Some Things Are Easier to Fix than Others

I have now completed The Week of Fixing Everything. Here - ta-dah! - are the results.

1. Carseat straps that needed adjusted: DONE! It took ten minutes total including the time to nag my son to do it.

2. Dog hair in the car: GONE! This might have taken five minutes total. Now I can invite friends to ride in my car without shame.

3. Shabby clothes: TWO NEW DRESSES PURCHASED ONLINE; one has been dropped off for alteration at a friend's seamstress. I also did the easiest and most cost-effective shopping of all: shopping in my own closet. It turns out I do have plenty of non-shabby clothes; I just prefer to wear the same shabby ones over and over again. So I'm planning to force myself to branch out.

4. Inadequate will: ESTATE PLANNING CONSULTATION SESSION ACCOMPLISHED! The new documents will be ready for my signature next week.

5. Family member in need of medical checkup: HEARTFELT PLEAS FINALLY WORKED! APPOINTMENT HAS TRANSPIRED! But many future appointments are going to be needed. Still, I can't tell you how extremely relieved I am that this is happening.

6. Children's literature article revisions overdue: HARDLY ANY PROGRESS MADE (insert frowny face emoticon here). I did re-read my article and fell in love with it all over again; then I re-read the reviewers' comments and felt despair all over again. But I'm ready to accept that I can't possibly do everything they want me to do, so I'll make a list of ten things I'm willing and able to do, do them, and hope for the best. I can't do this until later in August.

7. Revisions on a children's book manuscript desperately needed before I can even show it to other writer friends for their review: AN HOUR A DAY (well, two hours on some days) DID THE TRICK! I emailed the vastly improved draft off to five writer friends ten minutes ago.

8. Guilt for not composting: CONTAINER IS ON COUNTER! COMPOSTABLE BAGS HAVE BEEN PURCHASED! I AM COMPOSTING MOST MERRILY - but newly aware of, and newly appalled by, how much food we waste. But now we can start doing better.

9. Desire to lose two pounds: FAILURE! Oh, well.

10. Awful meals: THREE NEW RECIPES TRIED. Unfortunately, it appears that no one but me will eat anything I cook, so I ended up eating their portions, too - thus, the failure for goal #9 above. More pondering is needed here....

11. Frazzled time with grandchildren: TEN-YEAR-OLD MOTHER'S HELPER HIRED FOR ONE DAY NEXT WEEK, with backup sitters in view.

12. Chaotic pantry: MY HUGEST TRIUMPH! In two hours, it was sooooooo much tidier, cleaner, and better organized. The photo doesn't do justice to its splendor, but note how you can actually walk into it without tripping over boxes of Cheeze-Its.

So here's what I've learned from The Week of Fixing Everything:

1. It was a wonderful idea that led overall to wonderful results. Each thing fixed built momentum to fix other things. I was a crazed woman on a mission! This was a happy and satisfying week for me.

2. The easiest things to fix are the "one and done" items (or, at least, "one and done for now"): little pesky chores that take hardly any time and, once done, stay done for a reasonable length of time. This should have been obvious to me, I suppose, and yet I procrastinated disgracefully on these piddly tasks until I decided to tackle them en masse this week.

3. The other particularly satisfying category of fix-it items are the "just take the first step" items: in my case, make the estate planning appointment, make the family member's medical appointment, start household composting. For composting, the important thing was to overcome groundless resistance and to develop what I'm sure will be a self-sustaining habit. For estate planning and medical appointments, the important thing was to face things that are depressing to face - one's own mortality, a family member's declining health - but will be much worse if not faced.

4. The hardest things to fix are things that need constant vigilance. Even if I had lost those two pounds, I could easily have regained them with the purchase and consumption (in a 24-hour period, as is my usual wont) of a single bag of Keebler Fudge Sticks. Re the wardrobe woes, I will have to force myself continually to wear the less familiar and comfy non-shabby clothes. And even if I had had a successful experience making three decent meals, I wouldn't be able to rest on those meal-making laurels forever. I have to keep on making meals week after week after week. Sigh...

5. The biggest casualty of the week was energy diverted from my writing projects to fixing everything else in my life. Writing is hard, period. Any easier task can beckon me away from it, especially if the easier task yields instantaneous rapture (e.g., MY PANTRY!!!). This is why I can't make every single week of my life The Week of Fixing Everything. That said, there was really no way I could finish book revisions AND article revisions in a single week, and in the end I think I made more progress on the book revisions spurred on by fix-everything mania.

Bottom line conclusion: As a once-in-a-while undertaking (perhaps quarterly?), I highly recommend giving yourself the gift of A Week of Fixing Everything.

The Week of Fixing Everything

Here's my hard-won boast: I am extremely good at accepting what I cannot change. "Oh, well," I say with a sigh and a rueful grin. This is my standard response to the long list of things that are sub-par in my existence.

But of late I've been struck by this new meme I'm encountering: "I'm tired of accepting what I cannot change. I'm going to start changing what I cannot accept."

Ooh! Maybe there are some troubling aspects of my life that I CAN change? And if so, maybe I should actually change them?

This prospect, though, is somewhat daunting. So, of course, I sat down and made a list of all the problems in my life, large and small, and how I might possibly do something to solve them. And then I decided to try to SOLVE THEM ALL IN ONE WEEK! Why not just face what has to be faced and  take care of them all in one fell swoop? So this last week in July, starting TODAY, is going to be the week of fixing everything.

Here is my list of current woes and what I plan to do about them this week.

1. It's an ordeal getting my granddaughters in and out of their carseats because the straps need adjusting. Fix: ADJUST THEM!

2. There is dog hair all over the front passenger seat of the car from taking Tanky to the vet. Fix: VACUUM IT! PUT AN OLD SHEET IN THE CAR TO AVOID THIS PROBLEM IN THE FUTURE!

3. My clothes, all bought at Goodwill, are getting too shabby even for me. Fix: BUY SOME NEW ONES! When I was teaching in Utah last month, I admired a student's dress and asked if I might inquire where she had purchased it. So now I have a new favorite dress source: Mikarose, a Utah company specializing in "modest" clothes. I know it will cause a sensation in church when I arrive wearing something different from the same half a dozen things I've worn for the past half a dozen years.

4. I wake up in the middle of the night worried that my will is woefully inadequate in a way that would be disastrous for certain family members if I died tomorrow. Fix: MAKE AN APPOINTMENT FOR A FREE 90-MINUTE CONSULTATION WITH AN ESTATE PLANNER!

5. Another family member's health is declining rapidly; this person needs to have a years-overdue doctor's appointment to see what might possibly be done. This one definitely seems to fall in the category of "things I cannot change" because if there is anything in this world that is true, it is that you can't change other people and make them do something they don't want to do. Or IS that true? Fix: TRY HARDER TO COAX AND CAJOLE AND COERCE AND COMPEL!

6. I feel stressed every day about a children's literature academic article which needs to be revised-and-resubmitted from the reviews I received from the journal many months ago. Fix: JUST SIT DOWN AND DO IT!

7. I feel stressed as well about book revisions that feel especially overwhelming. Fix: JUST SIT DOWN AND DO THEM!

8. I am consumed with guilt that everyone else in Boulder except for me composts their food waste, but it just seems so messy and complicated. Fix: GET COMPOSTABLE TRASH BAGS! GET A CONTAINER FOR FOOD SCRAPS TO KEEP ON THE COUNTER! BY THE END OF THE WEEK IT WILL BECOME SECOND NATURE TO DO THIS!

9. I would like to lose two pounds to have my weight below a Certain Number on the scale. FIX: EAT LESS! NO MORE KEEBLER FUDGE STICKS FOR YOU, MISSY!

10. The meals in our house are awful, truly awful - lots of snacking, lots of carryout. FIX: GET OUT MY COOKBOOKS, PICK A FEW RECIPES, AND MAKE THEM!

11. I find myself frazzled at the end of each long day of caring for my granddaughters during their monthly ten-day visit. FIX: HIRE SOME TEN-YEAR-OLD "MOTHER'S HELPERS" TO COME FROM 3-5 EACH DAY!

12. The pantry is a nightmare of disorganization where I can't find anything and end up buying lots of things I already have, thus adding to the chaos. FIX: CLEAN IT!

I do believe it is possible to fix every single one of these things over the course of the next seven days, though maybe I'll have to choose between the article revisions or the book revisions. Still: even if I don't get all of these things done this week, even if I only get half of them done, how much better my life will be. . . .

Can the Joy of Time Away from Home Inspire Joy upon Returning?

I am spending a blissful week at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, where I taught in the Graduate Programs in Children's Literature for the six-week term last summer as well as for six weeks in the summer of 2014. I'm not here to teach this time, however. I'm here just because I couldn't bear to stay away. Our beloved founding director, Amanda Cockrell, is retiring after a quarter century in the position. My dear friend Lisa Rowe Fraustino now takes the helm. I wanted to be part of the gala farewells to Amanda and to spend time with colleagues and former students returning for reunion week.

So here I am. I'm writing this while sitting at "my table" in the Hollins library, looking out at a grassy hill rising toward the Blue Ridge Mountains.

It is such a perfect place to work! So far since arriving on Monday evening, I've sat here and typed up minutes for last weekend's Church Council meeting, written a review of a scholarly article on child author Opal Whiteley, written comments to deliver on a philosophy paper on the ethics of using photographs as tools of moral persuasion for the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress next month, and read part of Perry Nodelman's brilliant book The Hidden Adult that will help me revise and resubmit a children's literature paper of my own. Today I'm turning to creative work - revisions on my current chapter-book-in-progress (the one about the girl attending an after-school comic-book-making camp).

I love work. I always have. And I especially love working at a beautiful table in a beautiful library on a beautiful campus in a beautiful city. Plus walking twice around the permimeter of that campus at sunrise. Plus eating scrumptious cafeteria breakfasts (how I love made-to-order omelettes, and hash-brown potatoes, and biscuits with butter and jam.). Plus attending luncheon talks on craft, and an inspirational talk last night by visiting author Guadalupe Garcia McCall. And a pool party Tuesday night, dinner party tonight, and Francelia Butler Conference all-day Saturday.

I'm so happy here, and so productive here, too. Maybe I'm so happy partly because I'm so productive. And maybe I'm so happy and productive partly because I'm so intellectually and creatively stimulated. So now my question for myself is: can I find a way to be this happy and productive at home?

At home I take a lovely walk each morning at 6 am with a dear friend and a faithful dog. So I already have that. At home I make myself breakfast - maybe I could go to a little extra effort to make a more lavish one? But maybe that's not worth it. At home I have lots of creative and intellectual friends - maybe I should make sure to have regularly scheduled breakfasts and lunches with them, or to find stimulating talks to attend together. Still, I do have all these delightful Hollins-y things already in my life.

The main thing I lack is a place to work that is as inspiring as this table - so quiet, with so much room to spread out my books and papers, in a room so full of light, with a view so serene. I have an acceptable little office at home, with a desk I keep fairly uncluttered, and a view out into a tree where squirrels scamper and play. But . . . it isn't THIS quiet, and THIS beautiful, and THIS sacred a spot consecrated to doing the work of my heart. So I think I should give myself the pleasant challenge of trying to find one.

The one thing I can't find a replacement for at home is the whimsical little children's literature characters, created by Hollins faculty member Ashley Wolff, which are hidden all around campus.

I can stumble upon bread-and-jam-eating Frances and wild thing Max only at Holllins. But a quiet, uncluttered, serene table with a view? I bet I can find that somewhere in Boulder if I set myself to seeking....

Creative Joy Progress Report

As some of you know, my chief goal for 2018 is to have 10 hours of creative joy each month. I have strict standards for what counts as creative joy: it can't just be joy experienced doing something creative - too easy! It has to be joy experienced doing something creative with something EXTRA added: writing somewhere special, writing while eating something special, writing in the company of someone special, even just writing with a lit candle by my side, or a dollop of Cool Whip in my morning Swiss Miss hot chocolate.

So far this year I've totaled: 14 hours of creative joy in January, 14 in February, 15 in March, a whopping 22 in April, 14 in May . . . but only 9 1/4 in June. My average is definitely greater than ten hours a month, but according to my self-imposed rules, I'm not allowed to stockpile creative joy hours in lush months as a safeguard against leaner ones. The goal is to make EVERY month a creatively joyous one.

Those missing three-quarters of an hour of creative joy in June stand as a reproach to me. My hero, Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, faithfully logged his pages written every day, entering "day by day, the number of pages I have written, so that if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour so that the deficiency might be supplied." He confesses that "a week passed with an insufficient number of pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart."

So now my little creative joy log stands as "a blister to my eye" and "a sorrow to my heart."

Nor have I logged a single hour of creative joy thus far in July, consumed instead with taking two little girls to Tiny Town, to Sunflower Farm, to the Carousel of Happiness, and to a planetarium show at the Museum of Nature and Science - plus many happy hours at the pool where they bobbed about in their Puddle Jumpers like two buoyant little boats on a sunny sea. (I did, however, get to check off many of these items toward the goal of experiencing thirty different "summer pleasures" -  oh, how I love lists!)

Next week will be nonstop creative joy, as I'm traveling to Roanoke to reconnect with colleagues, former students, and dear friends at the Graduate Program in Children's Literature at Hollins University. I'll write in their beautiful library. I'll write curled up in one of the soft blankets thoughtfully provided by the library against air conditioning chills. I'll write in a rocking chair on a veranda. I'll write, and write, and write, and every minute of it will be joyous - and duly logged as such.

But I still wish I had made myself get just 45 more minutes of creative joy in June.

Finding Happiness Closer to Home

I'm back from the Children's Literature Association conference in San Antonio, where I had the usual exhilarating time listening to dozens of scholarly papers over the course of the conference's three days. For just a few:

• Picture book portrayals of Mrs. Noah in Noah's Ark picture books
• Patron statistics and written reports on librarian-patron interactions from the children's division of the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library 1907-1910
• Nineteenth-century child-created cookbooks
• Food and female community in early 20th century girls' college novels
• Pioneering children's librarian Anne Carroll Moore's close relationship with (wrongly) convicted murderer Leo Frank
• Visual representations of the state in picture books about children of incarcerated parents
• Swimming as an element of progressive girlhood in early 20th century Girl Scout novels
• Textual changes across numerous editions of Louise May Alcott's Little Women.

And so many more!

My own paper on child poet Hilda Conkling was well received. I caught up with beloved once-a-year conference friends, drank margaritas on the River Walk, scribbled down so many book recommendations, reconnected on such a deep level with a world I love, and even joined in a "Families Belong Together" rally in front of the nearby cathedral. I also walked alone every early morning past the Alamo and found a wonderful bakery/cafe, La Panaderia, where I sipped hot chocolate and nibbled on pineapple empenadas while writing poetry.

But. . . it's so hard on my family when I travel now, given health issues and other ways in which I'm needed and will be needed even more in years to come. As I noted in my previous post, conference travel is extremely expensive, too. Partway through the conference I thought: oh, I love this world too much ever to let it go! But by the end, I started to think: these twenty-five years of attending the conference have been blissful, but my life at home is pretty blissful, too. Anywhere that I can drink hot chocolate and write poetry is a blissful place to be.

My two little granddaughters are here now for their monthly ten-day visit. Today their father and I took them to Tiny Town in Morrison, where I used to take him and his brother when they were small. It's an old-fashioned, somewhat shabby and shopworn, dear sweet little place; the Tiny Town train (which we rode twice this morning) has been carrying children and their families since 1915. Here are the girls in their 4th of July finery:

Today at Tiny Town with them I was just as happy as I was last week, immersed in the world of children's literature scholarship. (Not happier, I have to say - but equally happy.) In an ideal world, I guess I'd have both: travel to fascinating academic gatherings all around the country (and the planet!) AND intense family time at home. But few people live ideal lives in an ideal world. It's enough to have a happy life, in whatever form it needs to take.

On this Independence Day, I'm remembering that, in the end, independence isn't everything. Pursuing happiness isn't as important as appreciating happiness when you already have it.

Is It Time to Hang Up My Spurs?

I'm off on Tuesday to San Antonio for the annual conference of the Children's Literature Association (ChLA), the 800-plus-member organization of children's literature scholars and professors. My paper this year is on child poet Hilda Conkling, part of two back-to-back panels on child artists. I spent the last week toiling mightily on it, even though it's less than 3000 words (barely nine pages). I gave it my best, but I know it isn't my best paper. I hope the attendees for our session will find it informative and engaging; few people seem to have heard of Hilda Conkling, although I found her widely anthologized poems everywhere I turned throughout my childhood years. But I know already that it's not going to be something I can develop into a publishable paper, as two other terrific papers have been published already on Hilda Conkling, saying everything I'm saying, only better.

I'm finding myself wondering, now that I'm supposedly retired as a university professor, whether I should keep on doing this: writing these little papers, to read to a few dozen people at an academic conference, papers that may or may not have any potential ever to be published, and if published may attract half a dozen readers at most.

I sat down and reviewed my past history with ChLA, an organization I love:

I attended my first ChLA conference, in San Diego, in 1990. I became a regular attendee starting in 1994, in Springfield, Missouri. Since then I have missed only three conferences, and I've presented papers at all but two of the conferences I did attend, and for one of those I was giving the presidential address instead, as I was ChLA's president 2012-13. Of the 20 papers I presented, I've published 17 of them - actually, every single one up until 2015. That year's paper is currently waiting for me to revise-and-resubmit it to the journal Children's Literature, which I've pledged to myself to do. The paper from 2016 may not have the potential to be developed into a publishable piece; ditto for 2017. As I said, I already know that this year's paper has no publication prospects.

Now, I do expect 2015's paper to be published. I'm good at revising-and-resubmitting; I do it all the time, and it always has a good a result for me. I may yet find a way of expanding and deepening 2016's paper, and even the one from last year. So maybe it's premature to conclude that my days as a regularly published member of this profession are behind me.

And yet . . .

It's so much work to write these papers! It's VASTLY more work to take a 9-page conference paper and turn it into a rigorously argued, literature-grounded 25-30 page article. And it's GRUELING work to revise an article after receiving two sets of sometimes scathing comments from the "blind" reviewers. It also costs $1000 to attend an academic conference: at least $200 for the conference registration fee, an average of $300 for the plane fare, upwards of $100/night at the conference hotel (this, if I'm lucky enough to have a roommate), meals (and drinks!), and more.

And yet. . . .

Every time I go to ChLA, I walk in the door and see so many dear friends, from decades of conferences past, and I have the same thought every single time: "THIS is my world. THESE are my people." When I look at my c.v. (not that anyone on earth really cares about my c.v. any more except for me), I'm proud to see that long line of articles, from all those years. When I first left my tenured position in the philosophy department at the University of Colorado, I took this as my mantra: "Do not go gentle into that good pasture."

And yet . . . is the pasture beckoning? Or rather, is the work of remaining an active "workhorse" too demanding?

Here's what I'm telling myself: I don't have to make any "forever" decision about any of this. Few decisions are "forever" decisions, anyway. I'll go to ChLA, present my own modest little paper, hear many dazzling papers from scholars I revere and adore, have long wonderful conversations with friends, and at least one margarita on the River Walk.

After all, there are worse ways to spend five days in June.

Inspired (and Humbled): Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers (WIFYR)

I'm back from a grueling and glorious week in Utah, teaching a course called "Getting Ready to Write the First Novel" at the Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers workshop (WIFYR), now in its 19th year. I've taught at WIFYR several times before  (I've lost count of how many), and it's always the same: exhausting and exhilarating, where no one leaves without laughing, crying, and growing in our craft as writers.

My class met every day from 8:30-12:30, for the five days of the workshop: a total of 20 hours in the classroom, more than half the hours of a typical semester-long university class. My eight students had submitted 20,000 words (around 80 pages) of their novel-in-progress to me and the rest of the students in advance. Some chose to submit opening chapters and then skipped ahead to climax and resolution; others just chopped off the first 20K-word chunk and gave us a synopsis for the rest. In the weeks before the workshop we sat at home hundreds of miles apart, frantically reading, reading, reading, So when we finally met in person, we already knew each other well, just from dissecting our stories so intently.

I structured the class in this way.

On Monday, we introduced ourselves more formally, each writer sharing the origin of how his or her story came to be. Then we gave rapid-fire fifteen-minute overall responses to each manuscript, devoting half the time to listing the things we loved best and half to raising questions or concerns for further discussion throughout the rest of the week. Even though I knew from experience that reactions would change as we talked together - critique is best when it's interactive - there is value in getting a first reaction to one's work. After all, that is what future readers are going to be giving. Few spend an entire week in close analysis of a literary work before weighing in with an opinion.

On Tuesday, we focused on characterization. For each protagonist (and some books had two equally important main characters), we asked: what does this person WANT at the start of the story? It's often hard, even for the author, to figure this out, but without a clear desire/goal, a character tends to be passive rather than active, and the story fails to pose a central dramatic question that keeps readers turning pages. Then we asked (a question borrowed from the brilliant Kathi Appelt): what is each person's "controlling belief"? - i.e., their guiding principle that will be tested through the course of the story, climaxing in a "crisis of faith." What is their character arc? How does each one change and grow from the first page to the last?

On Wednesday and Thursday, we focused on plot structure and gave close a close reading to each manuscript's opening chapter. Was there an "inciting incident" that sets the story in motion? Did the chapter have a strong opening paragraph and a final line where the central dramatic question of the book clicks into place for the reader?

On Friday, our final day, we read some revised (and much improved) beginnings by those who offered them for additional critique. Then we turned to theme and imagery: what were the philosophical issues explored by each book? If there were more than one, which one was most important? Could any imagery be created to make this thematic material more vivid for the reader?

And then we said our teary farewells.

In case all of this wasn't enough, every afternoon there were four more talks and/or workshops to attend, by agents, editors, faculty authors, and other authors coming in to share their expertise. My workshop was "How to Write Morally Charged Stories without Teaching or Preaching." I have to confess that the biggest treat for me was the session by Charlie Holmberg, "Kissing Like You Mean It (Smooching 101)." I doubt I'll ever write a kissing scene, but if I do, now I'll know how to make it a great one! Over lunch and dinner, WIFYR faculty shared hours of intense conversations while sipping root beer floats and gobbling Fat Boy ice cream sandwiches (and meal-type food, too).

I learned so much from my fellow faculty members who gave these talks and conversed so passionately with me. But I learned even more from my students. Some have attended WIFYR over half a dozen times. Some have been rewriting their books for years, while raising families and working at challenging day jobs. Could I work as hard as they do? Could I care as much as they do? Could I give as much of my heart to my books as they do to theirs?

All I know is: I'm going to try to write the best books I can to be worthy of having been their teacher.

I'm going to model their dedication and commitment.

And I'm going to have myself another root beer float, too.