Ch. 40: I foolishly take on more projects

But they are projects I prefer to some other ongoing commitments. So, beginning April 1 I am quietly jumping in to NaPoWriMo. This morning I put together a new 60-page journal in anticipation of many flowing words. I am also going to daily read in my new copy of The Canterbury Tales (Oxford University Press’s David Wright translation).

In addition to the poetry, I have agreed to do five teen writers’ workshops with my sister in crime, Kim—one each in April, May, June, July, and August.

Oh, and I’m planting a new mixed hedge of lilac, viburnum, and holly (plants already ordered, no backs), and moving some rosebushes…

Gifts

One thing I’m still trying to learn is patience, and how the finding is not always in the looking, but in waiting and in faith. My writing has been in so many ways a struggle for the past couple of years (purpose? desire? quality?); and though I keep telling myself to listen and to wait, these things are very hard to do.

One thing I already know is that life is not a series of accidents or coincidences. So I accepted the gift that was friend Kim’s invitation to help her out with a writing workshop for teens (haven’t done one of these together since last summer). Yes, I worried that the teens would sniff me out for a phony. And I felt nostalgic but detached (admit it, Self: guilty) when Kim mentioned a character of mine whom I haven’t thought of for a long time.

Then a funny thing happened. We each began working on a “character collage”—cutting pictures from magazines to represent a fictional character. As I flipped through a Victorian accessories catalog (oh Kim, where do you get these things?), my mind went to a woman character in a tale that I’ve picked up and set aside dozens of times in the past two and a half years. Silly me, I thought she would show up as a child of the dark ages in Revolutionary America (ok, there’s time travel involved). How had I not seen that she once knew Tennyson, and would latch on to Victorian dress and jeweled hairpins? Lo and behold, I was busy thinking through the story again, reshaping, reinventing, reinvigorated.

Where does it go from here? That is the question I can’t allow myself to ask. As Kim herself would say, I have to “follow the whisper.” And enjoy the gift.

Box of writing fun

Tomorrow, Kim and I are going to lead our first Teen Writers Workshop since last October. On the agenda: preparing to create our own literary magazine.

In an heroic effort to find inspiration and visual aids, yesterday afternoon I went out into the freezing garage, climbed a rickety wooden drop-down ladder, and poked around in the attic until I found The Box. It is a heavy box, and as I maneuvered my way back down the rickety ladder with the box in my arms, I thought of how I had promised Princess Two I’d be gone “just a minute,” and fervently hoped I would not be found many hours later by my hysterical five-year-old, unconscious on the ground with the contents of the box strewn all over me.

Of course I made it. (The hero should.) So what’s all the fuss about The Box?

The Box is a time capsule of about twenty years of my writing life, from Misty’s Wonderful Adventure, copyright 1979, to several publications I edited in the 1990s. What I was actually searching for were my old high-school and college literary magazines. They’re in there (except I seem to have misplaced at least two of the college mags). It is an interesting exercise to read old poems and wonder just what that 17- or 21-year-old was thinking. Much more fun, though, to read Misty’s Wonderful Adventure, written when I was in third grade, in the days when self-publishing meant crayons, cardboard, and contact paper. The story features an ocean cruise, shipwreck, and of course, a romantically happy ending. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 5:

I had always like Neil and now I really liked him because he saved my life.

I don’t know if my teacher did all the text-copying (handwritten—1979, remember), contact-papering, and binding-stitching herself, or if she had parents to help. Whoever did this much work for a class full of third-graders, God bless them. The book is a sweet little ridiculous thing, but even thirty years later, it means the world to me.

The moral of the story?

1. I’m sentimental.

2. For the teachers, parents, mentors out there: Your work matters. You don’t know where the spark will catch, or in what shape the fire will burn, but it will.

What writers dread

I think it is reasonable to assume that writers would rather be writing than, say, speaking in front of a room full of strangers. So you may assume that I am a little leery of a presentation that I am to make tomorrow, at the Harvest Literacy Conference held at St. Xavier’s University here in the Chicago suburbs. 

The good news is, I don’t have to do it alone. My good friend and fellow writer, Kim, will be undergoing the same torture as myself. The other good news is that the presentation is all about the Teen Writers’ workshop that we lead once a month at the Orland Park Public Library. I love doing the workshop, and I love sharing my joy of writing with the kids. Therefore it is a special privilege to share what we do in the workshop with those attending the conference.

Bad news: Our presentation is going on at the same time as a presentation by the lovely and talented poet/picture-book maker, Heidi Roemer.  And worst of all: Newspapers might be there. Photos—ugh!