Tricia Springstubb's Blog, page 23

This is where I’m headed!

Every fall some of my writer friends and I go on an informal writing retreat here, an island just far enough out in Lake Erie to make us feel we’ve left the real world behind. We stay in a big, slightly moldy house with a great round kitchen table, a dining room that could double as a funeral parlor, and a deck that–fingers crossed–we’ll be sitting on a lot.

Here is where I’ll be  daydreaming, brooding and poking my lower lip as I think about my work:

This year a new writer is joining us. We’ll also, sadly, hold a memorial reading for Mary Louise Robison, a gifted, witty, generous writer and friend whose stories about growing up in Alabama tickled us all.  Mary always cooked for us at KI. She’d putter around the kitchen all afternoon. Tomato and peach soup–none of us will ever forget the year she made that.

Here are the famous in the neighborhood Glacial Grooves. They’re actually even more magnificent and imposing than this photo conveys. Geological heaven.

Kelley’s is the island my new middle grade novel is very loosely based on. My island is farther out in the lake, and what happens there is entirely fiction. But it’s going to be interesting to be there now, when I’ve just finished the new draft of the book. I’m looking forward to picking up a few more islandly smells and sounds, not to mention putting my toes in the water.

 

Last Saturday night, the 8th,  my writing group, all 8 of us, gave its first (but I hope not last) group reading at a wonderful local indie bookstore, Macs Backs. We read in the basement, where it was, against all basement logic, about 100 degrees, and you could hear the creak of footsteps overhead.

We each read for 8 minutes–pretty clever, right? And variety abounded. I sometimes think of myself as the most schizoid member of the group, since I write for “all ages”, but most of us shimmy the genres. One poet also writes journalism, one novelist also writes poems, and our sci-fi guy writes creative non-fiction, though he insists on calling it a novel (can you tell we have debated this?)

I’ve never been in another writing group, but I hear they can be brutal. Ours, I’ve been informed, is supportive, kindly and egalitarian by comparison. Whew. Not sure I could survive any other sort. While we can certainly mete out the suggestions, and a polite silence has been known to reign ominously long, no one ever brings a sledgehammer to the table.  I always come looking for criticism, but I also, truth to tell, dearly need the support. This is a lonesome occupation. When the work is zombie-eating my brain, I crave talking to someone else who knows what that’s like. Who tells me it’s worth it. Who reminds me why.

We sounded really good in that basement. Even better than we do at each other’s kitchen tables. It’s funny how a podium and an audience sitting upright in folding chairs gives the work a new validity.  I read an essay about the time Paul left a kitchen cupboard door open and I hit my head on it, coming close to a do-it-yourself lobotomy. It was really about forgiveness in marriage, and afterwards a woman came up and asked me where she could get a copy for a couple she knows getting married soon. That was nice (it appeared last April in Cleveland Magazine.)  One of us has a series of poems about a character named Wesley. I’ve come to think of him as ours–but there he was, out in public, strutting his stuff. I was so proud of him!

My mother was a writer, too. In high school she was editor of the newspaper, a role that in those days, in Queens, the way my mom told it, put you a step above prom queen. Undeniably a beauty, she had glossy dark hair, full lips, and terrific cheekbones—in photos she’s got the sultry pout of an Ava Gardner but the gimlet eye of Katherine Hepburn. Though as young women we looked nothing alike, now when I look in the mirror, I see her. That startled and depressed me at first, but not any more.

She wrote in college, which she had to leave before finishing. When I was still small, she enrolled in an adult education class at the high school. The one night a week she attended “Creative Writing”, dinner was a hurry up job. I remember her, dressed in her good, rose-colored cable-stitch cardigan, slinging food onto the table. Back then, I knew I was a reader, but I wasn’t at all sure what a writer was. Books were organic things that sprang up of their own accord, like wild-covered mushrooms on the front lawn after a night of rain. The impulse to write still lay curled up and waiting inside me.

After I left home, my mother got her college degree. She took night classes locally, and one summer she went away to Brown University for an intensive writing course. I recently found the letters she wrote to my father while there. It was the first time they’d ever been apart, other than her being hospitalized for her five—you read that right—Caesarean sections. Two or three of my siblings still lived at home, and my mother’s glee at being away from the domestic front brings tears to my eyes. She wrote him long descriptions of her classes, her profs, her fellow students and the intense conversations they had, all in her slashing script that dented the paper so that if you turned the sheet over you could read it backwards, with your fingertips. God knows what my father made of those letters. (Of course they didn’t phone—it was long distance.) I imagine he was glad for her—he never could figure out how to make her happy. Yet he must have been anxious, too.

What made me write this post was coming across, in that same stash of her papers, a copy of The Writer magazine, dated June 1977. My mother had a subscription, to my surprise. That issue features as its special market “Women’s Magazines and Home and Garden Publications”. It’s astonishing how many there were back then, not to mention how well they paid.  My mother circled likely markets—Modern Maturity, Redbook, Viva, Playgirl. Playgirl!? I imagine she was taken with the note that they were looking for humor and satire, genres she favored. On June 7, she noted, she had sent her “bowling stry” to Talk, formerly GirlTalk.   

In those same papers, I found a photo-copied article from the February 1981 issue of The Writer. She must no longer have had a subscription—the cover notes that it is the property of South Huntington Public Library. It also notes that one of the articles is “Point of View in the Short Story”, by Tricia Springstubb. By then I’d published in some of those very magazines she’d marked—not Playgirl, unfortunately, but Redbook, McCalls, Good Housekeeping. My little blurb notes that my first YA novel, “Give and Take” is about to come out that spring.

In the  article, I write how every writer suffers from claustrophobia, “the my-skin-fits-so-tight-I-long-to burst-its-seams kind. As they grow older, most people become undercover dreamers ( i.e. readers), but writers go on shamelessly imagining what it would be like to live inside another skin.” Now, when I talk about why I write, I usually say it’s because I’m so greedy, one life isn’t enough. It’s nice to discover that I was saying something similar so long ago—sort of like seeing my mother’s bones emerge in my own face.

She and I never talked about writing, except for my telling her when I’d had something accepted or rejected.  I didn’t even know she’d submitted to national magazines. What I knew was how essential for her was the process of writing, putting external form to feeling and thought, trying on other ways of viewing the world and always, always, trying to tuck in a laugh—and how, slowly, the same became true for me. She was, I now know, the first writer I ever met.

Wish you could read this, Mom!

We’re supposed to take it easy this weekend, right? So instead of writing something, I decided to steal–I mean share–some of my favorite recent quotes on writing. You can find many more on the Poets and Writers blog, poetsandwriters.tumblr.com 

Enjoy, and happy chilling!

From Sarah Manguso’s “Advice to Young Writers”:

Once you’ve truly begun, slow down. The difference between publishing two good books and forty mediocre books is terribly large.  Don’t expend energy in writing and publishing that would be better used in your family or community. Become tempered by life. Make compromises for love. ..

From Joy Castro’s “Getting Lost”:

Writing povides a way to make sense, in language, of the puzzling, wild, beautiful moments our life keeps delivering to us. Here, whispers life, figure this one out.”

From Zadie Smith, whose new novel  “NW” is just out:

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone. I gather sentences around me, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad.

Give me a W! Give me an R! Give me…oh never mind. Go back to that lovely hammock and take a nice nap.

This week I’m just posting a little  piece I did on why I’m glad I’m not an Olympic athlete. (I knew you were all wondering about that). It’s up this week on the lovely blog I contribute to occasionally: www.fromthemixedupfiles.org

This week…

…I got up very early to try and do some writing before the fun began.

This week…

…my refrigerator was forested with strange and wonderful containers labeled hemp milk, ginger beer, Kombucha and Activate

…I ran out of towels.

…I enjoyed YouTube videos of a three-toed Costa Rican sloth being rescued as it tries to cross the road http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES32UFlPOUA&feature=em-share_video_user, and a dog dancing the merengue much better than I could in my fondest dreams http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc9xq-TVyHI&feature=em-share_video_user
This week…
…every cute thing our cats did was captured on a cell phone camera.
…I went to the beach where the water was warmer than the air and the seagulls clustered and stared out at the lake like p.o.’d commuters watching for their bus.
…I had many, many conversations about careers
…and men
…not necessarily in that order and sometimes simultaneously.
This week…
…I watched a baffling and  moving film called “The Belly of the Architect”.
…I listened to lots of music whose lyrics escaped me.
…I went to a 5k race and cheered as wildly as I did at high school meets ten plus years ago.
…I ate roasted Spanish cod with almond mayonaise and drank really, really good Prosecco.
…I tried hard to make Cleveland seem like an exceedingly hip and attractive place.
This week…
…I was, at least half the time, steeling myself for goodbye.
…All three of my daughters were home at once.
But now this week is over.

My friend L (who for the moment must go by an initial only) just got a book deal. It’s a jaw-dropper. When she e-mailed me the news, the note began  “Are you sitting down?” I was, but at the library where I was subbing, and it was all I could do not to start yelling, yelping and yodeling. As it was, I had to confine myself to spinning around in my desk chair.

L is one of those overnight sensations, after 30 years of working at the craft.  She’s an editor, and for decades has toiled over other people’s words. Now she’s the Cincerella who, after tending and mending others’ evening clothes, gets to dance at the ball herself.  I believe she’ll wear Teva sandals, though!

Though I’m getting old, I’m nowhere near the age where I should be burying friends, if such an age ever exists. But we  just went to the memorial service of a friend who died suddenly at 55.  Seth was a union organizer who improved the lives of countless families, and the place was packed to the ceiling with people wanting to pay tribute and tell Seth stories.  On his desk he kept a quote from Chief Justice Earl Warren: “Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile, I caught hell for.”  He was also father to two kids, one of whom told how when her goldfish Spotty died, Seth took him to work, promising he knew a guy who could resuscitate fish.  And, astonishingly, Spotty returned home that night alive!

And just because I haven’t featured him lately, and because he is up there at the top of the furry feline friend pantheon, here is the beloved Habibi.

 Tonight I’m hosting a dinner party for 17 guests, not all of whom I’ve  met.  I am trying not to channel  The horror, the horror of Conrad (who, by the way, died on this date in 1924 at the horrifically young age of 66) but rather the giddy anticipation of Woolf:  Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. ..What a lark! What a plunge! (a novel published, by the way, the very next year, 1925)

Of course Clarissa Dalloway was not faced with the task of scraping cat fur from every soft surface of her house. And I will pick, rather than buy, those flowers.  Obviously I  am  insane to be sitting here.  Off I go, to slice like a knife through everything.  But wait!

 

 Must share this astonishing quote from “Splendors and Glooms”, a forthcoming novel by that magician Laura Amy Schlitz.  At the heart of the story is an opal endowed with enormous mystical powers. An evil puppeteer (!) longs to possess it, but discovers he can’t steal it. Only a child on the brink of adulthood can.  And why? 

“For the child believes–everything!  And he feels–everything! So much life, instinct, vital force–and then the first stirrings of adult desire. Everything is potent, volatile!” 

It turns conventional wisdom upside down: children are the ones with the true power.

This is probably the question writers get asked most frequently (I can remember when it was, “Do you use a pencil or a typewriter?”).  Some of us have stock, if snarky, answers, like “I try to lead an interesting life” or  “At Ideas ‘R’ Us.”  When I talk to kids, I sometimes say how ideas tap me on the shoulder, and I whirl around to pump their hands and cry “How do you do?” Some of those ideas become stories, but most are just passing acquaintances.

But today I’m asking literally–where do you get them? In the shower is common, and so is while out running or taking a walk. This summer, here’s where most of my fireworks have been going off:

I don’t know what it is about the backstroke, but lately I’ve been bumping my head on the pool wall a lot, because I’m thinking about my work. As hard as I try to remember to bring my notebook, I sometimes have to jump out and grab whatever paper is at hand. Ideas are unruly things that come and go, and to make sure you catch them, I can testify that a (dry) kick board or a bike seat makes a lovely desk.   

Driving is dangerously generative–thank goodness for stop signs and long red lights. I used to get ideas while I stood in grocery store lines, but now I’m too mesmerized by the cooking shows on the overhead TVs. Airports, of course, restaurants (especially after a glass of wine), while listening to other writers read or talk…

How about you?  Where do you get your ideas?

When we were in Japan (words that continue to amaze me), communication was a challenge. In truth, beyond hello, thank you, bows and smiles (all of which go a long way there), it was more or less impossible.  At least with people, you could so some mime.  But in a convenience store…

Take a chance? Wind up with fried eel bones (which Paul ate and claimed to enjoy) instead of yogurt?

But I never tired of the signs written in earnest, endearing, endlessly creative not to say lyric English!  The country-wide effort to conserve energy has resulted in lowered air conditioning and dimmer lights; in one store I read a sign apologizing for the “quenching of the lights”. In another, a closed cash register said, “This counter is stopping.”  

At the gate to a temple graveyard, we found this notice:

At the Kyoto Museum of Modern Art, the catalog was clearly perplexed by some of the work on exhibit:

“An artistic disorder we have never known have brought us now ‘ruins of old styles’. Contemporary art of Japan, also in spirit of his own history and situation, could not be saved from this universal tendency.”

No matter!  We ate bread called Smile Forever and drank coffee in the Pure Friend cafe.  When I was young, I used to beg to be allowed to drop in the coins and pull the stopper to dispense my parents’  Winstons from the cigarette machine. In Japan, I could still buy these:

On our last day in Tokyo, we spent all afternoon in one of the students’  favorite spots, Yoyogi Park.  Families, lovers, musicians, artists, poets, frisbee players and tiny, tiny dogs!  And across the way, a street fair straight out of the ’60’s, with a message anyone can appreciate, if not quite translate.