Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity. William Hazlitt

Last night I was sitting on the ground at Cathedral Park listening to music and gazing across the river at the wide and graceful span of the St. Johns bridge. It’s an amazing bridge—medieval and timeless in design and when I’m around it, I feel transported back in time. Perhaps this sense has been influenced by my reading George R. R. Martin’s series set in the faraway and long-ago Seven Kingdoms. I’m on the fourth book and so caught up in the twists and troubles of the sprawling cast, that it’s difficult to not read…. But anyway, I’ve been thinking about grace and lately I’ve been noticing my lack of it. Here’s why:

In the past month or so I have broken my toe, injured my back, had an allergy attack of such severity that it I had to rush in for immediate tests because it felt like I was having a stroke and heart attack at the same time, my computer died, my waistline expanded, I missed an appointment to be interviewed on public radio because I forgot to write it down, drove one and half hours through a traffic jam for a book signing/ mini-lecture attended by three people who did not buy copies of my book, had a panic attack while driving along a zigzag mountain pass at 5000 feet, took a break from talking to a family member because her mental illness makes me want to smash habanera peppers into my eyes, and while reapplying lipstick outdoors in daylight saw such a haggard visage that I feared someone might land a house on me and wrest my ruby slippers from my curling toes.

Meanwhile, I’ve never caught up on my paperwork, have racked up some impressive medical bills, forgot to check the “do not send” boxes on my club notices, am falling behind in writing my book although a preliminary deadline is looming in a few months, have not sent my agent the proposal I promised her in June, went on a shopping spree when my bank account was anemic, ranted “Don’t you read?” along with other bits of outrage when one of my dearest friends proclaimed there was no such thing as global warning, have counseled several perfectly lovely writers that the manuscript that they’ve been slaving over needs a complete rewrite, developed yet another sinus infection that felt like a sadist was jamming an ice pick into my left nostril and eye, had a bad reaction to an antibiotic, and endured a heat wave without air conditioning.

So if you’ve just been diagnosed with cancer, been recently in a head-on collision, or are in the midst of a bitter divorce, things might not look so bad at my end of the street. But for some of you, you might realize that I’m going through a dark night of the soul that will take a certain amount of grace to navigate. I’ve wallowed through times much worse than this one, and have looked back and wished I’d handled myself with more grace. So I’m trying to readjust to quell myself when I start whining, but mostly to rein in my thoughts, especially the bitter and angry ones, before they take over my mind like wildfire.

Grace isn’t one of my best attributes—I’ve got lousy depth perception and eyes that don’t match so I walk into things (hence the broken toe), I brood, have terrible allergies and a lousy immune system so thus have reason for self pity, spend a lot of time alone and even though I know better, often see the worst in people. I’m the type of person who wakes up in the cold light of dawn regretting something she blurted out the previous evening after the main course. I’ve been known to hold a grudge, swear at rude drivers in front of small children, make snap judgments later reversed, gossip, and nurse slights like a playground nerd picking at a scab. I can remember nightmares from when I was three, and the various traumas, heartbreaks and missed opportunities that make up my history. I often forget to count my blessings, look for silver linings, and or keep on the sunny side of the street.

I’ve frequently fallen from grace and it makes me feel small and uneasy. And I think that grace is related to writing, just as most everything is related to writing. I’m not talking about the religious concept of grace that means mercy, but rather the broader definition. The word has Middle English, Latin, Greek, and French origins meaning everything from beloved and effortlessness and artfulness. It is related to gratus and gratitude. In Greek mythology, Grace is depicted in the three sister goddesses, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, who dispense charm and beauty and are favorite subjects for sculptors. When I’ve come across statues of any of this trio, I’ve paused at their fluidity that is somehow imposed on marbles, symmetry of beauty and charm. Grace is also defined as elegance and beauty of movement or expression, a disposition to kindness and compassion, benign good will.

Because although it might sound like I need a horse whisperer for my clumsy soul, I actually think I’m getting better at grace all the time and because I meet people who embody it and read writers who make me want to reach for it. And because even when I’m hobbling along in pain or sweating through a heat wave, there is always a part of me that cannot be tarnished. This part always notices things to write about and chats away with strangers and laughs a lot, and remembers to say thank you and relishes reading and finds the caress of summer air unspeakably delicious. And feels an enormous amount of compassion for most people muddling around on this rotating planet, especially writers and artists.

I don’t have a formula for grace but I think it’s part humor, part compassion, part resiliency, part generosity and part relishing life in all its shades of black, blue and golden. It is the outward expression of your inner zen and love of life. My graceful self is willowy and patient and always kind to myself. It is part Buddha, part giggling toddler, part downhill skier in the zone. Grace seems to come to me when I most need it like a parched ground needs rain. Grace is when you carry on when you want to whine, when you write when you want to slack off and watch reality television, when you negotiate with your child rather than issue threats and ultimatums,

I’m inspired toward grace by other writers I know, especially those who are coping with bad luck of the draw. I know a woman who left a bad marriage, then reinvented her life with a new job, a new band, and a new methods of dealing with an autistic son. I’ve recently been contacted by a writer who wrote to my as he was reading my book and described how he was hit by a drunk driver traveling at 75 miles an hour. When he awoke from a two-week coma his short-term memory was gone. But he’s just written a book designed to help people with brain injuries; while yet another writer I know who was severely injured by a drunk driver gives talks around the country to teens. I know a woman who was dumped by her husband and doesn’t look back with regrets and instead conjured her first book deal and is off on a road trip that she calls a bliss quest. I know another writer who treats her husband with kindness even during the times he tries to drink himself to death and yet another writer friend who is caring for her brain-damaged husband at home after he was pronounced dead for twelve minutes.

Because of the circumstances of their lives, most of these writers cannot write as much as they want to, or even take vacations from their troubles. But I see grace etched in their every caring gesture, coating their brave hearts.

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward; for there you have been, and there you long to return. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Last night I was driving home around ten from playing mahjongg. I had won that evening and it was the fifth time I played and I was finally getting the hang of the game, even the complicated scoring system. The game has a certain mystique carried over from past centuries and you begin the game by being assigned one of the four directions and building a wall of tiles. Last year I wrote a book on the I Ching and while researching the topic and Taoism in general, I thought a lot about the differences between the philosophies of the East and West.

With these thoughts tickling my mind, I came to a stretch of the road and ahead me was a low-hanging full moon, that was so huge and magical that I gasped at the sight of it. It was not as burnished as a harvest moon, but still had a pale golden hue, and was gleaming and mysterious as a fever dream. When I reached home I went out to my patio to hang out, bathing in the moonglow, but I could only see it by standing tiptoe and peering over the fence. Disappointed, I went to bed to read but from time to time would peek out the blinds at it, still touched by its magic.

Yesterday I finished reading George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords which is book three in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Before the mahjongg game, I tried to buy book four but the bookstore I visited didn’t have a copy so I’ll visit Powells, always a treat to bask in this bastion of books and words. I’ve rarely read fantasy because I prefer fiction that’s more reality based, but this remarkable series has opened my eyes to the potential in all storytelling. To the basic drives in humankind that can be told with sword fights and wolves and castles. Each of the three books weigh in at 900+ pages and is centered around a theme—the first book A Game of Thrones is about honor, the A Clash of Kings about power and the third book betrayal. The scope of Martin’s imagination, which includes a complicated society, royal families and a cast of hundreds, is simply inspiring. The books include maps of the north and south sections of the kingdom and an appendix with complicated lists of royal families, sworn brothers of the Watch (a three hundred- mile wall that keeps the northern tribes of wildings out) outlaws and other houses.

Martin began writing as kid and sold his stories to neighborhood kids and was first published when he was 21. This lifelong apprenticeship is easily noted in his work which is as finely crafted as an ancient tapestry. I’ve started wondering if there is some way I can interview him or contact him. But here are his words about why he writes fantasy:

"The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to middle Earth."

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
William Stafford

A few nights ago I attended a concert at a new park in the Portland area, Foothills Park in Lake Oswego. It lies between downtown Lake Oswego and the Willamette River and was created from industrial land that was recently purchased. The park has been landscaped with care and walking around it, you can imagine that in five or ten years when the plantings and trees are more mature that it will be a sweet haven of green and wind-tossed trees. A sculpture that commemorates the poet William Stafford sits at the north edge of the park, along a path that winds above the river. It was designed by artist Frank Boyden and is a grouping of lean, vertical stones that creates connections between the river and nature and Stafford's work. Lines from his poetry such as “the stream is always revising” and “water is always ready to learn” are etched into the stones and seem to coax the reader to absorb Stafford’s ideas and the vista at the same time.

One of the stones has this complete poem etched into it:
You Reading This, Be Ready
Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts? When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life-What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around? William Stafford

Since I visited the park I’ve been thinking about Stafford’s work and legacy, about the example he lived. How he moved here from Kansas and adopted the West and gloried in the land here. I’ve been especially thinking about how he was a conscientious objector during World War II and served in a conservation corps as his sentence. He wrote about those experiences and he wrote a poem every morning including the day he died in 1993. I wonder what he’d think about these political times when "liberal" has been coined as an obscenity; where Americans are being spied on by their government; where elections are stolen and compromised; and laws, including the Geneva Convention, tossed aside for the convenience of furthering corruption and consolidating power. I wonder what sort of poems he’d write in the midst of all this, what we –poets and novelists and screenwriters—should be writing in brave response.

So I broke my toe a few days ago and last night decided to stay home from fourth of July festivities so I could rest. If someone or something brushes against it, the pain is awful and I don’t want to imagine what will happen if someone steps on it. Tonight I’m attending an outdoor concert and can only wear flip-flops, so I’ll try to guard my foot from the crowd. I bashed it into the edge of an antique chest on Saturday night and well, there’s not much you can do with a broken toe except bandage it to its neighbor toe and try to stay off your feet.

Since I’ve already mastered editing while sprawled on the couch, I can handle this but am getting behind in my exercise program. I cannot remember the last time I stayed home on the fourth of July, but it seems that that they invented a lot of new fireworks since then. My neighborhood erupted in them last night and one device sounded so much like a bomb going off that I felt like I was living in Baghdad.

Years ago, when I first moved to the Northwest, I visited my brother for the fourth. My brother lives in the Yakima valley and grows wine grapes and cherries on 120 acres. That July we attended a pig roast-luau at one of his friend’s home. Most of his friends work in the wine industry and gather regularly for dinners and parties where remarkable wines are served. I remember the pig had been wrapped in imported banana leaves and our host was groggy and silly since he’d been up the night before tending it. I remember that I had pitched in and helped carve it and felt transported back in time to a medieval feast as I sawed flesh off the huge beast.

There were probably 100 people at the party and later at dusk, I was holding a baby named Guy while the Rolling Stones blasted from the stereo. Guy was about six months old and chubby and dark haired and good natured and adorable. At the time I hadn’t held a baby in years and his heft and smell were familiar and lovely. We were standing out on the road—the couple lived in the country outside a small town and in the distance the fireworks display from town began. The fireworks were perhaps a mile away and as each one erupted into the night sky Guy would coo and sigh and arch his tiny body at the thrill of the glittering display. I’ve never forgotten the newness of his experience and his appreciation of the bedazzled sky.

I think a lot about tricks for living well and how some of these tricks I’m still trying to master and some I don’t know if I ever will. But several I’m good at—living with awareness and trying to see things with the eyes of a child. For some people it’s not possible to hang out with children and slip into their world view so you must do it on your own. Because this freshness of view is like your first fireworks, your first ice cream, your first carnival. If you live with newness and awareness the smallest outing like a trip to the grocery store becomes an opportunity to really see the goods and people and feel the chilled air of the freezer section and notice all the giddy colors of the fruits and vegetables in the produce section. If it’s all new and if you’re noticing all the time, everything becomes an adventure.

It’s officially a holiday weekend, hot but not blistering and I've been writing since I awoke except for a few breaks for laundry and meals. I've got one more writing project on today's to-do list and then I'm heading out for errands and just to take a break.

Last night I invited two of my former students over for dinner and we sat in my back yard until midnight the crescent moon winking overhead talking about writing and divorce and special diets and trust and men and writing. Athena brought her laptop and showed us photos of her recent road trips including one where her red Jeep is parked within the crotch of a giant redwood. She talked about her blog (www.theblissquest.com) her book deal to write ghost stories about Seattle, and brought along a notebook so filled with life and color and art and whimsy that I wanted to steal it on the spot.

The other writer Mary fretted about finding time to write between working full time, commuting too many hours, playing in a band, and taking care of a dog and special-needs son. She also owns a home and is thinking of buying smaller one, with a more manageable yard as one solution. She described an incident when her son locked her out of the house and she was forced to call the fire department. How when they were breaking into her house, a fireman informed her that her gutters needed cleaning and they were causing water to leak into her basement.
So she hired a kid to clean the gutters, but it’s all a lot to cope with and write too and meanwhile, her agent might send out her novel again if she was working on a new one.

At times like this, when really nice writers deserve a break, I wish I was a millionaire or a fairy god mother. I’d grant Mary a year or two off from work so she could settle into a new novel and I’d provide a gardener and pay for day care for her son. When I was kid there was a television program on the air called The Millionaire. Each episode began with Dali-esque swirling graphics that sort of made you dizzy watching them, as if you were falling into the television set. The concept of the series was that each week the millionaire, John Beresford Tipton, would anonymously give someone a million dollars through his assistant and then the story evolved around the ramifications of this generosity. The millionaire’s associate, the actor Marvin Miller as Michael Anthony, would deliver a tax-free cashier's check on the condition that they never try to discover who sent it, or reveal where the money came from, except to their husband or wife.

Anthony was often on the sidelines as newly-minted millionaires would often run into trouble because of their wealth, sometimes learning hard truths such as money can't buy happiness. The episodes would end with Anthony reporting to his boss about the lessons that the recipients learned. Like Rod Serling’s brilliant series The Twilight Zone of the same period, it managed to deliver drama without being preachy or moralistic.

Some days I have so many yearnings that I can scarcely sit down to write or keep my wits about me. Just this morning I was thinking that if I’d studied math and science more in school I would have loved to work in brain research. The older I get and the more I witness about how people screw up their lives, the more I want to know the brain’s role in our sorrows. Or maybe that’s just a way to acknowledge how difficult writing can be.

But back to Mary and other time-starved writers. Sometimes there are no simple solutions for a crowded life. You try to write the best you can, snatching moments here and there. Parents of young children often must scrabble together writing time like kisses stolen in church. You carry a notebook all the time, all the time. You write when you’re tired and on your lunch hour. But you don’t put it off until the children are grown and the mortgage is paid. I’ve met a lot of these writers who waited until retirement or they had reached a certain point of ease. And just like most of us, writing still doesn’t come easy, they still need discipline and persistence. But what I have noticed also about these writers is that sometimes when they delayed their writing ambitions, that by the time they settled into the writing life, that not only had the fire of their youth waned, but also sometimes passion for things big and small had waned too.

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. Thomas Mann

Well the heat wave has finally broken and I’m coming out of my heat-induced fog. As a person who doesn’t have air conditioning and works at home, the last week was mostly misery and meant I was bailing out of here regularly and working in my underwear with a fan blowing on me. The windows in my place are all oversized giants (I guess that’s redundant) and two face east and so this place starts heating up early and none can accommodate room air conditioners, which I would install in a heartbeat if I could. On Saturday with temperatures in the high 90s, I attended an annual art festival and walked around broiling amid splashes of color, then spent time on a friend’s boat and had dinner on his patio. I also went out to dinner three times, gave a book signing at Powells in Beaverton where, although it was supposed to be air conditioned, I sweated like a big dog throughout my talk amid the shelves of books, saw two movies, and last night joined friends on a backyard deck for a glass of wine. So the good part of the heat wave is that I didn’t have to cook and I’ve spent time with friends. The bad part is that I’m falling behind in my work.

On Sunday morning with the sun blasting furnace-hot breaths onto the pavement, I strolled around at a nearby farmer’s market stocking up on raspberries and cucumbers and such, when I noticed a plant named Datura being sold. In my new book (Bullies, Bastards and Bitches, the Bad Guys of Fiction to be published in February 2008—a little shameless self-promotion there) I am writing a chapter on creating memorable characters. In this chapter I’m adding a sidebar about the importance of naming characters. Characters names are vital to storytelling, because characters are first the sound of their names and the best are suggestive; reveal an era they were born in, and other tidbits of information such as family background.

In Dean Koontz thriller Forever Odd his villainous is named Datura. I had assumed that he’d made up the name because it’s perfectly suited to her kinky brand of evil. The farmer informed me that Datura is also called Devil’s Trumpet or Angel’s Trumpet. So I spent some time on-line looking into this plant and found that many myths have been created about it by cultures all over the world. It has a wide array of medicinal properties including that it’s a hallucinogenic and often used by shamans for its visionary powers. It is also interesting to note that all the Datura species contain potent alkoids which when taken in sufficient quantity have the power to kill. So clever Koontz—who has managed to add another layer of intrigue and fright to his villain’s repertoire.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. Theodore Roosevelt

There’s a heat wave coming. I’m up at dawn with windows thrown open and window fans blasting cool air in here before I close this place up and head off to an art festival and then later to shop for another fan. By Monday temperatures are supposed to reach 95 which to my mind is about twenty degrees too hot since I don’t have air conditioning and work at home. I was thinking this morning about summer days when I was a girl. I grew up in a town in northern Wisconsin and back then summer was endless punctuated by dazzling thunderstorms, the county fair in August, and sometimes a visit to the city to see my grandparents. Of course it was hot, but I cannot recall the heat as being oppressive although I have a clear memory of us kids sleeping the lower hallway of our old house one sweltering night. I can still remember a sunburn I got at girl scout camp and how later I lay on my mother’s chenille bedspread and could feel each bump against my baked skin. As a fair skinned person I’ve paid for those sunburns with skin cancer and wrinkles, but still I don’t remember the heat in its choking reality.

Last June I was visiting in this small town for a few days and walked about six blocks to the courthouse to obtain a copy of my birth certificate. The courthouse had been newly renovated and the marble floors and walls with gold leaf gleamed and the air was cool as a refrigerated morgue. Stepping back out into the glare, I walked a few blocks in the downtown area, comparing it to my memories. Since WalMart moved into town most of the downtown businesses have vanished, replaced with secondhand shops, a video store and cell phone store. No more department stores, shoes stores, women’s clothing stores where I bought my school clothes in August. By the time I walked back to my aunt’s house I was drenched to my underwear and it took me an hour sitting motionless in her air conditioning to cool off and for my neck to finally dry.

I don’t miss that sort of heat and I don’t want it here in the Pacific Northwest and I believe in global warming but also in the magic of summer. In fact I witnessed it last night. I was home and about an hour before dusk went upstairs to open my bedroom window wider to cool off the room. And coming down the street I spotted a small family: mother, father, and small girl of about two or three. The child had platinum curls, the father wrap-around shades and flip flops. And the mother wore shorts and carried a hand bag while running ahead of them to photograph them with her digital camera. The father and daughter were riding on a skateboard, a wide, navy blue model and the toddler was imitating her father’s moves, leaning into it, bending her knees a bit. But they stopped for her to adjust her stance, because she was scared or unsure, then they were off again. I moved to my office and the window there to follow their progress. They’d stopped and the dad picked up his daughter and was holding her in his arms as they glided up the street. I’ve never wanted to follow people more in my life. I wanted to step into each room of their house, snoop in every drawer, know their childhood stories.

It seems to me that in each season there is a moment, sometimes magical, where that season is epitomized. And as I watched them head east, framed by breeze-tossed trees, I realized the hipster skateboard family contained just that moment.

And if I have to be a thieving, immoral crow in order to write a book, then by God, I'll grow black feathers on my fanny and croak as loud as I can. ~
Pasi Jääskeläinen

The first day of summer has dawned with palest of blue skies dotted with wispy clouds floating dreamily past. Today the temperature is supposed to reach the mid-seventies and around town gardens are not nearly as showy as they were a few months ago as spring flowers fade. I’m realizing that I need to be more vigilant about watering my flowers and herbs and yesterday bought a bunch of products to fight garden pests. A lovely potted rose bush on my patio was plagued with black spots but I had ignored the problem until I returned from my trip and noticed that all the leaves are gone. So it’s stripped bare and I’m feeling guilty for my lack of attention. Part of the problem is that I don’t know much about slugs and bugs and fungus that kill plants and I hate using products that might harm birds and butterflies, but I’ve been too busy to look into natural solutions. So last night while I baked halibut in the oven I started spraying and today I’m going to fertilize.

I’m back working on my book in the morning and editing in the afternoons. It’s a rhythm that I think I can maintain for a while because my next trip isn’t until July. When I was at Paulina Springs bookstore on Friday the evening ended with a question and answer session followed by my signing books. One young woman who works at the bookstore asked about the effect of writing a novel over a long period of time, say five or ten years. She then described how Tolkien took thirty years to write his Lord of the Rings trilogy.

I added that Charles Frazier spent six years writing Cold Mountain and the results were stunning. Then I added my usual smart-ass answer that I think the best way to write fiction is to write quickly as if your pants are on fire. But at the time I didn’t elaborate enough on the reasons for this, so I will now. First, it’s too easy to burn out on a project if you spend too much time on it. Burn out can often lead to abandoning the manuscript. Second, often when people spend years writing a manuscript they start making major changes and second-guessing themselves and tinkering endlessly so that it ends up a muddled mess with too many digressions, characters and sub-plots.

But one of the most important arguments for writing quickly is unity. A novel or short story or memoir needs to read as if it’s been written by one person at one time with one purpose in mind. The authorial or narrator’s voice needs to be consistent, the tone rings true throughout, and the pacing appropriate for its various chapters and events. This is often most easily accomplished when you write with the heat of inspiration.

Now I know that some books are complicated sagas and require a lot of research and plotting and simply time to get them on the page. But if you write fast and consistently often the book lives inside your imagination and follows you around when you’re not writing. When you take five or ten years to write a book, it’s not always possible for the characters and events to take up residence in your head for such an extended period. I’m not sure how long it took Tolkien to write, The Hobbit was published in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings in 1954-55. Tolkien taught English and literature at Oxford, wrote a number of critical and philosophical works while he worked on his fiction He’s credited with recreating the creatures found in Germanic folktales—dwarves, elves, wizards, trolls and adding more of his own, and with creating the sort of complicated fantasy world and trilogy format that has since been emulated by other fantasy writers. When you create huge new worlds it’s likely to take time. The trick is to always stay close to your story and keep building your skills and to write and edit for a unified effect.

I returned home from Sisters, Oregon yesterday after teaching a mini-workshop at Paulina Springs book store. It’s a great bookstore, not huge but still spacious, light-filled and stocked with thoughtful selections and staff recommendations and several deep armchairs for perusing your selections. Sisters sits in central Oregon amid the Cascades and is high, arid and has a frontier charm. The town works hard at maintaining its Western look and hosts a rodeo every summer. Store fronts are wooden or log with massive baskets flowers adding color to the mostly brown and beige buildings. Because of it’s short growing season and other factors, what I notice most about central Oregon is the startling blue of the sky—I am reminded of the shades favored by Matisse and Van Gogh and the lack of variety in trees and plants—mostly Ponderosa pines and sage.

I drove home through the Warms Springs reservation and then driving further west hit the Mt. Hood National forest and the green world I’m familiar with as 26 hugged the flanks of the mountain. Road weary, when I reach home I flopped on my couch and started reading one of the books I bought at Paulina Springs—All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve along with Snow in July by Heather Barbieri. Shreve’s recent Light on Snow ranks high in my list of all time favorites and I loved the way she used the weather and season to shape the story and suggest layers of metaphoric connections. It seems to me that there is much to be learned about storytelling by closely examining her tactics.

In All He Ever Wanted, she is writing in a man’s voice, Nicholas Van Tassel, an academic. Framed as train ride as Nicholas journeys south to Florida to attend his sister’s funeral, it’s about obsessive love and intimacy and autonomy in marriage. And like many captivating tales, there is a secret at its center that is unraveled over time and lends tension and suspense. Shreve says she lays the groundwork when she begins the story, making decisions about the tone and voice. “I rewrite so often during the first 50 pages that it takes forever to get to 51. I spend half the time of the novel on the first 50 pages.

Shreve continues, “It’s true for every book, which drives me crazy. You would think after 10 books it would be easier, but with each one it’s like reinventing the wheel.”

One reason that I believe that Shreve’s novels work so well is because she writes about complicated people with complicated emotions. In this book, she’s created a sympathetic character in Nicholas, but over time as we watch him in action, our sympathies wane and we find ourselves questioning our assumptions about him. Because much of the story takes places at the beginning of the twentieth century, it also reflects on marriage and sex roles, vales and mores of another era. She also cleverly has Nicholas tell his story in his sixties, lending more credibility with the hindsight of his added years.

This is taped to my desk below my monitor: What is to give light must endure burning. Victor Frankl Been burning a bit in my life lately...

Back in the loop again after six days of being away from this desk. Essentially what happened was last Thursday afternoon my computer lost it’s ability to find the operating system, so Friday took it in for repairs. After I got it back on Monday it still wasn’t working properly so I had a new system built. I am now working on my new computer, and all files safely transferred and the new system running with a quiet, efficient hum. Funny how dependent we are on having this little box running on the desk all day. My laptop had already died and I’d put off buying a new one because I’ve had a lot of business expenses lately, but will be purchasing one next month so I never go through this gap of being computerless again.

I spent the time reading clients’ manuscripts, paying bills, sorting through piles of papers that needed sorting and filing, running errands, and vacuuming and cleaning. So everything is tidy as can be, but my office seemed like a ship without an engine with my computer gone and I felt forlorn or orphaned when I didn’t begin my day by writing. Left town Friday afternoon to help a friend pull off a 50th wedding anniversary party for his parents and returned Sunday afternoon in need of sleep. Two glorious walks along the ocean at low tide at Cannon Beach with the air redolent of an endless deep. This week I also finished reading the first book in George R.R. Martin’s series and enjoyed it immensely although I’ve never read much fantasy before. Bought the second book in the series and am enjoying that my prejudices about fantasy are melting away in the hands of a great writer. In fact, the whole time I was reading his first book A Game of Crowns, part of me was marveling at the scope of his imagination and ability to weave in such an intricate storyline and history for all his players.

If I start my day by writing it seems that no matter what happens the rest of the day, it goes well. My morning writing sessions are my touchstone, foundation, center of gravity. Years ago I read an article written by Sue Grafton the mystery author about how to spend more time writing. She said that people make the mistake of putting writing last after they’ve finished all the other obligations of the day, week, month. But that approach will never work. If you make the writing your first priority, the rest of your life will fall into place. And so it does and I’m grateful to be back in my routine.

It's not every day that the world arranges itself into a poem. Wallace Stevens

I’m falling into a rhythm again of writing in the morning and editing, gardening and running errands in the afternoon. The new book is coming along great—so far. Not effortless, but my proposal, which is actually a fairly detailed outline, is helping lots. All the novels I’ve read lately are also sort of simmering to the surface of my consciousness, the characters wanting a voice in this book, where I explain how to create specific types of fictional characters. I don’t want to jinx myself, but I feel calm. Writing my last book I felt anything but calm and I refuse to return to that frayed state. I now drink only a single cup of caffeinated tea each day and might be able to give it up eventually. Yesterday spent three hours gardening, also calming, although of course, I fretted that I should be working, but my flower beds were badly neglected and finally everything is planted and transplanted and weeded and tweaked. I cannot wait to see what happens with the tall dahlias—I never planted them before and so far the plants look pumped with testosterone, so am hoping for mega-blooms.

Yesterday I also spent about an hour looking for a file in one of my office closets. I’ve lived here for two years now and this is the first time I went through the boxes and file containers on the top shelf of this particular closet. My office has two closets and both are jammed with books and papers and the detritus of life. I’m shocked to find how much nonessential stuff I moved here, copies of every handout I ever created, envelopes stuffed with tax records, copies of e-mail messages from 2002. Since I used to teach so many classes (I’ve cut back considerably now that I’m writing full time) there are hundreds of copies of handouts from dozens and dozens of classes. Filled a garbage bag with papers to be tossed, others to be shredded, but didn’t find the file I was looking for.

About eight years ago or so I used to teach a class called Myths, Monsters, Heroes and Ghost Stories. My students were eight to ten years old, there would be 10 in a class and we’d meet at Portland State in the summer time. I tried to teach them techniques for writing fiction and then they’d go home and write a new story and read it aloud to the class. There were six meetings and invariably a fundamentalist Christian mother who was homeschooling her kids would get in my face about the content of the course. Once it was because I read the kids a vampire story, another time because we talked about witches in class. Based on the title of the course, what did they expect?

Sometimes I’d turn the lights out while I read them ghost stories. In one particular class where the kids were difficult to manage, a few kids ducked under the table when room was darkened. Because I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that these kids hadn’t had any great frights in their lives, I asked them about their nightmares and told them about some of mine—several which I can still remember even though they occurred when I was three and four. One girl told tales that sounded like alien abductions (I don’t know if I believe in alien abductions, but her nightmares had an uncanny similarity). Kids described the usual-- being chased by a monster but being too frozen with terror to scream or run. But one girl’s nightmare I’ve never forgotten. The dream takes place during a camping trip and as she looks around the campfire’s gleam, she discovers that each of her family members has disappeared to be replaced by a pile of silvery bones and she’s sitting alone within that ghostly circle.

Then after we talked about the dreams, we listed on the board all the physical reactions you have during a dream and upon waking. I wanted the kids to use these sensations for their monster and ghost stories, so they could portray fear beyond using clichés. I was searching for that file with my handouts and my notes from the kids’ nightmares. So far I haven’t found it and I’m hoping that it’s not one that I threw out. If I hung on to my e-mails from four years ago, why wouldn’t I save these class notes?

Stories, in some way, are blueprints for the imagination. Barry Lopez

It’s the beginning of June and this should excite some sort of passion, some introspection about a year nearly half gone and summer looming with its heat and promise. But I’m looking at the summer ahead as a time to plough into my next book projects while maintaining some kind of balance with my non-writing life. So much work lies ahead and if I try writing this blog on a regular basis, people will discover that I lead a fairly dull existence most often spent sitting at my desk as the window in front of me displays an ever-changing sky.

In the past year or so I was so busy cranking out books so I could justify not writing a blog. My life was a blur of words, email exchanges with my editor, shoulder and back pain, my brain thick and clogged as I struggled to churn out ideas. But those books are written and I’m poised to begin writing another batch and am entertaining this fantasy that I’ve learned something from my last writerly excursions so that I’ll keep writing this blog, I’ll stay in touch with friends and I’ll exercise regularly and squeeze in fun and host dinner parties, all the while whipping out a few thousand words a day. We’ll see.

Most often you’ll find me at my computer, in my pajamas or pink robe or sweats, often without make up, sometimes pacing or bending over to relieve my tired back, or shaking out my cramped fingers. I’ll be gnawing at some concept that seems never to quite reveal itself When I cannot sit here another moment I’ll head out the door to walk this neighborhood, or visit a park or walk along the river, or invent errands and excuses for escaping this desk. That’s also called writing.

Case in point: I have spent the last three days alone here writing and editing. I ventured from my townhouse for daily walks and errands and talked on the phone with friends from time to time. But guess what? Much of a writer’s life is spent alone in a room. In the 1970s movie Julia with Jane Fonda, starring as Lillian Hellman (apparently some of the details of Hellman’s life story are in dispute, but that’s another story) in frustration pitches a typewriter from her garret window. Part of me thrilled when that typewriter crashed through the window, splintering and loud. Evidence of my frustrations are not nearly so dramatic—a trip to the refrigerator to stare at the contents that I have memorized anyway, bitching to my friends who call, flopping on the couch and reading a novel when I really should be working, skulking around my neighborhood, taking in everything like a drowning person gasping for breath.

Yesterday I got up at 5:30, wrote until 8, edited until 1, napped for an hour then back to editing. Just before the post office closed, I slapped on real clothes and make up and mailed off my client’s manuscript pages. I finished her memo this morning. Yesterday after mailing her manuscript, I wandered over to the trendy Mexican restaurant across from the post office. It’s housed in a Victorian painted inside and out garish gold, deep pink, purple and blue. I ordered an early dinner and buried myself in my newly-arrived Sun magazine. When I noticed it was pouring (I had conveniently forgotten raincoat and umbrella in my car) I ordered a Margarita and while the rain splashed down on my trendy neighborhood replete with bistros and antique stores, I read and watched the latest storm, listening to the soothing tunes in Spanish—songs sung in Spanish always sound so plaintive and mysterious—then since I was unwilling to drink more at such an early hour, I dashed to my car then home in the rain. Where I wrote more, checked my e-mails, tweaked the client’s memo, ordered airline tickets to teach at a next writer’s conference. When the rain stopped I wandered around my neighborhood, the air blessedly sweet after the rain, new flowers emerging everywhere like rioters who cannot be contained. I ended the evening with the television on and a new novel. I warned you this was a dull tale.

Sometimes when I start talking about writing I mention that I know a lot about writing. And I do—I can often help writers fix things and I’m able to explain how fiction works and the elements of creating characters. I know that the key to everything I do is living with awareness. But I’m not an authority on life or matters of the heart or how to raise children or a million other practical matters. I’m a good cook, I’m a good friend and listen for what people are afraid to say. But mostly I’m willing to sit here and listen for what I’ve been storing up from my dreams, my walks, my reading, my editing work, my students' questions and conversations with friends. It’s sometimes meager and sometimes a galaxy of wonders.

So here’s what I think today: Write at your own risk and keep paying attention..

I believe that I need to start a support group for people who have not read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. And now, since I saw the movie a few nights ago, I’m stuck wondering if I need to read it to fully understand the movie. Several years ago I read the opening chapters and then skimmed through some chapter endings examining Brown’s techniques. It’s clear that he was adept at using a fast pace, cliffhangers and other gambits to create suspense. But I wasn’t pulled in, found the writing hackneyed, and laid it aside for other novels that promised more satisfaction.

I was at a dinner party last night discussing the movie with a woman who read the book and claimed to have loved the movie. I was underwhelmed by the movie. First, because a movie based on a book should stand alone and the viewer shouldn’t need to read the book to understand the movie and care about the characters. The movie has many strengths especially a terrific use of setting, especially the lavishly portrayed art collection of the Louvre Museum, the streets of Paris, and the gorgeous architecture of various soaring cathedrals. It also managed to richly portray history in intriguing, if too brief flashbacks.

However, I was never caught up in the character’s lives, never cared a whit about whether they’d survive or not, and didn’t know enough about them to worry overmuch if all would end well, despite the continuing body count. I also thought that the talented Tom Hanks was flat in his role as Robert Langdon and the usually luminous Audrey Tautou never grabbed my heart in her role as Sophie Neveu the French cryptologist. I found myself noticing that she reminded me of Audrey Hepburn and I kept seeing Tom Hanks, as well, Tom Hanks, not his character.

So although the book has sold more than 60 million copies and the movie has grossed gazillions and broke records in the opening weekend, and although it is filled with dazzling costumery and effects, and is stirring up controversy with Christians worldwide, I join the critics who found the movie a disappointment. While weaving in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, various burial places, mysteries, a chase, ciphers, the Holy Grail, secret brotherhoods and Church history, it came off as a pile of clues, not as a story with flesh and blood people at its center.

But still we all need to applaud Brown for his imagination and courage. Because it’s time that someone whispered about the missing books of the Bible, the truth about Mary Magdalene, the machinations of the Council of Nicea, and about how the pagan religions were appropriated then destroyed by a partriarchy. So bravo for Brown and other authors and scholars before him for bringing these topics into the light. I just wish the story both in print and on the screen was more engaging and the movie version did a much better job of connecting the dots of history and reflecting the human heart.

I’ve decided I’m suffering from a case of city envy. A few weeks ago while in Olympia I mused about how lovely it would be to live there among the hills, charming old neighborhoods and lapping waters of the Sound. Last week I yearned to settle in D.C. among the sophisticats with a chance to spend my free time wandering its museums and old neighborhoods. Last night before a workshop/book signing at Jackson’s Books in Salem, I fell in love with downtown Salem. I love medium-sized cities—just enough culture and shopping and interesting people to create an urbane existence, but with the quiet and low volume of traffic to make it sane.

In downtown Salem I strolled past a mix of businesses—lots of coffee shops like everywhere in the Northwest, a bridal shop next to tattoo-piercing parlor, and Thai restaurants. I ambled through an antique mall and stopped at a J.C. Penney store which was sufficiently outdated to make me feel like I had stepped back in time. On the way back to the bookstore I spotted a gaggle of little girls walking along with their mothers. The girls were dressed in formal dance costumes of varying pastels—pink, lime and yellow. Their hair was pulled tight into buns encircled by a band of matching silk rosettes and walking past them it seemed like they had just emerged from some secret fairy den.

Jackson’s Books is located on the edge of a small park that has a creek running through. Green light filters in through the low windows that overlook the park and rhododendron bushes planted next to the store. Inside, fine old jazz is playing and people wander quietly among the stacks.

After reading the first paragraph of Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time—the Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, I bought it. While his novel, Winemaker’s Daughter didn’t grab my attention, Eagan, a Pulitzer-prize winning writer makes history and place come to life like no other writer. If you haven’t read his first book, The Good Rain, I highly recommend it.

The book begins: On those days when the wind stops blowing across the face of the southern plains, the land falls into a silence that scares people in the way that a big house can haunt after the lights go out and no one else is there. It scares them because the land is too much, too empty, claustrophobic in its immensity. It scares them because they feel lost, with nothing to cling to, disoriented. Not a tree, anywhere. Not a slice of shade. Not a river dancing away, life in its blood. Not a bump of high ground to break the horizon, give some perspective, spell the monotone of flatness. It scares them because they wonder what is next…..

As you can see, he’s a gorgeous writer, or as a friend --also a Pulitzer prize winning writer-- (his Pulitzer was tacked to the walls of his outhouse outside his Door County, Wisconsin cabin) once said, “he writes like the angels.” I’ve read through the first few chapters, am amazed at the stats he’s describing, and can’t bear to put it down but must because I’ve got a manuscript to edit.

It’s so much fun to delve into some aspect of history that you don’t know much about, like stumbling into a secret room while exploring an old house. But I bought it also because I believe my writing voice is growing thin. When I was performing the final edit on Between the Lines I was worried at how many times I repeated words like whisper and dazzle and sizzle and deepen. Sometimes it makes sense to read a writer who has a voice similar to your own, but better. It seems to me that the other writer’s skills and word craft start to mingle in your imagination and subconscious, shoring up your own weaknesses.

I woke this morning to a wet, wet world in Portland, but as the day is wearing on the clouds are parting from time to time. After spending the previous week in Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania, I am keenly aware that the Pacific Northwest is sponge-like, holding in all this rain, the air thick with moisture, every surface glistening. Apparently the week I was gone the weather was lovely and a thunderstorm struck just before I arrived home on Sunday night.

I was struck by so many things while in D.C.—-my first sight of the Washington monument piercing the afternoon sky as we drove past in the airport shuttle, the charming neighborhoods of Georgetown, the grandeur of the National Gallery with it’s amazing collection, and everywhere massive, old buildings, gargoyles and fantastic architectural styles, and the reassurance of history. The Ford Theater was near my hotel as was the house where Lincoln died. Tourists and school kids swarmed the sidewalks, monuments, and museums and were easily discernible in their shorts, T-shirts and walking shoes. Was fascinated by the way the people of Washington dressed—as if The West Wing had come to life. D.C. is such a hub of wealth and power, the air buzzing with deals and gossip and clout. It’s a hard-working town, with men in suits and elegant women scurrying along engaged in rapid-fire conversations and conducting business via cell phones. Northwesterners are a casual bunch—a smattering of elegant types live here, but mostly the casual, the athletic, the Bohemian, the tattooed, and the grunged-out make up our population. The difference in dress codes was startling and when I taught workshops at the Writers Digest Conference in D.C. and even Pennwriters in Pennsylvania I was so struck by these differences.

The Writer’s Digest BEA Conference had the usual confluence of energy and optimism and desperation as happens when writers with dreams come together. The Writer’s Digest staff was great as usual—kind, professional, poised and passionate about books and writing. I taught my two workshops and slipped back to my hotel for a brief nap then joined others from the conference for dinner.

I didn’t expect BEA to be so overwhelming. As I was walking into the giant complex of the Washington Convention Center, James Patterson was hurrying out the door and then I noticed that everyone was wearing badges that said “James Patterson rules summer.” I kept wondering what he thought of the adulation. The convention center was like a massive temple to books—giant banners everywhere proclaiming the upcoming summer blockbusters, a group of women attired in aqua swimsuits, heels, and beach towels hawking a book about making peace with your thighs, people in costumes including a few Star Wars characters, wanna-be authors handing out promo pieces about their manuscripts, and more hype, noise and long lines than I’ve seen in years.

I had checked out of my hotel room and was lugging around my brief case and heavy purse, so by the time I started collecting the free books I felt so burdened I was more than happy to pay the efficient UPS team an extra $20 to ship the books home to me. Of course then I found more give-aways and ended up lugging them with me…..After signing books for the second time and chatting with an interesting array of people including a few nuts, I sprinted back to the hotel to catch a shuttle to Dulles Airport which was so crowded and crazy it matched the energy level of the convention center.

Trying not to worry that I was going to miss my plane, I fretted in the long check-in line, discovered my suitcase weighed exactly fifty pounds (it felt like eighty) and crept along in endless security lines (it seemed that despite the many signs and constant broadcast loop my fellow travelers were trying to smuggle their lighters on board) I was in the air. I reached Harrisburg, PA and the first thing I noticed was the green, green fields and woods surrounding it and once inside the airport, rocking chairs. After the bustle of D.C. it felt like I had landed in a cow pasture and I was so grateful for the quiet and nearly empty airport that I practically wept.

The people at Pennwriters Conference made me feel like I was back in the Midwest. It was laid-back and the people were real and funny and kind. And, believe it or not, on Saturday night I banged a mallet onto a device that launched a rubber chicken into the air and into a pot. And won another book. Of all the things I was expecting about teaching at another conference, a rubber chicken never entered my imaginings.

I’ve been meeting a lot of writers lately since I’ve been traveling a bit promoting my new book. Last Friday night I was in Olympia and after my book signing went out for drinks with a few writers. And because two of the writers were journalists, we bandied around names of nonfiction writers. I brought up Truman Capote, they mentioned Hunter Thompson and Amy Goodman. I introduced them to Scott Russell Sanders, Barry Lopex and Sin and Syntax by Constance Hale. Told them about Peace Like a River by Leif Enger—a book I cannot stop talking about two years after reading it and The Memory of Running by Larry McLarty.

I’m always a little amused when writers ask about my life. What it’s like to be self employed. One guy wanted to know how much I spent every month on health care. I tell them I get up early and sit at my computer by six or so. I like to start early before I chicken out and start fretting about errands and phone calls and dirty laundry or plants that need watering. I’ve never forgotten the author who wrote about tying himself to his desk chair with his bathrobe belt, because it’s so comforting to hear that other writers feel anxiety or dread or less than fabulous emotions when they begin the day’s writing session. My life evolves around an invisible bathrobe belt, looping me into this chair, this life.

Books spill off every surface of my small townhouse and are stored away in boxes. I dream about books and words and amazing creatures appear in my nightly movies—I woke this morning after dreaming about a giant grizzly—I mean Empire State Building giant-sized rising from a northern lake. In the dream I had been crouching in a cave, looking out over the water, feeling still and strong, helped in my position by a sword (an object I’ve never brandished in real life) when the bear started rising from the water. My job then was to warn friends and batten down the hatches….

Brought up in the Midwest in a matriarchal family, I make my bed every day, always have fresh flowers in my house, take walks to watch the gardens in my neighborhood go through the seasons and love to watch the sky. Last night I was driving home from a kids’ baseball game (my team lost by one run) and the sky was simply amazing –so huge with billows of gray battleships arriving as if to explode the sky. I get pedicures in the summer and my toes are usually painted bright cherry red. I hate cigarette smoke, try not to eat sugar, and suffer from seasonal allergies. I listen to Air America and NPR during the day but am starting to become more comfortable with long swaths of silence and am thinking about playing lots of moody Sarah Vaughn-Billie Holliday-Ella Fitzgerald-my-man-left-me-again music when I start writing my new book in a few weeks. I love the thoughtful lyrics of songwriters like Cole Porter and am always on the lookout for contemporary songwriters who are more than clever. I would like to spend a month in France writing as two writers from British Columbia who I know just did.

As the oldest daughter in a family of six I started cooking at a tender age, was a professional cook and caterer in a former life and when I bring appetizers or a salad to a dinner party usually garnish the platter with fresh herbs and flowers. I think that telling the truth often requires surprising amounts of courage, that most aspects of life can be more graceful; that we all need to spend more time simply talking with people, especially around a dinner table and especially under the dim glow of candlelight; that adults should provide comforting rituals as well as surprises for children; and that aging is about growing more comfortable with our bodies and regrets.

Since last I wrote, I’ve launched my book tour at Third Place Books in Forest Lake near Seattle. Nice bookstore that seems to be the hub for the community, but then I guess unless a bookstore is moldy and filthy there are few bookstores I don’t like. Traveled by train to Edmonds, WA and back and on the return trip the train was delayed by three and a half hours because someone had been killed on the tracks by the train ahead of us. I have since not heard the details about the death and keep wondering if it was a suicide and how the train engineer is doing.

Train riding is delightful and maybe now that gas prices are so expensive, this country can finally invest in train travel again. Riding along, the scenery slides past and you slip in and out of a dreamy state. You slide in and out of the mystery of tunnels and the world out the window is tender greens, new crops in the fields, a second year vineyard outside of Kent, the dazzling Tacoma Narrows bridge, and the long, blue shoreline of the Sound.

I read Nicole Krauss’s lovely book The History of Love, wrote in a journal, but mostly watched the scenery and eavesdropped on fellow passengers—a gaggle of girl scouts playing cards and eating junk food, friends returning from a Motorcross event in Seattle, families, couples, oddballs. A large man in the business car on the return trip drank and talked nonstop throughout the trip and delay. His wife and friends all seemed to expect this nonstop commentary and I kept wondering about someone with such a need to converse. By trip’s end, I learned that he had a severe fear of flying and once downed 16 drinks between New York and Ohio and then realized I had come to like him…..

On Tuesday I drove to Newport and stayed at the Sylvia Beach Hotel. It is a hotel for booklovers and could not be more charming. (although when I arrived, howling 50 mph winds made my room chilly for the beginning of my stay.) I stayed in the Sigrid Undset room and copied one of her quotes into my notebook: “Life must be lived when caresses are new and dazzling.”

Because of the winds, I didn’t walk on the beach on Tuesday, but trudged against the wind in the charming Nye Beach neighborhood, ate fish and chips for dinner, and bought an aquamarine straw hat.

On Tuesday evening gave a talk about fiction elements to the Willamette Writers group who meet monthly at the Newport Library. It’s a fabulous library, especially the children’s section with cozy corners for readers and the most beautiful jade-infused light coming in through the low windows.

The talk went well and I so appreciated the retired engineer who had driven 50 miles from Florence to hear me speak and my other listeners. We laughed amid commiserating about the difficulties of crafting fiction. Walked on the beach Wednesday morning and on the way home stopped in at Grass Roots bookstore in Corvallis and bought Sarah Dunant’s latest book.

A few questions arose during the talks—one man asked about the line between fiction and creative nonfiction. There is no line. Fiction is a pack of lies, in fact, whoppers and nonfiction is the truth as best you know it. Use narrative TECHNIQUES, but don’t fictionalize your life or reinvent memories that never happened. Another lovely man who is writing a novel based on his mother’s life, asked about his difficulties with spelling and punctuation. Corrections were bogging him down—I explained that you write the first draft as if your pants are on fire then worry about perfection later. Not exactly profound, but that’s it ….write, write, write. There will be plenty to worry about and time to fix things during the rewrites and second, third, and fourth drafts.

On to Orca Books in Olympia tonight. Another bookstore, another community of writers and book lovers. Perhaps that’s what the world is made up of after all.

Yesterday I checked Amazon twice because my book which was supposed to be for sale on the 25th, but it was still listed as unavailable. I also discovered a blurb I had sent them contained a major typo. I seem to be making more typing mistakes these days especially when I’m working at night….I’m afraid to check it again, because surely it’s a sign of obsessiveness or vanity to visit your own book on Amazon….

Years ago I read a comment by the oh-so prolific Joyce Carol Oates. She mentioned that it seemed that her computer had become an extension of her brain. I’ve never forgotten that remark and understand it completely. I’ve been using a computer for writing since the 1980s and sometimes it seems that my day doesn’t start until I click on the computer switch. With a mug of steaming Earl Grey (lightly sweetened with honey) my morning ritual is complete.

However, lately I’ve been writing in longhand more often. I’ve started buying new notebooks, assigning specific notebooks to specific projects, and jotting down ideas when I walk in the door with something simmering in my head. Last night I was driving home from a kid’s softball game and the opening sentences and concept for the preface of my new book came to me. I repeated it to myself a few times as I drove along—desperate not to lose it and tried to keep my brain from filling up with too many ideas—my ongoing struggle. When I reached home, since my computer was shut down for the day, I sat down and wrote out the idea on a yellow lined legal pad. Leafing through the notepad to a blank page, I noted how many pages were filled with ideas.

One page was the genesis of my April newsletter and another page was dedicated to a column I’m going to start writing. I’ve been writing on the train, in bed, in coffee shops and returning to a ritual that has always stamped the day with promise--in the first moments of dawn while on my couch, covered with a pale green afghan as the world twitters awake. I’m going to start writing my new book in earnest in June and feel a need to visit the Oregon coast with a pile of notebooks and novels and write the old fashioned way. The computer is so fast, so easy, so quickly corrects a misstep or clumsy locution.

But it seems like writing on the page-- when you can sketch and scrawl in the margins and circle words and scratch out mistakes-- is connected to the girl in me, the quiet part of me, the person who wonders a lot while I walk and when I’m alone.

About ten years ago I attended a book signing with Ann Perry. She was visiting an independent book store in Portland, plugging the latest book in her Victorian-era suspense series. A number of fans came dressed in Victorian costumes and Perry spent much of the evening answering questions. That evening she explained that her writing process was to write her books longhand, then have an assistant transcribe them.

In the early 90s I interviewed Natalie Goldberg who explained that writing longhand was a form of Western meditation. I also interviewed Dennis Lehane after Mystic River skyrocketed to the New York Times bestseller list and Clint Eastwood bought the movie rights. We talked about many things pertaining to writing, especially how to use setting and detail to bring a story to life. He explained that he wrote while listening to music and I asked him about his writing process. Here is a portion of that interview:

Morrell: I’ve heard that you throw away a lot of pages. What is your editing process? How do you fine tune?

Lehane: I write longhand first.

Morrell: Does that feel like your natural voice comes through with your hand on the page?

Lehane: There’s a sense that I can write anything. It’s not written in stone yet. Stone is when you type and so I can write the car was blue, gray, purple, you know, and just keep going.

Morrell: Doesn’t your wrist get sore?

Lehane: No. I get these cheap pens and they write like buddah and then usually that night I will type that draft into the computer.

Morrell: So that’s essentially edit number one.

Lehane: Yeah, in a way that’s edit number one. And then I just go along and make a lot of mistakes. The one thing I think I do have---which again, can only be created by writing a lot—I think I have an amazing instinct for when it’s going awry. I mean, I’ll still write forty pages in the wrong direction, but then suddenly I can’t write any more.

Morrell: You can hear it?

Lehane: There’s something just eating in me and usually it takes a few days to dawn on me. Then I’ve got to go back. But then I get to the end of a draft and I just read it and I mark it and read it and mark and read it and I do a lot of that and I then start playing with it.

Morrell: As far as language?

Lehane: Yes, I do a lot with language. Or something is missing as far as the character or if a scene is a little fuzzy in terms of plot. And then I send that version off to my editor or agent and in that time I’ve had three weeks to think about it. And I’ve also had time to send it out people and their responses come back.

Morrell: And hopefully they all say the same thing.

Lehane: Or if somebody says something in that month that has started to occur to me, like oh gosh, maybe that scene didn’t fly--because by this time, you want everything to fly. And then you go, ‘okay, you busted me on that. Let’s deal with that.’ You know. And that’s when it gets into squeezing the manuscript so hard it starts to bleed. And that takes a three to four month process. But I’m a maniacal believer in revision and think it if you don’t do it, you’re just a typist.

I was out walking yesterday afternoon in the late afternoon. We were facing west and after a mile or so, we were all feeling punished by the sun. First time of the year to feel too warm and then we turned around, our backs against the sun, the east wind sweeping in from the Columbia Gorge cooling everything. There is a path in Portland called the Springwater Corridor. It’s a former railroad line, and loops 40 miles through the city, wandering along the Willamette River in my neighborhood, but mostly follows Johnson Creek into the foothills of the Cascades. I needed to water my plants before I left home yesterday and realized that the rhythms of the season—watering the garden, long walks, lingering on the patio, spending more time outdoors, especially during the long, sweet dusk—were already here.

On Friday I received a call from an editor at Writer’s Digest Books with the news that they’ve accepted the proposal for my book on bad guys in fiction so I’ll begin working on it in June. Woke up this morning from a complicated dream where I was in trouble because of caring for other people’s kids and came into my office and turned on the computer. Somewhere in between the bedroom and office the enormity of starting a new book hit and I asked myself how in the world I was going to fill so many pages. Gulp. I’m also working on several book ideas so I also need to figure out when each of these books will get written, or at least the approximate timeframe.

Life has been complicated lately. My parents were visiting over the Easter holiday and it’s clear that my mother is suffering from dementia. Her doctor says it is Alzheimer’s and has her on medication for it and her neurologist says she’s not suffering from it. Since her mother and five aunts died of it, it seems likely. I’ve been talking with family members about the future—I want to share information, set plans in place so my father isn’t isolated and overwhelmed by her care.

My answers to the enormity of writing the new book, juggling future plans, worry about my parents, coping with other problems, is to write more. I am going to use my writing habits as a ballast in the coming years which I believe are going to be joyful and difficult and blessed and sad. On Friday night I spent time with a friend whose husband almost died about a month ago. In fact, after a seizure, he was dead for twelve minutes and then was resuscitated. Naturally he has brain damage and faces lots of rehabilitation ahead, but his near-death and so many things lately have been teaching me about the possibilities of what we do with our lives. About the preciousness of each drawn breath, each dewy sunrise and pink-hued sunset. It’s as if when we’re born, most of us, and certainly more so in the West, are offered all these fabulous choices about spending our time on this planet and what the footprint we leave behind will look like. If I was a child born in the slums of Calcutta or Mexico City to a family of twelve, my choices, of course, would be smaller or nonexistent.

Since I was eight, my choice has been mostly to write and now to teach people how to tell stories. Because when our parents are ill, are beloved husband almost dies, when we spot a bluebird sitting among pink blossoms along a trail; our tool to spread the news, to find comfort, to cope and understand is in stories. Stories express our terrible vulnerability and happily, our strengths. Just keep writing (and breathing) through it all.

For the past few days I’ve been writing a piece about an experience I had at the Na Pali coastline of Kauai in 1990. Back then, I had been in the midst of a bitter divorce, my teenage daughter and I were not getting along, my job as communications director at a computer manufacturer was shaky, and I was generally soured on life. At the time I stilled lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and the change of locale from the shores of Lake Michigan to the emerald islands of Hawaii was like stepping onto another planet. What lingers in my memory was the softness of the place, the air soothing, of palm trees and bougainvillea and wild blooms tumbling along the roadsides and volcanoes that made me imagine the beginning of time, and sugar cane fields burning in the middle of the night.

I was vacationing with a friend and first we stayed in Maui and then moved on to Kauai, a place of astonishing beauty. We went on a catamaran trip out into the turquoise waters of the Pacific, to see the Na Pali coastline (a wilderness not accessible by car) from afar and snorkel. And while there, the captain told tales of ancient Hawaii and the race of giants (anthropologists had found bones of men 8 feet tall) and a line of kings, and whispered how the ancient ones walked at night in the still, looming forests.

I’ve been searching on google for information about facts and the myths of Na Pali and am mostly finding advertisements for excursions, condos, and helicopter rides. It feels like the information is just beyond my finger tips and I keep searching my memory for the captain’s words. What I remember most is his first mate—a tiny young woman of about twenty who wearing a skimpy yellow bikini, was so exotically beautiful and perfect, that I was almost blistered by her presence. At the time I was in my mid-thirties and worried about my looks. Now looking at those vacation photos, I see that I looked just fine—fit and thin and tan. But her beauty shook me and somehow frightened me, so it is the whispers of place and her appearance that I remember most about that day. But mostly I learned how a single experience can forever change a person.

Last weekend I taught a workshop and one of my students was a research librarian. I’m realizing that I need another means into the information on the Net and if I cannot find the portal, I’ll ask her. What I’m looking for are a few facts so that I can blend the myths and reality of a magical place with my own sense of transformation. Something happened to me that day in the Pacific. It’s was transcendent, spiritual awakening, the kind of life-altering event that is so difficult to describe. But I know that by the time I watched dolphin’s playing and the sun winking off the waters and soaked in the sight of misty mountains and waterfalls and caves and mysterious, deep, deep forests, that I was not the same. My bitterness and fear began to melt. My belief in things magical and eternal and benevolent, which had long been hibernating, reawakened. I’ve never returned to that bitter self. I’ve found the bigger and the ancient and generous side of life.

And in it all, I want to write.

I know that Daylight Savings Time is unnatural, but sometimes the longer evenings seem like a gift from the gods. Yesterday afternoon I turned in my final draft to Sisters Of The Road and then went to Powells and sold a bunch of books, then bought more. This selling and buying of books seems as natural a cycle as the flow of the tides. Since I’m planning to write several more books on writing, I’m always researching, examining how writers plot and develop characters. After Powells I went out for dinner then returned home restless and too moody to sit at my computer. I could either walk off my mood or garden. I chose gardening since I had fuchsias, geraniums, and other tiny plants that needed to get into pots or in the ground.

And I had forgotten how expansive dusk can be in spring after the clock has been turned forward. The sky seemed enormous and the clouds, still instead of scuttling through as they often so this time of year, sat motionless overhead like whales on a coffee break. They were suffused with changing light and turned pearly, then pink, then purple, then gray. The changing sky as soothing as a Valium. By the time I yanked out dead plants and replaced them with tender new ones, I was feeling calmed and purposeful again.

I’ve been on a reading marathon lately—the aftermath of writing three books—and read in the past week: Eating Heaven, Jennie Shortridge’s second book, a psychological thriller Lost by Michael Robotham and The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank who also wrote The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing.

I know that Jennie had moved to Portland from Denver when she wrote Eating Heaven and she set the story in Portland and managed to capture the weather here with a newcomer’s eye, describing the endless spring rains and magical sun breaks. I love how she slipped weather and lighting into every scene and how the story felt intimate and true. I also love any story that has food featured prominently and how she comments on how women use food for comfort and to express love.

Lost is quite a different type of story—taut and layered in riddles and filled with twists and an array of antagonists. Robotham is a former journalist and his training shows because there are no wasted words, yet the story comes to life brilliantly. It begins on a cold London night with a detective pulled from the Thames with a gunshot wound. He has no memory of how he got in the river, what he was doing there or who shot him. However, in his pocket is the photo of young girl—a case he had worked on three years previously. At this hand, the girl’s murderer is in prison. Great hook, isn’t it? Then Bank’s Wonder Spot created a whole new world of an East coast Jewish family coming of age in the 80s. I became quite enamored with Sophie, the protagonist and found myself reading when I should not have been because I was wondering and worrying about her.

All three authors succeeded in writing their novels and I was puzzling out the common link. In James Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Novel he talks about using sympathetic details so that readers can then empathize with the protagonist and take on his or her goals. However, it seems to me, that in some way, all main characters and often secondary ones too, must be vulnerable. If they are invulnerable we don’t care. And the two best ways to make characters vulnerable is by revealing their back story and then placing antagonists in the story to torment them. One or two areas of vulnerability are not enough, you want to create many chinks in your character’s armor. Or perhaps no armor at all. In real life there are usually only a handful of people who we feel safe enough to expose our vulnerabilities to. In reading fiction we’re allowed this privileged relationship and the results are delicious.

Once a writer is born into a family, that family is doomed. Czselaw Milosz

When I’ve fallen behind with a friendship we get together for dinner or go for a walk to catch up on each other’s lives. It seems to me that if people don’t eat meals together we’ll never know enough about each other’s struggles and triumphs. Last Friday my friend S and I went to a downtown Thai restaurant for dinner and since the service was horrendous, there was plenty of time to talk. In fact, we were seated so near the kitchen that the fumes from roasting hot peppers were making us cough and the scents that drifted out to our table were tantalizing. But our waiter, who when we arrived was jogging and dashing through the place trying to keep up with his tables, disappeared after he took our order. After awhile it became funny to watch dish after dish leave the steamy kitchen destined for other tables as we speculated on our order. S who hadn’t eaten a solid meal all day, kept gulping her tea while I polished off a glass of wine. We were both practically gnawing our knuckles when the waiter finally reappeared, shocked that our appetizer salad rolls hadn’t arrived.

After we finally ate, the conversation settled into the sort of speculation and planning and confidences that women are prone to. We had driven to the restaurant in S’s red Mercedes that warms the seats for you, (the butt warmer really is a lovely invention) so that when we emerged from the car into the rainy night with our backsides warmed, the downpour wasn’t daunting. S is a real estate agent and spends a lot of time driving around Portland scoping out properties, sometimes with her perspective clients, sometimes on a scouting mission. She described what it was like to drive people around who are house hunting. That week she was working with a lesbian couple looking for a house when the conversation erupted into a fierce argument that really had nothing to do with the enclosed porch on the house they just looked at and everything about their differences. Apparently such arguments about house features—the powder room, the deck, the extra room that one person visualizes as a home office and the other as a nursery---are common. S concentrates fiercely on driving until the eruption fades.

“Ah, that’s subtext, “I explained. “It’s the river of true emotions that runs beneath the words that are being spoken.” I went on to describe how arguments are often not about the topic at hand but deeper issues in the relationship. Subtext is exploited by fiction and screenwriters to enhance tension.

On Saturday night I drove to meet a friend for dinner the sky striated with lavenders and pinks as a storm ended and clouds scuttling east. My friend E who works as a private investigator and had recently visited two Caribbean islands looking for documents and evidence for a federal case she’s working on. Along the way she and the retired cop she was partnered with stirred up a hornet’s nest and the body guard to the prime minister (recently indicted on murder charges) was trying to stop them. By the time they discovered they were in trouble it was Friday night and the only way off the island was a fishing boat. So they stayed and enlisted a local for help and eventually all was well, but I cannot mention the islands or the case she’s working on except to say that it’s generated a million pages of pre-trial discovery.

Since I’m never privy to the sort of scenes and people E has access to—death row inmates, houses filled with meth addicts, and farm homes in Mexico—our conversations are generally fascinating and her adventures exotic. About twenty years ago I was hiking around a nature preserve in northern Wisconsin. It had been formerly owned by the Sears Roebuck family, but the estate with its outbuildings and stables had been torn down and the land was a wide, wide swath of whispering forest. As we walked along we found a single wild orchid. It was a soft orange and its discovery, so far north. etched a memory that has lasted all these years. Sometimes when I talk with E it seems like she is collecting a lifetime of rare orchids.

She described government officials so inept, lazy and uncaring that they made the Bush administration look like a bunch of Eagle Scouts. Of walking into a government office where everyone was playing video games and had crowds of people standing around them offering suggestions for their next move. Of unairconditioned basement offices in the tropical heat so miserably hot that her glasses steamed up.

And then I was driving home on Saturday night after dinner, listening to the car radio. All day there had been updates about the death of Buck Owens, describing him as the creator of the Bakersfield sound because he lived there and drew inspiration from his surroundings. Bakersfield, California is a place where many Dust Bowl refugees arrived searching for fertile farm lands in the 1930s. Buck was born in Texas and grew up in Arizona, but he and his wife moved there after he traveled through the region during a truck-driving stint. When Owens began recording his string of hits he went against the pop-influeced trend of the time and recorded songs that had a rawer, honky-tonk approach, influenced by the Mexican polkas he had heard on border radio stations while growing up.

When I was a kid and my parents played Buck and his Buckeroos, I’d howl in protest. Now that I’m older, I think Buck really knew how to swing and his sound was clean and crisp and true. His rendition of Act Naturally and Santa Looked lot Like Daddy are just plain fun. Every time another icon from my childhood or teen years leaves the planet, I see the shape of the world I once knew growing smaller and less authentic. I see less real genius around me. Or am I only missing it so busy at my computer with Air America strumming political talk in the background all day? The music scene is now populated by Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Tim McGraw and Jay-Lo and these new celebrities just cannot fill the shoes of the bigger-than-life music idols who have gone: Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Marvin Gaye, John Lennon, George Harrison, Jimmy Hendricks, Jim Morrison. I want them back so I can sit in the audience one more time and hear the gravel and heat and knowing in their words. Watch them hunched over a guitar or piano. Feel the music enter and my veins and lift me up. Hear their lifetime stories in every note.

If myths were bound by time and place, then they would not be myths. Negel Spivey

More rain and blooms and the sky has dawned with pale blue lacing through the clouds. Just before waking, I was dreaming about my new book. It was one of those dreams that meld from a mini-horror story then on to dabs of normalcy to then segue into a preposterous scenario. In one segment I’m throwing a party for my upcoming book and I see the book for the first time. It’s a gaudy horror of childhood and retouched photos of people I mentioned in the preface (in real life I didn’t mention anyone), lots of movie stills from a Disney movie (perhaps Mary Poppins) about half a dozen pages of the stills and the colors mostly in turquoise. The book is, in a nutshell, tacky and strange and the art direction has overshadowed the content. Shaky from this discovery, I frantically start trying to play hostess to the crowd, popping open some champagne which has not been chilled enough and assembling plastic champagne flutes that leak.

Back to real life where yesterday I submitted a proposal for an upcoming book about writing fiction. I’m fairly sure the proposal will be accepted because the editor is already interested and I’ll be working on the book in May or June. I’m planning on spending about a week outlining and preplanning before I start writing—perhaps go to the coast with a pile of notes to mull things over before I plunge in….When writing Between the Lines I realized I had bit off too much and was forced to submit an abbreviated table of contents. With this book—I want a roadmap laid out before I begin.


Saturday afternoon I spent some time reading Nigel Spivey’s Songs on Bronze, The Greek Myths Made Real and A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong. Armstrong’s book begins by stating that humans have always been mythmakers then traces the evolution of myths from the Paleolithic period until now, when mythmaking has declined. I’ve been mulling over her conclusion ever since.

She writes: “We may be sophisticated in material ways, but we have not advanced spiritually beyond the Axial Age: because of our suppression of mythos we may even have regressed. We still long to ‘get beyond’ our immediate circumstances, and to enter a ‘full time’, a more intense, fulfilling existence. We try to enter this dimension by means or art, rock music, drugs or by entering the larger-than-life perspective of film. We still seek heroes. Elvis Presley and Princess Diana were both made into instant mythical beings, even objects of religious cults. But here is something unbalanced about this adulation. The myth of the hero was not intended to provide us with icons to admire, but was designed to tap into the vein of heroism within ourselves. Myth must lead to imitation or participation, not passive contemplation. We no longer know how to manage our mythical lives in a way that is spiritually challenging and informative.”

Armstrong goes on to recommend that we go beyond nineteenth century thought that myth is false or represents inferior thinking. In other words, we need myths to fully experience our humanity.

Although Armstrong decries storytelling as inferior to mythmaking, I believe we can write about people with heroic qualities we want to emulate, burdens we can imagine carrying, and dilemmas we can solve. Sure sometimes we can write stories that are are a vicarious thrill ride or frothy as cotton candy on a sticky July afternoon, but we can also touch the deep heart of knowing that lies in all of us. We can write to understand birth and death and pain and love. We can write to untangle all the knots of human emotions, to lend hope, and expose troublemakers and monsters in human clothes for what they are. When stories are contrived with artistry, empathy, and intricacy, reading or watching them is not a passive experience, but a deep experience of shared humanity.

“I find stories everywhere,” she told me, her voice coming over the telephone line. I jotted down her words immediately on the back of an old envelope and we went on to talk about this phenomena –stories everywhere. Everyone a story. The story collector’s name is Kathleen and she had called to enroll in a writing workshop I’m teaching in April. As we talked, I looked out my living room window to the cherry trees blooming pink in the neighbors’ yard, the sky smudged with gray, the vibrant greens everywhere. The world offering up its own story.

And I’m still thinking about this and how I walk for exercise, but also to collect stories. About a month ago I was walking on a March afternoon when the sun was blazing but the temperature was still in the 40s. I came across two boys, about nine years old, lying shirtless across the sidewalk as if to sunbathe. I asked them if they were cold and they assured me solemnly that they were not. As I walked along I could almost feel the bite of the cold sidewalk against my back and thought about the pranks and derring-do of childhood. Thinking back to myself at their age—a girl with a thick ponytail and freckles, on my red Schwinn racing down the hill on Matthews street to freedom, my grandmother’s house, or the Wisconsin River. In the March of my childhood, there would still would be snow piled in vast drifts, but a spring thaw usually came in March and the gutters would run wild with melting snow and a patch of sidewalk would be commandeered for hopscotch or jumprope.

Nowadays I like to walk at dusk when people are flicking on their kitchen lights and pulling out pots and pans they’ll need to cook dinner. Sometimes the smells of chicken roasting or a backyard barbecue perfume the air and I can imagine their meal, the murmurs at the table as they bite into a chicken leg or spoon potato salad onto a plate. Sometimes the flickering screen of the television is glowing in the dusk. Sometimes kids are hunched at the kitchen table doing their homework. Sometimes a screen door slams. Once I walked past an old house and the garage door yawned open and inside the darkened garage it was festooned with tiny Christmas lights in every color, glimmering. And it was as if I’d stumbled on a child’s treasure box.

Kathleen is right about stories simmering everywhere for a writer to scoop up and elaborate on, but it requires that your mind quiet down so that the stories can slip in. It requires wonder. It requires asking the next question—what if, why, how does it work? Who is the person who strung the lights?

(written March 9)
It’s snowing in Portland this morning. Snow is always a rare event here but especially so in March when the forsythia, cherry trees and daffodils are blooming and turning the landscape soft with lavenders, pinks and yellows.

I am traveling to Vancouver later this afternoon to teach two fiction workshops. Canada beckons as a haven of sanity in these times as the morning news reports that there were “irregularities” with Florida voting machines in yesterday’s primary. Funny word irregularity. Used to describe everything from constipation to criminal tampering with voting machines.

But on to writing. I am in the final laps of writing three books in about an 18-month period. Yesterday a meeting with Sisters Of The Road, the nonprofit organization I’m working with, writing a book based on 625 interviews with homeless people in Portland. The book will be finished by the end of March and I’ll miss my friends at Sisters. I am also waiting for my editor at Running Press to send the draft of the I Ching book for my final edits and Between the Lines, master the subtle aspects of fiction writing is going to be in stores in April. So the marathon writeathon has been worth it, but when I look back at the past year, it’s a blur of eyestrain, back pain, and brain overload. So this is the wrap-up phase and I’ll be soon into the next phase of submitting new proposals and starting new books.

But there’s something about endings, isn’t there? I joke with my students that finishing a book is like giving birth to an ugly baby. Toward the wearying end you just want the little beast out of you, will pay a king’s ransom to be rid of it. And then when it’s arrived in the world, you’re sure it’s so hideous it will spend its life locked away from the world’s harsh view. All your doubts about your skill level start blooming, after all, who are you to write a book? But then one day, when you’re not quite so exhausted, the baby grins a crooked smile at you, and you start to think maybe this kid isn’t so ugly after all.
Maybe I can write after all.

Whoever said that mothers forget the pain of birth is lying. Birth pain lives in your cellular memory always and lingers there on your child’s thirtieth birthday or whenever you recall the hours of delivery. There is nothing quite like it—so searing and seemingly unsurviveable.

And so there are times when slogging through a manuscript that you don’t think you’ll survive the struggle, the pain, the doubt. But like birth, somehow you do. I am not one of those writing teachers that preaches the airy-fairy bliss of writing. Yes, it brings joy and meaning and depth to my life. I love writing, but I know it’s mostly hard work and endless decisions and analysis. And I’m thrilled with sending my new children out into the world of readers and kindred spirits. But there is a price to be paid. I pay it gladly, but I’m always aware of the cost.

The Writing Life Too
“Here’s the secret to the universe: Everything has structure. From snow flakes to fire, everything has form and function. And this applies to the craft of writing." Jay Bonansinga

The clouds are back in Portland after days, weeks of sun and impossibly lovely weather. I’ll confess to needing a respite from the sun which winks of distraction, beckons me outdoors when I need to be writing, slants down through the skylight above my desk onto my computer screen. My agent has given me guidelines for a rewrite, so distractions are not welcome, because, frankly, I can easily manufacture plenty on my own. Besides, I’m moving in a few weeks and everywhere I look, I see things that need to be packed.

Warning: a small politcal rant follows--
Today there are more hearings about the prison tortures in Iraq. Last week I tried watching Rumsfeld on CNN but his lies, dissembling, misdirection, avoidance and convoluted rhetoric pissed me off so much I had to switch to Air America, the liberal talk radio (hallelujah!)for those who don’t listen to it, to calm my nerves. Actually, that's a lie because the talk show hosts on AA are far from calming, but at least it's nice to hear people who I agree with about this political mess we're in. So I’ve become hooked because much as I love NPR, I need to bail out from time to time and CNN is distracting too especially when the ever-smirking Rumsfd--may he rot in hell--and certain Republican senators are on the screen. I wish I was one of those quiet, contemplative types, but I spend a lot of time alone in my office and I need noise to work by.And then when my brain is too stuffed, I head into the outdoors to sort my ideas.

This morning I had a long, complicated dream about an Indian reservation and rose to write about it, but then my morning poem became an agony about the prisoners tortured in Iraq. Since when is our military run by Hannibal Lector? We’re piling up deficits by the billions for future generations to pay off because we're paying a bunch of mercenaries to do our dirty work. And let's not talk about the obvious sick thrills that a bunch of out of control psychopaths or sociopaths were having far from home. But photos don't lie. And government "contractors" (alias mercenaries) are doing what, where? Since we’re a society that no longer questions our government’s crimes, my poems do.
End of rant.

But for those of you who aren’t interested in politics, I want you to know that when I’m not writing about my rage at government I’m riffing on the sweet parts of life. A few days ago I wrote a poem based on the memory of the first of May when I was a girl and we delivered May baskets in the neighborhood. This week Portland is full of roses fresh and dewy in new bloom. Like spring, the roses bursting into May is a yearly surprise. Portland is called the city of roses and aptly named. The climb telephone poles and spill out of gardens and onto sidewalks. Roses are everywhere in every velvet hue and size and their perfume follows me when I walk past.

I’ve been teaching and editing a lot lately. Last weekend a workshop on fiction middles in Eugene. When I teach fiction workshops I talk about the underpinnings and structure of fiction. In screenplays, the structure is a given, the format a guideline. In fiction it’s the foundation that beginning writers need to learn. All writing requires scaffolding. Now buidling scaffolding isn’t glamorous or easy, but it keeps a rickety story upright. Imagine music or other arts without scaffolding. Imagine Brahms without chords. No chords means no music.

If you don’t understand how fiction works, you’re likely going to suffer when you try to create it. Without some knowledge of the when and how things work in fiction your story will likely fall apart. To write something as complicated as a novel without a plan is like building a house without a diagram. Okay, I think I’ve thrown in enough similes and metaphors here.

So here’s the story on story: fiction is a record of changes that are inflicted on characters. Theses changes, are actually a series of crisis that create a world of hurt for your characters. Each crisis becomes progressively worse as the story goes along and sends your character into a tailspin and forces him or her to take action and select goals. Fiction requires that you constantly implant surprises that rev up the story and keep the reader engaged.

Scaffolding, structure—it holds up the world and your story world too.