Once More to the Beach

Summers have gone by where I get to September and realize I haven't been to the beach a single time. I'm doing my best to make sure that doesn't happen this year.

Basement Overhaul, Part ??

So I haven't done an organization post in a long time, and I know you all have been sitting around going, "Huh, what's up with Andrea not organizing anything lately? Could it be that she reached her pipe dream goal of getting her house so clean it just stays that way?"

Well, oh-ho-ho, no, my house is not that clean (yet! I haven't given up hope). And while I have been chipping away at the basement in small bursts (or perhaps spurts), such as the "root cellar" room and the Lego corner (I'm not even going to link to the dozen posts in which I talk about reorganizing the basement), a lot remains to be done, due in part to the fact that the process of the Complete Overhaul of the rest of the house resulted in a lot of crap being deposited at the foot of the basement stairs, like this:

I've cleaned and reorganized this corner of the basement at least once before (in blog history), but then I stole the shelving for use in the root cellar room and it got all messy again.

So anyway, this mess has been weighing on my psyche a lot lately, and I wanted to get it all cleaned up before a) our next camping trip (so that we can access the camping supplies) and b) before school starts (so that I can find the stash of school supplies and don't end up buying everything new again). But summer is no time to spend in a dismal basement, is it? So, as a compromise, I promised myself that on the very next rainy weekend, I would clean up the mess. And this past Sunday happened to be rainy, so I had no choice but forge on.

I spent all morning moving and sorting things into piles (kids clothes, craft supplies, kids craft supplies, gift wrap, etc., etc.). Once I had the area all cleared out, I painted the walls a lovely shade of aqua using clay paint, which magically transforms ugly, dirty, damp concrete walls into bright, clean dry walls (and has absolutely no painty smell, just a kind, well clay-like earthy, barely-noticeable-and-gone-once-it's-dry smell). While the paint dried, I drove to Scarborough and bought a cabinet for storing all of my craft supplies and stayed up way too late getting everything in order.

I was tempted to buy two cabinets--one for my stuff, and one for the kids, but I wouldn't have been able to fit two in my car (I barely fit one!).

I did manage to get all of my own supplies inside (or on top) and devoted the bottom shelf to the school supply stash. Overflow of kids' stuff went into the crate next to it and some migrated back upstairs to their cabinet. I still might go back and get a second cabinet, for things like felt and felting supplies, seasonal decorations, gift wrap, etc. 

I was especially happy that all of my yarn fit (I don't have much yarn stash--which is probably a good thing). C was very skeptical that such a small cabinet would make any dent at all in the basement mess, and truth be told, if you could see behind the camera, you would see a lot of crap. But I did take one moderate-sized bag to Goodwill and recycled a ton of paper. I have a couple big bags of clothes waiting to go to little friends. Next up, I'll go through all of the toys and try to get rid of half or more of those, and then dig through boxes of fabric. In the long-run, I'd like to migrate those ugly plywood shelves (on the left-hand side of the top photo--if you dare look again) out to the barage, along with all the camping equipment (everything but sleeping bags should be OK in a garage, right?) and replace it with a nice big hutch. But all of that will have to wait for a rainy weekend.

(Emmet Otter's) Christmas in July

Some time ago I received an email from someone who had seen the Emmet Otter I had needle-felted for E two Christmases ago, asking if I would be willing to custom-make an Emmet and Ma Otter set for her daughter. Despite all of the usual crazy demands in my life--work, kids, grad school, etc.--I said, "sure!" with the caveat that it might take me a month or so to get them made. Well, here we are, four or five months later and I finally finished Emmet and Ma (good thing we're still a long way away from Christmas).

It's amazing with needle-felting, how nothing looks right until you put on the eyes (and the eyes are the last thing you do). I'm still not 100% satisfied with Ma's face, but I can't quite pin down what's wrong with it. Also, they look so sad with those down-turned animal mouths (but that's how they are in the book, so...).

As I was starting on Ma, her unformed body reminded me of a mummy (Z thought it was more like an owl pellet) and ever since then I've been trying to visualize how I would needle-felt a mummy complete with case and sarcophagus. Yes, Ancient Egypt is one more thing I can totally geek out on.

A Recipe for Slowing Down

Last Tuesday evening, after I arrived home from work and the farmer's market and the grocery store and my library writing session, after I put the quinoa on to cook for Wednesday evening's Geography Club, I was rushing outside to find soccer balls (for the activity we were providing--South America Geography Soccer--which was not nearly as fun as it sounds) and cut mint for the quinoa, I somehow slammed my own finger in the front door, catching it right on the nail, which is perhaps one of the top five most painful spots on the body to smash. I did a lot of screaming and yelling and jumping up and down and cursing and clutching my finger.

When I finally released it from the grip of my left hand, I saw that it was only bleeding a little, but it would go on to swell and bruise a good deal (making finishing the quinoa salad complicated). It was my middle finger. My writing finger. The one I need to type the k, m, i, 9 and the comma. The one I need to steady my pen with. "What are you telling me, Universe?" I cried. And the answer came, not from the universe, but from myself. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps I am trying to do too much. We went ahead to Geography Club the next night, because we had already promised to bring some South American fun, but I have decided to decide to slow down. To find time when we have nowhere we need to be and nothing we need to do (sometimes this time must be wrested from the clutches of Responsibility, but wrest it we must).

Some useful ingredients for a Slow Day:

Hibiscus tea, slow-steeped in the sun:

A slow breakfast of eggs with avocado, goat cheese, grilled tomato and toast with rhubarb-grapefruit jam:

A very slow game of cribbage:

A slow and shallow river (yes it really is an actual river):

Three fast frog-catching boys (they slow down once the frogs are in hand):

Slow-moving wildflowers:

And not-so-slow but paused for a moment damselflies:

And a couple of mysteries:

(The first is a freshwater sponge--did you even know such a thing existed? I didn't) and the second remains mysterious, but I'm working on it--slowly).  Edited to add: That crazy bug is most likely a nymph of a dragonfly in the cruiser (Macromiidae) family, of which we have two species in Maine: Stream Cruiser (Didymops transversa) and Swift River Cruiser (Macromia illinoiensis). I know you were lying away last night wondering what it was; now you'll be able to sleep soundly.

The only other thing I would have liked more of in this day was some slow, lazy reading time. Our summer books have been sadly neglected (with these chapter-book listening boys; they're letting me read them Charlotte's Web right now. Meanwhile C just finished re-reading them the second Harry Potter...as long as they get their fix of magic, I guess they'll let me slide in with some classics).

How have you been slowing down this summer?

Semester 1 Bibliography

I've been meaning to write about the books I read for this semester, but have not managed to get around to it, and now it's a new semester so I figured I would move on, but then I realized I need to put them into a bibliography for my final thesis anyway, so I figured, what the heck, two birds, one stone and all that. I focused on short story collections, because that's what I'm focusing on writing. Here are the ones I read, with one tidbit of wisdom gleaned from each author or volume:

Katrina Kenison and Kathleen Hirsch, editors

Mothers: Twenty Stories of Contemporary Motherhood

From this book I learned that motherhood is a valid literary topic.

Flannery O’Connor

A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

From Flannery O'Connor I learned about physical description ("face like a pipe").

Shirley Jackson

Novels and Stories. Edited by Joyce Carol Oates

Just an Ordinary Day (Unpublished and Uncollected Short Stories)

Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. By Joan Wylie Hall

From Shirley Jackson I learned about ending a story in a way that leaves the reader breathless.

Candace Ward, ed.

Great Short Stories by American Women

From this book I discovered a lot more authors whose work I want to read.

Rick Bass

The Watch

In the Loyal Mountains

The Hermit’s Story

The Lives of Rocks

Rick Bass led one of my workshops and is my mentor this semester and I've already learned so much from him (pages and pages of notes from workshop). To choose just one thing, I'll go with I learned to "stay in the dream" when writing a story.

Lorrie Moore 

Birds of America

From Lorrie Moore I learned about witty dialogue and showing your characters while they speak.

Ann Hood

An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life

From Ann Hood I learned about writing sex scenes. Right there. In the middle of the page. Not hinted. No significant section breaks. Whew.

Colm Toibin

Mothers and Sons

From Colm Toibin I learned about slowing time down so that the reader can really see, think and feel right along with your character.

We were also required to read and annotate one craft book, for which I chose 

Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction. And then I also read Rust Hills' Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, the Writer's Digest Handbook of Short Story Writing, David Jauss's Alone With All That Could Happen, as well as parts of Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer and Ann Hood's Creating Character Emotions.

This semester I'll be reading more along the canonical lines with the likes of Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Dorothy Parker, Alice Munro, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates and Mary Gordon. For craft, right now I'm reading David Huddle's The Writing Habit, which I'm enjoying now that I've gotten past the first chapter, in which he describes his sabbatical during which he jogged, wrote, walked, wrote, napped, wrote, because he had "a wife who during those months was willing to look after herself and our daughter." I truly wanted to throw the book across the room when I read that line (and did set it aside for several days out of pure indignation), but now I've gotten past that and am finding it useful.

What have you been reading lately? Who are your favorite short story-ists? Any craft recommendations?

Edited to add:
I forgot to include one book:
Stefanie Freele
Feeding Strays
From which I learned about playing with structure, lenght and point-of-view.

Re-Entry

Here's where I've been for the last ten days (not counting Wednesday, when I dipped back into the pool of reality, going to work, getting my oil changed, going home to the family for the evening):

My bucket is full and my fire is lit.*

By the end of ten days of listening to presentations and readings, workshopping stories and staying up late being literary (ahem), the language center of my brain had overheated and I found myself unable to complete sentences and putting wrong words in wrong places.

This residency was much better than last time--partly due to it being summer, partly due to being less off-kilter having done the routine once before, partly due to meeting new people and getting to know people I met last time better--yet it still felt a bit like a baptism by fire with a necessary swing through the complete range of emotion. It's set up this way so that at the end of ten days you're ready to climb back out of writer's tea in which you've been steeping.

After a tiny meltdown Sunday (oh, my control issues), I went for a swim in the ocean and sat elbow-to-elbow with friends new and old at picnic tables on the edge of the foggy sea, everyone around me cracking into red lobsters while I ate a salad covered in maple syrup (truly the weirdest thing I've eaten in a while). I managed to close down the party, telling the chicken story one last time to the rest of the stragglers (I'm beginning to feel guilty about the amount of mileage I'm getting out of my children's heartbreak).

I came home last night, looking forward to a restful night in my own bed, but the rain that fell (I swear) all night, drummed on an upturned bucket beneath the eaves. I rolled out of bed early and went to the pool before returning to the realm of cubicle and tedium, where no one speaks in the secret code of "What genre? What semester? Who is/was your mentor? Whose workshop?" No one in real life thinks about showing not telling, "being in the dream," tempo and rhythm, beginnings, endings or titles, beautiful sentences. In real life you don't drink beer and eat pizza, or sip wine and chat, or play werewolf games with people whose names grace the spines of actual real books.

When I got home this evening, the boys had returned from a weekend at their grammie's lake house, and they seemed so much louder and whinier than they were before I left. They quickly reminded me that typical dinner table conversation runs more often along the lines of farts than literature. I'm craving a little time of suspended animation, a couple of days in a sensory deprivation tank during which to quietly let the knowledge absorbed over the last week or so to sift and settle into place, stack itself up in preparation for the work ahead.

*It turns out that the quote erroneously attributed to WB Yeats is actually a dumbing down of some Plutarch wisdom, if you can believe what you read on the internets.

Magical

Did you have a good Fourth of July?

C took the boys to the Kings Mills parade while I stayed home and finished up my workshop comments. He recorded some of it on his phone, and it looked like the usual fire trucks interspersed with flatbed trucks holding Republicans and foot-powered floats of hippie farmers wearing enormous cardboard locally-made cheese wedges on their heads. So I didn't miss much.

We spent the afternoon on the lake, and managed to stave off the thunderstorms until we were ready to leave anyway. C changed his mind about taking the crew to the Augusta fire works and set off a few at home instead, and everyone cast spells with the fireworks the baptist church people handed out at the parade, which I think is a nice poetic justice...if only they knew people went home and avada kadavra'ed each other with the Sparklers for Jesus.

Tonight I took the boys to some live music at Lithgow Library in Augusta (This Way, a band for whom one of my MFA classmates plays bass) and E fell asleep on his hard plastic chair, so it was just as well that they didn't stay out extra-late at a big fireworks show last night...three little fireworks seemed to satisfy them anyway.

I leave tomorrow for my residency. I probably won't be back here during that time (but you never know). I'll be back for sure after the 16th.