Taking a Break from Writing: Harley and Guitars

Cathy Moser, Bob Ekstrand and Erik Lillestol at Dusty's BarI had a good feeling about taking the day off from writing on Thursday when I stood in line with the Harley Man at the doctor’s office. That, and later that night when my husband and I pulled up to Dusty’s Bar in Northeast Minneapolis.

As much as you might try and succeed at keeping a daily writing habit, you’ve got to take a day off once in a while. Last Thursday, case in point.

Since I had a doctor appointment, I went ahead and took the whole day off from my regular writing routine. Getting poked in more ways than one would not normally inspire me, but while I stood in line at the appointment desk, a new character for my story appeared from the exam rooms and stood behind me. I’m a tall woman at five feet, ten inches, but he towered over me somewhere around six feet, four and hardly fussed while waiting in the long line. He wore a leather jacket with Harley Davidson embossed on the back, clean, crisp Levis and cowboy boots with ornate silver plates nailed to the back of the heels. He sported a trimmed salt and pepper goatee and curly shoulder-length hair tied neatly behind his balding head. I’ll call him my Harley Man.

Harley Man will usurp my current ho-hum supporting character, the Honda Guy in the story I’m working on right now. Imagine: It’s October and just started to snow along Minnesota’s north shore. An average-looking middle-aged IT guy on a Honda Goldwing stops to offer a ride to an attractive Latina woman who’s neglected to keep enough gas in her Jeep Cherokee—no, no, no. Honda Guy just won’t do.

Imagine my Harley man instead: A rumble approaches from behind the woman and beats like a bass drum in her heart. It startles her at first, but triggers a primal sense of comfort. Harley Man pulls up side by side to her stalled Jeep, leans over and taps his leathered fist on the glass... Oh, yeah. Goodbye Honda Guy. Hel-lo Harley Man.

Okay, so letting my mind drift while waiting in line at the clinic helped me spice up my story, what about after the doctor’s visit at the bar that night?

I don’t make a habit of frequenting the neighborhood watering hole on weeknights nor am I especially fond of beer, but last night was exceptional in every way. For the longest time my friend and talented musician, Cathy, had invited me to hear her and her musical partner, Bob, play at Dusty’s on Marshall Avenue in Northeast Minneapolis. I finally made good on seeing my dear old friend on the coldest night of the season when the mercury dove below zero. I brought my husband with me and we ended up eaves dropping on an extremely talented jam session.

The BobCat duo’s guitar plucking and soprano siren pleased our ears, but soon the night turned into unimagined musical ear candy. Every now and then a man bundled in a parka came in through the door of the hole-in-the-wall bar, ordered a drink (or two or three) and found a vinyl-padded seat within the bar’s brown paneled décor. Each one gave a friendly wave to the bar keeper and other patrons. These were more than just your friendly neighbors stopping in for one before heading home…

 By the end of the night, three of those guys had a guitar, a bass fiddle, or a microphone in their hands and at one point the Bob-Cat duo had swelled to a strumming, crooning, harmonizing quintuplet crammed into the middle of the bar’s long narrow layout. Before my husband and I left, we’d heard various renditions of blues, jazz, folk, bluegrass, basso nova, calypso, and soft rock—all with a glass of dark New Castle in the palm of my hand. Who says you have to go to Glasgow or Dublin for soul-satisfying pub entertainment?

So today, with memories of BobCat and friends who so generously provided the spirited break I needed, I’m taking up my pen and beginning fresh with Harley Man—and what’s this? The snow is falling outside my window like flour from a sieve. Time to write!

Thanks goes to the BobCat duo, Cathy Moser on guitar, flute and vocals (Buffalo Gals) and  Bobby E. Ekstrand on guitar, and their special guests, Erik Lillestol on bass (Café Accordion Orchestra), Tom Craven on guitar, Maurice Jacox with vocals (Willie and the Bees) and Dean “Deano” Mikkelson on the archtop guitar.

I Wanted Her to Go Kicking and Screaming

Unfortunately, some online lit mags evaporate into cyberspace and along with them, writers' hard-earned stories. This flash fiction of mine once appeared on Verbumcavus. Now, it only appears here! Thanks to inspiration from The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field (see my previous blogs!). It's one of my older pieces, but perhaps you'll find it still worth some entertainment value.

Enjoy!

I Wanted Her to Go Kicking and Screaming

Instead, Ruby lied, crafted a story of shells and salt, Buddha and incense. As if in a trance, she spoke not a word when she brushed my cheek with her wispy lips. When will you come back? I asked as I pushed some stray hairs up off her forehead, anything to touch her, to keep a hold of her. I reached for her hand and instinctively felt for the ring I’d given her in the spring, but she pulled her hand away before I could feel its absence.

She never answered my question. She flashed a brief grimace of a smile, glanced at the giant airport lobby clock, and she was off through security, piling her backpack filled with her sole possessions into a grey tub on the conveyor belt. She passed barefoot through the metal detector, never looking back.

That was in November, a year after my promotion to grain consulting manager and the 60-hour work week, a year before I joined AA and surrendered to the Higher Power, and two years before I met and married my wife.

It was seven years before I saw Ruby again.

My wife, our three-year-old daughter, and I were at the Minnesota Zoo and had stopped along the Northern Trail. Families of wild Asian horses and Bactrian camels lounged in the grass stubble of their enclosures, lazing in the Indian summer sun. Did they have any clue that they lived the royal, free-lunch life of captivity? Or that their wild, peasant ancestors, the few that survived on the wind-swept steppes of Mongolia, had to fend for themselves? I couldn’t decide who had the better life, the coddled captives or the barbaric beasts. My wife told me to not think so hard, Honey, relax. It’s just a zoo. She was right. Come on, Daddy, said my daughter. They moved on ahead to see the prairie dogs while I went back to the refreshment stand to grab us some drinks and a snow cone—grape—my daughter’s favorite.

There she was, ordering a Coke. I was ninety-nine percent sure it was Ruby. Sunglasses, the movie star kind with thick, black rims and gold embellishments rested on the bridge of her nose—her nose with the little crook in it, the nose I used to suck on with my lips, nibble with my teeth, and stroke with my tongue. She’d bleached her hair. Instead of going gray and in spite of her Czech blood, she’d chosen to go Swedish and it gave her a sexy, coquettish look. It reminded me of when we first met, back in college over summer breaks when we used to lifeguard together at the rec center pool, but then it was natural, burned blond by the Midwestern sun and chlorine.

I tapped her on the shoulder.

Oh, my god, Ruby said.

My thoughts exactly. I was right. Lady Lazarus stood before me, but instead of the foul rancidness of four days’ rot, a field full of lilies of the valley blossomed invisibly around her. My cock stiffened involuntarily.

She pushed her sunglasses up and over the top of her curling hair and with her jaw agape, she stared as if to verify what she’d seen through the Polaroid lenses.

I asked her how long she’d been back in town. She pulled her glasses back down and grabbed her Coke. She said, a while, and stepped back from the stand.

She invited me to sit on a bench in the shade with her, but by then I had two Cokes and a melting glob of ice in a soggy paper cone balanced in my hands. Couldn’t she see I had other plans, other responsibilities? I fumbled with the snow cone and spilled some of the purple syrup on my sandal as I explained that I had to catch up with my “group.”

She looked at me suspiciously from the corner of her glasses.

The familiar lull of Ruby’s voice and a peek at those doe eyes of hers made me want to confess my sins and forgive any misunderstandings there’d been between us years ago: my growing neglect of her, the drinking, her flirting, my jealousy. I loved her, asked her to marry me, but if this was love, she sure as hell didn’t want to get married. I’d work less, quit the booze, give her space, but unless she moved to the other side of the planet, I wouldn’t let her go.

All forgiven, all forgotten.

I wanted to nuzzle into the girlish ringlets that haloed her face and inhale her perfume. I wanted to find out what adventures she’d had without me in Asia over the last seven years. Had she found herself? God? Was it all worth leaving me?

I asked her to meet for drinks after work the next day. She winced, sipped on the Coke, and shrugged her shoulders. I suggested I give her a call and just as I asked for her number, I heard a man’s voice call her name from behind us.

I gotta go, she said.

I blurted out, Exactly how long have you been back in town?

I never left.

You never went to Thailand?

She slowly shook her head.

What the fuck? She never left?

She set her face flat towards me and grimaced just like she did in the airport. More syrup dripped across my toes.

Coming, Ruby called back over her shoulder to the man’s voice as she stood up. She skipped around me where she ringed her arm with another man’s and walked away barefoot, never looking back.

Life with Gifted Children: Four Years Later

(This appeared today in a guest post on Lisa' Rivero's everydayintensity.com)

Like many parents of gifted children, when our children left the cocoon of family life and began spending most of their waking hours in public school, I worried. Will they make friends? Will they be challenged? Will they be OK?

Our son, Ben, and our daughter, Jillian, were so bright and capable, but also so very sensitive. I worried for their happiness. I advocated for them because I knew as small children, although they were mature beyond their years, they didn’t have the wherewithal of life experience to advocate for their exceptional educational needs. For years I wished I could read something other than the dozens of how-to or research-heavy books about gifted children. I wanted a story. I wanted to listen to someone who’d already been there, raised their gifted children, and survived to tell the tale. I found nothing published within the last 30 years, so I wrote the book I wished I could’ve read, Life with Gifted Children: Infinity & Zebra Stripes.

When I began writing in earnest, Ben was an eight-year-old fourth grader who was soon accelerated another year in math and Jillian was a fresh five-year-old kindergartner with interests beyond playing house or racing cars on the carpet. Ben went on to excel in math and declare himself a physics major at Carleton College. This week he’ll step on a plane to Germany and live with a host family while studying theater and the history of Berlin. Next week, as a recent high school graduate with a Merit Scholarship, Jillian will meet her roommate from Chicago, an artist like her, and begin her freshman year at Carleton.

What’s happened since advocating for our children in grade school? The teenage years are often described as the most tumultuous phase of a person’s development that can provide enough angst to last a lifetime. Anxiety, depression, and loneliness marked our children’s lives in various degrees. On the other hand, so did hours of caring for lizards and snakes at the nature center, nights creating web pages for a neighbor, winters nordic skiing with teammates, and days earning academic honors, as well as developing friendships and falling in love for the first time. That’s what has happened. Mind you, Jillian celebrated her 17^th birthday only two weeks ago and Ben is still 19. The process of searching for a circle of friends where they can truly relax, be themselves, and be understood, is still unfolding. The main difference is that now, they’re in a social and intellectual environment of their choosing.

My most satisfying realization as a parent of gifted children is that after graduating from high school, they’re lucky enough to spend their next four years in an environment that supports their intellectual curiosity as well as their quirky and intense interests. An alumnus once told me that this will be the only time—four precious years—that their true peers will surround them. Once they get out into the real world, they’ll work with and serve people from all walks of life. These four years are a gift that will allow them to continue developing their talents and interests, develop lifelong friendships, and grow into people who’ll make a difference for themselves and others in the world.

In the meantime, both Ben and Jillian continue to discover and wrap their brains around the what-ifs. Ben continues his fascination with mathematical and analytical problem solving. In addition to his physics classes, he’s taking as many computer science classes as he can. He’s a modest kid. He doesn’t say much about his college work, but when I ask, he will. I can tell that he simplifies his explanations for the sake of my elementary understanding. If only I could discuss Saturn’s rings or the properties of the low-temperature helium he’s researched over the summer like his housemates can, but I can’t and that’s okay.

Jillian continues in her persistent and private ways. She’s an artist. Stories constantly simmer beneath her calm exterior and bubble out her fingertips in writing and hundreds of doodles and sketches. Very few people know and even fewer understand how these narratives and images run through her veins. She’s not an exhibitionist, but a true artist whose primary purpose is to make her characters come alive and solve their problems. And what problems they can be! The worlds she creates are half science fiction and half fantasy, sometimes with whole civilizations teetering in the balance.

Everything changes, and yet, nothing does. The external circumstances, the geography of our lives, will change completely. In a week my husband and I won’t hear the floorboards creak at night when Ben jumps out of bed with a startling discovery or hear Jillian laughing as she watches an episode of The Big Bang Theory from her laptop. Our grocery bill will decrease by 50% mostly because “the Hoover” (as we’ve nickname Ben lately) won’t be around. I won’t be picking up the water glasses or socks that Jillian routinely scatters around the house. As much as our home will change from bustling to stillness, Ben and Jillian will always be our children. On occasion they’ll need our guidance as they navigate the many firsts to come—filing income taxes, renewing a passport, booking a flight, maintaining a long-distance relationship or dating a first real boyfriend.

What advice would I give parents now that our children have crossed the threshold from home to college and beyond? Persist. Expect the unexpected. Lay a solid foundation for them. Know that no matter how brilliant you think your children are—and they’re probably more brilliant than you’ll ever know—they’ll find their way. In the meantime, you’ll have more sleepless nights when you ask yourself, Will they be OK? Take it from a mother who’s been there: with your love and guidance, they will be all right.

Susan Power: Pure Magic

Susan Power, author of The Grass Dancer and RoofwalkerWhat happens when you put ten creative writing students in one room for a semester with author extraordinaire, Susan Power? Magic. Pure, right brained, I-don’t-know-where-this-is-going-but-I-like-it magic.

Susan Power, a Dakota Native American writer, won the PEN/Hemmingway award for The Grass Dancer and the Milkweed National Fiction Prize for Roofwalker. Susan’s writing is circuitous and timeless and her process is revelatory, a deliberate approach without deliberation. She doesn’t manipulate her characters like puppets to show readers what she believes. Instead, she listens and allows the characters to show her, the writer, what they believe. Over the semester, Susan shared her magical gift with the class: the courage to surrender control and to open the heart to listen and give voice to whoever shows up.

I knew this class was going to be different when Susan handed out a brief one-page syllabus with no reading list. She wanted us to simply write and to write without restraint. After intense, highly structured craft classes on groundings in fiction, flash fiction, and point of view, this was what I needed to generate material.

Kicking off the first class, Susan challenged the advice commonly given to students: write what you know. “Why would we bother to write what we already know?” she asked us. “Marcie Hershman says to ‘Write what you need to know.’ Let your writing, your stories, be discovered and then ask the questions.”

Yes! This is why writing fulfils me like no other intellectual pursuit because it combines my desire to mull over, to meditate, and to address issues creatively. I can still research for authenticity when necessary, but then I can take the facts and soar with the story born from them. In this process I not only learn new and interesting stuff, but I discover a greater human element that can only be understood empathetically and vicariously through the experiences of my characters and the telling of their stories.

I’ve reviewed my spiral notebook from class and have come to the conclusion that the only notes I really need to carry me on are the first three lines on page 2.

Finding the Truth of Fiction

Puppeteer vs. Freewill characters

Finding the Truth vs. Forcing the “Truth”

These phrases sum up a method of writing that Susan coaxed from each of us in the class. By freeing our minds to follow an image, a sound, a face, a phrase, we discovered characters that we had no idea were possible. We spent the next 13 weeks getting to know them and their families, friends, and enemies. They told us their stories one week at a time, one chapter at a time, and we wrote, revised, and shaped them.

We began with interrogating characters—any character that came to mind whether it was someone we’d been writing about for months, a quirky name, or a face that just popped into our brain. We interviewed our new companions to discover the motivations behind their actions. We asked them why they did what they did through a set of 10 random questions. I turned my screen to white print on white and followed the voice that rose from within my mind—I called him The Dog Walker.  No editing, no censoring, no stopping, just letting the intuitive side of me flow from my fingertips.

Some of my best stories came out of innocent questions such as What is your favorite movie? and Who are your grandparents? These questions morphed into What is it with you and Mary Poppins? And How did your Swedish grandmother and your French grandfather become husband and wife?

Sometimes the questions led to personal discoveries (because I always wanted Mary Poppins to be my hero, my savior, my surrogate mother) and others led to family secrets (they met as strangers and fled Europe’s post WWII desolation with forged marriage documents in order to immigrate to America).

Each week students read from the voices of their newly discovered characters, eager to tell their stories: a Minnesota woman recovering from anorexia; a Russian wolf-girl-woman who after a series of petty thefts in the village, steals an infant; a non-repentant modern, dream-stealer and his quest for love; a drowned Icelandic boy whose ghost returns thirty years later to resolve his pain, and more.

Through the freewill of our characters, we discovered the truth in their stories. No premeditated agendas. No planned themes to follow. No points to prove. Just the delightfully surprising stories that caused us to sit on the edges of our chairs in anticipation of the answer to what lay on our lips, What happens next? More often than not, a student’s reply was, I don’t know where this is going, but I like it.

Magic. Pure magic. We like it too. Thank you, Susan Power.

-----------------------------------------------

Most notable works by Susan Power:

• The Grass Dancer. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994.
• Roofwalker. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2002.

A brief biography of Susan Power and a review of The Grass Dancer can be found at http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/powerSusan.php



Writing Groups: Mixed or single genre?

9 of the dozen or so writers at our first official meeting. 6 pictured here and me (in the green) now form the core group.I've belonged to a summer writing group since late May and today being August 27th, summer is almost over. I must decide now whether to continue with this group, drop it, or forge a new group based on what I've learned from my first experiences at forming a serious writing group.

My three goals for the summer were to read a novel every other week, to write every week and read one story at every meeting, and to submit work to lit mags. I'm happy that I met all three goals and used the structured bi-weekly meetings as a way to keep me going over the summer. It worked.

So what's at issue?

I created the group first with an invitation to women whose work I admired in my MFA classes at Hamline University. Then I welcomed anyone else these women wanted to invite. After several meetings it boiled down to a core group of us, a lovely cohesive and extremely talented bunch of 6 or 7 creative non-fiction writers and me. I've written plenty of CNF, but my focus is fiction, and I find it interesting that only CNF writers really stuck it out or found the common bond. Granted, when I first met some of these women, they were pursuing fiction or poetry, but they've since landed on the CNF side of the fence.

I love my sister writers dearly, respect their input, talent, and honesty completely, but I'm feeling the need to surround myself with like-minded fiction writers, men and women who recognize the challenges and understand the nuances that makes fiction worthy of the storytelling.

It's like I'm the token, but well-loved, fiction-head amongst the truth-sayers of CNF. I know we all strive to tell truths, however, there are marked differences between the forms. My CNF friends assure me that all the genres inform each other, and I agree, but at what point does a writer need support from her own genre clan?

I will probably continue with my CNF writer friends since we will meet only once a month during classes and I enjoy the camaraderie. But after that?

I'd love to hear from you if you have an opinion about writing groups, mixed or homogeneous genres, and how writing groups can and cannot meet the needs of developing as well as mature writers. Please leave a comment here or email me with your thoughts: wendyannskinner@gmail.com