Anyway I went to The Grove Bookstore in South Park San Diego (where I ran into a few other San Diego writers including Jill Badonsky) to find the book Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson which is getting great reviews (read this one from the NYTimes by the also wonderful writer Stacey D’Erasmo–just the first two paragraphs of the review had me hooked).

“By delving as deeply into the lives of her characters as she does, tracing their long relationships not only to one another but also to various substances, Henderson manages to catch something of the bloody, felt intersection of lives and cult bands, of overindulgence and monastic refusal, of the dark, apocalyptic quality of the ’80s. She gets extremes, and people who gravitate toward them.”

Alas, the book was not in stock so I purchased something else: The Crafter’s Devotional by Barbara Call. Sure, I need another book on craft projects like I need a hole in the head, but this one is different–really! It has something to do for every day of the year, i.e.

Monday: journaling

Tuesday: recycle, reuse, or revive

Wednesday: collection, stash, and materials

Thursday: personal history

Friday: noncraft inspiration

Sat. and Sunday: collaborate, gather, and experiment

Just something to keep the creative juices flowing. Right? See a sample page here.

So, where did YOU go and what did YOU purchase on Save a Bookstore Day?

Also, you may have heard, if you’re my Facebook friend, that I had a great time in my Sewing Class and came away with a really cool tote-bag. The class taught the basics of sewing machines and we practiced various stitches on a swatch of fabric until we felt confident enough to do some real sewing.

There were several different styles and designs of fabric for the bag but I decided upon the burlap coffee sack– acquired by Home Ec Studios by a local coffee merchant. For the most part the sewing was easy– straight lines up and down the sides of the tote bag, but then I had to sew a liner inside the bag, and then straps, and you have to do it all inside out which is very confusing, but somehow it all worked. And it was fun. It was me and 6 women– all laughing and chatting and breaking thread and getting our stitches all knotted up.

Now I just have to remember it all so I can use my own machine. I have a ton of really cool vintage fabric, mostly of cowboys and cowgirls, that I want to turn into pillows.

Here’s a poem  by Naomi Shihab Nye

Sewing, Knitting, Crocheting,

A small striped sleeve in her lap,
navy and white,
needles carefully whipping in yarn
from two sides.
She reminds me of the wide-angled women
filled with calm
I pretended I was related to
in crowds.

In the next seat
a yellow burst of wool
grows into a hat with a tassel.
She looks young to crochet.
I’m glad history isn’t totally lost.
Her silver hook dips gracefuly.

And when’s the last time you saw
anyone sew a pocket onto a gray linen shirt
in public?
Her stitches must be invisible.
A bevelled thimble glitters in the light.

On Mother’s Day
three women who aren’t together
conduct delicate operations
in adjoining seats
between La Guardia and Dallas.
Miraculously, they never speak.
Three different kinds of needles,
three snippy scissors,
everybody else on the plane
snoozing with The Times.
When the flight attendant
offers free wine to celebrate,
you’d think they’d sit back,
chat a minute,
tell who they’re making it for,
trade patterns,
yes?

But a grave separateness
has invaded the world.
They sip with eyes shut
and never say
Amazing
or
Look at us
or
May your thread
never break.

The premise of BB is simple: you come in, I read a prompt from my black box of prompts, and then we write for a set period of time (within an hour). After the time limit we then read our pieces aloud. No critique, just listening.

I’m so glad to be back. It makes for such a rewarding hour, especially since it’s on Tuesday; it helps to ease me into the rest of the week.

If you’re someone who has trouble finding that time to write then definitely join or start a group like this, or, hold your own private, one-person Brown Bag writing hour. (I recommend using Judy Reeves’ A Writer’s Book of Days !)

I also love finding/getting my own prompts. Sometimes I’ll find them online, on a writing webpage, but most of the time I take lines from poetry or prose and use those as prompts. For example, here are some past prompts:

Write about Food and Comfort (from James Merrill’s Poem “Maisie”)

You became so attached to the objects of our home (from David Plante’s The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief)

This week’s prompt also came from James Merrill– I think all of the prompts I’ve used are from his book From the First Nine: Poems 1946-1976. (of which I have a first edition!).

Here is the prompt:

The street, if it ends at all, ends here (from “Light of the Street, Darkness of Your Own House”)

I’ve even used the title of the poem as a past prompt–which made for some great writing from everyone.

Here are some lines from the brief scene I wrote during that Brown Bag session:

There were no real streets on the reservation. No side walks. Nothing that indicated where one yard began and the other ended. No stops or starts. In this way we were all connected.  The warmth from the oven of one home was felt in the chest of someone in the next . The rise of bread, the sinking of hopes. An open window carried voices, songs, welcomed anger, provided temporary escape for regret.

If you’re in San Diego, come to Tuesday Brown Bag– every Tuesday 12pm to 1pm. Or Thursday Writers held at Lestat’s West Coffee House. More info here.

And definitely take a look at James Merrill’s poetry. It will inspire!

I have just one more day of giving final exams– next Wednesday– and then my summer begins.

Summer, for me, equals:

finishing current draft of novel (updates to come)

reading (my book list to come)

movies (what’s a summer without movies?)

making stuff (did I mention I’m going to take a class on how to use your sewing machine?)

travel (maybe?)

work– oops, nope! no work/teaching for me this summer! (good or bad thing?)

Here’s a good thing: poem, Summer Trips, by Jonathan Greene

Summer Trips

As a child sequestered in
the back seat on a long journey,
exiled in one’s own world,
a refuge. Deep sleep naps.
Ice-cream stand oases after
a long stretch of highway.

A whole year of work
brings us this week at the beach.
The Devil’s bargain parents made,
a contract that renews every time,
weary after the nine-to-fives,
they unlock the front door.

“Summer Trips” by Jonathan Greene, from Distillations and Siphonings. (c) Broadstone Books, 2010. From The Writer’s Almanac.

Finished Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff. I loved the information about Egypt and Cleo and Mark Antony, but I was missing dialogue (the book is serious nonfiction). Still, Schiff impressed me with her knowledge and Cleo impressed me with her sheer tenacity.

My office at home is looking like one of those NYC apartments where the reclusive tenant saves every newspaper, magazine, letter,  leaflet and flyer. I’m too embarrassed to post a picture of it.

I cut the tip of my middle finger off and it hurt. Ok, it wasn’t really the tip, more like the corner of the tip. But it still hurt. For a couple of days I had to wear one of those splint-thingies so that I wouldn’t bump it on anything, but it definitely made it seem pretty drastic (but if you know me, you know how melodramatic I get with just the sniffles). And then I had to learn how to type without using that finger, which a couple of days ago I finally mastered. But now the finger is healing better and I can pretty much use it, only I have to re-learn how to type with it. Arghh!

While I was in the Emergency room Ted brought me Nicole Krauss’ Great House to read. I absolutely loved The History of Love and have been wanting to read this. It doesn’t disappoint. I read about 50 pages in, but I’m also reading another book so I may have to put the Great House aside until then.

Speaking of books…though I’m not finding, or rather making, the time to write as much as I should (I think that I somehow didn’t get the gene for discipline…), the little bits, spurts of writing that I’m doing I’m pretty pleased with. I’m loving working on two characters that I’d only been sketching out, or had only been on the periphery so far– the young female English High School Teacher with the secret stash of lipsticks in her desk drawer at school and the Shivwit Indian boy, Limpie, whose POV is told entirely through an essay he’s writing. It’s funny how developing these characters more and letting them lead me on this journey has sparked such new energy in me.

Ted‘s out of town for a week visiting his mom and then our new niece, and the cats, Betsy and Jack, are so neurotic (i’m fine though, thanks for asking)! They are completely underfoot. Betsy sits with me while watching TV, her head resting in my lap.

On another note, I’m obsessed with this website Instructables–have you seen it?– from which you can learn how to do anything from how to tie a tie, how to kiss, to other more craft-oriented tips such as  book-making, how to knit, make mosaics, origami, and my recent obsession: how to make linocuts.

I really really would love to have a letterpress machine, but this linocut thing looks a bit simpler (and less expensive). See the samples of what you can do below.

Many of the how-to’s have step-by-step photos and videos. Check them out, search for how to make or do just about anything.

Watched the last episode of TCM’s Moguls and Moviestars– the epic documentary series about the rise and fall of the movie studio system. It was completely fascinating. I couldn’t help but feel for the movie stars and studio heads when the studios started crumbling around them; not to mention the footage of the old studio land that was sold off.

Went to a fantastic reading Friday night at The Ink Spot. James Meetze (in the picture) read from his book of poems DAYGLO of which Rae Armantrout says “James Meetze is, in some sense, a ‘landscape poet,’ except his landscape includes ‘FA-18 Hornets’ that ‘boom above the freeway / as eucalyptus leaves rustle.’ He has a feel for his hometown, which is also mine. In fact, San Diego, with its ahistorical ‘Dayglo’ pastels, best glimpsed in passing from a freeway, is where we all live now, somehow, or soon will.”

Ryan Murphy (a friend from grad school!) says “Dayglo is a conscious artifact…”

Indeed, his poems took me back to my days growing up here. The beaches, the sunsets, the valleys and malls. But also they look at Southern California, and San Diego especially, through the eyes of someone who left here and then came back. They speak about beauty and warmth, of Eucalyptus trees, freeways and fluorescent lights, but also separation, isolation, regret, disappointment.

I’m particularly taken with the first two lines of the poem “To Make You Surfer”:

In all the movies about California youth,

we are made to believe in gold everywhere.

Ted doesn’t think it looks like a deer but I do. Doesn’t it? Or maybe it does have a little bit of a cat look to it.

Here’s a gorgeous poem by Joy Harjo, called Deer Dancer. Oh, those lines.

Nearly everyone had left that bar in the middle of winter except the
hardcore.  It was the coldest night of the year, every place shut down, but
not us.  Of course we noticed when she came in.  We were Indian ruins.  She
was the end of beauty.  No one knew her, the stranger whose tribe we
recognized, her family related to deer, if that's who she was, a people
accustomed to hearing songs in pine trees, and making them hearts.

The woman inside the woman who was to dance naked in the bar of misfits
blew deer magic.  Henry jack, who could not survive a sober day, thought she
was Buffalo Calf Woman come back, passed out, his head by the toilet.  All
night he dreamed a dream he could not say.  The next day he borrowed
money, went home, and sent back the money I lent.  Now that's a miracle.
Some people see vision in a burned tortilla, some in the face of a woman.

This is the bar of broken survivors, the club of the shotgun, knife wound, of
poison by culture.  We who were taught not to stare drank our beer.  The
players gossiped down their cues.  Someone put a quarter in the jukebox to
relive despair.  Richard's wife dove to kill her.  We had to keep her
still, while Richard secretly bought the beauty a drink.

How do I say it?  In this language there are no words for how the real world
collapses.  I could say it in my own and the sacred mounds would come into
focus, but I couldn't take it in this dingy envelope.  So I look at the stars in
this strange city, frozen to the back of the sky, the only promises that ever
make sense.

My brother-in-law hung out with white people, went to law school with a
perfect record, quit.  Says you can keep your laws, your words.  And
practiced law on the street with his hands.  He jimmied to the proverbial
dream girl, the face of the moon, while the players racked a new game.
He bragged to us, he told her magic words and that when she broke,
  became human.
But we all heard his voice crack:

What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?

That's what I'd like to know, what are we all doing in a place like this?

You would know she could hear only what she wanted to; don't we all?  Left
the drink of betrayal Richard bought her, at the bar.  What was she on?  We all
wanted some.  Put a quarter in the juke.  We all take risks stepping into thin
air.  Our ceremonies didn't predict this.  or we expected more.

I had to tell you this, for the baby inside the girl sealed up with a lick of
hope and swimming into the praise of nations.  This is not a rooming house, but
a dream of winter falls and the deer who portrayed the relatives of
strangers.  The way back is deer breath on icy windows.

The next dance none of us predicted.  She borrowed a chair for the stairway
to heaven and stood on a table of names.  And danced in the room of children
without shoes.

You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille With four hungry children and a
crop in the field.

And then she took off her clothes.  She shook loose memory, waltzed with the
empty lover we'd all become.

She was the myth slipped down through dreamtime.  The promise of feast we
all knew was coming.  The deer who crossed through knots of a curse to find
us.  She was no slouch, and neither were we, watching.

The music ended.  And so does the story.  I wasn't there.  But I imagined her
like this, not a stained red dress with tape on her heels but the deer who
entered our dream in white dawn, breathed mist into pine trees, her fawn a
blessing of meat, the ancestors who never left.

by Toi Derricotte

My mother was not impressed with her beauty; once a year she put it on like a costume, plaited her black hair, slick as cornsilk, down past her hips, in one rope-thick braid, turned it, carefully, hand over hand, and fixed it at the nape of her neck, stiff and elegant as a crown, with tortoise pins, like huge insects, some belonging to her dead mother, some to my living grandmother.

Sitting on the stool at the mirror,

she applied a peachy foundation that seemed to hold her down, to trap her, as if we never would have noticed what flew among us unless it was weighted

and bound  in its mask.

Vaseline shined her eyebrows,

mascara blackened her lashes until they swept down like feathers; her eyes deepened until they shone from far away.

Now I remember her hands, her poor hands, which, even then were old from

scrubbing,

whiter on the inside than they should have been, and hard, the first joints of her fingers, little fattened pads, the nails filed to sharp points like old-fashioned ink pens, painted a jolly color.

Her hands stood next to her face and wanted to be put away, prayed for the scrub bucket and brush to make them useful.

And, as I write, I forget the years I watched her pull hairs like a witch from her chin, magnify every blotch–as if acid were thrown from the inside.

But once a year my mother

rose in her white silk slip,

not the slave of the house, the woman,

took the ironed dress from the hanger–

allowing me to stand on the bed, so that my face looked directly into her face, and hold the garment away from her as she pulled it down.

“Christmas Eve: My Mother Dressing” by Toi Derricotte, from Captivity. (c) University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989. Reprinted with permission. (from The Writer’s Almanac)

The Ernest Hemingway Collection is made up mostly of loafers…

Then of course I looked online for other writers and their shoes. Not that I have a foot fetish or anything (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I feel like somewhere I’ve seen a picture of either Kerouac or Ginsberg in a pair of high top sneakers, Chuck Taylors or Converse.  Has anyone out there seen that picture? Or maybe it’s someone else wearing them?

The closest I could find online was a Jonas Brother– Nick Jonas?– in a pair.

Anyone who knows me knows that I wear my Converse All-Stars all the time. I have lots of pairs of shoes but for some reason I’m most comfortable in my Converse. So when they do the magazine spread of me it will feature me in my Converse.

Speaking of Chuck Taylors: Threadless Tshirts has the most awesomest T-shirt yet, called Woodchucks.

All shirts are on sale– $5, $10, $15. Can’t wait to get it.

There will also be readings, music, a film about poet Gary Snyder (who will also be there), book signings, and this amazing ‘gathering’ the last weekend where the whole town, community is invited. We’ll be at Camp Wallowa close to Enterprise, Ore. (pic of Snyder and Allen Ginsberg from Human Flower Project).

I don’t really know what to expect. I’ll be in a cabin, out in the middle of nearly nowhere, surrounded by nature. Oh, and there will not be any internet and very little cell phone service.

I’m hoping for a week of really getting back to the book, for introducing new characters, for discovering new plot twists and turns.

And here’s a poem from Gary Snyder:

How Poetry Comes to Me
by Gary Snyder

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

WS Merwin is such a sweet, spiritual man–a Buddhist and Environmentalist– who lives in Hawaii. (pic from Univ. of Arkansas Daily Headlines).

And, he’s 82!

Today NPR interviewed him (click to listen) for just a couple of minutes and he read this poem, so tiny and beautiful:

Separation

by W. S. Merwin

W. S. Merwin, “Separation” from The Second Four Books of Poems (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1993).

And here’s a pic of the young WS Merwin (photo from Univ. of Arizona Poetry Center).

OK, and shameless plug for a new T-Shirt, but it is writing inspired. It’s called, INKSpiration, and it’s

ONLY $10 and I love it. I just bought one. It’s from Threadless and you can buy it, for $10, HERE.

(cute guy not included–or I’m assuming). There are also many other shirts for $10 without a Pen on it.

My favorite postcard of all time.I think I bought it when I was about eighteen or nineteen, as a sensitive young gayboy in San Diego.

Peter Orlovsky (on the right) was incredibly beautiful and also a writer, but definitely inspired some incredible poems by Ginsberg, his partner of 30 years.

Peter Orlovsky 1933-2010