Moving Day

"Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.” ― Siddhārtha Gautama

This weekend we're moving my mother off the farm -- out of the house she was born in almost 80 years ago -- and into a retirement community. I'm taking my notebook and pen with me. And a camera. I'll have more to tell you sometime next week.

Book Discussion

I've spent years of my life wrestling with Hawthorne, so I think I can do a pretty good job sharing my passion. You're invited.

Book Discussion: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

When: Wed, May 23, 7:00pm – 8:30pm

Where: Everett Public Library, Main Library Auditorium,  2702 Hoyt Avenue, Everett, WA 98201 (map)

Description: Everett Community College professor Bethany Reid will discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne's undisputed classic, The Scarlet Letter.

Awake

http://www.nbc.com/awake/

I know it's not the usual sort of thing that I post, but I simply want to go on record as saying that this is an amazing, mind-blowing show. I can't believe it didn't find an audience.

When Life Happens

I have one million things going on in my life, but from five until seven this morning, I sat in my cabin and drank coffee and wrote. I typed!

Today I'm sending my poetry manuscript with changes to Writers & Books. Tomorrow morning I'm driving to Oregon with my friend Carla (and 45 student papers) for the Compose Writers Conference at Clackamas Community College. (That's a lot of C's.) This is my second poetry event this week, by the way. The first was an interview with a colleague's 20th century American literature class (they asked great questions that made me want to hole up somewhere and write more poems).

This coming Wednesday evening, 7 p.m., I'm giving a lecture on The Scarlet Letter at the Everett Public Library.

Oh, and my mom is moving Memorial Day Weekend.

When I catch my breath, I'll let you know more. As I tell my students -- when life happens, writers get to say, "I will survive this, and I will write about it."

"The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe." Peter de Vries

My Writing Cabin

I keep forgetting to upload the new snapshots, but the cabin is 99% finished, and I moved in yesterday. This morning I was like a little kid at Christmas, awake at 5:30 and eager to get the day rolling. It felt a little like waking at a campground -- a beautiful blue day already, my cup of coffee, birdsong. True, I get up every morning and write, but getting up this morning and writing? It felt ... as if I'd been blessed, which is exactly what I have been. I can't believe my good fortune. Twenty-seven years of marriage and my husband still has a few surprises up his sleeve.

As I've said here before, in my writing career I have often felt like the Lone Ranger, without Tonto and the cool horses. Teaching, mom-ing, trying to be a good daughter -- I get so overwhelmed and I feel that no one cares if I write my poems and books, or not. What's the point of writing one more poem? One more scene?Who is really waiting with bated breath to read any of it?

That is not, of course, true. (In my better moments, I've always known it isn't true.) The cabin is like a big old symbol sitting in my backyard: my writing is appreciated; it is supported. (Thank you, Bruce!)

"The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little stardust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched." Henry David Thoreau

Becoming the Novelist

Becoming the Novelist

Agatha Christie wrote in the bath.
I could do that, you think to yourself.
Though what you really mean is, 
you could take a bath.
Imagining bath, you can't really imagine
paper and pen. You imagine submersion.
You imagine only your nose and mouth
peeping out. You imagine candles.
And maybe Agatha Christie's biographer
didn't mean writing with paper and pen.
Maybe he only meant that she thought
while bathing, building the plot
in her head as she soaked.
First Poirot with his fastidious moustaches,
or Miss Marple having tea.
Then the corpse. Then the clues stacked
one by one like wafers of soap,
or like towels, waiting for her to step out
and dry off, to reach only then
for her writing tablet. It's messy,
this business of becoming the novelist.
It's sopping. You have to climb
from the tub, holding your head steady
so the details don't drain away.
You have to dry off your body
which has become merely the vehicle
for getting your head soaked in plot,
in setting and character and perspective.
And then you have to walk from the tub
to the keyboard. You have to sit down.
You have to lower your hands to the keys
because, finally, it's not the bath
but the wriitng that makes the book.