Talking With The Dead

All Hallows Eve is tonight; the spooks and demons, witches and goblins will have their night. Tomorrow is All Saints Day. And then it's Day Of The Dead. They say that this time of year, the veil is thin and it’s easier to pass back and forth between the worlds. It’s a good time to make amends, to ask forgiveness, to make peace with the past, to remember loved ones who have gone before us and to give thanks to all the souls whose shoulders we stand on.

Some people like to create a small altar to honor and remember their loved ones who have crossed over; some photographs, a little food, a piece of jewelry, maybe some flowers. Every year SOMARTS presents a Day Of The Dead exhibit, which includes many sensual and provocative altars by members of the arts community. This four minute video will give you a taste:

For more stunning images, go to:

http://www.somarts.org/exhibitions/day-of-the-dead/ and click on PHOTOS to see this year’s offering.

I had started out thinking I would bring this post around to antagonists—to how death is the ultimate antagonist, always just over our shoulder, waiting to put an end to all of our happy plans. It’s not an antagonist you can defeat, but like all great antagonists, it can force us to be our own best self. Death’s constant presence can remind us to live our lives fully and richly. That’s all I’m going to say for now—for more on antagonists, be sure to read Sarah Wones Tomp's post Empathy For The Enemy (with invaluable links!) at Writing On The Sidewalk at:

http://writingonthesidewalk.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/empathy-for-the-enemy/

Take Good Care,

Sharry

A San Francisco Landscape: Infinite City Revisited from 10/2/14

In the September 24, 2014 interview with Catherine Linka, she talked about how landscape is more than the physical and geographical aspects of an area—that it’s as much about the cultural and psychological make-up of a community. I couldn’t agree more.

This topic has lingered with me as I’ve pondered the cultural and psychological landscape of San Francisco’s unique, distinctive and diverse community. What is our cultural and psychological makeup?

Map by Paz De La Calzada

When people think of San Francisco, they think; liberal, left coast, tolerant, bohemian, weird, multicultural, QUILTBAG (thank you Catherine for introducing me to the correct term replacing LBGT) yuppie, old money, new money, fog, cold summers, steep hills, earthquakes, Victorian architecture, café society, high cost of living. We are home to the beat poets, topless clubs, Summer of Love, The Bohemian Club, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Those Darn Accordions,  The Flaming Groovies,  Twitter, Yelp, Pinterest, Mozella, Craigslist, Airbnb, Dashiell Hammett, Lemony Snicket, Mark Di Suvero, Richard Serra and Benny Bufano. (To name just a few.)

Thinking about all of this also brought to mind another writer and an atlas—a specific and interpretive atlas of San Francisco compiled and written by Rebecca Solnit, published in 2010 by University of California Press, called Infinite City—a San Francisco Atlas.

Listen to what Solnit has to say about the concept of geography and place in her prologue and introduction:

Places are leaky containers. They always refer beyond themselves, whether island or mainland, and can be imagined in various scales, from the drama of a back alley to transcontinental geopolitical forces and global climate. What we call places are stable locations with unstable converging forces that cannot be delineated either by fences on the ground or by boundaries in the imagination--or by the perimeter of a map. Something is always coming from elsewhere, whether it's wind, water, immigrants, trade goods or ideas. The local exists--an endemic species may evolve out of those circumstances, or the human equivalent--but it exists in relation, whether symbiotic with or sanctuary from the larger world...

Map by Ben Pease and Sunaura Taylor

Thinking like this, it seems a place is made up of many places, hard to define or pin down and constantly changing. It is fluid. There is so much about San Francisco that is fluid, liquid. We’re surrounded by water on three sides. Fog drifts in liquidy skeins of tiny droplets. There is a constant flow of visitors coming and going from all around the world. A constant influx of people, families, immigrating from all corners of the world with an equal out flux of those leaving to find more affordable living. Here, Solnit goes on to talk about urban space:

A city is a particular kind of place, perhaps best described as many worlds in one place; it compounds many versions without quite reconciling them, though some cross over to live in multiple worlds--in Chinatown or queer space, in a drug underworld or a university community, in a church's sphere or a hospital's intersections. An atlas is a collection of versions of a place, a compendium of perspectives, a snatching out of the infinite ether of potential versions a few that will be made concrete and visible...the place that is San Francisco has both a literal geography as the tip of the peninsula that juts upward like a hitchhiking thumb and another, cultural, geography as the most left part of the left coast, the un-American place where America invents itself.

Map by Ben Pease and Mona Caron

Every place is if not infinite then practically inexhaustible, and no quantity of maps will allow the distance to be completely traversed. Any single map can depict only an arbitrary selection of the facts on its two dimensional surface (and today's computer -driven Geographical Information System [GIS] cartography, with its ability to layer information, is only an elegantly maneuverable electronic equivalent of the transparent pages that were, in the age of paper, more common in anatomy books)...This city is, as all good cities are, a compilation of coexisting differences, of the Baptist church next to the dim sum dispensers, the homeless outside the Opera House.

I think Solnit’s comparison of books and libraries to people and the cities they live in is brilliant:

A book is an elegant technique for folding a lot of surface area into a compact, convenient volume; a library is likewise a compounding of such volumes, a temple of compression of many worlds. A city itself strikes me at times as a sort of library, folding many phenomena into one dense space--and San Francisco has the second densest concentration of people among American cities, trailing only New York, a folding together of cosmologies and riches and poverties and possibilities.

I’ve lived in San Francisco for more than 37 years and still gasp every time I leave and come back, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge into the city. I often wonder what I would think of the city today if I could see it with completely fresh eyes. Here, Solnit talks about coming home to San Francisco after living for a while in a homogenous rural area:

Every building, every storefront seemed to open onto a different world, compressing all the variety of human life into a jumble of conjunctions. Just as a bookshelf can jam together wildly different books, each book a small box opening onto a different world, so seemed the buildings of my city: every row of houses and shops brought near many kinds of abundance, opened onto many mysteries: crack houses, Zen centers, gospel churches tattoo parlors, produce stores, movie palaces, dim sum shops.

Map by Shizue Seigel

This gorgeous and infinitely fascinating book is a collection of 22 essays by 11 different writers; each essay is accompanied by a full spread artist's map of a different aspect of San Francisco, including: The Names Before the Names: The Indigenous Bay Area, 1769; Green Women: Open Spaces and Their Champions; Monarchs and Queens: Butterfly Habitats and Queer Public Spaces; Poison/Palate: The Bay Area In Your Body; The World In a Cup: Coffee Economics and Ecologies; and Treasure Map: The Forty Nine Jewels of San Francisco From the Giant Camera Obscura to The Bayview Opera House.

The book itself is a treasure and is available in bookstores and at the public library.

What is the cultural and psychological landscape where you live?

Take Good Care,

Sharry

A MURDER OF CROWS Revisited from August 2013

Every evening we walk our dog Emma to Ina Coolbrith Park at the top of Russian Hill. And every evening there are a few scolding crows who object to Emma’s presence—who could blame them? She takes delight in chasing them off the grass in other locations around San Francisco whenever she gets the chance.

Photo courtesy of John Winkleman

But for the past few months, there have been more than a few crows at the top of the hill. In fact, there have been a whole lot of crows—a murder—which is what a group or flock of crows is called. (A group of ravens is called an unkindness, or a conspiracy. Rooks are a building or a parliament) Why a murder? (Why unkindness or parliament, for that matter? But I’m going to stick to crows and murder, here) Supposedly because of crows' historical propensity to show up on battlefields after a bloody fight, which led to their association with violent death. And whether it’s this attributive name or a more deeply imbedded superstition or Edgar Allen Poe, a gathering of a lot of crows feels somehow ominous. Like they’re plotting something. Like they’re up to no good. I keep a firm hold on Emma’s leash, in case they attempt to swoop down and airlift her out over the Bay. These Ina Coolbrith crows probably remember her from the other parks miles away—or have at least heard about her. I kid you not—crows not only have been proven to have face recognition, but to pass that information on to other crows—‘watch out for that bad guy’, or in Emma’s case, ‘that split-faced dog with the needle nose.’ And these birds are fearless—I’ve watched them, time and time again, work in pairs, dive-bombing a red-tail hawk they feel is infringing on their territory.

Photo courtesy of Matt from London

They’re also incredibly smart. John Marzluff, professor of avian social ecology and demography at The University of Washington calls crows and ravens ‘feathered apes.’ They have complex brains with astonishing reasoning abilities. They build and use tools. They are capable of three step reasoning. Without prompting or previous observation, a crow will retrieve a short stick dangling from a piece of string in order to retrieve a longer stick inside a cage in order to get at a piece of food in a long tube. That's complex thinking.

Crows also play. They use flats of bark to ‘surf’ the wind and take pleasure in sliding on snowy slopes. Crows have been known to engage in string play with cats. They play tricks on people. And dogs. Marzluff tells a story about a colleague on the University of Montana campus who woke up one morning to his dog madly barking—when he went out he could hear someone calling, “Here dog, come on boy. Come on.” When he went to see who was calling his dog, he found it was a crow! Later, that same crow gathered up a whole pack of dogs in the same way and when classes let out, the crow gave a big “Caw!” scattering the dogs, causing chaos and making more than a few students spill their bags of chips. A clever way to get a snack.

But back to murder. This concept of crows and ravens as harbingers of death, as evil omens. I know, of course, that it is a trope. That if you put a flock of crows in a story, the reader will assume something bad is going to happen. They will expect death to show up on the page by the end of the next chapter. But reality and fiction aren’t always the same and I’m starting to think that crows have gotten the short end of the stick, fiction wise. Maybe as our knowledge of these amazing birds grows and changes, the trope will change. Maybe someday a flock of crows on the page will signify a joke about to be played. Or a complex problem about to be solved.  For as Henry Ward Beecher, an oft quoted Congressional clergyman in the 1800’s once said, “If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.”

Does anybody have other stories about crows they’d be willing to share? I’d love to hear about them!

Take Good Care,

Sharry

The Landscape of Home Away From Home

I’ve been home for a while (a month!) after a flurry of travel, (New York, Mexico City, San Miguel Allende, Santa Fe, Atlanta, Hawaii) and now I'm getting ready to head East again in a few weeks. It's hard to stay put for very long these days when there are so many places I want to go, (and go back to), so much I want to see.

For me, travel seems to open my heart and mind to other lives while expanding my sense of potential and possibility. I always love imagining myself, another version of myself, living in the places I visit. The contrast from a place like Santa Fe to say, New York City stretches across the spectrum from my life in San Francisco, allowing me to construct very different imaginary lives over the span of a few months.

Something I always do when I’m away from home, is to find ‘my house’—the house where I would, in my imaginary life, reside. I have virtual parallel lives and houses on several continents; a house in Buenos Aires, a house in Santa Fe, a house in Paris. My 'house' in Montpelier, Vermont is a charmingly tiny brick coach house, not much bigger than a child’s playhouse, where I could imagine myself as a quirky, arty spinster inviting my favorite writers to tea and making dolls to hand out as muses.

I discovered my favorite house (where the imagined famous writer version of myself lives and writes sweeping best seller sagas whispered to me by the ghosts who walk the moors) while on a family vacation driving through Dartmoor. We were in search of a Celtic stone circle from a postcard I’d purchased in Moretonhamstaed, driving, windows down, listening to the wind hush through the trees. Dragonflies zipped and hovered over grazing moor-ponies and sheep.  

And then there it was—the stone house that I silently but immediately recognized as my house. Time passed as we continued down the narrow road, until my husband turned to me and said, “Wasn’t that ‘your house?’”

“Yes!” I said. “It was!” He made a wide u-turn in the middle of the road, circling back. When I got out to take a photo, the owner came out and told us all about the house—how he and his wife and children were there on sabbatical—she was an architect, he a historian. He seemed very open to having my imaginary self move in when they went back to London the next year.

Now, if this all sounds pretty indulgent, consider the value of the exercise for housing fictional characters. We all have to live someplace, whether in real life, imaginary life or in fiction and sometimes the boundaries are thinner than you might think.

Take Good Care,

Sharry

Herding Gulls

During times when so much of my life seems to be in uncertain flux, it's good to look back and realize that some things haven't changed...

This is a post I wrote four years ago, but with the exception of the closing of The House Of Days, it could have been written today~

Yesterday, as the sun dropped low in the sky, my canine companion and I headed off on one of our favorite walks out on the municipal pier that curls into the San Francisco Bay at the end of Van Ness Avenue. Emma, a Shetland Sheepdog without a flock, especially loves this walk; she stalks and herds every gull who dares to rest on the pier wall. Her sincere efforts to launch herself into the sky (both comic and a little pathetic) always make the fisherfolk checking their crab pots laugh.

As we walked out on the dilapidated pier, shaped like a French curve drafting tool, warm coppery light poured through the Golden Gate. Literally hundreds of seagulls criss-crossed the bay, skimming the water in hopes of supper. A sea lion poked its head above the water, orienting itself before a smoothly undulated dive back under. A constellation of star fish clung tenaciously to the breakwall just above the tide line.

A lone swimmer from the Dolphin Club braved the inlet waters—53 degrees at the most. You couldn’t pay me to get in that cold water, but some people I know do it every single day.

Just off the pier, a class of grade school children sang sea shanties from the deck of the Balclutha—a retired, three-masted, 300 foot, clipper ship built in 1886. This ship once carried goods around the tip of South America but is now maintained by the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Museum and used for monthly overnight field trips for local schools.

After walking the length of the pier and back, we started climbing the hill toward our car, parked at the upper Fort Mason Green, but stopped to peer inside the House of Days. The small cement building, once the Searchlight building, was adapted by The Exploratorium; a tiny window allows viewers to glimpse a photographic display chronicling changing weather conditions at regular intervals. This is one of my favorite parts of our walk; for me, the pattern and rhythm of this progression is somehow validating, reassuring and holds the promise of many more glorious days to come.

Take Good Care,

Sharry

The Landscape of Space Reprise

I love this quote. And I believe it deeply:

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

Samuel Johnson is credited with saying that. Here is another way to put it:

From BookBrowse's FB page

Right?  Have you ever done that? I literally have.  Or have you ever felt that? Felt like your book is so much a living breathing thing that you want to hold it, hug it, take its hand and walk to the park with it? I have felt that. Over and over again.

How does a writer create the kind of book that asks for that kind of engagement?  I have been thinking endlessly about this as I have revised my last WIP. My last blog post delves into this too. The answer lies, in large part, with the space we writers have to leave...in the story and on the page.  I have preached this for years. Ask my friends. I  have been obsessed with it. The partnership between the reader and the writer. Louise Rosenblatt's Reader Response Theory. (The reader is a necessary part of completing the book.) Scooting over on the bench to make room for the reader. All that and more. But it has been tough to put my pen where my mouth is. 

I made a break though though this time around. Part of what made it possible was that I had been away from the text for a while. (Give your self space from your WIP in order to make space for the reader!) I was ruthless about cutting. Not just excess adjectives or favorite phrases, but whole ideas. I took myself out of the manuscript and left the characters there to fend without me. I trusted---for the first time---that the reader would be there to take care of them. My characters. 

I created space, and in creating space I created trust. 

Or as Chuck Wendig says, as only he can say it:

The reader wants to work. The reader doesn't know this, of course, so don't tell him. SHHH. But the reader wants to fill in the details. He wants to be invested in the novel and to make his own decisions and reach his own conclusions. You don't need to write everything. You can leave pieces (of plot, description, dialogue) out. The reader will get in the game. His imagination matters as much as yours. Make that f#$%&@ dance for his dinner.

I am going to continue to ponder this. And work on it. I would love to hear your ideas about it too.  

Gratefully yours (and apologies for posting a day late!)

Tam 

The (Possible) Blessings of Boredom (revisited from 6/26/14)

I have just finished a big project—the novel I’ve been working on for the past few years. I’ve taken some time to catch up on some other business that was neglected in the fervor of the big project, spent a few weeks planning for and teaching another fun and successful Young Writers’ Workshop with my wonderful teaching partner Ann Jacobus, and now I’m going to…

Well, I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do next.

I mean, I have plenty I could do—I have a half finished novel that should be taken apart and started over again. I have lists of ideas for new novels and more niggling at the back of my brain. But writing a novel is a huge commitment—not one you can take lightly and none of my current ideas are really “calling” to me at the moment. Besides, it seems my muse is taking a summer vacation like most everyone else. I’m expecting a postcard from Tahiti any day…

I’m trying not to panic. I don’t like not knowing what I want. Already, I feel an uneasy restlessness creeping up beside me. A restlessness that if quantifed, is basically a wish for a desire.

Luckily, blessedly, sometimes the Universe delivers a little gift right at the moment you sorely need it. One such gift showed up in the form of another blog post last Sunday—an essay by Maria Popova on the importance of boredom, which boils down to the innate discomfort of waiting for something when you don’t know what it is, and won’t know until you find it. Popova examines the writings of psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, who said that the experience of boredom is really the experience of waiting for yourself.

Waiting for yourself. I have to say that struck a nerve. That’s what I feel like I’m doing right now. Apparently, creativity needs occasional boredom—it is the time and space needed for a new desire to take shape. (Hear that, muse? I hope you’re getting good and bored on that lovely beach in Tahiti…)

Throughout the essay, I recognized so much of myself, so many of my own feelings—the association between being “good” and being productive and then the opposite—pairing being unproductive with being “not-so-good.” I certainly recognized the impulse to fill up spare time with busyness, to find a distraction…(like, ahem... checking Facebook and Twitter and email many times an hour.) The deep-seated fear that if you stop doing what you do for even a short time, you won’t know who you are anymore. I mean, how can you be a writer if you’re not writing? (The dualistic question is ‘how can you be a writer if you don’t take time to be present, to observe, to wander…?’)

But I do actually know that it’s so important at times to be still, to be quiet and, I suppose, to let yourself be bored for a while. I’ve told my own writing students that they need to “get off the phone” if they want the muse to call.

So, yes, it’s time to take my own advice and get off the phone.

For a while, at least…

You can all read all of Maria Popova’s excellent essay here.

Take Good Care,

Sharry