8/28/2007

Blame it on the moon

I went to the coast yesterday with Tim. Wind-washed sky stretched to the horizon; rippling waves ran over bevelled sand throwing off light like jewels.

I forgot my camera.

This morning I accomplished grocery shopping, emailing, and other various functions early, so I could be in line with all promptness to sign up my son for a chemistry class. I put his name on the list for Algebra II, a class for which he already was registered last week. I even paid for it twice, in blissful uncomprehension.

The best, the only good explanation, I've decided, is the moon. Not just because I awoke at 1:30 a.m. to view its complete eclipse (lack of sleep doesn't account for yesterday's lapse). No, it has to be the satellite itself, sloshing my brain-juices with tidal force. It's given me the condition where quirky repetitions occur and the victim can't help them. I've got a lunar tick.

Thanks to my friend Carol Jo, I've also got a couple of pictures from the telescope she and her husband loaned us. Tim and my son took them through the viewfinder; the smaller shots are my attempts--at least my camera was around for the wee hour show!




8/25/2007

Goofing off



Important items must accompany an afternoon's escape.

I used my camera a lot during an adventure today, but here's the shot I like best.


Ten days immersed in writing produced three chapters and an outline. Twenty-seven or so pages. A much clearer idea of what this critter is I'm working on.

So what to do on a free Saturday begging fun and frolickiness?


Begin with pancakes, of course.


Next, decide on a place to go, to walk your legs off and feel the sunshine and take a mess of pictures.

Somewhere I haven't been since I was a kid, and here in town...

The millrace.

I remember boats and geese and cool, flowing streams. It's not the most pristine place--over by the University and all. But this time of year few people are around. Sounds just ducky.


So bid dear, hardworking hubby farewell.



Take the path with lots of color.






Then cross the Willamette River on a high footbridge.



Enjoy all the interesting views.






Find words again another day.

8/14/2007

Back in a few

I recall the tingle of excitement, expanding my lungs several times before slipping underwater to swim the length of a pool on a warm afternoon.

This may be insane to consider, but I've gone all noble at the edges and am telling myself that if I work hard I could actually achieve my summer writing goal without coming up for oxygen. Nearly three weeks remain until a final fling at camping, and then other endeavors and responsibilities will arrive with the season of school. I dare to imagine taking a plunge of cessation from:
1) writing groups (they're wonderful, but the feedback they've provided lately has left me on the brink of significant choices, and it's time to make them);
2) excursions (my son has discovered some regular distractions/activities that ought to keep him busy, and I'll try to be content with treadmill rather than hiking); and
3) blogging (despite the fact I'm so addicted, I will attempt to quit maniacally checking your updates for a bit, but feel free to email any important messages to the address listed under my profile).

I've promised my guys I won't leave off vacuuming or neglect to bake a pie after they fill me a bucket of blackberries. I know I'll pause to savor last-light images out back, as blue sky deepens to reveal pricks of star, and silent bats scoop mosquitoes from the air.

And of course, life's surprises and my shifting moods may render this post moot. But right now with a last gulp of breath I'm submerging. See you at the other end of the pool.

8/11/2007

Flash forward

Remember the Star Trek movie with the whales? In an early scene the Klingon vessel carrying Kirk and his loyal friends sling-shots around the sun to complete its journey back in time. All hands on the bridge black out briefly, and during those moments Kirk hears disembodied phrases, such as "I never should have left him" and so on. They're snippets of dialogue from later in the movie, and by the film's end you have heard them repeated in the context of the unfolding story.

I'm going to share with you some disembodied phrases jotted down by me during the past week at a certain event involving philosophy and indepth Bible study. They're from small group discussions, lectures, and extended question and answer times.

Along with a few free hours for personal ponderings, we participants were served delicious, gourmet-type food. I feel as though I'm still digesting much of that bounty, along with banquets of conversation and reflection. So while I hope to someday produce an eloquent essay about Gutenberg and its unique methods, for now I'll beg your indulgence (and if you were there, maybe this will spark a memory or two).

Monday:
Referring to the passage in Matthew often called the beatitudes, "The really fortunate (blessed) person is the one who's existentially embracing the faith, with all the qualities this entails."


Tuesday:
Despair over myself can involve thinking something like, "God, you made me this way. How dare you."


Wednesday:
Kierkegaard used "dialectic" to mean the process/dialogue between an individual and God.

"Truth" in Kierkegaard's writings could be understood as "what's most important to God."

"Subjectivity" in the same context means "how I interact with whatever comes my way in life."

New Testament writers may have meant the same thing K. meant by "subjectivity" when they used "the heart," "the mind," "the inner man."

On today's cultural Christian idea of "spiritual formation": "Somebody shoulda told Jesus."

You don't practice your way into the Kingdom of God. You choose the Kingdom of God.

A participant in my small group, as we switched from our Kierkegaard reading to the Bible: "From one thick book I don't understand to another."


Thursday:
"God, make me good. I want to be good." That's the heart-cry of a believer.

Kierkegaard says, "It's possible to have a logical system, but not an existential system." We humans are not just products of arguments and evidence. I'm not just a product of my world.

A philosopher named Lessing coined the "leap of faith" phrase. Lessing pictured a ditch filled with evidences against "truth" and said he couldn't make the leap across it. K. said the ditch existed, but a lack of evidence was not the problem. The problem was an "infinite loathing" of the leap, of the decision.

We who "make the leap" do so in the midst of uncertainty. There are reasons, but they exist at an instinctive level; we can't express why our instincts tell us to do so.


Friday:
"Infinite" in Kierkegaard means "without boundaries." The Knight of Infinite Resignation does a good and essential thing in letting himself suffer loss for God. But he wears his suffering like a badge. The Knight of Faith believes all is well, loss or no, calf's head for dinner or not. "He does not do the least thing except by virtue of the absurd."

"That's part of life: making the wrong decision. It's our tuition."

In Mark 7:8-13, Jesus told the Pharisees that their manmade rules were ways of thumbing their noses at God and worshiping man.

All other religions encourage people to get control of their lives. True faith involves the acknowledgment of individual poverty.

True faith is hidden. "Inwardness" is K.'s term. It's absurd, because in our natural state we don't see how it could be this way.

An existential decision, according to K., is one directly related to my choice of whether or not to follow Jesus.

8/08/2007

Jane Kirkpatrick tenders a tale

I have to admit I don't often read genre fiction. But I love it when books come along that transcend their categories.

Jane Kirkpatrick has written a fine bunch of historical novels. Her books also get categorized as literary, religious, and western. They're good reads; that's the thing to know.

I'm pleased as one pioneer-descended, literary religious gal can be to get to share an interview I did last week with Jane.


We referred to her newest book, A Tendering in the Storm. In this second installment of the Change and Cherish series, "Emma Giesy, a strong-willed German-American, believes her young family will thrive in the light of their newfound freedom, after she and her husband branch off from their close-knit and repressive religious community in the spring of 1856."

DH: For our interview, Jane, I aim to match the loose theme of my blog title, Stories Happen. My intent's been to emphasize the stories from our creaturely lives. We see ourselves writing the stories that happen, whether fiction or fact, written down or not. And yet also from our perspective they "just happen" to us. I believe our Creator is authoring our lives more painstakingly than any human writer, but we get to "read" the stories in journeys of discovery. This leads to my first question for you.

I've often heard that writers of fiction draw their characters' traits from themselves and people they know. How does researching historical people and imagining their life stories intersect with your own life and relationships? Would you say your characters are mainly synthesized from your contemporary "stories", or are their traits mostly drawn from the historical evidences you've found?

JK: When I begin thinking about a story it's usually through a character. I ask myself "What was she doing there and would I have ever ended up there?" or "What would I have done in that circumstance?" so in that way I'm interjected early on into the story. But as I research, find out dates of events in that person's life, when they married or if they didn't; when they lost a parent or a child or when they made a major life change, then I try to understand what was happening in their lives and write their story without imposing mine onto them. When I finish though, I'm always surprised at how that story, the one I thought was about this or that, was really a story meant to help me deal with some issue in my own life, maybe one I've set aside and hadn't even considered before. It's one of the gifts of writing, I think, that we unveil things about ourselves at the same time.

DH: In this latest installment of Emma Giesy's story, "tendering" comes up in various forms, as noun, verb, adjective, and so on. Is there a story behind that word's importance to this tale?

JK: At first we were looking for a title that matched the rhythm of the first "A Clearing in the Wild" so "A Tendering in the Storm" fit. I wanted a word that exemplified tenderness, fragile qualities because Emma faces many vulnerabilities. Tender does mean fragile but it also means what you do to meat, for example, to make it more palatable, to soften it as in tenderizing. And then there's the tender related to a boat, a tender transitions people from a larger vessel to the shore and this was a transitional book in the series. Tender also brings images of caring and compassion. All those were factors affecting Emma's journey in this second book of the series. After the book was finished, I was reading in a historical fabric book, looking up something totally different, but in the glossary I found the word "tendering." Boy, was I surprised! It means the disintegration of fabric after exposure to caustic materials. For this story, it was the perfect word because Emma is exposed to caustic things, some of her own making -- some of her misunderstanding, some through her grief. So yes, the word has had special meaning for this story.

DH: I read in one interview that a new story was calling your name. How does that happen, and when do you know it's time to answer?

JK: Ah, that is the BIG question. Sometimes a fragment of information will just catch my attention and it might be years later before I realize that's the story I should tell. I wrote about a landscape here in Oregon that attracted a murder, an east Indian cult and then a non-denominational Christian kids' camp. It struck me as so strange and I wanted to know what was going on there! I'd had brief contact with the landscape shortly after moving to Oregon; then I knew some people involved in the cult; and finally, met people involved in the camp. Eventually, the time seemed right to tell that story as "A Land of Sheltered Promise" but that time didn't happen for close to 20 years after I thought, "Gee, I wondered how that happened?" I have contracts for new books so I'm always aware, listening to stories...and sometimes people bring them to me, maybe more than one person suggesting the same story and when that happens I really pay attention.

DH: Please give a brief sketch of your life at home on Starvation Lane. Do you think the landscape and context out there lend you any advantage as a writer?

JK: We live pretty far away from people. Our nearest neighbor is seven miles away; nearest town is 25 miles and we buy our groceries or if we want to see a movie, it's 52 miles one way. I travel a lot for research and for promoting books so when I get home, I'm grateful to be here. For seventeen years I communted 100 miles to work on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. I was also writing then doing so at 5 AM, then going to work at 8 AM, coming home to research and go to bed early. I found that writing before I went to work energized me for the entire day. It was as though no matter what else happened that day, I'd spent time in writing which was almost like prayer for me. For the past five years, I've been fortunate enough to stay home, sort of. I lead women's retreats and I speak at church events, for fund-raisers, university groups, libraries etc. which I love doing but I try to keep the time limited to the second half of the year and spend the first half writing and researching and re-writing during the second half. We also have a kind of working ranch, a few cows, make hay, that sort of thing. There's always something breaking down, the vet is 50 miles away and we have two dogs and a cat that need tending etc. Our son -- my husband's son -- works for us full time so it isn't that I have to do physical work very often in moving cattle or whatever; but I am aware of the seasons and the demands of the land in order to be a good steward of it. I can close myself off into this office for hours at a time while my husband is resting or helping as he can outside. That's a luxury for writing as I can enter my story and stay there. Sometimes I'll have worked on a scene with snow and it's cold and then I look outside and wonder what happened to it! Well, in August, the snow just melted! It's a privilege to have that kind of family support to write; and a blessing to be doing something I so love to do that time just slips by. I like it best when we buy groceries and know we might be here for a month (as we were one January). That's just fine with me!

DH: What advice can you share with those of us bloggers who dabble often with words and wonder whether or not to invest our energy in written expression? What did your basic process toward publication look like (5-year plan; just happened; spiritual encounter; etc.)?

JK: Someone once said that if you don't have to write, don't. I like that even though I think ocassional writing, blogging for fun, journaling, are very fine and very healing ways to create even if no one ever sees what you've written. If you blog, others will see what you write and your words can touch others in powerful ways. But if you HAVE to write, you will. It may be a story, an event, a time in your life, but when that time comes, you won't wonder if it's worth the energy. For now, many people are "living" their stories that they'll write about later and that's worthy work.

As for my own writing/publication journey: I always knew that words were powerful. They could engage people, make them think, could hurt people. As an administrator, I knew that words could move people because I wrote letters and reports and people would call and ask how they could help. I didn't imagine I'd write novels. My career began when we decided to follow our hearts and move to this property. I was really concerned about what I'd do here. My skills were as a therapist, an administrator, someone engaged in negotiations and public service. There was no one here but my husband and some rattlesnakes, the latter having no interest in negotiating -- and sometimes my husband doesn't like to negotiate either! It really was a spiritual answer to a question I asked one night in our family room, all alone. "What will I do there?" I asked and the word I heard was "write." I took community college classes (two of them) before we moved and had Bob Welch, a fine writer, as my first instructor. What could have been better? A second instructor was Bob Shotwell, a former newspaper editor and then a freelancer for the Oregonian Newspaper in Oregon. Both these men said they thought I could sell my stuff and I did! I thought I'd write features, essays, things like that. But it was a friend who said when they got my letters about our life here (we didn't have a phone for quite awhile so I wrote to people) that they didn't read them right away; instead, they saved them until after dinner, turned the TV off and read them out loud because they were like chapters in a book. That was the beginning of my book publishing. Homestead came out in 1991. The first novel came four years later. I was 45 years old when that first book came out. I like to think that when I couldn't NOT write, I found a way to tell the stories. It just took that long for me to hear the call and to discover that story-telling and work in mental health are very similar activities. They both heal and allow creativity though community and spirit. I'm very fortunate indeed.

DH: Thanks so much, Jane. I'm looking forward (and so is my mom, of course), to reading your third book about Emma.

JK: Thanks for asking, Deanna! That third book will be out next April and there'll be a corrollary book about the quilts and crafts of the Aurora Colony out in 2008 (September). It's called Stitching Stories. I hope you'll like it too. Thanks for inviting me to share time with your readers.

**Update on the fire story at Jane's ranch here. (It's out; they're okay.)**

My village





Mind expansion in progress. Wish you all could be here.
(Robby Julian capably clicks her camera, while I roll up my sleeves and get to work.)

8/05/2007

Fire and reads

They're here...

The institute I keep mentioning starts tonight. I feel like the Scarecrow in the Emerald City, waiting to get his head stuffed with brains.

Also, I conducted my first author interview, and I will post it within the next few days. Jane Kirkpatrick, of whom I wrote a while back, is doing a blog tour this week. She answered my questions with grace and some good writing tips.

But this weekend Jane and her husband are dealing, at their ranch out on Starvation Lane, with a wildfire headed their way. I hope it has actually passed them by at this point. You can check her blog for updates.

In the midst of everything this afternoon I'm trying to finish Harry Potter. Probably I'll read all night, then go bleary-eyed to the first institute discussion tomorrow. So many stories, so little time...

8/03/2007

This 'n that

Lest I neglect to mention it, during the past week I celebrated another anniversary. Twenty-eight years of marriage to this guy.



And, yes, he is that cute.

I've posted a longer bit about us here.

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