5/30/2008

For Anna

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'

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."

5/27/2008

Memorial day journey, part II

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.

5/26/2008

Memorial day journey, part I




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...

5/25/2008

Are you smarter than a homeschooler?


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

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.

5/24/2008

Holiday blog tag

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.

5/20/2008

It went like this

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!)

5/19/2008

This mommy blogging's fun...

...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.

5/12/2008

You can take Shakespeare with you

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.

5/03/2008

Ocean mountains

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.

5/02/2008

Before I go answer an email from my brother

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!

5/01/2008

And the envelope goes to...

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.

Featured Post

New Playroom

I've been consumed for a few years by care for my parents, so writing has fallen by the wayside. In and for my heart, this has become a ...