Death and the Dandelion

Today - a tie-in to the spring flowers post with this caveat: apologies to any lawn warriors out there - I'm sorry, but I don't see the world the way Scott's turf builder worshipers do.

That said, when I was out walking & taking photographs of spring's bouquet the other afternoon, I also saw this.
One of my neighbors was systematically going through his yard and the green space on the curb, pulling out offending dandelions and tossing their carcasses on the pavement.

And it made my heart hurt.

Plants jerked from the soil, roots and all; left to die in heaps, like garbage.

I'm not a big fan of the designation "weeds" for many a wildflower. I understand that some people like uniformity and neatness.

But to me, dandelions are pure joy.
How can you not love that brilliant, sunshine yellow. And after the lemony brightness fades, you have a bloom full of wishes waiting to happen.
Where is the bad?

Yet dandelions are cast offs. They are yanked from the earth and scorned. I don't like it. I choose to cherish dandelions no matter how often they are cursed by lawn tyrants. Grass isn't natural. Dandelions are.

One of my favorite snippets of wisdom comes from Thich Nhat Hahn:

I have lost my smile, but don't worry.
The dandelion has it.
Somehow I believe the world would be a better place if we all could keep this thought in mind.

Bridge

In addition to being a writer I teach history at a liberal arts college in St. Paul, Minnesota. I love my job - my classes bring me into contact with brilliant young people (okay now that I've referred to them as 'young people' I feel old) whose questions and ideas broaden my own horizons in fabulous ways.

My husband works for a non-profit organization that assists ex-offenders with reintegration into society. His program in particular mentors young men who are coming out of the maximum security juvenile facility in our state.

We both go to work every day, encounter 17 - 21 year olds, and try to help them find paths to the lives they hope for. But for the circumstances we encounter, he and I might as well be living in different universes. While my students are reading dense academic texts and writing at a post-graduate level, his may or may not be literate and their chances of finding employment as ex-offenders are slim. When we come home at the end of the day with tales from the work trenches, we're both aware that this disparity lays bare an immense, seemingly insoluble problem of 21st century America.

Tonight our worlds collided at an amazing, inspiring event that was the culmination of the "Schools to Prisons" class at my college. In this course students build a bridge between the privileged word of private education and the harsh realities of prison, release, and recidivism prevention. The students in this class participate in internships where they work for organizations like my husband's to get a firsthand look at the grassroots programs that attempt to disrupt the cycles of imprisonment and unemployment that plague our country. These students are humble, hard-working and absolutely committed to trying to make a difference in the world. They have the ideas we need to create a better future and the determination to see it through.

The semester has come to a close and tonight reminded me why being a teacher brings me so much joy. Thank you to the next generation, who bring hopes for a better future to life and share it with the world.

Next up: Wacky Holiday Post Extravaganza

Hope & Recycling

A story featured on the radio this morning captured my attention. California scientists are working on an early alert system for earthquakes. As someone whose major natural disaster home environment was pretty much limited to blizzards, I've always found earthquakes both exotic and scary.
But my life now brings earthquakes much closer to home. I married a man from San Francisco, who was right in the middle of the '89 earthquake, and my brother lives in Los Angeles. Earthquakes have gone from frightening and far off to something I actually worry about. An early warning system sounds fantastic to me.

What intrigued me about this story, however, wasn't the system itself but where it was being implemented. The scientists were using equipment from a Cold War bunker that tracked seismic activity produced by nuclear detonations in testing that occurred across the globe.

They say the best thing to do in the event of an earthquake is get under a table. During the Cold War students were drilled to 'duck and cover' during a nuclear attack. While the former actually works, the latter was obviously akin to using Swiss cheese for armor.

Still, this radio essay left me hopeful about the human condition. We may not have achieved nuclear disarmament, but we're a lot closer than we were in the age of duck and cover. And if a Cold War bunker can be transformed into a site that saves lives, who knows what other transformations we might be capable of. History is not without its own sweet sense of irony.

Early Birthday?

Suzette Saxton, did you know tomorrow is my birthday?

I'm tickled to the toes for receiving the Humane Award from Suzy of Shooting Stars. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

To share the love I'll pass this award onto these five bloggers:

Tricia O'Brien, Talespinning
Elana Johnson
Minnesota Matron
Yvonne (The Organic Writer)
Megan Rebekah

The rules of the award are:

1. Accept and post the award on your blog.
2. Link to the person from whom you received it.
3. Pass the award to 5 other blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment.
4. Let them know they've been chosen for this award.

Thanks again Suzette, to all readers of this blog, and to all my blogging friends!

Here is a celebration to start the weekend right:

From Toxic to Bliss?

There have been some interesting posts recently that discuss expectations, jealousy, and ideas about navigating the emotional rollercoaster that is the writing world.

Here's my two cents:

The ups and down of writing, revising, attempting to get an agent, get published, get reviewed, and the list goes on, inevitably produces the full range of human emotions from euphoria to rage to despondence. More often than not, this mental yuck will be directed at those of whom we're jealous or who we blame for our current dire-seeming circumstance.

Rather than hiding from these volatile feelings or pretending that we don't experience them, I think it's best to find productive ways to move through the toxic mire of envy and self-doubt to the Elysian fields of hope and confidence. To achieve this end requires conscientious, thoughtful traversing through one's own psyche.

When it comes to human relations I still don't think you can get much better than the golden rule: Do unto others as you'd have done unto you.

There's a reason this saying has been enshrined at the United Nations.

But even with the best of intentions, it's important to acknowledge and experience the emotions that come with the darker sides of writing life, namely rejection. So how can we rage without doing permanent damage?

I think I found the answer in the All-American Rejects song "Gives You Hell."

With this wickedly catchy song and what is perhaps the funniest video I've ever watched, the message is clear:
Yes you'll get angry, yes you'll be frustrated, yes you'll feel crazy, but at the end of the day it's all about walking a mile in the other person's shoes, knowing we're all in this together and that we're all human.

Notes from an Historian

I had the pleasure of hearing a plenary address from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich last evening. In the history world Ulrich is known for her work on early American women, and in particular her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Midwife's Tale.

Most people don't know that she's the person who coined the phrase: "Well behaved women rarely make history."

For all the accolades she's received Ulrich is an incredibly humble and gracious woman. In her remarks she had two points to offer that I thought were particularly salient to aspiring authors.

One: "You're not in this alone."

The writing world is a collaborative one. What would we do without families cheering us on, beta readers giving hard, but fair critiques, fellow bloggers sharing their experiences and aspirations, agents championing our work? Writing is often a solitary activity, but at the end of the day we're part of a community that we couldn't survive without.

Two: "You can't be rejected when you know you belong."

This point derives from the fact that Ulrich's prize-winning book examined the life of Martha Ballard, an eighteenth-century midwife whose existence had been dismissed as "unimportant" by historians for decades. Laurel Ulrich brought Ballard's harrowing experiences into the world at a time when women's history had barely drawn its first breath and still had many years to fight for the legitimacy of its existence.

Writers face rejection constantly. The mantra of authors, agents, editors, and writing gurus remains the same - keep writing. We write because we have to. We write because we know we belong. It will happen, keep writing, keeping dreaming.

And finally, in honor of Utah (where I'm at a conference for the weekend), I give you one of my favorite teen dance vids from bygone days when I had big hair and I wish you all "Something Good."

Into the Wild

It's official - my manuscript scampered off into the forest of editors TODAY in search of a happy, profitable home. (Commence nervous twitching now).

Charlie Olsen and Richard Pine of Inkwell are the agents who've put their stamp on the novel (thank you, thank you, thank you!); the agency has been amazing and I'm grateful for all the enthusiasm they have for my writing.

Wish me luck, folks, updates will appear on this blog. I'm not known for my patience, so waiting will be hard, but I do believe that dreams and wishes can come true. Waiting for the brightest of our hopes to take flight is well worth it.

Daydreams and Ferry Trips

I'm blogging from the homestead, Ashland, Wisconsin - small town settled on the South Shore of Lake Superior.

I'm here because my bathroom is currently being demolished. A leak had developed beneath the floorboards and had it gone any further, I might have ended up like this:

http://kstp.com/article/stories/S506173.shtml?cat=1

Fortunately, that crisis was averted, but I'm temporarily homeless but for the grace of my wonderful parents.

I dragged a fabulous colleague into the Northwoods with me and she's been an amazing companions. In the midst of academic hell this past year we found soul sistership; she dreams of creating films the way I dream of writing novels. Needless to say, we became fast friends.

Yesterday we boarded the ferry to Madeline Island and gazed out over the velvet blue expanse of Lake Superior. It was cold and spitting rain, but we still beamed and frolicked on the island.

We also plotted. And found a promise...a promise to ourselves and each other: To have that elusive site, the artist's retreat.

Someday we'll find an island or coastal hideaway in which to be our best creative selves. That making such a place a refuge amidst the obligations of life will be a priority and will help us realize our dreams.
Turning the eyes and mind heavenward to stretch toward dreams is both comforting and essential to the survival of an artist's soul. It helps to think of the ways we might best cultivate that side of ourselves, which the world so often smothers beneath harried tasks and mundane obligations.

What are your dreams of the future? What place or event would make your creativity take flight?

"A hope unreasonable and highly jarring..."

As a faculty member I'm expected to attend the annual commencement ceremony at the liberal arts college where I work.

I'm a new employee, and last year I skipped it.

I have a strong aversion to highly structured, large group activities. I hated school field trips and summer camp. I'm a loner. "Organized fun" is arsenic to my soul.

So I attended this year's graduation festivities with gritted teeth laced with a healthy dose of guilt at my own selfishness about my time (I had some really wonderful seniors this year and I was happy to see their accomplishments), though I think most writers are time-hoarders like myself.

For the most part it was what I expected. Platitudes, sentiment, congratulations. The unexpected came in the words of the college chaplain, who gave the invocation to the ceremony.

She asked that students move through the world with "a hope unreasonable and highly jarring." This phrase shook me out of my own thoughts and struck me as not only raw in its truth but profound in its timeliness.

The graduating class enters a failing job market and an unstable world. The keynote speaker at the commencement, a United Nations officer whose job takes him face to face with child soldiers in Africa, described the atrocities of war and a lost generation of children. Needless to say, his address was more sobering than inspiring.

In light of these truths, hope becomes unreasonable and the act of dreaming remains highly jarring. These dual processes, essential to a thriving soul, are all to elusive in a world that is often lonely, merciless, and alienating.

Writers are hope junkies. We have to be. We strive to create against the odds of getting an agent, being published, having success, one day making enough by writing in order to quit our day jobs.

We have hope that is always unreasonable and beliefs in our ability to continue this work that are always highly jarring. Our maladies are self-doubt, depression, despondency. We tread water amid high seas with stones chained to our ankles.

I mentioned in my last post that I was about to attend a reading by Rick Riordan. His visit was in a huge space that was brimming with children and parents, standing room only. I can't describe the elation I felt at seeing so many young boys and girls, hands stretched to heaven, waiting for their questions to be answered and shrieking with delight at discussion of their favorite characters from his books.

Riordan was a middle-school teacher for 15 years and at this reading he announced two new book series he's writing and that the movie of The Lightning Thief will be out this February.

In light of such impossible twists of fate an aspiring author might despair, could decide "that will never be me." But did I?

No.

My hope unreasonable and highly jarring remains to one day stand before an audience, like Riordan, and share the love of my books.

Turning Days

May 1.

It's interesting that a single day can hold significance for so many different groups, in diverse ways. It's Beltane, May Day, Lei Day (Hawa'ii), and National Love Day (Czech Republic).

I love the month of May, for some reason I tend to become very hopeful in May. The weather is perfect, not too hot, but no longer cold. Leaves begin to unravel and flowers bloom.

When I'm full of goodwill I find it easier to speak more honestly about life's challenges. A number of my favorite blogs have recently discussed the struggles that writers face in life. I'm particularly indebted to their posts.

As someone who struggles with severe, chronic depression it helps to speak with others who face similar challenges, and that this particular malady plagues those of the writing kind all too often.
It's vital to know that others understand your own pain, and that you needn't "suffer for art."

One of my favorite books on writing is Betsy's Lerner's The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers. This text addresses not the nitty-gritty of technical aspects of writing, but instead the life and spirit of those who write. The chapter "Touching Fire" struck a nerve as Lerner speaks to the ways in which so many writers are lost to depression and substance abuse. Nathan Bransford recently raised the subject of sacrifice and self-abuse for writers, and I think the topic deserves reflection.

While it can be wonderful to lose oneself in writing, it's too easy to also lose one's self entirely. I'm fortunate to have a wonderful husband, family, and friends who help keep me anchored, but at times I still find myself staring into the abyss.

The blogging community of writers offers yet another space in which to ground ideas and experiences and make me feel less like I'm stranded on a desert island. Thank you to all beacons of hope out there. You know who you are.

March Madness (and I'm not talking about hares or hatters)

It's tourney time!

March can be a loathsome month, but light shines from the hallowed halls of the NCAA to bring hope to the poor, frozen masses...in the form of the annual BRACKET.

I went a little nuts with my bracket this year, 1) because I've been to busy to follow teams and thus don't have a strong grounding in who I should be picking and 2) I love upsets.

While I won't go through my entire bracket, here is my final four:

Cal, Michigan St., Pitt, UNC. I have Cal and Pitt in the final game, with Pitt winning. Phew!

It's on!