Author Archives

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P.S. more on the creative spirit

91LlW46QU-LMichelle’s story about meeting her creative spirit was so funny and specific that I forgot until this morning that the first time I ran across this exercise it was in a book by Julia Cameron called The Artist’s Way. In all three of her artist’s way books Cameron stresses the importance of the ‘artist’s date’ – in which you take your inner artist (or creative child) out on a date, pay attention to them (her, him, or it), and do something they’d like to do. Because the date is for your inner artist/child/muse (or in Michelle’s case, for Bobo), you go ‘alone’, to make sure you’re paying attention and listening to your creative spirit instead of to a human companion. (Cameron writes that one of her favorite artist dates was a clock store in NYC.)

UnknownLynda Barry, in her book of exercises and thoughts on creativity What It Is, also talks about writing and making visual art, what can stop you, or mess with you, and what can help you get to that place where you’re in touch with … I want to call it primal creativity – which, in Barry’s book of words and pictures sometimes appears as a monkey (the medieval symbol for the artist) and sometimes as a childlike-looking octopus…a wide-eyed blob with legs, swimming in the deep.

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Imagining hope, the creative spirit

From my friend Michelle Lewis Kim, about a suggestion from her writing teacher that put her in touch with a hope-restorer:

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the blue stellar blob of Omega Centauri, the largest globular star cluster in the Milky Way

One day when I was talking with my writing teacher about how hard it can be for me to write, she said, “Maybe you need to talk to your creative spirit, find out what it wants to do.” As she was saying this, I felt like someone was floating in the air behind me. I knew right away that he was a blue blob and his name was Bobo. As my writing teacher was saying, “…. you know, see if it wants to go on an outing or something,” Bobo started bobbing up and down, and then zooming in circles around me.

The next morning Bobo picked out my outfit (an orange poofy skirt with sparkly tights, two items I have never put together before), and directed me on how to apply makeup (no eye makeup, and VERY BRIGHT lipstick). Then off we went, to take the bus on an adventure. We ended up in Fremont at a cake shop – yum.

In the bus on the way home I thought about our day, and how much fun I’d had with Bobo, and the way I tend to put my Creative Spirit aside in the name of accomplishment and organization. This train of thought gave me an idea for a children’s book. I wrote it as soon as I got home, with Bobo at my shoulder. (And I’ve roped my fourteen year-old nephew into illustrating it with me, giving me a chance to know him better, too.)

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Imagining hope, the afterlife

My friend Pat Fero sent a suggestion for imagining hope – two books by Eben Alexander, MD, with Ptolemy Tompkins, entitled Proof of Heaven and The Map of Heaven. She calls them “the most positive books I’ve read in years.”

DownloadedFileTurns out that the first one is a best seller and a focus of heated debate. For anyone else who hasn’t come across them: the books are about the author’s near-death experience and what he extrapolated, as a neurologist, from it. Before Dr. Alexander’s coma from a brain infection, he defined himself as a scientific materialist; now he believes that what happened to him during his seven-day coma actually occurred in another dimension, which he calls the afterlife.

From what I’ve been able to gather Alexander is trying to prove that near death experiences (NDEs) can give scientific evidence that consciousness exists beyond the physical life of the brain (in NDEs that occur when the brain is no longer functioning). In other words, he believes that even after the physical self dies consciousness continues in another realm, one that he is calling heaven. And guess what? He’s drawing a lot of fire.

A book review by Patricia Pearson in The Daily Beast notes that the arguments for and against Alexander’s books are part of “a radically fractured discourse. For materialists, it goes without saying that Eben Alexander will lose you at hello.” At a talk by Alexander she also notes that the part of the audience that listens to him with interest instead of skepticism “cross[es] every demographic line you can name. They aren’t the Christian right. They aren’t the “wishful” grieving. They aren’t some special group of American Stupid. They include scientists and doctors . . . philosophers, and journalists, and engineers, and musicians. They just happen to have encountered something singular and startling, not materially explicable—which we might once have called an intimation of the Divine.”

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Imagining hope, the writing exercise

Been telling friends about this writing exercise from Tristine Rainer’s book, Your Life as Story: Writing the New Autobiography, but the exercise was actually put together by another author and memoir-writing teacher, Deena Metzger, along with a student in one of her classes. In DownloadedFileWriting for Your Life, Metzger recounts how this student had had such a barren upbringing (father dead, mother an alcoholic), that she felt she had no history, nothing to write about. Metzger suggested she write about an aunt of hers, an artist who lived in Manhattan, imagining whatever she didn’t know (which was nearly everything). Instead of simply making a portrait of her aunt, the student ended up writing an entire imaginary history, in which the aunt became her friend and mentor, and took her to live with her in NYC. According to Metzger, the student writer was transformed; she had changed how she felt in the present by creating a new past for herself.

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Imagining hope, the mushrooms

After making the short list of books (that kept getting longer) it seemed like a good idea to keep on imagining hope. Here’s a link to an interview with Paul Stamets, mycologist, biodiversity advocate, and author of Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Save the World. Stamets found that mushrooms act as a filtration system and is researching their role in undoing ecological damage such as soil and water pollution, as well as their medicinal properties. For a futuristic, fictional interpretation of what’s in Stamets’s (scientific) book, see Nancy Farmer‘s novel The Lord of Opium.

 

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Imagining hope, the books

imagesBoth Ursula Le Guin and Diana Wynne Jones have said that “writers of the imagination” can inspire hope as they imagine alternatives to destruction and despair…Marina Warner said something similar in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, and probably so have plenty of other people. In honor of the sun moving into Sagittarius, the sign of optimism, what follows is a short, random list of hope-inspiring books and/or worlds, that offer alternative solutions to a number of things:

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, Always Coming Home, The Telling, Tehanu, Dancing on the Edge of the World, etc. (science fiction and literary criticism)

Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle, Fire and Hemlock, Black Maria, The Dalemark Quartet, long story short, pretty much everything (fantasy)

Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (essays about the classic romantic comedies — mostly starring Cary Grant, often with Katharine Hepburn.)

Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (using anthropology, literary criticism, fairytales, and the kitchen sink, Hyde looks at what it means to be an artist, healer, teacher, or anyone else whose work is based on the gift, living in a money economy.)

Isabel Allende, Eva Luna (magical realism, the story of a girl who is born a servant and becomes a writer)

Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (written in 1902, a scientist’s alternative to social Darwinism)

Emma Goldman, Living My Life (“If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution.”)(autobiography of an anarchist)

Terry Pratchett, Nation, Going Postal, A Monstrous Regiment, Witches Abroad, A Hat Full of Sky, etc., etc. (fantasy)

Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood for Our Time (essays about work with heart)

Carolyn See, The Handyman, Golden Days, There Will Never Be Another You (fiction: in which many of her protagonists fight despair with hoping outside the box)

Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own (the journal of a pioneer of lucid dreaming in 1920s London)

Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucky Strike (science fiction novella; alternate history of Hiroshima and the atom bomb)

Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark (essays) and The Fifth Sacred Thing (fantasy, a future California where San Francisco is run by little old ladies and Wiccans; L.A. is the evil empire where those who own the water run everything)

Nancy Farmer, A Girl Named Disaster, The House of the Scorpion (fantasy and science fiction: an 11-year old girl in Mozambique runs away from an arranged marriage, survives with the help of animals and spirits; the early life of the boy who is a clone of a 140-year old drug lord in a land called Opium, in what is now Arizona)

Francisco X. Stork, Marcelo and the Real World (fiction: Marcelo lives in a treehouse behind his family’s home; he hears inner music and is happiest working with the Haflinger ponies at his special school; what happens when his father puts him to work at his corporate law office for the summer so he can get some experience in the real world.)

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being (fiction: a Japanese-American girl named Nao is the time being; so is the woman named Ruth who reads Nao’s diary when she finds it on a beach in Vancouver; so is Nao’s great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun)

Robertson Davies, Fifth Business, World of Wonders (fiction: see earlier post)

Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night (mystery featuring Lord Peter Wimsey: set in a fictional women’s college at Oxford in 1935, the theme is women’s education, equality between sexes, and the course of true love)

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (fiction, or a very strange roman a clef: the Devil comes to 1920s Moscow — where no one believes in him — except a woman named Margarita and a nameless writer who was driven crazy when his novel about Pontius Pilate was ridiculed by the powers that be. This book was banned in the USSR for 30 years, censored for even longer, and Bulgakov officially known as “a slanderer of Soviet reality”.)

Doris Lessing, The Four-gated City, particularly the appendix, where she veers into an s.f. future (fiction, the fifth novel in her Martha Quest series, roman a clef)

Sheri Tepper, The Margarets, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, The Fresco, The Family Tree, Beauty etc. etc. (science fiction and fantasy, focused on gender and environmental issues, funny and sometimes sad)

Eleanor Arnason, Changing Women (science fiction: a group of anthropologists from a reclaimed earth land on a planet inhabited by matriarchal ‘fur-people’)

 

 

 

 

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Ursula Le Guin at the National Book Awards

imagesI was thinking about tricksters and detectives when a friend of mine sent me this link to Ursula Le Guin’s acceptance speech at the National Book Awards. In about six minutes, she politely (well, she speaks softly and she is a little old lady — and she can make a shrug and a half-smile go the distance) lambasts the publishing industry, and points to where their bums are hanging out. She begins by accepting her award in the name of her family and agents, but then goes on to accept in the name of all those “writers of the imagination” who, for the past 50 years, watched the big awards go to “the so-called realists“.

Le Guin (aka Grandmother Coyote) goes on to say that she thinks hard times are upon us, when we need writers “who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being…and even imagine grounds for hope. We will need the writers who remember freedom, the poets and visionaries…the realists of a larger reality.” (italics mine)

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Watching the detective/scene from The Mentalist

81U-69SPGLL._SL1500_Or: what good writing can do. In The Mentalist Season Six, episode 5, right when things are heating up in the hunt for the serial killer Red John, there’s this little scene between agents Cho and Rigsby, that, for my money, is the best thing in the episode. They’re taking a break to sit down and eat big bowls of fruit that Rigsby has bought for them from a street vendor.

Rigsby: [I’m] starving. Guess you burn a lot of calories, being a newlywed.

Cho: We’re not having this conversation.

R: It’s amazing. You’d think that marriage would cool things off, but for us, it’s just the opposite.

C: Please stop talking.

R: You know, I think I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Every morning when I wake up next to her, and every night when we go to bed together, I just think, ‘Wow.’ I’m the luckiest man in the world, you know?

C: I just lost my appetite.

R: So I want to say thank you, cause you were the one who made me take the risk.

C: I’m starting to regret it.

R: No, you’re a good friend, and I owe you. I’m going to find you somebody to love.

C: No, you’re not.

R: Yes I am. Trust me, there is no point in going through life alone….Are you really not going to eat that?

Cho passes Rigsby his bowl of fruit. Rigsby begins to eat.

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happy to be here, in Somerville, MA

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left field in Foss Park

Somerville, MA: Long story short, even being back when I’m sick with something vile I picked up on the airplane is magical. The place is. I think it always was, even though at first I couldn’t take all the sarcasm (why does everyone have to be so mean?). Then I got used to it, then I realized that for someone like me, being criticized by the right person in the right way (with humor and affection but no artificial sweetening) was the only way I could take a compliment. From left field.

Also, I can swear here, without consequences. I can say ‘fuck’ twice in a sentence, meaninglessly, and no one hears it, not even me.

Then there’s the way the light hits, especially at this time of year when the trees have turned. Saw a tiny Japanese maple in someone’s front yard yesterday, all its scarlet leaves quivering when there was no wind anywhere else, like it was about to take flight.