What to Say?

This the question I have asked myself the past month as I ponder the blank white space of this blog.

It isn't that I don't have stuff to say (me? with no opinions?), it is just that many of the things I want to say are not ones I want to haunt me in cyberland beyond my physical demise. But I haven't been in the mood, to write here or hang out on facebook or twitter or bloghop. Just not in the mood to socialize. It also doesn't help that the cold I had two weeks ago morphed into acute bronchitis, which has left me feeling weak and flaccid and full of throat tickles that become full-body coughs when I talk too much.

So what can I say?

The kids are good. Both of them. Number One Son is finishing his week at Rock Shop Camp. Number Two Daughter performed in three shows of THE LITTLE MERMAID before full houses. Somehow my husband and I have agreed to host a slumber party tomorrow for three girls and two boys (separate levels of the house). Indeed, #2 and her two friends are embarking on a sleep-over marathon, a progressive slumber party of sorts. The question remains: will she be a human I care to interact with come Friday?

Husband is good. He revels in the garden, his creation. Despite the whacko weather, it is one of the best years for flowers. We'll see how the raspberries and kiwis fare as the second round of stinkbugs hatch.

Myself, I am three weeks into my sabbatical. I am working on a couple of grant proposals with potential collaborators, and fleshing out my own proposal on opioid analgesic use and diversion. I spent a week at Common ground on the Hill and wrote some flash memoir and learned to play my native American flute. I have read six books. I have made zucchini bread every week, several pies, a batch of triple-berry jam, and read in the hammock when it is cool enough and/or not raining. We have shot off fireworks and eaten ice cream most nights.

In terms of writing, some big decisions on my current project THE MINISTER'S WIFE. The stories have become too sweeping to keep this as a novel of linked stories, so it is becoming 'just' a novel. Which is fine. I have been struggling with forcing the various stories into boxes that are the wrong shape and size. It is freeing to let the stories rip. All this upheaval thanks to my wonderful instructor and classmates at Hopkins.

I usually can't write flash while in the midst of novel land, but I will have a few small non-fiction pieces coming up in Flash Fiction Chronicles and Awkward Paper Cut. Will keep you posted on those.

So what are you up to?

Peace...

LOVE IN THE DESERT

11/22/2008

We come here to discover our origins. Outside, snow glitters to the end of the world. We join Xavier and Lucien in the concrete pod perched on the South Pole. Two years to melt and analyze ice, breathe recycled air, eat dried fish and tinned vegetables. Never going outside. I am not sure I can do this. But our grant ran out. And I love you.

2/14/2009

Years of study in musty stacks bound us together, years of long nights in the laboratory posing hypotheses that disintegrated to dust. Love for truth turned into love for each other.

Today you sketched me a rose.

5/4/2009

We perfect the mechanical thaw.

6/5/2009

We analyze the first melted ice core. One litre of potential life. We scan the water millimeter by millimeter, seeking life invisible at 10,000X.

10/9/2009

You sight it first, the fragile twisting helix. Xavier takes over, you withdraw in a sulk. We melt ice, faster.

11/11/2009

The fever melts Xavier’s eyes. We slide him out the door and onto the ice.

11/23/2009

Lucien succumbs. We keep melting ice, catalogueing nothing. The air hangs heavy.

12/5/2009

Tonight you shake me awake. “Amalie, come,” you say, your eyes like embers. You pull me to the microscope. “See?”  

The field glares white.

“Yes,” and I cry.

12/13/2009

I find you slumped over your papers, laptop humming. I remove your watch, the amber bead hanging around your neck. I pocket your wedding band.

12/20/2009

I can see the white mound of you.

12/25/2009

Without you, without the others, there is more room to breathe. I power down the microscope, the freezer, remove my jacket and boots. Later, I will open the chute. The air will liven me: ice crystals will embroider my eyelashes. I will walk into the desert, breathing at last.

My contribution to FLASHMOB2013, the international flash fiction blog carnival and contest extraordinaire. A non-competing entry, as I am one of the organizers, along with the brilliant Michelle Elvy and equally genius Christopher Allen. Over 100 authors from around the world. Check it out. Winners announced June 22. Peace...

We WantYour 300 Words--NOW!

June 22 is International Flash Fiction Day, and to celebrate all stories short and stupendous, a few of us are hosting FLASHMOB2013, a blog carnival and contest. What you need to do to do:


1) Write a story 300 words or less (send us something that pushes boundaries;

2) Then send the following to flashmobjune22@gmail.com:

--the link to your story
--the story in the Text of the email WITHOUT your name at the top
--a brief bio
--a funky pic

3) Send us your best by JUNE 10.

Of course, there's prizes. And the judges are spectacular writers from all over the world. Read more about it at the official website: FLASHMOB2013.

So get writing. The clock is ticking.

Peace...

Gray Days

Seems every day starts out gray, either veiled in fog (liked this morning) or spattering the earth with a fine mist. If I did not know better, I would swear I was in London or Seattle.

I would like Mother nature to make up her damn mind--really rain, or push the clouds east, over the ocean. The precip is not enough to do our garden much good, just enough to slicken surfaces.

The sun did break through late yesterday afternoon. I managed to find some time after dinner to suspend myself in the hammock. Closed my eyes. Listened to the birds chatter, cars drive by, lawn mower sing, children laugh, basketball thump asphalt, bull frog sing, cicadas chant. A meditation.

I had not yet seen the news, nor heard it. I did not know tornados had leveled a town in Oklahoma.

I will keep my gray days, and be grateful for a natural ferocity no greater than annoyance.

Peace...

PICKING RHUBARB -- For My Mother

Cutting rhubarb in the rain,
the mottled leaves thick with mud
and slugs, I wonder if these plants,
robust now, will stand another
season in this shaded corner.

If not, next spring my husband

will surprise me bearing rhizomes,
and plant them so my garden
will be as my mother’s, and
her mother’s and, perhaps, all
our mothers’ before.

I’ll slice the stalks into chunks

for pie, mine has strawberries,
though she says berries ruins
the rhubarb; she makes sauce
and eats from the pot, still warm,
spoon clanking against the sides,
a smile trespassing her face.

Tendering these stalks, making the pie,

heralds me a holder of apron
strings, honoring our history
unmarked with words or trophies, and
thus, all the more important.

I wonder how my daughter

will grow her rhubarb.



My mother loves many things, but in the food world one of the things she loves most is rhubarb. I also love the tart fruit, as does my daughter (in the form of pie). Every spring I look for the leaves to emerge from the black, rotten-looking stump of a stem. When they finally pop through the earth, I think of my mom, both of us celebrating spring's arrival.

Happy Mother's Day Mom! And to all the mothers in the world.

Peace...

AFTER THE TSUNAMI

Very pleased to have my story AFTER THE TSUNAMI featured at Every Day Fiction. Please take a look. A huge thanks to Gay Degani and the rest of the good folks at Flash Fiction Chronicles for hosting the String-of-10 Contest, and Kathy Fish for selecting my story and taking time to chat with me about the story.

Peace...

ROW HOUSE Up @ Blue Fifth Review

Very pleased to have ROW HOUSE, a story of creation out of detritus, featured as a broadside at Blue Fifth Review. Thank you Michelle Elvy for your gentle guidance of writers' words from everywhere. Peace...

Birth Day

Celebrate!

Promises of cake

& candles

light this morn

flush with spring rain & lilac;

a lone tree frog sings.

(a shadorma to celebrate--why not?)

Peace...

Chit-Chat at Flash Fiction Chronicles

Thrilled to be Interviewed by Queen of Flash Kathy Fish over at Flash Fiction Chronicles. We chat about writing small stories and the genesis of my story AFTER THE TSUNAMI, upcoming at Every Day Fiction.

Thank you Kathy for the provocative questions! Peace...

Life Comes at You Like a Wave

I am trying hard not to let what happened in Boston sink me deeper, sink me to the point where I give up on the goodness of the world. On the inherent goodness of people. This latest attack on people (I won’t call them innocents—aren’t all of us innocent to some degree?) makes me want to flee. But to where? Is there a safer place to live? A saner place?

I know that the horror I felt on Monday night, watching the news unfold, will fade. The images will blur around the edges, the facts become murky, the way a pond darkens as autumn leaves fall on its surface, then sink, rotting, to the bottom.

After all, what can I recall of Newtown?

I have hardened. I don’t like this quality, but I think it is part of human hardwiring, part of the armor which lets us survive. It is how we humans are evolving. In 100 years, or sooner, we will be a species with dexterous thumbs and a missing empathy gene.

After living half a decade I can discern good from evil, hopeful from hopefulness. But my children cannot, or at least not so well, and I can only imagine how the continued onslaught of horrible and ugly and villainous and tragic affects them. It makes me wonder if the decrease in our mental health--and the increase of our drinking and drugging and gunning—is our Darwinian desire to not feel the pain. Peace...

Hmmm...

It has been awhile.

I have written my Daily Poem.

I traveled to North Carolina, to visit family during the kids' spring break, and then entertained more family who came to visit us.


I returned to work, the children back to school. Back to routine, which comforts.

I managed to enjoy the warm days and cool evenings, which lightens my mood.

I heard the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra play its wondrous score for Fantasia seen on the screen.

I found some peace and quiet in my heart, much needed.

I breathed.

What have you been up to these past 10 days?

Peace...

If It Is the First of April

Then it must be National Poetry Month.

No fooling.

My favorite month, for what brings more joy than to read and write poems every day for a month?

Here, one of my favorites from William Carlos Williams. It reminds me that spring is coming, the earth cracks from its cold and the green spears of life will soon poke through.


THE RED WHEELBARROW

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.



So spare, so elemental, our attention drawn to a single object. This is Willams' gift--to paint a still life from an every day item using fewest words.

And now time for me to contemplate my daily poem. Every year I join the April Poem-A-Day (PAD) group over at POETIC ASIDES, the brilliant poetry Writer's Digest blog moderated by Robert Brewer. The theme today: new arrivals.

Pull up a pen, and play along. Peace...