the romance, the break up and the apology: about which she knows nothing!

This is a photo I took at WomanKind, February 2006.

So yesterday, Style printed my diatribe about not getting the Anne Lamott interview the last 2 times she's been in town. I wrote one just for me the first time and then elaborated and compounded for the second. But, when I read it in print it sounded a lot more whiny and pathetic than I had intended. Why would she want to interview with me anyway!? Not that it's her that makes those decisions. That's what publicists are for. Anyways, you can read my article, entitled "She Loves Me Not" HERE.

Get out your hanky.

what i read in alaska

This was my ship, and that is a whale.

In Alaska I read "Pride and Predjudice," my first ever Jane Austen novel. I lusted after Mr. Darcy and feared that I wasn't as spirited and rosy cheeked as Elizabeth and would never get the chance to run breathlessly across a moor.

I read "Gulliver's Travels" and felt like the at times huge at times tiny traveller of strange and foreign lands.

I read "Hero With a Thousand Faces." Isn't that pretentious? But I was really really trying to make sense out of the Hero's Journey, particularly those journeys upon which the hero repeatedly encounters a whale.

I read the prose-poet W.S. Merwin, particularly those prose-poems involving icebergs.

I read Poe's "Annabel Lee" because Avo the deck-hand had set it to music and kept singing it to the elderly guests after dinner.

I read a select few traditional Hebrew prayers because my mother sent them to me.

I read "She's Come Undone," the Wally Lamb novel about the obese woman who goes through therapy.

I read a Chinese poem about ghosts and drowing that the Chief Steward gave me one day in a card, with a rose.

a lotta angels & a lot more words

Yesterday around 3 pm, Henry and I headed into the fan for a lively afternoon of blue grass music and children's literature at Narnia Bookstore. The word "Narnia" alone made Henry laugh. I'm ashamed to say I had never taken him there before. We've already been gifted with about 1.34 billion children's books, not to mention I still have most of mine, so selfishly when we look for new books they are usually for me. Also, bookstores are trouble because of their high risk potential for spending way too much money. But this was a perfect excuse to risk taking out my wallet and adding to the boy's massive book collection.

Patricia Keeler, the step-mother of my genuine scraped-knee blood sister from kindergarten's was in town from Hoboken, NJ to sign her newly illustrated book, "Thank You Angels." A nice 4-some of staid looking 50 somethings played a guitar, a cello, a mandolin?? I don't know my stringed instruments!!! But I recognized a lot of the good music and soon a lot of kids and some moms and stragglers were doing a sort of stomp dance jump clap fest in the middle of the floor. Henry's favorite activity was eating the angel-shaped sugar cookies on the refreshment table and then demanding me to read him board books pulled at random from the shelves. We bought a copy of Patricia's book and I immediately recognized the name of the author: Doreen Virtue, PhD, because she authored a particularly good set of Goddess Tarot cards I used to have.

So this was all nice and fun, but the crazy part (I guess it's not really crazy considering we're talking Richmond) was the people I knew who showed up! It was wonderful of course to see Ida and her new-ish husband Ben (more about them later) and Sabot families I used to know and local author/actress/director Irene Ziegler, and Ingrid Mercer and Gail Shookoff (sp?) who took Ida and I to Water Country USA every summer for like 8 years even tho I didn't get a chance to even say "hi" because I was over reading a Cheerios Action Book in the corner , and then.....(drumroll).....Carter Graham walked in! Just last week I'd had this astral travel/vacuuming/muppet movie dream about him and had tracked down his address to send him a blow by blow along with an invitation to maybe come for dinner sometime and meet my son. I don't think I'd seen him for about 3 years. But since we were both there, I just went ahead and told him my dream and introduced him to Henry- they did the high 5-guy thing- and then that night, when he got home, my card was waiting.

So this morning, Stan, Henry & I had brunch with Ida and Ben: french toast, ruby red grapefruit juice, turkey-bacon, strooooong coffee and red grapes. What a great time! Ida, a former poetry professor now writes a newsletter for a museum/garden place in Wilmington, Delaware where they moved for Ben to work at House Industries as a "type designer." That's right, Ben has Master's Degree in Fonts. He received it somewhere in England, but I already forgot where. I asked him what he does all day working at a font company and he said he stares at letters (and answers tech support calls)!! Isn't that WILD?? I thought so too.

the unsuspecting poet

We met Darren through his writing first. We were sitting around the Black Swan bookstore one cold and stormy night when we the author of "The Paper Airplane Engineer" surfaced in little fits and starts through 5 double-spaced pieces of ordinary white paper. We were simultaneously curious and relieved to find a submission for the fiction contest that didn't suck, bore, need massive editing or an immediate call to the suicide hot line. Who was this masked man? Well, after he won second place (which was a horrible travesty and a major nudge to never again use nincompoops for judges) I called to interview him and mostly I remember that he made me laugh. Hard. He'd won the Virginia Commission for the Arts Fiction Prize and bought a couch with the stipend. Other wacky, funny stuff. He was very modest, self-effacing and goofy too.

The first time I ever saw Darren, I recognized him from the back of his head. He was about 10 rows in front of me in the auditorium at the Library of Virginia's James River Writer's conference. From the cocked way he held his chin, the earnest yet mocking look on his face when he turned around, the blonde goatee. It couldn't have been anybody else. The next week we made a unanimous decision to give him a trial run (we had an elaborate and crazy but foolproof system for trying out new potential group members including but not limited to monkey masks and black balls). Our round table discussion that night has gone down in the annals of writing group history- scatalogical jokes were made somebody cried, somebody quit, sparks flew, etc. etc and with that Darren was in.

How is it possible that there was a time we didn't know Darren? Last night, his poetry reading in the lower atrium (I do not know what the hell it's really called) of the Virginia Museum was subtle magic. Have you ever seen a 6 foot 5 baseball player read poetry beautifully? Death by fire, Persephone, the siren's song, bad god-lovin' license plates, thrushes and sparrows, a state of Henrys, vodka, apples, broken bottles of wine, death, love- you know the good stuff. It wasn't too long; it wasn't too short. And he didn't have on a turtle neck or a beret or read in that terrible monotonous sing-song voice that gives poetry a bad name. And he read a poem that made it OK to hate poetry readings, but truly, I think I can say this for all of us, last night, nobody did.

i lost the photo of tom robbins and me

Here are the remaining photos of the day my mother, my mother's then boyfriend but now husband, Buddy & I went to a picnic for Tom Robbins at the home of the White Pygmy Queen (I swear, i think that was her name!! I also think she died some tragic, lonely death with noone to bury her.) We brought a potato salad and some extra chairs. My mother is a button maker, listed in the phone book. The Pygmy Queen wanted to have buttons made for the picnic she was planning for her old friend coming to visit from Cal-i-forn-i-a, Tom Robbins. (You can see Tom with one of the buttons pinned to his Hawaain Shirt, middle right). My mother said I'll make the buttons if you let me and my boyfriend and my daughter come to the picnic. She drives a tough bargain, my old ma, doesn't she? The Pygmy Queen (standing with Tom Robbins in the white t-shirt on the photo to the right) said O.K. So. I was 20 and still very much enamored of Mr. Robbins as were the at least 8 other women who married him. (I don't know if it's really 8, but it's more than 3 and less than 10). I was then spending 6 weeks of my summer as a counselor at the UVA Young Writer's Workshop in Charlottesville, but arranged to take the day off to come over and meet my own personal effusive pan jitterbug freaky literary hero man. So I was wearing a brown polyester dress with flowers on it and several people there came up and asked if I was his new wife!! Ha! She wasn't much older than me, and looked like me too. Then I met Tom. He had on a LOT of skull and snake rings. I told him I was a writer. He told me that writing classes are worthless. Then I told him I was majoring in creative writing at sarah lawrence college and teaching at a young writer's workshop at UVA. He said drop out immediately and do something useful with your life like attend nursing school. I told him no freakin bleepin way, are you kidding? Actually, I don't remember what I told him, but I know it wasn't good. And them my mom gave him a photocopy of a story I'd written (OF COURSE, right??) and he told me he'd read it on the plane (YEAH RIGHT?) The story was called Star Wars and was about a girl taking a bath and dying her leg hair purple when Jesus comes in and they have this crazy conversation about Star Wars and Taco Bell and other modern pop culture stuff. Do you think my style was at all influenced by Tom Robbins? Anyway, later on in the picnic, the wicker bench Tom and his wife were sitting on fell over and me and my mom ran up and started taking photos of them lying on the ground. (See photo bottom left). Of course the really great shots are scrapbooked away somewhere and I just can't find them anywhere, so these that I've scrounged up will have to do as the visual representation of my story. And that's pretty much the end of it.

uniform

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

I've been wondering why there are no standard issue uniforms for writers. Why must we be indistinguishable from normies? My husband, for example, has a different uniform or "outfit" for every hobby he's adopted (or adapted or whatever.) When he bought his Tiger Triumph when I was 8 months pregnant, the fluorescent full body suit was not far behind. See exhibit A. Now he's into windsurfing, and you guessed it, another full body suit. See exhibit B. These lifeless 4 limbed phantoms are always flying around suspended by hooks or hangers in the bathroom or just inside the closet door scaring the bejesus out of me. I, on the other hand could spend my entire working day in sweat pants or tights or a hula skirt or whatever the hell I want. I'm a "writer." Yes, I go into the "office" 2 and 1/2 days a week, but that's pretty loosy-goosy too. I just have to look not-crazy. Sure, it doesn't hurt to blow dry my hair and/or put on makeup every once in a while, but whether I do or not does not a writer make (or destroy.) Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that I'd ever wear a uniform even if there was one, nor do I long for my name cross-stitched into the left breast pocket of my shirt. I just want to know if you're anything like me when I see you walking down the street.