Patching the House, a cento from poems by twelve poets

Two people in a room, speaking harshly.

Now we will count to twelve

This house in one year fallen to decay

guarded in elegant blackness

won’t be forgotten

Hopes, left with those hangers-on

All doors from their lives are entrances

like a window in a building on fire. For Jesus

And silence is always coming,

but nothing lasts forever

There’s a bankruptcy that’s pure gain.

The heat of the night is giving us new things

and the house             after all            is half paid

Sources: [Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Robert Frost, Audre Lorde, Sappho, W.D. Snodgrass, Rainier Maria Rilke, Terrance Hayes, May Sarton, Nikki Giovanni, Jelaluddin Rumi, Mark Strand, Nikki Giovanni]

Works Cited

Frost, Robert. “The Census-Taker.” Intro. Louis Untermeyer. New Enlarged Pocket Anthology of Robert Frost’s Poems. New York: Washington Square Press, 1969. 179. Print.

Giovanni, Nikki. “Age” Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1978. 45. Print.

Giovanni, Nikki. “Poem (for Ema)” Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1978. 74. Print.

Hayes, Terrance. “Coffin for Head of State [Trouble Sleep].” Lighthead. New York: Penguin Books, 2010. Kindle file.

Lorde, Audre. “Timepiece.” Comp. Judy Grahn. Another Mother Tongue. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. 101. Print.

Neruda, Pablo. “Keeping Quiet.” Trans. Stephen Mitchell. Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poems of Pablo Nerudo. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997. 155. Print.

Rich, Adrienne. “Novella.” Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974. New York: Norton, 1975. 65. Print.

Rilke, Ranier Maria. “Girls.” Trans. J. B. Leishman. Possibility of Being: a selection of poems. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1977. 9. Print.

Rumi, Jelaluddin. “One Who Does What the Friend…” Trans. Coleman Barks. Soul of Rumi. New York: HarperOne, 2002. N.Pag. Rumi Poetry. Web. 27 August 2014. http://peacefulrivers.homestead.com/Rumipoetry1.html#anchor_16450

Sappho. “100.” Trans. Mary Barnard. Sappho. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958. n.p. Print.

Sarton, May. “Of the Seasons.” Ed. Serena Sue Hilsinger and Lois Brynes. Selected Poems of May Sarton. New York: Norton, 1978. 121. Print.

Snodgrass, W.D. “Snow Songs.” Ed. A.R. Ammons. The Best American Poetry 1994. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. 169. Print.

Strand, Mark. “The Mysterious Maps.” Ed. A.R. Ammons. The Best American Poetry 1994. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. 175. Print.

Dialogue and The Dining Room

A.J. Gurney, Jr.'s "The Dining Room" is a series of french scenes that show the decline of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) through a day spent in a dining room that represents dining rooms across time in America. However, it's also a look at intimate relationships and how they have changed with the culture. One of the scenes early in the second act, is a scene between Jim, in his late sixties, and his daughter Meg, who is about thirty. After a series of messy relationships, Meg wants to move home with her three small children and her father doesn't want her to.

In this short scene, Gurney effectively uses "interpretation and misinterpretation.... to carry the essential freight of theme and characterization" (Downs and Russin 145). When Meg tells Jim that she's left her husband, her father interprets it to mean she's taken a vacation from her husband, because he doesn't want to hear what she is really saying (Gurney 339) and he doesn't want to have the conversation that he knows is coming. He tries to avoid the conversation he knows is coming by trying to not be alone with his daughter, and when that's impossible, tries to steel himself for it with alcohol.

Another technique Gurney uses in this conversation, is to weave the exposition into the conflict. When Jim reveals that he had an affair and that Meg's mother ran off the "other woman" it is exposition, but it's also part of the reasoning behind his argument: that Meg should toss the other woman out and try to make things work with her husband. Similarly, Meg explains that this won't work because she's not only had an affair of her own with a married man, but also with a woman.

Guerney uses dialogue to support the scene but also the overall theme of the play. When Meg says "I want to... do all those things you and Mother used to do with all of us. I want start start again, Dad," she is talking about her own life; she's also longing for the WASP culture that doesn't exist anymore. She says that she can't go back to the way it was in her married life and Jim says that he can't either. He means that he can't go back to the way things were in his marriage as well as to the way things were culturally when he was raising Meg and her siblings.

A.R. Gurney, Jr. is a master at using dialogue to convey characterization and theme. "The Dining Room" gives examples of how to do this over and over in each of the scenes of the play. I'm hopeful that I can learn from him and employ similar technique in my playwriting.

Works Cited

Downs, William Missouri and Robin U. Russin. Naked Playwriting: The Art, The Craft, and the Life Laid Bare. 1st ed. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2004. Print.

Gurney, A.R., Jr. "The Dining Room." Plays From the Contemporary American Theater, ed. Brooks McNamara. New York: Signet Classic, 1988. 339-342. Print.

First Novel, First Revision

After attending a holiday party last weekend and having a lively conversation with a local bookseller, I decided it was time to get back to my 2011 NaNoWriMo novel and start revisions. I am sailing into new waters here. I have never revised a novel before because I have never completed a novel before. I'm excited about the prospect and not feeling an ounce of trepidation.

I spent a few hours last Sunday afternoon taking the first draft and migrating it into my copy of Scrivener.  I can see the benefit of getting a holistic view of the work, having research and thoughts in one place, and being able to jump around easily to work on different sections. I got Scrivener after starting NaNoWriMo last year so I was too unfamiliar with it to use it during November. I am now more familiar with it and I think Scrivener will be a lot of assistance to me in the days to come. I especially like the idea of cutting things but not really getting rid of them in case I change my mind later. Woman's prerogative and all.

I haven't read the first draft since I wrote it a year ago. After finishing it, I told myself I wanted to let some time pass so I could come back to it with fresh eyes. I'm glad I did. As I started piecing the novel into sections for the Scrivener software, I found many delights and surprises in things I had done and forgotten.

I learned something about myself from it too. Despite the fact that I'm an optimist with a good outlook on life, the parts of the novel that have stuck in my mind for a year are pretty much the sections I thought so terrible in the writing of it that I've never let anyone read the first draft. Perhaps I'll explore that someday. For the record, those sections didn't get any better for sitting there a year. They are still awful and will be re-written. I'll also be making changes to some other parts that weren't bad but could be stronger. I've had some relevant live-changing experiences in the past year and my key learnings will probably find their way into my revisions too.

I still have to finish moving the novel into the various chunks I've divided up in Scrivener but that is helping me to see where the weak parts are. So far, revising is a lot of fun. I think I'll do it several times.  :wink:

NaNoWriMo - What's Next?

I apologize for not posting something sooner to let you know that I was a National Novel Writing Month winner (anyone who completes the 50,000 words and has their word count validated on the site is a winner).  It was my first time attempting and succeeding at writing the complete first draft of a novel.  Despite the fact that I heard about NaNoWriMo late, had never written anything that long in my life, and was sick the first week, I jumped in and decided to give it a try.  I am so happy that I did.  I finished it with slightly over 50,000 words, which made me a "winner" among many thousands of winners.  The fact that there are so many of us magnifies the accomplishment for me.  I feel a sense of unity with the other winners, the joy of a shared experience that turned out well.

I am fairly certain that I will never write the same way again; that is, the way I wrote before NaNoWriMo.  That inner editor is still chomping at the bit to get out of the gate, but I'll keep her at bay in the future until after the first draft.  So what's the next step for me?  I'm currently taking the advice of some published writers and haven't yet re-read my first draft.  I will give it about three weeks and then start to work on editing.  I am sure that I will cut a lot of material and add a lot more.  The basic story is done, but there is still so much more to do with what is there.  I'm excited and can hardly wait.

And if you're a writer, I hope you'll join me in writing a new novel in 2012 because I'll be doing it again come November.

NaNoWriMo Madness Continues

I made a lot of progress and then the past couple of nights had some other things to take care of in the evening.  I am over 10,000 words which I find amazing every time I see the word count on the page.  The madcap idea of trying to write 50,000 words in one month is obviously working for me.  I have throttled the inner editor completely (well, almost completely) and I am just writing.

I am taking to heart the advice that Neil Gaiman gave in a NaNoWriMo pep talk, "You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days.  Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die.  Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny.  But that does not matter.  What matters right now are the words, one after another.  Find the next word.  Write it down.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat."

The novel that I am writing was a collision of ideas that fell into my lap.  I've been writing fantasy recently and decided to try something completely different for NaNoWriMo since one of the rules is that you have to start the novel in November and finish 50,000 words in the same November.  On a whim I decided to try literary fiction.  I didn't know that most literary fiction tends to be quite a bit longer than 50,000 words until I learned that the average word count of the world's "great novels" is about 135,000 words.  Good thing I didn't read that until after I was committed to my idea!

Ignorance is bliss, though.  I decided to try a literary fiction novel about a woman who is my age and feels vaguely suicidal.  She wants to escape from her life. I thought that I should be able to muse and ponder and toss about 50,000 words around that.  Literary fiction is, after all, more about the character than about the plot, right?

Funny how it happens, though, I started wondering why she'd vaguely feel these things.  It turned out that she was being surplussed at her job and wondered how she'd support herself and her young daughter.  It isn't easy to find a job when you're fifty, as plenty of currently unemployed people can attest.    And then out of the blue, she learns a secret about her recently-deceased mother that changes her life.   She thought her mother was an orphan but she wasn't.  Her mother has a sister and grew up in Hermann, Missouri.

As if that weren't enough, a few days after starting the novel, more plot fell into my lap.  I went to Missouri wine country and started reading about my own ancestor's contributions to early Missouri wine-making.  I've always been a genealogy buff and knew a bit about my third great-grandfather.  I read about a varietal that he'd cultivated that I've never heard of, mostly because I don't think it exists any more (dang prohibition!)

More to come later, but now, back to the novel, which has the working title of The German Diary.

NaNoWriMo Progress

Despite being under the weather for the past couple of weeks, I've decided that a late start to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is better than no start at all.  I've never participated in this before, but after some encouragement from others, I've decided to give it a whirl and I have no regrets.  I'm checking in with locals (#stlnano) and with others (#NaNoWriMo) on twitter.   I've joined the NaNoWriMo site and in three very partial days of writing, I've managed a 2,262 word count.  


I should be working on that word count now, but it's been so long since I blogged that I thought it was important that I take a little time out to write this.  Lynxter and I are still eating primarily vegan, with a lot of juices and smoothies, and we are still losing weight.  I went to the doctor to have blood tests about six weeks into the new regimen and had some odd results.  My protein levels were on the low end of normal, which I expected, but my vitamin D level was way below normal along with my platelets (could be a centrifuge error).  More on all of that another time.  


The novel I'm writing this month doesn't have a title yet, but it's about a fifty-year old woman who learns that she has been surplussed at her company and must figure out how she will support herself and her teenage daughter at the same time that she learns her deceased mother had unshared secrets that will affect the second half of her life.  I still have my other writing projects in progress but I put them on hold so I could participate in NaNoWriMo.

So back to it for me.  How about you?

Food and Change

There has been a dramatic change in my eating habits in the past month.

About a month ago, lynxter watched "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead" and decided that we should go on a juice diet to lose weight.  Since I wanted to support my partner and was keenly aware that my weight had crept back up over the years we've been together, I thought it was worth a try.  Also, a colleague had recently lost a lot of weight on a juice diet, so I knew it could be done.  I went out to fatsickandnearlydead.com to find out what I'd gotten myself into.

On the website for the film there was a link that asked "Ready to start juicing? Visit RebootYourLife www.jointhereboot.com today".  I'm glad I clicked on the link before just diving in or I probably would have made every mistake possible.  I went through the quiz and dissatisfied with my results, looked around the site until I found the option that included a juice-only set of days.  They called it the "Reboot Standard" program and even though the fellow in the documentary did only juices for 60 days, the website recommends not doing one that long without medical supervision.

The website gave information on how to ease into a juice-only diet.  I went shopping that day and we started the day after that.  To get the ingredients for the suggested menus was not cheap, but it was a good way to find out what we did and didn't like and we justified it by acknowledging that we'd been eating fairly unhealthy for awhile (yes, toasted almond gelato, I'm talking about you).

I learned about the taste of raw foods and how they differ from cooked foods.  For example, while I am a huge fan of Ukrainian borsht, I don't really care for red beets in any juice recipe.  I will have to take a suggestion on the reboot your life site and try golden beets instead but I can't choke down the red ones.  They taste like dirt to me.

We extended the first five days of the standard reboot to seven so that we could do the juice-only days during the workweek.  After five days of juice-only, we've eased back into a schedule that is mostly vegan and includes juices or smoothies for most of our meals.  The goal has been to keep at this until we've lost our excess weight, but to gradually move back into eating solid foods with occasional "reboots" for those inevitable times we "fall off the wagon".

How are we doing?  Well....

I thought I would be starving, but between the juices and all the water I'm drinking, I haven't really been hungry for the past month.  I've noticed that sometimes what I used to think was "feeling hungry" was actually being thirsty.  I've also noticed that I experience the sensation of fullness differently.  I can actually feel my stomach being full, high up under my rib cage.  In the past I didn't feel it that way, my entire abdomen would have a general feeling of fullness.  So maybe describing this as a "reboot" is really the right description.

To that end, I've noticed how certain foods affect me when I've reintroduced them.  When I ate a little mozzarella cheese melted on portabella mushrooms, I had stomach pains.  I always knew I had a bit of a cow lactose intolerance/allergy, but had never recalled feeling it so directly before.  Feta did not have this effect on me, but then I'm not allergic to goat's milk... And while a couple of bacon strips had no effect, eating a six ounce piece of steak has given me stomach pains, probably because it's not the easiest thing to digest in bulk, especially after eating almost entirely vegan for the past month.  So, as much as I like cheddar cheese and cow's milk and steak, I'll be making some different choices going forward.  I may not eliminate any food entirely, but I will make different quantity choices.  Why make my digestive system work so hard if I don't have to?

Despite a four-day trip to Nashville where we had breakfast (twice!) including bacon, biscuits and gravy and grits at our favorite restaurant, the Country Boy in Leipers Fork, I have lost 20 pounds in the last 30 days.  That's a lot of weight, and includes gaining a couple of pounds after that Nashville trip and a couple of days where my weight stayed the same.  I admit that I was looking at calorie content to minimize the impact of eating this way, which I hadn't done in the past (what a shocker it was to see how many calories were in those breakfasts!), and except for those breakfasts I have been avoiding white potatoes and almost any kind of wheat product.  Breads were always my weakness (and a craving) and since diabetes runs in my family, common sense tells me I have to watch those things.  I am almost to the point where I'm going to need a new wardrobe, as I'm looking more and more like the youngest kid wearing too-big cast-off clothing from the older children in the family .

Most importantly, I feel fantastic.  I had a headache for the first three days, which I think was caused by giving up black tea (I have never been a coffee drinker, but I could put away a lot of tea in a day's time).  I found that when I drank more water, the headache went away.  I have had more energy, I haven't needed caffeine, and I have started to appreciate the smell of food without having to actually eat it.  I can walk through the bakery section of the grocery store on the way to produce and enjoy the yeasty breads and sweets and that's enough.  In fact, I think the aroma may be more satisfying than the consumption would be.  I'm not going to test that theory yet, but I am allowing myself to enjoy the smell of these things without feeling like I have to eat them.

While all of this has been going on for the past month, I've put swimming on hold, although I did go to the pool a couple of weekends ago with my mom.  The swimming lanes were all in use for a triathlon, so we walked around the other part of the pool.  I plan to get back to swimming now that I'm accustomed to the dietary changes I've made.  And I found my old pedometer and I plan to start walking as well.

Since getting all of our juices ready and grocery shopping for fresh produce takes up so much of my evenings, I have not been playing much guitar. Seeing the Americana Festival showcases in Nashville last weekend did make me want to start writing again, and even though I haven't written any music in the past month, I did finish the first draft of a short story.  That's a first for me, I start so much and finish so little.

Could the dramatic dietary change actually be a ripple of change moving throughout my entire self?

I like to think it is, so that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The Decline of Art in the US

This past Saturday, there was a special panel discussion at the Sundance Film Festival called Power of Story: Making Art Matter (You can view it online). One of the panelists mentioned that the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking has been administered since 1966 to capture individual creativity levels. I'm paraphrasing from memory, but what I found interesting, is that the panelist said around 1990, American test scores leveled off after having increased dramatically every year prior to that and have actually been decreasing.


So I went looking. I discovered that Kyung Hee Kim, an associate professor of educational psychology at the College of William & Mary, performed analyses of Torrance test scores for almost 300,000 American adults and children and found that all of the scores of the Lateral/Innovative thinking factor, Vertical/Adaptive thinking factor, and Creative personality factor have significantly decreased or have significantly started decreasing. The decrease has been more in recent years than earlier years.


The Torrance test measures creativing in not only artistic areas, but science, interpersonal relationships and others. Dr. Kim says that in western cultures we think of creativity as artistic but that in eastern cultures they think of creativity as scientific.


Dr. Kim believes the decline in U.S. creativity may be in part because kids spend more time with television than in activities that utilize creativity - playing outside for one thing. She also thinks the lack of creativity development and the stifling of children’s creative opportunities in classrooms is having an impact. She is quick to point out that it's speculation since there haven't really been significant studies to look at this.


Creativity is so important to me that I devised a game for my son when he was almost a toddler. We've been doing it so long, I can't remember when we really started. He would ask to be told stories and we started out telling stories to him. After awhile, I wanted him to be able to come up with stories too. So I came up with a game that we played for years.


One of us would come up with three things and then the other would have to build a story around it and tell that story. As time went on, we would come up with the craziest mismatches we could possibly imagine and still the stories came. Good ones, terrible ones (mine mostly fell into that category), mediocre ones. Funny and poignant ones. It was a great game, and I hope it helped my son's creativity even though we didn't start with that intention.


I've also shared with my son the love I have for caving. We have spent many hours crawling through muddy passages and sloshing through borehole passages with water up to our thighs. On those trips we speculate about what might be down a side passage or how to get the best photograph of a pink planaria.

I like to think I'm a relatively well-rounded, creative type and I hope my son shares that capacity. He's been writing a science-fiction novel since he was about 12 and he's thinking about studying physics, astronomy and marine biology when he goes to college in a couple of years, so I'm hopeful.

What A Year 2010 Has Been

This has been the year of the iPad introduction, the passing of JD Salinger and the results of another census that will inevitably redistribute seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. We said goodbye to Eddie Fischer and "hel-LO (again) Betty (White)!"

I have more irons in the fire than I've ever had before and time seems to be just flying. I've continued to write music with my co-writer and I've spent less time on the three women script (but have actually found some time to work on it). It seems as though it has been especially challenging to complete projects this year. We took a trip to Juneau AK last month and had a lovely time. Definitely plan to go back - much more hiking to do than we had time available. So I guess the challenges applied to my travel as well this year!

As the year of the golden tiger winds down, I'm feeling as though I want the year of the metal rabbit to be the year of wrapping up open projects in writing and music. Since the year of the rabbit is traditionally associated with family and home, artistic pursuits and diplomacy, I'm hopeful that will be the case.

The year so far is a lot like a whirling dervish, with speed, nonlinear travel, and chaos. Is that what's supposed to happen in the golden year of the tiger?

I have been writing songs with my songwriting partner. Some are pretty good and some are pretty awful. I believe the more I write, the better they will be. I ended up upgrading my ancient notation software to Sibelius First. It's an impressive program so far, but I will probably end up needing full Sibelius before it's said and done. Mostly because Walt Aldridge turned me on to DADGAD tuning and my compositions haven't been the same since because I love writing in that open tuning and I want to be able at some point to use a hex pickup to directly write into Sibelius. Sibelius First can't handle anything other than standard guitar tuning. :(

That said, I haven't forgotten about the three woman script (who am I kidding? As if those characters would let me!) and I've been sneaking little bits of it in here and there. It's just that the things with deadlines turn into the squeakier wheels. As long as I'm moving it forward, I consider all of it progress.

Loglines

So, a guy walks into an elevator and standing in front of him is Steven Spielberg. That happens everyday right? Well, it probably does. But how often is the guy a screenwriter who would love to pitch his movie to Spielberg ? Maybe once in a lifetime, if that, especially if Spielberg is willing to hear the pitch. The guy has only seconds. Will he blow it? I dunno, but I have read enough to know that the guy better have his logline in order or he doesn't have a chance in "h-e-double-hockey-sticks".

The experts generally agree that the logline needs to explain who the main character is, what her problem is & how she's going to solve it. Which means the folks writing the descriptions for TV Guide are getting all kinds of practice. If a logline is a one sentance pitch, then I want my loglines to have well-defined protagonists who are up against larger-than-life antagonists. I want my loglines to give a sense of the atmosphere and setting of my script. I want my loglines to identify the conflict between my protagonists and antagonists , to lay out what's at stake. I want my loglines to identify the genre of the script. I need my loglines to do this all in one sentance and I am so wordy that this leaves me feeling anxious.

Adjectives help identify the protagonist and antagonists with greater clarity. If the descriptive is juxtaposed to the goal, it can be used for greater effect. For example, the neglected farmgirl in the Wizard of Oz just wants to get back home.

It has to grab the reader, make the reader want to read the entire script. No pressure. It has to tell who the main character is, who the antagonist is, and what makes the script unique. It should emphasize the internal and external conflict. It should identify the sizzle: sex, greed, humor, danger, thrills, satisfaction. I have a lot of work to do....

What the experts are really saying is that the logline is the superobjective (or spine) of the story.

I finally decided I should just write a bunch of loglines: good, bad or indifferent. Practice is the way to go. I'll let you know what kind of luck I have.

My New Year's Resolution and the Year of the Earth Ox

They say that writers can't be afraid to "kill your darlings" so I've done some blog housecleaning, deleting the very few but rather inane posts I've written over the past couple of years. I kept the very first one I wrote and another that has personal meaning for me. And while I really haven't been a fan of new year's resolutions over the years, this year I thought I'd give it a try. I have been writing more and I resolve to blog more. I also want to learn to write really good loglines. It feels right since the year of the Earth Ox is upon us once again on 26 January 2009.

In general, eastern astrologers believe that oxen come into their own during ox years. Taking stock, examining where you are and where you are heading are supposed to be good activities for oxen in an ox year. (Aren't they good activities for anyone in any year?) Being a metal ox, I am supposed to be strong, hard-working and will do whatever is necessary to achieve my goals. Time will tell but one thing is for certain, it also continues to march on.