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2009-01-19T18:44:00.000-08:00

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Freedom vs. Liberty: Karl Marx and Niccolò Machiavelli

2008-11-05T19:01:00.000-08:00

June 13, 2008
Senior Thesis, Victoria Hershiser
Advisor: Chris Swanson
The word “politics” in this day and age generally applies to endless arguments in which no one ever makes any progress, everyone talks past each other, and nothing is ever solved or agreed on. Yet this is only part of a broader picture; it is impossible to avoid politics because, as Aristotle once said, “man is by nature a political animal” (Politics, 59). Taken in a broad sense, this description applies to every age and culture. To be political is to live in some kind of organized state with other people. How organized and in what way may vary widely, but for people to interact in any meaningful way, a structure must exist. Even language itself is an organization of symbols according to socially agreed-upon rules. The only alternatives to polity are either total solitude or total anarchy, and it is doubtful whether there are any cases of the later which do not eventually develop a political structure or else self-destruct.
For Americans, and all people who participate actively in their own government, the question arises of what this structure should look like, because it depends on their choices. Yet, in the age of information-overload and sophisticated propaganda, it is exceedingly difficult to sort out which choices are good and which are bad; there are almost always a large number of people arguing persuasively for any particular position, and an almost equally large group against it. On major issues, they very rarely argue about facts; instead their different views come from different ideas of what a political system is supposed to do. Unfortunately, almost no one ever brings up this question. Instead, each side assumes it knows what the goal for a political system is, and then debates issues based on that assumption.
In order for an individual to make any sort of rational decision between these different views, it is necessary to first answer the question of what the goal of a political system should be. Although few are willing to discuss it today, there have been authors in the past who were willing to lay out their ideas plainly.
Two of these have been particularly influential. One can hardly enter into a discussion about politics without running into the ideas of Karl Marx and Niccolò Machiavelli. Both have been generally loved or hated, praised or blamed by the great (and not-so-great) political theorists, activists, and people in power who have read them. More importantly, each of them laid out a specific model of what he considered to be the best possible political system, and both of them believed that these systems would work in the real world. They also were both confident enough in their basic assumptions that they did not feel the need to hide them.
Although they lived in two different times and were writing to address two very different situations, the core issues about what a political system should be, and what the nature of man is, are just as relevant today. The details may be different, but the central issues are the same.
However, it is important to know the particulars of their situations, and how they differ from each other and from today, to better understand their larger ideas. Machiavelli wrote while living in exile from his home of Florence after Lorenzo di Medici rose to power, at a time of princes and states, where the idea of a “nation” was still fairly new. The Prince, Machiavelli’s best-known work, was dedicated to Lorenzo di Medici, because he represented the main power in Italy at the time, and also had the ability to bring Machiavelli back from exile, if he was impressed.
Marx wrote in response to the rise of industrialization and capitalism, which had led to extremely exploitative and inhuman conditions for almost everyone not in the small upper class. When Marx denounces capitalism in the Manifesto, he is not complaining about a system in which not everyone can afford a flat-screen T.V. and decent health insurance; he is talking about a system in which people were literally being worked to death on a regular basis. Unlike Machiavelli, he is not talking to powerful leaders (except possibly to warn them to get out of the way), but to a group of people who are being incited to revolution by very specific circumstances.
Yet they do have some very important traits in common. Both had a rare combination of interests and knowledge, in that they both were practically addressing real, specific political situations, and yet both had visions for the way politics and history worked as a whole. Each also expected his principles to hold valid in every situation, present, past, and future.
Marx believed that history was the history of class struggles, which had been unfolding until it reached the point at which communism was the next necessary step. Machiavelli believed that men always had and always would behave in much the same manner, and so a system which was based on principles which had worked well in the past would be very likely to work well again. Each of them believed unwaveringly in his own assertions because he did not consider it a belief at all, but rather a logical necessity based on historical evidence. Because of this, they also share a certain degree of bravado; Marx welcomes “Every opinion based on scientific criticism” (Capital, 298) with the confidence of one who believes that, while a few particulars of his ideas might be flawed, the foundations are untouchable; similarly, although Machiavelli’s introduction to The Discourses apologizes for any errors of judgment he may have made, he is so certain that his view of the consistency of history is sound that he makes no attempt to defend it (103-04).
Yet, in spite of this shared confidence, their idea are mutually exclusive. Machiavelli believes that, however circumstances may change, “all cities and all peoples are and ever have been animated by the same passions” (Discourses, 216). They will not be perfectly predictable, because there is an element of chance in all human ventures, and no two situations are exactly the same, but the general trends will always follow pre-established patterns (216). Marx, on the other hand, believes that the nature of human interaction not only can change, must. All history has been the history of class struggles, yet communism will be the end of class struggle (Manifesto, 473-78); it is something which could not have happened in the past, but which must happen in the future. It will not only be a change, but progress; humanity as a whole will actually improve.
From these differing principles come two very different views of what man is like, and therefore of what the goal of a political system is.

Marx and Freedom

“Man does not exist for the law but the law for man—it is a human manifestation.”

Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right”

According to Marx, the goal of a political system is freedom for its people to act in accordance with their nature. Marx's ideas about freedom will make no sense, however, unless one discerns Marx’s understanding of human nature. He sees humans as purely social beings, who will feel total alienation if they are not allowed to exist and act as such.
Marx’s view of humanity is a drawn primarily from the philosophy of Hegel. Hegel described history as a dynamic, unfolding process, in which each new stage arises from the conflict between two antithetical ideas. The result is a synthesis of both ideas, but it is also something new. Similarly, Marx saw history as a series of epochs defined by struggles between social classes, in which each new epoch is the result of the struggle of the last, but also a new development. Hegel also saw human beings as a corporate entity; for him, “the people” was in some sense just a development of “the state.”
Marx rejected Hegel’s picture of Geist (abstract spirit or mind) coming to know itself, and replaced it with a materialistic, human-centric vision, all the while maintaining many of Hegel’s concepts. Engels says of Marx’s views, that he “placed [Hegel's philosophy] upon its head; or rather, turned [it] off its head, on which it was standing” (Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, Introduction, xxi). While Marx argues that “The state is an abstraction. The people alone is what is concrete” (Critique, 18), he retains Hegel’s notion that “the people” is a singular entity, not a group of individuals. This becomes more obvious as he discusses the political state in connection with humans, not as individuals, but as a species.
Marx borrows the term “species-life” from Feuerbach (another Hegelian) to describe this relationship. Feuerbach argued that
Man is to be distinguished from the animals, not by “consciousness” as such, but by a particular kind of consciousness. Man is not only conscious of himself as an individual; he is also conscious of himself as a member of the human species. (On the Jewish Question, 34)
“Species-life” as Marx defines it is the state of man existing socially, rather than individually. He argues that
since this “species-consciousness” defines the nature of man, man is only living [...] in accordance with his nature when he lives and acts deliberately as a “species-being,” that is, as a social being. (34)
By assuming that man’s nature is social, and that the goal of a political system is to allow humans the freedom to act in accordance with their nature, he can argue that
The perfect political state is, by its nature, the species-life of man as opposed to his material [or egoistic] life. (34).
In contrast, a state which does not express the species-life oppresses man by suppressing his nature; he feels unfulfilled or, as Marx puts it, “alienated,” when he cannot be what he is supposed to be. This is the case when people are being forced to act against their will, as in a tyranny, but also in any state in which there is a separation between political and private life, or between what a person does as an individual and what he does as a member of the species.
For example, Marx is vehemently opposed to religion, especially Christianity and Judaism, because they both require a submission to something external to the species-life. It “is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long as he does not revolve around himself” (Critique, 54).
This explains his seemingly paradoxical anti-Semitism (he did, after all, come from a Jewish background (Tucker, 26)). Judaism, in particular as it existed in the midst of culturally Christian Germany, is the ultimate example of rejecting the species-life. It not only puts a higher calling above the idea that man is primarily a member of a species, but Jews tended to reject even German culture in favor of their religious, individual identity.
Marx perhaps does not deal sufficiently with the paradox of religion which may be chosen without compulsion, and even in spite of punishment for choosing it. He rejects this choice as foolish and irrational, arguing that “it is not religion which creates man but man who creates religion” (Critique, 20), but he does not explain why man as a species would have created religion in the first place.
For this same reason, Marx rejects republican government, because the people are subject to a written constitution which is superior to the will of the people. Even if the people chose their constitution freely, “The content of the state lies outside these constitutions” (22), so there is room for private lives outside of the corporate life of the state.
Democracy is the best form of government which has existed so far, because it does away with the separation between the personal and the political. Marx says that “all forms of state have democracy for their truth and [...] are therefore untrue insofar as they are not democracy” (21), because only democracy merges the will of the people with the form of government. Yet even in a democracy there exists the possibility of oppression, not from the government but from external circumstances.
Freedom can only exist in a democracy, but a democracy does not ensure freedom. Both the ancient Greeks and the people of the middle ages had “democracies of unfreedom.” That is to say, they had political systems in which all parts of their lives were political; there was the same correlation between the species-life of the people and the government form which would be required for true freedom, but the people were still enslaved by forced labor.
Forced labor is work done for the sole purpose of survival. Marx argues that “freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases” (Capital, 441). People in all political structures in the past had to labor to keep themselves fed, clothed, and protected from the elements. Although they felt it as an oppressive force, they submitted to it because they had no alternative. They could also draw some satisfaction from their work, because it directly benefited them by keeping them alive, and they still had some time for life beyond labor.
By Marx’s day, things had changed, and a new, spectacularly oppressive political system emerged. In spite of varying governmental structures between different countries, a single economic structure had emerged which gave the real form to people’s lives. Capitalism became the structure which influenced all of people’s social actions, regardless of their government’s official constitution. In this structure, combined with the technological advances of the industrial revolution, forced labor appeared for the first time in a pure form:
The bourgeoisie [...] has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored [...] It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers. (Manifesto, 476)
Instead of providing for their survival directly, the wage-laborers’ work provides them with money, which they may then use to buy necessities. This money is not determined by what they do, but only how long they work and how little their employers can get away with paying them. When people work in factories, there is no direct connection between the labor they are doing and their resulting survival. Labor “is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely the means to satisfy needs external to it” (Manuscripts, 74). The worker feels alienated from his work, because it does not fulfill him directly, and is therefore not his. “External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice [...] It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self” (74).
Nor does this sacrifice even provide for the physical needs of the workers. Because the driving force behind capitalism is the accumulation of money, it is subject to a very strange disease, “the epidemic of over-production” (Manifesto, 478), which leads to famine. This epidemic is possible because of the unique qualities of capitalistic exchange.
In the past, when people valued objects for their usefulness, it was possible for people to make exchanges in which both parties benefited, such as the exchange of bread for clothing, because the two objects had qualitatively different uses (Capital, 303-08). When they primarily value capital, or the accumulation of money, however, all profitable exchanges must exploit one of the participants; money only varies in quantity, so in order to get more, one must trade a small amount of money for a larger one (329-36). This may be done primarily by exploiting workers; if a man produces twice what he needs to keep himself alive, but is paid only enough to survive, his employer may sell his product for twice the means of subsistence while only paying for it once (358-59).
If too much is produced to be consumed, however, the capitalist can no longer make money in this way. Technology in the industrial age had reached a point where enough product to flood the market could easily be produced (Manifesto, 478). Since the capitalist is unwilling to provide employment if it does not turn a profit, and unable to sell at greater prices due to competition, he either pays his employees less than they need to survive, or else fires them. This creates a vicious cycle, because his laborers are also consumers, and if they cannot afford products then demand will go down even further, leading to lower profits, etc. (Capital, 427-28).
Yet, within this system of oppression, Marx sees hope for a new epoch, in which oppression is done away with entirely. “[The bourgeoisie] is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure the existence of the slave within his slavery [...] [therefore] Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (Manifesto, 483). The people will unite into one, undivided group, and for the first time they will be able to be completely free from forced labor. This new epoch will be the age of communism.
Marx is so certain that the revolutionary change from capitalism to communism and from oppression to freedom is inevitable, that he does not go into much specific detail on what form the revolution will take, and even less on what political structures will look like afterwards. But what he is clear on is that two major changes will have to take place for free species-life to be possible; the dissolution of private property and of class. In The Communist Manifesto, he lays out the specifics of what that will mean.
By the dissolution of private property, Marx means much more by this than just doing away with money and the ownership of goods. He believes that all relationships which are individually “owned” rather than being social will be done away with as well: family, private education, and marriage, will be replaced with non-hierarchical social relationships, social education, and open sexuality (487-88).
He argues that traditional social bonds have already been replaced with bonds based on capitalistic exploitation, and so the communists would merely be removing the exploitative aspect (487-88). More importantly, even pre-capitalistic relationships undermined the species-life through their “private” nature. Family, private education, and marriage are all relationships between individuals; a father is only father to his children, a student is the student of his teachers, a wife is the wife of her husband, just as a capitalist owns his property. Communist relationships will be purely social, purely species relationships.
The dissolution of class is seen in a similar light. As Marx argues, every age so far has had class struggles, manifesting as “the exploitation of one part of society by the other [...] which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms” (489). He assumes that the human race can do away with individualistic selfishness and desire to oppress if they become a homogenous whole.
As for forced labor, Marx believes that it will be obsolete in the new, communist society. While he does not explicitly state why he thinks this, he likely assumes that technology has progressed so far by his time that labor is nearly obsolete. The assumption that technology could solve every human problem prevailed in the modern era, and only began to be dispelled with the advent of the atom bomb. Marx likely believed that work would become so easy that either it would take so little time it would hardly count, or that the human species would be invested enough in its own preservation that it would care for itself without compulsion.
The latter option seems more likely when one considers that Marx thought that free man’s natural activity is “productive life.” He argues that “The whole character of a species—its species character—is contained in the character of its life-activity; and free, conscious activity is man's species character” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 76). This is in contrast to forced labor, which is done only from necessity. Marx argues that man “produces even when he is free from physical need” (76). He is fulfilled by “creating an objective world by his practical activity [...] in accordance with the laws of beauty” (76).
In the past, only those who gained wealth by exploiting others had the necessary leisure time to pursue free production. It is only in communism that both the oppression of exploitation and the oppression of necessity can be done away with at the same time, leaving the entire human race in a state of freedom.
Marx's freedom would seem a very strange thing indeed if one looked at it in terms of individual human beings. It is a freedom which abolishes religion, voluntary submission, or having a private life separate from the political sphere. But, if freedom means freedom from exploitation and necessity, and such a freedom is possible, then communism is the only answer. Each person may freely create without using or being used by any other individual. And if man's true desires can be summed up as the desire to create and the desire to be part of that species who are creators, then in this freedom he will be utterly fulfilled.

Machiavelli and Liberty
“For as good habits of the people require good laws to support them, so laws, to be observed, need good habits on the part of the people.”

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses

Machiavelli believes that it is good for people to be free to do what they want and not feel oppressed. However, he also believes that freedom without limitations will eventually destroy itself. Therefore, he argues, a good political system gives freedom boundaries, so that it is not self-defeating. It must also be able to preserve itself from external attack and internal corruption, so that it can maintain its protective control over freedom. The name Machiavelli gives to this self-sustaining, controlled freedom is liberty.
It is important to note that Machiavelli is often misunderstood. It is possible that he coined the phrase “the ends justify the means,” and even if he didn’t, his name has become synonymous with a willingness to use any means necessary to achieve a desired end, so it is easy to see why people read him as an amoral utilitarian. However, reading him this way misses the substance of his seemingly compassionless practicality.
When a utilitarian uses the phrase, he means that any action is justified, as long as its results are better than they would have been if the action had never been taken. The major problem with this philosophy is that it is impossible to put into practice unless one is omniscient. Otherwise, there is no way to know that the results of a given action will actually be better than those of any other action; they may have a higher probability of being good, but there is no way to know for sure. Also, actions which have an immediate good effect may cause worse results further down the road; the farther away the future consequences are, the harder it is to predict their results, and an action with great positive effects at one point may have terrible ramifications later.
In contrast, Machiavelli argues that any action is justified if its alternative is necessarily self-defeating. He is aware that no one can predict the exact outcome of their actions, but he believes that a great deal can be learned from the mistakes of the past, and that sometimes it is better to put some boundaries on freedom if the alternative would be entirely oppressive.
Using the examples provided by the Roman Republic, Machiavelli describes what he sees as the ideal state in The Discourses. His state is not a perfect, impossible idealization like Plato’s Republic, but a concrete blueprint for building a working political system. He has to compromise between freedom and oppression, because
[...] how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his own preservation. (The Prince, 56)
The reason for this discrepancy between an idea state and one which can actually exist is a basic flaw in human nature. Machiavelli does not explore the cause of this flaw, he merely looks at examples from the past and concludes that “all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature” (The Discourses, 117). They “act right only upon compulsion” (118).
This bad nature keeps people from making reasonable compromises, even those which may actually be in their best interests. Although everyone wants freedom for himself, people also have the innate desire to oppress others. When people are successful securing their own freedom, they always turn on someone else, “as though there were a necessity either to oppress or to be oppressed” (232). This results not only in general oppression for weaker individuals, but also continuous conflict between those currently in power and those who want to be. No one is happy.
Political structure is an attempt to circumvent this problem. Within a political system, laws may compel individuals to act for the good of the group instead of just to further their own freedom at the expense of others. This is ultimately in the individuals’ best interest, because it will result in liberty for all. Liberty is a balance of oppression and freedom, designed so that no one is either so free that he can oppress others, and no one is unnecessarily oppressed.
In order to preserve liberty, however, the state in which it exists must be stable. This also requires some suppression of freedom, because people are more naturally inclined to act in their own interests than in the interests of the state. Machiavelli believed that freedom from oppression does no one any good if the state is not stable, because a free state that either collapses internally or else falls prey to attacks from the outside will degrade into anarchy, or else the constitution will change to something else, in which freedom may not exist at all. Such is the case with monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy; each may be “good” while it lasts, but “monarchy [easily] becomes tyranny; aristocracy degenerates into oligarchy; and the popular government lapses readily into licentiousness” (112).
A stable state, on the other hand, is capable of mitigating oppression. Machiavelli saw the Roman Republic as history’s best example of this kind of state. Its founders opted for a combination of the former three good governments, “judging that to be the most stable and solid [...] [because] these three powers will watch and keep each other reciprocally in check” (115).
In The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, he draws extensively on Roman history for examples of what liberty should look like and how it may be preserved through stability. He argues that Rome was not only “from the first free and independent,” but it maintained this freedom through “privations [imposed by] the laws” (109). Because of these limitations, nothing “could corrupt them during several centuries, and they maintained there more virtues than have ever been seen in any other republic” (109).
He gives several examples from the Republic of cases where limiting freedom is the only way to preserve stability. The first is with the enforcement of laws. Some might argue that violations of minor laws do not deserve harsh punishments. Machiavelli argues, however, that a law which is enforced half-heartedly or inconsistently is worse than no law at all. As he says,
“there can be no worse example in a republic than to make a law and not observe it [...] if the [law] was useful, then the law should have been observed, and if it was not useful, then it should never have been made.” (229-30)
because a law which is often broken without reprimand weakens the authority of the law in general, thereby undermining its protective control.
Nor does it follow from this that the government should have an iron fist, crushing anyone who dares to step outside the laws; rather, it means that there should be no unnecessarily laws, so that the necessary ones will always be obeyed.
The second example is dictatorship. The protest could be made that a dictatorship undermines a free state and its constitution, but Machiavelli argues that the lack of it will lead the state to destruction. The constitution of the Roman Republic could have insisted that the Senate and the People would have to come to an agreement before they could change any law. This was a good system during peacetime, but during wars regular laws could get in the way, and the time lost changing them through due process might lead to defeat. A dictator, on the other hand, could act outside the law without reprimand, for as long as he held the office. He would still be subject to the law, however, that he could only take office in an emergency, and he could hold it for no longer than one year.
If there were no proviso in the law for extreme circumstances, then the people would be limited to two bad options: either they would follow normal procedure, and might be overrun by barbarians while still discussing litigations, or else some individuals would have to break their laws to save the state. The first option will definitely lead to their destruction, and the second probably will as well, “for if the practice is once established of disregarding the laws for good objects, they will in a little while be disregarded under that pretext for evil purposes” (203), leading to the dissolution of liberty.
Rome did not become a “dictatorship” by the more common definition of the word until Caesar broke the law and gave himself the title of “dictator for life.” This, in turn, took place because the Senate, “To deal with an armed threat to its powers, [...] violated the very procedures meant to defend them,” and illegally gave military commands to Pompey and Crassus. Both of them had reasons to be untrustworthy, and therefore legally could not be commanders (Kagan, 136). Both proved to be ambitious and dangerous, especially after they allied with Julius Caesar, forming the First Triumvirate. The Senate, fearing the monster they had created, took the opportunity afforded when the Triumvirate dissolved at the death of Crassus to ally with Pompey and attempt to have Caesar exiled or executed. Caesar, knowing this, violated the constitution again by crossing the Rubicon river and bringing his army to Rome. The conflict between Caesar’s many supporters and the citizens who upheld Roman law led to a series of civil wars, which eventually ended with the establishment of the line of Emperors. (Kagan, 138-39)
Even if Julius Caesar did not intend to oppress the people, he is still responsible for destroying the Republic (Discourses, 142). He made it possible for a single man to come to power and abuse the laws however he wanted, paving the way for later, oppressive regimes like those of Nero and Caligula (143).
The third example Machiavelli gives of oppression for the sake of stability is ostracism. He argues the, in a republic, sometimes one citizen may become so hated by the people that they will be rid of him by any means necessary. It is better, he argues, for there to exist a legal way for them to vent their anger,
[...] for if there exist no legal means for this, they will resort to illegal ones [...] For ordinarily when a citizen is oppressed, and even if an injustice is committed against him, it rarely causes any disturbance to the republic, for this oppression [...] is effected solely by the public force of the state in accordance with the established laws, which have their prescribed limits that cannot be transcended to the injury of the republic. (131-2)
By taking away the liberty of a single citizen, the laws also curtail the degree to which liberty in general can be undermined. If the citizens instead resort to illegal measures, there is no limit to what they might do (132).
It should be noted, however, that a republic is not the only type of rule which can create a strong and stable state. A well-run tyranny is also stable, for a different reason: in a tyranny, everyone is equally oppressed, except for the tyrant. There will not be internal conflict, so they may be strong against outside forces. This is the picture painted and advocated in The Prince. Yet in The Discourses, Machiavelli makes his strongest moral statement out of either of the two books, saying of efficient and oppressive tyranny:
Doubtless these means are cruel and destructive of all civilized life, and neither Christian nor even human, and should be avoided by everyone. (184)
A republic is preferable to a tyranny, not because it works better practically, but because Machiavelli sees oppression as cruel and morally wrong. A republic, on the other hand, not only minimizes oppression, but gives the people freedom to be virtuous. Rome is worthy of praise, not only for its stability, but because within that stability “they maintained there more virtues than have ever been seen in any other republic” (109).
What virtue means for Machiavelli is never explicitly stated. He obviously has a relative of Christian morality in mind, yet is unclear to what degree he believes it is intrinsically valuable, as opposed to just being a useful tool for the state. He argues that the religion of the Romans was good, because it “gave rise to good laws, and good laws bring good fortune” (148). He criticizes the Roman Catholic church on the basis that
[...] if the Christian religion has from the beginning been maintained according to the principles of its founder, the Christian states and republics would have been much more united and happy than what they are. (151)
but it is not clear whether he is critiquing the church’s divergence from true principles or just its poor job of aiding stability in culturally Christian states.
Even if he is a Christian and believes that morality is intrinsically worthwhile, Machiavelli might only discuss the political relevance of Christianity because he is writing a political treatise. It is impossible to say what his views on the personal significance of Christianity are.
He also praises Roman virtue, which is more obviously political in character. With its emphasis on courage, loyalty, and practicality, the Roman moral code was highly suited to protecting and supporting a Machiavellian republic.
Machiavelli does clearly believe that virtue is indispensable in a good political system. Indeed, he argues that if the people cannot be virtuous, then a republic is not possible: “For as good habits of the people require good laws to support them, so laws, to be observed, need good habits on the part of the people” (Discourses, 168). This is why he is willing to advocate oppressive tyranny in The Prince. He argues that “a corrupt people that lives under the government of a prince can never become free, even though the prince and his whole line should be extinguished” (Discourses, 165). Not all people are this corrupt, but the citizens of Florence whom he writes about in The Prince have already fallen so far that they have no hope for anything better.
Yet virtue alone cannot be the foundation of a republic. Even in a nearly-ideal republic, those in power must be willing to do what is necessary to maintain stability, even if that means resorting to cruel or unjust methods. As stated earlier, because people are flawed and selfish, they will not follow good laws unless those laws are strictly enforced.
In summary, Machiavelli’s republic functions along a similar principle to the arch (which, incidentally, was invented by the Romans). The top of a Roman arch is made of wedge-shaped stones; as each stone is pulled down by gravity, it presses against the others equally, keeping them all from falling. It is actually gravity which keeps the arch up. In the same way, each part of the republic puts pressure on the other parts, and it is the people’s self-interest which keeps them from oppressing each other excessively.
A political system cannot be built on freedom or virtue alone, because neither of these can be maintained without imposed order, due to the selfish nature of man. Nor ought it to be built on stability alone, without freedom or virtue, because such a state would be evil. Liberty is the only goal which is both practically achievable and morally acceptable. Therefore, the best political system is a republic, because it preserves liberty best.

Conclusion
“For the real difference between man and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, just and unjust.”

Aristotle, The Politics

Both Marx and Machiavelli agreed that the goal of a political system should involve freedom. They disagreed, however, on the their views of human nature, and therefore they developed radically different pictures of what freedom would look like, and whether oppression was a solvable problem or not.
History has shown that Marx must have been at least partially mistaken in his assumptions about human nature, because his “inevitable” revolution (the result of those assumptions) never took place. He assumed, like Hegel, that history was made up of an inevitable sequence of theses and antitheses. The antithesis of capitalist oppression was communist revolution, with the synthesis being the dissolution of class and the triumph of free production. Unfortunately, in reality, human greed was neither altered nor undermined. Although communism did triumph briefly in some places, it did not do away with oppression. Instead, people suffered more under their “communist” dictators than they had under their capitalist overlords. The free production and selfless sharing of goods which Marx envisioned never came to pass, and the outrages he hoped would foment revolution have led instead to reform, if they have been changed at all.
Even if his entire critique of capitalism was right, his predictions of how people would behave when capitalism was overthrown were strikingly flawed. These flaws stem from his view of human nature. Freedom as he described it might have worked if humans really were free producers whose sole concern is the species-life, but history shows that they were not.
Machiavelli has a very different view of history and human nature from Marx. He assumes that people do not change fundamentally from one age to the next. It is true that a wide variety of different circumstances may occur, but people will generally act in the same way that they always have. Therefore, if complete freedom has never existed, it probably never will. Where Marx argued that capitalism and class struggle were causes of human suffering, Machiavelli would probably have argued that they were symptoms of a deeper, unsolvable problem. If individuals oppress others, not because they have no other choice, but because it is in their nature, then oppression is not something which can be done away with at the drop of a revolution.
Despite his ambiguous feelings toward Christianity, Machiavelli’s view of man is also decidedly more Biblical. That men are basically evil, and that they will always have the same kinds of flaws, are both very Christian ideas: “All that has been done is that which will be done” (Eccl. 1:9) is a sentiment which Machiavelli lives by. And, if his political goals are based on an accurate view of mankind, it stands to reason that they are also more appropriate.
Yet, despite the profound insights which both authors have to offer, they both present views of the political world which downplay or ignore points which would have been of paramount importance to earlier authors. When Aristotle or Plato discussed political systems, they described them as institutions for dispensing justice or upholding virtue. Machiavelli, on the other hand, describes them scientifically. Although he has an affinity for virtue, he is not concerned with a political system’s goal outside of itself. The goal of a political system is liberty, and liberty is both the most efficient and the most morally appealing way of maintaining a political system. Whether there is any higher goal is not addressed.
Machiavelli was the first well-known author to treat politics in this way, but it is the way they have been viewed ever since. Marx may have disagreed with most of Machiavelli’s points, but he was still influenced by him; he also treats politics as a closed science, although that science is based on Hegelian dynamics rather than straightforward historical empiricism. He wants to build a totally materialistic model, because he believes such a model is accurate and deterministic. Anything outside this model, including a higher purpose, is considered irrelevant. He does not argue why freedom should be the goal of a political system, he merely states that it is.
This limited view of what is relevant to the realm of politics leads to one of the most striking aspects of both Marx and Machiavelli’s writings: their lack of moral character. Marx is anti-moral, at least in the sense of traditional morality, while Machiavelli is ambiguous: he seems to value a sort of Christian morality, but he is also willing to part with it if the need arises.
Ironically, Marx is the one whose arguments presume objective moral values; despite his anti-moral and anti-religious stance, he believes that oppression and suffering are intrinsically evil. He is outraged at the unjust and exploitative character of capitalism, and he is willing to fight for what he believes. He is not interested in compromise; oppression is evil and should be done away with entirely.
Machiavelli, on the other hand, supports conventional morality and Christian values. At least, he likes them when they are practically executable. When it is not practical to act in accordance with morality, he has no qualms about advocating compromise, even to the point of taking action which is “neither Christian nor even human” (Discourses, 184).
It seems likely from this that he would approve of what has happened to capitalism. Machiavelli argues that when an evil rises up in a state, it is safer to try and mitigate its effects than to try and suppress it completely (198). Capitalism has not been overthrown or fundamentally changed, but its most oppressive tendencies have been limited. People are no longer dying of overwork in droves, and, although most are still deeply unsatisfied with their jobs, they are only selling half of their lives in order to sustain themselves.
As far as the goal of a political system goes, Machiavelli appears to have the more realistic picture. A Machiavellian republic deals with humans as they actually are, keeping them from destroying themselves and oppressing others, while at the same time protecting them from outside threats and protecting its own constitution from corruption. Like Rome, it may be overthrown or corrupted eventually, but it is the best you can get in a world of flawed human beings. It also encourages and depends upon at least a quasi-Christian morality.
Marx, on the other hand, has a highly unrealistic view of the stability and workability of his plans. He gives human beings too much credit, and ignores the vital importance of religion, not just as a political tool, but as something real and vital to human beings living with a sinful nature. Yet he does have something in common with Christians. He believes that things are not as they should be, and that it is possible for them to be different.
As a Christian, I cannot disagree with the picture Machiavelli paints of practical human existence. There is only so much one can do to mitigate people’s general evil and selfishness, and one cannot hope to change the world until God changes it. Also, it does not seem improper to put limits on freedom for the sake of lessening the power of oppression.
However, I also believe in the importance of things which fall outside Machiavelli’s limited view of the political. I am bound to a view that some things are objectively right and wrong, regardless of circumstances. This means that sometimes my actions may have to come into conflict with Machiavellian practicality. Machiavelli argues that tyranny is the only practical option for keeping a state whose people are already corrupt stable; if liberty and virtue are not practically attainable, then there is no sense in pursuing them. I would argue, on the contrary, that if one has to choose between actions which will preserve the existing system but which are morally reprehensible, and actions which are politically futile but morally right, one ought to choose the latter. It is my responsibility to strive after virtue even when it is impossible to succeed, and to feel and act on compassion for people’s suffering even when there is little I can do to change it.
For these reasons, I agree with Machiavelli that liberty should be the goal of a political system, but only with the provision that upholding a political system is an inferior goal to acting in accordance with the mandates of Christian morality.

Leaving what's happened

2008-08-18T15:15:00.000-07:00

Tons of fun. A few frustrations. That's been my experience with this blog.

But in keeping with a summer of changes - rearranged office, children graduated, new hairstyle - I've decided it's time to move on. Or at least to move.

I've been working on a future website. My authorish place to hang out, when I have more publication credits to display and, well, maybe wisdom to impart. My full site isn't yet a reality, but an intermediary place to hang is. I'll direct you now to a blog with a template that should fit the coming website. For me it's a whisper of fresh air, a release from bloggy gadgets. Those do-hickeys are fun, but I've fooled with most of them all I wish to. Now on to simplicity, while not forgetting, of course, that I'd like you to know about my writing and life journey. I also wish to keep sharing in yours.

You can check out my new blog in this spot. From now on I plan only to blog there, and to leave this site intact, seeing as I've grown fond of her. She's taught me much, through many bleary-eyed visitations. The past will remain here for nostalgia's glimmering sake.

Loon Lake day two

2008-08-18T09:40:00.000-07:00

The buck came back the next morning to visit Tim and our son.

This time he brought his family.

Camp visitor

2008-08-17T08:53:00.000-07:00

After arising the first morning in a campsite near Loon Lake, Tim had company at breakfast.

Inquisitive fella.

Humble sunrise

2008-08-13T05:58:00.000-07:00

Up earlier than usual, I’ve opened wide the house to a deep morning with velvet light showing above the eastward neighbor’s roof. I need to cool the kitchen before starting an apple pie for my guys who are returning today.

Tim and our son left Monday afternoon for two nights’ camping and stargazing. I remained in these quiet rooms to write and read. Ah, life without TV has been good.

Yet I’m ready to greet my family again. Brindy’s random patterings through the hall and Westley’s requests for more food only satisfy a need for companionship for so long.

I did work though, yesterday and this morning. I took a picture to prove it.
I’ve changed my hair for the first time in a decade. My face has sure changed since my last different do. Guess I need to remember beauty can only rise from within at any age. Guess this look’ll suit me for a while.

More Russian along

2008-08-12T20:01:00.000-07:00

You no doubt heard this past week about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's passing. I have on my desk his very thick and more inviting than ever book, The Gulag Archipelago. I won't begin it yet, but it's on my list for after I've explored a few less lengthy volumes. Tim and I watched a special the other night about Stalin's restructuring of Moscow. The dictator literally moved land and water trying to build the city of the future. He also maintained an insane, iron grip on the Russian people. Solzhenitsyn's crime that originally sent him to prison was mentioning Stalin's mustache in a letter.

Recently I've experienced shades of near-Russian culture, visiting a Serbian Orthodox church that Victoria has been attending. My daughter's new interest has drawn me to learn more about these beautiful, highly ritualized services. Here's her church, with its set of clear-ringing bells.

Of course, I'm not the ritual go-getter, but I did wear a scarf as I stood to chant with the quiet, beguiling voices of conviction at St. John's. As incense wafted from the priest's censer, I felt transported to a time when peasant families trudged the Eastern snows and entered hushed sanctuaries, one by one crossing themselves, bowing close to the floor, and rising to kiss the icon of a saintly father perhaps known to writers whose books would sit on my desk one day.

Crazy, warm Russians

2008-08-12T12:19:00.000-07:00

At last, over the weekend, I finished with those dear Karamozovs. A heart-y story, if you know what I mean.

I found it interesting, as I did when reading Crime and Punishment, that despite flittings hither and yon and conversations that blocked the margins of page after page, Dostoevsky's prose energized and carried me through (well, after I'd begun the book over, having started it two years ago and stalled in the first section).

Must be a Russian thing.

Anna Karenina gave me Levin, a character I've long been grateful to've known. Now the Brothers has lent me Alyosha and Mitya, and I won't soon forget them. Ivan, either, though I can only hope he changed his mind about the permissibility of everything.

Warm day crazy

2008-08-05T18:27:00.001-07:00

You know how it is when you think you hear voices from the other room, and you walk out there to find the air conditioner blowing and remember that you're home alone, and you feel just a tiny bit creepy?

You don't? Oh. Just me, then.

My cuz's 50th; my first limo

2008-08-03T19:41:00.000-07:00

I've been a bit bleary-eyed all weekend. This is what happens, though, after you take an evening ride with the gals on the town in one of these.
They stocked it well. (But really, I was looking up through the sun roof at the Portland buildings. Cool.)

My cousin (left) enjoyed the surprise from her hubby and sis-in-law (right).

A piano player serenaded us at a happenin' establishment on the 30th floor.

We all wore black in consolation, but none of us was upset to be older and, uh, wiser.

An authors collage

2008-07-27T09:06:00.001-07:00

I wanted to show you, because, hey, I'm in it. But the coolest thing is someone I know, who graduated a year ago from my daughter's college, is there, too.

Congratulations, Zak, on your forthcoming short story in Relief! I can't wait to read it.

How does this strike you?

2008-07-25T07:47:00.001-07:00

You can help me, if there's help to be had, by giving your honest appraisal of the following title, subtitle, and brief book description ("handle").

DEEP WATER, BRIGHT MERCY:

LOVING AND BEING LOVED DESPITE GETTING IT WRONG

A story of confronting ultimate questions, by a fisherman-preacher's daughter who scrambled to avoid seeing ugliness in herself and beauty in people who didn’t fit her religious ideals.

Please let me know what you think, by commenting or emailing me at deannahershiser[at]gmail.com.

Be brutal. Really. Better you than them.

Plus, if I ever sell it, I'm inviting you all over for one of these apiece:

Messing about

2008-07-22T06:03:00.000-07:00

It’s 5:04 a.m., and I’m working on a blog post. Shameful! I oughtn’t forsake my “real” writing. Yet I sit, paused to a degree, and at the moment I’m thinking this stretch for reflection is necessary – it may ultimately assist whatever it is I’m doing.

Twelve hours ago my gaze caught sunlit hills above Leaburg Reservoir. I grasped a fishing pole’s handle, its tip aimed skyward while the line met water that rippled under a welcome breeze and thunked the metal boat’s bottom. My bottom was growing a bit weary from contact with the wooden bench near the bow, but I didn’t mind one bit. Every so often I glanced at Dad in the stern.

In his favorite element, my father rechecked the aft anchor and asked me for the hundredth time, “Is your anchor holding up there?”

“I think so,” I said, peering over prow and seeing far below outlines of logs and wavy moss. The small, bell-shaped forward anchor’s rope followed it dutifully straight down.

“Let out some more rope,” Dad said, and I did, feeding damp line past the cleat, until it bowed beneath the surface and our little vessel aligned itself properly. We were sideward to the current, casting our weighted fishing lines downstream toward the dam.

I marveled. I hadn’t been out fishing like this for probably – whoa – 35 years. But side by side with Dad, as he reminded me, “Reel in, now, just two turns,” I felt as if our previous excursion had only been last week.

Likely the main difference – besides my wrist growing tired immediately when I turned the reel’s handle in great hope of a great fish, only to realize I was snagged on a rock – was that my thoughts drifted often to the book I’ve been reading in preparation to send off (yet another) book proposal. I’m way early in this latest process, trolling, perhaps, for the most logical ideas about presentation of what I wish to say to the reading world.

The book, by the way, is Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write, by Elizabeth Lyon (from my town!), and it’s full of the sort of instruction I should have shelled out cash for months ago. After only beginning to read it this week, I already grasp a little better the mindset I need to acquire if I ever hope to offer a bookseller my product and watch his or her eyes brighten while perusing the cover.

Last evening, after Dad switched my waterlogged worm for a ball of bright orange goo he called wonder bait, I felt a tentative tug. Then my pole’s tip trembled, and I reeled in, moving the tip toward Dad. “I’ve got one!”

“Good going, kid,” he said, slipping the net beneath a silvery, shimmering rainbow trout and lifting it into the boat.

I beamed. Later I paraded my stiff fish before Tim at home, took it out back with a Cutco knife, and cleaned it, tossing the head to Westley who sniffed it and gave me a look like, “You want me to do what with this thing?”

Guest blogging

2008-07-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

A post I wrote for Relief's blog is up here.

It's about me getting rejected and learning some behind-the-scenes publishing stuff and, more recently, reading for Relief.

Magic bullet boredom

2008-07-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

boredom (bôr΄dəm), n. a bored condition; weariness caused by dull, tiresome people or events, ennui. –Syn. tedium.

Of all the headlines I’ve recently scanned, the prizewinner for dumb in my book went something like this: “Tips to prevent school children’s forgetfulness: ways to keep lesson material at hand all summer.”

A sincere educational soul, no doubt, wishes to help a child remember three plus four and what is a verb for that first week in September. The article’s author probably also thinks, “Ah, yes, give the kiddies school lessons to do a couple times a week, perhaps whenever they start moaning that they're bored. Two problems solved!”

As early-morning writing becomes further ingrained in this fortysomething’s daily routine, I recognize two types of boredom featuring in most years of my life. One I’m finding I welcome with open arms after decades spent waiting for it to arrive. The other helped me become a writer in the first place. And schoolwork at any time of year never relieved them.

As is well known by anyone following this blog for a while, I hated school. Learning, let me make clear, I always enjoyed (and so there were days and teachers at school I really liked – my hatred was in a general sense). School restricted and constricted me, and so partly for that reason I homeschooled my kids, but you know what? While the two of them got to follow schedules more attuned to their personalities and learning styles than I did, my children each found themselves restricted by limitations. Victoria, for example, had to live in a bedroom with weird orange carpet. I’d no clue how much the 60s-style shaggish stuff, reminiscent of rotten orange peel, chafed her refined artistic soul. Only now do I get why she attempted to cover her floor covering with all her toys and drawing papers – I always wanted her to pick up, of course. (Well, now the carpet’s gone, and V. can stand to come visit.)

My point is, the more constricted one feels, the more tedious one’s tasks become. When children launch into a school year, whether at home or away, they face a daily amount of time where they’re restricted, bound to complete tasks for their own good. I don’t care how many over-the-summer drills a child has practiced, he or she must transition into their school routine, perhaps remembering educational points, perhaps not, but this jerky process is overall a good thing. It’s equally good, I would argue, to face the boredom entwined in the process – the first type of boredom I mentioned above.

This #1 boredom (usually I call it tedium) is the better type. It tends to springboard me to a positive outcome. The sensation is the same I felt during summer mornings when Mom handed me a trowel and said, “Go weed around the raspberries.” I would sigh. I had plans I’d rather carry out: lounging in my room, for instance (which by the way had a nice wood floor with a neutral throw rug).

But an interesting thing happened out in the yard. Beneath the swaying bushes where sweet-scented berries hung I gradually relaxed and enjoyed the job. It suited me. It felt good to accomplish the task. I just needed the nudge of Mom’s command and the restriction of being under her authority to get to it.

Boredom type #2 dogged me every school year (well, except sixth grade – Mr. Loftis was so cool I fell deeply in love with him). This type of boredom feels very unfair. I mean, here I spent idyllic early years at home with my family, until lofty powers commanded I must do this stupid thing five days a week: go be shut up in a room with 29 other kids my age and only one adult, figure out some inane problems in the first ten minutes, and sit bored out of my skull for the rest of the day while the other kids at best ignored and at worst taunted me.

Books, of course, rescued me in many ways. But boredom really pushed me to write stories. I’d learned to wield that pencil, right? And this writing process put those books on the school library shelves, so I might as well contribute. I wrote because stories sparked in my head like nothing else – they stayed with me on the awkward journey home as I made up whole chapters and retained them to write down the next day.

Finally each long year summer arrived. I skipped home, free. I stretched, ran, breathed, and dreamed, and even weeded the raspberries. My mind needed that release from boredom #2. Though I don’t know for certain, I think summer activities helped me retain my required school learning.

I still ache with tedium, sometimes even anxiety, amid conditions that I feel forced into and just can’t deal with. Thankfully I still have books to tote with me and my writing pad on which to scratch with pen.

I still meet the first type of boredom, as well. When I’m where I want to be, but lazy, I require a nudge to do stuff for my own good. With kids grown, I now can do 4:30 mornings. By my own command I’m restricted in those magic hours from checking email or blogs. Every day I begin wondering how I’ll possibly survive till my shower and breakfast. Nearly every day I think, I don’t know what to write next. But I’m compelled to be in the place that suits me. And it never fails. Somehow raspberry breezes lilt inside my brain. Ideas spark, and I do the task, joyfully.

Just too cool

2008-07-16T16:59:00.001-07:00

Parents! You never know what they'll go and do next.

Funny critters

2008-07-09T10:05:00.000-07:00

A peek into our home this morning finds me pondering salt and Westley moping and shedding. I'll return to these subjects, but first a view of things that are becoming only memories.

Before she moved out three years ago, Victoria's room looked like this:Her door:Change and transition have simmered since then. Lately my project's been completing the transformation of this corner of our home into my office and exercise space. At last yesterday I happily trotted on my treadmill beside one window, while gazing at sun-dappled trees through the other. This sure beat a staring contest with My Little Ponies.

The only problem in our new set-up belonged to Westley. He found himself stuck in the room with me, and I wasn't going to pause my strides just to let him out, so he wailed for the final five minutes. Adding this discomfort to the stress of my having moved things around in his territory led to what appeared like moping to me (the shedding just happens all summer).

On the Fourth, at one of several get-togethers we attended (social butterflies we), a colleague of Tim's looked at me aghast when I mentioned I prefer watermelon with salt. He appeared further disgusted as I listed quite a few fruits and vegetables on which I sprinkle the iodized mineral. "My uncle did that," he said. "Salted everything. He died of a heart attack at sixty."

Since then I've reviewed my salty habits. Maybe I should change. But what I really ought to have answered, despite recognizing the man's intent to help me, was that I think I'd rather spend 60 good years enjoying salted foods than 80 or more tasteless ones without it.

Anyway, back to the home front. Today I may finally take down Victoria's door decorations that she hasn't already removed. I think I'm ready...I think.

And yes, by the way. As I finished breakfast (yogurt with cantaloupe, banana, and Nutty Rice cereal that tasted fine as it was without added salt), I remembered something from the Fourth and laughed a little. The man who warned me of the folly of saltiness was on his way to a corner of the patio to smoke a cigarette.

We're such funny critters.

Encouraging

2008-07-01T09:09:00.000-07:00

The great courage of the creative artist - whether it's a composer, a writer, a painter or whatever - is that he or she is willing to sit down and write that first line of dialog, make that first stroke on the canvas. Even though the artist realizes that by that act he is beginning to destroy the vision he has in his mind. Because the vision you've got for a book is monumental, it flows like water, it's beautiful, it's this, it's that. But to write it, you have to struggle into the real world.

~Robert Campbell

Limits and minivans

2008-06-27T08:46:00.000-07:00

It’s been a hardscrabble week, in terms of plunking out pieces to a difficult essay. I’m writing about a rather weird, barren stretch in my journey. My main idea involves showing how over a few years I interacted with a homeless family. And, as usual for me, the writing brings up what I learned through failure.

Even setting it out as “my interactions with a homeless family” hints at problems in me. I journaled back then about meeting this homeless couple with their two kids. I was so proud. I planned to take on their burdens, to conquer poverty and perversion in my own little sphere. It really gets me reading the ways I described—not just with this couple but with my husband, kids, relatives, and so on—my belief that I could “hold up those God has put beside me.” My journal is replete with these statements; here’s one regarding my hubby: “I can be Tim’s foundation and safety belt system, if I’m plugged in to the right power source.”

I guess I’m mostly amused. Maybe each of us this side of forty (nearing that 50 mark and looking at becoming compost) gets a fuller picture of the idealism from their 30s and before and smiles. Not that anything’s wrong with idealism, with longing to set things right. I wouldn’t want to give the impression I’ve given up.

No. In fact, I think I’m seeing now that my blind spots then included the thought I wouldn’t or shouldn’t have to expend much energy righting the world’s wrongs, once I set up the system that would put everything on track. I phased through various possibilities in hopes each one might be THE method for me: prayer, my writing, political activism, to name a few. Surely I would hit on something wonderful to make things on earth better, then I’d receive accolades and retire to a cabin along the river in the sun.

My systems always, sadly, involved looking at others who weren’t part of my system and who might look down their noses at my methods, and seeing the flaws in their methods, the limits in their plans. I was usually to some degree right in my assessments, but I wasn’t fair, because I failed to understand we all face our limitations. We all end up with flaws on our canvasses. I sorely lacked grace.

Here’s an example. In this draft of my essay I write about a floody morning in 1996 that forced me to exercise on a different route from my normal routine: “A sign warns me off my running path. High Water. I have to jog home through neighborhoods, past businesswomen swearing softly over coffee thermoses while herding backpack-laden children into minivans.”

Do you get how I despised them? I didn’t even realize. I could see in career women the limitation, the flaw, of separating themselves from their family during the heart of every workweek.

Maybe I was right. So what? A woman driving her minivan past the school to her workplace could be longing just as much as I for rightness, for goodness. She might be wanting to save the world, too.

Even the homeless woman I got to know (yes, even she) set about in her own way to find justice on the planet, to set things right. She spent her energy closer to the vest, because life for her did carry a weight of flaws. But I never found a way to fix everything for her, or even to set my helpful methods on autopilot while I sat home relaxing. I still struggle in thinking about her, long after my limitations have separated me from being her friend. I’ll continue spending energy my life through, I imagine, seeing just how small my role is in setting right the world, in helping such limited souls as me.

You could see it

2008-06-26T17:36:00.000-07:00

If you're in my town, say, for Olympic trials, yet you'd like an entertaining diversion Friday night.

My son's play will be performed again. A fun encore, replete with Russians and explosions.

8:00 pm. Eugene Bible College. Get there early for a good seat.

Nearly guacamole

2008-06-23T20:11:00.000-07:00

Here's some more about food. Sort of. Working on my latest essay, I'm reading back through my old journals. From September 7, 1996, I find this:

Cutting a just-ripe avacado in two (around the pit, of course) Victoria said, "That avacado's in its prime - not too green, and not yet guacamole." That's just how I feel at this stage of my life.

Cute. Real cute. Now it's nearly twelve years later. We all know which side of ripeness I've been smushing toward. Sigh.

5 of 12 steps?

2008-06-21T13:21:00.000-07:00

My digestive system revolted last week in every possible way (yes, it was revolting then; it's much better now). In the aftermath I had to decide how best to begin reintroducing myself to food. Years had passed since the last time I hadn't been able to eat anything for more than 24 hours.

Cherry Jello in small slurps assisted in rehydrating and giving slight energy. Then, as in childhood after battling the tummy flu, I started thinking toast with butter sounded good. Memories arose of Mom bearing the lap tray to my room, propping an extra pillow behind my back as I sat up to receive the plate of toasted white triangles and cheery, melting bits of Parkay.

But this time I pondered information my daughter has recently imparted regarding the difficulty many people have digesting wheat gluten. Victoria figured out several months ago that she is gluten intolerant. I've done my share of mock groaning since then, whenever family has gathered for a meal. "Good grief, Uncle Dan's lactose intolerant, Grandpa's diabetic, and now Victoria can't have bread. Soon we just won't be able to eat!"

Victoria's culinary education must have sunk in somewhat with me, though, because last week I decided it might be best if I refrained from wheat products. It may be I've recalled our macaroni and cheese days, when my three-year-old girl would get cranky after lunch, while I felt my stomach behaving oddly and simply blamed it on the weird digestive track I was left with after a couple of surgeries. Or I finally listened to instincts saying, Less complex food'll do for now.

I took time to cook some rice. With a smidge of butter and salt it went down well. In fact, leaving out gluten from my recovery menus helped me feel a lot better, faster than maybe ever before.

When I really consider my eating habits, I've avoided abundant bready stuff for years. Tortilla chips are my snack of choice; Wheat Thins were never quite as yummy. Salad makes the best lunch or dinner. It never bothered me when I'd ask Victoria what sounded good, and she'd say, "A meat and cheese sandwich without the bread, please." Even pizza has become less appealing in recent months.

I never expected, though, to call a halt to Grape Nuts. I mean, breakfast for me is always a bowl of Grape Nuts, except on those mornings when I mix in some Life cereal with my Grape Nuts. The crunchy texture is my friend. Yet for a couple weeks, almost, I haven't eaten the old tastes-like-wild-hickory-nuts standby. Fruit and almonds or rice with milk and brown sugar have sufficed. And it's truly amazing. The world feels better.

I still don't wish to fanatasize this. Last night I told Victoria of my diet changes, making sure to say, "It's not that I want to start checking everything I eat for gluten." I could have added, "Like you do."

"But you should cut out gluten all the way, Mom," my daughter said. "You'll feel fantastic."

So, maybe, I'll borrow her recipe book and follow along when she shops the gluten-free aisle at Market of Choice. Just curious, mind you. Not committing to anything, yet.

Anyone need half a box of Grape Nuts?

(I don't eat this anymore, either.)

Yondering

2008-06-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

This week I'm proceeding like the weather. I arise fairly clear-brained when skies first lighten and work on my writing. Then as clouds gray the late morning I go back to sleep. Finally sunshine removes the covers, and in its somewhat coherent glow I read.

I was asked to be an actual Creative Nonfiction Reader for the fall issue of Relief. Already I'm expanding my literary education and, as usual, recognizing my shortcomings. Instinctive rather than academic, I can tell you when I think a submission is delightful, but I'm hard-pressed to express the merits of its story arc or suggest what sort of tweaking might lift the final paragraphs.

Guess that's why I'm reading, not editing.

I can, however, recognize when a writer uses spell check without attention: We where in the car when it began too shudder. An essay with several such errors is bound to lack attention to other details, as well.

Armed with a smidgen of knowledge this morning, I shall henceforth dispense advice to writing students. I feel like doing so, I'm at my blog, and so I will.

First, though, let me bring up a point about blogging. I've read good blog posts this week. The problem was, they were submitted for consideration to a literary magazine. If they'd been on a blog, dozens of comments would have flurried around them. Praise would have been aptly bestowed. But for their authors to expect recognition and exposure in a journal, they should have worked them into more than simple, immediate blog post material.

Now back to me on my blog (with no real credentials) telling student writers a thing or two.

A cover letter really isn't the place to state, "I wrote this piece as a Creative Writing class assignment." Two days in, I've seen several such introductions, and already I groan at them. Not that I've come to think no one should submit to a journal one of their papers from class. I just recognize in the essays I've read (and I remember too well from personal experience) a sense of, "Wow, I finished a piece of writing! Sure, a teacher prompted me to do it, but she said it's good, so, let's see, I'll just send it right out for publication!"

Doing so almost guarantees rejection.

An essay needs to be reworked, rewritten, pummeled, squeezed, and refashioned for the arena into which you are sending it. I can say (backed up by words from other authors and some hard lessons of my own), it's best if the specific publication grabs you in some way when you browse samples from its website or read its statement of purpose. Try to take the cues of the editors who'll be reading your stuff. Do you think they care about the same things you do?

When you're really ready to send off your piece, whether it began as a post or assignment, you will have reshaped the essay into something barely resembling what you first wrote and posted or handed in.

You may tweak the work even further, after launching it into the wild blue yonder. You will still likely be told "No thanks" by some editor somebody. But you'll be making strides, learning pointers for later, for next time. You grow yourself and your writing when you spend the time crafting, continuing, beyond workshops, classrooms, and blogs.

Off into reality...!?

Graduation #2

2008-06-15T18:20:00.000-07:00

The before shot.Blogging friend and her little one mysteriously appear in background.

Congratulations abounding.

Gutenberg faculty and graduating class of 2008.

Silly folk.

We are so proud.

Near death 'n toasty

2008-06-15T18:13:00.000-07:00

This past week I must've looked like death on toast. Results of food poisoning are not pretty. But it started out so well...

Tim and I went along on our son's senior trip to ride the Portland Spirit's gourmet cruise. The food was wonderful, and as far as I know it didn't cause my troubles.

Later that afternoon we hiked around gorgeous waterfalls.

Not until the middle of that night did I toss my proverbial cookies. My under-appreciated digestive system shut down, and so did I for a couple of days thereafter. (No photos, sorry.)

Friday I attended a final homeschool picnic at Shotgun Creek Park and got toasted. A beautiful day, lush scenery, vibrant kids, and friendly parents whisked around me, and I sat. Too tired to tote camera or go splash in the trickling stream, but enjoying the moments and memories. Of course I will compose some sort of summing-up post regarding my years as a mom teaching her children at home. After I'm fully recovered.

Graduation #1

2008-06-07T20:22:00.000-07:00

First, the state of mantle health here at home (hee, hee, Travelin' Nan).

Next, my son with a friend he's known since they were little guys. (Sniff.)

Speakers at their ceremony included one of our state senators, Vicki Walker (far right). She helped save Homesource. She's cool!

Last, my two favorites (young people and photos).

For Anna

2008-05-30T14:45:00.000-07:00

Ah, old times and faded photographs. The following were taken in a living room where friends and folk hung out a lot, and where some scenes took place of young love in bloom.Sorry, Anna, these are pretty blurry, but your smile is so cute!

Chive talkin'

2008-05-30T08:06:00.000-07:00

When I was in junior high (1975), I thought it the coolest thing to remark, while helping Mom with dinner, "Don't you chive me."

Memorial day journey, part II

2008-05-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

My walk beside the Willamette the other morning took me an hour and forty-five minutes. A hike, really. The broad, north-flowing river sends finger-crooks off its east bank near a shopping mall. Tall reeds, cattails, and unwelcome nutria-hovels border quiet water sections. Cottonwoods and birches flutter new leaves above the half-submerged log where a mallard and his mate converse in low chuckles.

I breathed deeply, following the cement pathway’s curves past signs announcing, “Fragile habitat. Stay on the trail.” Lavender blooms bunched close, fragrant in the light breeze. My feet had found their rhythm; they didn’t stray.

A year ago I read my book’s first chapter to one writing group. The women critiquers agreed. My flittish descriptions of the troubles I’d gotten into while living on the coast in my twenties were far too vague. “We need more of the story you’re hinting at,” they said.

So I rewrote and a month later read the results to another writing group. The eclectic members confirmed my suspicion that I was turning this into a sermonette, a throwback to articles I used to provide to Christian magazines in the 1990s. I didn’t want to preach, but I couldn’t deny my story involved the way I grew up understanding God. I pondered one experienced writer’s critique. “You’re giving us the ending in Chapter One,” she said. I concluded I’d gone too eternal, theological, and with too heavy a hand.

Over the summer I strove to expand those parts at which I’d hinted in my first chapter, and this plunged me fully into getting my ages-past drama on paper. I’d always supposed someday I’d write it all down, and once or twice I’d made attempts but had given up. Now imagination plopped me directly onto Oregon coast sand, and I watched it all unfold again. My biggest failures. My greatest lessons.

I read version after version to hubby Tim. “Is this okay?” I asked. “Should I really try to publish what happened?”

He’s not for nothing the man I married and am with today. “I’m on the edge of my seat,” he commented, “wondering if Deanna and Tim will make it.” By August, though, Tim asked, “Could you just read this to me when you’re done changing it?” I began to notice I’d put him repeatedly through hell.

I branched out for opinions to three trusted friends. I had 27 pages. They each read them and provided very helpful impressions. Autumn had arrived, and when the time changed to standard, I shifted to arising an hour earlier. I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. I was on a roll.

Aloneness, many authors have told us, is both the solace and bane of creative souls. Though I tried to write with the door closed, I found myself around page 150 needing to share. Wishing I lived next door to an agent, editor, or some other professional who’d fix me hot cocoa on stormy mornings and assure me this effort would be worth it. I used my handy blog for an emotional, often quite whiney outlet.

What I began to guess is what appears to be true. Working on a book-length project for me looks the same as producing an article or essay, only expanded. I flail and go through machinations and sometimes zip along and often deceive myself as to its doneness, but eventually (and in a book’s case it’ll be a long eventually) I finish. And almost every time I need outside help. I sure wish I could do this writing thing alone, just as I walked four miles last week in solitude, but for whatever reasons I’ve been given a task that requires input to be done well.

Thankfully, my need for feedback met recently with an editor’s desire for material. In April I began a conversation with Lisa from Relief, the journal that published one of my essays last year. Lisa liked both versions that I sent her of my first chapter (by now I’d completed the book manuscript and was beginning further revisions). She wanted cnf essays, and she liked my style. The problem was my Chapter One was a springboard to what had become the first third of my book. It didn’t stand alone, either way I’d tried it.

So Lisa offered to coach me in a reworking that would make the piece I’d titled “Memorial Day” fit Relief. She said I could let her know my decision about the revising, and one other thing. The publishers required that Tim and I were both certain ahead of time we would allow this story to see print. Apparently they’ve had several authors pull memoir-type pieces after developing chilly feet about letting the world know their pasts.

I seriously considered both elements of Lisa’s request, but my decision was pretty easy. First, sure, I had to release my dream of completing and selling a book any time soon. I was consenting to squish my life crossroads story back into one essay. I sensed that with guidance, though, this might work the way I’d envisioned when I started last year, only it would be richer, better.

The second part, me telling about Tim and me and some intense stuff. Well, I’ve blogged about us for two years, right? Plus the two of us have shared our story in public – more times, I’m sure, than Tim would have chosen – but we’re fairly used to it. I gave Lisa an eager thumbs up.

After a challenging, educational process for me, working with Lisa throughout May, I sent her my essay last week. And then I enjoyed my long walk. On Friday Lisa emailed that the Relief team wants to publish “Memorial Day” in their August issue.I’m happy. I’ll receive a free copy of the journal once again. Though I can't foresee whether some tide will bring me book publication one day, I’m finding confidence and joy in accepting that I am an essayist. Where my words can fill a need, no matter the wobbly process getting there, I want them to go.

Mainly, and finally for you who’ve bleary-eyed through to the end of this post, I see more clearly than ever the benefits of friends, the reasons for blogging. I gain rather than give posting here. I truly hope that will change someday, and I can be much more of service. For now, if you feel a bit gypped, because I’ve only told you that my dramatic story will be available for sale sometime in August, feel free to email the address listed in my profile. We’ll talk.

Memorial day journey, part I

2008-05-26T16:05:00.000-07:00

One day last week I took a long walk. It was time. I’d just emailed off a version of an essay that I knew was finally the way I wanted it.

A year, basically, is how long it’s taken me to get this piece of writing right. The work’s been through a lot (and so have some of you, who’ve given me your time and feedback). Like the Willamette flowing beside me as I strolled the bike path, I’ve seen months at low levels, seasons in full freshet, and now I’m simply coursing between banks – I shimmer whenever sunlight peeks through.

The idea started out safe this time, so I guessed. Last February or March while vacuuming I sensed a eureka building. “Yep. Maybe that’s it,” I said to the cat. “I could do a nonfiction book on that topic.”

I’ve sure wanted to finish a book, you know? To birth and raise a full-length manuscript, and then dress it, set a hat on its head, and wish it well as it leaves the file drawer to seek its fortune.

I felt ready to work under tutelage of the best authorly methods. I started out just writing, simply pouring onto the page my experience, my knowledge.

Except, mm. This is where I’d first faltered with other manuscripts. Knowledge to some degree I’m packing. Experience, sure, plenty in years that keep lengthening. But as before when I’d written to help people, maybe to teach, I quickly shifted into tell-my-story mode. My life, there it is, the only thing in which I’m truly credentialed.

But I reassured myself that I could express my experiences briefly in my initial chapter/introduction, and then move on to the meat of my message. Once people knew me on the page, as when folks and I get acquainted in real life, they might care to listen to my opinions about navigating emotions, relationships, and religious traditions (I had easy goals, see?).

I wrote and wrote, until I found what could be the nub, the gist of what I’d like to ultimately express. Then I pondered regarding my book’s framework. How should it begin?

Memorial Day weekend. I thought back a year previous (two years now). Tim, our son, and I spent a Friday night camping at the coast. We stayed near a place that, for me as well as my husband, brimmed memories. I’d been back before, lots of times. But this particular weekend the recollections surged, a personal sneaker wave caught me off-guard. Dramatic it sounds, but indeed in this locale I had, at twenty-three, faced my life’s crossroads.

To be continued...

Are you smarter than a homeschooler?

2008-05-25T19:05:00.001-07:00

This video contains at least a couple of inside jokes. It was made by homeschoolers as an assignment for a class called Media and Culture. A certain local philosopher inspired my son's character.

Katie plays the host. Her mom has a great name and also blogs.

(I like the commercial! The rest is good, too!)

*Update: now Katie's mom has posted the blooper reel.*

Absorbingly so

2008-05-25T16:44:00.000-07:00

I've come across a well-wrought essay about essays, here, by Michael O'Rourke. Among other things, he expresses how a good essay is like literary jazz. It can sound as though the author isn't really trying, it can seem to meander unintentionally. But, oh, I'm learning how challenging the "music" can be, and how worthwhile it is finding a way back to the theme.

The essay disposes of the writer/narrator distinction, and the first-person narrator speaking is the writer writing. Who is the speaker in E.B. White's brilliant "Once More to the Lake" if not White himself, and how does it advance our understanding of this essay to say that he's not? He gives himself no fictional name; no "tension" is evident between the speaker's observations and some writer-behind-the-scenes; and for what it's worth, his essay tells us, "This happened to me." We don't "suspend" our disbelief when we read the essay as we do when we read, say, Charlotte's Web; we take what White tells us at face value the same as we would were he telling us in the flesh. In an essay, the writer speaks directly to his reader, without the buffer of an invented middle-man narrator. He risks being candid, risks being himself-risks, most of all, not being believed.

When the essayist is believed (as we always believe White, whether he's fishing with his son on a lake in Maine or mourning the death of a pig), the effect is a feeling of kinship with the writer himself that we rarely experience with other, more overtly "artful," forms of literature. The essayist isn't posing, and he isn't setting himself apart. He speaks to us as equals, and flatters us with the notion that we are at least as intelligent as he. He doesn't sit in his director's chair and dictate every move. He's one of the actors, like us, and he never upstages us, and frequently is content with a lesser role.
~Michael O'Rourke, "Literary Balls: An Essay On Writing Essays"

I recommend a meander through White's essay.

Awesome, huh? Nowadays they call this stuff creative nonfiction (cnf). Maybe they do because "essay" means "try", and we essayists want to sound somehow more sturdily, yet prettily, intentional. I'm still making little essays at cnf, but I'll write literature of my own about that someday.

Holiday blog tag

2008-05-24T06:31:00.000-07:00

I guess Memorial weekend is a holiday, though not the festive kind (especially if you're camping in soggy Oregon right now). It's more reflective, even when you'll be busy out on your parents' driveway.

So before I leave to help set up for Mom and Dad's garage sale, I'm participating in a meme for which Robin tagged me. Thanks Robin! May all your blue skies remain.

This one goes like this:

1. Write the title to your own memoir using six words.
2. Post it on your blog.
3. Link to the person who tagged you.
4. Tag five more blogs.

I stayed abed till 5:30 this morning and came up with my title:

Living Captivated by the Brightest Mercy

I may even actually use it someday. In any case, the description fits my sense of life, even in the chilling rain.

Whee, I see sunshine! Think I'll tag these bloggers, who seem the sorts who might enjoy such a challenge: Sandy, Jodi, Deanna, Marianne, and Bookbag Lady.

It went like this

2008-05-20T15:16:00.001-07:00

Tim and I visited a pub with friends. It being near my birthday, someone bought me a margarita (mm, tangy). About the hour when karaoke started, Tim bought me a birthday Long Island iced tea (pretty good, as well).

I got the idea I should sing. Something short, I thought, nodding my head to other tunes as other folks sang, feeling groovy. I decided it should be Desperado, a song that's sounded all right when I've sung along to it in the car. I have two versions - one by Linda Ronstadt and one by the Eagles. They're both sweet.

The DJ asked if I wanted the key the same or lower than the original. I chose lower. Then I held the microphone close to my lips. My voice? Hm, I thought, where'd that lovely sound go I thought I heard from myself while practicing just now in the bathroom?

So, ahem. I learned something. Thankfully an audience of people who've had a few can be nice to someone singing (sort of) who has had two and doesn't usually (drink or sing). A few couples even got up to dance, slow, to my "crooning."

But to top off my little glow, Tim said he thought I sounded good. He'd had less to drink than I. Lovely husband, who drove me home.

It was then that it happened. The severe wounding, the unwarranted attack. I tipsied myself off toward bed, scuffed into my red slippers, and then noticed Westley the cat. Weird one, our Westley. He gets this crazed look, usually late at night, often when I wear my red slippers. Like a little bull, he suddenly needs to pounce, to gouge.

But I saw Westley's look and the ears pointing backward, and I ditched my slippers quickly. All was well, I thought, but I failed to diligently observe Westley, and as I climbed into bed he sank his claws and teeth deeply into my leg!

That, however, was not the unwarranted attack. I'm sorry to say I did it. In my drunkish state I felt no qualm tossing Westley into a corner, then following him to the living room, lifting him by the tail and sending him out the front door, thusly, into the darkness.

I know I shouldn't have. Under normal circumstances I'd have simply bawled him out quite loudly, but at this point I became a woman of action. Lest you judge me harshly, though, recognize Westley seemed unfazed, unhurt, and fairly relieved that I got him out of my pathway without the usual lengthy scolding.

He didn't come back to the bedroom all night, either.

And here he and I were a couple days later. Me, fully sober; Westley, still not willing to admit his wayward role.See my injury? Well, it's better now. I'm also retired from my career gracing the karaoke circuit.

(By the way, Tim gave me those new, non-red slippers for my birthday!)

This mommy blogging's fun...

2008-05-19T16:56:00.000-07:00

...and about all I can manage right now.

For those who know my son in three dimensions, here's a new one:

His Mr. De Pinna came off so well, as did all the parts in the play. We laughed and laughed...what a fun couple of nights. Those kids (my, they're young adults!) did great.

Here's the set before they started:If you get a chance to see this on stage sometime, I recommend the zany story - it's got tons of heart.

My little writing biz moves forward lately. A worm's wiggle is still movement, right? The work's steady, anyway; monetary reimbursement, however, is the very slow to arrive thing. But I don't mind, as long as I'm getting nibbles. And right now I am.

There are always gifts through the long haul of perseverance. One I've enjoyed when I can get there is reading a blog by romance writer Jodi. Her site's called Will Work for Noodles, a title I couldn't resist in the first place. Then I found her posting about the writing process. So what if I'm not doing fiction and never plan to give romance a shot? Common ground exists between differing written expressions.

Stories, wow, people just keep doing them. Makes me wonder if we take those with us.

You can take Shakespeare with you

2008-05-12T08:03:00.000-07:00

A photographer shot the dress rehearsal of my son's play. Everyone's so beautiful, I had to share.

Next show they're doing is You Can't Take It With You. Two performances, this Friday and Saturday, 7:00, on the Eugene Bible College stage. C'mon and watch. These actors know their struts, if I do say so.

Ocean mountains

2008-05-03T20:06:00.000-07:00

Summer, 1967. I drowsed in our Buick station wagon’s rear seat, one of my brothers on my left and the other brother sprawled in the “way back.”

My dad drove and Mom navigated beside him. They were acting weird.

“Oh, Peter, can you believe it?” Mom kept saying. “The trees. I’ve missed them so.”

Dad nodded.

Mom turned to us for the thousandth time. “Kids, do you see how tall they are? How many? Aren’t they magnificent?”

I agreed they looked interesting – the forest pressed close on either side of the narrow highway. Evergreens. I’d never beheld such a shadowing abundance. I craned my neck again, seeking their tiptops high in the sky.

Life experience having carried me through first grade, I couldn’t remember leaving the Midwest before this summer. Now my family vacationed in Washington State. Dad and Mom grew up in Oregon, and they’d longed to visit Northwestern regions. For them, the stately pines made up a welcoming committee of the finest order.

I shrugged my shoulders. The trees were okay.

“Just wait,” Mom said. “We’ll be at the beach pretty soon.”

She wished I could remember the ocean. But in the photograph that proved I’d been there, I sat wrapped in one of her hooded sweatshirts, a grin spread over my pudgy face, wind sculpting infant hair-whisps across my smile.

I noticed stubbier trees the nearer we came to a gray-ceilinged stretch of land. Dad parked the car. We stepped onto a surface that rolled beneath each footstep, sucking momentum. Climbing a short hill on our way toward the water involved work with leg muscles I rarely used. My tennis shoes filled. I reached my hand into the warm, dry rise where sand mounded, lifting and watching its colored specks trickle from my grasp.

“We’re here,” Dad said, tapping my shoulder.

The beach stretched wide. We stood far from the place where waves met shore. A breeze assailed, fishy, salty, chlorophylled. My feet met firmer sand, and a joyful sensation propelled me toward the strange expanse of water. I ran and hipped and hopped.

“You can take off your shoes,” Mom said.

I left footgear and stiffness behind, capering beside my brothers, noticing Mom and Dad holding hands as they strolled.

Finally I paused, closer to wet sand. I strained to see and couldn’t believe it.

Mountains. Way out there, huge peaks loomed. Yet they slowly transformed. They sank and recovered. I marveled a moment, then continued to play, sneaking peeks at the changeable ocean landscape before which I felt very small.

I’ll always remember the sense of awe invoked by those ocean mountains. Since that first day I haven’t experienced the Pacific in quite the same manner. It was an alien scene to me then, and now I know what I’m looking for prior to arriving. My nearsightedness is corrected now; back then I was a few months from receiving a first pair of sky-blue, cat’s eye glasses.

My initial view of mountains in the ocean can be explained. But the sensation, or a piece of it anyway, lingers every time I greet the thundering shore.

Before I go answer an email from my brother

2008-05-02T11:03:00.000-07:00

Lots of cute, quirky, and informative emails alight in my box most days. How fortunate I feel to receive missives so magically. One blogger sends daily quotes and some awesome photos (this person asked my permission before adding me to their list). A friend from north of here sends noteworthy quips and greetings. My unique Timothy passes on unique offerings.

Last week I got to converse back and forth with an editor about some of my work and the possibilities of rewrites and strengthenings. Positive and constructive feedback, yum.

Yesterday I recalled I had signed up for emailed announcements whenever a new issue appears of Etude, an online magazine dedicated to literary nonfiction. The publisher, Lauren Kessler, teaches at the U of O. She has a few things to say in an essay about the fake memoir we in this town are sorry to be associated with. Her piece reminds me there are many people in this land of the undying hippie who consider honesty paramount to any life story. Yes. Let's bear the truth well.

Now, as my title suggests, I'm off to answer an email from my brother. I hope he's not blushing too much to read that I love seeing his name in my Inbox!

And the envelope goes to...

2008-05-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

So you know, here's the mix-up:
And first prize goes to:Second prize:
Congratulations!! Cecily, I think I have your address. Sarah, you can email me (deannahershiser@gmail.com) with yours. Happy reading; may you discover historical and sociological perks from the works.

Thanks for supporting my joy of giving away stuff. I wish I had more books now. But the publishing powers that be may send me more to send you in the future.

Lounging

2008-04-29T16:32:00.000-07:00

I forgot.

At first I meant to post who won the contest for Jane Kirkpatrick's books by Monday. But we were off to the coast to pretend an existence enjoyed by the likes of the bewhiskered critters above. Tim and I frolicked two sunny days. More pictures will follow.

If you've considered entering for a readerly prize, be sure and post a comment now, and since you're late like me you'll need to work a bit for the chance to win. Tell me in your comment whether or not you'd have traveled the Oregon Trail (imagining you'd lived in the 1800s) and why or why not.

Those who've already entered and waited, thanks for your patience. I'll select the winners' names by this Thursday. I promise.

Now, for you, a nifty contest

2008-04-21T09:29:00.000-07:00

In the previous post I reviewed Jane Kirkpatrick’s latest book and series.

At no cost to me (except shipping if you live far away, but I’d be glad to), I get to send fabulous prizes to two of you, as thanks from Jane’s publisher for reading about her good writing. So, yes, you’re hearing right, I’m offering free books. Want one, or three? As I just said, I highly recommend the story. And I already received my own freebies for reviewing. Those publishing people can be swell.

Here follows the contest rule: comment on this post or the previous one (either of the posts from today). I’ll put your name with the others in a hat (or on a coffee table) and draw two winners. (Of course, if only two people comment, you’ll win something!)

First Prize will be the complete Change and Cherish Series: A Clearing in the Wild, A Tendering in the Storm, and A Mending at the Edge. Second Prize is the last book. I’ll draw the winners in a week. Hope you have fun.

Emma's tale: a meeting in the past

2008-04-21T09:11:00.000-07:00

I tend to find any story compelling when it’s been plucked from one intriguing line of a historical record. At the same time, I want to trust the writer who has turned an imagination-pique into a novel. I don’t wish to read in the author’s notes about how in reality our hero only might have taken that trip or parented this number of children or run off with so-and-so to discover that treasure.

Fortunately, when Jane Kirkpatrick creates a history tale she builds her speculations on a well-researched foundation. So I read with confidence the first two books in her Change and Cherish series, and recently when treated to her final installment, A Mending at the Edge, I was very satisfied to learn how things turned out for Emma Giesy.

In an interview at the back of the series’ first book, A Clearing in the Wild, Jane relates happening upon this sentence: “1853. Emma Giesy came as the only woman in a party of ten Bethel, Missouri, scouts to find an Oregon site for their communal society.” Jane then began a journey of discovery about a real woman who was certainly strong and capable, while most likely creative and resourceful.

In her books Jane has created a world with sense and texture regarding the ways we seek community and flee or withdraw from it at times. People: can’t always love 'em; it’s pretty impossible to leave 'em. I relate to this quandary within Emma. Her story never attempts to paint her family’s group as flawless, even though they’re portrayed as seeking to follow Christ and let their scriptural understanding guide them. The colony from Missouri founded what is now the town of Aurora, Oregon. We don’t discover them as folks on some outer fringe, either, within Jane’s imagery. I found a realistic balance as she wrote them as individuals.

At the back of A Tendering in the Storm, the middle book about Emma, Jane is again interviewed and is asked whether or not everyone got along as hoped for in Emma’s community. Jane responds, “There is strong evidence of dissention among the colonists, though what they portrayed to the outside world was a group of loving, supportive people. That’s not unlike most families (or even faith communities) where what we show to others is not always what we reveal to our closest friends.”

Jane reveals Emma’s character treading a path I readily accepted. Emma matures within a personality ever longing to stand out. At one point in the story Emma’s husband offers to hold a lantern for her at night as she searches for treasures along a bay shore. Emma replies, “I want to do it by myself, see what my light uncovers from the darkness.”

To step into these books is to discover what portions of both gloom and shining treasure Emma found.

Every time's got a first thing

2008-04-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

You know how last weekend we had summer?

This morning, it was a good thing Tim cut the lawn yesterday, because like he said the mower might get a bit clogged in snow.At least he sawed more wood and kept this going.
I'm fresh out of weather predictions for this year.

Cringe of the wild

2008-04-17T05:55:00.000-07:00

Heart thudding my ribs, I waken. I expel breath caught in my throat and sink into the pillow. Oh, brother, another bear dream. Fading now is whatever led to my dumbstruck stare into the animal’s furious face as it roared only yards from me. I'd glanced at a rifle in my hands and discovered it was made of lined notebook paper; the part I yanked down to cock it simply tore away.

I think I know what caused this rendition of a familiar nightmare. Near the woods last weekend my son parked behind an empty station wagon. We climbed from the car to scout for a trail. The car ahead of ours bore dozens of stickers on its backside – slogans promoting peace and candidates from elections long past.

I stuck some things in our trunk, in case we decided to hike. My son wandered a bit and returned to tell me this wasn’t the right place. He got in the car while I closed the trunk. I’d automatically locked my door (thanks to Tim’s training I’ve done this most of my life upon exiting a vehicle), so I aimed my key at the lock.

A low, labored Wuff sounded behind me. An animal of size. My imagination flashed on a just-done-hibernating bear empty of tummy and lengthy of claw. I spun to see a huskyish dog, head low, rushing at me.

My fingers fumbled as I cried out. Just as I opened the door the dog halted in its tracks, turned, and ambled back the way it had come.

My son chuckled. “I unlocked the door for you,” he said. I hadn’t noticed.

“It’s just, it could’ve been a –.” I leaned weakly on the armrest.

He shook his head.

Maybe if I would actually ever see a bear in the wild, I’d get over my nightmare-spurring phobia. Truth is, we rarely spot striped chipmunks on our mountain-view ventures, let alone creatures of large girth. Oh, yeah, once we startled a fat toad, but that doesn’t much count.

Other hikers, though, tell me they’ve come fairly close to brown bears many a time. The animals are pretty shy, my friends who hike reassure me. They’d rather avoid me than eat me.

Well, sure, they can say so. They lack my experience. Every time I stayed home sick from grade school (after it had been a few weeks since I last missed, long enough to convince myself I really must be feverish and it was all right to tug on my dear mom’s sympathies), I read at least two books. Usually Charlotte’s Web came first (the animals, the humor, the love), and often next I opened Old Yeller. Fred Gipson’s tale was tragic, lovely, exciting. And the initial deed of adventure and bravery done in the book by the star, Yeller the dog, was a rescue of the little brother, Arliss, from a bear.

Of course, the story makes plain the lesson not to play with a bear cub by the creek as Arliss did, and certainly not to get so scared you hang onto the cub’s leg while its mother charges you. But I know. If a cub wanders away from its mother toward anyone, worrying the mother murderous sick until she finds her babe, that someone in the path at that wrong moment will be me.

Summery day in April(!)

2008-04-13T16:37:00.000-07:00

As we drove through town around 1:00 yesterday you could sense, if not hear, the exuberant thrum.

A swell of people appeared, pouring from doorways into yards brandishing trowels and clippers, or onto sidewalks hippety-hopping to the grocery store, or into every vehicle they could steer, like us, toward the highway. Outta here! We got blue sky, a warm, dry day for the first time in months. Gimme a stretcha road, scenery, places for fun, greenery!

We drove past Dexter, up the winding little highway, and then on to the road to Eagle's Rest. Higher, higher. I'd been craving altitude like a drug. We greeted tall firs, our old friends, on each side dangling a branch or two after winter's harsh treatment. We rounded curves into open air, imbibed the view.

Then we met snow, still bunched and blanketing the ascending road. A refreshing whiff of chill on a solar-stimulated day. We couldn't make it, yet, to the Eagle's Rest trail. But it awaits us, as does Mt. June much farther up, more deeply buried. Beneath whiteness, though, now stirs a warming sensation growing, set to reach the fever pitch felt joyously below in our town for this one out-of-season afternoon.

Fun Globe Trekker style

2008-04-11T20:05:00.001-07:00

Here's something new to me - YouTube! This video comes highly recommended, made by people from the zaniest family.

Upon seeing

2008-04-10T07:52:00.001-07:00

I’ve been writing about jumping out of an airplane. No, I’m not contemplating doing it – not probably ever again – but I did do it once, and so I’m reviewing old pictures as I piece together an essay related to memories and what I’ve seen.
What we see, I’m thinking as I write, we always come back to. Visuality. I don’t very often ponder why I pursue activities, readings, entertainment, obligations. I make commitments and step up to carry them through. And invariably something unpredictable takes place. Then I hang in space, suspended after the tumble, and at last I see things. Oh, it’s a patchwork. Oh, yeah, the earth curves. Much wider is the perspective. I’m such a tiny speck. Yet here I am, part of it all.
My skydiving experience took place before I had children. In fact, I recall wondering as I floated toward earth if the tiny seed of a person might be hanging suspended inside me. Tim and I – after five years of indecision – wanted to make a baby. But we would actually have to wait another six months or so to discover we were on the train to parentland.

As anyone fully engaged in raising a child knows, it’s quite a ride. A more awe-producing experience than the thrillingest extreme sport. And whereas for my parachute jump I received five hours training on how to keep my feet together and roll upon smacking the ground, no one could really teach me ahead which actions to take when encountering the realities of motherhood.

I’m thankful for moments, before and after the jolts of living, in which the view opened before me, broad and bountiful. I gained perspective, releasing foolish ideas that it was all about me. Yet the gift endured: I got to be a part of it all.

Saturday my two adult children posed (their grandparents in the background), for a snapshot of where we are now. My son had just finished his role as Friar in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (he played other parts, too). Victoria made it to the matinee performance. During the play, from several seats over, I listened to my daughter’s laugh ringing gusto and joy.

2008-04-08T09:24:00.000-07:00

Due to a long winter

2008-04-02T08:45:00.000-07:00

Early last summer, Tim proudly showed off our woodpile. For the first time since he built the covered structure, he'd stuffed it full. We were more than ready for winter.

I'd clicked some pictures of his labor.Pieces of logs seasoned alongside the house for next year.

Last evening, the covered wood looked like this.

And here's where Tim has taken from this next winter's wood to chop those few chunks you saw above.

We burned it all. We're still burning on mornings such as this when the house shivers, because outside it's 28 degrees F.

Thankful for the wood we had, the man who could prepare it, and the efficient stove to burn it in, we try not to wonder what we'll do next. And summer, hey, you can't arrive too soon.

In quotes three

2008-03-31T14:15:00.000-07:00

Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually):

It's fine to know, but not to say, that in some inadequate and surprising ways, things will be semi-okay, the way wildflowers spring up at the rocky dirt-line where the open-space meadow meets the road, where the ground is so mean.

In quotes two

2008-03-31T14:13:00.000-07:00

Serrin M. Foster, The Feminist Case Against Abortion:

No compassionate person, pro-choice or pro-life, wants to see a teenage girl drop out of school and face a lifetime of poverty because she became pregnant. No compassionate person wants her to suffer the pain and anguish of abortion.

In quotes

2008-03-31T13:12:00.000-07:00

Wendell Berry, Standing by Words:

One cannot love the future or anything in it, for nothing is known there. And one cannot unselfishly make a future for someone else...
Because love is not abstract, it does not lead to trends or percentages or general behavior...Love proposes the work of settled households and communities, whose innovations come about in response to immediate needs and immediate conditions, as opposed to the work of governments and corporations, whose innovations are produced out of the implicitly limitless desire for future power and profit.

Beyond Easter

2008-03-30T07:59:00.000-07:00

When I ask God for what I want, it goes like this:

Help me do better teaching a class. I wish to remember what I saw in myself last time, that ugly need to look like Somebody. You brought up short this clawing creature, revealing poor motives. I struggled. I cried for help. Let me move forward this next time, doing better.

God says, "Okay."

I do the class better. Recalling flaws from last time, I make fewer. A student even mentions I was smooth. Inside myself, I'm all Yes!! and leaping onto furniture.

But God's priorities and mine differ in the largest sense.

A situation sails in out of the turquoise, and here I sit. Stuck. Exposed. Complex motives to sort, good intentions gone awry. Questioning, raging, then.

Oh, God, I see the wrong in me. Help.

Either God is a sadist, or.

The priority isn't to move forward, doing better (as much of a grace and gift as that can be). The one necessary thing involves - requires - keeping sight of what's real about me (not pretty, but it's such a relief to remember mercy) and what's actual about the God who has a clue.

Involving the economy of contentment

2008-03-27T08:39:00.000-07:00

I will attempt to comment upon current events.

Now that my hearing and other senses are returning, after nearly two weeks of being more or less under weather and beneath covers, I pick up from morning news shows a snippet about home sales.

"If people don't buy houses," the anchor person intones, "you'd think it's only a problem for the sellers, right? But this hurts the whole economy, because..."

(OK, I don't remember the reasons; my brain fogged out again.)

Sipping hot orange juice I recall days when restlessness struck me each time I passed a for sale sign stuck into the lawn of an intriguing house. It was years ago, the kids were young, and life, though interesting, sometimes begged for a hint of romance, adventure. A different house and neighborhood might fit the bill, I thought.

Then Tim's TV station built and transferred to a new building. I convinced myself, for my husband's sake, we ought to move. He likes riding his bike to work, after all, and the new station's miles farther away. We ought to live closer (in one of the well-to-do surrounding neighborhoods).

It had been one thing to desire a new residence after we'd moved a couple hundred miles and while we were living in a too-tiny second floor apartment with ceiling heat and no air flow. Back then after much effort we'd found our own home to buy, and with the joy of a prisoner released I'd asked God to keep us settled for a good long while.

Five years later I passed those beckoning for sale signs, in front of houses that were, well, if not the most fabulous, at least a step up from our 1950s-style 'hood, and, besides, they looked so...different. I wanted different. I longed for change.

We made one offer. Rather a long shot. The next day people from California offered cash for the seller's price. Oh, well. I sighed. I drove over to that street a few times afterward, and sighed again.

Today I'm glad. Thank you, Californians. We might have done that different thing, but as it turned out we can now glimpse the end of the mortgage tunnel on this house. It's still a ways ahead, but in that other house the debt journey would loom long still. Or would I have tired quickly in that place and traded up again in a few years? No progress, because we'd progressed.

I wonder this morning. Might this housing crunch, as it's called, cause other families to breathe thanks a few years into the future? Maybe staying put rather than selling one place to snatch up another can relieve a lot of us. I've come to appreciate my neighborhood more than I could've realized. Might others focus energy closer to the four walls in which they must stay put? Reach out to neighbors, build a corner grocery, a park? Or even simply wash windows, coat walls with fresh paint. Not for buyers or in order to move on. For this little same old place.

Tim still rides his bike whenever possible to work. He's buff.

2008-03-16T08:04:00.000-07:00

The better part of three days this week I spent home by myself. I chatted with this unfortunate creature from beyond a back fence, as he mourned, as usual, his family's absence during the day.

Even flowers abloom couldn't cheer the poor guy.

If you know me, you've noticed I can sink a tad into neediness. The self-pity engine sometimes chugs on for a bit.

Though for years I've seen more clearly the unloveliness, I haven't conquered the tendency to travel to the state of poor me. Perhaps I'll struggle with it until my final breath, but here's hoping I wipe the lenses of insight more quickly as time passes.

My time alone this week did not, though, find me howling like my little friend. I savored what felt like a vacation. Weird me, some of the neatest flights I've taken into worlds of deeper understanding and even escape, have occurred while (to quote a goose from Charlotte's Web) I've sat quietly-ietly-ietly at home.

So this week I journaled, using a neat lap desk friends gave me.Cool, huh?

I read, did laundry, cleaned house (some), read, cooked taco soup, watched a video, and read.

In between, new horizons of thought dawned. I recalled that I'm a creature, like the beagle out back only different. Caused to exist, and therefore valid. Is that logical? Well, if I weren't valid (and still assuming I was caused to exist), then the Causer would have eradicated the mistake that was me. Same with every other whining, howling critter. From my newly tweaked perspective, I see I tend to ask the wrong question when the unpredictable occurs (that is, most every day). My foundational views often are colored by thinking I'm supposed to prove I was meant to be, or even to prove others are intrinsically worthy of existence.

But what if that's simply a given? The Causer perhaps only created that which was planned. So, if so, then there's some other underlying query I'm supposed to formulate. I could ask, say, about the circumstances I'm experiencing. What might I be meant to learn from them, apart from any worries about my validity? Hm. Maybe something regarding another person, or morality, or my family history, or... Hey. Lotsa stuff. Whatever is being caused to happen, by this intelligent One I believe in, must be pretty intelligent.

Emotions interfere with logical proceedings, and so does my inherent rebellion against the theory that I'm not the cause of trouble, or of reality. But beyond these, at the horizon of consideration, sits this possibility: I can grapple with what's going on before me, while shedding insecurity about my validity within it.

I guess it's an old preponderance revisited, and I'm not likely making it clear. But I sure had fun gnawing on it in my own little spaces.

And hubby brings it home again

2008-03-13T08:17:00.001-07:00

For sixteen years we've managed all right with a secondhand stove that gives its all.
Last night, though, Tim and my son tossed it out to the garage and replaced it with an only ten-year-old secondhand stove. I'd told Tim he could give me a new toilet seat for my upcoming birthday. But I never imagined this.
Self-cleaning oven. Woohoo!!!

In this low

2008-03-08T20:18:00.000-08:00

Music I love. Lyrics: The moon is aching; my heart is blue.

An emailed response from an agent I respect: Thanks very much for letting me see this, Deanna. I think I'll say "no thanks," but I'll encourage you to continue exploring your possibilities. Some of the writing is very nice.

Husband stretched the couch's length, watching Cops. Nestled on his back like a soft-furred kitten, I breathe scents of outdoors: sun warmed woodpile; the yard stretching as if a child beneath blankets awakens; weeds tugged from matted mud by the house corner.

Whiffs also of the attic where husband lifted and dragged and carried boxes: a daughter's stuffed panda, velveteen rabbit, alongside dishes china perfected for future evenings at tables where laughter and talk will accompany wine poured, music imbibed.

Sunk low earlier today, I donned magic shoes and trotted to more favorite tunes. Life is real, I thought. I get to keep doing this. Some of the writing is very nice, after all.

Hitting the spot

2008-02-28T14:39:00.000-08:00

In his essay, "The Specialization of Poetry," Wendell Berry examines the way 20th Century poets developed inner worlds of words, often to the exclusion of experiencing an active life outside themselves. He quotes one of those poetic guys: "I have the feeling that I am a metaphor for my own being."

While he bemoans this state of affairs, Berry, a poet himself, appreciates many contributions of the specialized poets. He simply notes that we have to think in broader terms, no matter what we're doing with our talents, jobs, livelihoods.

I love best what he says here. It grabs me where I exist these days, and I've thought along somewhat similar lines many times, but have lacked Mr. Wendell's eloquence:

Perhaps the time has come to say that there is, in reality, no such choice as Yeats's "Perfection of life, or of the work." The division implied by this proposed choice is not only destructive; it is based upon a shallow understanding of the relation between work and life. The conflicts of life and work, like those of rest and work, would ideally be resolved in balance: enough of each. In practice, however, they probably can be resolved (if that is the word) only in tension, in a principled unwillingness to let go of either, or to sacrifice either to the other. But it is a necessary tension, the grief in it both inescapable and necessary.

But it keeps me out of trouble

2008-02-27T12:37:00.000-08:00

Feel free not to subject yourself to another of my posts featuring: a)look how much I want to be able to write stuff, and b) look how much I go through to try and be able to write stuff. Go read any of the bloggers listed on my sidebar. They're funnier, funner, and some are less driven at the moment to drive others to distraction.

Lately my husband, Tim, works hard (as always) at his engineering stuff, takes me to movies made from books I've read, listens to me read aloud my manuscript that depicts our marriage and himself, not always in the loveliest light. Yep. He's a good one.

My son practices driving (when I mentioned I'm a driven person I wasn't joking), rehearses for two plays in which he's acting, does gobs of other schoolwork, keeps a busy social schedule, and will graduate in June (yes, for those who read that he might wait till next year, the plan has returned to his original graduation date, and it's a good thing).

Victoria, my dear daughter, will graduate from college on Friday the 13th of June. Anyone who knows her recognizes this is an appropriate date for her and her classmates. To have made it this far, those Gutenberg seniors are not to be daunted by what some consider ill luck.

Victoria, by the way, is working on a senior thesis. Before graduation, she'll need to present and defend it. I can't wait to read that piece of intellectual writing by my little girl. (Sniff.)

So, I am actually having a fun week, but I tend to forget it while knee-deep in preparing my book proposal. This is the business part of the job I wish to get to continue with. An editor won't initially want to read my complete manuscript - he or she wants me to sell the idea, the concept (accompanied by a sample of good writing). I also need to convince these behind-the-scenes book developers that I can market myself. I'd rather not have to sell me to the world. But I've always known it would be part of the deal.

I'm back to 4:30 mornings, so I can get this done. I really do enjoy early arisings, since at that time I usually unearth the other half of my brain, and often I discover creative expressions as well. Even for something stodgy and required, like a proposal.

And genuine fun was had Monday night, when Dorcas spoke to my writing class, giving us lots of encouragement, and just being a person. If I ever get to speak to gatherings about a book I've written, I'd like to just be real, too.

Travelin' Nan wrote more about Dorcas.

Amidst the things I need

2008-02-24T08:03:00.000-08:00

It could be argued I have not been provided everything I need in my life right now.

In fact, I think I overheard myself arguing that very thing the other morning.

But then I reminded myself I have this:

Throughout my days I've listened to and repeated such phrases as "God supplies all my needs." Once, though, someone grabbed my attention by asserting that God had not given her what she needed.

The person making the claim wasn't angry, bitter, rebellious, or PMS-ing, so far as I could tell. She simply stated the truth. I her case, God had withheld marriage, something she'd come to see she needed. We were made to long to share our lives with another person.

God determined, this woman could see by the way her life played out, that her story would not be containing the provision of one of her significant needs. And so she grappled with her belief in a creator who withholds. Is this still a creator who is good? Who provides what is absolutely necessary in order for Life to happen as it should?

I've applied her words to various situations since then. Even though I received marriage in my own life, I see that in this wedded state I haven't had all my needs met. Sure, I don't get what I want. But, yeah, I don't even have some things I really need.

And yet some days, truly needy, I glimpse anew what I guess I'd call radical truth. My ultimately necessary thing. Of which it once was written, "It will not be taken from her." At least for me, when everything else falls to ashes, it's the shard I'd like to discover clutched in my grimy fist.

Into wild, honest life

2008-02-21T08:55:00.000-08:00

Last week I finished reading Jon Krakauer’s book about a young man who walked into Alaskan wilderness in 1992 and didn’t come out.

I’m drawn to such stories by master nonfictionists. I read Krakauer’s Into Thin Air a while ago and was haunted by his account of an ill-fated Mt. Everest climb. On my shelf sit other books about true, dramatic events: The Perfect Storm, by Sebastian Junger; Seabiscuit: An American Legend, by Laura Hillenbrand; Apollo 13, by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger; Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea, by Steven Callahan; Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, by Piers Paul Read (a bit grizzly, but great); and the one I began with, preteen and romantic: Dove, by Robin Lee Graham, about a boy who sailed solo around the world. These sorts of tales involve many elements, layers, details, and I can’t help it – I love an immersion into the worlds they reveal when someone has limbed them with style.

This latest read, Into the Wild, made me catch my breath early in and debate whether I’d chosen a wise leisure activity. The story’s main character, Chris McCandless, was an intelligent, idealistic guy who could become ensnared by forays into deep thought, who came to be repulsed by our techo society, and who loved to hike out into nature. A boy reminding me right away of my son.

It turns out Chris reminded a lot of the people he met of sons, brothers, or themselves before life had tested and changed them. Prior to leaving for his “great Alaskan adventure,” he leather-tramped (wandered without a vehicle) throughout the western U.S. He made friends of all ages. Chris kept in touch with everyone, except the family he left behind in West Virginia. Having severed contact with his parents; he introduced himself on his travels as Alex.

What intrigued and ultimately satisfied me about Chris’s story is that its lesson, while tragic, is real and not without hope. Like a lot of young people, Chris got angry with his folks. He was a moral kid. He learned his parents had done some awful things back when they were younger. What bugged him the most, it sounds like, was their dishonesty regarding their pasts. Chris came to feel like his childhood had been a sham.

I remember throughout the year Tim and I went through our worst times, having people we’d grown up with – even our wonderful parents – share their failures. We appreciated the gestures. We also wondered to each other, “Why didn’t they tell us this stuff sooner? Maybe we wouldn’t have considered them too perfect to bring our less-than-lovely admissions to.”

As a parent, I felt determined to be honest with my kids. And yet, going through the raising of children taught me there’s a time for discretion. It would be easy to dump a load on a young person’s shoulders that he or she’d have no capacity to bear. Minefields can’t be avoided, I discovered. There’s no perfect way, either, to navigate them. We do the best we can.

Yesterday, Tim and I found time to meet at our city’s cheap theater, where movies on Wednesdays cost a buck apiece. Tim had called me earlier, to say, “Into the Wild is playing.”

“Let’s go!” I said.

The movie, perhaps even better than the book, handles the roles of Chris McCandless’s parents very well. There’s honesty about who and what they were and where they failed. The final credits thank the real-life couple for being brave.

As I contemplate my freshly finished book manuscript, with its bits of drama and details to which I hope readers can relate, I remain hopeful regarding its honesty. People have already told me I’m brave for writing about my failures. Yep, brave or stupid, I suppose.

Truth will out, though. I guess I want to be the one to tell it.

If you’re into truth well told, and if you can handle tragedy’s expression in your life right now, I recommend Into the Wild, both on the page and screen.

Agh! and hair-pulling ensues

2008-02-16T09:17:00.000-08:00

Have you ever tried to title a book? Some of you, yes, I know you're out there. How did you settle?

Probably you're less wishy-washy than me.

Today I'm waffling, flapping all over, seeking to be certain I've found the best title for my book. Even though I know it could well be changed later on by someone in publishing land. Still, I need one to work with.

This reminds me of the week or so before Victoria's birth. We had a girl's name decided, and then I'm like, no, maybe Andrea. Or wait, maybe... My wussy side accelerated.

Good and Desperate. That's the choice I made eons ago, it seems. I continue to like it. But it requires a subtitle. Here is where I go bananas.

I want the word mercy. I want a reference to being a prodigal. And, did you know, prodigal means extravagant (on the positive side) and wasteful (at the negative end)? It refers more to monetary resources than to ditching your responsibilities which, I think, we assume it means when we hear it nowadays. But, considering the original definition, I like prodigal more and more as a compliment to mercy.

I've been shown, throughout my life, prodigal mercy.

And did you know, there are liturgical, lectionary readings mentioning this very phrase?

Kinda interesting.

Doesn't help a whole lot at the moment. Tim is offering his assistance. He'd like, of course, to see this book sell many copies. He's reminding me that in the book I mention how he dismembers trees near transmitter sites, and once he badly cut his knee doing so, and that a title should intrigue people, so they'll purchase the book. So here's Tim's idea:

Secretly Evil: A Bloody Chainsaw Story

The last day

2008-02-13T08:46:00.000-08:00

Uncle Jim, riding shotgun with Dad up front, reached into one ear. “Look what I got,” he said, bringing forth something similar to a small wad of Playdough. Only a miniscule antenna protruded. “I’ve been half deaf all my life.”

Mom and Dad and I nodded. We knew.

“Now I finally got hearing aids that don’t loop over my ears. They work great; they’re set for me especially. The old kinds – they always broke, because I got in fights and shit. So they’d be in the repair shop more’n in my ears. I gave up on ‘em.”

Each of us expressed our joy for Jim. I said, “Uh, oh, now Mom and I’ll have to watch what we say about you back here.”

I could tell Dad had fun conversing with his many-years-younger brother the rest of the way to Portland. Mom and I found plenty to chat about. Once or twice Mom paused mid-sentence to call to the front, “Peter, watch your speed. You’re not remembering where you are.”

At last we parked in front of a pretty house not far from a school in a tidy Portland neighborhood. Cousins Kandy and Landy and their mother, Dad’s Aunt Shirlijeanne, greeted us at the door with hugs. Aunt Linda rose from the couch.

Beyond her, sleeping on her back in a hospital bed, lay my Aunt Nancy. She looked skeletal, the cancer having ravaged her frame. Still, her hair was nicely combed, and the covers drawn around her appeared comfy and warm.

I hadn’t been with Aunt Nancy for far too long. Mom had told me the minute she learned Nancy’s cancer returned. Metastasized, appearing in her liver – shot through it, really, and therefore inoperable. I’d talked to Nancy on the phone, viewed pictures of her on our extended family’s website, even mailed a Christmas card last month. But I knew this minute how remiss I’d been. I should’ve driven up here to visit. Instead, I let life’s details excuse me.

Mom went immediately to Nancy’s side to greet her.

“She looks asleep, but she can hear you,” Kandy said.

I followed Mom. When my turn came, I set my hand on her wasted arm. “Aunt Nancy,” I said. “Hi, it’s Deanna.” Gently I squeezed.

“Notice the difference in her breathing,” Uncle Jim said from across the room. “When someone’s talking to her, Nancy breathes harder. And I can’t believe how well I can hear it.” Jim went on to show everyone his hearing aids and describe how he obtained them.

Friends and other relatives stopped by throughout our time at Nancy’s home. People reminisced. Everyone recalled her boyfriend, Ron, who’d been a bear of a man, a motorcycle rider, who died several years ago. Aunt Nancy tended him with great care until the end.

I marveled at the scene around me. Laughter at familiar stories, good-natured teasing, even of the sister who lay dying. “She’s sure got the family nose,” Jim said.

This group of siblings had watched others linger upon the precipice of life’s end. A talented brother who died of Hodgkin’s just before I was born; the beloved grandmother who raised them; a brother from Eugene who lived long-haired, bearded, and drug-using, but who made his peace with God and the family before crossing over. Even the mother who made each of them strive with conflicting emotions, because of her glaring absence from their formative years – even she’d received all the attention her children could muster at the end.

Now they kept gentle vigil at Nancy’s bedside. This sister, fourth in descent of the original nine children, had never married. But as Dad would remark a week later at her memorial service, “Nancy was the prettiest sister.” The other female siblings in attendance would huff in mock protest. “But it’s true,” Dad would say, and they’d all smile.

I didn’t ever really know Aunt Nancy. Yet she enfolded me in tight squeezes at each family gathering. If my kids weren’t there, she pumped me for their latest exploits. I remembered her in yellow, with a broad straw hat, at summer reunions. She’d add witty remarks to the end of everyone’s family stories.

I’d find out at her service the next week how fond of Nancy her coworkers had been. One man took her on trips during the last months she was able to travel. They even made it to Ohio to see Uncle Tim, the family’s youngest brother. That friend of Nancy spoke with quiet grace and humor about her.

Uncle Tim would also make it to the service. He’d tell me about riding on the bus with Nancy and how she helped him out so many times.

My memories of Aunt Nancy also involve thoughts of the bus rides she took. A hostess on Trailways back in the sixties, Nancy paused on layovers to stay at our house, in my room straightened up pretty just for her. I was eight or nine. I considered Aunt Nancy the coolest adult in my little realm of acquaintance.

That last day in her home Nancy’s eyes never opened. Before leaving with Dad, Mom, and Uncle Jim I went over to her again. Awkwardly I hugged her narrow shoulders. “Nancy, I love you,” I said. My heart was grateful for the permission she gave me to participate, to care. Even though I’d mostly done it from a distance, uncool as I am.

Our goodbyes that day were garnished by Uncle Jim’s exclamations. “Was that a sparrow singing? Let me tell you how many birds out by my place I’ve noticed since I got these hearing aids…”

Mostly quietly, with a bit of fanfare

2008-02-05T21:11:00.000-08:00

Beginning next Monday, I get to teach a writing class. Smaller and of shorter duration than the one I'd planned for the community college, this one will happen in a building owned by Gutenberg.

A few friends plan to attend. Even people I don't know are sending me checks. I'd better get something worthwhile ready for them.

Most fun, Dorcas Smucker will be our guest author-speaker one of the class evenings. That night, anyone's invited to drop in (just let me know ahead of time, if you'd like to be there). Even my dad, who has enjoyed the lively Mrs. Smucker's books, plans to come!

These plans and other projects are keeping me away from blogging, but I aim to get back soon. Observations on life ought to be published when possible, after all.

What I did this last week, I also must share: I got up at 4:30 eight mornings in a row (Tim was out of it; sick with a feverish cold; so we had no weekend plans). I became feverish only in the sense of wanting to write and write. Rather obsessively I worked to finish. that. book manuscript.

And I did.

When first thing it smells like snow

2008-01-27T15:01:00.000-08:00

I tried to capture a glimpse at dawn.It covered the ground, and more was falling.

Around here, the white stuff snicks away soon.

But this morning, it kept whiffly-drifting down.

Today and way back when

2008-01-23T16:08:00.000-08:00

Although I’d looked forward to school adventures, that season of beginnings in Moore, Oklahoma, altered my ego. My style became one of adherence. It started, I think, one afternoon at recess.

A group of us first graders had learned to congregate at the far edge of the playfield, up a small, grassy mound layered red beneath. Spring’s zephyrs carried to us orange butterflies, baby grasshoppers, tinges of dust on our tongues. Imaginations swelled, and we became birds – eagles – soaring and crying into harsh breezes. Other days as horses we galloped, sweat flecking our withers.

Our schoolroom vaguely existed at such times, far away, reminding us of its presence only when the recess-ending bell pealed. We knew well enough to hustle back inside before the ringing of the second bell.

A bright day, all of us in sleeveless shirts, the young dogwoods along the rise rustling dark leaves as we swooped and danced between them, until my neighbor Kerry noticed. “Stop!” he commanded, and we turned to look.

The playground was empty. We’d failed to hear the first and second bells.

If I could’ve started school as an older kid, maybe I’d have assessed the situation and realized I must get out, now. Flee, across vacant lots through briers brimming goat-head burs toward home. They oughtn’t shove me into a mold that squeezed my stomach so hugely at the hint of slightest infraction. Fear like this shouldn’t be planted in my budding heart along with three plus three.

Our teacher scowled when we entered class and said firmly, “You’re late; sit.”

But it was the endless, heads-down march with my friends across the deserted playground that shaped my future.

And by the way

2008-01-18T08:35:00.000-08:00

I'm taking a day off from writing (earlier post aside).

Last night I read my first chapter to the writing group, made up of authors of note and great potential, that never has seemed to pull punches in critique.

They extended positive superlatives.

Dude, they liked it.

:o)

To explain

2008-01-18T08:15:00.000-08:00

I received this challenge from a friend:

This is your assignment:
Write a short story in as few words as possible. The short story has to contain the following three things.
(1) Religion
(2) Sexuality
(3) Mystery

Don't know why you sent it, Milton, but thanks. The previous post is my attempt.

Anybody else want to give it a shot?

Because Uncle Miltie asked

2008-01-18T07:52:00.000-08:00

Two men in hats - pants belted high, sweaters over buttoned shirts, hair tufts straying from nose and ear - occupied their usual bench.

Starlings twittered. A long-haired woman, blossom-faced, tended stroller and babe.

"Did you hear a word I've said?" one man asked the other.

"Not really."

"Oh, I get it," said the first man. "Hots for that young mother?" He ribbed his friend.

"No, no." The second man swallowed. "Her parents attended church in my last parish."

"Well, say hello, why don't you?"

A forehead swipe. A cleared throat. "I'd just lost my Liddy. The couple came to me for counseling - infertile."

"Ah, too bad. You help with an adoption?"

"No, no. Her mother and I - "

A coughing fit. Back-slaps from his friend.

The old men sighed.

Inside moments

2008-01-07T18:40:00.000-08:00

Saturday at dusk, snow fell outside the window while on the glimmering screen Aragorn bid Boromir, "Be at peace."

Friends grew misty-eyed, sitting with Tim and me near the crackling wood stove. No matter the repeat views, we grieved. And hummed the masterful music.

Shivering when our friends left for home, we cuddled again near flames, chocolate kisses in our tummies. My lovely man slept a while on cushions before he had to go. Uncovered Fox satellite receptors don't do well in snow. He went to clean the dishes.

I burrowed beneath sheets and blankets, imagining true winter colors remaining for days. I knew they'd really be gone by morning.

Lovin' his way with words

2008-01-01T14:47:00.000-08:00

The God-man is the sign of contradiction, and why? Because, Scripture replies, because he was to disclose the thoughts of hearts. Does all the modern thought about the speculative unity of God and man, all this that regards Christianity only as a teaching, does this have the remotest resemblance to the essentially Christian? No, in the modern approach everything is made as direct as putting one's foot in a sock - and the Christian approach is the sign of contradiction that discloses the thoughts of hearts. The God-man is an individual human being - not a fantastic unity that has never existed except sub specie aeterni [under the aspect of eternity], and he is anything but an assistant professor who teaches directly to parroters or dictates paragraphs for shorthand writers - he does exactly the very opposite, he discloses the thoughts of hearts. Ah, it is so cozy to be listeners and transcribers when everything is so completely direct. Gentlemen listeners and transcribers must watch out - it is the thoughts of their hearts that are to be disclosed.

~S. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, p.126

On the brink

2007-12-30T15:54:00.000-08:00

Reasons I named my blog what I did include one way I see life:
stories happen
love happens
shit happens
redemption happens.

To me this existence comes along, comes about, sometimes even fits together nicely.

But I recognize no visible means of support. Amid circumstances wafting at and around me I make choices; I do the best I can. I'm acted upon; I react.

Randomness. Chaos. Injustice. They appear to control. Yet pinpricks of light manage to glow. Some days they appear, hugely shining. Radiating, yes, and burning themselves out far too quickly. But I won't deny these illuminated moments. I conclude they weren't my doing, seeing as none of my superstitious repetitions force them to happen again. They come when they will.

Another way I see life exists simultaneously with the first:
stories are written
love is decided
shit makes for contrast
redemption is brought about.

To another being - a grand designer, a creator, a large, large One - this existence is seen and truly understood. Caused. If this One were to snuff out, so would it all. What this One determines, is.

My free as a zephyr's choices are free. Yet the Causer continues to cause.

Theology's structure stands, yet it fluxes. I've been influenced to see things this way. My belief-building happens, and I'm not trying to force it on you.

More than a year I've appreciated this gift of the blog. I started it intending to help my story processes happen. Messy grubbing and selfish emotions on my part ensued, and they're still present. Yet wholly unexpected, a community sprang up. Shanty houses belonging to others, to you. Your stories happening, your viewpoints firm, yet fluxing as well.

I gather your wishes, whether or not entered beneath a space marked comments, and clutch their bright embrace. My words and wishes to you gush forth often unbidden. But I'm forgetful; I do this thing wrong. Glad to nevertheless remain included by being read.

Looking ahead I expect to leap from this brink of holiday hiatus back into a lake of story, my book. I hope to keep a toe in the blog world. I pray you will find your way true in a very happy new year.

Beside a wintering ocean

2007-12-29T11:23:00.000-08:00

We got a room with a view.
And an electric fireplace. (Tim didn't have to feed it logs all night like he does at home.)
And the hotel shown a spotlight on the surf (entrancing in the wee hours).
And there was a hot tub down the hall.
And Showtime showed While You Were Sleeping (a romantic comedy I happen to like).
And in the morning, between storm systems, Tim and I picked our way along the rocky shoreline.
And our kids stayed home.
And those are all the details I'm telling.

In dark moments, behold

2007-12-26T14:51:00.001-08:00

Under a waxing gibbous

2007-12-22T14:18:00.000-08:00

The company truck hummed, its large headlights trained on my car. I shivered, thankful for a warm knit hat a friend recently made and gave to me.

Tim, shop light in one hand, inspected under my hood. "The hose is way down by the drive shaft," he said, frustrated.

I read his mind. Why do they make engines so inaccessible these days? He placed a foot on the front bumper and hoisted himself to stretch flat, belly down, across the V6. Tim reached far into it with his crescent wrench.

He lifted his feet, straining, and his pants slid from his ankles to reveal Santa socks. I smiled.

Throughout our married life I have spent uncounted hours pacing beside insolent engines and transmissions, with thingies called breathers and release valves and their assorted greasy bolts and clamps strewn over the ground, waiting for Tim to complete his testosterone-infused mission, to rescue me.

Last night, though the scene looked similar to many others, I differed inside from the reactive me I've often been. In the past I've conjured a thousand anxietized thoughts: Why did this happen - what did I do wrong - how did Tim force us into this circumstance - what if we're stuck here - are those people safe in their warm cars laughing at me bobbing next to our dorky, older, broken vehicle??

Last night I looked up.

Not that doing so - peering through fog at a waxy smirk of moon - saved my spirits. The fact that I could lift my head evidenced my buoyancy. Two reasons existed for the change.

First, I just spent four and a half years driving a newer car, a van that took care of me and my children. Not once during the months we made payments on my Plymouth Grand Voyager SE did I require rescue near a ditch on the road. Never mind we couldn't really afford the sticker price or the maintenance. I enjoyed my van every minute.

This week I sold the Voyager. I bought a '91 Dodge Dynasty from friends. We paid off the van, made an extra dimple in the mortgage, and, best of all, I can continue staying home this next year to finish my book. I'm happy. Thanks again, dear Plymouth.

Second, I saw things differently last night because of what happened yesterday morning. A friend and I walked through our neighborhood to the park where my kids used to dig in the sand beneath volleyball nets, devising stories of fanciful deserts. My friend is suffering right now.

She's going through a very rough time. I tried to forge a smoother path for her with words yesterday, then recognized my kinship to Job's friends of old, and mainly listened. My friend expressed the same pain I would face in the same situation. She struggles; the grief chafes raw. She weeps. But after our long walk, in the middle of a residential street leading back to my house, this friend spoke words that bolstered my heart. I can't quote her exactly, but she said to me and the chilled breeze and sunshine, "There's no escaping God. I accept that he's given me blessings and that now he is giving me heartache. I can stand nowhere else. I know God is good."

Beneath a waxing moon last night I remembered this Truth. I nearly laughed for joy. The joy of peace on earth, between mankind and the God who is there. Who is good, though he press his thumb forcefully upon the heads of those who love him.

Snug in the hat knit by my other friend, I drove home, Tim in the truck behind me, and I parked our faulty new old car in the driveway.

Joy to you this Christmas. Truth, love, and peace with God, dear friends.

Of mosaics and my grandma

2007-12-19T09:20:00.000-08:00

My dad's mother, Edna, looked like this in 1940. I've cropped her from a photo where she stood beside her mom. In front of the older woman posed my dad and his sister. They were preschoolers. They knew Edna as a wonderful visitor. Their grandma was "Mother" to them.

In this photo Edna looks like she's giving her photographer the finger. My great aunt explains that she had badly cut her middle digit on a broken jar. Doctor's labors saved the finger, but it remained stiff. She could no longer play the violin.

Interesting, though, because Edna had taken a bird-flipping stance toward society. She'd left her first husband while pregnant with my dad and would go on to strew behind her marriages, affairs, and eight more children.

Reflections on Edna resurfaced lately. I've decided human beings are reasonable. In general, anyway. Many times I've heard myself telling someone my grandma possessed a brilliant mind but no common sense. Looking at culture now, though, I'm rethinking how life amongst us on the planet happens. Were Grandma Edna's sensibilities simply far too common?

The other evening I wandered the quirky off-campus retail store where my daughter works. The sound system played a stale pop tune in which a man and woman duet regarding the possibility of spending the night together. Who needs tomorrow? they croon, as if recognizing that sleeping together tonight might incite future complications. They don't love each other, but they've both been lonely, so apparently they decide to go ahead and have sex, whatever tomorrow may bring.

I paused in front of a display for "dirty girls" bath products, struck by the song's outdatedness. No one worries anymore about spending the night with someone they don't love. On TV shows I've perused this season, sex is part of checking one another out. The dorks are the couples who commit big-time after only a few nights together.

Back in my pop culture days, an aura of hesitation and even wonder still surrounded sex outside marriage. It was okay to do it, of course, but the act carried a weight - and could carry one away - in a sense that I see has now disappeared.

For Grandma Edna in the 1930s and 40s, society generally and specifically (legally) discouraged extra-marital romances. Taboos stood solid. A rebel like Edna found herself receiving electro-shock therapy at a mental institution. Yup. It happened. To continually swim against the cultural tide, a person must have lacked fundamental pieces of common sanity. Or perhaps (as I'm beginning to wonder), they grasped with tenacity a certain logical reasoning.

In her early eighties, riding around town with me as I took her shopping and visiting, Grandma Edna reminisced about going to the movies as a young woman. The silver screen entranced her. Dashing, romantic men wooed fashionable females. Some women were flighty, but many stood up for themselves, capably tossing witticisms back at the guys.

Edna glimpsed independence along with the romance in those movies. She also lived with her own life's experiences, some tragic, many that can't be known. Somehow it all combined to build her philosophy. She reasoned, I think, that there's nothing wrong with following desires that we've played up to one another as noble and beautiful - the longings of intense, initial-stage love. Why should she be denied their repetition, just because living out her movie scripts brought children into the world and caused society matrons discomfort? Edna became a pioneer of grabbing the gusto.

What Grandma Edna and others fostered, aided extremely well by technologized birth control and abortion, has become our culture's heritage. A legacy in which each member of society's goal is an ideal relationship, built mosaic-style amid endless intimate dabblings.

The appeal is not new; I've felt its pull, and I've read some ancient stories... Mm, hm, been around awhile. Only now it's on billboards as well as beneath covers in two-bit motels. Looking at life in general these days, through lenses of emotion and flesh and neediness and availability, to live from bed to bed seems reasonable.

In fact, to borrow a term from Kierkegaard, people naturally take offense at persons stuck in the mindset that sex is exclusively for marriage. To say someone has made immature choices while seeking to navigate relational terrain is fine; everyone screws up. But to insist that any motion in a sexual direction is wrong outside of a marital commitment. Ahem. That offends most people.

As I understand it, Kierkegaard - great cultural offender he - proposed that beliefs and ideas surrounding Christ will ever look unreasonable to us. Only when something different takes hold of me can I gaze at life with an "infinite" view. Not a view that abandons reason (as some have thought K. was saying we must do), but a perspective dramatically realigned.

I'm sure Grandma Edna would have liked Kierkegaard. As far as I know she never read him. In her sixties she took community college classes. She'd returned to her home town, cared to the end for her ailing mom, and become serious about her own version of Christianity.

Though Edna irritated people and made weird decisions the rest of her days, and though I could never peer inside her heart, I've guessed her thoughts on some things changed. Did she go to her grave believing she always made the best choices she could? Maybe. Satisfied to have pioneered a culture in disregard of the seemingly unreasonable. But perhaps she faced into a different possibility, and looked at the chaos her mosaic left behind, and cried out for infinite understanding. For rescue.

And the nose grows

2007-12-14T21:22:00.000-08:00

It does. Keep growing, you know. It's not just that it feels that way when you have a cold.

I pondered this, the other day, when primping before going out the door. Even if I could stop the aging process, as ads proclaim, my schnoz continues to lengthen. No one will give me the time of day - as in, what a hottie - once they notice the nose. It's long. I'm old.

Yeah, women get those surgeries, I guess, for this reason. "Just trim the end off, Sonny, if you please. I got a date for Saturday that's gonna sizzle. Right after my hip replacement Friday." I think trying to be thought of as hot these days makes way too little sense. I'm me. Here on earth, we age.

Every nose knows.

Helpful for such a week

2007-12-12T08:29:00.000-08:00

These:

(Make doubly sure you buy triple ply, lotion-imbued Kleenex.)

And, of course, this:

Cast Away is a Christmas movie. Christmas is in it. Really. This is probably just me, but I glean something new every time I watch Chuck Nolan (alias Tom Hanks) endure his trials and tribulations. Last night, I viewed again his transformation and recognized it went far deeper than a physical change. The test in this movie took a man -- confident, in control, at the top of his game -- and thrust him inside himself, inside pain, bereft of control.

Cliche-ish, I know, but true: certain experiences leave a life forever altered. Perspectives change because of them. Like castaway Chuck, the person is still the same guy or woman. But in some ways they are more themselves than they were.

More than you'll ever know...

Am I making sense? Ah, well, back to triple plies and hot orange juice.

I like these guys

2007-12-10T19:17:00.000-08:00

They've got a clue something's important here. I enjoy spending time with them before Christmas.

Yes, the angel's wings have broken off. They've been glued back on a few times, but I decided this year we'll just let her keep her feet on stable wood. No need to hover precariously (that's how wings break in the first place). The message is the same. Something. Really. Important.

Watch and see.

Doing it again

2007-12-07T09:16:00.000-08:00

Still sickly today. Hurts to swallow. Poor me.

Here's a slightly bigger bite from my second chapter.

My new husband missed meaning in my words at crucial moments. Sometimes my efforts to communicate felt like embracing a dense fog bank.

I told Tim how timid I felt during his 24-hour duty nights. He had to spend them on base tending the USS Grayling’s nuclear reactor. I tried going to bed before sunset those nights, so they would pass quickly. But I always awoke at 3:00 a.m., tense, fearing every noise in the dark.

“I wish we had more time together,” I summed up when relating my woes to Tim.

“You need to get out and make girlfriends,” Tim said.

I seethed. He was supposed to reach for me, cup my chin, whisper comfort in one ear. “I’m sorry,” he’d say in my imagined script. “You’re going through a lot to be with me. I appreciate you.”

It didn’t help matters that Tim’s idea of doing right by me translated into buying on credit a 1968 Mustang, the type of car he’d always wished he owned, and then spending most free hours of our initial married months at the base auto hobby shop rebuilding the engine.

The car was for me to drive, so I knew I should be happy. But even after he finished its engine and we paid back the loan, I harbored a civil resentment.

Our neighbor Bob died in early October. Tim and I spent our spare moments with the family and attended his funeral. Grabbing hold of such reality – the death of a regular guy I’d just met – loomed beyond my aptitude.

Somewhere around Halloween I perched on Gail’s sofa. As she handed me tea I asked how she was today.

“I go back to my office tomorrow,” she said. Long-worked fingers gripped her mug. Her eyes, though red-rimmed, shown clear. “I wouldn’t really have to, you know. Bob provided well for his family.” She squared her shoulders. “Thank God. But I miss him.”

Gail’s older daughter Kari sat on my other side. She pulled her knees to her chest and plucked at tassels on a pillow. “Deanna,” she said, “why did God let my daddy die?”

I was pea soup. I didn’t know.

Small bites

2007-12-06T11:24:00.000-08:00

Don't mind me today.

Feel free to peruse without comment the many paragraphs I'm posting. I'm home alone, pent-up words to the world remain from (almost) not blogging last month. And today I'm battling the yucky stuff that's making the rounds. Tim's had it a week or more, poor guy. Dealing with a windstorm's aftermath by day, coughing into the bleary hours of night.

Food, in smaller portions, I'm trying to enjoy. You know, take a taste, roll the goodness on your tongue, appreciate. No need to finish the whole bag/leftover/bunch! I hope I'm building a good habit for Christmas.

Every day I wish to sing out where I am in the writing. Getting up at 4:30 sends me into raptures by mid-morning. I've worked! I'm productive! I'm on page 143! Somebody needs to see this.

But I'm committed to a structure, for the best, I think. Clearer all the time, I see the pattern to shoot for.

Finish this book. Don't contact agents, editors, or the media before it's done. Finito.

After I write The End I can let it sit, as Stephen King suggests, and then read through it with different, stepped-back eyes. Then I can ask my dear friends to subject themselves to the complete version. Next I will take pieces of it to the writing group of my choice. Amid this time of receiving feedback, I can craft a wonderful, ripened proposal. Then it'll be ready to go.

So good to see the big picture, what I should do. But, yuck. How will I ever...? So far away.

Today I think I'll try, for sanity's sake, quoting myself. A tiny sample from my first chapter. A book, after all, I'm learning, is a marathon of small bites. Here you go.

Many years have passed now since we began unfolding reality together. Tim remains a technology man; I am his inner-gizmological woman.

Questions often dance and spar in my head. I doubt Tim; I doubt myself. But my universe, I’d like to think, is woven of different fabric than it was in the past. Not indestructible, just a tad more able to flex.

Duh

2007-12-06T10:54:00.000-08:00

I've pontificated many times about doing things outside the box. And yet I forgot until yesterday a ramification of being able to.

We're homeschoolers here. My son navigated a rough patch last year, regarding life more than academics, but the time for schooling wasn't especially productive. This year, according to age he's a high school senior, and he could reach his transcript goals, barely. But he's missed several courses he wanted to take, such as chemistry. The classes at our local resource center were full or conflicted with other offerings.

Yesterday it struck me -- he can finish high school next year. Nothing earth shattering about doing that. Plus many of my son's friends are a year younger than he. They'd end up graduating together.

He's thinking about it, seriously considering the idea. The more I ponder it, the more I wonder we didn't do this sooner. It may save us money, as well, which couldn't hurt right now.

I'll let my son try this on for a while. The final decision's his. But already, I think, we're relaxing around here, just knowing this option's available.

In case you wondered

2007-12-06T10:46:00.001-08:00

He's eating his food again.

And I am glad.

Under the radar

2007-12-03T09:39:00.000-08:00

Allowed access.
Immature, thoughtless,
wonder abounds.

Not near serious enough.

Thrill to see, there, There, LOOK,
on paper, that's what I've kept inside so long.

Rather than strive to bestow blood from pores,
glibly accept an initial gift.

Ignoramus, tote the package worldward, fling it,
eyes closed, twirl.

So happy; everyone ought to be.

Thankful

2007-12-02T09:22:00.000-08:00

A while ago Sandy tagged me to post three things I'm thankful for, beyond the usual, i.e., husband, family, and so on.

Having returned to regular bloggering, I give you these:

1) A healed ankle. My right one twisted on a hike during Labor Day weekend. Afterward I kept jogging on my treadmill, until it became obvious I shouldn't've. For weeks I left off exercising, missing my slow-runner's high. Now the ankle's back; the buzz has resumed. I also feel less guilty munching malt balls bought from a neighborhood Girl Scout.

2) I can do Christmas cards the old fashioned way. Maybe not many, but I'll enjoy the process. Last weekend I started trying to figure out how people create those holiday newsletters brimming photographs from their year. Flailing around in Word and Picasa and Photoshop, I became smothered by my cyber-ineptitude. Ha! Now I have conquered by declaring a full retreat. I'll unearth my pen and write to people.

3) Too few people signed up for the community college writing class I was slated to instruct this fall, and it got canceled. After initial disappointment (it would have paid), I recognized more of an opportunity to work on my spiritual memoir. I began arising regularly at 5:30 and logging three hours on it every weekday and a couple on the weekends. Then daylight savings switched back to standard time, providing an easy transition to 4:30 awakenings and four hours' writing a day.

I'm loving my schedule. I'm halfway through my book! (30,000 words, for those NaNoWriMo inclined.) The path forward looks clear. I'd not have believed this possible three months ago. Now my class is offered again for winter term, and I'm ambivalent about whether I want enough students to enroll.

These sure are me-centered thankyous. They wouldn't exist without encouraging people in my life. You blogger friends aptly fit the category of builder uppers. Thanks.

Global groceries

2007-12-01T09:10:00.000-08:00

I'll share more of my latest lifely happenings, but this I gotta show you next.

Tim passed on to me an email titled Perspective. You may have seen it. The images gave me quite a reaction.

Germany : The Melander family of Bargteheide
Food expenditure for one week: 375.39 Euros or $500.07

United States : The Revis family of North Carolina
Food expenditure for one week: $341.98

Japan : The Ukita family of Kodaira City
Food expenditure for one week: 37,699 Yen or $317.25

Italy : The Manzo family of Sicily
Food expenditure for one week: 214.36 Euros or $260.11

Mexico: The Casales family of Cuernavaca
Food expenditure for one week: 1,862.78 Mexican Pesos or $189.09

Poland : The Sobczynscy family of Konstancin-Jeziorna
Food expenditure for one week: 582.48 Zlotys or $151.27

Egypt: The Ahmed family of Cairo
Food expenditure for one week: 387.85 Egyp tian Pounds or $68.53

Ecuador: The Ayme family of Tingo
Food expenditure for one week: $31.55

Bhutan: The Namgay family of Shingkhey Village
Food expenditure for one week: 224.93 ngultrum or $5.03

Chad: The Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp
Food expenditure for one week: 685 CFA Francs or $1.23

My dumb cat

2007-12-01T09:01:00.000-08:00

I want to kill Westley. Not really, but, yeah, sometimes more than usual of late.

He tasted mexican-flavored beef that I'd dropped in Brindy's bowl -- a tiny leftover bit she could snarf up as a treat. Except for once Westley got there first. Next thing I knew he'd perched on the edge of the kitchen sink, a stunt he hasn't attempted in years. He licked some remaining beef crumbs in the pan before I said, "WESTLEY."

Since then, my brilliant feline pet has refused to nibble his Purina One. Instead he hangs around Brindy's dish, puffing little meows at me. "Give...me...more...beef." He's tasted bits of dog food. I think he's gotten thinner.

Oh, well. Want a new idea for helping your pudgy kitty slim down? Feed him taco meat and wait.

Urgh.

So you know

2007-11-26T16:37:00.000-08:00

It's nowhere near all joy and roses for this old writer gal.

I received this in today's mail -- one of the more creative rejection letters, I must say, that it has been my displeasure to read.

Sigh.

All part of seeking to do.

See you for a real post around this weekend.

P.S. Tom Hanks helped me recover after I received a rejection a year ago. I wrote about it here.

You got me

2007-11-11T07:51:00.000-08:00

Not a post, though, really.
A commercial.
I get mentioned here for being published in this forthcoming anthology.

Nah, BloPoMo; Cheerio!

2007-11-01T20:06:00.000-07:00

I think my brain's iced over, and our temperatures haven't yet dipped below freezing.

Actually, for the writing I'm trying to do (sorry about my broken-recordness) the mind-gears seem to turn okay. I read an author interview where the woman (a memoir writer, yes!) stated she operates by writing, then editing, then reworking and rewriting until the words are, in her mind, like over-chewed chewing gum. That expresses how I experience working. It takes large time quantities. I've likened it to trying to get all the toothpaste from the tube: squeezing from bottom, pressing more out the top, going back down and smoothing... Anyway.

This approach doesn't well suit blogging. I love blogging. But I didn't commit to this month's opportunity to do it daily. In fact, because of many projects in my world, including a reorganization of my bedroom so I can listen to favorite music before slumber, I've decided to be antithetical. I'm committing not to post here again until the last day of November. We'll see if I make it.

Along the way, I plan to read daily posts by Cecily, Sandy, and maybe others whose NaBloPoMo ambitions have newly sprung. I'll cheer you hardy souls onward whenever I can, and I'll enjoy your humor and ingenuity. Go for it, true bloggers!

I leave you with my clever hubby in his Halloween costume. Can you read his mind?

Blogger women unite

2007-10-23T19:40:00.000-07:00

We received our first visit from cyber people.

Actually, the women who visited me are quite three-dimensional. Good, solid folk from the Midwest. Patti, whose son goes to Gutenberg, drove out with her daughters for a Gutenberg Junior Tea and a series of other events. They spent Friday, Sunday, and Monday nights here.

Patti blogs at Hobbits8. She's a self-sufficient homeschool mom (of six kids), and she's working on becoming a genealogist. I offered our home to her and the girls for the nights they needed, with fear and trepidation. I hadn't hosted overnight company for a long while.

Everything went well, though. I sensed Patti reveling in the sorts of conversations I almost take for granted here in Gutenberg land. She and I talked a lot. Tim (who attended a very interesting Oktoberfuss this past weekend with me), joined in our dialog-fest last evening. I so enjoyed Patti's daughters. They and my son and I played rounds of Catch Phrase last night, too.

Today Cherie came over, and her girls were able to join us for a Yumm-bowl lunch. Good gabbing, a full house, and Indian summer weather warmed my brain, heart, feet, fingertips.

I'm just a little empty, now that they're gone.

A fun thing

2007-10-22T20:16:00.000-07:00

Small moves. Little steps. Moments of joy. Sometimes they happen.

I got a letter from Writer's Digest today. (Yep, my name is way down the list on this page, but it's there!)I'm honored to be mentioned.
Stay tuned for a post about the woman who came out of my computer and is spending a few nights in the guest bed beside it. :o)

Sixteen years ago

2007-10-16T12:45:00.000-07:00

I prepared. I read pertinent books and attended seminars. I spluttered and worried, especially when things first were supposed to really get going.

We had moved into our house in August. All was lined up for me to plop this show on the road, but then the needs of a dear one couldn't be ignored. My grandmother who lived three miles from our new home had just received open heart surgery. Other relatives were hours away.

I began tending to Grandma Edna's needs: driving her for groceries, filling her insulin needles, dealing with her bookkeeping.

"We're supposed to start homeschooling. Yesterday!" I wailed, quietly, in my bedroom on my knees.

My two children accompanied me on adventures with Grandma Edna. We stopped with her to chat whenever a scraggy man or woman approached. "Hey, Edna," they would greet. "How's it going? We've seen better times, huh?"

Sometimes the old friends would relate to me how Edna helped them out of a tight spot back in the day. I knew some had been drug users. They could always crash at Edna's, to the chagrin of her neighbors.

I clenched my teeth, checking out at the grocery store. Grandma Edna's Oregon Trail food stamp card didn't work correctly when she gave it a shaky swipe through the machine. People in line behind us lost patience. Edna wrote a check sometimes.

I knew her finances might not cover it. I took her home and loaded her refrigerator and bade her farewell till we could go over bills again tomorrow.

Then at home I sat Victoria in a wooden elementary school desk, and we opened books. With her pencil she turned numbers into flowers and animals. Early into her lessons she slouched and fidgeted.

My stomach hurt.

By the next spring we would have little to show for our launch into homeschool kindergarten. Grandma Edna would be recovered enough to start up old tricks. She'd buy a Nissan, never make a payment on it, but at least be able to drive it until the repossessor came. She would visit us unannounced or phone asking Tim to fix things.

Though Victoria's eyes would glaze at the sight of addition worksheets and she'd rather I read to her than we practice ABC's, she would excel at drawing, coloring, painting. I'd begin a journey with her each evening through The Lord of the Rings.

My son would romp gleefully with the puppy we would acquire from Grandma Edna. Someone gave her the tiny, black-with-brown canine she named Brindy. Within two days Grandma Edna realized raising a pooch was beyond her. A miracle (and much small-child imploring) would make Tim grant our request to keep her.

We'd also be given a duckling, and not long afterward would find a garter snakeling. Quacker and Jafar would become handy educators, and both would be released again one day into more accustomed environs.

Grandma Edna would need me on and off for eight more years. I would struggle, and laugh, and cry, and continue.

Goodbye, sun

2007-10-14T19:52:00.000-07:00

If our weather forecast's correct, this may have been the last sunny day for a while. Today transitioning trees hugged a blue sky.
The fat spider out front enjoyed warm breezes.Westley made his rounds in comfort.
My son spent time in "Chuck's" back yard. (Chuck, by the way, has recovered from being roughed up.)

Even Tim rested. At least he stayed put while I ran for the camera to record a rare pause in his activity.
Me, I soaked it in, the dallying farewell. A final embrace of summer.

The reason for my previous post

2007-10-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

This week I pondered. I wasn't sure I believed it.

Not the possibility of someone writing for joy as opposed to money. I mean, a foundational part of my worldview at present is the idea that God bestows creativity as a gift. To me. To you. It's work and it's fun and it's just there to play with. To worry like a dog with her bone. To keep coming back to, because, hey, I want that.

I pondered, though, the outlandish concept that a man who succeeded in a ginormously commercial sense was simply wailing on his gift. You mean to say, Mr. Prestigious King, you did not set out with a five year plan, or practice eighteen sure-shot techniques each morning in order to realize the finances you desired through writing?

I guess it shouldn't be so hard to swallow, but somehow it is.

And yet if I do believe S. King (I just noticed he has the same initials as Kierkegaard -- kinda spooky), I must travel along a thought path regarding my own ambitions. I say I want to write, I'm at a place in life where I can do so, and I am now regularly writing. I also find myself constantly over-anxious about proving to Tim and the world (and myself) that I'm making progress. Real progress. Which, I guess, would translate into a saleable production of words.

I worry much and often about producing a fully formed structure. I pore over books of similar style and genre to the one I'm writing. I try to make sure I'm doing this in a way everyone might accept.

There's something, though, I often fail to do. In the midst of stressing and striving, I ought be thankful. I get to feel the buzz. Sure, writing, like any other endeavor, is work. But for me it's also a stroll along thought-forest trails. Some days I straggle. I'm frustrated; I go nowhere. Other days I pause in awe at sunlight striking a multi-hued cliff face.

As I excavate deeper, I discover meaning. A new sense emerges of confidence in my own instincts. The goal is not material; it's to reveal with care the tacitly understood. The form of this story exists beneath layers, solid granite in places, but worth going after. Days of Eureka! are awesome days.

Okay, just one more...

2007-10-13T11:23:00.000-07:00

Near the end of his book, Stephen King says something I had to ponder this week:

Do you do it for the money, honey?

The answer is no. Don't now and never did. Yes, I've made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it...

I have written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side -- I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.

For now

2007-10-06T18:49:00.000-07:00

It's finding texture,
writing in color.

It's attempting to learn Greek,
to be involved with women studying biblical philosophy,
and to read and discuss Practice in Christianity.

It's dates with Tim,
times with Victoria,
getting my son where he needs to go,
moments with Mom,
evenings with friends.

It's a lot right now,
a fullness I embrace.

It's chest wall pain some days (our doctor assured me long ago that what I get is normal, a stress thing).

It's looking forward to a big weekend and welcome company in two weeks,
while wondering how the house can be homey for them.

It's bleary eyes,
Tim working one and a half jobs,
kitchen sink overflowing cups and plates,
frozen pizza every other day.

It's Much Ado about Nothing for my son,
a thesis conception for Victoria that must gestate.

It's cold in the yard,
glowing in the woodstove,
pancakes on the griddle.

Priority? The page.
Writing in color.
Finding texture.
For now.

Quote for today

2007-10-02T17:35:00.000-07:00

"Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing -- being flattened, in fact -- is part of every writer's necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you." -- Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, p. 141

Lesson for today

2007-10-02T17:26:00.000-07:00

Write till your eyes fall out.

Then stick them back in your head and go clean the kitchen for a while.

(Also, dream that overlooking the coastline, dramatic, in a Kierkegaard t-shirt will make you more literary.)

2007-10-01T19:36:00.000-07:00

At least one serious post clamors in my head for publication, but all prose and no pics makes Deanna a tedious blogger. I'll share a few views from past weekends made enjoyable by friends, plants, and animals.

Mom shows off her begonias* in waning summer warmth.*Dahlias, begonias; they're some kinda flower.

Friends show up as evenings darken earlier.

Kinship during study time.

Blessings of companionable baking.

And, mm, ooh, the mouthwatering results.