The Process of Writing

Brief update. We are living in a one-level ranch-style house in beautiful Spearfish, South Dakota. As one friend said, it sounds like a place where a writer would live. Well, this writer lives here, and I know for a fact that others do, too. Love this house, love the location. Love the bird drama from my windows - the robin and blue jay fledglings, the starling committee meetings, the occasional deer and rabbit appearances - quite a show outside. The weather here tends toward the alpine, because Spearfish is located in the Black Hills, instead of on the prairie and plains, like Belle Fourche. Spearfish, in fact, holds the record for fastest rise in temperature change in the world. Seriously, look it up. Certain things I miss about Belle Fourche include the rides Bob and I used to take through the gravel roads and the Dairy Queen. Belle's DQ is superior to Spearfish's DQ.  Also, I'm keeping my hairdresser, James.

I lived in Maine for four remarkable months. Bob and I drove back to Mountain Time at the end of April, after a brief stop in paradise (Madison, Wisconsin), which I am beginning to believe is the last outpost in a barren world. Again, back here, it has taken a while for this quiet woman to adjust. Western South Dakota is truly a charmer in so many ways, but if I haven't mentioned it before, and I know that I have, it's a different culture. People here don't whine, which I have honed to a fine art and truly miss. A sign in the Aladdin General Store reads, "No Sniveling". That says it all. This is a snivel-free zone. Noted.

I go for days without talking to anyone except Bob and the animals. Bob is a pretty good conversationalist, and sometimes, the animals answer me. I'm nursing my beloved cat, Jessie, as he travels a dark road toward the great hunting ground in the ether. He suffers from kidney disease and will not recover. We have kept him alive for six months by doing the opposite of what we were told to do. He refused to eat food geared to keeping his kidneys functional, so we're feeding him what he will eat - anything from shrimp to chicken to certain cat foods that we rotate to keep his stomach filled. He's a good guy with a good attitude and I'm happy to have had him for as long as I have. The Wonder Dog is sleeping down in the cellar as I type this. She needs a haircut, but is maintaining, otherwise.

We have had several visitors in the form of human companionship for the month of June. The eldest son of a dear Maine friend dropped in on his own quest across country with his non-girlfriend (they don't like the boyfriend girlfriend terminology - it's too loaded). It was nice to see them, and to see that they are committed to their own life-style. Oh, to be young and idealistic! I hope that they do not lose the glow they demonstrated while they were here. I felt particularly useful guiding them to Wall Drug Store in Wall, South Dakota, for the donuts. Really. These are spectacular donuts. I don't like donuts, but I like these donuts.

After the 'kids' left, we had visits from my adopted brother and dear friend, Michael, who is the most optimistic, enthusiastic, talkative, curious person I know. I loved seeing this world through his eyes. Devil's Tower really grabbed him, as did his tour through the Black Hills. Michael left, two friends arrived from Wall via Washington State. They will return tonight on their way back to the left-handed coast (if you're facing the United States). Bob's siblings and cousins dropped in, as well. I got to flex my vacuum cleaner and meager hostess skills, physical and social muscles I haven't used in a long time.

Well, that's not such a brief update.

What I want to talk about is the process of writing. It occurs to me, particularly after last night, which was pretty sleepless except for the chapter arrangements for the new book that marched through my brain for a few hours, that most of my writing takes place before I sit down to type. I can only speak for myself, but it appears that a lot of essays and advice is available on the act of writing itself: What one needs to do before sitting down before that blank computer screen or picking up the pencil to produce prose longhand, for instance. How one avoids writer's block. What to do when the words don't come.

But no one really talks about the huge amount of time one spends walking around seemingly sane while holding strategy meetings with imaginary people in one's head. For instance, last night I walked the Wonder Dog along Spearfish Creek, smiling and saying hello to occasional passersby, and all the while, I was conversing, arguing, pointing out, and pushing around plots, scenarios, chapter links, character actions, and possible conclusions to the book I am working on. I can only be grateful that those polite walkers didn't want to talk, because I'm not sure I could have escaped the mishmash of my fictional world without spewing gibberish. I am not on the planet very much.

My point to all of this is that although I type for four hours a day, I am working about twelve hours a day on several things having to do with another world or worlds. When I'm really into the work, it's more hours than that. It's a funny - as in odd, unusual, weird - world that is hard to understand unless you're a writer. I could add artist, musician, actor, and so on. But it IS work. Johnny Mercer closed his eyes and reclined on a sofa while composing lyrics. Ann Patchett has written that she stares out of windows a lot (I'm paraphrasing). I know it seems as if I'm here, but I'm not. And it IS productive - just as productive as something more concrete and visible.

I guess I wanted to explain this to all of those who are lucky enough to 'be in life'. That's my phrase for people who take advantage of the present to actually do visually and conscious functional and fun things. If I do not let my imagination take over my life, I cannot happily perform functional and fun things when I AM on the planet. But I digress. Now, lunch, preparation for company, and a dog walk with the Wonder Dog, who is looking at me as if she is bored stupid by whatever I'm doing that doesn't include her. I understand, more than you know. Thanks for understanding back.

She writes because she loves it

My friend, Maxine, and me.

I have been trying to convince my friend, Maxine, to publish her work. She graciously pooh poohs that notion. She writes gorgeous essays, historical pieces and book reviews, but the truth is, she doesn't seem to care whether or not any of it ever appears in print. She doesn't need to establish 'her brand', host a blog, put up a Facebook page or tweet. She hasn't an agent, an editor, a publicist, or a number of readers, or a chart that shows how many 'hits' she's had that day. She doesn't hop onto Amazon.com several times a day to see how her book is selling. She writes because she's compelled to write. She writes when something moves her. She shows it to some people and I feel lucky that she's included me in that group. I like to picture her at her computer, typing her heart out onto the page, sharing memories, living her past even as she takes hold of her present with a zest that defies her reference to herself as an 'old woman'.

I first met Maxine when she sent me an email via my website telling me that she had read my book and loved it and had felt compelled to pen a review/essay on how she felt. Would I like to see it? I said yes, and she sent me the following, which she has given me permission to print here.

red ruby heart in a cold blue sea

As an old woman of 81, I mostly read non-fiction.  Recently I've been re- reading my way through WW II, starting with Walter Lord's Day of Infamy, then on to Craig Shirley's December 1941, while Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two Ocean War patiently waits at the top of the stack of books beside my chair.  I generally buy non-fiction books.  With a dull pencil I scribble barely legible comments in the margins and faintly and crudely underline passages that clutch at my heart and mind, all the while hoping that my abuse of the books won't ruin the reading experience for anyone who might want to borrow them.

Recently, in the Maine Sunday Telegram, I read a review of the red ruby heart in a cold blue sea, a first novel by Morgan Callan Rogers who, by the way, is a native Mainer who grew up in Bath.  I was hooked and immediately called the library to have my name added to the waiting list.

After reading it, I checked out about 30 reviews on Google.  A couple reviewers made less than glowing comments, but the remaining reviews ranged from favorable to rave. Most mentioned that it's a "coming-of-age" story set in a 1960s Maine lobster fishing village where "everyone knows everyone else's business."  Well, there are coming-of-age stories and then there are coming of-age stories.  Morgan Callan Rogers does for Florine and her pals Dottie, Glen and Bud what Herman Raucher did for Hermie and his buddies Oscy and Benjie on Nantucket in the Summer of '42.

With the help of some kind of magic glue, the phrase "sometimes it's personal" has stuck to my brain.  This story is very personal to me because of the setting and descriptive passages and not because of the heroine, who in the words of one reviewer has the reader vacillating between "cheering her on and wanting to slap her upside the head."  The author hooked me on the first page when she wrote of Florine and her mother sitting on the front steps eating ice cream "and watching water wink at them from the harbor at the end of The Point." How many times as a child have I sat on Cummings & Norton's doorstep licking an ice cream cone while watching the water "wink" at me from Moosabec Reach at the end of Underwood's Lane.

Mark Twain once wrote that "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is a really large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning bug and lightning."  Author Craig Shirley gave an excellent example of this when he mentioned that before President Roosevelt gave his six-minute speech on 12/8/41 in which he asked Congress to declare war on Japan, he crossed out one word and substituted another, so "a date that will live in history" became "a date that will live in infamy."  Ah, lightning!

 Morgan Callan Rogers has a knack for using the "right words." She can turn a phrase with the best of them. While I couldn't mark up the library book, I had the good sense to start taking notes on page one and ended up with seven pages of notes by the time I finished reading it.  I have the book on order and when it arrives I shall use a highlighter to carefully mark the passages that had a particular meaning for me.  As for whether the highlighted passages will annoy anyone who borrows the book, I selfishly don't care.  It's personal.

Of all the passages, one moved me most.  "Just before Grand died, Daddy and I were allowed into the emergency unit.  We watched her take her last breath. It rose in a high swell before she settled forever on a calm sea."  At the end of that sentence the book slid out of my hands and the tears began to roll down my face. That was an identical description of my mother's passing.  My tears quickly became a spring freshet and then a full bore crying jag.  I soon realized that I wasn't crying just for the loss of my mother, but also for the loss of the hometown I knew in the 1930s-'40s.  Thomas Wolfe was right. You Can't Go Home Again.  Eventually, peace returned as I realized once again that people, homes and businesses will pass, each in its own season, but the sun shining on Moosabec Reach causing the water to "wink" is eternal.

There was one sentence in the book that bothered me.  In referring to lobsters, Florine's father said, "I got some cripples I was going to have for supper." I assume he was talking about one-claw lobsters which I have always known as "culls."  Is the word "cripples" just used by the characters in the book or is the term used along parts of the Maine coast as a substitute for "culls?"

Because of the shooting angle, the picture on the book jacket doesn't show the lighthouse and distinctive red oil house.  Inside of the back jacket the scene is identified as The Nubble, York, Maine.  Please notice the ledge in the bottom right corner of the photo.  Decades ago I had the embarrassing misfortune of falling overboard at that site while trying to board the tiny skiff in which the lighthouse keeper—my cousin—was attempting to row my husband and me to The Nubble.                          

                                                                                MSM   2/28/12

I loved the time she took to write this moving review, and I wrote her so. When I found out that she lives in South Portland, across the harbor from where I'm staying in Portland, I asked if we might meet for some tea. She suggested Panera Bread, and we met for what became a 'mug up'. What a lovely woman I met! Maxine, a retired teacher, is an active, curious historian and occasional fiction reader who had all kinds of questions for me regarding the book, which I hoped I answered. She also loaned me The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, a book my agent had mentioned a couple of years ago. She also lent me a DVD of The Summer of 42, which I saw decades ago and had forgotten about, until Maxine pointed out that the landscape reminded her a bit of what The Point might look like.

To stumble out of a room after three years, the stardust of imagination still tinting the work-a-day world, to submit to the harsh hands of reality a manuscript forged out of the secret places in the heart, to know that someone has read the resulting book and has been touched in some way, sends a strong signal to me that the universe approves of my attempts to belong to something larger than myself.  It's such a gift. I loved Maxine's generosity in letting me know that what I wrote was important to her. It meant the world to me.

I head back to South Dakota next week, and I wanted to meet up with Maxine to return the book and the DVD before that happened. So, back I went to Panera, which will be forever a part of Maxine. We had tea, chatted a bit, and had our picture taken together. And, she gifted me a mean date and nut cake that has made Bob and me happy this week. It's also made my father and two other friends pleased, as well. I leave the east for the west, filled with dates, nuts, cake, and thanks to Maxine, who writes because she's moved to do it.  I hope that our paths cross, again. 

Maxine's date and nut cake. Sublime when topped with cream cheese.

     

The Not-So-Stuffy Book Club

Red Ruby Heart underneath the lights.

I love book clubs, as I mentioned in the last post, because, for the most part, people have read the book and I am pleased, as an author, to be able to discuss the book in more detail. I have read in a home where I sat on a wooden chair in front of where the big screen television usually comes down and read and spoke to participants seated in big red chairs looking down at me - sort of the Supreme Court of book club discussions. I have driven to Alna, Maine to meet with a former co-worker and her group of friends in a gracious home by a beautiful hearth, then taken my leave to drive home - an hour away - to Portland under the watchful eye of a full moon. One of my dearest friends, Becky, held three book clubs - each with its own personality. All of them added up to extraordinary experiences.

I've gone into a middle school to meet with teachers after school, to the 4th floor of a condominium where one of the women began crying over Carlie's disappearance and wanted comfort  and an explanation from me regarding my decisions as Carlie's creator. (It's fiction, folks.) Discussion and questions - and reactions -  indicate to me that I, as a writer, have created a world real enough to care about. And that tells me that I've done my job, for the most part. I've met an amazing group of people, and I feel lucky to have been invited into their homes and hearts.

Decoration for book club meeting at Kathy Leighton's house.

Steamed mussels with garlic and wine, prepared by Brian.

But I wanted to spotlight one book club, because the women in this group should be noted for their spirt, their devotion to keeping their book club alive - for ten years and counting - in many ways, and because it was so damn fun to be a part of the group for one night. Called the Not-So-Stuffy-Bookclub, the night was held at the home of Kathy Leighton, as suggested by her friend, Laura, via my very good friend and sister-of-the-heart, Charlotte Brown. Kathy is tiny and full of light and energy, and the friends that attended this special night were all women of substance and laughter, all Florine's type of women - in life. Most of them are mothers and some are grandmothers. All of them are professionals and some are retired. They are great women.

Amazing blueberry cake, made by Kathy Leighton.

What I want to say is, Thank you, Kathy Leighton.
She (with some help from her husband, Brian, and their dog, Sandy) cooked seafood, supplied wine, and decorated the table with red ruby hearts and stars. This was such a wonderful thing to do - so creative and thoughtful. If this wasn't enough, she also had Brian set off fire crackers at an un-timed moment during the evening (a fire cracker raid is a crucial early part of the book). We sat around a large table with lit candles and discussed the book, and we talked about their lives and the book club, which celebrates their January meeting with a Yankee swap, wherein a gift that they may have received that doesn't suit them is put up for swap. They dress up in costume for some books. They live whatever they are reading in some special way. And my book was no exception to them. They had some very good questions and some observations that should have occurred to me, that challenged me as the author of the book to pay more attention to small details (details that I thought I had covered). I felt so welcomed and part of their experience. It was a rare and unexpected, delightful evening.

Sandy (Sandra when she's bad), the golden retriever.

It took me three years to write the book, working evenings after a full-time job, working weekend mornings, and whenever I found a block of time that I could sit down and enter Florine's world. I gave away my television set. I drew back from many friends and acquaintances. Some friends were lost along the way, some were gained. The world spun and changed even as I stopped time for this little, fictional world where so much happened, where so much mattered.  I came out of this experience with a book, feeling as if I'd been gone for quite some time. I re-entered the world a changed person, a little shaky. I fell in love and moved away to a foreign country (You cannot tell me that southern Maine and South Dakota are in the same country.) I left my little crooked house on my little street in East Bayside, Portland, and I left my full and fabulous life to follow my honey. There, among the plains and the prairie, I've been trying to regain my footing. Shortly after I moved, the book was published, and has been published, thus far, in four languages. None of it seems real, at times. It's been joyful, but unsettling. I've had to resort to pepto-bismal tablets on nights that I read. My introverted nature has had to step it up a notch, into some semblance of extroversion that I can exhibit in short bursts. I've had to learn new skills and develop an insight into the reasons why I make up other worlds, at all.

But that night, in Kathy Leighton's home, I felt, well, vindicated for my choices. I love talking about my work. I love talking about what I'm passionate about, what I do best. I felt grounded in their belief in my work and in my words. I felt welcome and wrapped up in their warmth, their humor, and in their full lives.

Forsythia, West End, Portland, Maine, April 12, 2012.

Bob has arrived in Portland and spring is proceeding along, after a languorous, false start. It's chilly, but blooms are touching the landscape with bursts of color - forsythia and hyacinths and scilla (it's great to get to say these words once a year). Again, with the changes. Again, with the moving back to South Dakota and the Black Hills. Unlike last time I moved, I am going forward with a full and grateful heart, anxious to start the next chapter. We're moving into a rental house in Spearfish, where I will have a small room with a door to close. When that door closes, I will enter other worlds, go to that lonely place that exists outside of every day conversations and shy of relationships. I will leave that room changed, every day.

I am humbled by those who have opened their worlds to me and held my girl and her world in their hearts, and let me know that it has meant something to them.

Thank you.

The "Not-So-Stuffy" Book Club. Kathy Leighton, the hostess, to the left.

Leap Year

Signing at Longfellow Books, Portland, Maine. Photo by Berry Manter.

This day doesn't exist for the next three years, so it's important to take advantage of that fact and celebrate its appearance. It's a gray day in Maine. It's about to snow. But because it's tardy and after-the-fact, it won't last long, despite predictions of several inches of fluff and nonsense. It's as if winter overslept and woke up with a jolt, gasping, "Crap. I forgot to snow. Gotta get cracking."

So does anything I say or do today really count as my history, if this day doesn't exist three out of four times? Or is my entire history only valid during Leap Year?

Enough. The book is out, and I'm learning about readings, signings, and general marketing. I am grateful for so many things in my life, so many skills that I developed as I bumbled along without a clue. Seriously, I've never through, well, I'll do this, which will lead to this, and this, and finally, here I am, at my goal. Which was? To write a novel and to have it published. Although, frankly, that was a dream. So, what does one do when one has their dream come true, and how does that dream manifest itself in the reality of traveling to bookstores and libraries, and to book groups, and in talking with reporters?

The last bit about reporters, I'll tackle first. In a way, I'm in my element when talking to reporters, because I was one for several years. I was a terrible reporter because I'm naturally shy. Sometimes, neurotically shy. I'm also a Yankee, which means that I don't stick my nose into anyone's business. Asking questions makes me feel as if I'm Mrs. Krebs's cousin, peeking into her neighbor's windows to see if I can catch anyone wandering around in their underwear or doing something that could be construed as gossip-worthy. Anyway, I did learn how to answer questions, and how to edit myself, and to figure out what people are really asking, and so on. I enjoy interviews, actually, which surprises me. And it isn't as if what I'm doing is controversial and I have to defend myself. I'm a little middle-aged lady from Maine who wrote a book that appears to be doing well.

My sister and I at the book launch of the book, at the University of Southern Maine Bookstore.
Thanks to Barbara Kelly and staff. From the Maine Sunday Telegram. Photo by Judith Alessi O'Brien.  

Bookstores - oh how I love them. Independent bookstores that have survived the onslaught of box stores and seem to be thriving, in most cases. University of Southern Maine Bookstore, Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine, Gibson's Books in Concord, New Hampshire, Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, Maine - and several more that I will be reading and signing at this summer, when I'll be back to cover the areas in Maine that are largely silent, except for the hardy residents that tough it out during this time of year. I acted for several years, so I have some experience in being in front of small and larger groups. I'm developing a reading persona. This persona speaks louder than normal (and singing helped me develop my diaphragm so that I can project), remembers to look at as many people as I can while reading, to bring out a little of each character, and to respect the pauses. This persona understands that smaller crowds have come out to hear the reading and are JUST as important as a larger group. A friend told me a story about Stephen King. When Carrie first came out, she put together an event for him. Seven people showed up, all family. Who shows up for a reading and how many is pretty much random. And each event at each store is carefully planned and wildly appreciated by the author. The potential is there to reach one person who needed to be reached in that minute, in that hour. You never know.

Book groups. I adore book groups. One, people have purchased and read the book and it can be discussed freely and openly, because there are no 'spoilers' that might give away too much during a reading. Discussions about why this or what that can take place without fear of taking up too much time. And there's usually wine and food. Which are good things Although, a fellow author and dear friend recently said that one should refrain from drinking on the job. It depends on how many friends are in the group in question, I think. One glass of wine generally puts me over the edge (I'm a cheap date) so that's actually really valid...The last time I was in Deadwood, South Dakota - well, what happens in Deadwood stays in Deadwood, I guess. Only the Bobster knows for sure what happened, and he maintains discretion in matters like this, which is one reason I adore Bob more than book groups.

The Patten Free Library in Bath, Maine. The statue in the pond is called Spirit of the Sea, by William Zorach. 

Libraries. I worked in a wonderful library - The Patten Free Library in Bath, Maine - for seven years. It changed my life. I was hired through a CETA program to be an assistant for a Reading is Fundamental program. Hired by a fiery, feisty, fierce little woman named Barbara King, who saw through my pathological shyness and general insecurity and believed in me enough to take me on. I will be grateful to her, all my life. I walked into a sanctuary almost every day and was embraced by books idling on the children's shelves and in the adult stacks. One day, I must have whispered, I will write a book that will be shelved in these stacks. People will take it out, hopefully enjoy it, and perhaps it will hold as much meaning for them as my special books did and still do for me. Tonight, I am going back to that library. Tonight, which only happens once every four years, I will read words I have written, inspired by a life I lived back in that small city and by the mix of characters I both loved and dealt with on a daily basis. Tonight, I will come home and I can only hope that they will take me in.

60

Sunrise, Atlantic Ocean, East Coast. Photo copyright, Shannon Thorne. Simply Shannon

I arrived via Cesarean, delivered by a doctor named G.W. Twaddle, on January 12, 1952. That makes me 60 years old today. I am not sure of the fate of Dr. Twaddle, but I am thinking he may have departed this mortal coil in search of a more dignified name. Of course, no matter what his name, I am grateful for his help and his knowledge on how to deliver skinny, blue-tinged babies.

Sixty. I 'made it' to 60, as opposed to 'reaching' 50. If I'm lucky and lose about 20 pounds, I may 'hit' 70. After that, anything is fair game. My parents are both 84. That's remarkable. And they've been married 61, going on 62, years.

I don't feel physically different than I did yesterday, when I was 59, which somehow sounds like leftover age-gravy ready to be thrown out, anyway. Sixty actually sounds kind of perky, and I like the 'x' in the word. Words with the letter x in them are a little mysterious. Sphinx. Vortex. Xanadu. Lynx. Excalibur. Excuses. Excommunicate. Okay, some of them are mysterious. The others are based on ancient languages that exalted the 'x'. 

Pemaquid Point, Maine - Robert Clements Photo

It's storming outside today. I am living in a small apartment in the West End of Portland, Maine, looking out at the long-last-it's-freakin'-here snow and thinking about shoveling the car out. I will probably put this off for a long time. I wanted peace and quiet for my 'big' day, and I have it. Later, I will watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs and drink some red wine and think about angels.

Robert left a little over a week ago, headed for the prairie via airplane. I talk to him about four times daily on the phone, but it's not the same. He sent me beautiful roses for my birthday. They sit in the sink, staining the porcelain a brilliant scarlet, feathery leaves softening their thorns like tender, rail-thin fingers. I am wondering about vases, and cuttings, and rejoicing because although I miss the two flower-eating cats that prowl the gallery in Belle Fourche, they will not tear, nor attack the roses, stems, leaves, or anything connected with them. Rua, the dog, is not interested in roses, and Jessie, my beloved street cat, is sleeping, dodging the bullet of his terminally failing kidneys for a little while, at least. I miss the prairie, my partner, and the quiet. But I also love it here. Resources are available. There are ridiculous choices in fancy grocery stores. Restaurants. Current movies. The ocean. My family and East Coast friends.

Me in front of Pemaquid Lighthouse. Photo by Robert Clements

No matter where I am, Life is about to change, significantly. My book is being released in a couple of weeks. I will be reviewed, interviewed, viewed, and eschewed for about fifteen minutes. I have readings set up, will be giving at least one lecture, maybe two, have book club commitments, and will be applying for a fellowship at Breadloaf, thanks to the wonderful recommendation to them by someone who is incredibly kind to me. To say that I am reeling from all of this attention is a small thing. To say that I am grateful for the amazing support of people from all parts of my life, is a given. I am grateful, excited, and overwhelmed. To have created something that most people that read it (not all - see reviews. Oh well...) seem to like or even love, and something that someone will read after I have 'hit' seventy, and then, well why not - eighty and beyond - and started down the long, cane-riddled, blue-permed path to my eventual demise, gives meaning to me for why I existed at all. This is my paged-child, my eldest, my first-born. I will enjoy every minute of what will be happening, albeit quietly, because I am a Maine girl, and my mother would have my hide were I to get stuck on myself.

Pemaquid, Maine, January 2012. Photo by Robert Clements

So, if you see me acting dazed, understand that I have to grasp it all. I have to understand what it means. Process it. Shape a new paradigm for life. Punch-list the important things, and save the rest for later. Transmogrify (where is Hobbs when I need him most - love, Calvin). I am excited, exuberant, excellent, and teetering on the fact that something extraordinary has happened. I will take every next experience as it comes, and when it all becomes too much, I will go to the ocean to examine my smallness against the universe. I will think about the prairie sky and the grasses that roll on forever, and I will say to myself, "Sixty. Hmmm. You are sooooo young, under the sky and in front of the sea.  What's that sound? Are the waves laughing at me? Is the sky snorting? Is the grass giggling?"   Then it's all good. It's as it should be. And I'm humbled and happy that I was able to contribute a small part to the universal cha cha. Everyone...keep dancing.

Thank you

In about two weeks, I will be traveling east for four months. My book, Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea, will be published on January 23rd, 2012, eleven days after I turn 60 years old. It promises to be an eventful year with wide, loopy, learning curves. Even as Red Ruby Heart is published, I am writing the sequel, and will be grateful to have the privacy and comfort of an upstairs apartment in the West End of Portland, Maine, courtesy of two irreplaceable and beloved friends. Bob will travel east with me and the little dog, stay for about two weeks, then travel back to the gallery. I will visit him in February, then return to Maine. I look forward to seeing dear friends and family, but I will miss Bob very much.  

As I indicated in the last blog, I do love western South Dakota. Every coyote sighting, every deer encounter, every time I see a hawk or an eagle, or drive the nearly deserted roads through a slice of Wyoming or to Piedmont to horseback ride badly, I am grateful for the Black Hills, for the prairie, and for the sky. When I was a child, I think that this is the landscape I imagined living in. I loved babysitting my five wild cousins in the nearby farming community of Woolwich, where I rambled fields and woods, not as myself, but as a creature fueled by imagination. I may have come by it naturally. My great-grandmother, Katherine (Kate) Morse Rogers lived on a farm in Phippsburg, Maine. She died the year I was born, and I'm told that I look very much like her. She, too, loved horses and the country. I think about her from time to time and wonder if I may have taken on some of her attributes. At any rate, I will miss being here, although not being here during the relentless howl of the wind may be an okay thing.

The patient, gentle Tigger.

I have people here, now, that I will miss. Friends I've made. A writing group that amazes me with its warmth and kindness, and a knitting circle that makes me giggle!  I will miss my friend, Meg, who is solid, feisty, and wise, and my friend, Jenny, who personifies everything joyful. Andi, who took it upon herself to write a long, welcoming email to a lonely eastern woman, thus assuring her passage into the ladies who lunch (well, okay, we drive about 50 miles a shot to do it, but hey...) group. Judi is my riding instructor, and patiently teaches me as she watches me 'ride' the dauntless Tigger, a bay thoroughbred/quarter horse with the temperment and manners of a hoofed saint. I worked at the Tri-State Museum when I first arrived in Belle, and the kindness of the museum director, Rochelle, and my co-worker, DeEtte, were essential to making me feel welcome. I am especially grateful to the Bearlodge Writer's Group (www.bearlodgewriters.com) in Sundance, Wyoming. I am honored to be amongst these folks, who operate with encouragement and wisdom, and a generous eye to what works and might be better in each piece of work that we peruse.

It has taken me a while to understand the heart of this country, and I'm still learning about it. Our politics are mostly, very different. Most of the folks I've met belong to a church and that organization is important to their lives and to who they are. My spiritual side is based on the sky and the earth, and with what I believe to be godlike, which, being intangible to me, cannot be explained. I live in the middle of American history, not as it was taught to me, but learning how it really was and is. Bob likes to say of those of us who saw the west from our living rooms in front of the television (Ah, Little Joe. Ah, Heath and Nick. Ah, The Wild, Wild West), "The West. As it never was." I am living the West, and it is what it is.

I've often felt superfluous in South Dakota, that odd woman who walks her dog at various times during the day. Why isn't she working? Who is she? She's not from around here. Well, that's a bit of a comeuppance for a small-town woman from Maine, who used to ask the same questions of new people, and who used to think the same things of them. But I've asked myself the same questions of the residents, here. Who are these people? What makes them tick? Which zipperheaded ancestor dragged their family onto the plains (fueled by eastern propaganda that promised some kind of paradise) and settled in a flat-lined sea of grass, building a life with tools mainly kept in working order by a stubborn, relentless drive to succeed and settle and to make a home here?

Many of the answers to these questions and more have been found in the above-photographed pile of books. It started almost as soon as I moved here. My book club back in Portland, Maine read Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, and I empathised with the plight of an eastern drawing-room woman who fell in love with a western engineer and lived in mining camps, much to her dismay. I vowed not to regret my life, nor my decision. Meg suggested I re-read the Little House on the Prairie series, and I have, and found them more profound in a very simple way. I read Buffalo for the Broken Heart by Dan O'Brien, and Great Plains and On the Rez by Ian Frazier, another outsider fascinated by this place. I read The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin and felt sorrow and horror for the loss of lives due to the bibilically-proportioned weather. 

But I really began to 'get' South Dakotans and the people of these plains when I read Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains by Hermosa rancher Linda Hasslestrom. It's one of the most fascinating reads ever. She keeps a 365-day diary of her life on the ranch, and every entry is filled with details of her work, her thoughts on being a rancher, and weather, lots of weather. Pat Frolander (currently the Poet Laureate of Wyoming), penned a book of poems called Married Into It. She, like me, is an outlander who has adapted to her world here. Gaydell Collier's recently released Just Beyond Harmony is another good read by a woman born in the east, but who thought west. I also loved Horizontal Lines: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere by Debra Marquart - a North Dakota native, blues singer, wild child turned professor, and Dakota: A Spiritual Geography by Kathleen Norris. 

These books, and the people I've met, and the land, this hard-assed, clear-eyed, no apologies land, have sustained me for the time I've been here. I look forward to my return, after the hard winds have died down, and the spring begins to crack open the hardpan and the plants begin their journeys. Not everything blooms here, but that which does, is hardy.

Prairie Smoke. Photo by Robert Clements

Sheep Mountain

Sheep Mountain, in the southern unit of the Badlands. Photo by Robert Clements.

For some reason, well, for the reason that I'm technically challenged, I find it hard to get onto the blog lately. Not because I have nothing to say, or share, or blather on about, but because I can't match up emails to passwords. Today, I did it. I wrote the combination down - I feel like a safe cracker - and now I hope I will have more luck.

But I've been anxious to get onto the blog, because some extraordinary shifts have happened to me since I've come back and settled in for a spell. They have to do with larger things than me. With understanding that something within me responds to something outside of me in unconscious ways. As a writer, I know this, because I make up characters that surprise me every day with who they become. But this is different. This is my unconscious reacting on and responding to the person that I am. It includes the writer and the animal lover, and the partner and sister and daughter and friend and the thousands of widgets that make up the whole board of morganopoly that is me.

Sheep Mountain from another view. Robert Clements Photo.

All of this occurred to me after Bob and I visited Sheep Mountain, which is located in the South Unit of the Badlands. It's not the 'popular' tourist destination, which is scenically stunning and colorful and located near Wall. Sheep Mountain is a place unto itself. If it were a setting for a movie, it would be shown in the part when the heroine has lost her horse, or her mind, and is wandering through canyons of upthrust rock underneath a cloudless, pitiless blue sky that stretches across forever. It is an ancient, ancient, place. That timelessness gives it the power that it has. It is beautiful, yes, but it is not pretty in any sense that is obvious. This place has been there, done that, and came back with the geological, anthropological, archeological, and mythological teeshirt. 

Teeth in the ground. RC photo

We drove for two hours from Wall to get there. We saw a bobcat along the way and the sky and prairie and hills that are part of this Dakota. We photographed rows of tiny hoodoos - rock mushrooms that happen when the stone underneath a plate on top of it crumbles. We drove up powdery hills onto a high plain and gazed at vast gulches of rock teeth sticking up from the rock gum that is the ground. It was dazzling. Colorless. Bone white and stark. So stark. While Bob took photos, I came close to the edge of the world to look down and across, and up to the sky. The combination of starkness, the silence, the vivid blue, the shadows, and the geological perspective made me humble. Being an introvert, I couldn't voice what I felt, and I don't think I should have, anyway. It's never good to try to describe something that is beyond description.

We drove through part of Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation, then up to Hermosa and through Rapid City to get home, eventually. And we settled in for the night. Or so I thought. But my mind had wrapped itself around the fact that, yes Virginia, there ARE things bigger and older and greater than you, and it surprised me with vivid, vivid dreams wherein I was looking for shelter, any shelter, and there wasn't any to be found. And I woke up, changed.

To fall in love with a person, or with a place, it is important to demystify it. Only when you see its true nature - like those barenaked rocks and the undaunted sky above it all - can you decide whether or not to commit to it. So, it's with great surprise that I find myself in love with where I live. It only took about a year and a half, but I can say, for sure that I love this place. I think Sheep Mountain gave me a vision (oh don't get all moogly for heaven sakes, I'm still as Yankee, dry-witted, and practical as ever) and with that vision, the gift of itself. It caught me with my pyschic drawers down, which is something that has never happened to me before. 

Bob Dylan sang, "You've got to serve somebody." Well, yeah, I guess you do. As yet, what I serve is nameless, but I recognize its power. Maybe it's the earth or the sky, or both. Maybe it's the willingness to even contemplate it. Maybe it's understanding that the universe spins itself into wild dances of unbridled rapture and sorrow, and that I can either stand by the sidelines and watch, or I can choose to be part of it all. All I know is that, ever since I've had that experience, joy has re-entered my life, and I hope that it unpacks its belongings and sticks around for a while. 

Tilted road to the sky. Photo by Robert Clements.