsess about why i am worrying whether or not Massachusetts will pick a Democratic senator. I mean, my home state, Massachusetts! How could they not?

Then I listen to a pediatrician describe children dying of treatable wounds because they have no medicine—and the medicine is there, it just hasn’t been unloaded off the airplanes yet, because—because why? I don’t know. I don't know anything.

2010-01-13T22:39:00.000-08:00

There are personal things going on, the usual and the unusual--worries about jobs, sendings out of manuscripts, working in the garden, coordinating poetry gigs in schools, attempting another rewrite of my play--but mostly I am thinking about Haiti, reading the Times reporting on Haiti, imagining the streets of Haiti--which were poor when I visited them, in 1982, and are now unimaginable.

The front page of the New York Times is "Haiti in Ruins," accompanied by some of the most heartbreaking photos I have ever seen. Haiti was always in ruins. I've never seen slums like the slums of Port-au-Prince, children playing in alleys running with sewage, people living in shacks and huts with dirt floors and chickens clucking on the crowded streets in the middle of a crowded city.

When people are poor in America they still have lots of stuff. You can be poor here, financially, and still have things, possessions, because there is so much excess in this country that it's possible to live pretty well on other people's cast-offs and throw-aways. In Haiti I saw people who really had nothing, whose clothes were rags, whose children were naked. I saw women who could and did carry a bucket of water or a load of washing or a big bundle of sticks on top of their heads and walk barefoot like that, over miles of steep rocky mountain paths, and I witnessed men whose skinny muscles looked like ropes, men harnessed to sledges like beasts of burden, whose work was to pull enormous loads until their veins exploded.

I saw crippled people in Haiti who had no wheelchairs and were carried around on the backs of their friends and relatives. I met women who had borne fifteen children and buried half of them. I smelled the burning dung they used to cook with when they could not get wood.

It's hard to imagine Haiti worse off than when I saw it in 1982, and yet I know things have gotten dramatically worse since then. And now this earthquake. I don't know what to do, other than give money and hope it helps. What I keep with me about Haiti and Haitians more than the material poverty is the spirit of the place. it's a place of trauma and survival and imagination.

Haitians live deeply in their belief in magic. It's all they have. They are people of imagination, people who make cupcakes out of dirt when they are hungry, and tell stories, and paint pictures. The place is exploding with creative talent born of desperation and spirituality and hunger. A potent mix. If we could find a way to export that--to the benefit of the people themselves--then we would have a solution for Haiti.

Haiti's great natural resource is her people. Their warmth and compassion and pain and ingenuity and songs and stories. Their sense of aesthetics and their elegance and grace under pressure. I worked at Haitian refugee centers in Miami and in Boston for years, teaching ESL and doing low-level social work. I learned much more from them than I ever taught.

2010-01-05T11:29:00.000-08:00

Saturday night we danced--under a just-past-full moon--at Marci and Mark's intimate backyard wedding. So sweet. Such a long journey with all its twists and turns, for them to get to this place, for us to get to be there with them.

I met Marci years ago, in yoga class. She was a jock then, and I was--and am--a yoga class clown--but we bonded over tight hips and hopeless headstands. And years and years of crazy dating experiences, insane roommates, and a couple of weekend getaways to yoga retreats.

There was one memorable Nazi Boot Camp Ashram where conditions were extremely spartan--bunk beds, and no toilet in the room. The swami had been out of circulation for forty or fifty years and he breezily dismissed ordinary life as "samsara" without, it seemed to me, ever having experienced it. The food was vegan--very very vegan--and our fellow participants were an odd lot. There was an ex-Marine who was detoxing from PTSD, there was a plump mother-daughter duo on a special diet, there were the usual visionaries and seekers and finders.

I think Marci and I were among the less spiritual people there--we were reprimanded for skipping the 5 a.m. meditation (an hour of meditation, followed by an hour of chanting, followed by an hour of yoga--and THEN you got breakfast, or something they called breakfast.) The swami's "adjustments" were rather rough, but I felt surprisingly great after we left--light and lithe and all stretched out. I remember with glee stopping to get gas on the way back and re-toxifying at the mini-mart--with potato chips, dark chocolate, and Diet Pepsi. And laughing and laughing.

There was another yoga and meditation weekend which was a little less severe. There were many "girl's nights," with videos, food and true confessions. Lots and lots of girl talk.

And there she was the other night, radiant in white, in her own home, with her best friends around her, glowing and laughing and crying. Beautiful. If Sandra Bullock and Salma Hayak had a lesbian affair that produced a love child, that is who Marci would resemble.

Christopher took some great photos. My favorites were two of Marci and I pointing upwards. She was actually showing me how some tablecloths had been pinned to a frame to create a tent effect, but it looks as if we're pointing up at the stars, or a distant planet. Which is what Love seemed like to us back in the years when we first met as single girls--like some very distant, unattainable place. And here we were, here we are, having landed on that star, still in our space-suits, breathing.

**********************************************************************************

Fun fact: Tony Kushner gained 100 pounds while he was working on Angels in America. Yes he did. He retreated to the woods with boxes of Oreos and other necessities and wrote his ass off.

Far be it from me to compare myself or what I am doing with Angels, which i consider one of the works of genius of our age, but let me just say that finishing The Recruiter is proving to be fattening and difficult.

I know I have no right to complain. I know I chose this. I know I am privileged godamnit, but it's hard right now. I was so close to what I thought was the finish line. It was only after consulting with my team--that is, the few die-hard, stalwart friends who will still read my emails and the repeatedly revised drafts which i attach to them--and you are angels, you are worth your weight in gold and I can never repay you--anyway, the consensus is that it's Still Not Done.

It's close. I can smell the champagne waiting for me at the finish. But I have more research to do, and more writing to do. And I don't wanna do it. Don't want to go to that place I have to go to with my main character, Tony. Don't want to have to feel my way through all the shit that he's feeling. My butt hurts. My back hurts. I'm tired of looking at this little screen, these characters.

At least I now have an epigram for the play, from Anna Deavere Smith's book Talk To Me, which I have been re-reading. This is what she wrote about Clinton whom she interviewed as the Monica Lewinsky ('memba her?) scandal was breaking.

“Our ability to create reality, by creating fictions with language, should not be abused. The abuse is called lying. Perhaps we understand the precariousness of our situation. We as linguistic animals. At the very least language is currency as we create “reality.” To abuse language, to lie, is to fray reality, to tatter it. Those in public life who create our values are especially asked not to “lie.” Yet most of us say, at least, that we believe we are often being lied to.”

She also said that--given the fact that many Americans expect politicians to lie, and/or mess around-- "Perhaps Clinton's downfall was that he was too expressive in a time when studied nonchalance is the status quo."

Interestingly, Jeannette Walls' book Dish, about the interpenetration of gossip to news, and news to gossip, opens with Clinton and the Lewinsky incident. Remember how that dominated the airwaves for months and months even as everyone professed disgust with the coverage? There have been so many many instances of politicians' sexual shenanigans coming to light in the past year I can't even count them all. And so what, really? And yet the issue of the use and abuse of language is still crucial.

Okay, now I have to go back to reading the closing pages of The Good Soldiers, and re-entering that world...

2010-01-01T15:15:00.000-08:00

I am, in general, a List Queen. I make to-do lists every week or so. I celebrate every new year, fresh start, new beginning I can--Rosh Hashana, Chinese New Year, all Solstices and Equinoxes, new moons, you name it. If there's an excuse for a clean slate and a nice list of projects to be accomplished, there I am with my colored pens, drawing it up. It certainly beats the hell out of actually doing the work itself.

So I tried to think of new year's resolutions for 2010. But the truth is, I don't have the heart for it. My friend Genie Zeiger has died, too young, in Massachusetts. My sister sent me the beautiful front-page obituary from Western mass yesterday, with Genie';s lovely smiling face on the cover. Genie was a sweetie-pie, a poet, enthusiastic and tender and eager. She was sixty-six when she died but very youthful the way artists are, no matter what their chronological age.

So her death and carla's health, and the economy and the state of the world in general. I saw another artist friend at the year-end "Circle Sing for Life" celebration; you get in a circle with other people and sing for hours and hours. Linda Tillery, another one of my artist-heros whom I am proud to call a friend, was there leading the circle for a couple of hours. Afterwards she talked with my friend mary and me. "Two thousand and nine was just a turd of a year," she said. "Let's hope two thousand and ten will be better."

I had to agree. Even though great things happened for me personally this year, they happened against the backdrop of terrible things happening for other people, including some of my loved ones. And there's the overriding tension not knowing if our teaching livelihoods are secure or not. Unless some kind of miracle happens for the California state budget, i don't actually see that situation getting remedied in the next twelve months but I hope I am wrong.

Meanwhile I still have plenty of goals (as opposed to resolutions.) I plan to finish the next draft of The Recruiter, finish the book proposal, publish the next book of poetry, apply for some grants, write more, write better, all that. I'll always have lists of goals. But resolutions? Only two: drink more water and be kinder. To myself as well as to everyone else. The rest is commentary.

*************************************************************************************

We've had quiet holidays...I've been reading Anna Deavere Smith's wonderful book, Letters to a Young Artist. It's really inspiring--she's really inspiring to me as an artist and an intellectual. I love her long-running inquiry into the state of the American character via the language we use. I sit fascinated in front of my computer when I should be writing, listening to her interview with Bill Moyers (google it! It's worth the thirty minutes!!) I want to study with her, to sit at her feet. I would happily carry her bags, pick up her take-out, wash her laundry to know what she knows. But it's clear, from her book, what she knows--it's what carla knows as well, what all the artsists I admire know: hard work.

Joy too--fun, too--but also, unremitting practice and discipline. I was delighted to learn in this book that ADS is a committed swimmer, (like me!) and that she also does yoga and vocal exercises daily. I think the demands of work in the theatre, when met whole-heartedly, constitute one of the most complete trainings a human could ever get. To be an excellent theatre-worker, you have to know about your body, intimate; you have to know how to train and work with your physical and vocal potentials and limitations.

You also get an unending education in history, literature, sociology, philosophy...Deavere Smith is so erudite that even reading a relatively simple book of hers sparks my mind by osmosis. As I read her book, I began to understand more deeply what my play The Recruiter is about. And this new understanding necessitates another draft, a restructuring. So here we go again.

Okay, there are more goals for the new year: one is to master a new piece on the piano, now that "Louie Louie" is solid. C is encouraging me to tackle a simplified version of a Beatles song--that way I could sing along with myself as I played. I never thought I'd learn piano in my fifties, but it's really fun. As I listened to him play the blues last night with a musician friend I wished to learn that form as well. There's really no end to it.

We saw District 9 the other night which was great fun. I love the mock-umentary style with the hand-held camera, and the goofiness of the whole thing, despite the underlying seriousness of its message. We watched the special features afterward and I noticed that the director was about twelve years old--alright, maybe thirty, tops--and that he freely admitted that he didn't really know what he was doing when he started the project but was making it up as he went along. This was all the encouragement I needed. I nudged C in the ribs. "Hey, we could make a movie!"

Later, my friend Shazam came over for New Year's Eve and we began plotting it out on a napkin at the kitchen table. Video technology is so easy, so accessible now. We could do something like the Blair Witch Project, which was made on a shoestring and has raked in millions. So maybe that's a third New Year's resolution: to finish the projects I already have on tap and then to cut loose and make our own movie...

2009-12-21T13:55:00.000-08:00

This is it. Bottom of the belly of the bowl of the dark time. I'm resting here for a minute, after a flurry of sending out new poems, another essay, thinking about work.

There's so much to say and I'm not sure what is worth saying. Yesterday, doing last minute Christmas shopping in Berkeley with C (no, we're not very organized, but hey, this is not my holiday,) I loved how russet and yellow and orange and brown the leaves were, piled in thick clumps on the street, or still full on the trees. And by the time they fall completely and the branches are naked and black, new green buds and blades and leaves will be pushing and pulsing out. That's how it is around here. There's no real dormancy the way there is on the East Coast, where a blanket of snow covers everything and you have to sit inside and make soup and read.

Among other gifties we bought skeins and skeins of wool to give to a sister-in-law who is a knitter. I bought two skeins for myself and started in on an oyster-colored scarf for C that is already too fat--he likes them skinnier--but the wool, called "Fisherman's Wool" feels so smooth and soft in my hands.

We've been watching a filmed stage version of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," with a young, very buff and very beautiful Marlon Brando in the role of Mark Antony. He was wonderful! And James Mason--again, very young--is fantastic as Brutus. It's illuminating to see these actors whom I mostly know from their later lesser work doing Shakespeare--and doing it really well. After we're done with this one, we've got my favorite Antony and Cleopatra to watch--I love that play! It's great to watch them after having seen Rome--now that we know the significance of Phillippi (sp?) and Actium.

Mostly though, I'm trying to pause and appreciate. Because this year was wonderful and terrible. Wonderful: we had a great wedding, with beloved friends and family helping us celebrate. We danced to At Last and C dipped me! We savored being with my father, my stepmother, my sisters and brothers his brothers, our cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews and Little Sister. I have never believed that a wedding creates a marriage--how could it be so arbitrary? but this year we joined each others' families and consecrated our own.

But this year was also terrible: Carla's health got worse faster than anticipated, with a lot of accompanying heartbreak and suffering. I don't know what else to say about that except that it gigantically sad and unacceptable and wrong to be losing my beautiful funny talented wise friend and for her to be losing everyone and everything so young.

And on a different scale, our beloved Dede died, C had his car accident, and of course the economy tanked, taking with it most of my free-lance work and the full-time jobs and savings accounts of some dear friends.

It was also wonderful that my book came out: See How We Almost Fly, available from Pearl Editions. And that we got to go East to celebrate my father's 75th birthday with him. The youngest person at the party was our 14-month nephew Liam, who was cruising around, supremely oblivious to sharp corners of glass coffee tables, like the Divine Fool in the Tarot deck, while his mother and grandmother and I chased close behind, throwing our bodies in front of sharp edges and calling out, "Don't step on the baby!" to the hordes of other larger grandchildren.

And the oldest person at the party was my father's cousin Arthur who is 83 and claims to have gotten all over France after World War 2 with one sentence in french Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?"

As I said above, in this climate you can keep going all year round without stopping. Nature doesn't stop here--she's always working away at her next project, blooming and dying simultaneously. So if we don't take it upon ourselves to pause for a moment and breathe deeply and go out and look at the garden, then it will just keep rolling over us.

Yesterday at Interplayce I danced with a 90-ear-old woman. I was going to say "You could see she had been beautiful in her youth," but the truth is, she is still very beautiful, twinkling and graceful and flirtatious and adventurous. She and her family are going to the place where the whales mate for her birthday.

Even though this and everything else I see is a poem, I'm trying to let it all rest just for a bit--trying to let life go by for a minute without pouncing on it and making art out of everything. Even though there are scribbled drafts in my notebook, even though the latest Poets & Writers arrived yesterday, even though I think that no matter how much I've published or won or done it's still not enough--I'm trying to just let that go. Because I think it's good for everything to take time off, to knit a scarf or re-pot a small bright red begonia plant that I received as a gift yesterday, or make fried rice or just walk up in the hills and look and look...

2009-12-14T21:24:00.000-08:00

I was afraid I wouldn't recognize him. My brother's son. For years he had lived with his mother, my brother's ex-wife, and I had missed him on my trips back East. I hadn't seen him for a few years and in that time he had changed from child to young man, had grown an inch or two taller than me, had filled out and started to shave.

On the train platform i recognized him by his ears. Jug-ears, like my brother's and like mine--the bane of my young life--they stick out of his head cheerfully. And his slightly lopsided grin. He's appealing, this boy. There's an open-heartedness to him, an openness, an easy-goingness, a sweetness, that is relaxing.

He's nineteen and doesn't know what he's up to. Which way is up, what he's going to do, even where he's going to sleep from night to night. He thanks me a hundred times for making him simple dinners, for sewing up the torn pocket of his jacket, for inviting him to sleep in our guest room. He hangs out with messed-up kids who go to jail and do dumb things, and yet he's not bad himself, just confused and far too amenable.

If he makes it out of this morass he's in, if he survives his twenties and into his thirties, he could become, in time, a voice of wisdom. people like him, are drawn to him, sometimes the wrong people. He walks through the world without a filter. In time, he could become a therapist, he could help kids like himself, he could learn from his mistakes and use his powers to attract people for good. Or he could go the other way.

I used to long to be a parent. Now I wonder how people do it. I wuld be scared to death if he were my son. I'm scared being his aunt. Yet I myself did plenty of dumb things when I was his age and older; hitchhiked across country, hung out with men of questionable character, got myself into all kinds of scrapes. I hope he has the same kind of hardworking guardian angel I had. I see some of myself in him, especially around the almond-shaped deepset dark eyes and the eyebrows. And in the openness and lack of judgement, which is both a good thing and a not-so-good thing, depending.

Christopher has been a wonderful uncle, generous and unselfish. We all went together with Gerry to see The Road, based on the Pulitzer-prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy. It was a powerful movie, very horrific and depressing. I spent about 20 percent of it with my hands over my eyes, because i couldn't bear to witness what i was seeing, and about 20 percent of the time crying. I don't think i laughed or even smiled once. So I wouldn't recommend it as a mood-lifter or anything, but it made me feel and it made me think which are the two things i ask of a work of art.

What it made me feel was shock and horror at the prospect of this world-as-we-know-it ending. I went online afterward and read that the novel "The Road" was hailed as the best ecological book ever written, better than Silent Spring, better than Walden, because it detailed so painfully what it would be like on earth without our biosphere. Gerry wanted to know what the specific nature of the ecological disaster was, but i didn't need to. There are enough contenders; global warming, nuclear winter, a meteor strike...what is important are the questions it raises: when is life worth living and what makes it not worth living anymore? And how do we keep the light inside ourselves alive?

The father and the boy undertake an Odyssey with the slenderest, vaguest thread of hope. Hope for what, when there are not trees, no vegetation, and almost no animals left, when the human race has been reduced to random bands of scavenging starving cannibals? What is there left to hope for? Survival? What do we owe life when everything has been stripped away? The father trudges on, not for himself--he is dying and he knows it-- but for the faint possibility of life for his son, for some hope that he might go on. Although all his effort is based on the most personal of motives--that his son might live--it is really in service of Life itself.

For that reason, although I can't say I enjoyed it, I think The Road is a great movie.

Other media I have been absorbing: Eve Ensler's wonderful political memoir, Insecure at Last, in which she examines our attachment and clinging to false security, and tells of her travels in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Bosnia, Kenya, New Orleans, and a women's prison in upstate New York, where she worked with women survivors of rape, genocide, prison, catastrophe. Again, not an easy read but a powerful one.

And Christopher and I rented the BBC adaptation of David Copperfield, which i enjoyed more than I thought I would. The minor characters are all drawn so beautifully, there is so much feeling and passion in that world, that the whole piece sang. Once again i got online and read up on Dickens (whom, I confess, I was never that attracted to, although reading A Christmas Carol at Carla's house years ago brought me to unexpected tears. I think it was the sense of wordiness and denseness and the sheer size of the novels that turned me off--and the way the good characters are so good and the bad ones are so awful.

But when I read about his early life, and how young he was when he wrote this stuff--he was an international celebrity by the age of thirty, he and his wife had 10 children, he created a home for fallen women that was ahead of its time in its enlightened attitudes--I softened. Maybe not enough to dive into Great Expectations--I seem to be on a non-fiction streak that shows no signs of breaking, except for The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which was a wonderful novel--but mostly i want to read about real people and situations right now.

We've lit the Chanukah candles every night so far, and I'm touched by how much both boys, Christopher and Josh, my nephew--seem to like the ritual. they remind me about it, they take over the choosing of candles and the lighting, they whisper the prayer--or the pieces of it they can remember--along with me. They are smitten with the lights.

I don't feel particularly resentful about Christmas this year. In fact, what I feel mostly about Christmas is a big sense of relief; here is a holiday that I don't have to "do." I get to just sit back and watch. Pretty lights, some nice music, some shmaltzy and unbearable music, but I am free--free most of all from expectations.

December twenty-fifth doesn't have to be magical or fulfilling or anything for me. it's okay if it's ordinary. I can enjoy a walk around the lake or a movie or just a grilled cheese sandwich as much or more than people who have made a big fuss. I love the un-fussiness of my December 25th compared to the extreme fuss that the culture at large seems to need.

My stepmother makes a fuss over the holiday--all of her six kids come home and they have a holiday dinner and open presents and I'm sure it's a lovely time but the thought of that makes me feel tired. Last year we walked around the lake on Christmas and I saw several women, alone, crying on park benches, or sitting close to the water looking so sad.

When you think--when you are told repeatedly--that a certain day is supposed to be x--when you're told that your college years are supposed to be the best of your life--or that your wedding day should be like a page out of a fairy tale--or that Christmas means family gathered around a tree, singing carols--then when it isn't like that you feel shattered, bereft, and in my case, as though you must have done something wrong for your experience to have fallen short of the prescribed bliss.

Right now, Christopher and I are trying to decide which movie we're going to see on the twenty-fifth. I may ask some orphan Christians to join us, if they need a place to be and people to be with. Maybe we'll go to a Chinese restaurant--a time-honored Jewish tradition--or maybe we'll just make a nice dinner at home. I'll probably check in on my Dad who usually sounds a little hassled and confused on that day--what's he doing in a house with a Christmas tree? Still, it's nice, he acknowledges.

I used to love my family's Christmases--we didn't celebrate, we got the hell out of Dodge. We went to Cape Cod and stayed at a Howard Johnson's Motor Inn for a few days. It had a heated indoor swimming pool--we kids lived in the pool for hours, splashing and racing each other. Our mother, who craved warmth, sat in the sauna. She and my dad were in one room, the four of us kids in another. I remember reading A Nun's Story in the bathroom while my younger siblings watched cartoons on the T.V. At night we'd stroll around the deserted streets, and eat "lobster rolls," pieces of indistinguishable fried lobster on a hot dog bun. Good times, children, good times.

2009-12-07T22:32:00.000-08:00

Two days out of town with my Libra grrrlz, in a cozy WARM little cottage near Mendocino. We mostly stayed inside reading, eating, talking, and singing. B and I went to the gym and she worked out while I swam. Then back to the cottage for more good books, wine, dark chocolate, discussion, and the movies Enchanted and an old pic starring a young and breathtakingly beautiful Elizabeth Taylor called The Last Time I Saw Paris.

It was refreshing to get away from home especially as I had pushed and pushed myself to get out a full draft of the play before we left. Somehow before I leave for any trip i am always seized with the fear that I won't return, or I won't return in one piece, and so I must get my affairs in order. So I ordered my Chanukah present for my brother, finished a draft of the play, mailed what i had to mail, deposited what i had to deposit, and in general secured the perimeter before we left.

And when I got home, C had fixed the radiators and the furnace so we now HAVE HEAT and we just ate dinner and it was a very civilized 68 degrees inside the house!!! There was a big article in the NY Times Sunday magazine by a married woman writer who got her husband to go along to various marriage therapists and counselors with her so they could improve their marriage. Reading it made me shudder. Maybe I am superstitious, maybe I'm old and somewhat battle-scarred but i think even good marriages are vulnerable tender entities which should be treated with care and not subjected to the harsh scrutiny of Feudian psychoanalysis or whored out for a book contract.

Maybe it's because I've been through one failed marriage already, a marriage which started with mutual love and devotion but collapsed startlingly quickly that I think there may be a mystery at the heart of love which can be expressed through poetry but which should not be dissected in the office of a professional. And yes, spouses drive each other crazy, and yes C and I drive each other crazy sometimes too, but I think insight and analysis are highly overrated; I think they often increase irritation rather than resolve it. At any rate I don't believe there is any "solution" for the problem of two distinct personalities struggling to work together in harmony. I don't think it's supposed to be easy.

Rather than analysis, I would vote for old-fashioned virtues like patience, loyalty and discretion as keys to a lasting union. If C and I got to the point where we needed extra help I think I would turn, not to a marriage therapist, but to an older, longer-married couple, because any long-term union endures its shares of bumps and difficulties, and I'd want to hear from a veteran how to make it through the rough patches, not from a psychoanalyst with a bunch of theories. I hate theories--I prefer my reality mixed-up and messy and confusing, not sorted into neat little categories. And like most couples we've developed our own private language and way of reaching out to each other when we're stressed or cranky and I'd want to protect those small tender gestures at all costs, not subject them to a fifty-minute hour and some psycho-jargon.

So far my best relationship advice has come from my married lesbian friends. Once when i was complaining about something C had done or said that annoyed me I looked over at B who has been with her wife for over ten years and she was biting her lips to keep from bursting out laughing. I realized how ridiculous my ranting was and I started laughing too--at myself. Which seems, in the end, the best strategy of all. Because we're all ridiculous and childish and self-centered, and most of the stuff we stress over is pretty silly in light of the much bigger issues that confront us now. And our best friends help us realize this.

2009-12-04T21:05:00.000-08:00

Finishing my play, the last lap...and listening to the news. The war, the escalation of the war, 30,000 more troops to be sent to Afghanistan as early as May.

Cooking rice and salmon and brussel sprouts I felt so sad. Not angry--I know there are liberals who are angry at Obama, who feel disappointed that he's the one approving the troop build-up. I voted for him and I don't feel betrayed by him. He never promised perfection and I didn't expect it. He promised an improvement on the Bush regime and he's more than delivered that. And let's not forget that he inherited all these problems, Iraq and Afghanistan and the tanking economy. It's not like he woke up one morning and decided to invade. We were already there.

That said, the war makes me sadder than the recent set-backs for gay rights in New York. That was disappointing and I feel angry about it but not hopeless. Gay marriage is a reality whose time has come, and I feel confident that within the near future, probably five years or so, it will be a nationally legislated fact and everyone will wonder what all the fuss was ever about. So it makes me mad when someplace like New York--whose economy is fueled by gay people, hello?--doesn't get it, but I don't feel hopeless. In fact, maybe anger is a way of expressing hope, because to be angry means you believe things should be different--and that they can be different. And I do, and I do.

With the war, I feel hopeless. I don't know how we're going to get out of this mess. It brings back Vietnam all over again, viscerally, the dying and killing, the endless suffering. And I don't have any easy answers like I do for opponents of gay marriage ("Get over it!") I've come to think that simple pacifism is meaningless unless we can come up with good alternatives.

I've come to see war as so linked to the problems of unemployment--we "only" lost 11,000 jobs in November, the New York Times reports--what are we going to do with all those young men and women who can't find a way to support themselves, who have no meaningful way to launch into adulthood? Why does the Army look attractive to them, despite the horrific injuries people come back with, despite the roadside bombs and the PTSD, despite the mounting casualties, and the horror stories?

I am the daughter of a woman who had a poster declaring "War is not good for children and other living things" taped to her front door for oh, thirty years. It was only taken down after her death and by then it was frayed and the Scotch tape which had held it in place was yellowing and cracked. And here we are again.

I agree with that poster. War is a nightmare for children. The Iraqis have lost a whole generation to low birth weights, to trauma, to disrupted schooling, to collateral damage, to malnutrition and easily preventable diseases. Children there have witnessed atrocities and lived through terrors that would crack the psyches of hardened adults. Their whole lives have been forfeited to this folly. (Note: Go and see Tony Kushner's amazing play, Only We Who Guard the Mystery Will Be Unhappy, featuring Laura Bush reading from The Brothers Karamasov to a group of dead iraqi children. Devastating.) How do we even begin to reckon the cost of these wars? What could be the compensation?

So I'm not saying that I support the war in any way. I'm just saying that the books I've been reading and the movies I've been seeing and the thinking and writing I've been doing have led me to see the soldiers who volunteer to fight in a more complex, nuanced light than I did before. There is such a thing as warrior energy and it must be channeled for good.

When I was 22 I served a year in VISTA and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I think a year of service to one's country for all young people is a good thing--service in the sense of fighting poverty, building schools and homes and hospitals, tackling some of the major problems we face and digging into it. During that year my fellow VISTAS and I lived on $75.00 a week. We were poor but we were young and could share a bedroom and eat beans every night. Meanwhile we were getting invaluable experience.

Maybe such a program wouldn't work for everyone. Certainly there were issues with the administration of it. Some kids dropped out--it wasn't Shangri-La. And, honestly I don't have answers for the greater questions of what to do about terrorism, or Al-Quaeda. I don't know of a non-violent way to meet those threats. Investigating this stuff has left me with more questions than answers. And my heart is heavy with it all tonight.

2009-12-03T16:49:00.000-08:00

The days are beautiful, bright, and short; the nights are long and dark and cold. We're sliding into the belly of the bowl, the darkest shortest day. Three weeks, a little less than three weeks till the year turns and the light starts lengthening. Every year I tell myself to embrace the dark, embrace the cold, and every year I miss. I can't help it, my whole body contracts when I'm chilled to the bone, as I mostly am in our house because certain tough flinty Protestants don't want to turn the thermostat on EVER even when their blue-lipped shivering wives are begging them.

Well, actually, in fairness to my flinty Protestant with the fast metabolism, turning on the furnace in our house is like throwing hundred dollar bills out the window, as we have no insulation in this drafty old barn. But we did just meet with the roofer guy, an Irishman who sat in our 60-degree living room wearing a T-shirt and sipping coffee and talking about solar panels. He encouraged us to insulate the attic which I think we'll do. And after the solar panels are up, then it will be more cost-effective to run big-ass space heaters that actually heat something. Or we might get a gas pot-bellied stove for the fireplace or something. I don't know where the money for all this is going to come from, but one way or another we'll get the place a little warmer.

Last winter I swore I would never go through another miserable winter freezing my butt off night and day in my own house and this year it looks like we're going to do exactly that, freeze our butts off again, but next year, I swear, it will be at least 63 degrees at all times. Which I do not think is unreasonable, especially since I really want it to be 70.

Meanwhile I'm sitting in my tiny study-area in our bedroom, which C kindly enclosed for me by installing French doors two years ago. I have a little space heater which warms me up pretty well if I sit almost directly on top of it. I'm inching along on the last 20 pages of The Recruiter. So many layers to add. I go back and back over each scene that I've written, again and again, combing through the dialogue and adding more dimensions. I want to get a full draft done by the middle of this month. Then I'll turn my attention back to essays for a while.

2009-11-29T12:05:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving dinner with about 20 friends, and music and mayhem afterward: Motown, the Beatles...our guests ranged in age from 97-year-old Sylvia, in a wheelchair, who sat in the room with the instruments and watched her daughter play viola and her son-in-law on flute and organ with a big smile on her face, to 19-year-old Dylan who sat in on the drums.

I made vegetarian chili for the vegetarians (secret ingredients: Dijon mustard, black olives, red wine, fresh dill: recipe courtesy of Laurie Wagner,) and turkey for the omnivores (secret to a moist turkey: stuff it with garlic cloves, Meyer lemon slices chopped fennel, and onions rather than bread stuffing. The vegetable-lemon stuffing gives moisture, while bread stuffing absorbs it. I forget who taught me that.)

For the last two days we've been digesting, and eating leftovers, and going to the movies (The Messenger with Woody Harrelson--very good!) reading, writing, (me,) practicing music (C), and watching the climactic end of ROME (why did Cleopatra turn her ships around in the middle of the battle of Actium, thus sealing her and Antony's fate? Why? Why? Why?) And Saturday, Christopher took me on a long-awaited mystery date...to a shooting range in Concord. Background story: I am writing a play about a combat veteran. I have never shot a gun. C arranged for his boss, a Vietnam vet, to meet us there and give us instructions in target practice.

What I learned: guns kick. Yes, they do. And they have sharp edges on them. If your thumb is in the wrong place, the kick can slice you. This is where the Band-Aid on my thumb comes from.

The noise when we first got there was unsettling, even with foam earplugs and head-phones. It was a beautiful day, clear as glass, but windy, gusting. At first I jumped a little every time anyone fired a gun close to us. Quickly I got desensitized. I can understand now how soldiers returning want to listen to really loud head-banging rock. And there was a smell of burned gunpowder in the air, smoke from all the other shooters' guns. Mingled in this smoke, the smell of a cigarette felt as if it belonged.

There is a festival in Berkeley called How Berkeley Can You Get, or something like that. The shooting range is at the opposite end of the spectrum, How Un-Berkeley Can You Get? I took a perverse pleasure in being as far away from my normal pacifist feminist Tarot-card reading improvised-dance, act-like-a-Redwood-tree hippie milieu as possible. Not that I want to live in a gun-toting veteran's culture either, but just that I don't want to be limited by ideology as to who I can hang out with or where I can find interest.

There is a whole etiquette and world connected to guns that I know next to nothing about. The people who are into them are really into them; they invest a lot of money and time and energy and passion in them. You can't be a casual gun-owner; you have to practice regularly if you ever have any intention of using one, because the muscle memory of marksmanship fades quickly without constant practice. I did hit the target a respectable amount of times for a rank beginner, although I didn't hit the bull'-eye. I'm pretty sure that "sniper" is not on the list of possible career choices for me, but at least I know what it feels like to hold a gun in my hands.

After two hours the wind and noise got to me and I went and sat in the car while Christopher continued to fire rounds with his boss. I turned the key in the ignition and there was a Bach CD. I sat and watched sunlight gild green grass and the wind riffle through it while listening to beautiful, orderly peaceful Bach punctuated by bangs and explosions from the firing range behind me.

The part of Concord where we were was relatively undeveloped: undulant green hills like breasts, peaceful, bucolic. I tried to think about beauty while I sat in the car: is there any beauty in war? A gun can be a thing of beauty. Bravery is beautiful. Sacrifice. Youth. I think of war as waste and tragedy only. But how does such an attitude feel to a returning veteran?

One veteran who served two tours in Vietnam (26 months) said he wouldn't trade his experiences in the war for anything. In the next breath he acknowledged that in some ways it had messed him up for the thirty years of his life following. You do not spend two years in combat without being changed forever by the experience.

I thought of Carla--I think of her every day, in every place. What she is going through is like a war in that it includes extreme physical stress, trauma, and the threat of death always looming over her shoulder. Even if she were miraculously cured tomorrow she would never be the same afterward. No one could be.

It's a war she never signed up to fight. She said at the outset that she didn't want to spend her energy battling ALS, she wanted to live her life to the fullest, every day, every hour that she could. And yet what that comes down to is a fight. How much of my energy have i spent fighting dumb things that didn't matter, straw men that I invented as a smokescreen for the bigger more important and scary battles? In the purest form of Islam, jihad is supposed to be a holy war which you wage against your own baser impulses: lust and greed and sloth. This seems to me to be the only war one can truly engage in with integrity. Yet sometimes--often--the outer world demands that we step up and do battle on behalf of something we believe in.

I didn't figure anything out in the car. Just let myself experience the sublime contradiction of gunshots and Bach, the car rocked now by high winds, now by explosions behind me, the illusion of safety and warmth inside, the storm outside. Eventually Christopher finished--he's tougher than I and was also wearing a warmer jacket--and we drove home to eat more leftovers (flourless chocolate cake--thank you, Debo!) I'm not sure how I can use all this material to help me finish the play but I'm glad I got to have new experiences. Thank you.

2009-11-25T22:42:00.001-08:00

Today was unseasonably warm and golden. For the first time in months, we walked to the old tennis courts and played. Grateful, grateful, grateful. For the swing of my arm as it rises to meet the ball without my conscious volition--thwack! For the towering pines that ring the court dropping cones and pine needles and littering the ground with yellow and orange leaves. For the sweet mild air, for the squirrel skittering across the court boldly, for the sliver of new moon rising in the late afternoon.

Most of all grateful for my sweet companion, his back 97% healed, once more swinging and running and swooping and diving all over the court opposite me, once more calling out encouragement and challenges, once more saying "Good game!" as we walk home through the sunset haze. Grateful for the new moon, for the turning season, for our weathered, vital middle-aged bodies and the pleasures they still give each other.

I wanted to live inside a good marriage and I despaired many times because I didn't think I would get one in this lifetime. I feared I was too old, too damaged, that there was no one left, that perhaps I wasn't capable of that kind of love, that perhaps no one would ever love me that way. I feared my ideals were too high, that I wanted too much, that I was too much, that I had missed my chance.

I looked around and didn't see any marriages that I could imagine myself in. I knew I wanted a level of intimacy that was unusual; that I wanted total trust, that i wanted acceptance and humor and good food and bedrock values. I didn't imagine it would be Christopher. I had never known anyone like him and when I first met him I had no way to recognize him. We joke that if we had met as housemates one of us would be serving a life sentence for trying to murder the other. We would have hated each other; he is so fastidious, and I am so...not. And yet because of this love-thing, this chemistry-thing, this I-don't-even-know-what-to-call it thing, it works.

I didn't know what a good relationship would feel like, smell like, be like until i was in one. It feels like a remarkable absence of drama. I have worried about him when he was late coming home, worried about car accidents and heart attacks because that's how I was raised, to worry. But I never worry about whether or not he loves me, about whether he'll be faithful to me. I know there are millions of women who are younger, prettier, better housekeepers, and more successful wage-earners than I am. Yet I know now that love is not conditional on any of that. It just is. This is what beings tears of gratitude to my eyes when we kiss. I don't have to do anything to deserve this--I can't deserve it. It's too big to deserve.

Sometimes you get the thing you always wanted and it turns out to be a great disappointment. Love is worth it. It was what I was yearning for all those years and I was right to yearn. Even the hard parts, the painful places we come up against when humor deserts us and our differences are too vast to bridge--even then. I am so grateful I got to experience this. Whatever happens, I know what a good marriage is now. I went into it fairly blind. I am not a visionary like so many of my good friends--I am actually kind of dense. I have to do a thing in order to figure out what the hell I am doing. I didn't know if I would know how to be married until I was. And somehow I do.

Which means that the life I'm living now is in many ways a miracle to me. And in many ways it's still the same life. I still struggle with most of my same old issues; I still don't earn enough money and I often feel lost and lonely and unworthy. Christopher hasn't cured or fixed any of my rough edges--thank God. I don't expect him to. Neither of us can shoulder the basic responsibility for living a good life for the other. It's just that life is infinitely better with him. And that he has shown me I am capable of loving another this consistently, this carefully, this day to day. He has given me back a piece of my innocence that was lost. And for that and so much more, I am grateful.

2009-11-22T19:55:00.000-08:00

Five hundred people filled the auditorium at College of Marin to see the documentary about Carla, "Leave Them Laughing." Five hundred people were on their feet for a standing ovation. How much love can five hundred people generate? A lot. It was overwhelming.

I saw a rougher rough cut of the documentary in carla's apartment a month or so ago. The rough cut Friday night felt much more coherent and smooth. I don't know what the director did exactly to make the flow better, but whatever it was, worked. Actually, I think I do know; the addition of subtitles stating things like "Six months after diagnosis," or "a year before diagnosis" served to clarify the chronolgy and added the extra layer of information that we viewers needed. Now we didn't have to waste any time figuring out when such-and-such a scene happened in relation to other scenes, and we could just sit back and drink in the scathing humor, the beauty, the love, and the poignancy.

After the film, Carla wheeled out onto the stage, joined by Maclen, and John Zaritsky the director and Montana Berg the producer, and the place erupted. Mac was a real revelation. I remember him as a semi-inarticulate thirteen year-old, a typical male adolescent answering dumb adult questions in monosyllables ("how's school?") and ducking out of social situations. Where did this tall, handsome, self-possessed, hyper-articulate young man come from? He could be running for Senate right now, if only he were old enough to vote or drink. As it is, I'm seeing First Jewish President in gold letters under his name.

He served as Carla's extra voice, articulating things she wanted to say but didn't have breath for, thanking people when to do so would have made her cry (and then choke,) adjusting her mic, and in general being the smoothest, most helpful, grounded, confident teenager I have ever seen, bar none.

I loved it when Carla announced shyly, "Soooo....I've joined a gang. We usually sit in the back, because, well, we're a gang. you may have heard of us. We're the Crips."

There was such an incredibly diverse crowd there, from people in the ALS and disability communities to students and former students of College of Marin, to the Driving Miss Craisy cohort, to family, friends and Muselings. In some ways it was like a giant wedding, with guests asking each other, "So how do you know Carla?"

Carla looked beautiful, dressed in a short skirt and gold top, with a big smile. I worried that the event would wear her out, but she seemed to be gaining energy from all the energy that surrounded her and patiently answered audience member's questions. Whe one woman asked how she was managing to surrender her independence gracefully, she answered honestly, "I'm not. I hate losing my independence. Some days I am really cranky about it."

When someone else asked her who or what was her inspiration, (maybe they were expecting her to say Buddha or Jesus or Ghandi,) she cited Mac and then said "My girlfriends. They raised me. They taught me how to be a woman, how to be a mother. And they teach me about love every single day."

I brought Marci with me as my date, and afterward I was trying to thank her for coming with me and she kept stopping me to thank me for having brought her. The movie, and then seeing Carla speak, blew her away. Me too. I needed her help just to find the freeway entrance to get home afterward, and lucky for me the car drove itself, because I sure as hell wasn't capable of much navigation.

2009-11-17T09:34:00.000-08:00

For the past week or so I have been back in the world of The Recruiter, reading everything I can get my hands on about the military and military families, watching war movies and documentaries, and thinking about war and the way it affects us all.

I haven't consciously set myself to do this. It's more like, once I turned my focus to this project, that's where my attention wanted to go. Stories about PTSD in the newspaper (there have been plenty lately, with the Fort Hood shootings.) Voices of veterans on the radio.

I'm ashamed to say this but there was a time when I would have changed the station. I couldn't bear to hear about the things people do to each other in the name of war. I didn't want to think about those men--and increasingly women--and who they were and are when they come back.

The shadow of Vietnam is very long for people of my generation. I hate even thinking about how many homeless people are Vietnam vets, and all the horror and ugliness of that war. And the fact that now we're in another one, no less horrible, no less ugly.

Right now I'm reading David Frankel's book The Good Soldiers. It's devastating. He writes from inside the hearts and minds of these nineteen year old kids who are in an infantry division in Iraq. He writes about IEDs (improvised explosive devices) buried in heaps of trash or sewn into the corpses of dead dogs, or lying around in the running sewers and the constant constant stress of life there. He writes about the town so you can see and smell it as hell. I can only read a few pages at a time.

I can't make a play about Iraq and I don't aim to. What I'm trying to do is make a play about the U.S. and the mother, father, girlfriend on the other end, us, driving around in our cars, shopping at the malls, eating our burgers and holding the other end of the string. Our "American way of life" and the contrast between this life and what goes on in the name of protecting it.

I feel nervous, insecure, and lost as I venture into the second act. I feel like I don't know what I'm doing, like I have no right. My family is not a military family; in so many ways I have been protected from these realities. And yet. I'm an American. I've paid for and benefited from all these wars that have been fought in my name. I drive my car with the relatively cheap gas that's there because of the continuing wars in the Middle East. I buy cheap goods because my country's strong military gives us more leverage in negotiating trade with third world countries. I pay taxes and some of those dollars go to fund the atrocities abroad. I am not innocent.

As a woman especially I'm interested in the warrior archetype;. Okay, when we are watching ROME I have a crush on Pollo, the ultimate warrior. (Actually I have crushes on both him and Vorenus. Christopher doesn't mind. He's very understanding.) They embody some of the problems of returning veterans, problems that are as old as civilization: what do you do with men? There's farming and hunting and manufacturing and thinking, but there are also always men--people, but mostly men--whose ruling archetype is warrior. How do you find a place for those people, and what do you do with them when the wars are over?

It's not "them" either, it's me. What do I do with my own warrior energy? Where's the place for that?

I have been following the stories of women warriors and veterans with interest, especially on the New York Times home page, which has a lot of video. I notice more soldiers in uniform, men and women, standing on line at the car rental place, in the post office, at the supermarket. Especially when i fly across country, there they are, going about their business in their uniforms which set them apart, give them a special status.

Since I've been working on this my uncle remarked in an unrelated email that my great-grandfather was an officer in the Army in--was it Romania? before the turn of the twentieth century. Unusual for a Jew. He also was apparently an alcoholic and perhaps a wife-beater--also unusual, and perhaps not unrelated to his military experience.

I'm interested in how easily evil blooms from simple boredom. And what about the emptiness of our culture is fuels this need for war?

These are the big questions behind the play, but what I'm working on now--slowly and painfully--are the very small questions: what would this character say or do next? What scene should follow this one? Where do I find the patience to keep going when I don't know what I'm doing and every word in the scene I just spent three days writing will probably have to be revised? And how did I get into this project anyway? Whose brilliant idea was this?

The other great book I have been reading lately is by Kim Rosen, Saved by a Poem. everyone go out and buy this book! It is about memorizing great poems as a spiritual practice. She herself has learned hundreds of poems by heart and so her mind is like a cathedral--yes, she used that image, my favorite--she can walk inside domed vaulted ceilings enclosing sacred space and give herself the pleasure of mingling her mind with Neruda, Mary Oliver, D.H. Lawrence. She has these poems all the time. No one can take them from her. She writes about how even patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease can retain fragments of poetry and music that they had learned; it's encoded in their brain cells.

Inspired by this book, I've been trying to learn the Ginsberg poem the first verse of which is on my website "Song." It starts, "The weight of the world is love." I recited it to myself as I climbed in the hills the other day and found that the exercise of hiking made the breath in the poem more urgent and added its own layers of beauty on top of what was already there. Another poem I love is D.H. Lawrence's "Song of a Man Who Has Come Through":

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!A fine wind is blowing in the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it will carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world
Like a fire, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul;
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.

2009-11-10T15:56:00.000-08:00

A week of reconnection--old voices out of the past, people I hadn't seen or heard from in a while, some weeks, others years. I wonder who will pop up next?

November is the month when the veil is very thin. The veil between past and present, between the living and the dead, between what might be, what could have been and what is. I feel it. I walk in the hills and there's the death and dying all around me at the same time new green is pushing through everywhere. Fall and winter in California are as much a time of renewal and birth as spring and summer are. the rains bring green immediately; the land never sleeps, it doesn't even doze.

I went over to Carla's house and found her busy at work on several projects. She's getting out a calendar of sexy photos of people with ALS dressed as their favorite Hollywood fantasy characters, but complete with wheelchairs, respiratory equipment and feeding tubes. There's a picture of Carla in fishnet stockings and stiletto heels, there's someone lying in a bathtub full of rose petals a la American beauty, there's a stripped-to-the-waist Harley davidson-looking guy with a feeding tube, etc. It actually needs to be experienced to be understood.

Anyway, she greeted me in the midst of explaining that she's working on this project, she's overseeing the production of her third CD of original songs, all recorded before her voice started to go, and she's getting ready for the premiere of the documentary film about her, Leave 'Em Laughing, which will show at College of Marin on November 20th. Which would be quite enough for an able-bodied person, but oh yeah, she's also maybe got a nibble from a book publisher about her blog. As Gerry said about her, "The busiest dying woman in show business," or as she says about herself, "I can't die. I'm too busy!"

What can I do but take my hat off and salute? We are who we are, and we fight and deserve the right to be ourselves our whole lives, up to our very last breath. For what other purpose could we possibly have been born?

2009-11-05T10:00:00.000-08:00

Esalen: gorgeous blue clear skies, familiar faces, warm sparkling baths, the gardens twitching and bursting with life, rocky cliffs, crashing Pacific, faces, faces, embraces, snatches of conversation, sometimes shouted over the din of the dining hall, sunsets glimpsed from the porch or while hurrying through the garden back to my room to fetch a sweater, the faces of my students seated on cushions in a circle, bent over their notebooks, writing...

And I'm hurrying. When I think of Esalen, ironically, I always see myself running to get from one workshop to the next. Hurry to the Dance Dome for the panel, hurry down to the baths, back up to the dining hall for a meal, hurry through one conversation to greet the next person who is waiting to say something. The weekend is crammed full, and even after years of doing this I always worry about my workshops: did I plan well enough? Will I get enough people to sign up? Are they getting something out of it? That person is crying, why didn't I have the tissue box ready beforehand? How do the lights work in this room? Did they understand what I said? Did I just contradict myself? Will they give me good evaluations?

I never thought of myself as an anxious person, but when I saw my doctor for a routine check-up Tuesday I mentioned that I'd been feeling irritable over the weekend. Little things people said or did bugged me. I wasn't the at-one-with-the-Universe hippie the place evokes.

"That's a symptom of anxiety," she said and went on to talk about anti-depressant medications and various strategies for coping (switch to decaf, up the exercise, meditate.) It was a tiny off-hand remark, but illuminating for me. I have always been very in touch--maybe too much so--with the emotions of pain, sorrow, regret, etc. But I don't think I even recognize fear when it bites me on the ass. What, me, afraid? I'm the girl who hitch-hiked across country at 24, I'm the one who loves to beat up heavily padded assailants, I've been reading my poetry in public for decades, and have no discernible fear of public speaking.

Yet, when I looked more deeply, I saw that I do have fear, and anxiety--quite a lot of it. I wake up with screaming nightmares several times a month. I routinely dream that people are chasing me, trying to kill me. I fear offending other people even when I speak my mind about things.

Understanding that anxiety can cause irritability means that when other people are irritated with me, it's not necessarily because I hurt them. I used to think irritability was just a mild form of anger, and a response to being hurt. Thinking it could be because they are anxious opens the whole issue up, in a good way. It means I might not be at fault for another's irritable mood, and they might not be at fault when I am irritable with them.

I mention this because there's a flip side to having a gig in Paradise; being anxious about earning it, and scared that you'll somehow lose it. (And you will, I will. Nothing lasts forever.)

On the one hand I'm so lucky and grateful to be there at all, lucky to be published in The Sun as much as I have been, grateful to get the opportunity to teach in such a gorgeous space. On the other hand I'm well aware of all the other deserving writers and teachers who would kill for this opportunity and I feel like I have to earn it anew each time. And every year we do this I vow I'm going to come early to Esalen or stay an extra day, get a massage, take a hike, take advantage of BEING THERE, but every year I can't or don't--too many obligations on either side of the weekend.

Once I'm actually in the baths and my body is immersed in the warm water I finally relax. I stop, I bob, I float. I stop being a writer with a recognized name, or a teacher, or an anybody, I just become a body, breasts, legs, breath, bubbles. I watch other bodies dip and emerge, admire their perfections and imperfections. Humans are very moving when they are naked.

And I admit it, I'm a voyeur. Not so much in an overtly sexual sense--I'm not looking at bodies as a way to get to stimulation or orgasm for myself. But I love to see the infinite variety that we humans come in, tiny girlish breasts, big floppy pendulous ones, long legs, short muscular butts, and the folds and sags and ripples of aging skin. If I were a painter I would paint nudes.

I look out over the sparkling Pacific and pinch myself. It's like floating inside an Ansel Adams photograph, or a Robinson Jeffers poem. I feel a long way from suburban New England, and even after all these years of living in california and many many hours of soaking in hot tubs I still sometimes can't believe I'm actually here.

Saturday night we had a small party for the SUN writers and staff and a few participant-students, and I found I couldn't speak. Or I could speak, but not much, not like usual. I couldn't crack jokes, or shout my way into the center of the circle. (I think Australians talk about "shouting" each other a round of drinks, and I can understand why.)

There was drinking and some smoking and general hilarity, and I didn't want to get drunk or stoned and somehow couldn't get hilarious. I was thinking of Carla and all the changes since I came here last, two years ago. Then I was a red-haired wild child, free spirit. Now my hair is graying, I am in a deep and sometimes complex marriage, and quietly entering menopause. I am having one of the least dramatic transitions that I have heard of, knock wood, no real hot flashes so far, but I am in that passage, and it makes me feel more internal and sad sometimes.

I should have crept away as my roommate did and gone back to the baths, gone somewhere where I could have had a quiet conversation or just looked at the moon and stars. But my seventh grade self who has lain dormant for the last few centuries re-awakened--it was Halloween after all--and she is miserably socially insecure and afraid of missing the fun. So I stayed.

Sunday we sat on a dais and talked about our creative processes. I told the truth: I just write. I have no special formula, no sacred space, I dawdle and waste time, my desk is a mess, piled with drafts, old copies of Poets and Writers magazine, checkbook, clothing catalogs ("clothing porn," we call it,) vitamins, (in the vain hope that I will actually remember to take them.)

When C is home he interrupts me sometimes to tell me there's an interesting interview on NPR or to read me something out of the paper or to ask me if I've paid the PG & E bill. I interrupt myself to get coffee, watch the feral kitties playing in the backyard (the mother and the biggest black-and-white one are currently curled up together on a scrap of carpet on top of the compost box,) check email. The phone rings and I'm glad to talk to whoever is calling. These interruptions are my life, and without them, I don't know what I would write about.

Sunday I drove home through heavy traffic, took a shower, changed clothes, kissed C who had prepared me a take-out dinner, and Ruth picked me up to go do a reading in Mill Valley with other SUN writers. It was beautiful to hear everyone else read--Krista Bremer read My Accidental Jihad, Ruth read My Fat Lover, Lee read some poems, and SUN staffers read other selections from the new SUN anthology The Mysterious Life of the Heart. And Sy read a bunch of excerpts from his Notebook. The Marin Community Center is a beautiful space, with paintings on the wall and high cathedral ceilings.

I read my poem, "Smashing the Plates," which appears in the book and which Lee Rossi described as "pure id." Indeed. Say what you will about a certain shmuck-o, I really got a lot of poems out of that brief encounter. I read some other things too, but I was disappointed that in my haste I'd forgotten to bring along extra copies of my own books to sell. There was just too much to keep track of.

Monday morning I was flattened and managed to barely crawl around the lake. Yesterday I finally made it to the gym and swam a half mile, and today I finally feel like myself again. Time to come down from Mount Olympus and get back to work--MORE is interested in the essay I sent them three months ago but requires a revision, and I am aching to finish the play. And I promised C I would call more roofers.

2009-10-29T21:47:00.000-07:00

Christopher told me he was going to take me on a mystery date, and then let it slip that it was going to be to an exhibit on the history of the screwdriver. I was all excited about that when lo and behold, the car pulled up in front of a movie theater playing Bright Star.

What a beautiful movie. I predict that Abby Cornish will at least be nominated for Best Actress, that Kerry Fox will be nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and that it will also be nominated in the categories of Screenplay, Cinematography and Costumes. It was a visual feast, and the writing and acting were wonderful. I loved the little pink-cheeked red-head who played Fanny Brawne's younger sister.

There was a naturalness and gentleness to the acting that was heartbreaking. I surprised myself by crying--a lot--as the lover's dreams of happiness slipped away. Keats knew all along, but she was young and naive and stubbornly clung to hope.

My favorite line in the movie was when Keats said, "A poet is the least poetical creature on earth," which is exactly what I think.

When we came home I got on Wikipedia and Google and read up a bit on the real history, which of course was more complicated and probably less pretty than what was portrayed in the movie. Fanny Brawne did marry someone else after Keats' death, and had three children, to whom she bequeathed the love letters he had written her. Keats himself had such a hard and painful life: poverty, abuse, lack of recognition, death of people close to him, illness, poverty, and loss, loss, loss. It's little wonder that he wrote "I have been half in love with easeful death." It must have come as a relief after so much suffering.

And with all that he wrote Ode on a Grecian Urn, and Bright Star and When I have fears that I may cease to be and all the rest of it. An astonishing legacy crammed into just a few years of life.

What is most poignant is that according to his biographers and the movie, he died "thinking himself a failure." If he only knew.

I remember reading La Belle Dame Sans Merci when I was a child--it was one of the poems in the Louis Untermeyer book I loved, the Child's Golden Book of Poetry--and I loved it and responded to its strong rhythms even if I didn't understand it completely.

I was so touched at C's selflessness--deep in his heart of hearts I suspect he may have preferred the history of the screwdriver--but he manfully and graciously made this date about doing what I wanted and we even ate Chinese afterward instead of pub food. So sweet.

And now I'm packing to go teach at Esalen this weekend which should be great fun only I wish i felt better physically. I've got a nagging tickle in the back of my throat which I hope doesn't erupt into anything worse. It will be an intense day Saturday--I'll teach four sessions starting at 8:30 a.m. and ending after 9 p.m.--but hopefully I'll get a chance to just hang in the hot tub with Angela and my other SUN friends. It would be really great if I could somehow squeeze a yoga class or a massage into the weekend, but probably not. probably I'll just try to get to my classes on time and stay hydrated.

Sunday night we are doing a reading in Marin. It will be at 7:30 at the the Mill Valley Community Center, 180 Camino Alto, for anyone reading this who wants to come.

And: shameless self-promotion time. See How We Almost Fly can be ordered from pearlmag.com/pearled.html.

2009-10-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

I didn't sleep well last night, and got up early to see sunrise. Thick painterly smudges of gold and purple and mauve. A hummingbird in the guava tree. I sat there for a long time on the couch by the window, coffee cup in hand. Watched the world wake up, the deserted street begin to stir. A guy on a bicycle, wearing a florescent yellow vest, cycled slowly up the hill. My neighbor warmed up her car, then left for work. It's impossible to catch the exact moment when the sky changes from mauve to tea-colored to clear daylight.

Now I'm at work at my desk. Love Shack is complete and I'm sending it to another contest, only I've changed the name to Tiny Paradise. I spent the last week obsessing over a long poem I was building called "Cathedral." Besieged poor Christopher with drafts the moment he walked in the door. Sent drafts to Ruth, to my other friends. Nailed my butt to the chair revising and revising.

Now I think it's done. Done enough. It could always be better--everything could always be better--and there's always more to say, but comes a time to let things go. I realize this is the job of an aging artist. What's your narrow place, what is your Red Sea, what's your Promised Land? The narrowness for me is ambition that is too small, an overly tight focus on just accomplishing and achieving. I'm addicted to striving for that. I'm not proud to say it but it's true.

The Red Sea I have to cross is the wilderness of the work itself, surrendering to the process, really letting myself go as deep and far into my subconscious mind as I can bear, as I have courage for. That is scary but exhilarating.

The promised Land I used to imagine was publication, minor fame, making it onto the radar screen of the general culture, earning a seat at the big kid's table when it came time to discuss the interesting questions. That's what i wanted. I still want that, honestly--I do. But I'm thinking that perhaps the Promised Land is something quite other than whatever my ego imagines it to be. Perhaps the Promised Land is just a feeling of connection to all people, something that, ironically, success might prevent one from feeling. Success could be great, but it could also be isolating. Anyway, success is success. Connection is connection. They are not the same thing.

I am still figuring out what the Promised Land is to me.

I told my essay writing students to take themselves on artist dates, a la Julia Cameron, but I haven't done that for myself in ages. I've been waiting around passively to see Bright Star, the movie about Keats, which Christopher doesn't have time for, instead of just taking myself to the movies the way I used to do when I was single. So today's the day, reward for a task completed.

This last weekend Wing It! had a series of three concerts where we performed for the 20th anniversary of the company. It was very sweet and deep. Beautiful things happened at each concert, and each one was completely unique, being improvised. I feel so lucky and grateful to be part of the company, to have so many people to love, to be able to be in long-term relationship with such fine souls. Despite--or maybe because of--our differences.

None of my closest relationships have been conflict-free. Christopher and I are a great pair, but we're so different in our styles, temperaments, strengths and weaknesses that it's funny. One of the things that unites us is mutual sarcasm, stubbornness, and fiestiness. Also, he told me last night that he spent a year immersed in Bach, thinking of little else. This was a propos of my asking him about the influence of church music on his composition.

This relates to Wing It! because for so long I've had such a hard time accepting that I am indeed nestled into a group comprised mostly of church-going Protestants, a surprising number of whom are or have been ministers. I just could not wrap my head around that. Now I'm married to a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and I so appreciate the virtues he has which come from that background; he's hard-working, humble, idealistic, and has great boundaries. I married my greatest teacher. Go figure.

So too, with me and Wing It!--it's not perfect, but it's very good. I'm glad even for the painful parts which shove me right up against my most alienated Jew self. I'm grateful for the opportunity to play and keep playing, to move through states, to keep getting a little better (hopefully,)to keep stretching and growing.

Today the lead story in the New York Times is about homeless youth. Kids as young as 11 and 12 are out on the streets because of the recession. Families are stressed and losing their homes; there's not enough space or money or food. Domestic violence is on the rise. The paper said perhaps the most tragic thing is how hard the kids work to elude capture by social workers whom they imagine are seeking them, when the sad fact is that parents often don't even report the kids missing. No one is even looking for them. They are truly invisible.

I think about the people I know and know of who are trying everything in their power to get pregnant--who are doing IVF and hormone treatments and investigating surrogates and buying other women's eggs in order to have a baby. How is it we live in a society in which one part of the population idealizes parenthood to such an extreme degree, while at the same time unwanted children starve or sell their bodies on the streets? How come millions are being spent every year trying to get menopausal women pregnant while there are real live born babies dying around the world of malnutrition and neglect?

C deals with those kinds of homeless and broken kids every day. Juvenile Hall sucks, but it's often the first place some of those children have ever experienced three meals a day. He brings home stories that are completely heartbreaking.

I can feel both sides of the issue; the longing for a pure unspoiled baby, a fresh start, a little bit of Heaven. The damage gets done so early, even in the womb. There are kids in the Hall who were crack babies, or have fetal alcohol syndrome. Who wants to take that on?

On the other hand, what happens to us as a country, as a world, when we prize the offspring of the affluent, and allow the children of the poor to die miserably in abandoned buildings?

We have been watching the HBO series Rome lately; C says he likes it even better than The Wire. I like it too but I don't know how much to trust the writing; were the ancient Romans indeed so similar to us? In their decadence and egotism and sexuality and sadism and voyeurism, they seem like a mirror of our own world, some of the least attractive parts of it. In the extremes of their classism, I think we are a bit different; at least now there is some lip service to the idea of universal human rights. At least most people nowadays agree that slavery is wrong.

But what do we practice? If someone doesn't have access to a warm bed, food, or medical care, does it really matter so much that he or she is not a slave?

One surprising thing that watching Rome is doing for me is in softening my attitude toward Christianity. I used to think that the Christian religion was a scourge on the earth, the cause of many of our current ills. But seeing the blood lust of Roman society before Christianity even arrived on the scene, I understand more how it was a kind of evolution, an improvement. Of course, once Rome got ahold of the religion, they turned it into something that was culturally close to what they had before; the Pope was just another kind of Emperor. The Crusades were another chance to rape and pillage. But the ideals of forgiveness and mercy, even if expressed as "We're better than you because we're Christian," were a step in the right direction. Even if we're not there yet. Even if we never get there.

Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, is said to have answered, "I think it's a very good idea!"

Shameless self-promotion section: you can order See How We Almost Fly from www.pearlmag.com/pearled.html

2009-10-21T09:28:00.001-07:00

The youngest grandchild was fourteen months old, toddling around like a drunken sailor, occasionally crawling under the glass-topped dining room table to get away from the fray. The oldest party-goer was my Dad's cousin Arthur, a tall thin 83-year-old flirt. In between were all the rest of us, eating cake, talking, laughing, doing a jig saw puzzle, wrangling nieces and nephews--"Lucy! Get down!"--and looking at the album of photos which we compiled for Dad's 75th.

He cried when he looked at all the old pictures, some of which he had even forgotten existed. There was our mother, dark-eyed and gorgeous and young, before the M.S., before the bad times. There we all were with our terrible '70s haircuts, up against the car with the sun in our eyes, squinting.

Dad was overcome and overjoyed. And he cried when I showed him the poem I wrote for him, which I tucked as a surprise into See How We Almost Fly. I really don't have words for how much I love my father. I can't convey the utter sweetness of this man who would do anything, give anything for his children. He shows me the roundness of a life well-lived, coming full circle, the children's children on his lap, the overspilling living room.

There was a freak early snow on the day we celebrated his birthday--earliest in the year in recorded history. I had brought my long underwear and I wore it, despite everyone's teasing--yes, I am a California wuss and I need to be warm. Christopher and I went out and ate pub food. I wanted him to taste real New England onion rings which are so delicious and about a jillion calories apiece. He liked the clam chowder and the fish chowder.

Monday, my birthday, we wandered around Newburyport, a scenic little fishing town that has become a tourist mecca. Looked in windows at stores selling ships in a bottle, looked at boats on the dilapidated wharf, ate seafood chili, and wandered under leafy tree-cathedrals. I had taught poetry workshops in a nephew's fifth grade classroom and a niece's kindergarten earlier in the week, so there was a little bit of everything: work, play, family, and couple time. The one thing there was no time or space for was writing, so now I'm back at it, back at my desk, looking at rough drafts for some new poems, the revision of an essay about remarriage, and of course the new play, The Recruiter. Trying to decide which thing to work on first. Poems win.

2009-10-08T12:15:00.000-07:00

The weather has turned gray and cold, which is depressing for life but good for work. There must be so many great English writers because the weather there is so dismal; it's harder here in California where the outdoors is so glorious it seems really stupid to stay inside trying to put words in some pleasing order.

Here's what I've been seeing, reading, and thinking about lately: after an appropriate mourning period after finishing The Wire, which was the best show EVER, we are now renting ROME from Netflix, which is good; not quite as good as the Wire, but it has the added benefit of teaching you some ancient history.

Rome is bloody and violent in a casual way that makes The Sopranos look like Romper Room. Watching it I could understand how, in context of the times, Christianity would seem a better option; when contrasted with human sacrifice and animal sacrifice on a large scale, with torturing and killing slaves for entertainment, with rape and incest as common ways of passing the time, Christianity could be seen as a real improvement. (When the Emperor converted to Christianity, then Christianity itself became Roman-ized, in the form of Roman Catholicism, and the old values of empire and violence became part of the religion, but that's another discussion.)

Anyway, we watched the first two episodes with interest, and two more just arrived in the mail, so we'll keep up with it for a while. I wondered where the Jews were when all this history was going on, and marveled at our survival in such a bloody, bloody time. My friend Marci says it was Jews (Jewish slaves?) who built the Coliseum. How did we ever make it?

We also went to the Berkeley Rep last weekend and saw American Idiot, the Green Day musical. If I were twenty-five I might find it inspiring and moving; as a fifty-year-old I was irritated not to be able to make out the lyrics for the first third of the show. I also found myself thinking, "Hair was better." Which is, perhaps, an unfair comparison: that was then, this is now. American idiot represents the anomie and angst of the generation that came up under 8 years of Bush, Jr. So there's a lot of rage and hopelessness and flailing, which we can all relate to, but which, by itself, doesn't necessarily make for good theater. You need some plot or characters or something to hang it all on. There were many moments of beauty; there was some very fun dancing, and a lovely aerial ballet featuring four wounded soldiers; there were some good voices and some nice guitar work. But four days after seeing it, I retain not one line or note. There's nothing running through my head from it, it's like the proverbial Chinese meal--none of it stuck.

Last night I went to see The Pillow Man at San Jose Repertory Theater, a black comedy about the random torture and murder of children. It's a brilliant play; like a set of those nesting Russian dolls, stories within stories, opening up to more stories. Among other things the play asks the question, "If art arose in human beings as a response to the horror of suffering, if telling stories is a way we soothe ourselves from suffering, a way we make sense of it, then what price are we willing to pay for our stories? Is the suffering and death of innocents necessary to a world in order for theater to exist?"

As the play progressed and as the gruesome stories piled up, I was caught between laughter and horror. It was so over-the-top it was funny, and, well, as my companion (not C., another friend) said, "Slipping on a banana peel is funny." I was raised by a woman who believed that slipping on a banana peel is not funny--we were not allowed to watch The Three Stooges because she found the image of people hitting each other on the heads with hammers to be repellant. I'm fairly certain she would have hated the Pillow Man.

For myself, I'm torn; I wonder why we find violence so entertaining. Are we just like the Romans? Their gladiators really did suffer and die, while our actors are only pretending, but is there something in the human psyche that revels in the spectacle of other people's pain?

The Hindus think of all of this drama of life that we undergo as "lila" (not sure if I'm spelling that right)--God's play. We appear to suffer; we appear to die. In reality, they say, life is everlasting, and all these terrible things, wars, famine, sicknesses--are just illusions. Our souls are untouched by it all. But something about this whole human experiment calls for drama, and in drama you have to have the play of light and shadow, good and evil, life and death. Even if, underlyingly, it's all one, we need our illusions for the sake of, I don't know--education? The testing of one's mettle for the progress towards enlightenment?

Which begs the question: would God enjoy watching The Sopranos? Would He or She enjoy gladiator contests, or wars? What kind of a huge (sick?) mind would God have to have to be entertained by this stuff we call life?

Sorry, but this is what watching Martin McDonagh's work does to me. It opens up these weird cynical dark places in my brain that I am normally not in touch with. McDonagh wrote The Pillow Man, along with six(!) other plays in one year--actually in one nine-month stretch--when he was 24 years old. This is kind of inconceivable to me as a writer--it's a feat akin to running a marathon every day. On the one hand it shows what a person is capable of if he focuses, and he doesn't have anything else going on in his life, and if the weather is really shitty. On the other hand, what the--? How is anyone sane supposed to be able to compete with that?

All his plays are filled with images of torture, cruelty, sudden death, and the like. There's a real shortage of what we could call the feminine principle. And they are funny. And brilliant in their own way, although after I saw the Beauty Queen of Lenane I wanted to throw myself under a train. It was the most godawful depressing disturbing thing I had ever sat through--and I've sat through some bad poetry readings and a fair amount of bleak theater.

Anyway, I appreciated seeing The Pillow Man because there was so much to chew on, even though it was depressing, and even though Mary Zimmerman's Arabian Nights also dealt with the theme of story-telling and the never-ending story without making you want to go out a down a bottle of Prozac. I wished they would have cut about twenty minutes out of the script and had an after-theatre discussion--although we wouldn't have been able to stay for it, as it was a weeknight--because I think the real value in this kind of work lies not only in experiencing it, but mainly in digesting it--with other people. Theatre, unlike reading, is a communal act, and the fact that we were all assembled there to hear these unspeakable stories, and watch some of them acted out, and even to laugh at some of the horrors our world comes up with, is something worth acknowledging.

I'm also reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a wonderful novel that was recommended to me by one of my writing students last year. I'm loving it, reading slowly and savoring as I go.

I finished a draft of the Second Marriage essay for MORE magazine--at least that's who I intend it for, I hope they'll take it. They still are holding onto a 900-word piece I wrote earlier in the summer. The magazine industry has been hit so hard by the recession that many editors have been laid off, and advertising pages lost, which means less pages available for essays and memoirs. Which means for me, that it's taking three times as long to hear back about work I've submitted, and that essays which might once have been taken--like the piece on self-defense for women which was near and dear to my heart--are being rejected. Not enough pages, the magazine is too skinny to support the more eccentric work.

It may, big picture, be a good thing, politically and ecologically speaking, for some of these glossies to shrink or go under completely. It's probably for the good of the planet if Revlon and Cover Girl and the people who make Botox and spend millions promoting their unnecessary products fail. But for those of us free-lancers who cling to the undersides of capitalism--and I realize, yes, it's parasitic--(but it's also a way to sometimes get paid good money for writing)-- it's a loss of an outlet. Then again, there's the hope that other venues will spring up, maybe ones that are healthier for civilization as a whole.

Okay, shameless self-promotion: you can order my book of poems, See How We Almost Fly from www.pearlmag/pearled.html, or from Amazon.

2009-10-06T08:55:00.000-07:00

It's beautiful, cool sunny fall weather, but there's a sadness in the changing of the season. We want to hold the light and we can't. Figs are hardening on the tree. Feral kittens nowhere to be found this morning, although the mama is coming around faithfully. C is healing well but still in some pain. And my book is HERE and I've been sitting at my desk thinking up strategies for shameless self-promotion, which is what's needed, but kind of embarrassing. I do want to sell the book. Eight years in the making, the work deserves whatever publicity I can get for it. At the same time, the poems in it are old to me; I'm more interested in what I'm working on now, or what I'm about to work on. Last poems for Love Shack. Finish the essay I started about second marriage and the book proposal. Finish The Recruiter. Get the three little one-act plays of Glitter and Spew produced, separately or together. And keep going deeper into the heart of the world, leaves and light and people.

2009-09-30T12:36:00.000-07:00

See How We Almost Fly is officially here!!!

The books came two days ahead of schedule, in a big box, and they are beautiful!! If I were more tech-savvy, I would include a picture of the front cover to display, but you can see them (and, hopefully, order them) from my web site www.alisonluterman.com. Or you can go to Pearl Editions at www.pearlmag.com/pearled/html and order your copy there.!

I have to go drop off some copies for friends now....

2009-09-27T12:48:00.000-07:00

Christopher came home Thursday night--weak, fragile, and in pain. I don't know how we got him up the stairs into our bed, but we did. God bless Gerry for staying with us through a long boring frustrating exhausting day at the hospital, trying to get a notary to come to C's bedside to authorize me to collect his car from the tow-yard ("But you're married," my friend Ruth said incredulously. "Yeah, you'd think that heterosexual privilege would count for something," I said. It doesn't. Everyone's trying to legally protect themselves from getting sued.)

C meanwhile, still couldn't keep anything down, and was throwing up and writhing in pain whenever he tried to sit up. Finally by the end of the day he managed to sit up and we got the back brace on him, then loaded him into a wheelchair and took him home. No discharge plan, no cane or walker, no thing. Good-bye and good luck.

He made it into the house on sheer determination alone, collapsed into bed and basically slept for the better part of two days, eating a very little at first and then gradually a little more. Friday he sat up incredibly s-l-o-w-l-y and carefully, and we got the back brace on. A trip to the bathroom was an Odyssey. But Saturday, he managed to walk all over the top floor and even venture downstairs. And today he's been puttering--slowly, cautiously, balancing between pain medication and the brace, but puttering. He's learning what he can and can't do in this new, recovering body, and--typical--he wants to be up and doing again.

It's bright and hot out and we've been sitting in the living room drinking coffee, eating figs from the tree, listening to Harry Reasoner and reading the Sunday Times. So simple and precious.

Last night I left him for a few hours in the care of a good friend and with his encouragement drove to Sacramento to hear No Nude Men Theater group read my play Glitter and Spew. It was about two dozen people, lots of very strong actors, a couple of other playwrights, and directors. They loved the play! They laughed, sighed, and there was a great discussion afterward which gave me ideas about how I could expand and improve the third section. Of course I felt critical as I heard it aloud--lots of places I wanted to fix. In particular I'm concerned about the balance of lyricism to "real" dialogue.

I read an interview with Sarah Ruhl (author of The Clean House and many other wonderful plays) who said that writing a play was writing poetry for the stage. That quote from her gave me permission to write heightened, poetic monologues for my characters; it was very freeing. I'm concerned though that it's easy for me to write "poetically" and that i shouldn't lean on that ability as a lazy substitute for character development or plot. So hearing the play aloud, I wanted to trim some of the fancier monologues. But Stuart, the director, said that he wouldn't change a thing from the first two short sections. The third one he said, does need more development.

It felt great to have the play read aloud, finally, and exciting to make connection with this talented crew. And it felt--I don't know--independent--a little lonely, but kind of good--to know that i could have both these halves of my life, but that I alone am responsible for balancing them--to work as an artist and also be a care-taker. It was a long drive back without radio reception; I listened to my CD of Carla singing, and also to the Roche Sisters. It reminded me of so many long empty moonlit road trips, with Alan and without him, and now with C and without him. Times in the car when you go without saying or even thinking much of anything for long stretches and then come to with a start, realizing you've been dreaming awake, and the road has flown by, and you are finally home.

2009-09-23T18:07:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, Christopher passed out from low blood sugar behind the wheel of his car. Fortunately, (thank god, thank God, thank God) he was not on the freeway at the time and only hit a chain link fence going very slowly. Fortunately, he received good medical care at the scene and got taken to a decent hospital. Fortunately, I was home when the phone call came and after an interminable wait in the waiting room at the ER, I could see him and be with him without restriction. And Ruth came, and sat with me, and brought salad and little tea candles, and lavender oil, and a book of spiritual poetry.

Unfortunately, he has compression fractures in his vertebrae and it hurts when he tries to move. Fortunately, there are drugs to deal with it--lots of good drugs.

He spent a lot of time today dozing, and having an MRI, and got measured for a back brace by a charming young man with one prosthetic foot.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Farm equipment when I was a kid," he said. "It sucks, but it's how I got into this line of work."

It was clear he really cared about what he did; he was careful and friendly and easy as he made lots of tiny black dots on Christopher's body with a magic marker. Unfortunately, Christopher will be in this brace for the next few months. Fortunately, this will not be permanent, and who knows? Maybe this whole incident has some good things to teach us--like we should meditate, or we'll start doing yoga together, or...

Unfortunately, this accident puts the kibosh on some of C's more ambitious plans for doing the solar paneling on our roof himself. On the other hand, who knows--there could be a silver lining to that too.

I'm feeling the kind of numb I get around hospitals. The smell. Last night as I drove home after spending about eight hours in the hospital--from 3:30 to 11:30 I was immensely comforted by the bare moonlit hills of Castro Valley, and the rich stink of skunk. Okay, it's not a "nice" smell, but it was real. Whereas hospitals have this fake baby-powder smell that is really masking some far ickier scents, and it just makes me anxious.

Fortunately, I could come home and sleep--sort of--in our own bed. The first time i have slept there alone since Christopher moved in two years ago. I am going to cook myself a bunch of garlicky string beans and eat them--an antidote to the abysmal, sugar-laden glop that is available at hospitals--and I admit, there's something about stress and trauma that makes me crave sugar. I feel like eating a king-sized box of movie candy and just disappearing into a PEOPLE magazine. (There was a reader's Digest Ann Rule true crime book at the gift shop which I bought for a dollar and have been reading--all about a dentist who killed his girlfriend and his wife. Very uplifting.)

I asked C how he felt about staying in the hospital one more night as he was dozing off into a morphine haze. "Well, they do have cable, " he murmured. "And then it's hard to beat the food..."

Before we found out exactly what happened, when I was sitting for that interminable hour and a half in the sitting room, imagining stroke, seizure, heart attack, I had told Ruth, "As long as his sense of humor is intact. If he can't walk, that will be a drag, but we'll manage. As long as he still has his sense of humor..."

He can feel all his toes and wiggle them and move his legs. It's just that his back seizes up when he tries to do anything more than that. And it's hard to see him in pain. I think I'll go say hi to the mama feral cat (who is still nursing, even though her babies are almost as big as she is.) Maybe pull a few weeds and eat something green. Then head back to the hospital again.

2009-09-18T09:18:00.000-07:00

"How are things in the poem factory?" Christopher asks as he arrives home. I barely take my eyes off the screen.

"Just finishing up." I kiss him and shove a few pages under his nose. "Here, read this."

"Can I go to the bathroom first? Can I get a snack?"

"If you must."

For the past few--I don't know how long it's been, days? Weeks?-- the poems have been coming thick and furious. I've pulled apart the manuscript of Love Shack, eliminated a lot of weaker pieces that I see now were just place-holders, and replaced them with the new work which feels much stronger.

Of course that means the overall shape of the book is changing as well, bursting its bounds, like the fig tree in our front yard which I wouldn't let C prune back as hard as he wanted to last winter. Now she has completely taken over, threatening to put people's eyes out with branches that reach across the sidewalk, but oh, there are millions of figs. Enough for us, for the birds, for passersby...

So the book, which started out life as a collection of love poems--I was thinking specifically about an Anne Sexton book, Love Poems, which I read a million years ago, and which contains some of her best writing--has now expanded to include a bunch of my other, usual preoccupations, Oakland, street people, kids, women, etc. And animals.

More cats and dogs in this book than ever before, probably a result of living with Mr. Cat-Magnet, who, however little sleep he has gotten the night before, still always remembers to set out food for the feral cat family. The mama now boldly nurses her babies out in the open in our back yard, in plain view of everyone. I see her from the upstairs bathroom window and if I make any noise she looks up startled, and the kitties jump and scatter. I didn't realize that cats had such an acute sense of hearing.

Last night we went to hear Chick Corea at Yoshi's, courtesy of a wedding gift from a friend. Awesome. Corea looks like a friendly science teacher and plays like a monster, but I fell in love with Stanley Clarke, the bassist. What a presence. he did everything with that bass short of actually fucking it onstage and I'm sure I was not the only woman in the audience who thought about him doing that. He caressed it, slapped it, bowed it, played with it, and in general was one with his instrument.

I envy musicians having such communal fun with each other, with the audience while they are doing their art. It's a great feeling to be writing so intensely, great and also lonely. When my friend Angela was on a writer's retreat last week, it was almost like we were working together as she and I would email each other updates during the day.

Now that she's back to her real job, I email drafts to Ruth, and bless her, she manages to respond with great speed and helpfulness, even claiming that it's "fun" to be inundated with new poems. I also send them to family and friends, fairly promiscuously. My father, who has no more self-control than I do, usually responds by inflicting my early drafts on his entire email list. By the time those poems have landed in his friends' inboxes I've usually revised them.

There's a new movie out about Keats called Bright Star and of course I'm going to see it. I love seeing writers depicted in movies, especially since writing is such a boring and solitary pursuit. I mean, where's the dramatic tension in watching someone hunched over a piece of paper or a keyboard? It's not exactly The Wrestler, with Mickey Rourke sticking needles full of steroids in his butt in the locker room, or any of the great bio-pics about musicians, which have plenty of wonderful concert footage.

How do you dramatize something as ethereal and often sedentary as thought? I mean, moving commas around and selecting one word over another may end up having a profound effect on a poem, but it doesn't do much visually.

My favorite writer-movie scene, because it was so highly improbable, occurred in Julia, when Jane Fonda, playing Lillian Hellman, threw her typewriter out the window in a fit of frustration. Loved that. Would never ever ever do that, no matter how frustrated. They really should show writers opening the refrigerator door and staring at the contents, picking their noses, checking the mail obsessively, and pacing around their house, pinching dead leaves off of houseplants, only that is almost as boring and depressing as the act of writing itself.

No matter. The poems are coming. The book is getting leaner, meaner, and yet more abundant. Expansion and contraction at the same time, which is the theme for this week. I have been thinking about how there is not expansion in life without a significant contraction buried in the heart of it, and vice versa. No contraction without a strange and contradictory expansion. I could say more about this, but I have a feeling everyone reading it will have their own examples.

2009-09-15T14:00:00.000-07:00

Christopher sent me an interesting link to an article in today's New York Times about unconditional love. This article talked about the way parents give and withhold approval from their kids in an attempt to control their children's behavior. The research shows that conditional love "works"--that is, parents are able to get their kids to be socialized, achieve, etcetera, by this method. But it produces adults who are insecure and resentful.

I wondered about this. First, I wondered What would unconditional love look like? How could a parent conceal their approval of some behaviors and their disapproval of others? Would that even be desirable?

Then I wondered, What would unconditional love feel like? I suspect it would make me uncomfortable because I am so accustomed to judgment as a way of being. It would be hard to release that. But delicious, I think. Delicious and scary. My fear for myself would be that without conditions I would descend into total sloth and selfishness. Without the fear of losing other people's love and approval I would not be motivated to exert any efforts to combat my own natural immaturity.

I thought about my Little Sister. I don't love her unconditionally. Well, I feel compassion for her, and I appreciate her funny, quirky, stubborn nature, but I can only deal with being around her if she is relatively gentle and respectful; I can't take it when she's aggressive and rude. It wears me out.

I know the deal is to separate the person from their behavior. "I love you, I just don't love it when you..." Or as my mother used to say, "I love you I just don't like you." Ecchhhh.

That hurt, when she said that. but what if it's true? What if sometimes you don't like the person you are supposed to love--or the person you do love deep-down even though right this moment you can't access that love-feeling? What do you do--dissemble? Remove yourself from the situation until the love comes back? Apply unconditional self-love as fast as possible and hope that does the trick? Man, my heart goes out to parents. This shit is hard.

Luckily, Christopher has not yet done anything that has even come close to shaking my love for him. We get annoyed and frustrated with each other at times, yes, but nothing toxic, ever. He has never made me feel like I had to choose between him and my own psychic survival. At the end of the day I can always count on his innate decency and kindness--I'd bet my life on those qualities of his. I have bet my life on them.

My Little Sister on the other hand, has worked my last nerve. She stretches me and tries me and I come up short and find myself wanting. It's hard for someone who didn't receive unconditional love as a child to learn how to give it. It's hard to unconditionally love someone who has built up thick hostile-looking walls. It's hard to love when the relationship is by its nature lopsided, when the language and culture are different, when it's inconvenient and expensive and often feels unappreciated.

Yet the more challenging it is to love in this way the more rewarding it is when the breakthrough occurs, the walls are breached, the shift happens. In her and in me.

I read the article. I understood the words. But seeing and experiencing difficult love is another animal entirely. I am such a beginner.

2009-09-12T16:51:00.000-07:00

Today I laid down the law with my Little Sister and got great results. She was giving me attitude before my car had even left the church parking lot where I picked her up, turning up the volume to earsplitting levels on the radio--KMEL which I let her listen to, rather than NPR or KCSM the jazz stations, which I prefer--and defying my attempts to turn it down. She had that hostile, distant, closed look on her face which I've come to know and dread over the past year, the look which makes me feel like I'm dealing with a 20-year-old thug rather than a child.

I stopped the car, took a deep breath and said, "Look, I am a volunteer, do you know what that means?"

She nodded in an adults-always-lecture-you way.

I said, "Tell me what that means."

Eye-roll. "It means you want to help."

"Right, I do want to help. But I don't want to be treated badly. And I don't have to do this if I don't want to. If you can't be nice to me then you're going to have to find a new big sister."

She was quiet for about five minutes after that as we drove and I thought Uh-oh I blew it. But then she started talking like a normal 8-year-old, rattling on some stories about making a volcano out of play-doh and putting vinegar and baking soda together to make a bubbling froth to come out of it. Normal kid stuff. Amazing.

And she stayed like that for the next three and a half hours, during which we bought food coloring, made play doh, did science experiments, cleaned up science experiments, and made a batch of chocolate chip cookies. She even let me read a few pages of a kid's book to her. And we wrapped up the cookies and tied them with a ribbon for her granny and she wrote out a gift card, totally on her own initiative.

She's starting to grow up. We were talking about being the baby of the family, which she is, versus being the eldest, which I am, and she said, "When you're the baby you're spoiled, like I am." She didn't have any shame about saying that about
herself; she thought it was a good thing to be spoiled. She wouldn't want to trade her position.

When I was a kid my mother used to say that my father spoiled me and I'd feel terribly ashamed and try to prove that I wasn't spoiled. Now, I'm not even sure I know what spoiled means exactly. Is it getting what you want? What you need?

I do know that it works much better with this little girl when I set firm limits and back them up. This has not historically been my strong suit, but when pushed to the wall I can do it. (I guess the trick is to learn how to do it even when not pushed to the wall.) Some people just need to see that strong reaction from you to know that you're not kidding. Or maybe to know that you're really there.

She had taken her medication too. That may have had something to do with it.

I had been feeling lately like I wanted out of this volunteer commitment. Had even talked to the social worker at Big Brothers Big Sisters about it. It's been over a year and I couldn't feel that she was really bonded with me--not when she'd act so distant and defiant. There were many times when I felt just like a chauffeur and a meal ticket. I know this is a common experience for parents of teenagers, but it's not what I signed up for.

I couldn't figure out how to "make" her treat me with respect, but when the moment was right, those words came. And more important than the words were the eye contact I gave her, and the body language that said I really meant it.

I am no saint. And I am not always as skilled, with her or in other situations, as I would like to be. What I do give myself credit for is sheer stubbornness. She can be a tough little girl--there are a lot of good reasons why she has had to be--but I can be a tough woman too. And I like it that I don't quit. I'm glad I'm hanging in with her, despite the ADHD, despite our differences and all the other issues. She's not the only one learning and growing.