This is the very best photo anyone has ever taken of me. My dad took it a loooong time ago. I sat forever because he used a large format camera back then.

As it happens, Popeye had something in that little old saying of his. What I love about the statement, “I am what I am,” is that it’s not fear based. It’s a simple declaration of love, love for being who he is when others don’t quite get him.
That is kind of how I see being a writer. I have heard other writers say they won’t tell people they are writers. I understand the reason. I know that it all comes down to that dreaded question, “Oh yeah, well do you have anything published?” As if that is somehow supposed to validate what I feel inside. As if it somehow deminishes what I am doing because a few people on the outside may or may not think my words are worthy.
What I realized, as I am journeying through this thing called life, is that what others say or believe doesn’t really matter. I am what I am. I am so many things, a writer is one of them and I am not afraid to say it. But, I also am a mother to two great kids. I am a wife and partner. I am someone who loves to bake. I am someone who loves to bead. I am an educator. I am also the things I am not. In other words, I am not the sum-total of my publications or awards, as perhaps I’ve been led to believe at times. I am not a workaholic, though I love my work as a writer and an educator, but none of it feels like work. I am not nearly as good a cook as my husband, though I give cooking a try.
If we give voice to who we are, then we validate it. If we shout it from the rooftops, then we validate it, even when others might be laughing or doubting that we can create the life we want.
I am reminded of a Sunday Morning on CBS interview with Dolly Parton I saw a while back. In the interview, she spoke of her high school graduation. She spoke of declaring then that she was going to be a super star. She said everyone laughed at her, but look at her now. It wasn’t that she knew it so much as she said it and kept saying it until she manifested it.
So, go ahead and say it. I will. I am a writer, among so many other things. I am what I am.

P.S. Rather than have a bio associated with this blog, I have changed it to an Artist’s Statement, because that is what I am, too, and I rather like the idea of an artist’s statement versus a list of all that I have accomplished, which really doesn’t say anything about me.

Maynard in the Moment

a cold Sunday morning. Eventually, I’ll get out and take Maynard for a walk.

It’s probably in the middle of winter that I find it most difficult to write. The short days have sunk in. The cold penetrates my core and I just want to sit back and do as little as possible, but I won’t. I’ll keep at everything because I have to, because my body needs words.

As with more than half of America, we are struggling to make ends meet. We both took leaps at the same time, leaps with great risk. I have read people’s thoughts on risk taking and the idea that risks should be calculated. Still, even the best calculated risks are frightening. It wouldn’t be a risk, if there wasn’t the potential for failure. So, we are mid-flight in our risky leaps and, as to be expected, things at times feel exhilarating and at other times feel down right terrifying.

It’s at the moment when it is most terrifying that it is hardest to stay focused, but I have to remember then to stay in the moment, to let go of regret, to keep moving forward. After all, regret is rooted in fear and fear leads to ruts. I hate ruts. I’ve been stuck in too many of them only because for my whole life I feared the act of taking a leap.

So, I’ll just continue to plug away at my dreams, continue to understand that in mid-flight there is not going back to where things felt safe. There is only what’s below (or ahead).

And Maynard? Well, he reminds me that sometimes the best antidote for fear is taking a moment to play in the snow with a friend.

Kid one on his way to Hogwart's

simulated pretty well at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure Theme Park’s Harry Potter area.

The trick, or not so much of a trick, is to keep at it, to keep going and going and going. As I begin this new year, I am trying to keep this in perspective. My mantra as of late is “stay the course.” Who am I kidding? My mantra always is “stay the course.”

I did read something recently that said that often writers aren’t given all of the time in the world to be writers. More often than not, they are as busy as everybody else. It’s all about clinging to that dream with all we’ve got.

Just as with last year, I set goals. This is how I cling in what is again going to be a busy, busy winter. I started the goal setting last year, thanks to my Momwriter pals. I managed to meet or at least make some headway on all of my goals, so my goals list has been created again. There is no magic, but at the end of the year when I look at my list I am sure my reaction will be Viola! I did it. Each little step forward is a nice push in the right direction that, while not really magic, feels a little like magic.

I’ve written before about the couple of times in high school I had written something and teachers pulled me aside to tell me I should send those things out. One thing I neglected to mention about those incidences is that it wasn’t so much that the teachers recognized anythings. Recently, I got in touch with an old friend from my high school French class. It got me thinking about why those teachers said anything, one of them was my French teacher Mrs. Hodgins. I remembered the feeling I had when I wrote those couple of things. I remembered the feeling of excitement I had as I created those stories. I didn’t realize then that that was the spark of inspiration. I might even have been frightened by that spark in some way. Either way, I knew what I was being shown then was that I loved creating stories. I just didn’t really realize it until much later. Well, it’s back to the drawing board, but no biggie. I’ll get there.

There are of course times or events in our lives that shatter that glass jar and the only alternative is to finally take that crazy messed up road. What are my events? Well, there is an insane long list of them starting with the birth of my two beautiful children and ending with a little rumble I had a few years back with breast cancer. There were a host of other crazy things that were sprinkled in between there for good measure.

I know I am not the only one who has gone through all of that crap. The point is, however, that I could either succumb to all of that and whine and cry about it all or I could say, “In your face!” to all of it and leap into the life I am meant to have. I chose the latter. Again, I am not saying it’s easy and that there aren’t moments where I say to my self, “What the hell was I thinking?” Still, I come back to the way those shards of shattered glass twinkle like stars, flare even like sparks of dreams of places I am supposed to go. Those sparks include sending my book and stories out until something aligns and they become what they are supposed to. They also include weaving more stories and writing the story that makes up the new book I am working on, one I grow more excited about every time I think about it. The sparks also include the merging of my love of good food with my love of words as I build a following for my Ann Arbor Cooking Examiner site.

So, I keep plugging along. I’m really excited about my step forward into food writing. If you are curious, go ahead and check it out, and thank you in advance for doing so.

The following is a list of the things I am currently grateful for in this writing life:

1. The many new and old friends I have that inspire me and my writing with their own. This is a solitary pursuit for sure, but there is a community built so steadfastly around it.

2. The seed of a little novel “Sometimes the Smallest Things” was planted ten years ago with immediate encouragement by author Betsy Cox at Bear River Writer’s Conference. I scrapped for bits of time between raising children and working full time in order to massage every word and every scene. That took every bit of ten years. I finally have a full and what for now is a complete manuscript, complete enough to be sending it out into the world. It is getting some notice, so we will see what 2012 brings, but for now I am happy to have completed it.

3. I have been fortunate to dive into my passions this year. I am teaching, now, which I have longed to do since finishing my MFA. Because I am teaching, I get more time with my writing and my family.

4. This year, I have had some writing success. A couple of my poems appeared in publications. The first was Driftwood 10. The second, which I recently received my contributor’s copy, was a cool little book called Bigger Than They Appear: An Anthology of Very Short Poems.

5. I stay connected with my old writing job by still being able to write  feature articles for the magazine Homefront, my favorite part of the job. I also get to write a poem specific to the center photo spread of each issue.

6. I am able to merge my love of food with my love of words in my online post as the Ann Arbor Cooking Examiner.

7. I am always grateful for my family and the support they give me in pursuit of this crazy ass dream.

First, my Dear Partner J got sick, really sick, which put him out of commission for the last week of food cart season. He has been running the show pretty much on his own since I went back to work. I help here and there, but he is Debajo del Sol. So, that final week there was no Debajo del Sol. He couldn’t get out of bed. We got through that only to have a dog crisis on Tuesday.

I am to blame for that. I thought the day started out well, even if it started out at the doctor’s office with my daughter. That was a planned, routine thing. I dropped her off at school after that and stopped at grocery store number one. I made a quick stop home and went to grocery store number two. I had this grand plan of making all this stuff and gathering lessons for my classes. In the interim, between my two grocery store runs, I failed to secure the pantry doors. That meant our dog, Maynard, had full access. Of course, the two things that were in his reach were chocolate chips and raisins, the two worst possible things a dog could get. That tripped the switch on an afternoon of chaos. I made repeated failed attempts to induce vomiting with peroxide, per the vet’s recommendation. The dog just burped and lollygagged playfully around the backyard. I ended up taking him to the emergency clinic where they had much better luck inducing vomiting, and sure enough he had eaten raisins and chocolate. I understand that was irresponsible of me. That was why I had such a rough day. The lesson I learned from this is that all canned goods go on the lower shelves and all chocolate chips and raisins go on the top shelf of the pantry where Maynard can’t reach them even if he gains full access to the pantry.

In our defense, we are not used to a chow hound like Maynard. With his predecessor, Maggie, we could leave a whole Thanksgiving dinner out on the counter and she would never have touched it. Maynard, however, will find a way to get the Thanksgiving scraps, do or die. Thankfully, I realized what he had done fairly quickly, so he seems to be doing well. We are still keeping a close eye on him.

I, too, am feeling a whole lot better. I am back on track, not with NaNoWriMo numbers, but I have some off time next week to get caught up. I can’t wait to bake a pumpkin pie. I can’t wait to have the unfettered time with my family. It will be the first time ever that my holiday week isn’t packed with deadlines and work.

A long time ago, I did a couple posts on the glamorous life of a writer. That, of course, was the irony. There is not glamor. There is toil, rejection, small victories, rejection, a kind rejection for an editor or agent, just plain rejection, and the more than occasional day of complete chaos. It’s up to us to continue to gather roses, even when it’s not a rosy day or a rosy week. That means gathering the gumption to write as much as you can in those times. I did that. It wasn’t much. It was zero on the day of chaos, but I put a few words down yesterday. I’ll put some more down in the days to come. Really, that’s what pulls me back up, back out of the chaos. Folks, this is the glamor–the sticky, messy, chaotic glamor. There’s nothing shiny, new or rosy about it.

NaNoWriMo Count: just over 19,000 words.

I sat in a hospital waiting room today. I sat there and waited for X-rays with my daughter. It’s part of our routine. It’s been part of our routine since she was only weeks old. Every six months we visit the orthopedic. Still, we are fortunate. We live near one of the best pediatric hospitals in the world. Today, it was made clear how fortunate we were as we watched two young boys from somewhere in Asia (I didn’t ask where) who were flown here for surgery. I know I am lucky on so many levels. I know this. I know.

Still, there is only so much pulling up of bootstraps one can do before, ya know, the arms start wearing out. I don’t know where to begin really. I have been putting on a good face for a long time. I put the face on to hide the shame I felt about being a single mother. I put the face on to show I can handle my daughter’s disability or the horrors of my own cancer. I put the face on to get me through college, yet again, because I blew it the first time. I can feel the throbbing muscles in my cheeks. They throb because my real face can’t hold those facades up much longer. This is not a pity party. This is the real me, the real tired me. Part of carrying all those faces, part of looking like it’s all going perfectly is the act of doing way too much and forgetting to be in the moment. So, in this moment I am going through a decompression. It happens when I pile it all on, and I work and work and work, but things go in reverse instead of going forward. Bills pile up, disasters happen, and the crap just keeps coming. My whole adult life has felt like a race to nowhere. I don’t know what the game is or how to play it or what to do anyway. I write. That’s the only game I know, whether I am good at it or not. I just write, except for today. I didn’t write today because I was dowsing fires all day. Perhaps I’ll get into that in a future post, but today I’m tired and have accomplished nothing except to say in this post that I am tired and that’s the the truth.

NaNoWriMo word count for the day: 0

NaNoWriMo word count to date: somewhere over 18,000 (the site was down)

Until yesterday, though, I didn’t believe wholeheartedly that I was any good at it. Or, I believed that because I came later to writing that I somehow wasn’t really a writer because I wasn’t one of those people who talks about having been born with a pencil in her hand. Yesterday, I saw it all so clearly. I was always a writer. I just grew up with this notion that anything I wanted was out of reach, so I should just settle for what’s in front of me. I have lived by this for a long, long time–too long. Mostly, I believe the notion was based in fear.

I clearly recall sitting in one of my favorite professor’s office. This was when I dared to go back to school after my first misguided effort and finally began doing what I wanted to do. Still, I wouldn’t admit back then that I could be a writer. I was going to be a teacher. That too was somewhat misguided at the time. At one point, I dropped out of the education program. That’s when I found myself in Professor Richard Sax’s office. He asked me what I wanted to do if I wasn’t going to be a teacher. I wanted to tell him that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I still lived with that fear, that notion that because I wanted to be a writer so bad that there was no way I would be allowed to be a writer. I didn’t believe in my ability back then. I never told my professor that was what I wanted. I thought he would tell me I couldn’t, that I didn’t have the ability to make it.

Yesterday, I looked a lot of those old papers. I looked at the notes from professors. I don’t know why I didn’t see it really until yesterday, but I could write back then and I don’t think my professor would have told me I couldn’t. Tucked in with the college papers were little stories I wrote in fourth grade that had hints of imagination and imagery. In high school, I was one of those kids who did well enough, but I wouldn’t say any one of my teachers would remember me. There were two times, however, that teachers called me out on my writing after I put a lot of effort into creative assignments. One of the assignments was a story I had written in French. My teacher suggested I translate it back to English and send it somewhere. I never listened. I brushed it off. I thought successful writing happens to other people, not me. But, I see now that those were all clear signs.

In all those moments, what I failed to see was that the universe was throwing my destiny at my feet. I was walking over it, failing to recognize it as mine, most likely fearing the act of claiming it, know if I did I might be seen as presumptuous. I was trying to do something else, anything else that wasn’t so frightening. The thing is, and my family can attest to this, I am not good at lying. I could be practical for a while, but I wasn’t going to be successful at being practical for very long. And, it just made for a miserable me.

Yesterday, it all came together like when you are tuning a guitar string and suddenly the vibrations disappear and the note rings clear and smooth. This is my life. This is what I am supposed to be doing. As crazy and uncertain as it may be, I am a writer.

NaNoWriMo word count: 12,083

Words to date: 5,100