Thankful Thursday: Weekend Edition

Sometimes gratitude feels too specific, too personal, to share. Other days thankfulness seems too sweeping to express. In the margin between exactly this and something like that, I arrive here.

Gratitude has a rhythm. It catches and continues. This week I am trying to catch the beat, holding to each note so that I might swing to the next. Repetition helps:

• I spent the week in Seashore Family Literacy's Summer Writing Adventure Camp, leading 9 children and 1 teen in explorations designed to inspire poems, stories, songs, and more. I am thankful for patience, willing, and words.

• As the rest of the world swelters in summer heat, the Oregon Coast stays at a steadfast 60 degrees with a crisp ocean wind. On a field trip this week, the temp dived. By the time we arrived at our (outdoor) walking adventure, the youngsters were far from home, damp, chilled and teetering on tears. I am deeply thankful for hot chocolate, and the refuge of the Pig 'n Pancake.

• Poetry is everywhere, when you're looking. Some of the most poetic lines this week were not written in journals, but spoken in casual conversation. Write that down, I urged, again and again. But the moment moves quickly and we sometimes don't recognize the value of our everyday observations. Thanks to the kids, my ears were tuned to hear.

Heard

    lines of conversation from the young writers

It’s the circle of life.
Everything on earth is part of the circle.

How do you blow a bubble?

How tall am I to the tree?

We are waiting.
We are at a crossroads of nature,
an Eden of petals.

Don’t eat the twinberry!

This is a sacred arch.  

I have too many words.

The bridge is wheezing.

I hear the zoop zoop zap of life.

This is a sweet exotic treat.

How do you spell happiness?


- edited/arranged by Drew Myron

 

What are you thankful for today?

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to appreciate people, places, and things in our lives. Gratitude multiplies with effort and desire. The more we are thankful, the more we recognize the richness of our daily lives — and the more we are thankful.


Wish I'd Written That

I don't just drink wine, I savor the label and brighten at the writer who deftly combines taste and wit with a splash of verve.

This label is from Sokol Blosser, my favorite Oregon winery (this pinot gris is available at the winery, and at The Wine Place in Yachats, Oregon).

For another wonderfully poetic label, see Wine Words (a nod to my other favorite Oregon winery, King Estate, and their "next" label).

Surely, literary labels aren't limited to Oregon. What's your favorite find?


Thankful Thursday: Once More?

For days I basked in the fabulousness of my weekend — a gift of new shoes, blueberries chest high and ripe, warm summer sun, a long jog, new friends. All of it so delicious.

And then Monday arrived, and with it the holiday hangover — you know it, right? — in which the zest for life circles the drain of ordinary routine. On Tuesday, the grit of irritation was building a fortress of annoyance. By Wednesday I was a slow burn of foul fumes: Can't anyone do anything right? Do I have to do everything myself? Does nothing ever change? blah blah blech.  (Yes, I've been a delight to be around, thanks for asking.)

This morning I was not a bit thankful for the wonderful weekend that now seemed distant and impossible. Thankful Thursday? yeah, right. 

And then I read my horoscope:

You've let go of minor grudges and resentments before, and now you're in the same place all over again. Should you forgive one more time? No. Forgive a thousand more times.

Wham! Well, yes, of course. Because this is how gratitude works, it sneaks up to humble the boastful and elevate the chagrined. Thank you, Thankful Thursday. Your mystery moves me.

 

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to appreciate the people, places, things (and horoscopes) in our lives. Joy contracts and expands in proportion to our gratitude. What makes your world expand?


Three Good Books

Sometimes the world is bursting with books, and I can't read fast enough. At other times, the world is full of books but nothing sticks.

I'm drawn to good writing, of course, along with engaging characters and story. But it takes more, doesn't it, to keep us on the page and eager. It's not just the book, it's what the reader brings to the book — a mysterious mix of timing, willing and luck.

Fortunately, I'm on a winning streak, absorbed and intrigued with nearly every novel I read. Here, a few recent favorites:  

The Interestings
by Meg Wolitzer

Perceptive is the key word. From the New York Times to O magazine, nearly every review notes Wolitizer's keen ability to write characters with depth and empathy. This sweeping novel, says the Times, is "acutely perceptive about the feelings and motivations of its characters." It's no simple story, either. In her ninth novel, Wolitizer follows a group of summer camp friends far into adulthood for a complex story of friendship that is expansive, engaging, and at every turn rings true.

 

The Age of Grief
by Jane Smiley

It's easy to dismiss a collection of short stories. Just as you get comfy it seems the story is over and another begins. But don't skip this one! In this slim volume, Smiley (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres) demonstrates her powerful skill in rendering character and tone with deft economy. The title story (a long short story, or novella) is the keeper of the pack — it's a wise, moving, and at times funny story of a marriage about to break.

''I am thirty-five years old,'' says the story's narrator, ''and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don't think it is years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better-looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all — after all that schooling, all that care.''

 

The Obituary Writer
by Ann Hood

“When someone you love dies, after some time, no one listens anymore.  I listened.”

In a story both fluid and empathetic, the lives of two women — one in a loveless 1960s marriage, and the other in the early 1900s grieving the end of an affair — are juxtaposed in a novel that examines the expectations of marriage and love. With The Obituary Writer, Hood, the author of 15 books (short story, memoir, novels) combines fluid prose with touches of literary suspense. The resulting novel is a sophisticated, accomplished observation of love and endurance.

 

Let's talk! What book has you hooked? 


What's in your Journal?


What sort of diary should I like mine to be?

Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through.

 

I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.

 

The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

— Virginia Woolf
from A Writer's Diary
edited by her husband, Leonard Woolf

 

Be a Follower

On Monday, July 1, 2013, Google Reader is going away.

Is this a big deal? Not really. Fortunately, when one window closes, a zillion others open.

To follow this blog you have many options. I suggest you:

Enjoy this blog delivered directly to your email.
No fuss, no muss, and you won't miss a minute. Simply type your email address in the box at right, where it says Follow This Blog By Email.  —>

Or

Use a blog feed service, such as Bloglovin. It's a helpful way to organize your favorite blogs in one place. To follow this blog, simply copy this url: /off-the-page/. This blog will be added to your list of favorites to follow. (If you're currently using Google Reader, you'll have the easy option of importing your existing blog list).

 

How do you read this blog? What's the easiest way to organize and read your favorite blogs? And how many blogs do you follow?


Thankful Thursday: Retreat

The memory might wilt but it blossoms a new treasure each meeting of pen to paper. — Hayden
I recently enjoyed 24 hours of suspended responsibility.
And now I long to regain the lightness a brief retreat provided.

At the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology earlier this month, I spent the day playing with words. There was no pressure to write smart, clever or profound. We let loose, and encouraged each other to wonder, wander, explore.

It was a luxury of sorts, and just what I needed. Like most people, my days are full of deadlines, demands and the small pressing acts living requires — meals to make, towels to wash, and worry over bills, health, housing and the myriad things beyond my control. 

In a life full of internal chatter, my day away allowed time for restorative quiet. Barbara Hurd writes that this sort of refuge helps "stop our natterings, our foot twitchings and restless tongues."

Those who are fond of various retreats — writers, ecstatics, parents with young children — often comment on the silence such time away allows. Silence becomes something present, almost palpable. The central task shifts from keeping the world at a safe decibel distance to letting more of the world in. Thomas Aquinas said that beauty arrests motion. He meant, I think, that in the presence of something gorgeous or sublime we stop our natterings, our foot twitchings and restless tongues. Whatever our fretful hunger is, it seems momentarily filled in the presence of beauty. To Aquinas’s wisdom I’d add that silence arrests flight, that in its refuge our need to flee the chaos of noise diminishes. We let the world creep closer; we drop to our knees as if to let the heart, like a small animal, get its legs on the ground.

— Barbara Hurd, from Refugium in The Georgia Review


On this Thankful Thursday, I am grateful for a day away, removed from worry and immersed in the pleasure of playing with words.

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to appreciate people, places, things and more. Joy contracts and expands in proportion to our gratitude. What makes your world expand?

 

Happiness Is Running Out

Or wait, I mean: Happiness is . . . running out of books!

Thin Skin, a collection of photos and poems, is now in its second printing.

If you bought my book, thank you from the bottom of my deep and needy heart. If you didn't, here's your chance to get it free:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Thin Skin by Drew Myron

Thin Skin

by Drew Myron

Giveaway ends July 16, 2013.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Can't wait? Must have it now? I like your style.
Buy Thin Skin here:

• Amazon

• Push Pull Books publisher

• West Side Books in Denver, Colo

• Mari's Books in Yachats, Ore

• Directly from the author (me!).
  Send cash, check, trade, or jellybeans, to:

Drew Myron
PO Box 914
Yachats, Oregon  97498

Thankful Thursday: Grab Bag

•  a $2 thrift store blouse •  massage •  a box of books •  poemcrazy by susan wooldridge •  waking to sun •  lungs to run •  legs to climb •  the idea of pink brussel sprouts •  bubble bath •  olive oil •  these words from anne carson: it is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself •  wedge heels •  a quick easy laugh •  once, when I was 23, sad, and living alone in a big and dreary city, an elderly man stopped me in the produce section of the grocery store. you are pretty, he said. i was overweight, overwrought, and not at all pretty but it didn't matter because in three words he eased the pressing isolation of invisibility. maybe that is the best gift: to be seen •

 

It's Thankful Thursday. Please join me in a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things and more. What are you thankful for today?


Thankful Thursday (on Friday): Laundry

It's Thankful Thursday! Please join me in a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places and things — large and small.

On this Thankful Thursday, I am thankful for laundry. Yes, I said I am thankful for piles of stain and stink.

Of all the household chores, laundry is the lazy girl's dream. You don't have to break a sweat or break a nail — and the results are dramatic and fairly quick. A task requiring very little physical toil perfectly suits my domestic lassitude. I like to fold and iron. When my mind is a tangle of deadlines and decisions, doing laundry provides a sort of solitary focus, and a sense of accomplishment. With the touch of a button and a few folds, I get order, in my house and in my head.

I'm not alone. Years ago in a poetry class with Sage Cohen, one of our assignments was to write about an ordinary task, such as washing dishes or mowing the lawn. Great material lurks in the mundane.

There is joy in clean laundry.
All is forgiven in water, sun

and air.

— from Laundry, by Ruth Moose


What are you thankful for today?

What have you done?

Indexed - by Jessica Hagy


So, what have you done for your writing community lately?

We've talked before about good citizenship but it's a concept for which I can't stop trilling (or drilling). Here's the deal: It's not enough to write your novel, poem, story. You've got to give back. It's that simple. You give, you get, you give some more.

Pioneering the principles of Literary Citizenship, Cathy Day sums it best (italics mine): "I wish more aspiring writers would contribute to, not just expect things from, that world they want so much to be a part of."

How to contribute? Take a cue from these Literary Citizens:

Shine a Light (on someone other than yourself)
• Brian Brodeur, creator of How a Poem Happens, has penned two award-winning books but you'll never hear him hyping himself. Instead, he interviews other poets to gain backstory on their work (to date, over 150 poets featured). The results are insightful, sometimes amusing, and always useful.

• I like Mark Thalman's style. Rather than mention his book at every turn, he turns your attention to others. He created www.poetry.us.com for just this reason. Packed with poems and writing tips from his favorite poets, it's a one-man labor of love. He's not making money, and, in fact, he's busy teaching middle school students and writing his own poems, but he takes time and effort to make others look good.

• When poet Diane Lockward was writing a book of craft techniques, she reached out to other poets for poems they had penned using her prompts and practices. Using these real-world examples, her forthcoming book, The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop, includes the work of 100 poets — a real chorus of the community!

Write a Book Review
• Give a writer gold. Write an Amazon or Goodreads review and that book will get traction, and maybe even sales. No joke, a quick review — and we're talking just two to three sentences delivered with enthusiasm — will boost a book's visibility. Forget those high school book reports, today's "review" is simply feedback, and it really is gold to an author.

Provide a Stage
• Lisa Romeo, nonfiction writer and teacher, frequently invites authors to compose pieces on topics of their choosing. This simple action — providing a stage for writing colleagues to share their work — introduces others to new authors, books, and ideas. She illuminates, and helps others navigate, a wider world of writers.

Take to the Streets
Literary Citizens take action. They give words a fresh twist. Need some ideas?

• That man ranting on the street? Oh, that's just poet Shawnte Orion. He's taken part in over 50 readings and the venues are often, ahem, unusual. As in: pool halls, art galleries, and busy street corners. He's what I call a true poet of the people.

• Set up a booth — for poetry, like this group offering Poems While You Wait. Wouldn't this be a great fundraiser for your favorite literary organization?

• For three years, I've helped orchestrate a poetry contest for the Denver County Fair. Poems get ribbons (just like pies) and winners get to read their poems on the stage between canned preserves and pet pigs. It's a hoot, and it showcases local, often unsung, writers.

Encourage Others
We've all got voices in our head, and most of them are unkind. How wonderful, then, when a colleague offers sincere applause, or an offer to write together, or to share work. The simple stuff, really.

And even better to encourage young writers, those finding their way and their voice. Read to a child. Write with a teen. Small actions can yield powerful results.

"Writers and artists naturally have generous spirits, I think, and we need to tap into that generosity to support one another (and let go of envy)," writes poet Hannah Stephenson.  

Exactly.

Pay attention. Take action. Be a good citizen.

 

"And I started writing"

The graduation season packs a wallop (what an odd word), which is to say announcements and invitations flood the mailbox and we get to gaze upon the precious faces of children we haven't seen since their parents' wedding some 18 to 22 years ago.

No, that's not true. I know most of these kids, and frankly, I'm surprised some of them have made it to the finish line. When I open announcements from students who were once flunking and floundering, my heart swells and I want to shower them with gifts. You did it! I also want to say, You think that was difficult? Wait 'til the bigger pond drowns you in sorrow. But I hold back. Let's keep 'em tender and trusting for just a bit longer.

In 2009, Ellen DeGeneres — comedian and icon — delivered what is now my favorite graduation speech. It's a hilarious message, with heart, and it bears repeating at this commencement season. And take note, her very successful comedy career began with writing:

I was soul-searching . . . I was like, I don't understand, there must be a purpose, and wouldn't it be so convenient if we could pick up the phone and call God, and ask these questions. And I started writing and what poured out of me was an imaginary conversation with God . . . and I finished writing it and I looked at it and I said to myself, and I hadn't even been doing stand-up, ever, there was no club in town. I said, "I'm gonna do this on the Tonight Show With Johnny Carson" — at the time he was the king — "and I'm gonna be the first woman in the history of the show to be called over to sit down." And several years later, I was the first woman in the history of the show, and only woman in the history of the show to sit down, because of that phone conversation with God that I wrote.

— Ellen DeGeneres
commencement speech at Tulane University, 2009

 

A Mixed Memorial

Weeping Angel - Cincinnati - Spring Grove Cemetery - David Ohmer / Foter.com / CC BY
If ever a prize for the holiday with the most mixed messages, Memorial Day would take an easy win. 

From barbecue picnics to Macy sales, to cemetery visits and festive parades, Memorial Day is a mixed bag of reverence, sorrow and start-of-summer-celebration. We offer thanks for selfless military service but gratitude comes with a heavy heart that recognizes every side loses something, someone. Freedom, yes, but always at a price.

Poet Emma Shaw Crane addresses this sort of mixed emotion: 

prayer for a soldier back from baghdad

you, my kindergarten best friend come
home
talking of nailing breathing targets
drunk/angry you tell me to SHUT UP
a lesson I inherited from my grandfather
we a family of marines: the few/the proud
I was three the first time he kicked me
I slammed eyes closed to the rug
rage is a battle scar
semper fi

this is distant war brought home
from Baghdad Okinawa Mosul Tarawa
we the emotional casualties
our childhood of long august afternoons
n apple branch forts:
collateral damage
what can i ask:

did you shatter Iraqi cheekbones?
did you hang
someone's father from
dislocated shoulders
in the screaming doorways
of Abu Ghraib?

at your goodbye barbeque before boot
camp you jumped me into the pool
for a moment in your arms:
before the impact/before the hit
my cheek to your collarbone
my eyes closed against your neck

I repeat this flash second of tenderness like
a rosary
my prayer for you/for the rainbow
you drew me on my seventh birthday
for the people you kill I will never meet
someone else's beloveds:
children blown apart playing marbles
like we used to
under a kitchen table

this is my prayer for my grandfather
his angry hands trembling/our relationship
sacrificed
for sweaty midnight nightmares of
Nagasaki after the bomb
a handful of medals/veterans' bake sales
children that fear him/ a black n white
photograph of boy men (the smiling sons
of anxious mothers)
ripped apart
in a war my grandfather will never return
from

war takes our men away from us
an invisible paperless draft
out of juvenile halls
trailer parks
principals' offices n
single parent poverty

our grandfathers/our cousins/our first
loves/
n our hometown high school kids
come home talking of
nailing breathing targets
bring nightmares to our kitchens our
orchards
our bedrooms n our streets

I'm praying in poems for you/my
kindergarten best friend
I just want you back alive/I just want you
back with your soul
I pray for the people you kill
mothers walking to buy milk
lean gentle young men like you once were
lovers tangled up in each other
children chasing chickens like we use to
n I pray for myself because
what does it mean to love the murderer?

— Emma Shaw Crane
from Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25
edited and introduced by Naomi Shihab Nye

 

Thankful Thursday: Silence

photo by dobrych/Creative Commons


Turn up the quiet

A dense forest,

a long road,

the hush of a pew.

Between each swell

even the ocean churns

out a rush of silence.


At home the refrigerator

hums in a steel envelope

of calm. When an ice cube drops

an after-silence descends that we

would not hear but for the fall.


This blanket, on this couch,

wraps a quiet that does not

bend as much as billows

and pillows and tucks

into my every sharp

angle.


I am a quiet

person in a quiet

life and still I crave

silence the way a

drunk craves the cocktail

that will change every promise and past.


In silence, thoughts gather,

divide, settle in quiet corners

to wait patient as Sunday

for a maybe

for a yes.


- Drew Myron

 

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things and more. What are you thankful for today?

 

Are you a sponge?

Take What You Need ProjectI'm a sponge.

This week I am saturated, sour, and a bit wrung out.

For those with sponge personalities, words both wound and revive.

( How do you know if you're a sponge? If you are unable to apply this phrase to your life: "Let it roll off you like water off a duck's back" — you are likely a sponge, unconsciously absorbing the emotional tremor of every room you enter. )

But it's not all bad. In this state, the best solution after saturation is to retreat, absorbing what fills you, not depletes you.

We can't stop the world and simply get off. There are, after all, jobs to do, deadlines to meet, dinners to make . . . but we can choose to take a mental break (as in pause, not to be confused with break down) from resistance.

And so, this week I was absorbed by a radio interview with poet Marie Howe. How refreshing it felt to listen to intelligent, creative people exchange ideas without showmanship or banter, just genuine and mutual respect. And it strikes me now how sad that this type of conversation feels refreshing, rather than normal. The interview is here: On Being with Krista Tippett and Marie Howe. Click on radio show/podcast in upper left.

Also this week, I retreated in books, absorbed by:

The Dinner — a riveting novel by Henry Koch.

Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Trandscendence in Competitive Yoga — an engaging memoir-experience by Benjamin Lorr.

Just This, striking tanka poems by Margaret Chula.

It is reminder, these ideas thoughtfully written or gently spoken, that words will almost always restore my faith and spirit, my energy for life.

What restores you?