An Hour A Day

Chocolate Fountain

2012-02-15T05:36:00.000-08:00

I was already having a very pleasant Valentine's Day. Unexpected flowers arrived from a friend, delivered to my Prindle Institute office, to congratulate me on making the Chicago Public Library best-of-the-best children's book list for 2011, and there is nothing like the squealing fun of having flowers appear on the morning of February 14th. I enjoyed reading everybody's Valentine posts on Facebook. Email brought the announcement of the birth of a dear friend's baby, so now she has two little boys. Class went well.

Then, as I was leaving class, I was accosted by a faculty member who works at the DePauw Writing Center; she was standing outside the center door to invite everyone in for their Valentine's Day open house. Of course I accepted the invitation, only to behold a table covered with adorable little pink cupcakes, miniature brownies, and a CHOCOLATE FOUNTAIN, surrounded by plates of dippable objects: strawberries, pink and white marshmallows, bite-sized chunks of angel food cake.

Not only did I dip away merrily myself, I became the chief recruiting officer for the chocolate fountain. I ran down to the political science office and brought Deepa and Krista back with me. I ran up to the philosophy department office to share the news with colleagues there. I bumped into Lili from creative writing on the stairs: did she want to come see the chocolate fountain? Indeed, she did. I think I made four visits to it all in all.

The day finished up with session two of my Cheshire Calhoun reading group, this time discussing her essay, "The Virtue of Civility." I supplemented the usual wine and cheese and other munchies with a heart-shaped box of Russell Stover chocolates and a bowl of those little conversation hearts (which I can't stop eating). No chocolate fountain, but maybe four trips to the chocolate fountain were enough for one very happy Valentine's Day.

A Conversation with Ian Frazier

2012-02-14T04:32:00.000-08:00

Acclaimed author Ian Frazier - New Yorker writer for decades and author of many books including Great Plains, On the Rez, and his memoir Family - is here at DePauw for two weeks as a visiting distinguished professor of creative writing and writer-in-residence. Last night I organized an event out at the Prindle Institute as part of our year-long series of events built around the theme of "the ethics of life writing." For an hour, Ian sat with me and my colleague from creative writing Peter Graham by the Prindle fireplace to field questions about the ethical challenges involved in writing about one's own family.

He said that his family had saved so much memorabilia from their lives together - everything from huge quantities of letters to old pieces of farm equipment - that he had the sense that they wanted, or at least expected, that he would do something with it. He said that he writes only about what he loves, and that when you're writing from love, that love is going to illuminate what you write and usually ends up making others feel glad that their lives were recorded in that way. He said that the high school girlfriend whom he wrote about in one chapter had her lawyer (!) ensure that she read not only the parts about her, but the whole entire book, before giving it her blessing. He said that a writer has to balance the importance of some episode or observation to the book as a whole against the possible pain it might cause to those depicted in it. He said that he wrote about his recently deceased parents with the goal of restoring to them what they had lost in their late-life decline, and to give their lives meaning.

It was a wonderful hour of discussion - he's not only wise, but hilariously funny - and well attended, too (perhaps 65 people in the audience, from the community as well as from the campus). The little sandwiches I ordered from Treasures on the Square were very tasty. The predicted snow didn't materialize until people were safely home. Altogether, a most successful evening!

Addiction

2012-02-13T12:38:00.001-08:00

I have been stuck in my writing of late, withering from want of encouragement from the great world beyond, wishing I would get more reviews of my Mason Dixon series, wishing I would get some end-of-year distinction for the THREE books I had published last year, wishing I would get an invitation to somewhere alluring, wishing I would hear from a certain editor about a certain project.

Then last night, while I was wasting time on Facebook, I saw that the Children's Book Guild of Washington, D.C., had posted a link to the Chicago Public Library's recently issued list of the "Best of the Best" children's books of 2011, because two Guild members were on the list. I am a member of that organization, even though I haven't lived in the D.C. area for over two decades now. So I clicked on it to see the names of my two Guild member friends, and when I did, I had the nice surprise of seeing my own Fractions = Trouble! as one of the featured titles (easily overlooked by the Facebook poster, as nonresident members can be out of sight and out of mind). Good news at last! I posted my own little Facebook brag; as of this writing some 72 Facebook friends have "liked" my post.

Yay, I thought! I got my little fix of fame! I got my little whispered word of encouragement from the universe! Now I was ready to write!

Alas, all I've done today is surf the Internet to see if I can find MORE little fixes of fame, MORE whispered words of encouragement. Like an alcoholic who has that one fatal swig of hooch, I've reawakened a ferocious thirst.

This is not good.

I need to stop this. I need to write something for its own sake, for the sheer joy of putting words on paper. I need to do this because I am a writer, and writers write. If I can't write a chapter, I can write a page. I can write a poem. I can make notes in my creativity journal. I can write this blog! (I can always write this blog!). No more self-Googling! I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears, and if the universe has anything else to whisper to me, it will have to wait until I'm ready to give it my attention, because as of this minute, I am going to be too busy writing even to notice.

A Day Spent Reading

2012-02-12T04:45:00.001-08:00

It turned bitter cold here this weekend. I took advantage of the weather to spend my entire day yesterday doing what I might love best in the world - even more than writing? - well, almost as much as writing: reading.

I forced myself out of my nice warm bed in the morning and headed over to the Blue Door Cafe. I sat there for two hours, over hot chocolate and "breakfast casserole," reading Cheshire Calhoun's paper, "The Virtue of Civility," for our reading group on Tuesday night, as well as getting through ten more ten-paged submissions for the Undergraduate Ethics Symposium - papers on topics such as the dearth of legal services for the indigent in New York City, arguments against penalizing "poor lifestyle choice" in the context of health care provision, benefits to Muslim women of wearing hijab, and removal of exotic species from public lands.

Home again, I got back into my nice warm bed and stayed there for the next seven hours. I read all of Nick Hornby's hilarious/disturbing novel, How to Be Good. I read three (short) children's books I'm going to be reviewing. I read the first four essays in Edwidge Danticat's collection, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work.

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard says, "Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.” She's right about her second point: a life spent reading is a good life. But she's wrong about her first point. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? I would!

Dread and Delight

2012-02-10T07:01:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I wrote about the knot that I have in the pit of my stomach on the days that I have to teach. Today I want to record the flip side of that: the exhilaration that comes when teaching goes well.

My class yesterday went very well, in my own humble opinion. I have never before taught a class with such a diverse population of students, including a woman from Ghana, a woman from South Korea, a woman from Tokyo, an African-American woman, a Latina woman, as well as students from different disciplines (philosophy, biology, politics, science, women's studies). And even, in this class on Feminism and the Family, one male.

On Tuesday we had gone around the room and generated our own definitions of the family, ranging from "a group of people who live together related by blood or legal ties" to "a group of people joined together by commitment and love." We did this in the context of discussing an essay by Linda Nicholson on what she calls the myth of the "traditional family." Yesterday we talked about what families are "for" - what purposes do they serve for their members and for the wider political community? - as a way of engaging the debate between political theorists William Galston and Iris Marion Young about the degree to which certain family forms (e.g., the "intact" two-parent family) achieve these purposes better than alternative arrangements. Lots of people talked. The time flew by (at least for me - but believe me, if it drags for me, it drags even more for my students). I was happy about the class for the rest of the afternoon.

It's strange how I dread Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I teach, and look forward to MWF, which offer me wide open meadowlike spaces to write, read, work, cross all kinds of other tasks off my list, and yet I'm almost always ecstatic on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from having class go well, whereas I often sit paralyzed on MWF: I have so much that I should be doing, but nothing that absolutely has to be done TODAY, that I sit at my desk unable to make myself do anything.

Anything except for my blog, of course!

I don't know what to conclude from this. Maybe that structure is good, that real deadlines (like having to walk in the door of Asbury 112 at 12:40 and teach that class) are motivating. I need to try to trick myself into imposing more restrictions on my non-teaching days. I do find that I get more done on those days if rather than facing my hundred-item to-do list, I tell myself: just do this ONE SMALL THING, but ACTUALLY DO IT. So now I need to come up with my one small thing for today. It should either be: 1) start reading the 68 10-page submissions that I have to assess between now and February 20 for our Undergraduate Ethics Symposium - read at least ten of them today, or maybe at least five, or maybe just make myself open the zip file and read at least ONE: or 2) spend at least one hour on the paper I'm supposed to be contributing to a volume called Philosophy in Schools: An Introduction for Philosophers and Teachers - my chapter is supposed to be on "philosophical children's literature for middle school." For some reason I'm stuck on this, maybe because I just wrote something similar for a volume called Philosophy and Education: Introducing Philosophy to Young People and so I have to find a way not to repeat myself. Either one of those tasks would do. The one that is stressing me most right now is the book chapter, so I should do just ONE HOUR on that. Or even half an hour. Or even fifteen minutes.

And then dread will turn into delight. And the rest of my life will be happy forever. That's how I feel on Tuesdays and Thursdays after my class. That's how I want to feel today.

Stage Fright

2012-02-09T06:01:00.000-08:00

I have been teaching philosophy at the university level for twenty years now. I love teaching, and I've had some lovely recognition as a teacher, including a university-wide teaching award two or three years ago. So you might think I'd be confident as a teacher, that I'd leap out of bed and skip over to my classroom with a light heart on each teaching day. You would be wrong.

Even after two decades of teaching, I always wake up on teaching days with a sick feeling in my stomach. It feels impossible ever to be prepared for teaching, because the classroom experience has so much in common with improv theater: even in a large class, it isn't just a lecture, or a performance; there is always interaction with an audience, and with an unpredictable audience, one that can ask ANYTHING or say ANYTHING, and then it's up to the teacher - that is to say, to ME - to incorporate that into the shape of the hour somehow. And what if the audience says NOTHING? What if I call out, "Give me the name of a town! Now give me a career - policeman, fireman? Now give me a common household object!" - and nobody says anything? If they just sit there in stony silence and I have to create the whole improv routine out of nothing at all?

It doesn't help that for some terrible reason I don't seem able to prepare for class until the day of the class itself. As soon as I do prepare, I start to feel better: surely they will have lots to say about THIS! But I don't seem able to do this the day before. And I always feel better once I actually teach the first class of the day, vastly better: oh, I DO remember how to teach, I do, I do! But this semester, I'm not teaching until the afternoon: my class is from 12:40-2:10 (note: an hour and a half is a LOT of time to fill). So I have all morning to fret and fidget, which is what I'm doing right now.

Okay, I'm off to prepare. My particular bunch of students this semester is wonderfully lively and engaged, so I know class today will be good. Or at least I hope it will be. But what if - no, don't think that way! Go off and actually prepare the darned thing! Go!

Episodes of Happiness

2012-02-08T05:58:00.000-08:00

I used to have the life strategy of planning out five episodes of happiness for myself each day. The episodes could be small. Small ones are often the best. But they had to be reliable/guaranteed episodes of happiness. For example, sometimes teaching my class is the highlight of my day; other times, I leave class feeling that I have to wear a bag over my head for the rest of my life. So I never put "teaching my class" on the happiness schedule; if it ends up being an episode of happiness, that's a lucky extra in my day. Favorite items included: 1) lingering in bed for an extra ten minutes in the morning, without guilt, luxuriating under the covers; 2) walking a few extra blocks before I got on the Skip to go work; 3) having lunch with a friend; 4) reading a good book for half an hour before going to bed; and 5) ??? It was always fun to try to come up with that fifth episode.

Since I've come to Indiana, I've fallen out of this habit. Every day here is one long unbroken stretch of happiness. But lately I've decided that I missed the practice of distinguishing and honoring distinct little bits of happiness. So sometimes now I reckon up my episodes of happiness after the fact.

Here is my list from yesterday:
1) reading Honor Scholar submissions in my comfy bed in the early morning with my mug of hot chocolate
2) walking up and down Seminary Street as it was beginning to be light
3) oatmeal at the Hub with lots of brown sugar and raisins
4) my class - really good!
5) session one of my Cheshire Calhoun reading group, all of us sitting by the Prindle Institute fireplace discussing Cheshire's essay, "Changing One's Heart" - extremely fun!
6) talking on the phone for a long time to my dear Colorado friend Diane

That makes six, not five. But there is nothing wrong with having an additional episode of happiness, or for that matter, two or three or four.

Oatmeal

2012-02-07T05:54:00.000-08:00

For those of you interested in what I ate for breakfast today, today I tried out a NEW BREAKFAST PLAN. The Blue Door Cafe has beautiful hot chocolate, delicious French toast, and perfectly cooked omelets, but their oatmeal, I regret to inform you, is of the instant variety that comes in those little packages; they just don't have enough early morning traffic to justify having a big pot of oatmeal sitting on top of the stove.

So today I took an early morning walk up Seminary Street (my street) from the un-fancy end where I live to the very fancy end where the president of the university lives; then I walked back on Anderson Street, where I may live next year (I've looked at a beautiful century-old house there that would be available when its owner departs for her sabbatical year in Germany). I ended up at the Hub (student cafeteria/food court) in the student union on campus, where they offer have a big pot of oatmeal, as well as a big pot of cream of wheat.

I fixed my bowl by layering it: first a bunch of oatmeal, then a layer of brown sugar and raisins; then repeat. The final effect was like eating a bowl of molten oatmeal raisin cookies. Cost: $1.70.

I still love the Blue Door beyond all reckoning, but this made a nice change on a gray morning. It's good to expand one's culinary horizons, don't you think?

Fourteen in One Blow

2012-02-05T05:59:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I heard FOURTEEN different talks in the Grimm Legacy Fairy Tale Symposium at Harvard. I sat on a comfy couch in the back of the ornate room at the Barker Humanities Center, choosing coziness over a clearer sight line to the podium. Sitting on the couch with me were a children's librarian from Rhode Island and a professor of Portuguese at Harvard who remembers all the fairy tales told her by her grandmother as she was growing up in the Azores Islands.

A few highlights from the long, extremely full day:

Maria Tatar, brilliant scholar who chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard, gave exquisite opening remarks. I tried to write down all her best sentences, such as this one: "Stories make the human world, and they also make the world human." She talked about Gretel as a trickster heroine who spawned a legacy of surprisingly strong girls, such as Pippi Longstocking. She quoted James Baldwin: stories are "the only light we've got in the darkness."

David Rice, recent Harvard graduate who is just back from a year in Berlin working on his novel (now I want to have a year in Berlin working on MY novel!), spoke eloquently of the distinction between the "forest" - a literal, real place that can be mapped - and the "woods" - the landscape of imagination, a subjective state of feelings. He distinguished fairy tales, where readers sign an implicit contract to enter a world of magic, and literature of the fantastic, where magic breaks in unbidden.

Ariane Mandell, completing a degree at Harvard Divinity School as she also completes her first novel, talked about the role of tears in the Grimm stories, first invoking ancient Jewish wisdom that tears have the power to get God's attention when nothing else will. The miller's daughter's tears bring the aid of Rumplestiltskin; then her tears get him to grant her a reprieve on her promise to give him her firstborn child. Cinderella waters the tree over her mother's grave with her tears, thus bringing her the magical assistance she needs to go to the ball. To weep is to hope, Ariane said; people with serious enough clinical depression no longer bother to weep.

Perri Klass, pediatrician and author of numerous essays on literature, distilled a century of childrearing advice from leading physicians on whether or not parents should read fairy tales to children. Dr. Spock said no: the world has enough cruelty in it without gratuitously introducing more. But he is in the minority. Bruno Bettelheim said that when children request the same story over and over again it is because there is some message that they want the PARENT to get!

Animator Ruth Lingford showed her hauntingly beautiful film of the lesser-known Grimm tale, "Death and the Mother." Jerry Griswold brought the house down with hilarious musings about the different endings of "Beauty and the Beast," focusing on Beauty's bewilderment when her beast is suddenly replaced by some handsome stranger: "Who the heck is THAT?" John Cech looked at Sendak's illustrations of Grimm; Michael Patrick Hearn looked at the Cruikshank illustrations from the first English-language edition of the tales. Claudia Schabe showed clips from socialist retellings of the tales in East German films of the Cold War era. And more!

I was too tired to go out to explore Cambridge in the evening. I waltzed back to my bed-and-breakfast and got in bed and read. I now have a couple of hours before I have to head to Logan for my flight home. Should I walk around Cambridge in this sunny but very cold morning? Or stay curled up at this sweet Irving Street b&b? Or maybe a little bit of both?

So Glad I Came

2012-02-03T16:22:00.000-08:00

Greetings from Cambridge!

I've been trying to remember the last time I was in Boston or Cambridge; I think it might be at least twenty years ago. We came here once as a family when Christopher was a toddler, before Gregory was even born. I know I came here for the APA (American Philosophical Association) convention the year I went on the job market. Those are the only two times I can remember. But once upon a time, when I was an undergraduate at Wellesley, taking a good number of classes at MIT through the Wellesley/MIT exchange program, I rode the bus into Cambridge several times a week for a period of years.

Now I'm back for a blissful weekend attending the symposium Harvard has organized to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales. I flew in this morning and got from Logan Airport to Harvard Square for a $2 Charlie ticket on the T (the ticket presumably named for the song "Charlie of the MTA"). I easily found the charming bed-and-breakfast on Irving Street, near the Harvard campus, where I had reserved my room for these two nights. My room is two flights up, tiny, with a shared bath: exactly what I wanted. A computer is available in the parlor; that's where I'm typing this now. Each room is stocked with books to read (which guests are welcome to take); the parlor also has magazines, including The New Yorker, and newspapers, including the New York Times.

For the next couple of hours I wandered around Cambridge, spending most of my time in the aisles of the Harvard Book Store (not the university bookstore, which is the Harvard Coop). I bought three books: Anne Sexton's book of fairy tale poems, Transformations; Diderot's Rameau's Nephew; and Nancy Mitford's Voltaire in Love. At first I thought the bookstore's relatively small section of children's books boasted no Claudia Mills titles. But then I looked again: two copies of the newly released paperback for Being Teddy Roosevelt - hooray! I asked the guy at the bookstore for a lunch recommendation and he directed me to a place called Darwin's on Mt. Auburn Street: truly excellent sandwiches, plus comfy armchairs for starting in on reading Diderot.

Then it was time for the symposium to begin, in the Barker Center for the Humanities. Two talks today: a presentation on the development of the SurLaLune fairy tale website that contains thousands of versions (and classic illustrations) for dozens of fairy tales - and the keynote address by prominent fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes on the Grimm brothers' legacy in contemporary Germany. Tomorrow there will be talks all day, starting at 8:45 and going until 6:30.

Right now I'm eating moist chunks of apple cake provided by the bed-and-breakfast - and then I'll curl up in my single bed and read some more, probably fairy tale poetry tonight. I'm so glad I came!

Windshield Wiper Woes

2012-02-02T06:50:00.000-08:00

In Colorado, precipitation in the winter comes in the form of snow. Any wet stuff that falls out of the sky is going to be white fluffy stuff. Not so in Indiana, where winter can bring rain, or snow, or, worst of all, freezing rain. I heard that the community of Greencastle was paralyzed for a week last winter, the university closed and classes canceled, because of an ice storm that left intractable ice covering everything.

I had my first encounter with the freezing rain of Indiana a week or so ago. I left the play I had attended on campus (shamefully having driven the very short distance to get there because of the inclement weather) to find my car entirely encased in a thick covering of ice. I turned on the heater and front and rear defrosters, as I chipped away at that ice for all I was worth, but I couldn't make a single dent in it. Finally, the guy scraping and chipping at his windshield behind me came over to show me how to proceed: just get one TINY little crack in the ice anywhere, and then use that to gain purchase on the rest. I finally did clear enough of the windshield to be able to drive home. But in the process I made the mistake of trying to force my windshield wipers to do their share in the ice removal ordeal.

The poor wipers couldn't do it any more than I could. The next day, one of them refused to go altogether, its heart having given out under the unfair strain. Or so I thought. But then, after a few days of rest, I tried the wipers again, and the ailing wiper made a miraculous recovery and wiped along merrily with his brother as if nothing had happened. But then, alas, when I tried the same experiment again on the following day, that wiper had a relapse and ground to a halt halfway up the windshield. His brother kept on going, the two got entangled, and the healthy wiper was now mangled: fatally injured!

So it was time to take my little Chevy Aveo to York Chevrolet. Guess what I paid for the repair? $9.36, for the replacement wiper. The kindly manager tightened the originally ailing wiper and replaced the subsequently destroyed wiper for free. It all took less than ten minutes. So thank you, York Chevrolet! But next time there is an ice storm, I'm going to treat my windshield wipers with more loving kindness, that is for sure. When it comes to windshield wipers, this Colorado girl turned Indiana girl is sadder and wiser now.

Fairy Tale Adventure

2012-02-01T07:50:00.000-08:00

This is going to be a year filled with fairy tales for me.

I've been working on what I hope will be a series of young chapter books that have a fairy tale theme. The children in second grade at Grimm Elementary are studying fairy tales; each child is assigned a fairy tale of his or her own, charged with retelling it in some new and different way. But as the children work on their retellings, they find that their own lives start to parallel their fairy tale in uncanny and illuminating ways. So far I've written Priscilla and the Pea, and now I'm working on Jeremy and the Beanstalk, while waiting to hear from the publishing powers-that-be if the idea is a go.

I'm also writing a poem every Thursday to share with two poet friends from last year's poetry retreat, and I've decided to write fairy tale poems, as poems of doomed love are not to my taste this year. I want to write them in all different forms: sonnet, pantoum, sestina, haiku.

I'm going to be teaching children's literature in the English Department here at DePauw this fall, and of course we'll cover fairy tales.

So when I saw that Harvard is hosting a one-day extravaganza this weekend to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Grimm Brothers' collection of fairy tales, I thought, maybe I should go to this. And so I am. I'm flying on miles, I'm staying at a darling bed-and-breakfast right off Harvard Square, and I'll be rubbing shoulders with all the greats of the world of fairy tales, Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar, Jerry Griswold, and so many others, at the Harvard symposium for Grimm Legacies.

Land of fairy tales: Here I come.

The New Semester Begins

2012-01-30T04:17:00.002-08:00

Today is the first day of the new semester at DePauw. I came to my Prindle Institute office at 6:15 this morning to try to get my life completely organized in preparation for the new semester and to make my time management plan.

Last semester I worked out a plan that had many appealing features but didn't work out completely as hoped. I taught my Rousseau class on Tuesday and Thursday from 10-11:30 and committed myself to office hours on those days from 1-4 in my cozy office in Asbury Hall. That office has no computer, so I had no temptations to distract me from the task I had set myself for those afternoons, of seriously making my way through the many brilliant scholarly books about Rousseau that I had bought once upon a time and never read. I managed to read three of them and even take good notes on them so that I'll have them at hand for when I teach Rousseau again in the future.

I spent Monday, Wednesday, and Friday out at my office at the Prindle. There I gave myself latitude to pursue a wide range of non-teaching-related tasks, from scholarly writing to organizing and participating in reading groups and Prindle-related events. The thing that didn't work out there was that I spent too much time just reading for the reading groups. There they were, all those huge, fat, appealing books lined up on my Prindle bookshelf: American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us, Tangled Webs: How False Statements Are Undermining America from Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff, Bound by Recognition by political theorist Patchen Markell, and more. I love to read. But prime work hours should not be spent reading.

So this semester I am going to spend Tuesday and Thursday once again on campus, preparing for and teaching my course on Feminism and the Family, which meets from 12:40-2:10. I am going to try to get all my course-related work, including grading, done on those days. I will still spend MWF out at the Prindle. But this time I am not allowing myself to do any reading on those days before 4 p.m. Instead I will WRITE: a paper for a collection on philosophy for children, my paper on Beverly Cleary for the conference in China, my paper on artistic integrity for the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. Children's book writing I'll do early in the morning, either in my sweet little house or at the Blue Door Cafe.

I am planning to be astonished by my productivity. Watch out, world!

Say It

2012-01-25T04:53:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the next-to-last class in my Writing Children's Books winter term course. As we finished the critiques of the middle-grade novel chapters I realized that most of my students needed a workshop on dialogue. So I created this exercise on the spot. I think it worked out pretty well.

On the board I wrote the following bare bones conversational exchange:

“How are you?” John asked.
“I’m fine,” Mary said. “How about you?”
“Just okay,” John said.
“What’s the matter?” Mary asked.
“It’s my mom,” John said.
“What about her?” Mary asked.
“I think she’s sick,” John said.
“Oh, no,” Mary said.

It was not improved by substituting fancier speech verbs:

“How are you?” John inquired.
“I’m fine,” Mary responded. “How about you?”
“Just okay,” John muttered.
“What’s the matter?” Mary interrogated.
“It’s my mom,” John confessed.
“What about her?” Mary interviewed.
“I think she’s sick,” John whispered.
“Oh, no,” Mary exclaimed.

Nor by modifying each speech verb with adverbs:

“How are you?” John asked politely.
“I’m fine,” Mary said. “How about you?”
“Just okay,” John said nervously.
“What’s the matter?” Mary asked curiously.
“It’s my mom,” John said sadly.
“What about her?” Mary asked persistently.
“I think she’s sick,” John said softly.
“Oh, no,” Mary said sympathetically.

Nor by getting rid of most of the speech verbs altogether, though this is definitely less annoying:

“How are you?” John asked.
“I’m fine,” Mary said. “How about you?”
“Just okay."
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s my mom.”
“What about her?”
“I think she’s sick.”
“Oh, no.”

Instead, what worked to improve this stretch of dialogue was situating John and Mary in a setting and interspersing their bits of speech with body language, action, brief descriptions, and thoughts from our viewpoint character (it could be John or Mary: we picked John). The students decided to make our characters sixteen-year-olds. Where might teenagers find themselves? At the mall. This is the revised dialogue we wrote together:

“How are you?” John asked Mary, as they were approaching the Gap.

“I’m fine,” Mary said. “How about you?”

“Just okay." John lowered his eyes, hoping that the other shoppers couldn't hear. A kid from school walked by talking on his cellphone.

“What’s the matter?” Mary leaned in closer.

John hesitated. Then he made himself say it. “It’s my mom."

“What about her?”

“I think she’s sick." The kid from school seemed to be looking right at him, but John didn't care any more.

“Oh, no." Mary's eyes filled with tears.

Great. Now I've made her cry.

That's better, isn't it?

Outside My Comfort Zone

2012-01-23T06:12:00.000-08:00

On Friday I decided to up the coolness quotient of my Writing Children's Book winter term course, as well as providing a huge surge of creative energy, by having Greencastle illustrator/author/animator Troy Cummings come to visit us. Troy is the author/illustrator of The Eensy Weensy Spider Freaks Out! (Big Time!), as well as the illustrator of the mega-fun read aloud More Bears! by Kenn Nesbitt.

Troy read Eensy to us, as well as giving a world premiere read-aloud of his forthcoming picture book about a dad who plays horsey so convincingly that he is captured by horse rustlers and then escapes to star in a rodeo, walk the tightrope in a circus, and win the Kentucky Derby.

Then Troy did drawing exercises with us. The first one involved making character sketches by combining a name, an adjective, and a noun. I got Billy/clumsy/waffle. I was the only one in the class who misunderstood the assignment. I tried to draw a boy named Billy who demonstrates his clumsiness by dropping a waffle. I couldn't even draw that: I had to cheat by making dialogue come out of Billy's mouth: "Oops! There goes my waffle!" But that wasn't the assignment. I was supposed to draw Billy the Clumsy Waffle. Billy WAS the waffle.

Then we had to use pictionary cards to make up a dummy page or spread for a picture book. I couldn't do that one either. I could stick-figure draw a couple of the items on my card: a scarf, a man wearing sideburns, and a fruitcake. But I couldn't come up with any story line connecting them, let alone draw a scene relying on that story line.

The final assignment even Troy admitted was impossible. We each got a slip of paper with something literally impossible listed on it: mine was to draw someone opening a lid and releasing an entirely new COLOR. Needless to say, I couldn't do that one, either.

Here is the humbling thing. Lots of my students COULD do these exercises. Lots of them did them BRILLIANTLY. I would say that out of the group of sixteen of us, there were only three who had visible trouble with the exercises, and I was one of the three. Oh, and I had to show my failed attempts to the class, going FIRST, to show what a good sport I was.

What should I conclude from this? Several things, I'd say.

One is that I've always had trouble with this kind of spontaneous exercise, so my failure here really comes as no surprise. When my boys were small, people often said to me, "I bet YOU make up wonderful bedtime stories!" But I didn't. I can think of a story only if I brainstorm ideas for a month or so, then laboriously work the chosen idea over many more months into its final form.

Two, this makes me a LOT more sensitive to why some of my students feel shy about sharing their writing exercises with the class.

Three, different people have different creative processes. Some of the students who were not shining in the writing exercises I assigned shone here. Different people create in different ways. This is to be celebrated.

Finally, my creative goal this year, you may remember, is to write a book that surprises me, to try something new and different. And so, hey, on Friday I did try something new and different. I found out that it's hard to do this. Maybe I'll try this exercise again sometime in the privacy of my own home just to limber up my creative brain a little bit. Maybe not. But it was a good thing to shake myself up a bit. Scary, yes. Embarrassing, very. But probably on balance, good.

By Popular Request

2012-01-21T14:19:00.000-08:00

More pictures of my Greencastle world: views from my office window out at the Prindle Institute for Ethics. This is the peaceful, serene place where I have one of my two offices at DePauw; the other is in the cozy suite of offices belonging to the Philosophy Department in Asbury Hall, right in the heart of campus, steps away from the Roy O. West Library and just a block from my little house. Usually during the semester, I spend Monday, Wednesday, and Friday out at the Prindle, and Tuesday and Thursday (my teaching days) on campus.

During Winter Term, I'm teaching every day except for Thursday from 1-4 in the afternoons, so I spend every morning out at the Prindle, then head to campus to teach, and then return to the Prindle in the late afternoon because there is a Winter Term baking class that meets there and delivers kuchen to us fresh from the oven just as my own class is coming to a close. As part of my new mindful eating routine, I'm trying to make myself a cup of tea and put the wedge of cake on a plate first before eating it. Then: ahhhh.

The Blue Door Cafe

2012-01-20T05:09:00.001-08:00

It is somewhat of an ordeal for me to post pictures on my blog. First I have to remember where I put my camera; then the battery invariably needs charging, and I have to remember how to get it out of the camera and how to put it into the charger, and then after I take the pictures, I have to remember how to upload them onto my computer. Of course, all of this remembering would be vastly easier if I executed these operations on a regular basis. One of my new year's plans is to do just that.

So: here are some pictures of my beloved Blue Door Cafe. The two interior pictures were taken in the early morning. The Blue Door opens at seven, and I am usually the second customer there, at least during this quiet time of January Winter Term. You'll notice that it is DARK outside at seven. Indiana is on Eastern time and really should be on Central time, given its geographical location. So the sun rises late here. However, this only makes the Blue Door all the more cozy. The woman at the counter is Sue, the owner and manager who presides there in such a warm and welcoming way and who knows exactly how I like my hot chocolate: made with skim milk, but with whipped cream and chocolate shavings on top.

Maybe tomorrow if I'm feeling extra ambitious I'll take a picture of my mug of hot chocolate, too.

Pajama Party

2012-01-19T07:37:00.000-08:00

Last night my Writing Children's Books winter term students and I had our class pajama party by the fireplace in the Great Hall at the Prindle Institute for Ethics. I switched our class time from afternoon to evening, encouraged students to wear pj's and/or nightgowns (complete with robes and slippers if so desired), and to bring stuffed animals and a favorite book to share. I wore a nightgown as well, my favorite new warm flannel Lanz of Salzburg nightgown ordered from the Vermont Country Store, and provided hot chocolate, milk, apple cider, and a tray of cookies, plus a dozen tiny red velvet cupcakes. The cupcakes were in honor of a student who had written her picture book about a cupcake war between two sisters resolved when they discover a shared love for red velvet cupcakes.

I would say that the event was a success. Only a few students actually appeared in their pajamas, but at least there were those few, and we had a total of five stuffed animals, including my jackrabbit, Ruby. I was shocked to find that one bear didn't have a name yet and also noticed some hesitation on the part of my students to make the voices for their stuffed animals. But by the end of the evening, all the stuffed animals were conversing comfortably.

We heard selections from Fancy Nancy, Frog and Toad, and Dr. Seuss, as well as snippets from some older chapter books. The highlight of the evening was when we started reading Junie B. Jones Is (Almost) a Flower Girl, and just couldn't stop. We ended up reading the entire 68-page book aloud, passing it from reader to reader, each one taking a chapter. I especially loved hearing the boys reading Junie's lines with lots of expression.

Next treat for my class: tomorrow we have a visit from illustrator/animator/author Troy Cummings.

Plotters and Pantsers

2012-01-18T04:28:00.000-08:00

Last night I took my Writing for Children class to a talk at the Putnam County Library by Indianapolis-based young adult author Mike Mullin, author of Ashfall, a coming-of-age novel about a boy struggling to survive post-apocalyptic conditions following an eruption of the Yellowstone super-volcano. I thought, correctly as it turned out, that Mike's presentation would be a good counter-weight to my focus on younger, sweeter stories. After all, there is quite a difference between trying to stay alive during the aftermath of a volcanic holocaust and trying to get the promised ice cream cone for having passed all of your times tables tests (7 x 9 = Trouble!). And I thought Mike's talk would up the coolness quotient of my course, as well, which it did: Mike studied Taekwondo in order to write the book and ended his presentation by smashing a sizable cinder block with his bare hand.

I confess that I did have a moment of despair at this point in the evening as I wondered how a staid middle-aged authoress is supposed to compete on the lecture circuit these days.

For me, the smashingest part of the evening, however, was NOT the karate chop. It was an insight the Mike offered during Q & A into the age-old writing question of whether it's better to write from a detailed, self-conscious outline, or better to grope your way through a story without any clear plan. Mike called this the difference between being a plotter and a "pantser" (flying by the seat of your pants). I had always thought that both approaches were viable: some writers are plotters, some are pantsers, and both can produce wonderful, and terrible, results.

Mike had a different insight, which I'm still pondering this morning. He pointed to empirical research comparing "logical" versus "intuitive" creative styles. He claimed that according to this research, when logical people try an intuitive style, creativity goes up. BUT (and this is the interesting part), when intuitive people try a logical style, creativity also goes up. He concluded that there are considerable creative benefits in trying the style with which you are LESS comfortable.

Hmm. While I'm not a rigid plotter, I definitely start with a fairly clear vision of what the structure of my story needs to be (details to be filled in later). As I continue on my creative journey this year, with the goal of "writing a book that surprises me," perhaps I need to give myself some "pantser" freedom.

It's worth a try.

A Few of My Favorite Things

2012-01-17T03:38:00.001-08:00

When I went on my new year's trip to tiny Goldsmith, Indiana, to visit the boyhood home of my friend Keith, he took me to an indoor flea market/junk shop in Kokomo. I don't consider myself much of a shopper: it's been years since I've set foot in a shopping mall, I buy all my clothes at yard sales and Goodwill, I'm not one for having very much STUFF in my life. But this Kokomo market was irresistible.

I made three purchases, pictured above: a lovely blue-and-white ceramic teapot, a copper teakettle, and a goose-shaped cookie jar. The teakettle was quite tarnished, but Keith brought me over some Brasso, and I tried polishing it with amazing results. Then Keith re-polished what I had already polished with even more amazing results. And the goose was already amazing, especially as she cost three dollars. This is the goose who might become my story goose, my jar of ideas. Or maybe she's my muse, a benign, serene creative presence in my life.

As of this moment I have yet to boil water in the teakettle, make tea in the teapot, or put a cookie or story idea into my goose. I just have them all lined up on my stove to look at. The gleam of the copper makes my heart sing. Every glimpse of the goose makes my heart shout. The teapot actually cost more than both of them together and right now I love it less, though I still do love it.

I love all three. Especially the goose.

Cocktail Party

2012-01-16T05:30:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I gave a motivational/inspirational/how-to-accomplish-all-your-writing-goals-and-dreams talk at a Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators schmooze in Carmel, north of Indianapolis.

I began my presentation with an exercise/game I learned from creativity guru Cynthia Morris. It's called "Cocktail Party," or at least that's what I called it yesterday. In the game you project yourself forward to the end of the year, or to some point in your future, imagining that all your wildest dreams have already been accomplished. You are surrounded by bright, creative dreamers who have also achieved great things. You have all come together to celebrate your accomplishments, without shyness, without envy.

So: you approach somebody at the party, introduce yourself, and then say, "How was your year?" You listen as they tell you of wonderful creative breakthroughs and well-deserved recognition. "What about you?" they then ask. And you tell them.

It's quite an amazing thing to project yourself into a place of confidence and success. Some people in our group yesterday had trouble doing it. "I think I'd like to have my book finally accepted," they'd say timidly. No! In this game you say, "I'm thrilled that the middle-grade novel I've been working on for the last three years was accepted by HarperCollins in a two-book deal."

In my own case, I found that it was illuminating for me to see what I was hungering for by what particular kind of success I was projecting for myself. I found myself saying, "It's been a good year. I took some creative risks I'd never taken before and really went out on a creative limb, and now my experimental novel has just gotten its third starred review, this one from Horn Book." I DO want to do something different this year. And, while all we can control is the effort and not the outcome, I'd love love love to have that level of critical recognition.

For ten minutes yesterday, I had done it, and I had it. It's something to hold on to, to inspire me and guide me, in the eleven and a half months ahead.

Not for Dummies

2012-01-14T06:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday in my Writing Children's Book winter term class, we had a workshop on making picture book dummies. This was a very smart thing for us to do.

I came to class with a stack of blank book dummies. For each one, I took sixteen pieces of copy machine/printer paper and stapled them together on the left-hand side to make a 32-page book. For readers who are not children's book authors: that is the length of a standard picture book. All books are manufactured in such a way that the number of pages is some multiple of eight. You might see a picture book of sixteen or twenty-four pages in the educational market, but not in the trade market. And as picture books grow to forty or forty-eight pages, production costs skyrocket. So: thirty-two pages it is.

Of that, four (most likely) go to front matter: title page, copyright, dedication, etc. So that leaves twenty-eight pages for text and art. A picture book story has to fit in that number of pages, with enough action - and variety of action - to give the illustrator something to draw - and enough moments of suspense to give the reader reason to turn to the next page.

I came to class with a huge bag of scissors, tape dispensers, colored pencils, crayons, and markers. And we got to work. Students sat busily cutting up their manuscripts into little strips of words to tape onto the pages; they sketched out what art they might imagine accompanying their words. And they learned a lot about what didn't work about their manuscripts.

Some students discovered they only had enough material to fill half a book: by page 16, they had petered out entirely. Some saw how text-heavy their story lay on the page. Long paragraphs needed to be broken up into smaller morsels. One particularly serious writer gave up her story halfway through and started another one: what she had was a lovely poem, but it wasn't a picture book.

I asked each student to identify the central problem faced by the main character. On what page was it introduced? The earlier, the better! A third of the way through the book: much too late. And on what page was it solved? Two-thirds of the way through the book: much too early.

So on a gray, snowy day, we sat cutting and coloring and truly becoming picture book writers.

First Snow in Greencastle

2012-01-13T05:25:00.000-08:00

Snow has been late to come this winter in Indiana, but it snowed an inch or two yesterday, and it's snowing now outside my window. Snow here has a different feel from snow in Colorado. In Colorado snow feels like: "Hooray, it's snowing, and the skiers will be happy, and tomorrow the sun will be out and glittering upon all that wonderful white fluffy stuff, and most of it will melt, and by the day after that kids will be out on the playground again in shorts and T-shirts." In Indiana snow feels like: "Winter is here and is going to stay a long long long time."

It's become clear to me already that I need to buy a much warmer coat, a long padded one that will cover me from shoulders to knees. I've already bought a warmer hat at the Dollar General. I have a pair of warm boots that I bought last year on my once-a-year shoe-buying spree at Brown's old-timey shoe store in downtown Warrensburg, Missouri. But now I need to spray them with some extra-strength waterproofing.

I'm also going to have to focus all my energies on COZINESS and CHEER. So this morning I went to Kroger's in the early morning dark and bought a huge heap of art supplies, because in my Winter Term children's book writing class this afternoon we're going to be making dummies for our picture books. I am now the proud owner of many pairs of kid scissors, many rolls of Scotch-brand Magic tape, boxes and boxes of crayons, colored pencils, and markers. And then I took myself to the Blue Door Cafe for breakfast. Outside it was so gray and cold and bleak. Insight the Blue Door it was so bright and warm and merry. Today I had a tomato, onion, pepper, and cheddar omelet: most tasty. Now I may turn on the gas fireplace in the Prindle Institute Great Hall and write.

Coziness. Cheer. Coziness. Cheer.

Someone's Got to Do It

2012-01-11T07:27:00.000-08:00

As part of my project of being a stellar campus citizen during my visiting professorship at DePauw, I responded to an emailed call-for-volunteers and offered my services as a judge for one of the four cooking competitions staged for the students in the Winter Term "Sweet and Savory Science" food class. Competitions will be held over the course of the month in four categories: Childhood Favorites, British Pub Food, Vegetarian, and "Chopped" (in imitation of the Food Network show). Guess which category I signed up for? Yes, indeed: Childhood Favorites.

So at 11:30 yesterday I arrived at one of the residence halls with my fellow two judges and was served two different meals by two rival teams, each to be judged on four dimensions: adherence to the theme, menu (attractiveness and informativeness of the written menu given to us), presentation (including table setting), and of course, taste. The first team served: mozzarella sticks with marina sauce for dipping, Roman pizza, side green salad, and a dessert creation of their own called Puppy Chow Pie. The second team served: pigs and blankets, tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, and funfetti cake balls for dessert.

Boy, was it close! All three judges thought that the second team was the clear winner in terms of their interpretation of the category theme and their over-the-top beautiful menu (with a cheery kidlike cover and delightful information provided in a lively attractive way). All three judges thought the first team won more points on taste, which is, after all, a not-inconsiderable part of an eating experience. The overall verdict, when all was tabulated: the second team. I was the judge who put them over the top with my raptures over the menu they produced. I guess I just don't care that much about how food tastes; it's the IDEA of food that I love most. (Hmm: maybe something to think about as I proceed on my new year slimnastic plans.)

So: when there is a job that needs to be done, I offer my services. Someone's got to judge an amazingly fun student cooking contest. Oh, heck, it might as well be me.

Driving at Night with Headlights

2012-01-10T07:28:00.001-08:00

E. L. Doctorow is quoted as offering this wonderful insight into the process of writing a novel: "It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

That's how I'm feeling about my Winter Term writing-for-children course right now. I realized on day one that the course presented three challenges that I am going to have to deal with somehow:

1) The class is very large for a writing class: 22 students.
2) The class sessions are very long: three hours a day, four days a week, for several weeks.
3) The class population is not what I'm used to: I'm used to middle-aged women, and this class has a sizable population of 20-year-old guys who have never read any of my own childhood favorite texts (no Betsy, Tacy, and Tib fans) and who are primarily interested in writing graphic novels.

So I am going to have to make some changes to what I had planned.

I have to do a lot more small group work as it's deadly to have to listen to 22 students report on their weekend reading, 22 students each share a picture book manuscript for critique, 22 students each share a book chapter for critique. I have to mix up the format to accommodate the long class sessions and the student learning styles: scrap the long lectures in favor of interactive exercises. I'm making the changes day by day, so that I can learn each day from what I did the session before and whether it worked out the way I wanted it to. Basically, I have to keep on my toes. Make that: on my tippy toes!

While peering out through the windshield at that next stretch of road ahead, lit up by those headlights.

Sheer Quantity

2012-01-09T05:16:00.000-08:00

I'm home from the poetry retreat. One of the authors there did an estimate and concluded that together we read and discussed some THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE POEMS over the course of those four days.

That is a very big number. It includes poems we were given as inspirational exemplars in each writing session, plus the poems that the fifteen of us wrote in response to each of the many prompts we were given, and then shared in our circle. So right now I am saturated with poetry, stuffed to bursting with it, reeling drunk with it.

I also realized that while I was away I posted my five hundredth blog post. This is now blog post 502. That is also a very big number. I have done a lot of consistent blogging over the last two years.

So this is leading me to reflect on the benefits of sheer quantity. Author Malcolm Gladwell is quoted all over the place as saying that it takes 10,000 hours of doing anything to become really good at it. And it seems to be the sheer quantity of hours amassed that matters.

I have found that when I've written something that hasn't worked the way I want it to, the best thing to do isn't to try to rewrite it over and over again, but simply to write something else, something new. Then I return to rewrite the earlier failed piece with hardly any effort at all. Writing guru Brenda Ueland says the same thing, that rather than endlessly polishing the same little pearl, write something new and then you'll see how to fix up that pearl in no time flat.

When I was working on my Mason Dixon series, I started off with trying to write the book that became Mason Dixon: Fourth Grade Disasters. My writing group had much fault to find with it. I put it away and wrote Mason Dixon: Pet Disasters instead. My writing group loved it, and by then I knew exactly how to write Fourth Grade Disasters to that same level.

Sometimes, less is more. But sometimes more is more.

Straw

2012-01-08T04:27:00.000-08:00

If I were to use one word to describe my experience at the poetry retreat this year, the word would be: humbled. I'm inspired, yes, and I'm growing, yes, but I'm also stunned, astonished, slain by what some of my fellow poets are producing. We take a pledge not to share details of anybody's poems - at this stage so raw, so private, shared only with those who are also willing to make our work vulnerable to others' eyes - but I think I don't run afoul of this agreement by saying merely that some of the poems are amazing. I have known many of these poets for many years now, and I am seeing work from some of them at a level I have never seen before.

But what I'm also seeing, sad but true, is that at least here at this retreat, the most truly amazing work is coming out of a place of pain. People are dealing with extremely difficult and agonizing burdens in their lives, and they are transforming those into exquisitely moving poems. In the past, that was sometimes me, as well. But this year I'm happy. I'm just happy all the time. And that's good. For me. Less good for my poems.

Though maybe it's not so much that we need to have pain to write. Surely that's true. But as we're learning to be poets, groping to explore new forms, it helps to have a standing topic, a subject matter already intimately inhabited, so that we can focus not on what to write about but on how to write about it. It helps to have a theme.

Yesterday I remembered, in the nick of time, that the theme doesn't have to be about me. Or, it can be about me, but only obliquely. I decided to return to an old favorite of mine: fairy tales. For the prompt to write a pantoum (a form of poetry that has repeated, braided lines), I wrote about Hansel unable to retrace his bread crumbs in the woods. For a prompt about under-rated pleasures, I wrote about Rapunzel opening her tower window after the rain. And for a prompt about using repetition in a poem, I wrote this:

Straw

Straw my father claimed I could spin into gold,
Straw in that dusty chamber piled high,
Straw upon straw, all the straw in the world,
Straw I must spin into gold or else die.

Straw that he spun for me, strange little man,
Straw in exchange for the child he would take,
Straw for a promise no mother could keep,
Straw for a promise I knew I would break.

Straw, little darling; straw, sleeping babe.
Straw is the reason I have you to hold.
Joy of my arms, light of my heart,
You are the straw spun into gold.

But I haven't been spinning as much straw into gold as usual this time around. The fact is, I just haven't had as much straw as usual, for the spinning. And for that, I guess I should be grateful.

Poetry, Day Three

2012-01-07T04:18:00.000-08:00

My head is crammed full of poetry!

Our leader this year is Leslea Newman (there is an accent mark over the second e in her first name, but I don't know how to type accents in Google blogger - it's pronounced Les-Leah). She is wonderful. For every session, she gives us a HUGE packet of brilliant published poems by a wide range of poets based on some theme: poems about names/naming, poems about common occasions (birthdays, first menstruation), poems about the body (including poems about hands, poems about hair, poems about bellies), list poems. We read them aloud and talk about them together and then we disappear to all corners of the convent to write a poem of our own on that theme. Finally, we reconvene and share. This is pretty much the format all of our poetry retreats have followed, though our packets seem to be extra-fat this year.

I haven't yet written any poem that I adore, but I feel that I grew a lot as a poet - and as a person - by writing a poem about my red skin (which I hate) - and then trying to write an affirming poem about it as well. I wrote a funny poem about my belly button (but not so funny that I feel confident sharing it here). And a funny poem called "Manicure" about how much I enjoy biting my nails (also not worth sharing over the Internet, but my poet friends here chuckled when I read it).

Today we're going to focus on FORM. I love writing in form, so maybe this will be the best day yet for me. But really, the best part is just trying everything - even the exercise yesterday afternoon where we were given a poem written in RUSSIAN, yes, Russian, and had to write our own stab at a translation of it - which forced us to focus on how the original poem looked on the page, so freeing us to play with form rather than obsessing about content.

So maybe I'll have a poem I can share on this blog today. Maybe not. But I'm learning so much in every session, stuffing myself full of poems, poems, poems, poems, poems.

Powatree

2012-01-05T03:59:00.000-08:00

I wrote my first book when I was six years old. It had about eight words in it, each one spelled out by me and accompanied by a crayoned picture: flowr, burd, fathr (feather). But on the last pages of the book, already confident in my future output, I advertised two forthcoming titles. One was going to be a BIG BOOK about MY LIFE: 100 PAGES! And the other was going to be a book of POWATREE.

And now this weekend, for the sixth year in a row, I'm off to a poetry-writing retreat. I fly to New Jersey this morning, rent a car at Newark Airport, drive to a convent (and converted former orphanage) in Mendham, New Jersey, and then I'll spend the better part of four glorious days doing nothing but reading and writing POWATREE. The retreat, founded by the incomparable Susan Campbell Bartoletti, is for women children's book authors who want to develop their poetic voice. Susan invented it out of her amazingly fertile brain and energetic self because she believes that there is no better way to grow as a writer generally than to immerse oneself in poetry. Each year she finds a different poet to come be our workshop leaders. Past leaders (of the retreats I've attended) have been Sally Keith, Vivian Shipley, Molly Fisk, Kathleen Driskell, and Jeanie Thompson. This year it will be Leslea Newman.

I haven't written a poem in many months - probably since I gave up my poem-a-day regimen (inspired by last year's retreat) last spring. But I know I will write at least one poem today. Probably two. Some of the poems I write this weekend will be better forgotten. Others will be small treasures - at least for me. And as my writing goal for this year is to write a book that surprises me, perhaps I'll write a poem that surprises me, too.

POWATREE!

Winter Term Begins

2012-01-04T08:08:00.000-08:00

Today is the first day of DePauw's three-week Winter Term - it begins today and then ends on Wednesday, January 25. For the first time ever, I'm teaching a full-length course on writing children's books. I've done four week one-evening-a-week classes on writing children's books for Lifelong Learning (adult continuing education) in Boulder; I've been a retreat leader/facilitator; I've given countless talks on craft at various writing conferences; and I've mentored seven writers through the terrific mentorship program run by the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. But this course is my most ambitious venture to date: it meets four afternoons a week from 1-4 for the three weeks of Winter Term. That is a lot of class time!

I've planned some fun things. One fun thing is an outing to the Putnam County Public Library (just two blocks from campus), where the fabulous children's librarian there will present to us her favorite of the newest crop of recently published children's books. Another fun thing is going to be an evening of reading aloud stories to one another up at the Prindle Institute fireplace, while sipping hot chocolate and eating cookies: the wearing of pajamas will be encouraged. In fact, I just bought a new nightgown for this very purpose: a Lanz of Salzburg flannel nightgown ordered from the Vermont Country Store (see above). Of course, I'll also give my talk on Peppy Pacing and Sturdy Structure - and play an entertaining "show, don't tell" game - and do a great character-development exercise borrowed from children's author Denise Vega (where you get two cards, one with a character trait and one with a situation, and have to write a short scene showing how that character trait could be exhibited by your protagonist in that situation). And we'll write tons, and read tons, and do tons of critiquing.

I'm not sure that I'll be able to use the Story Goose I blogged about yesterday. I may put cookies in her, after all. I'll just have to see.

The Circus in Winter

2012-01-03T11:59:00.000-08:00

On day one of the new year I preached my new year's sermon and then said goodbye-for-now to my Colorado life and flew back to my life in Indiana. I arrived late at the Indianapolis airport and drove in the darkness to the tiny town of Goldsmith, Indiana, population 200, where I spent the night with my friend Keith's family.

On day two of the new year I had persimmon pudding for breakfast and explored rural Tipton County. Highlight: an indoor flea-market-junk-market in Kokomo (to the north of Goldsmith) where I bought a tea kettle, a teapot (my new year is going to have lots of tea drinking in it), and a very large Mother Goose cookie jar - or maybe it's Jemina Puddle Duck - or some other statuesque fowl in a kerchief. I'm not going to put cookies in her. I'm going to put book ideas in her instead. I may make her the centerpiece of my Winter Term class on writing children's books - I'll let you know.

Then Keith and I drove to Muncie, Indiana, to have dinner at the gorgeous Victorian home of author Cathy Day and her husband, Erik. Cathy's critically acclaimed collection of interlocking short stories, The Circus in Winter, has been made into a musical by creative writing/theatre students at Ball State University. Cathy's home town is Peru, Indiana, which was the winter home of a Midwest touring circus at the turn of the last century, and she draws from local lore as well as family stories to create her gallery of portraits of circus folk in the dark still season of the year. The musical was being performed that night, and it was wonderful: poignant, sad, wrenching, uplifting - with not one but two amazing enormous puppet elephants.

Now it's day three of the new year, and I'm back in Greencastle, typing this from my office at the Prindle Institute, readying myself for the launch of my Winter Term class tomorrow. Will I use the Story Goose or not? Probably I will. It just seems as if it's going to be that sort of year.

"Foolishness"

2012-01-02T07:25:00.000-08:00

My poet friend and creativity consultant Molly Fisk structures her new year around choosing, not a set of goals or resolutions, but a special WORD. She says that sometimes she finds her word, and sometimes the word finds her; sometimes she starts the year with her word firmly in place, other years it might not disclose itself until as late as the middle of March.

I decided to try Molly's choose-a-word system last year. I was starting to grope for my word when it suddenly became clear to me that that WAS my word: "grope." And so began a year of transitions, trying to figure out what to do next with my life, with my writing, with my heart. I no longer minded that I didn't KNOW any of this, because, hey, "grope" was my word, right? It was okay to spend 2011 in groping mode.

This year I thought I might preach my new year's sermon on Molly's find-your-word system. So that sent me to the Bible to look for possible words for me this time around. I opened it to Paul's first letter to the Corinthians and let my eye fall upon this passage: "For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength." And there was my word: "foolishness."

So now I'm going to spend some time in 2012 thinking about foolishness - bad, costly foolishness - good, playful foolishness - and how to tell them apart.

I think I've started the year with some good foolishness. After I flew back to Indianapolis yesterday, instead of driving directly to Greencastle and getting a sensible start on all I have to do for the new year, I drove in the other direction to my friend Keith's family home in Goldsmith, Indiana, population 200. I didn't get in until 1 in the morning, and then Keith and I talked until 2. This morning I walked in the bitter Indiana cold - windy flurries - and explored the town, picking out which house I would like to live in if I decided to move here someday. Who knows, maybe I will? Then I had persimmon pudding for breakfast, something I've never eaten in my life before.

Day two of 2012: persimmon pudding for breakfast. I'm liking 2012 so far.

Welcome 2012

2012-01-01T05:27:00.000-08:00

Well, the first thing I did to start my new year was to give in yet again to Snickers's incessant 4:30 a.m. meowing and get up and dump some dry food into her bowl for breakfast. So some things never change.

My next task of the new year is to finish writing the sermon that I'll be delivering in church this morning. For the past couple of years, Christopher and I have teamed up to do the first service of the new year at our beloved church, St. Paul's United Methodist Church. Christopher takes over for the regular organist (as he does frequently) and plays all the hymns as well as prelude, postlude, offertory. I take care of the rest: call to worship, scripture selection, pastoral prayer, and sermon. I love being "the preacher girl."

The title of my sermon today is "Filled with All the Fullness of God." The idea for the sermon is that as we make our resolutions for the new year, we should consider the following strategy. Instead of trying to eliminate various bad things from our lives, we should try adding good things.

So, if the issue is weight control and healthy eating, instead of swearing off gluten, dairy, fat (every single one of my friends, it seems, has sworn off something), try adding more fruits and vegetables - so many of them that you won't have any appetite left for the foods deemed problematic.

If the issue is finding time for the work you love, don't spend enormous effort clearing the decks (or cleaning your desk) to make room for it. Because, sad but true, those decks and desk will probably never be all that clear or clean. Just start writing, or whatever it is you love best, and those other pesky projects will just find themselves somehow shoved to the side.

If you're wrestling with grief and loss, try adding some new source of joy. Remember the words of Carly Simon: "I haven't got time for the pain. I haven't got room for the pain." Crowd that pain right OUT, brothers and sisters!

And then, since this is after all a sermon for church and not just a self-help pep talk (much as I adore self-help pep talks), rather than emptying yourself out to make room for God, just stuff yourself full of God and then see what happens. Make more time for prayer, Bible reading, worship, service, and let the rest fall by the wayside. And here you don't actually have to do anything, really - just let God stuff you full of his goodness and grace.

So here's to a 2012 stuffed full of all good things for all of us.

Farewell to 2011

2011-12-31T06:25:00.000-08:00

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

I always read these lines from Tennyson aloud on New Year's Eve, as I say farewell to the year that was. And I always do a review of the year that was in my trusty little notebook. My reviews are always positive. All I list are my "nice things and accomplishments," not my heartbreaks and failures. Every month as the year progresses, I keep a running list of "nice things and accomplishments," and then I compile my master list for the year in its entirety, in the categories of creative writing, scholarly work and teaching, and personal successes for me and my family.

This year, three things stand out.

First, I wrote my longest and most ambitious novel, still untitled, though right now the working title (for me at least) is No Exceptions: the story of a seventh-grade honor student who brings her mother's lunch to school by mistake, a lunch that has in it a knife for cutting up her mother's apple; she turns it in immediately, but is now facing mandatory expulsion under her school's zero tolerance policies. Writing this book was a great joy for me. It was so long, and all-encompassing, that I wrote on it everywhere. I wrote while lying in bed in my hotel room at the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics conference in Cincinnati - I wrote while sitting in cafes in Santa Fe - I wrote while visiting a wonderful librarian who is also an amazing composer in the charming guestroom of her home in Missouri. Wherever I was, I wrote. This reminded me how much I love writing, especially when I am in the middle of a long, compelling project.

Second, I dealt with the painful and difficult task of readying not one, but two, ruined properties for sale. It took me YEARS to face the fact that I had to do this, and that in order to do it I was going to have to borrow tens of thousands of dollars on top of massive debt I already had - and I was going to have to toil without ceasing for weeks and months - and I was going to have to dwell in the land of heart-rending memories. But face it I did, and do it I did, and both properties sold and are now out of my life. Oh, my darlings: whatever you have to face, just go ahead and face it! Whatever you have to do, just go ahead and do it! You will be so glad and grateful and relieved that you did.

Finally, I had the adventure of moving (temporarily) to Indiana and starting a new life there in a whole new part of the country. I had never before even seen a field of soy beans! I discovered what it is like to teach at a small liberal arts college in a town of 10,000 people where I can walk everywhere (and where "walking everywhere" means walking three or four blocks to get everywhere). I learned how happy I am in a small, compact, manageable little world. Maybe some year hence I'll learn how happy I am in a huge, bustling, overwhelming city. But right now happiness for me is French toast and hot chocolate at the Blue Door Cafe in Greencastle, Indiana - where I'll return tomorrow evening on a 6:59 p.m. flight from Denver to Indianapolis.

So those were the three highlights of my year. I wonder what the three highlights of 2012 will be.

Remembering

2011-12-30T06:25:00.000-08:00

The holiday season is overlaid with special memories for my family. My mother's birthday was Christmas Day. Grandpa's birthday was December 30: today is the day he would have been celebrating his 101st. Both of them left this earth last year: 2010. So the season is filled with sweet memories of these two beloved ones.

The boys and I - with their girlfriends this year - baked my mother's butter cookies earlier in the month. On Christmas Day I served her yeast cinnamon rolls, made from her recipe. I even said to Gregory what she always said: "See, no raisins!" She altered the recipe years ago because Gregory dislikes raisins. So I pointed out to him their continuing absence, in a voice that wobbled a bit with remembered love.

Every year for the past many years we had a wonderful birthday party for Grandpa at his favorite restaurant, Dino's on Colfax in Lakewood. So today four women who loved Grandpa, and who through him came to love each other, are gathering there to have lunch and share stories, as well as updates on our current lives. It used to be that Grandpa was "news central" for all of us: he would tell me about Bonnie's stay at the Trappist monastery, about Billie's knitting class, about Kay's fishing expedition. Now we have to tell each other directly. And so that's what we'll do at 11:30 today, with hearts full of memories of this inimitable man who took such a vivid interest in all of us up until the last days of his long long life.

It is definitely the season for remembering.

With MORE Love to My Writing Group

2011-12-29T06:10:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, a fellow Boulder Montessori preschool mom told me that she was interested in writing children's books. Did I have any advice to give her on how to get published? Yes, I told her. Step one is to find yourself a writing group to critique your manuscripts before you start sending them out. She drew herself up, affronted. "I KNOW how to WRITE," she said icily.

Well, I know how to write, too, and I've been in a writing group for almost my entire career, learning how to write better. Another writer friend of mine, a Newbery medalist and mega-best-selling author, has been in a writing group for all of her career, learning how to write better. Perhaps needless to say, this mom who didn't need a writing group has never been published. And I still continue to meet with my beloved Boulder writing group, grateful for every suggestion that falls from their often-critical lips.

Right now I'm wrestling with what at first seemed two opposing sets of criticisms on my new book/series in progress. One friend loved the particular book manuscript but thought the series concept was "forced" and "weak." Another loved the series concept but thought the particular manuscript I had completed featured an unlikeable main character and was pitched at too high a reading level for the intended audience, with not enough lively action and too much quiet introspection.

At first I felt like shrieking and falling into a helpless faint on the floor.

But then I had tea with Phyllis, and together we figured out how to fix the series concept completely with two small, easy, but wonderful changes. This morning I'm having tea with Leslie to brainstorm how to deal with her worries about the story.

This project is going to be a thousand times better just from these two sets of comments, and I'm still awaiting comments from the rest of the brilliant insightful group.

I DO know how to write. And it's my writing group who taught me how to write. And who continue to teach me.

"A Book that Surprises Me"

2011-12-26T12:12:00.000-08:00

In the wake of my ruminations about what to write next, I gave myself the Christmas present of ten sessions with amazing poet, essayist, and creativity coach Molly Fisk. I met Molly several years ago when she was the teacher/leader for the annual poetry-writing retreat I attend every January (coming up soon!). Her radiant creative presence turned me into however much of a poet I am. So I figured a few sessions with Molly couldn't hurt as I fumble toward a new book.

I had my first Molly coaching session over the phone on Christmas Eve morning. I told Molly my dilemma. I told her that I want to write something new, different, and wonderful, but if I write on the top of my note-gathering page, "Wonderful New Book," I find that heading a tad intimidating, in a counter-productive way. She asked me how I'd feel about writing instead, "A book that surprises me." Ooh!

I think that's exactly what I want in my next writing project: to write something that surprises me. Molly is going to work with me on leaving room for surprise in my writing, to open myself to the possibility of surprises in a welcoming, but non-desperate way.

Along these lines, I've just read an essay of Molly's on doing something backwards on purpose: "Whatever it is you always do, don't do it." Wear your watch on the other wrist. Move your desk to face a different wall. Habitual behavior dulls our senses and limits our possibilities. Molly writes, "When you get attached to the way you always do things, you are in big trouble. The universe arranges disasters for people like you." She suggests that we can avert disaster "just by wearing unmatched socks once in a while, mowing the lawn in figure eights, eating lemon meringue pie for breakfast, and taking an occasional overnight flight to Mallorca."

It sounds like a plan!

If You Do What You've Always Done

2011-12-23T07:09:00.000-08:00

I spent much of my blissful snow day yesterday thinking about what I want to write next.

I have a dilemma.

On the one hand, I keep hearing in my head the disturbing thought: "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten." I sort of like what I've always gotten - I've had a charmed and very happy writer's life - but of course I would like to have a LEETLE bit more fame and fortune. Actually, what I'd really like is literary immortality, to write a book that children would be reading for generations. Maybe that's too much to ask of the writing gods. But why not dream big on this day-before-the-day-before Christmas?

On the other hand, I keep hearing voices, both disturbing and not disturbing, that incline me in the opposite direction. The disturbing voices of this sort these days talk about "branding": readers want to know what they're getting when they pick up, say, a Claudia Mills book. These voices say: remember "the new Coke" and why it was such an epic flop? The less-disturbing voices here say that we all have our own creative DNA: Jane Austen just isn't going to write War and Peace; Vermeer just isn't going to paint huge canvases of Napoleon's coronation.

And then there's a third group of voices, probably the wisest of all. These voices say that writers aren't supposed to be even thinking about the reception of their work; they're supposed to be thinking of writing the most beautiful, true, and powerful sentences that they can, one after another, and let the world make of those sentences what they will.

But still. I can write (well, try to write) beautiful, true, and powerful sentences about lots of different kinds of things. Right now I'm trying to decide whether to write them about the kind of things I've always written about - realistic school/family stories about middle-class kids struggling with relatively small problems like having to master the times tables - or about something else - something dark and dangerous? or haunting and strange? or - ??

Or - ????

Let It Snow

2011-12-22T07:26:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, on the Winter Solstice, I discovered what my son Gregory assures me that "everybody knows": if you go to Google and type in "let it snow," some pretty delightful things begin to happen on your computer screen. (And then I discovered something else that "everybody knows": fun things also happen if you go to Google and type in "do a barrel roll.")

In any case, no sooner had I Googled "let it snow" than it did indeed begin to snow: such thick heavy flakes that I had to put the car in the garage all covered with snow because it was snowing faster than I could brush it off. This morning there is at least a foot out there, and it's still snowing. The university is closed. My friend Carol and I decided to cancel our breakfast date at Lucile's, rescheduling it for next week.

The sudden joy I felt upon canceling the long-awaited, extremely fun breakfast date made me remember something I realized once years ago: there is nothing in my life that I'm looking forward to so much that I wouldn't prefer having it be canceled.

I wonder why this is, and what it means. Partly it's just that it's such a gift to be delivered an unexpected, unscheduled block of time: Here is this extra hour, here is this extra morning, make of it something magical. Part of it is that I might just be an over-scheduled person, and this is a signal to myself that I should restructure my life so that it has more down time in it, time for what Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write) calls "moodling."

I still want to go to all the Christmas activities coming up at church, and one more Hanukkah party of the three I'm attending this season, plus the rescheduled Lucile's breakfast (yum!). But right now I'm loving sitting here puttering at my computer (though I am NOT going to spend this gift of a morning doing email!), and listening to laundry thumping around in the dryer - thinking about baking the yeast-rising cinnamon rolls for Christmas morning - thinking about maybe even making some notes for a new book - and just looking out my window watching the snow as it keeps falling.

With Love to My Writing Group

2011-12-19T12:35:00.001-08:00

My writing group has its annual holiday dinner tonight. We have been in existence as a group, depending on how you measure its existence, for some nineteen years. The group had been in the process of formation when I attended my first meeting in the fall of 1992, the year I arrived in Colorado to assume my faculty position in the philosophy department at CU. And when I showed up, then we were fully formed: done!

There were eight of us then, including me. Over the years, two left the group (but didn't leave our hearts); another left only to come back again; and a new member, our first new member in eighteen years, joined us a year ago. I have no idea how many books we have collectively published in our almost two decades together. I would guess that it is close to a hundred.

It just occurred to me that my being a thousand miles away from my writing group this past semester might be one explanation for why I've been writing so little, and why what I have written hasn't yet been ready to be published. Duh! Without the expectation of having a chapter to share every two weeks at our every-other-Monday-night meeting, without the encouragement through fallow times, and the brisk, bracing critique of work-in-progress, I haven't been writing at the same level. I just haven't.

But now I've finished a first draft of a new possible chapter book, and I have it to hand out to the group tonight, for them to read at home over the next couple of weeks. Just knowing I had the deadline of the dinner tonight, at six o'clock sharp, with all of seated around the table holding hands, was enough to get me to move heaven and earth to finish it.

Oh, writing group, I love you, and I need you. Merry Christmas, darling writing group.

Home for Christmas

2011-12-17T07:10:00.000-08:00

I'm back in Colorado, after my now-favorite 6:45 a.m. Frontier Airlines flight from Indianapolis to Denver, which puts me down on the ground at DIA at 7:30 a.m., with a whole wonderful day-of-being-home-at-last stretching ahead of me to start cramming in some of the mega amounts of holiday cheer awaiting.

Yesterday's holiday cheer: wrapping up and shipping off all of the Christmas presents for my sister and her husband (we send a LOT of presents to each other - most of what is under the tree every year is gifts from Cheryl and Carey) - then hiking with Rowan for two hours on the snowy trails of Boulder's winter wonderland - then the CU philosophy department's "non-holiday non-party" with "fancy" dress code: I wore the sparkly outfit I bought to attend the National Book Awards gala back when I was a judge in the category of Literature for Young People in 2005. It was fun to have an excuse to wear it again.

Today's holiday cheer will include a Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators holiday schmooze and a performance of the Christmas Revels at the downtown Boulder Theater, starring my philosophy department colleague Alastair Norcross and his wife, Diana. Tomorrow: children's pageant at church, open house at the parsonage, and caroling to shut-ins. Monday: breakfast at Lucille's with my colleague Carol and my critique group Christmas party. Tuesday: the first of the THREE Hanukkah parties I'll be attending this week.

But I still did write my page today on my book-in-progress. There is no joy like being in the middle of a book, where the project FINALLY has enough momentum that it practically writes itself. I wrote on the little couch in my upstairs office, with my mug of hot chocolate beside me, and best of all, Snickers purring against my chest. Now maybe I'll write just a bit more on the couch downstairs next to the Christmas tree.

Ding-dong merrily on high!

Where to Write

2011-12-15T07:11:00.000-08:00

Maybe my favorite thing in the whole entire world is writing in different wonderful places. They don't have to be VERY different or VERY wonderful. I don't have to write in a cafe in Paris (though that would be lovely) or in a cottage by the sea (ditto). But it's so satisfying to have a day like the one I had yesterday, when I was in mega-writing mode.

I wrote chapter two of my book (these are short chapters) lying on the couch at the Blue Door Cafe, sipping my hot chocolate.

I wrote chapter three of my book lying on the couch by the fireplace in the Prindle Great Hall. One of the major accomplishments of my time at DePauw has been learning how to turn on the fireplace: where the secret key is hidden, and how to insert the secret key into the secret keyhole in just the right way to make the flames burst into brightness.

Where to write chapter four? I thought about this for a bit and decided to write it in an overstuffed armchair by the Christmas tree in the sitting room/lobby of the Inn at DePauw, right next door to my house.

With these three different delicious writing locations, yesterday might have been my best writing day ever.

Today I've already done my Blue Door Cafe writing. Now I'm at the Prindle, but I need to type up two chapters first, as I can't bear to let too much of the typing accumulate. So I'm not sure I'll do any writing by the fire today.

Tomorrow I fly home to Colorado for Christmas. Maybe I'll write on the plane, though even loving flying as I do, I can't say that I especially like writing on those little plastic tray tables. But once back in Boulder, I can try to think of possible options there. Even in my house, there are three lovely possibilities: the small couch in my office upstairs, the couch in the living room by the Christmas tree, or my bed with the wooden bed tray my father made for me many years ago. All good!

All very good indeed.

From Burned Out to On Fire!

2011-12-14T09:12:00.000-08:00

In the last twenty-four hours I have gone from thinking that my new possible book project is terrible, hopeless, boring, and bad to thinking that it is lively, fresh, and pretty terrific. What happened to make me change my mind about it? Here's what happened: I sat down and actually started WRITING IT.

What a difference actual writing makes!

I could hardly get myself out of bed this morning to write on something so unpromising, but I remembered my own blog post of just YESTERDAY about making luck by showing up, so I dragged myself over to the Blue Door Cafe, ordered my hot chocolate with whipped cream (lots of it) and chocolate shavings on top, and I started writing chapter two, following yesterday's lackluster, ho-hum chapter one. All of a sudden I started being funny. And I started having fun. By the time I ordered my French toast, an hour later, I knew that for better or worse, I'm going to finish this book. It may or not be published, or even publishable. The first chapter still is fairly dull. So what? I can go back and fix that later. I've already written chapter three. I think I'll write chapter four this afternoon, perhaps sitting by the Christmas tree at the Inn at DePauw next door to my little house.

Just write, just write, just write. That's all you have to do. Really. IT'S ALL YOU HAVE TO DO. Your Muse is tearing her hair out right now, because she has such wonderful gifts to offer you, but there you sit, a lump on a log, stubbornly doing SOMETHING ELSE when you could be writing. She can't make you write, poor thing. But she can make magical things happen when you finally pick up your pen.

Luck

2011-12-13T04:28:00.000-08:00

I read two interesting tidbits of thought about luck yesterday.

The first comes from Edwidge Danticat's very sad novel, The Farming of Bones. As two of the characters are in the process of fleeing from the horrors of an anti-Haitian massacre in the Dominican Republic, they meet up with a fellow refugee, who asks one of them a strange question:

"Do you have good luck?" Wilner asked Yves.
Yves laughed out loud. "Why do you want to know?" he asked.
"I like to know what kind of luck a man has had before I start on a journey with him," Wilner replied.

The second comes from a New York Times essay on Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, who has won a sudden string of games despite not being particularly good at most of the central skills of quarterbacking. What he IS good at is getting his teammates to believe that they can win. Frank Bruni writes:

Some people have what can be described only as a gift for winning. . . .This gift usually involves hope, confidence, and a special composure, all of which keep a person in the game long enough, with enough energy and stability, so that a fickle entity known as luck might break his or her way.

This made me ask myself whether I am a lucky person. I think I am. When Lori asked me, on the way to the airport on Sunday, if I had checked the status of my flight, at first the question surprised me. No, I hadn't checked. I knew it would be on time. I fly constantly, at least once a month, and my flights are always on time. (Well, except when they aren't.) In the same way, I'm never sick (except when I am.) I've had a fairly charmed writing career, publishing 45 children's books in the course of some 30 years.

But lately I've felt a tad discouraged about my career. My most recent books haven't gotten many reviews - the reviews they got were lovely, but there were so few of them. Am I being ignored, as a new young generation of authors arrives on the scene? And I haven't even been writing much since I arrived at DePauw. Am I burned out? Washed up? Or whatever fiery or watery metaphor you want to employ?

Well, I'd better not be! Because that Frank Bruni quotation reminded me, that if 90 percent of success is showing up, so is 90 percent of luck. He practically defined success as just hanging in there long enough for luck to kick in.

So, hang in there, my lucky darlings. And here, of course, I'm talking both to you, and to myself.

Reconnecting with the Past

2011-12-12T05:36:00.000-08:00

I'm back from my whirlwind trip this past weekend to Maryland to attend the party to honor Carroll Linkins, who just retired after serving for thirty years as the secretary and "den mother" for the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

"What brings you back here?" several people asked me at the party, knowing that I had moved twenty years ago to Colorado, and maybe also knowing that I'm now living in Indiana. They thought that I must have had a business trip of some kind to the Washington, D.C., area that coincided fortunately with the date of Carroll's celebration, which doubled as an Institute reunion.

"This party!" I told them. "This is why I came back: to go to the party!"

It was so wonderful to be there, seeing the people I had worked with in my decade as the Institute's editor and staff writer, from 1980-1990. We all exclaimed over how much we all looked just the same. But then we looked at the pictures in the Institute's treasured photo albums - pictures of Christmas parties, summer picnics, wedding showers, baby showers. Oh, we were young then, impossibly young. It was almost heartbreaking to see how young we were, especially for those of us who were pictured with people to whom we are no longer married, or holding babies who grew up to have sorrows of their own. And we took so many more photos that night, too, to be the final chapter in our time together, for we knew that this was the last time we would ever be together in this way. Carroll was the last person left at the Institute. The Institute itself, at least as a part of the University of Maryland, is no more.

On the plane home, I was reading The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat. She writes, "Father Romain always made much of our being from the same place, just as Sebastien did. Most people here did. It was a way of being joined to your old life through the presence of another person."

That's how I felt on Saturday night: joined to my old life through the presence of all these beloved people, and so joined more to my self. I felt more truly me, more truly who I am. Faulkner is often quoted as saying, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." It wasn't past for me this weekend, and yet it was - both eternally present and irrevocably vanished.

I'm so glad I flew a thousand miles to go to that one party. Why was I there? Because it was where I once belonged, and still belong, and will always belong.

One More Party

2011-12-09T04:59:00.000-08:00

Before I throw myself into the frenzy of finals week, I have one last party to attend. Tomorrow morning I'm getting on a 6:30 a.m. flight to the Baltimore-Washington Airport to spend the day with two dear women friends. That evening I'll attend the retirement party of the woman who served for thirty years as the secretary for the University of Maryland's Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, where I worked as an editor/staff writer/director of publications for a decade (roughly the 1980s). Sunday morning I'll fly back to Indiana.

It was such an intensely young time of my life when I worked there, of all of our lives, and we were so intensely close with one another. One week I remember having dinner six nights in a row with Center people (back then, we were the Center for Philosophy and Public Policy; the promotion to "institute" occurred later). Many people came to the Center after having failed somewhere else: being denied tenure, or reappointment, or dropping out of a Ph.D. program (me). Every single person went on to have not only a good, but a brilliant career, publishing important books and changing the face of the field of applied ethics. And we also transformed our personal lives, as well. When we started there, we were all (or almost all) single (and if married, living apart from one's spouse in a commuter arrangement). We watched each other date, marry (David and Judy even married each other), and have children, children who are now well into their 20s and launching their own careers.

One by one, we all left the Institute for jobs elsewhere. Finally, the Institute itself left: it moved from the University of Maryland to George Mason University this past year. The only person left, the last "man" standing, was our beloved secretary, Carroll Linkins, who retires this month.

So this is the point of the party: to have a reunion of the Institute family, as we celebrate Carroll's service to the Institute for thirty years. And maybe in the room there will be the ghosts of our much younger selves, looking for love, for professional success, trying to make a difference in the world of philosophy, and in the world in which we all have to try to live together.

Finals Week Is Coming

2011-12-08T14:28:00.000-08:00

Today was the final meeting of my Rousseau class. We toasted our now-beloved (I hope!) Jean-Jacques Rousseau by holding class at my little house, just steps away from the campus, where we discussed the final five "Walks" in his beautiful late-life collection of essays, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as well as eating food mentioned in some of his books (crusty baguettes, creamy French cheeses, grapes presumably gathered during the grape harvest at Clarens in his novel Julie, and cherry turnovers to commemorate the cherry-picking idyll in The Confessions). We also played my favorite Rousseau-themed game: I taped names of various Rousseau characters to students' backs, and they had to guess who they were by asking yes/no questions of the others in the class. Some of these were very tricky, especially "Monsieur Dudding," which was the alias Rousseau assumed when he decided to pretend he was an Englishman on one of his travels.

So now finals week is practically upon us. Everywhere is evidence of serious study about to begin. Gobin United Methodist Church has a midnight breakfast for late-night studiers; the Blue Door Cafe has a special menu of "study snacks"; the Prindle has extended hours, and I believe that milk and cookies will be available.

I've decided that I'm going to play the role of bad student trying to salvage the semester. Readers of this blog know that I've spent my semester at DePauw having tons and tons of fun, and being (if I may say so) a wonderful citizen of the university and community, but getting very little work of my own done. I have been a party girl, and now it's time to become a grind.

I think I'm going to throw myself into my own finals week, trying to get done some of the projects I've neglected all term. I can fuel myself with the Gobin breakfast, the special Blue Door snacks, and the abundant milk and cookies on offer all over the campus. This will not help with the weight issues I've been writing about. But it may well help with the work issues. And, heck, finals week is not the week to think about losing weight, right?

Milk and cookies, here I come!

The Meaning of Life

2011-12-06T16:04:00.000-08:00

Today was the last meeting of the year for the Prindle Institute student interns; we gathered together to discuss a short essay on the meaning of life that drew heavily on philosopher Susan Wolf's latest book, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. The claim by Susan Wolf that we were discussing was that a life that is meaningful requires both subjective attraction (you find something that you really care about) and objective attractiveness (you care about something that is indeed worth caring about). A life is less meaningful if one of these two conditions is unmet. You might devote your life to something that is clearly worth doing, such as feeding the hungry, but just not happen to be that "into" it yourself. Or you might devote yourself to a true passion, but a passion for something pointless, like playing tiddly-winks.

The student interns were asking what makes an activity pointless. It seems that we have some fairly obvious examples. A passion for shopping at the local mall seems not to be an objectively worthwhile activity. Another one that was mentioned was counting all the tiles in every ceiling. But the more we thought about it, the harder it was to come up with any reasoned way of drawing the meaningful/not meaningful line.

Rousseau spent his last years obsessed with botany. He writes, "I was determined not to leave a blade of grass without analyzing it." Is this pointless, to try to observe every blade of grass? Someone in our discussion suggested that it would be pointless to try to COUNT every blade of grass. Maybe. But what if while you counted it, you let yourself LOVE it? Is God wasting His time by numbering every beloved hair on our heads? I thought of the artist in the Denver Art Museum who paints exquisitely detailed close-up paintings of different clumps of grasses. Why not spend a lifetime observing blades of grass?

What makes this different from shopping? Maybe it's that we feel that the shopper doesn't really LOVE each item in each store in this kind of intense, attentive way. Or maybe we feel that the shopper could love shopping only if she were conditioned to do so by a consumerist culture. Or - ?? It does seem to me that all those blades of grass and hairs on our heads are worth loving in a way that all those i-pods and i-phones are not.

We didn't settle the question of the meaning of life this afternoon. I have Susan Wolf's book on my shelf in my Prindle office right now, waiting to be read, and maybe she'll settle it for me. But it was a good conversation on a gray December afternoon, by the fireplace.

December Saturday in Greencastle

2011-12-04T04:36:00.000-08:00

This is the first weekend in almost two months when I haven't been either away (Milwaukee, Chicago, two different trips back to Colorado) or entertaining house guests, with all the busy fun that involves. It's my weekend to do whatever I want to do all by myself all day long.

So yesterday I did laundry (long overdue), had breakfast at the Blue Door Cafe (veggie omelet for a change from French toast), and then went to a wonderful cookie sale at the Gobin Methodist church on the edge of campus: you pay for a decorated cookie tin (more of a coffee canister) and don a plastic glove and then wander past tray after tray of decorated cookies of every conceivable kind, making your selections.

After that I went to the Putnam County public library, two blocks from my house (about halfway between my house and the Blue Door) and read for my China conference paper, which is going to focus on the Henry Huggins and Ramona books of Beverly Cleary. I sat in the children's room and skim-read three Henry's in the morning and two Ramona's in the afternoon, after corn chowder at the Blue Door and a few of my cookie-sale cookies back at home for dessert. I could have checked out the books and read them at home; reading them there at the library made me feel like Betsy Ray off to Deep Valley's Carnegie Library (this is a Carnegie Library, too), to read all day in Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown.

After that I met with two students to help them with their Rousseau papers, and then had dinner with another first-year faculty member, Rachel from Conflict Studies: we both love "sides" rather than meals, so that's what we had. And then we went together to an incredible gospel service by the DePauw gospel choir, held at the beautifully decorated Gobin church. "This is not a concert," the young woman who welcomed us announced. "This is a praise and worship service! Prepare to get up on your feet and praise His holy name!" And wow, it was indeed impossible to sit still and remain unmoved by the music that followed and the passionate intensity with which it was offered.

And then I came home and put on my nightgown by 8 p.m. and read Janet Lambert's 1941 teen novel, Star-Spangled Summer: she was born and raised in Crawfordsville, Indiana, just north of here, and as you know, I now love all things connected in any way with my new state.

So that was my sweet December Saturday in Greencastle.

December Is Here

2011-12-02T08:18:00.001-08:00

And this means that my new life for December has begun.

I'm loving seeing my beloved Greencastle decorated for the holidays. There are colored lights strung from the courthouse across the downtown courthouse square, and lights are twinkling on the Christmas tree in the Inn at DePauw next door to my little house, and there is a tiny tree (with appropriately chosen blue ornaments and blue garlands) perched on a small table at the Blue Door Cafe. This weekend I'm attending a Christmas gospel choir concert, and another Christmassy concert, both at Gobin United Methodist church, right on campus. I think I'm going to have a gingerbread-flavored steamer at the Blue Door this afternoon.

My work projects for the month include finishing up the semester in a blaze of glory - helping my Rousseau class students with their final papers and hosting a lovely Rousseau-themed party for them - and laying the groundwork for my Winter Term course on children's book writing and my spring course on feminism and the family, as well as my spring reading group on the philosophy of Cheshire Calhoun.

Most fun will be thinking what paper I'll be presenting at the symposium on "The Image of the Child in Chinese and American Children's Literature" that I've been invited to attend next June at Ocean University in Quingdao, CHINA!!! The abstract is due December 15, so I'm going to spend this weekend curled up planning out ideas.

And I do have to start writing a new children's book, I do, I do!! I have to take the only idea I have right now and just start WRITING IT.

Maybe while sipping a gingerbread-flavored steamer at the Blue Door Cafe?

Lovely Last Day of November

2011-11-30T17:52:00.001-08:00

I said farewell to November with a near-perfect Greencastle day.

For starters, the sun came out, after seemingly endless days of rain and gloom. (To be fair to Indiana weather, apparently it was beautiful while I was away in Colorado for Thanksgiving.)

Before breakfast I faced a task I should have faced weeks ago: reading through a bunch of essays by the philosopher Cheshire Calhoun to choose which three I want to feature in the Cheshire Calhoun reading group I'm organizing at the Prindle next semester. Why on earth I put this off, I have no idea. The entire task involved reading and rereading exquisite essays by my favorite living philosopher: "Changing One's Heart" (on forgiveness), "Standing for Something" (on integrity), "The Virtue of Civility,""What Good Is Commitment?" and "Common Decency." What task could be more pleasant? But for some reason it stressed me to face it - how could I pick only three of the essays? Which three? But today I did it and chose the ones on forgiveness, civility, and commitment. Done!

I gave three talks to the three second grade classes at Ridpath Elementary just blocks from my house. I discovered last month that my Gus and Grandpa and the Two-Wheeled Bike is a selection in the Harcourt Story Town reader used in the Greencastle schools. I had known I was in some Harcourt textbook because a Harcourt photographer came to my house in Boulder years ago and spent hours on a very hot summer day photographing me standing next to a bicycle in my garage. But I had never actually seen the final product. It was so much fun to come to Ridpath as a Gus and Grandpa celebrity.

I spent a mellow afternoon at the Prindle Institute puttering at my desk and going to a delightful staff meeting. How many people have jobs where the staff meetings are a treat? I do!

I took myself to dinner at the Swizzle Stick bar downtown, admiring Christmas decorations as I walked there: a glass of Merlot and six potstickers, while I read a chapter of Patchen Markell's Bound by Recognition for the final meeting of its reading group on Friday. (See the degree to which I have now renounced procrastination, reading this a full two days ahead.)

Finally, I attended a gorgeous chamber music concert - Beethoven, Handel, Mozart, Mendelssohn - that featured one of my wonderful Rousseau class students on violin.

It would be hard to find a more satisfying way of bidding adieu to November.

Late Derrida

2011-11-29T04:02:00.000-08:00

One of the five reading groups I'm in this semester at the Prindle Institute is a reading group on the late-life writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It concluded with a festive fifth meeting yesterday evening.

My philosophical education in a department devoted to what is called "analytic" philosophy taught me to despise what is called "continental philosophy" - indeed, to despise it without ever having deigned to read it. Without ever reading it, I knew it to be unreadable. Jacques Derrida is a leading figure of contemporary continental philosophy. He is widely read by scholars in English departments - not by scholars in Anglo-American philosophy departments. But when I was asked by a DePauw colleague in the English department here to join the Derrida reading group he was organizing, I happily agreed. After all, I'm committed to saying yes to everything I'm asked to do at DePauw so that they will all love me and think I'm the best visiting professor ever. And I did think it was strange for an entire CONTINENT of philosophy to be dismissed so contemptuously.

Well, I have to say that the Derrida reading group did not convert me to the philosophy of Derrida. I did not take pleasure in reading sentences such as this one, from The Animal That Therefore I Am: "Would an ethics like that Levinas attempts be sufficient to recall the subject to its being-subject, to its being-host or -hostage, that is to say, to its being-subjected-to-the-other, to the Wholly Other or to every single other?" (In fairness, I could quote equally awful sentences from analytic philosophers, though they would feature a lot of math-y looking stuff.)

That said, I'm glad I was part of the reading group. While I didn't much like trying to read Derrida, I liked hearing smart people say interesting things about it.

I must confess that last night I hadn't actually gotten around to doing the reading for the evening. It would have taken me hours to force myself through it, hours that I decided would be better spent on other tasks on my to-do list. I almost didn't go because I didn't want to be "the bad student" who comes to class unprepared. But I did go, out of loyalty to the group, and I learned a lot from the conversation (and even got quite a bit of the reading done as we all stared down at these daunting pages together). I even managed to make one semi-interesting comment about Derrida myself!

So I guess the lessons I would distill for myself from this experience have to do with being willing to try something new, even if I don't decide to throw myself into it wholeheartedly. I would probably have gotten more out of the Derrida group if I had labored mightily on those dense and impenetrable chapters. But that "more" wouldn't have been worth the many many hours necessary to do it. I invested a little bit of time in the Derrida project and reaped a little bit of benefit, including getting to know some extremely bright colleagues in other departments around campus. That feels like a decent enough return for several evenings sitting by the Prindle Institute fireplace sipping good wine and eating lovely fruit and cheese.

The Terrible Trivium

2011-11-26T06:14:00.000-08:00

Every month I get sent five books to review for the online review site Children's Literature. The box arrives, I open it, I read whatever is in it, and then I write 150-250 words about each title. The most fun, of course, is opening the box. I hope it won't contain the second very long volume of some young adult fantasy trilogy; I hope it will contain fresh, funny chapter books. But I don't like to make too many specific requests of the team who send the books out to the reviewers. For one, it would make a difficult job even more difficult for them. But mainly it just seems unsporting.

This month the box had in it four picture books as well as the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. I haven't read The Phantom Tollbooth since Mrs. Orenstein read it aloud to us in fifth grade. Back then I hadn't liked it all that much. Certainly not as much I had loved Johnny Tremain, which Mrs. Robertson read aloud to us in fourth grade, and which remains one of my all-time favorite books. Norton Juster's humor was so self-conscious; you could tell how funny he thought he was being. All right, it WAS sort of like Louis Carroll's humor, but I had never been a huge Alice fan, either, not the way I was a fan of Anne of Green Gables and A Little Princess.

But reading it this past week to submit my review, I found that the book started to grow on me. As I read the wonderful tributes to it included in this anniversary edition - by luminaries such as Maurice Sendak, Jeanne Birdsall, and Maria Nikolajeva - I began to feel ashamed that I hadn't loved it the first time around. The story of a world in which rhyme and reason have been banished does feel awfully timely, I must say.

My favorite bit on this reading, the one that most spoke to me, is Milo's encounter with "the Terrible Trivium," who occupies all his own time - and everybody else's as well - with endless pointless tasks. "What could be more important than doing unimportant things?" he asks. "If you stop to do enough of them, you'll never get to where you're going."

He continues, "If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won't have the time. For there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing."

Ouch!

I confess that my life lately has been ruled by the Terrible Trivium. When I try to think of what I've been doing for the last few months instead of writing, it's hard for me to come up with an answer. I do know that every single day has been very very busy, filled to bursting with - well, with whatever it is I've been doing instead of what I really should be doing.

Thank you, Norton Juster, for pointing this out! And congratulations on the fiftieth anniversary of this now-classic book.

The Specificity of Gratitude

2011-11-24T05:42:00.000-08:00

Today is the special day set apart for expressing our gratitude. One of my Facebook friends does this every day, posting a wonderfully detailed and specific list of five small, or not-so-small, things that she is grateful for. I think gratitude is most powerful when it's specific. Not: "I'm grateful for my family, my friends, my work, my health, and my cat." But more like this:

1. I'm grateful for the fact that when I woke up this morning the house already smelled like Thanksgiving, from the lingering aroma of the pumpkin pie that I baked yesterday.

2. I'm grateful that I baked the pie from the same recipe on the Libby canned pumpkin label that my mother used every year, leaving out the cloves the same way that she left out the cloves because our family doesn't like our pumpkin pie too spicy.

3. I'm grateful that Christopher put the pie in the oven for me because I had terrible sloshy visions of its ending up all over the floor, and his steady hands took care of it for me.

4. I'm grateful that Gregory came over from his apartment as the pie was baking and right away saw that the smoke detector in the hall was hanging open, missing its battery, and in five minutes he had a new battery installed.

5. I'm grateful that the crimped pie crust, which turned alarmingly brown after the first fifteen minutes of baking at 425 degrees, did NOT get any browner during the remainder of the baking time because of the protective strips of tin foil that Christopher helped me place around it.

So that is my list on this Thanksgiving morning.

A lot of you know that I have a strange family. We've been badly broken because some of our members have been badly broken. I've been badly broken myself. I love the line Chris Cleave gives his heroine in his novel Incendiary: "I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself." I think I have a family built on the wreckage of itself.

But despite that, we're still a family. Maybe even, because of that, especially a family.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

Thankgiving Week

2011-11-21T09:11:00.000-08:00

This is the week for Americans to come together to be thankful. I'll teach my Rousseau class on Tuesday morning, give three talks at a Greencastle primary school on Tuesday afternoon, have dinner with my friend Deepa on Tuesday evening, and then fly home very early Wednesday morning. I've emailed Christopher the grocery shopping list so that I can leap into feast-preparation as soon as I hit Boulder.

Right now I'm sitting at the computer at my beautiful, peaceful office out at the Prindle Institute, looking out my window at a light November rain. Everything is so green here even as winter is approaching.

I have been invited to stay on for a second year at the Prindle, and I've accepted. This will NOT turn into a permanent appointment at DePauw: the Prindle has visiting lines only, and the Philosophy Department is already well stocked with brilliant people in my sub-area. But I'm so glad at the thought of another year here.

I'm going to get to teach children's literature in the English department in the fall! This is a lifelong dream of mine that will now come true. And I'm going to be organizing a major conference on Ethics and Children's Literature, also for fall 2012, which I can start planning now. I can continue building relationships with Greencastle public schools. I can find more covered bridges: indeed, yesterday, out for a Sunday drive around Putnam County country roads with a friend, I came upon the Cornstalk Bridge, one more for my list.

So this is a lot to be grateful for as I head home for Thanksgiving.

Too Much Fun

2011-11-16T15:59:00.000-08:00

I have decided that I have a strange problem in my life right now: I am having too much fun.

This is not a problem I expected to have during my year at DePauw. I expected that I would be having long days to do nothing but read, write, think, and grow as a children's book author and philosopher. What could there be to do at this small liberal arts college, where I'm teaching, yes, ONE COURSE a semester, to distract me from serious intellectual and creative toil? I envisioned leisurely hours out at the peaceful Prindle Institute where I would scribble/type away on philosophical articles, children's literature articles, children's books, and my brilliant memoir.

This hasn't happened.

Instead, every hour seems to be filled with the intense activities of this extraordinarily alive academic community. I am in five reading groups (one of which I'm leading). The Prindle Institute for Ethics alone has several events every week (there are even two competing events tonight). So far this week, I've attended a screening of the documentary Dark Days, about a community of the homeless living under the Amtrak tracks in New York City, a talk given by a Fulbright scholar who founded an NGO in El Salvador, and the meeting for my reading group on the ethics of life writing; tonight is a poetry reading by a Salvadoran poet; tomorrow is a talk on "Demystifying Cuba" as well as a reading group on Bound by Recognition by Patchen Markell. I'm getting involved as a speaker and writer-in-residence at Greencastle's three elementary schools. Bill Clinton is speaking on campus on Friday. I have tickets for La Boheme at Indiana University in Bloomington on Saturday. The theater department is staging Hedda Gabler this weekend, too.

All I do is have fun! And part of my job just IS to have fun. Part of what is required for there to be a thriving academic community is for faculty to support events by their attendance. Outreach to the community is part of my job, too. Can I help it if so many of my professional duties happen to be pleasurable?

But still. I can't sustain this pace indefinitely. Sooner or later I need to focus my thoughts on my next book, or on a major article, or something I can write down on my monthly list of accomplishments.

Right now, my main accomplishment for November is "I had fun." I did write one important book review and one short article; I did give a talk at Arts Fest here on campus and organize another Arts Fest event; and I did conclude my ethics-of-life writing reading group. And I taught my Rousseau class. But I mainly had fun. And that is good for a while. It's hard to argue with the claim that fun is good. So I'll have fun for a little while longer. But then I'm going to buckle down.

Really. I am.

My Kind of Town

2011-11-13T11:27:00.000-08:00

Chicago is!

Highlights of a wonderful weekend:
1) The kind and helpful concierge at the Palmer House Hotel, who really did seem to care about every detail of the happy days we were planning - "Come back and tell me how it went!"
2) The Chicago Architectural Foundation river tour: 90 minutes crammed full, every single second, of an incredibly fascinating lecture on some fifty buildings we were passing. It was VERY cold sitting on the upper deck of the boat, but I wasn't willing to slip downstairs for a warming break as I didn't want to miss a syllable or a glimpse of a single skyscraper's soaring spires. Best part: the very end, where we looked back at the array of famous building before us and reviewed all that we had learned: yes, there was a Beaux Arts building, and an Art Deco building, and a Mies Van der Rohe International style, and a postmodern contextualist building...
3) A pilgrimage to Hull House to pay homage to the community of brilliant, creative, politically engaged women mobilized by Jane Addams to improve the lives of Chicago's immigrant poor - incredibly moving and inspirational.
4) Drinks at the Signature Lounge on the 96th floor of the John Hancock Tower with sweeping views of Lake Michigan at sunset.
5) A theater production of a play about the Great Chicago Fire, performed by the Looking Glass Theater Company, which has its stage right in the old pumping station that was one of the only two public structures to survive the Great Chicago Fire.
6) The Tiffany dome at the Chicago Cultural Center, once the public library, and so filled with quotes about the importance of books and reading in many languages from luminaries through the centuries.
7) Millennium Park in the Saturday sunshine, where we joined the throngs of tourists taking the mandatory photo in the reflective surfaces of "the Bean."
8) Hours and hours at the Chicago Art Institute, especially the miniature Thorne Rooms with their incredible detail - I joined and now have a two-year membership, which I hope will motivate me to take many trips back!
9) Hours and hours and hours and hours talking with Robin!

Now I'm home, happy to be back in my sweet little Greencastle, even as I can close my eyes and see CHICAGO.

City of the Big Shoulders

2011-11-09T18:18:00.000-08:00

After I teach my Rousseau class tomorrow, I'm off for a long weekend in Chicago, visiting with my beloved friend Robin, a friend since my days of working at the University of Maryland almost thirty years ago. She's flying in from Maryland, and I'm driving to Indianapolis and taking the bus from there to Chicago (three hours and fifteen minutes each way), because I decided that a little Greencastle mouse wasn't going to be able to handle driving in such a great big city, a city "so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning."

Robin and I haven't made any plans yet except that we're staying in the grand old Palmer House Hotel. And we want to go to the Art Institute. And maybe do an architecture tour of some kind. And talk and talk and talk. I think maybe I'd also like to eat a cupcake. I read once in an inflight magazine that Chicago is known for its cupcakes.

That's it. We can figure out the rest as we go. For now, it's just teach (Emile, Book Three), and then get in the car and start driving, and get on the bus and start riding, and meet up with Robin and start hugging and talking. And find a cupcake and start eating it.

"Taking Emotion out of the Equation"

2011-11-09T05:50:00.000-08:00

After my last post on chubbiness ("Something Else"), fellow author Brenda Ferber posted in reply that her solution to worrying about her weight has been to adopt a whole new way of eating, "taking emotion out of the equation," and simply listening to her body and eating when she was hungry and not eating when she wasn't hungry. When I replied, with an anguished wail, that I don't eat gumdrops because I'm HUNGRY but because I LOVE them, she wrote back, "So eat them. Eat one or two. The whole bag doesn't taste any different from the first one or two and eating the whole bag just makes you miserable." (I'm paraphrasing here, but that is basically what she said.)

Hmmm. This is definitely something to think about.

Brenda's advice made me remember my college days. I was an undergraduate at a women's college, Wellesley, and we ALL ate out of emotion ALL the time. Sometimes there would be ice cream for dessert at dinner, and you never saw such a frenzy. First there would be screams and shrieks of uncontrolled delight. Then there would be a mad rush over to the ice cream table, with lots of pushing and shoving. We would grab enormous soup bowls and cram them full of multiple scoops of ice cream and eat the whole entire bowl before eating anything else. This, although there was plenty for everybody and actually ice cream night was quite a frequent occurrence.

Then I went to Princeton for grad school, living in the Graduate College. Princeton at that time was almost all men. We had our first ice cream night at dinner. I screamed and shrieked and ran over to the ice cream table. Then I looked around. I was all alone. The men were just sitting there eating their dinner as if - as if there was plenty of ice cream for everyone and ice cream night was quite a frequent occurrence!

So I have now spent two days eating the Brenda Ferber way. It isn't quite a fair test yet - is two days ever a fair test of anything? - because I had my strep episode on day one. But still I have to admit that the results so far are intriguing. I have a bag of my MOST favorite candy EVER, Hershey cherry cordial kisses, and I've been having two or three a couple of times during the day, fully savoring each one. Last night, at my Prindle reading group, I surveyed the snacks I had put out - fancy cheeses, crackers, Pepperidge Farm cookies, wine, lemonade, water - and I asked myself, "What do you really WANT to eat? Because you can eat anything at all that you want, you know." I decided that I wanted a couple of crackers with cheese, and two orange Milanos, and a small glass of wine, and a larger glass of water. And that was what I ate.

I think I'm going to keep on trying this new plan, Miss Brenda!

Malingering

2011-11-08T12:10:00.000-08:00

I'm never sick, so when I awoke yesterday with a terrible sore throat and lay freezing cold beneath a heap of blankets, unable to face any of the work-related tasks I had planned for the day, I wasn't sure quite what to make of my situation. If I wasn't sick, what could this be? Was I just MALINGERING?

I love this word: "malingering." I love that there is a word that means "to pretend or exaggerate illness, esp to avoid work." I love that so many people are tempted to do this that a word was coined just to describe this particular strategy of work avoidance.

I went to Kroger and bought a thermometer: a fairly disappointing one, I must say, as it promised to give me a result in 9 seconds and promised to have an actual alarm sound a warning if the temperature was over a certain point, and it did neither of these things. But it did say that my temperature was 101.4 That is not the temperature of a malingerer!

I made a doctor's appointment for later in the day, but when I got there, the thermometer there said I had no fever at all. How could this be? I have to say I doubted their thermometer more than I doubted mine. But the kindly physician did accept my self-diagnosis of strep without even ordering a throat culture. I felt so ill as I waited in line to get my antibiotics prescription filled that I thought I might faint away upon the floor.

It turns out that it was strep, or at least that within an hour of starting the antibiotics, all my symptoms were gone. I slept for 13 blissful hours and awoke ready to face a full and busy day of teaching, meetings, evening reading group. So I WAS sick, after all. Unless - would the symptoms have disappeared anyway, even without the medication? Could it be that all I needed was one day of . . . malingering?

Truckin'

2011-11-07T06:08:00.000-08:00

Here's the bad system that I've fallen into regarding my writing.

I'll get an idea for a new book. I'll make some progress on this idea. Recently, I even got a contract for the idea. But then I'll turn against the idea. The idea seems so hopeless! So bad! So flawed from the get-go! Sometimes I have some smidgen of justification for turning against the idea: a passing expression of doubt on the part of an editor, an evening of tougher-than-usual critique from my writing group (no, from ONE PERSON in my writing group). I decide that I can't write this book. As my friend Ina says, "Just because you've begun a mistake, you're under no obligation to continue on in it." In the case of the recent book under contract, I even entertained the idea of canceling the contract and returning the advance. In the case of recent gropings toward a book series, I just put the idea away in my forget-about-it file.

But this is not a good system, at least for me. It really isn't. Here is what a good system would be.

Just keep on writing.

That's the system.

For the book under contract, I ended up doing this, and by page 50 I was in love with the book, and by page 150 I thought it might possibly be the best book I'd ever written.

So now for this new possible series idea, this morning I took it out of the forget-about-it file and read over what I have so far and discovered that it is not in fact bad. It is in fact good! Not great. But good. Flawed. But not irredeemably flawed.

And in any case, guess what, I don't have any other ideas right now that are any better. And I'm miserable when I'm not writing ("The Dread"). So I might as well write this as write nothing. And here's my prediction: I bet I'm going to be very glad that I did. So for now I'm just going to keep on truckin'.

Sister Act

2011-11-06T06:18:00.002-08:00

My sister, Cheryl, is here visiting me in Indiana. Hooray!

Cheryl just started working as a tax specialist for a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey that is a subsidiary of Eli Lilly, which happens to be the largest employer in the state of Indiana, so she is out here for a series of business meetings at the huge Eli Lilly campus in Indianapolis. But first we are playing together in Greencastle, which itself happens to boast the site of Eli Lilly's first little homely drugstore, situated on our courthouse square, where the little eatery Treasures on the Square is now located. Cheryl always throws herself with enormous enthusiasm into any new endeavor, so she was eager to make a pilgrimage to this historic spot. So we had breakfast at Treasures on the Square as soon as she arrived yesterday, and then I took her picture in front of its charming front door.

The rest of the day was filled with happy sightseeing, including a drive around the backroads of Parke County where we saw EIGHT covered bridges, my biggest haul yet! Her stuffed bear Taddy has made friends with my stuffed rabbit Ruby, and it's altogether a wonderful visit.

There is nothing like having a sister!

"Something Else"

2011-11-05T03:51:00.000-07:00

Once when one of my boys was in high school, he had a disappointing grade on a history exam, so I brought this up for discussion with his teacher during parent-teacher conferences. "Do you have any suggestions for what he should do to prepare for the next exam?" I asked.

"He should do something else!" she said.

"Something else?" I asked timidly.

"Yes, something else! Because whatever he's doing now isn't working!"

Okay.

At the time I considered this to be exceptionally unhelpful advice from an uncooperative teacher. But I have to say that I've warmed to this advice as the years have gone on.

Take my weight for example, the creeping chubbiness on which I've posted before, and which, alas, has only gotten steadily worse since that post. What should I do about it? Well, SOMETHING ELSE! Because what I'm doing now - that is to say, eating every morsel of free food provided by DePauw University in general and the Prindle Institute in particular, supplemented by comforting feasts at the Blue Door Cafe, plus occasional lovely dinners, with free-flowing wine, at friends' houses - isn't working.

There is something about the clarity of this insight that is more helpful than I previously realized. Maybe I'll try something else, try NOT doing what I've been doing, and see what happens.

It just might work, after all.

The Village Soothsayer

2011-11-04T04:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday contained one of the biggest treats of the semester for me: a class trip for my Rousseau course. We headed off to the Green Performing Arts Center across campus for a program focused on Rousseau's opera, Le Devin du Village (The Village Soothsayer).

Yes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, famous political philosopher (The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, The Social Contract) and educational theorist (Emile), who also happened to write the best-selling novel of the eighteenth century (Julie, or the New Heloise), was also a composer of some renown in his own time, who wrote not only the libretto but the score for an opera that was the toast of Paris upon its production in 1752. The king reportedly went around the palace singing the opening aria, "J'ai perdu mon serviteur," all day after the performance "in the vilest voice in the nation" and offered Rousseau a lifelong pension for its creation (an offer that Rousseau refused).

Yesterday my students and I, as well as other interested DePauw community members, had our opera extravaganza in the Thompson Recital Hall at the Green Center for the Performing Arts. I made some introductory remarks on Rousseau-as-musician; Misti Shaw of the Music Library presented a fascinating in-depth look at the war between French and Italian opera during the time period (Rousseau took the side of the Italians and was burned in effigy by the Paris Opera); Prof. Matthew Balensuela discussed Rousseau's influence on child prodigy Mozart, who wrote his own treatment of the opera (at age twelve, mind you!). And, biggest treat of all, Prof. Caroline Smith's voice students performed three of the arias for us, including the one that so pleased the king.

I think my students enjoyed it as much as I did. Who doesn't love a class trip? Thank you, colleagues and performers, for making this amazing outing possible.

November New Life, Day Two

2011-11-02T05:40:00.000-07:00

I had a little setback yesterday, on day one of my new life. I did have a lovely French toast and hot chocolate breakfast at the Blue Door Cafe, with just ONE piece of French toast because of the new slimming plan, and I did have a lovely walk up and down Seminary Street, as part of the same weight-loss project. But I just found myself consumed with a restless agitation, the vague feeling that despite all my brave new resolves my life was spinning out of control, with lots of pending decisions that need to be made and might be made wrongly, though as for that, whatever I decide isn't going to matter all that much either way for the rest of my life. But still.

I bumped into my friend Deepa as I was heading out to find some slimming food to eat for lunch, and told her what I was feeling, and she said, "Oh, I feel that sometimes, too. I call it 'the Dread.'"

I felt so much better once it was named, pinned down with a label. Oh, it's just the Dread. People are bound sometimes to be shadowed by the Dread. Life has so much flux and uncertainty in it, so much doubt about what to do next, and how to do it and why. Of course, this is going to lead to the Dread!

So now my November new life has to have some provisions for getting past the Dread. As I learned in a wonderful talk some years ago by writer Laura Deal, "activity is the antidote to anxiety." So I got up early and walked up to the Prindle. I'm going to write the book review on the stunning collaborative effort, Keywords for Children's Literature, edited by Philip Nel and Lissa Paul, which I've been assigned to do for the Children's Literature Association Quarterly. I may take a mid-day walk around the quarry rim - more slimming! And as the biggest source of the Dread in my life right now is not having a new book project that I feel good about, I'm going to take my little notebook and sit for a peaceful hour in the Bartlett Reflection Center, right next to the Prindle Institute, and just THINK.

Dread, begone! Claudia's new life is here!

Last Day of October

2011-10-31T05:01:00.000-07:00

For some, the most salient thing about today is that it is HALLOWEEN! And its being Halloween does make me want to reread Harry Behn's wonderful poem that begins, "Tonight is the night when dead leaves fly/like witches on switches across the sky."

But for me the most salient thing about today is that it is the last day of the month of October. Tomorrow, November first, I will begin a NEW LIFE, as I do on the first day of each month: I will leap into new regimens of fitness, frugality, and productive work, regimens that will most likely (if the past is any predictor of the future) peter out in a few days, but will still leave me with all kinds of accomplishments I would never have had otherwise.

The last day of the month is significant for me, too. This is the last hurrah for October, the last chance to accomplish whatever I can of all that I meant to do when that new life began thirty days ago. October can still be salvaged! It is not too late!

So today I am going to:
1) Do the FINAL revisions on my paper on the teen novels of Rosamond Du Jardin and send it off to the Children's Literature Association Quarterly
2) Put finishing touches on the talk on "Truth and Children's Literature" that I'm giving this afternoon as part of DePauw's week-long Arts Fest, whose theme this year is "Art and Truth"
3) Make some notes for myself in the aftermath of my talk on artistic integrity at Marquette last Friday so that I can have another frantic burst of revision on the talk before I give it again in some other venue
4) Write up reviews of three children's picture books for the Children's Literature website
5) Deal with accumulated emails and otherwise clear my desk for tomorrow's NEW LIFE!

Milwaukee!

2011-10-29T08:54:00.001-07:00

I have wanted to go to Milwaukee ever since I read Betsy, Tacy, and Tib by Maud Hart Lovelace, as a little girl. In the book, Tib's Aunt Dolly is from Milwaukee, and the girls decide that Milwaukee has an evocative magic as an imagined destination. Betsy writes a poem that begins, "We're off to Milwaukee, Milwaukee. Milwaukee, Milwauk, MilewakEE." And then in one of the Betsy-Tacy high school books, Betsy in Spite of Herself, Tib's family has moved away to Milwaukee, and Betsy goes to visit Tib and her family in Milwaukee for Christmas. "It's practically a foreign city," Mr. Ray tells Betsy in preparation for her trip, which will immerse her in German-American culture of the turn of the last century.

And now here I am in Milwaukee!

The beauty of the city is taking my breath away. I'm staying with beloved former-grad-student Theresa, who lives ONE BLOCK off Lake Michigan in a charming old neighborhood; we're just back from a long stroll along tree-shaded streets with stunning lake views. As this trip is in part for me a Betsy-Tacy literary pilgrimage, I've requested that we have lunch at an old-time German restaurant, Karl Ratzsch's, and then we'll go to the Milwaukee Public Museum, which has a much-visited recreation of an old-time Milwaukee street scene from precisely the era of Betsy's Christmas visit to Tib.

My talk yesterday at the Marquette Philosophy Department went well, a talk on the concept of "artistic integrity": how best to define it, how to recognize when it has been compromised. The central feature of all my philosophy talks is that the thesis is false and the argumentation for it bad, but the questions explored are fascinating and I address them in an engaging, lively, and thought-provoking way. The falseness of the thesis and the badness of the argumentation invariably become glaringly apparent the moment the first person asks the first question in the Q&A period, the question that poses the inevitable counter-example that destroys the entire argument from start to finish. But everyone joins in helping me to make the paper better, and we all have a most intellectually jolly time.

And then last night I got the post-talk reward of a legendary Wisconsin FRIDAY FISH FRY for dinner, complete with polka dancing - followed by a tour of the Whitefish Bay pumpkin festival's display of hundreds of grinning jack o'lanterns. And now I get my Betsy-Tacy pilgrimage to boot. So it's worth giving a mildly embarrassing talk, with its grave but not utterly unredeemable philosophical flaws.

It's all part of getting to be off to Milwaukee, Milwaukee! Milwaukee, Milwauk - MilwaukEEEEEE!

Hooray for Grad Students

2011-10-28T03:33:00.000-07:00

The single best thing about my job teaching philosophy at the University of Colorado - and I think all my colleagues would agree - is having grad students. Grad students are wonderful. They are amazingly smart, knowledgeable, motivated, funny, fascinating human beings. They are also extraordinarily generous and helpful to faculty.

Over the course of my twenty years at CU, I am indebted to graduate students for:

- teaching my son Gregory to ride a bike (Sara, of course)
- going with us to Lakeside Amusement Park so that I wouldn't have to be the one to ride the rollercoaster with my boys (Sara, of course)
- co-authoring a paper with me on environmental justice (thanks, Rob!)
- creating with me a summer philosophy camp for high school students (Sara AND Rob)
- driving my boys various places when I couldn't go
- providing catsitting employment for my boys over university breaks
- HELPING ME TO CLEAN OUT THAT HORRIBLE HOUSE LAST SUMMER!
- letting me have the privilege of reading some amazing dissertations
- serving as my research assistants on projects ranging from assembling a Rousseau bibliography to critiquing my book-in-progress on parenting ethics.
- serving as my TAs in class after class
- acting out the play No Exit with me in those classes
- and so much more!!

It's always heartbreaking when grad students "grow up" - get their Ph.D.s and go away to their grown-up tenure-track jobs. But then - and this is the point of my post today - they invite me to come places and give talks. Thanks to Sara, I've been invited to speak at the Philosophy Teaching and Learning Organization (PLATO) conference last summer in New York. Thanks to Jen and Rich, I was invited to speak at the Undergraduate Ethics Symposium at DePauw, which led to my being invited here for this magical visiting year.

And thanks to Theresa and Kevin, I'm heading to the airport momentarily to give a talk this afternoon at Marquette and spend the weekend playing with them in Milwaukee.

Oh, grad students, I owe you so much!

Getting It All Done

2011-10-27T11:32:00.000-07:00

As we're heading into the busy, stressful portion of the semester, I thought I would write a post to remind myself of a few of my core time management principles that I seem to have temporarily forgotten. I'm feeling overwhelmed with all I have to do right now: prepare the talk on artistic integrity that I'm giving tomorrow (!) in Milwaukee, prepare the talk on truth and children's literature that I'm giving Monday (!) for the week-long Arts Fest extravaganza here at DePauw, do final revisions on my Rosamond du Jardin paper that was just accepted (hooray!) by the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, do a ton of planning for my winter session course on children's book writing, for my spring course on feminism and the family, for my spring reading group on the work of philosopher Cheshire Calhoun, for a spring event on the ethics of life writing. How can I possibly get it all done?

The first thing to remember is that I CAN'T get it all done. Trying to "get it all done" is the best way to ensure that I don't get any of it done. Facing a massive and endless to-do list is paralyzing, not empowering. What I need to figure out is how to get SOME of it done, preferably the things that need to be done sooner rather than later.

So my goal today (well, for what's left of today) is simply to focus on that paper I'm giving tomorrow at Marquette. I've located a previous draft of the paper that I had lying around, plus a bunch of very very helpful comments from various people that I saved from when I last gave the talk a year or two ago. I need to remind myself that the worst-case scenario, not even such a terrible scenario, is that I just give the talk the way it is. That IS a possible option. Having accepted that as an option, I can move forward knowing that anything I decide to do to the talk between now and tomorrow is likely to be at least a partial improvement.

Okay.

I'm going to finish writing this blog post, then I'm going to go get a late lunch at the Blue Door Cafe while I read through my notes and make my revision plan. Then I'm going to go out to my peaceful serene office at the Prindle Institute and spend at least an hour making what changes I can. I may find some leftover wine from last night's reading group to assist in this process. And then I'll just give the talk tomorrow and hope for the best, comforting myself with the thought that my argument may be weak, my conclusion may be false, but at least the paper isn't boring. It really isn't.

On the plane tomorrow I'll start reading the two books I need to skim-read to do my final revisions on that children's literature paper. I don't need to worry about my truth and children's literature talk until Monday. Heck, the talk isn't until 4:15 on Monday, so I'll have all day to work on it, fortified by French toast and hot chocolate at the Blue Door.

The long-term planning can wait until Tuesday. Or maybe even Wednesday.

I don't have to get it ALL done today. Just some of it. And now I'm off to do it.

Revise and Resubmit

2011-10-25T05:57:00.000-07:00

I just got back the two reviewers' comments from Children's Literature in Education on my paper, "'Better Times Are Coming Now': Wartime Dreams and Disenchantment in Rufus M." The verdict? The paper has promise, but it needs to be MASSIVELY revised before it can be deemed publishable.

Why am I not surprised? This is the story of my life as a writer and a scholar. In fact, if I were to write an intellectual autobiography, Revise and Resubmit would be an excellent title for it.

It's always a TAD disappointing, of course, to read through the LENGTHY comments pointing out all that remains to be done. But I have to remind myself: this is my PROCESS. I always send off a paper too soon, before it is as good as it needs to be. And I always send it off too soon for a very good reason. Because on my own, unassisted, I don't know how to make it as good as it needs to be.

The suggestions I received this morning are invaluable. I now have a list of books to read, points to develop, arguments to expand. I have a plan! It will take a TON of work to do all of this, work that I may well need to defer until next summer, but it's all work that I know how to do and will enjoy doing. And then I'll have a vastly stronger paper. No: I will have the definitive scholarly paper on this book. A paper written by me, but with lots of help from two brilliant anonymous reviewers (well, one brilliant anonymous reviewer and one VERY brilliant not-really-anonymous reviewer, because I can always recognize the particular pattern of this scholar's brilliance).

So now I'm to write on my list of "Nice Things and Accomplishments" for October: "Revise and resubmit comments on Rufus M." Getting these IS a nice thing. And it's going to lead, in time, to one heck of an accomplishment.

From Home to Home

2011-10-24T07:37:00.000-07:00

I got home to Greencastle, Indiana, last night, after a week of being home in Boulder, Colorado. I'm home from being home.

I don't remember ever feeling this way before in my life, as if I had two homes, both equally MY home, both dear familiar worlds with a house that is my house and a bed that is my bed and even with a stuffed animal that is my stuffed animal. (Though only Boulder has a cat that is my cat.)

This morning I had breakfast at the Blue Door Cafe, where Shelley and I squealed with happiness to see each other after our week of separation. I dallied over my beloved French toast and hot chocolate, and then walked my usual morning constitutional up and down Seminary Street, before heading out to my office at the Prindle Institute to exchange fall break stories with Linda and Nicki. Now I'm puttering at my computer here, getting geared up for my busy happy week back home, after my busy happy week away, or rather, my busy happy week back (at my other) home.

Two beloved homes, equally home, a thousand miles apart.

Brownie Hubris

2011-10-23T06:50:00.000-07:00

Today, my last day home in Colorado for fall break, is the day of the church chile cookoff. The three categories for judging are chile, cornbread, and brownies. Christopher and I are three-time winners for our "Scrumptious Cream Cheese Brownies" in the brownie competition, the undefeated champions. Actually, the first year of the cookoff the brownies were not actually judged for a prize, but everyone agreed that if brownies HAD been judged, we would have won.

So a lot is at stake for us this year as we defend our title.

But then I fell prey to brownie hubris. I decided to submit, in addition to our award-winning cream cheese brownies, a new kind of brownie as well. I found a recipe online for s'mores brownies: graham cracker bottom crust, then brownies on top of that, then a marshmallow topping with little bits of broken graham crackers and broken Hershey bars sprinkled in.

I felt like Mary Lou Retton, who after scoring an unprecedented 10 in the first of her best-of-two-tries on her Olympic vault, ran back and did a completely unnecessary second try and scored a second 10. Would there be a two-way tie in the brownie category this year, between Claudia and . . . Claudia?

No. Hubris proved for me, as for so many others, a tragic flaw. When I put the s'mores brownies under the broiler for a minute or two so that the marshmallows could brown, instead, in a few SECONDS, the marshmallows burst into flame. My oven was engulfed with fire.

As my adoring audience stood gaping, I called 911 and the fire fighters arrived. By that time, the fire was out, the marshmallows just ashes. No permanent damage was done to my kitchen. But the s'mores brownies had to be removed from competition.

I'm off now to frost the cream cheese brownies, a wiser and humbler baker. And maybe this year it IS someone else's turn to win.

Quantifying Revisions

2011-10-22T06:23:00.001-07:00

I was just talking to a writer who has participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) for two years running, generating a 50,000-word novel each time during the month of November. I asked her if she was planning to do it again this year, and she said she's inclining toward spending that month this time around revising one of her previous novels. The only problem is that it's so motivating to be counting up words toward the 50,000 word NaNoWriMo total and there doesn't seem to be anything comparably satisfying along quantitative lines for revision.

So I started thinking about how I quantify revision for myself, as I'm also someone who adores meeting visible/tangible goals and crossing them off my to-do list.

For revision I have two quantitative ways I proceed. One is to quantify revision in terms of time spent. I tell myself that I have to revise this book for ten hours, say, and then cross off each one.

The other approach relies on my having comments given to me by my writing group or my editor. There I assemble a huge master manuscript made up of every page with writing group or editorial comments, removing every page with no comments. My revision task is then to go through the master manuscript and deal with 50 comments, or 30, or whatever. I usually keep track by removing the pages from the pile as I have dealt with the comments on that page.

In the beginning I can make amazing progress, as many of the comments are just marked typos or other tiny things. So on my first pass through the manuscript I might get rid of 50 pages. But then come the hard things: Does Sierra express too much anger toward Ms. Lin too soon? The three pages that have comments related to this one issue might take hours to revise.

But I do get to count. And counting definitely motivates, at least for me.

How to Sleep, How to Wake

2011-10-21T05:34:00.000-07:00

Here is the best way to sleep:

1. Make sure the air in the room is very cool.
2. Make sure the blankets are very warm. It's best to have at least one big puffy comforter and at least one hand-sewn quilt.
3. Wear a Lanz of Salzburg flannel nightgown.
4. Position yourself in the bed with one leg straight and one leg bent.
5. Have Snickers the cat position herself in the crook of your bent leg.
6. Proceed with sleeping and purring.

This is guaranteed to give you the best sleep of your life.
Warning: it will make it VERY hard to wake up the next morning.

So here is the best way to wake:

1. Force yourself out of bed at six because you have a scheduled date to walk with Rowan.
2. Throw on your clothes.
3. Gulp down some Swiss Miss hot chocolate.
4. Force yourself to start walking in the pitch darkness at six-thirty.
5. Recognize Rowan walking toward you only by her yellow hat in the darkness.
6. Turn east and walk together toward the rosy brightness on the horizon.
7. Continue walking as the sun rises "a ribbon at a time" (Emily).
8. Continue walking until the sky is ablaze with pink and gold.
9. Continue walking until it's really truly morning.

So now you know how to do it!

What Next?

2011-10-18T09:13:00.000-07:00

I just finished my massive revisions on my novel for FSG, the book about the perfect goody-goody girl who takes her mother's lunch to school by mistake, a lunch with a knife in it for cutting her mother's apple, and then finds herself facing mandatory expulsion under the school's zero tolerance policies for weapons. I emailed it off five minutes ago. The changes I made from Margaret's suggestions were so terrific! I cut out 30 pages, motivated Sierra's change from perfect girl to rebel much more effectively, fixed many tiny inconsistencies and other puzzling holes in the formerly sprawling story. Hooray!

But now, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I have no new book lined up to write after this one. I've groped toward some ideas, written huge chunks of one possibility that I'm not sure I like, written an entire chapter book that still isn't right but maybe could be made to be right. But I have no next contract right now, no definite "This is going to be my next book" plan.

I'm trying to feel excited rather than stressed about this. The writing world is wide open for me right now. Should I write the memoir I've been thinking about? Maybe now's the time? Or return to poetry? Or something completely different, utterly unlike anything I can now even imagine?

Watch this spot!

My Soul Is All But Out of Me

2011-10-16T11:13:00.001-07:00

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote this wonderful poem that I memorized as a child and can still quote by heart:

God's World

O WORLD, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year.
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

This is what it feels like, being home this mid-October week in Boulder, at the peak of autumn brilliance, as I reconnect to the life and world I left behind two months ago to head to Indiana. Every day is so filled with emotional intensity. At church this morning dozens of people not only hugged me, but held on to me, as I held on to them. We stood there in the pews holding each other, close to tears. And that was only one hour of my visit home!

I've been so happy in Indiana - I had almost forgotten this, forgotten home - and now it's all come back to me, with a passion that is stretching me apart, my sweet life too beautiful for me to be able to bear it. I feel like Emily in Our Town, come back from the grave for one day, marveling at how earthly people are able to endure the intensity of each ordinary moment. “Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?”

Only I've come back not for one day, but for one whole week.

Home!

2011-10-14T16:11:00.000-07:00

It's fall break at DePauw, starting today; I flew home to Colorado this morning, so here I am for an entire week of reconnecting with my old life.

So far: hike on the Shanahan Ridge trails with Rowan on a perfect crisp fall day. Tonight: Gregory's jazz band concert at CU. Tomorrow: farmers' market breakfast with Rowan and then a matinee of Swan Lake in Denver. Sunday: seeing dear friends at church as Christopher plays in the bell choir; walking around Viele Lake with Elizabeth; dinner with Diane.

Somewhere during this week I have to find time to revise a novel, grade papers, get my teeth cleaned at the dentist, check in with the philosophy department, and CUDDLE WITH SNICKERS. But it's all off to a good start so far.

The Tempest and Me

2011-10-13T12:36:00.000-07:00

This is the week that the Actors from the London Stage are here on campus to do their performance of The Tempest, as well as to work with student actors in a number of classes, including the interdisciplinary team-taught class on the play that I've been attending. There is an article about our class on the university website this week, and of course, who is prominently visible in the first photo for the article, but the oldest, stoutest, most awkward, but also most enthusiastic student: me. Here I am practicing courtly manners in a class exercise. Note the kindly amusement on the faces of my fellow students.

The performance by the Actors from the London Stage, which I saw Tuesday night, was distinguished by the fact that the entire play was performed uncut with only five actors playing multiple roles, sometimes in the same scene, a tour de force of getting instantly into character with only the most minimal of props and costumes as well. I might go see it a second time tonight just to figure out "How did they do it?"

But in case you wanted to know how I did it, you can see it here!

Only at DePauw

2011-10-12T05:46:00.000-07:00

Here is my latest "only at DePauw" story that explains why I am so happy here.

Yesterday I was having lunch with a colleague in the English department over at the Two West restaurant at the Inn at DePauw, right on the edge of the campus. This is the restaurant that has the CAKE BALLS that I blogged about a few weeks ago. As I finished lunch, I saw other colleagues/friends eating there as well, members of the Janeites book group. And then at the table next to them sat the president of the university, Brian Casey.

Although he had only met me once before, at a new faculty orientation dinner at his home, he greeted me warmly and asked me how everything was going for me at DePauw. I did my usual gushing about the wonderfulness of the Prindle Institute and my happiness in the philosophy department.

Then he said, "Wait, you're the Blue Door Cafe person, aren't you?" This is the cafe I've come to love - oh, that hot chocolate! oh, that French toast! oh, the coziness of the couches! oh, the warmth and kindness of Shelley who presides there.

"Yes, I am," I told President Casey.

"Well, they love you there," he told me.

"Well, I love them!" I told him.

So I think it's pretty cool that the university president not only remembers a new faculty member so warmly but also keeps track of her love fest with the Blue Door Cafe. Don't you?

Scuffling through the Leaves

2011-10-10T05:11:00.000-07:00

My first-ever job was a part-time job in the junior clothes department at Sears, back when I was in high school. To show you how long ago this was: THREE young women worked in that ONE department. One of us worked the cash register, one of us attended the dressing room, and one of us tidied up the clothes racks and made furtive runs over to the chocolate-and-cheese department to bring back provisions for the others (that was me). It was tons of fun working there, as I remember.

The customers were always interesting, like the teasing man who asked me in all apparent seriousness if we took "federal reserve notes" - I told him I had to go check with the manager to see. Or the man who wanted us to try on a bunch of different outfits so he could see which one would look best on his girlfriend. (Actually, forty years later that seems creepy to me, but at the time it made for a jolly evening of fashion show.) And we also spent an unconscionable amount of time on the Sears phone line talking to our boyfriends.

Still, when October came I wanted to quit my job, because it was cutting into the time I could have been spending scuffling through the autumn leaves. I yearned for the pleasures of that kind of aimless idleness, strolling along through ankle-deep heaps of maple and oak leaves. So quit the job I did.

Over the years "scuffling through the leaves" has become a sort of mantra for me, reminding me of the pleasures I don't want to crowd out of my busy workaday life.

Now it's autumn in Indiana, and fallen leaves are thick everywhere I go. I'm busy busy busy with my job, but luckily I can walk to work at the Prindle Institute through the DePauw Nature Park, and scuffle happily for a full half hour each direction. I get to keep my job and scuffle through the leaves, too. Which is how I like my life best.

Getting a Grip

2011-10-09T07:07:00.000-07:00

It's the week before fall break here, and everyone is stressed, or has a right to be. Students are buried under the weight of all the papers they have to write; professors are buried under the weight of all the papers they have to grade. And when my students tell me all that they are doing in addition to writing midterm papers and taking midterm exams, I feel exhausted just listening: one student is playing the bass in the pit orchestra for the musical Urinetown AND spending two hours a day in Ethics Bowl practice; another is on DePauw's swim team; another is plowing through an enormous book for one of the Prindle reading groups in addition to the enormous books she's reading for class, and much much more.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking about the significant revisions I need to make on my longest-ever novel, the paper I need to submit for the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics conference, the paper I need to write for a Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO) volume, soon-due student recommendation letters. Plus the enormous books I'm plowing through for the FIVE Prindle reading groups I signed up for at the start of the semester when I really thought I'd have time here in my new life for EVERYTHING.

So we all need to get a grip. Here's how I'm doing it today.

Step one: get a good night's sleep - DONE!
Step two: get up and do at least an hour's work on the book revisions - DONE!
Step three: go to the Blue Door Cafe and spend an hour drinking hot chocolate, eating French toast, and reading the Sunday New York Times - DONE!
Step four: church - coming up next!
Step five: spend the afternoon at my peaceful Prindle office dealing with those recommendation letters and finishing the final chapter of one of the reading group books
Step six: attend the Prindle second-Sunday-of-the-month film series - today's film is a documentary called Deliver Us from Evil
Step seven: Ethics Bowl practice from 6:30-8:30
Step eight: home to get in bed and read a book I need to review
Step nine: go to sleep!

Will this make a dent in all I have to do? Yes, but only a dent. But a dent is still something. It is still so much better than no dent! I'll be able to cross at least a few things off my master list: the recommendation letters, that Prindle book, and most of all, the hardest thing on my list, "face those book revisions." And I got to have French toast, too!

Me and Belle and Donald and Daisy and Cheryl

2011-10-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

So here I am at the Epcot Center at Disney World on a perfect Florida October day, as we ate our way around the world at the Epcot International Food and Wine Festival. In the photo of Belle, note how much better she looks than we do! For some reason not a strand of her hair was blowing in the strong breeze, and her eyes weren't closed, and her mouth was curved into a perfect smile, and she was standing right in the middle of a shaft of sunlight, too. When we told Belle that we were glad she hadn't ended up with Gaston, she gave a small shudder: "I don't even like to hear the NAME Gaston."

Donald and Daisy probably look better than we do, too. But they weren't having any more fun than we were having.

FAME

2011-10-07T05:34:00.000-07:00

The FAME conference (Florida Association for Media in Education) truly lives up to its name, at least from an author's perspective. Here authors of books for young readers are celebrities. Dozens of media specialists have asked to have their picture taken with me so that they can take it back to their eager students who reportedly will be wild with excitement at this glimpse of me. People act flattered if I sit with them at lunch or walk with them through the gorgeous hallways of this posh Hilton resort. People treat it as a huge honor to be able to collect an author - an actual author! - from the airport.

Here is what I've been telling these wonderful dedicated media specialists (whom I still want to call by the honorific title LIBRARIANS).

These students who are so excited about books and reading and who are thrilled by the sight of an author? Do you know why they are so excited? It's because of YOU. It's because of YOUR love for books, and YOUR love for kids - your contagious enthusiasm - your creative energy and excitement. We authors would be nowhere - unwept, unhonored, and unsung - if it weren't for you.

So thank you, thank you, thank you, Florida media educators. You are the best!

Multiple Worlds

2011-10-06T05:29:00.000-07:00

As if I didn't have a wonderful enough time at the Epcot Center's International Food and Wine Festival yesterday with Cheryl and Carey (I'll post my photo of us with Belle of Beauty and the Beast when I return home to Indiana), now I'm having nonstop bliss at FAME, the Florida Association for Media in Education conference.

I loved being on a panel late yesterday afternoon with four other witty and sparkling children's authors, including two terrific Lisas: Lisa Wheeler and Lisa Yee.

I loved signing books - lots of them, too! - in the exhibit hall.

I loved sitting by the pool sipping white wine sangria with a new writer friend as the moon rose over the palm trees.

Today I know I'm going to love giving my talk and signing more books. And then I'm going to love lying on a chaise longue by the pool, writing.

Being here at FAME makes me think: THIS is my world, THESE are my people. Why do I ever do anything other than write children's books? The only trouble is that when I walked into the FEAST conference two weeks ago - Feminist Ethics and Social Theory - I felt the same way. And maybe I feel this way most of all when I walk into the ChLA conference - the scholarly Children's Literature Association. These are ALL my worlds. These are ALL my people.

So I'm lucky to have a lot of different worlds to visit.

Especially ones with moonlit palm trees.

Perfect Timing

2011-10-04T02:43:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow morning, very early, I'm off to Orlando because my book How Oliver Olson Changed the World is on the master list for the Sunshine State Young Readers Award. This means that children around the state will be reading my book, and the others on the list, preparatory to voting for their favorite title next spring. And it means that I was invited, together with the other nominated authors, to speak, sign, mix, and mingle at the Florida Association for Media in Education (FAME) conference, held this year in Orlando. My participation in this totally wonderful event will include an author panel Wednesday afternoon and talks on both Thursday and Friday, as well as other jollities.

Now, that would be fun enough, one would think. But it also happens to be the case that my sister and her husband made a last-minute decision to go on vacation in Orlando this week. And that I had already booked an extremely early-in-the-morning flight to Orlando, as there are very few nonstop options from Indianapolis, leaving me hours to spend all by myself before the opening of FAME at 4 p.m. So now Cheryl and Carey will be meeting me at the airport at 9 a.m. tomorrow, and the three of us can play all day at the Epcot Center during their International Food and Wine Festival.

How fun is that? Could timing be any more perfect than that?

Rapid Results

2011-10-02T08:32:00.000-07:00

As part of my current project to make my life in every way as wonderful as possible, I've been subscribing for the first time in many many years to The New York Times, sharing a subscription with my friend Keith. I pick it up first, trotting over in the morning to get our copy from the pile outside Asbury Hall on campus, and then I give it to Keith when I'm done with it. At first this worked out great, because I would force myself to read at least some of it every day and then simply pass it on to Keith, either way. But then I fell behind, and he fell behind, and now there are piles of them everywhere. And I know that every single issue is more worth reading than many books. I can't let myself get stressed by this, however. I have to say: whatever little sparkly thing I pick up from any given issue makes it all okay.

This morning I spent a lovely hour at the Blue Door Cafe, with hot chocolate, French toast, and just one section of the Sunday paper, my favorite section: Sunday Review. There was a terrific article on compassion fatigue, another on whether Gov. Christie of New Jersey is too fat to be president, another on the proliferation of super-people among college applicants, and the best one of all, for me, one called "Deadlines Get Results" by Tina Rosenberg.

She writes about the successes brought by the Rapid Results program, where people come together to pledge to solve problems in 100 days: HIV testing in Ethiopia, boosting infant mortality in Rwanda, digging wells in Sierra Leone. Things that hadn't been done in decades were accomplished within 100 days, because time-concentrated efforts pay off.

Ooh! Now I want to think what projects in my own life I could decide to tackle in 100 days. Just one, of course, for each 100-day cycle. After all, the article didn't say you could increase HIV testing, boost infant mortality rates AND dig a bunch of wells all in 100 days. It said, or implied, that you pick one thing, and then do IT. Plan to get it done in 100 days, and then see what happens.

I think I'm getting ready to make my 100-day plan....

Master Class

2011-10-01T07:32:00.000-07:00

The big big big excitement here at DePauw: YoYo Ma has been here for the past two days, suffusing the campus and community with his abundantly infectious creative and musical joy.

Thursday night he gave his public lecture - "YoYo Ma: A Life in Music" - where the best part was the clip of little boy YoYo playing with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic with JFK and Jackie in attendance - and then a couple of decades later, playing with Elmo on Sesame Street.

Friday he played an impromptu concert in the student center at lunchtime to a capacity crowd - and played to an audience of 25 at a Greencastle nursing home - and played a sold-out evening concert with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago.

The high point for me was attending the master class he gave in the morning. Two brave first-year students played first for him, a Brahms piece for cello and piano. Then three advanced students played a delicious Beethoven trio. To my surprise, YoYo Ma focused less on technique than on having the students understand what it was about each piece that they wanted most to share with their audience: "If there was one thing you wanted others to understand about why you love this piece, what would it be?"

He had the first pair of students play the piece with exquisite slowness: "Now I can feel the listening between you - you had all the time in the world to say what you wanted" - "Don't rush to the next note - let us HEAR it - MAKE us listen."

He talked about trust: "You can rely on the music to do most of the work for you you. You're just joining in."

He asked the second group if they had any questions or concerns about the piece they had just played so beautifully: one mentioned timing, one color, one unity at the conclusion. He said that lazy as he is (ha!), he likes to try to find the common denominator solution to resolve as many problems as possible, and suggested that the players conceive of each measure as one "beat" in a larger four-beat measure. The results were noticeable even on one playing.

So what can I apply from this to writing? I'm still pondering that. At the least: focus on what I most love about my story and most want to share with my readers. And write it with joy.

"Everyone flies to the assemblies"

2011-09-30T05:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was teaching my favorite chapter of Rousseau's Of the Social Contract, Book 3, Chapter 15, where he rails against reliance on "deputies or representatives" to serve the state. In Rousseau's ideal state, the citizens would be eager to serve:

The better the constitution of a State is, the more do public affairs encroach on private in the minds of the citizens. Private affairs are even of much less importance, because the aggregate of the common happiness furnishes a greater proportion of that of each individual, so that there is less for him to seek in particular cares. In a well-ordered city every man flies to the assemblies.

We were talking together about whether this is an appealing or chilling picture of political community: do we really want private affairs to be swallowed up in the public good? But then, as we were arguing about this, it occurred to me that Rousseau's idealization is pretty much the life I'm living right now at DePauw.

Every night I fly to some assembly. Yesterday I flew to three: to a philosophy department talk on Nietzsche's metaethics, dinner with the speaker and with the rest of my philosophy department colleagues, then an event presentation: "YoYo Ma: A Life in Music." Earlier in the week I flew to a meeting of the Prindle reading group on James Stewart's book Tangled Webs, with the author present. I've been flying to ethics bowl practices, to Fulbright application meetings, to all-faculty meetings, to the class on The Tempest. What private business do I need to have, what private cares, when this is the public business of my little liberal arts community here?

So maybe Rousseau was on to something, after all.

Things Due Now, Things Due Later

2011-09-29T04:42:00.000-07:00

Do any of you find that while things that are due now are impossible to face, things that are due later draw you with irresistible allure?

I have so many things that I need to do NOW: read for my Rousseau class, read Fulbright applications from my mentees, review books for Children's Literature, review a book for the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, organize some huge and wonderful event on life writing for the Prindle Institute (who could possibly face a task presented under that description!), revise a novel, write an overdue paper, and decide what paper I want to submit to the annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics.

Am I doing any of those things? No. Instead, my brain is seething with ideas for a paper on Eleanor Estes's Pinky Pye, for next year's Children's Literature Association conference in June in Boston. That paper abstract isn't due until January. All these other things I listed above need to be done by mid-October, or should have been done last month.

All I can think about is Pinky Pye. I'm rereading it, as well as Ginger Pye, to see if my paper idea is going to pan out. Guess what: it is! I'm making notes, I'm drawing connections, I'm searching for relevant articles, printing them out.

This is very bad, of course. But I really couldn't help myself. And all those other things: they will get done - if only because they have to. But right now, Pinky Pye is polishing up her little white paw, and speaking her one little meow word to me: "Woe."

Oh, Pinky!

"Don't Direct Each Other"

2011-09-28T07:07:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was the fifth meeting of the interdisciplinary team-taught class on The Tempest that I'm sitting in on in preparation for the performance next month on campus by Actors from the London Stage. We worked on acting techniques and did one exercise where we walked around the room in male/female pairings (taking turns being male or female) in courtly fashion as Renaissance music played. The climax of the exercise came when we presented ourselves to the queen, played by Prof. Andrea Sununu, who did a wonderful job of receiving us graciously, with a dignified nod or distant smile, except for the one or two occasions when she saw fit to extend her hand so that some favored one could kneel and kiss her ring.

Toward the end of the class, we received the following acting advice which doubles as extremely useful life advice:

"Acting is trying to change your partner" - but don't try to change your partner by giving explicit instructions for how the other person should act: "Don't direct each other." (With a blush I remembered the previous week where I had been full of helpful advice for how the Ferdinand and Miranda in my scene - I was Prospero - could deliver their lines more effectively!) Instead, "React to what they're actually giving you."

Here was the best part: Instead of saying "This isn't working, you're not coming to me," GET THEM TO COME TO YOU.

Oh. All those doomed relationships, a lifetime full of them, where I expended so much effort directing the other person to do what I what I wanted him to do, now exposed for the failure of my inappropriate directorial stance.

Oh, well. Now I know!

A FEAST Indeed

2011-09-26T06:34:00.001-07:00

I'm home from the Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST) conference. It was wonderful, despite the conference center "resort" itself proving a disappointment: closed pool, closed trails, meeting rooms with paper-thin walls, late-night revelry from the endless weddings going on simultaneously with our conference. But the conference itself was a banquet for the mind and spirit.

Often when I attend conferences, I deliver my own paper, go to a few sessions where friends of mine are giving papers, and then spend the rest of the time reading, writing, and sipping pomegranate martinis in the hotel bar. This time, because I wasn't giving a paper but was just going to to the conference in order to go to the conference, I actually WENT to the conference. I attended almost every single session, scribbling notes frantically in my DePauw University notebook - seventeen pages of them. In addition I scribbled down names of books I want to read, books I want to teach, ideas for future articles.

In the evenings I did curl up in my room and read a riveting biography of Emily Dickinson, Lives Like Loaded Guns, by Lyndall Gordon. The title is from a poem by Emily: "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun. . . ." I started reading the book simply because I've long wanted to read a biography of Emily Dickinson; I had no idea how much the book would bear on my current interest in the ethics of life writing. It turns out that everything written about Emily Dickinson for decades - including much that is still written about her - has been shaped by an intense family feud, triggered by the torrid adultery of Emily's brother, Austin Dickinson, that split the family into two warring camps, each with their own interest in "owning" Emily's poetry - and shaping the mythology that came to surround her.

So by day I feasted on papers with titles like "Queering Reproductive Ethics," "Gender and the Politics of Invisible Disability," "The Epistemic Function of Narrative and the Globalization of Mental Disorders," "Muslim Women and the Many Faces of Patriarchy," "The Weird Adventures of Western Aid," and "On Having a Bottomless Source of Moral Failure." By night I feasted on Emily's poems and the life that inspired them.

And I even lost a pound in the process!

Off to FEAST

2011-09-22T12:14:00.000-07:00

I'm leaving in an hour for the first of many fun weekend getaways this fall. This time I'm driving up to a resort on Lake Michigan north of Chicago to attend the every-other-year-conference of the association for Feminist Ethics And Social Theory: FEAST.

This is the first time I've ever gone to a conference where I wasn't presenting on the program. It had never even occurred to me to go to a conference if I wasn't giving a paper there. But part of the faculty culture at DePauw seems to be that it's perfectly okay to go to a conference just to - gasp - learn something new, something to bring back to the university in order to enrich our teaching, or to contribute to the quality of our shared intellectual life. The point of going to a conference doesn't have to be another line on our c.v.

Now, this isn't to say that I'm not wishing that I had thought of submitting a paper months ago when the call for papers went forth. I love giving talks and papers and value the critical feedback I receive. I wouldn't have a career at all if it weren't for forcing myself to give talks and papers at this kind of conference, gather the comments from the audience, head home to expand and revise, and then publish the paper somewhere. But this time I didn't get around to it. I was busy getting around to lots of other things instead, which were more urgent and important at the time.

So I'm going anyway. Just to learn. I'm taking my yellow DePauw University notebook that I bought at the college bookstore upon arriving to campus. I'll go to talks, take good notes in my notebook, see lots of University of Colorado friends, and return home with some new ideas bouncing around in my brain. Maybe an idea for a presentation at some future conference or a published paper. Maybe ideas to help me do a better job teaching my Feminism and the Family course here in the spring. Maybe just ideas to make me more intellectually alive right in this moment. Not all ideas have to be stored up for some future purpose, right? Sometimes we're permitted to learn, and think, and grow simply for its own sake, for the sake of the feast - FEAST - itself.

Dupery through Hope

2011-09-21T05:15:00.000-07:00

Today I'm giving a dinner talk at five o'clock at the campus Center for Spiritual Life in their "Food for Thought" series. Each speaker is asked to take as his or her topic: "What Matters Most to Me and Why." I heard that past speakers have given answers ranging from "human dignity" to "shoes."

I'm going to talk about hope. I'm going to begin by talking about the life-opening semester I had my sophomore year in college when I was simultaneously taking a religion course at Wellesley with Mr. Denbeaux and a philosophy of religion course at MIT with Mr. Brody. The MIT class reviewed the various arguments for the existence of God (the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the ontological argument - all bad) and the various definitional attributes of God (omniscience, omnipotence, omni-benevolence - all subject to crippling paradox). At Wellesley, on the other hand, Mr. Denbeaux told us that the characteristics of God were just "patience, long-suffering, and love." At Wellesley, Mr. Denbeaux told us that people who complained about inconsistencies in the Gospel record were like people who refused to listen to a warped record played on a fourth-rate stereo - despite the technical flaws, you could still "hear the music."

It was that semester that I read for the first time the most beautiful philosophy essay ever written, "The Will to Believe" by William James. James is arguing against another philosopher, William Clifford, who has a hatred of credulity; Clifford claims that it is always wrong to believe anything without sufficient evidence. James counters that someone like Clifford may succeed in avoiding any errors, but he will also miss out on believing crucial and beautiful truths. This, too, is a form of dupery, and "Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?"

So I decided then and there always to let myself err on the side of being duped by hope. I read "The Will to Believe" to the man I eventually married, to make the case for taking a chance on love. I became a children's book author, because the distinguishing mark of children's books is not that they have happy endings - many do not - but that they have hopeful endings: or should! I hate the ones that dupe children through fear. And if anything requires hope, it's the enterprise of writing, word after word, line after line, page after page, with no guarantee whatever that it's any good, or that anyone will ever read it, or care about it in any way.

Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear ?

Golden Perfection

2011-09-19T07:15:00.000-07:00

I've written before about how I generally send off half-baked scholarly articles, get back deservedly scathing reviewers' comments, and then set about to make the articles into real publishable pieces by adding in all the scholarship that should have been there before but wasn't. I'm good at going from half-baked to baked. I actually think my method is a pretty good one. It definitely produces more publications than the method of holding on to something forever trying to perfect it on my own. Baking is a collaborative enterprise.

I'm now working on a project where I'm taking an already baked article to the state of golden baked perfection. I have comments from one brilliant reviewer on my essay, "Redemption through the Rural: The Teen Novels of Rosamond Du Jardin." In the essay I show how Du Jardin uses the rural as a site of virtue, essentially "sentencing" selfish, shallow Pam, who is used to dating "smooth" guys with country club memberships, to marry a FARMER as part of her moral rehabilitation. This paper was not half-baked. I had already cited tons of books on American culture in the 1950s, on Midwestern literature, on pastoralism, on teen fiction. But this reviewer wanted even more.

So now I've found a 1960 master's thesis on Rosamond Du Jardin from Florida State University that quotes extensively from contemporary reviews of her novels as well as giving statistics as to her sales figures, and snippets from interviews and correspondence. The thesis itself is something to behold: typed on an actual typewriter! on that bond paper we were supposed to use for fancy projects! I showed it to some students here, and they were stunned by this blast from the past: "But what would you do if you were typing along and made a mistake?" Well might they ask!

I also ordered from E-Bay a copy of the December 1958 issue of the Reader's Digest that contains an article "The Danger of Being Too Well Adjusted," which appears thinly disguised in Double Wedding as Mike Bradley's school-paper editorial, "The Well Adjusted Generation."

I am digging. I am delving. This is going to be the best-baked paper ever.

My Little House

2011-09-18T10:16:00.000-07:00

Some of my faithful readers have asked for pictures of my little house in Greencastle. I'm not very good at taking pictures and even less good at transferring them from my camera to the computer. I have to take out the little instructions Gregory dictated to me: 1) Use black cord; 2) Turn on camera (one step I always forget); 3) Open folder to view files; 4) Click on photo; 5) Open MY PICTURES; 5) Drop and drag. Actually I don't do those last two. I don't know how to drop and drag things. I only know how to click on things. So I click on COPY TO and save it to MY PICTURES.

Anyway, so here's my sweet shabby dear darling little house that I rent for $375 a month. If you squint you can see the tiny pumpkin I bought for it yesterday at the farmers' market. A tiny pumpkin for a tiny house and for the happy person living in it.

Moon Festival

2011-09-17T13:14:00.000-07:00

Last night my friend Deepa and I went to the Moon Festival here at DePauw at the McKim Observatory (pictured above). This is the invitation for it that came to all of us over email:

We would like to invite you to the Annual Moon Festival next Friday (the 16th) at the McKim Observatory, starting at 8:30 pm. We will celebrate the mid-autumn moon in collaboration with the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the students in the ASIA Club, DePauw China Connection, and Physics Club. This is a great opportunity to see the moon through the historical telescope DePauw owns. The mid-autumn moon festival is a traditional East Asian holiday that occurs when the moon is considered most beautiful. Please bring your family and friends. Refreshments will feature traditional moon cakes, other Asian delights, and tea. There will be a chance for those who wish to share their favorite poems or songs in any language.

As you can imagine, this invitation filled me with great joy. It was the perfect example of the interdisciplinary richness that marks so much of my experience here: a festival hosted BOTH by the Physics Club and the ASIA Club, filled with astronomy, Asian culture, music, poetry, and food.

There was one undeniable disappointment that I must acknowledge: it was completely overcast last night, so we had no glimpse of the moon at the Moon Festival. But the observatory was thronged with students, faculty, friends; the moon cakes were delicious, and the menu of music performed on the stage behind the observatory was a multi-cultural delight. Deepa recognized the music for one dance performance: a song from an Indian film she had seen: "I can't believe I'm hearing this song in Greencastle!"

Happy Moon Festival, everybody!

Dolce Domum

2011-09-16T06:09:00.000-07:00

There is one chapter of The Wind and the Willows that I can never read without weeping: Chapter Five, Dolce Domum. In this chapter Mole is consumed with the wondrous adventures of his new life with Ratty and Mr. Toad, out exploring the huge amazing world, and then, as he is in the woods with Ratty, thinking of anything but the life he left behind, he catches a whiff of it, the scent of it: home.

Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way! Why, it must be quite close by him at that moment, his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again, that day when he first found the river! And now it was sending out its scouts and its messengers to capture him and bring him in. Since his escape on that bright morning he had hardly given it a thought, so absorbed had he been in his new life, in all its pleasures, its surprises, its fresh and captivating experiences. Now, with a rush of old memories, how clearly it stood up before him, in the darkness! Shabby indeed, and small and poorly furnished, and yet his, the home he had made for himself, the home he had been so happy to get back to after his day's work. And the home had been happy with him, too, evidently, and was missing him, and wanted him back, and was telling him so, through his nose, sorrowfully, reproachfully, but with no bitterness or anger; only with plaintive reminder that it was there, and wanted him.

This is what happened to me this week. I've been so consumed with happiness in my new life in Greencastle; for the first time in my life I've been having insomnia, because I'm too happy to fall asleep. And then, it happened: I had that whiff of home. Mine was an auditory rather than an olfactory whiff. It came in a video posted for me on my Facebook page, from Boulder church friends, of the church choir's performance of the rousing anthem, "Sing Hosanna," which they perform every single year for "kickoff Sunday," the Sunday after Labor Day when the choir returns after a summer hiatus. Usually I've signed up to be an usher for the month of September, so I'm always at the back of the sanctuary as the choir is practicing, and I can't help but dance to the song as they belt it out.

When I heard the song, in the recording posted for me on Facebook, I became Mole, catching that whiff of what is so dear, so familiar, so forever-beloved. Home! Oh, home - oh, home - oh, home.

I still love it here every minute of every day. I still can't sleep for the very joy of it. But I'm glad I'll be returning home for fall break next month, to go to church, and hear the choir, and be with all those friends I love so much: "The call was clear, the summons was plain. He must obey it instantly, and go."

Come Hither

2011-09-14T06:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the third meeting of the interdisciplinary, team-taught class on The Tempest that I'm sitting in on in preparation for a campus performance mid-October by Actors from the London Stage.

We began with an acting exercise. One student sat in the middle of the room. Each of us had to speak to her the two words, "Come hither" (we're working on getting used to Shakespearean diction). Each of us was assigned a strategy for trying to get this student to come hither: pleading, threatening, enticing, teasing, seducing, bullying, commanding, scolding, begging, etc. Mine was "enticing." We were encouraged to put our whole bodies into this. This was a challenge for me: when I was in plays in high school I was great at emoting from the neck up, as I stood stiff as a board from the neck down.

We tried the exercise again, this time using two different strategies (e.g., trying pleading after threatening didn't work, or vice versa). Then we did it while assuming some role in a relationship: e.g., teacher/student, parent/child, abuser/victim, pimp/prostitute, master/slave, lovers, buddies, doctor/patient, confidante/confessor (this is the one I got).

What did we learn from the exercise? Lots. We learned that even within a given strategy, there is a range: of volume, of intensity. Threats can be loud or soft, pleading can be more or less desperate. We learned how much interest is added to a scene by varying strategies: it's much more psychologically fascinating to watch someone abandon a failed strategy to try a different one than to watch someone repeat a failed strategy over and over again. We learned how much freer we felt to add body language when we were embedded in a relationship.

I also learned how hard acting is. I think when all is said and done, I'd rather stick to being a writer. But taking a turn as an actor is good practice for writing. How many different ways can one character convey the message "come hither" to another? How many different ways can the writer make this interesting for the reader?

Cake Balls

2011-09-13T15:56:00.000-07:00

Just when I was resolved to address my new chubbiness, here's what happened.

At new faculty orientation several weeks ago, we had lunch one day at the Inn at Depauw, an old inn right next to campus that has been converted into a very pleasant hotel, restaurant, bar ("The Fluttering Duck"), and conference center. The lunch was a buffet, and for dessert there was something called "cake balls," these round objects with frosting on the outside and cake on the inside. I liked the cake balls a LOT.

Last week I had lunch there with a colleague. There were no cake balls to be had. I asked the waitress about them, and she asked for my email address so I could be alerted when cake balls were next available.

Sure enough, a personal email came yesterday, in my DePauw email inbox. The subject heading said only "Cake Balls." The message was a promise that there would be cake balls today. It was signed by the executive chef at the inn.

So how could I not go over there for lunch today and have cake balls? What dieter could be so churlish as to refrain from them after such a kindly notification? They even had a big handwritten sign next to them that said CAKE BALLS, when nothing else was labeled.

I now have one more reason to love my new life in Greencastle. Its name is: CAKE BALLS.

Chubby

2011-09-12T09:39:00.000-07:00

All right, so here is one sad thing about my new life in Greencastle. I am getting chubby. Quite chubby, indeed.

Part of the problem is that the university serves me food constantly. Everybody serves me food constantly.

Take yesterday. There was a "pitch-in" after church, which turned out to be a very abundant potluck (I had never heard the term "pitch-in" before, so I had feared it was some kind of all-church work day where we'd go right from worship to altar-vacuuming and shrubbery-trimming, but fortunately I was mistaken). So of course I filled my plate. Then there was pizza after an afternoon film at the Prindle. The film was Born into Brothels, heartbreaking in its depiction of the lives of children born into Calcutta's red light district, but also inspirational in its depiction of the power of engagement with photography to transform these lives. And the pizza was very tasty. And then I went out for a late dinner with a speaker who gave a talk about the work of the 9/11 Commission. I carefully refrained from ordering any food myself, but ended up eating half of one person's french fries, and half of another person's onion rings, and I did order and drink two (small) glasses of Merlot. DePauw paid for it all.

This was a pretty typical day as far as my being provided food in Greencastle.

But in addition, and here I can blame nobody but myself, I discovered that just about every store here sells my favorite kind of candy, well, one of my favorites: bags of large cherry, orange, or multi-flavored gumdrops, as well as bags of my even more beloved spice drops. I bought one bag early in the week at Headley Hardware, and then another one midweek at Tractor Supply, and then a third one this weekend at Dollar General. Each bag contains ten "servings" (don't you love the idea of a serving of gumdrops?). So I hate to think how many servings I've eaten in one week alone.

This has to stop. I actually threw away the bag of spice drops still half full. I took cottage cheese and a tomato for lunch today. I am NOT going to buy any more gum drops for a long time. I really truly am not!