Peg Kerr's Journal

I had a perfectly lovely evening last night with minnehaha K. We took a walk through her neighborhood, admiring the gardens, had a delicious dinner at an Italian trattoria (the scallops were especially exquisite) and then came back to her house and worked on collage. I had already assembled and had with me the elements I wanted to make this card, which has been much on my mind lately.


The Empty Nest - Council Suit
I am the One who is left behind, in pride and grief, when the babies are grown and launched into the world.

I wittered a bit over the card, wondering if I was missing something, and hunted through my various images, looking for something I could put on the little roof overhang on the nest. I also considered the idea of putting a mama duck looking out of the nest hole, and I did have a picture that would fit.

But I wanted the card to encapsulate the mixed feelings I have about it: both pride (the people in the crowd below are both cheering and have their hands up to provide support) and sadness. So I put in the watchful eye (with the teardrop) instead.

The ducks, by the way, are golden-eye ducks. They do that: fling themselves out of the nest, and with luck, they'll land on a bed of soft leaves or into the water.

As I've mentioned, Fiona moves out August 1 and Delia will be leaving for college the last week of August.

Some pictures of the girls and me at a gathering of friends this weekend.

( Me )

( Fiona and me )

( With Delia, who wasn't sure she wanted to have her picture taken )

Thanks to barondave for the pictures and minnehaha B & K for the lovely gathering. And yes, I did go back and get the boots!

We went back to the workshop for the Heart of the Beast to work on the May Day parade. Fiona repainted her book, because she changed her mind about which book she was doing. Then she repainted it again because I pointed out that she had placed the book title on the wrong side. Then she repainted it yet again because someone stepped on it and smeared it. I hope the poor girl will not have to repaint it yet another time. Four times is enough! I have a picture of her showing it off, and once I figure out how to download pictures from my camera phone, I'll post it here it is. I had reminded her of the mistake she made at the last workshop, painting in her windbreaker, and asked her to remember to take it off before she started. I went to check on her a half hour later and discovered, yep, she'd forgotten to take it off, and it was covered with paint. I squawked at her, stripped her of the jacket and washed it off in the sink; we carried it home in a plastic bag. Fortunately, since I washed it while the paint was still wet, I was able to get most of it out.

I took another cute picture of Delia crouched in the center of a cardboard box, contemplating how she was going to turn it into a blue giraffe costume. She enjoyed the paper mache very much, but needed my big girl hands when it came to wielding the staple gun.

I wandered restlessly from one table to another, trying to decide which section of the parade to work on, and indeed, whether I even wanted to be in the parade at all. I have so enjoyed watching it for so many years. Did I really want to give up the fun and ease of being a spectator? C'mon, Peg, I told myself. Break out of your old comfortable pattern, here. Participate, don't just watch. I had thought of joining the books section, with Fiona. I was uncertain whether I really had time to start a costume for myself, especially since I was periodically helping Delia.

There is another section of the parade which is featuring ravens and cranes. One raven was already made, a paper mache headpiece with attached black fabric wings, mounted on a corner of one of the tables. I kept staring over at it. It made me think of the "ravens of unresting thought" which have loomed so large in my life in the past year, in the Yeats poem "The Two Trees," one my favorite poems. I went over and asked the artist for that section of the parade about it. "Oh, that's a piece that a woman made for another event, but we need someone to operate it. Would you like to do so?"

I looked up at the raven, which seemed to be cocking a baleful eye at me, and I smiled. What better way, perhaps, to exorcise those pesky ravens from my life?

"Yes. I will."

The workshops are great fun, a cacophony of excited noises, color, and new ways of looking at things. It is amazing what these artists can accomplish with clay, cloth, shopping carts, cardboard, paint, whiffle bats, flower pots, plastic cabling and a staple gun. I spoke with minnehaha K. for awhile (she was helping Fiona paint grass as Fiona was waiting for her book to dry again). And I had a nice conversation with Aaron, who popped up on my journal for the first time recently, although he has been lurking reading my entries for several years. See lurkers? If you know that you are going to be somewhere that I will be, please introduce yourself, and I will be happy to make your acquaintence.

Happy birthday to minnehaha B. (I'm not sure whether today, exactly, is the day, but I know that your birthday dinner is tonight--and boy, am I sorry that I can't be with you there at Vincent's to celebrate it. Have fun without me (*sniff*!)

Last Monday, which I had off work, the girls and I went to Cafe Latte for cream tea with minnehaha B and K. A wonderful time was had by all, partly because the tea was so good, and partly because B and K are such good company. They possess the enviable knack of conversing equally comfortably with both children and adults, a gift which is more rare than you might expect.

Anyway, the girls said rather wistfully that they wish that they could do it again this weekend. I nixed the idea of going back to Cafe Latte, and B and K are (I believe) out of town at this point, but I suggested that we might do a tea at home. I had a recipe for Bag End Seed Cake I was anxious to try. So we went out to the grocery store for various ingredients (where I spent more than I expected; do you know how expensive cardomom is?) and then came home and whipped it up. elisem, I called and left a message suggesting you come over to help us sample it, but I missed you. Anyway, that's what we had for dinner, and delicious it was, too. Bag End Seed Cake with jam. And Earl Grey tea. Yum.

Apropos of nothing, I learned how I have totally corrupted my children when they reported hearing one of the neighbor kids sing a common childhood song, and instead of hearing it as "The Ants Go Marching One by One," they took it to mean "The Ents Go Marching One by One."

Yeah.

Edited to add: Here's the recipe (originally from www.theonering.net)

Bag End Seed Cake

Ingredients:

3/4 cup butter
3/4 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1/3 cup brandy or buttermilk
1 1/2 TB caraway seeds, soaked in the brandy if you like.
1/2 tsp ground cardamon
1 tsp orange flavoring or orange zest
1 7/8 cups flour
3/4 tsp baking powder

Directions:
1. Heat oven to 350 degrees
2. Blend butter and sugar until well creamed. Beat in eggs, one at a time.
3. Add brandy or buttermilk, seeds and spices, then blend. Gradually add flour and baking powder until well blended. Pour batter into a greased loaf pan.
4. Bake 50-70 minutes or until knife inserted in middle comes out clean.

Buttermilk makes a moist cake; otherwise the cake tends to be rather dry. (Buttermilk substitute: 1/3 cup milk with 1 tsp vinegar or 1 tsp lemon juice.) Excellent with cream cheese, marmalade, jelly or jam. Serves 12.

I had a lot of pleasurable anticipation about last night all week, and it lived up to my expectations. ( Seeing Mary Fahl )

( B. and K.'s garden and music party ) A wonderful evening.

Cheers,
Peg

Bruce and Karen (minnehaha) hosted a party at their home last night. Delia seemed to be coming down with a bug at the last minute, and so although we had all planned to go, I went alone, which meant I was free to stay out quite late, a fact which I really appreciated. ( As Noel Coward says, it was a marvelous party. ) Finally left, very reluctantly, at almost 2:00 a.m., yawning, sneezing, but very, very happy.

I didn't manage to get up in time to take the girls to church. Ah, well.

Cheers,
Peg

I am continuing to mull over the book without starting to write yet.

I am much more aware of process at this stage of book creation than I was on my previous books. Perhaps it's because I am putting so much of my process in my LiveJournal, and so am forcing myself to explain, both to myself and to others, exactly what I'm doing.

I am feeling, as I've said previously, "gravitational pulls." If I am fishing, casting out my idea net, it's as if all the potential books I could write are swimming out there, just beyond the reach of my net, flirting with me like gorgeous iridescent fish with dazzling scales: "Pick meeeeee. Write meeeeee."

My creative back brain is restless and a little anxious. It is looking for a pattern so that it can start structuring things. But I have been thinking about something I read in Orson Scott Card's books about writing, either in On Character or How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (I forget which). He was explaining the writing exercise he does in workshops, called "1000 Ideas an Hour," where he simply asks questions, the audience throws out potential answers, and together they start structuring a story. One thing he said about that exercise that I've been thinking about today is that the first three or four answers your back brain throws up when you start asking questions of your story are the easy answers. They're the answers you've read before, or the answers you've absorbed from TV or the movies--the tried and true. The trick, if you want to write a really memorable story, is to wait a little longer until a really original idea comes up. I get anxious when confronted with uncertainty. Frankly, I don't like it at all--which, perhaps, is why I've been blocked on starting a novel for so long. I really had a damn tough time coming up with a plot on my first novel--Pat Wrede had to hold my hand practically through the whole process. I got through the process of structuring my second novel basically by stealing a plot someone else (H.C. Andersen) had written).

So now, as I've said, I'm feeling gravitational pulls, urging me to hurry up and make my decisions so I can get down to the writing. But I'm telling myself, now wait a minute, don't just grab the first obvious answer because you want to skip right past the discomfort of the not-knowing-everything stage.

For example: I've asked, okay, what is the system that this summer magic and winter magic is based upon? I saw the backgammon table at the Ren Fest which named the seasons as Jack Spring, John Barleycorn, Herne the Hunter and Jack Frost. bookofnights mentioned seeing the seasons described as Jack o' the Green, John Barleycorn, Jack o'Lantern and Jack Frost.

Now I really, really like that idea, and my first impulse is to say yes, that's it, go with it. But I recognize that it would lead me into using a structure of English folk tales. And after all, I've seen that used before (and very well, too), in Emma Bull's War for the Oaks (where Emma just basically transplanted English tales of the Sidhe court to Minneapolis) and also in Charles DeLint's Forest of the Heart, which used the Green Man legends in modern-day Ottawa. It's been done. Can I do something different?

What if I try to structure the magic system using roots that are more indigenous to Minnesota, specifically the strong Scandinavian background? Then I feel the tug of another gravitational pull, and that's Garrison Keillor, who talks endlessly about the effect of the roots of Scandinavian culture on Minnesota culture--and specifically, the emotional effects of Scandinavian culture (which gets into that heart of flesh/heart of stone territory, i.e., Minnesotans can come across as cold, don't talk about their feelings, etc.)

I think I've decided that I don't want to use the English folk tale structure, although the pattern of the four Jacks of the four different seasons is doing its best to seduce me down that path. I need, instead, to do some more research on Scandinavian conceptions of magic (and here I feel the tug of American Gods, with the idea that "Old World" conceptions of the supernatural are brought to the New World). Must do some more reading about Scandinavian folk tales. Could something in the Kalevala be helpful? I know there was that one bit about the maiden turning into a salmon, for example (Ruth MacKenzie turned into a wonderful theater production, "The Dream of the Salmon Maiden").

D'ye see what I mean? I talked with kijjohnson about this matter this weekend, the tug of gravitational pull, particularly at the beginning planning sections of a book. Perhaps it seems more bothersome this time around perhaps because I am consciously more aware of what I'm doing.

Ignorance might be bliss then. *Sigh.* But if I was really clueless about what I'm trying to do, it wouldn't be as good of a book.

The other danger, of course, is to spend too much dithering . . . reluctant to cast my net over the backs of any of those fish until they all swim away entirely.

Karen minnehaha called and left a message, assuring me I could borrow her book on the Heart of the Beast puppet theater, and also suggesting that I use the elf, by which I presume she means the Lake Harriet elf. For those not from Minneapolis: there is a tree by a lake in a city park here in Minneapolis. One day, a tiny door appeared between two tree roots. (I've never seen the home of the Lake Harriet elf, myself, and don't know exactly where it is). I don't remember how it started, but someone either wrote a note and stuck it on the door, or a note appeared on the door inviting questions, but the upshot is, people have been leaving notes by the door, and they have been mysteriously answered by someone calling himself "The Little Guy."

Great idea. Alas, it doesn't work with the ice palace timeline. The Little Guy appeared in 1995, and the last ice palace was sometime in the 80s, I think.

Unless I set the book in the near future, with a new ice palace about to be built, rather than setting it around one of the ice palaces in the past. Hmm. Decisions, decisions. . .

Peg, still cogitating

The Fires of the Faithful by Naomi Kritzer. Here's my blurb, which I will be sending to the editor via e-mail tomorrow: (ahem) "A confident debut . . . Kritzer captures a young woman's coming-of-age with heart and verve. A polished performance. I look forward to her next."

(Whew!)

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. I gave my report on this book earlier this month.

Then, I decided I needed to read more non-fiction, and so veered off into biography:

Me, by Brenda Uehland. I'd already read her If You Want to Write but had never yet read this, her autobiography. She seemed quite a likeable person. I liked that she adamantly refused to bad-mouth anyone--her ex-husband she referred to only as a discrete initial ("R."), and she candidly admitted that she, too, bore blame for the breakup of her marriage.

Dearest Friend, A Life of Abigail Adams, by Lynne Withey.

Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller by Jackie Wullschlager. I read this with great interest, of course, because of The Wild Swans. It seemed a very candid yet sympathetic portrait. The roots of Andersen's gaucheries and fragile sense of self, not to mention his constant hunger for approval, which manifested itself as gross vanity, are clearly explained. In reading both Andersen's and Ueland's stories, I found much that felt very familiar to me in terms of my own creative history: dry periods (which Ueland blamed on "sloth") periods of restlessness, awkward times in childhood, a history of depression, among other things.

What if Our World Is Their Heaven: The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick, edited by Gwen Lee and Doris Elaine Sauter. Thanks for the loan, Bruce! (minnehaha)

None of these books this month, I am pleased to see, were re-reads. It's a short list. The Andersen book took longer than usual to finish (it's a very peculiar sensation for me to take more than three days to finish a book. Most I finish within about twenty-four hours.) I also had a period of about a week when I just couldn't figure out what I wanted to read.

Peg

Hallowed Murder by Ellen Hart

Vital Lies by Ellen Hart

Stage Fright by Ellen Hart

A Killing Cure by Ellen Hart

A Small Sacrifice by Ellen Hart

This was my first exposure to Ellen's work, and all these books focus on her heroine Jane Lawless. I found the last one the most memorable, with a somewhat above-average twist at the end. I finally decided I had sated myself on her work for the time being and didn't pick up her other series, about the food critic Sophie Greenway.

Contact by Carl Sagan. Re-read. This held up pretty well my second time through

Love is Eternal by Irving Stone. This is a biographical novel from the point of view of Mary Todd Lincoln. Quite interesting, more sympathetic to Mary than other accounts of their marriage I've read. What struck me the most about this was the account of the twenty month period that Lincoln went through when he seemed to be operating in a stupor due to clinical depression. At forty-three, he felt as though he was all washed up–and yet look at what he went on to accomplish.

The Unstrung Harp or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel by Edward Gorey. Re-read. Lois McMaster Bujold gave this book to me right after I finished writing The Wild Swans. It is really priceless, and the cartoons truly add to the deliciousness. If you have ever considered writing novel-length fiction, you really must read The Unstrung Harp. IT'S ALL TRUE!

Here are three little excerpts about the finishing process of writing a novel:

Even more harrowing than the first chapters of a novel are the last, for Mr. Earbrass anyway. The characters have one and all become thoroughly tiresome, as though he had been trapped at the same party with them since the day before; neglected sections of the plot loom on every hand, waiting to be disposed of; his verbs seem to have withered away and his adjectives are proliferating out of control. Even rereading The Truffle Plantation (his first novel) does not induce sleep. In the blue horror of dawn the vines in the carpet appear likely to begin twining up his ankles.

And this:

In that brief moment between day and night when everything seems to have stopped for good and all, Mr. Earbrass has written the last sentence of The Unstrung Harp. The room's appearance of tidiness and Mr. Earbrass's of calm are alike deceptive. The MS is stuffed all anyhow in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk, and Mr. Earbrass himself is wildly distrait. His feet went to sleep some time ago, there is a dull throbbing behind his left ear, and his moustache feels as uncomfortable as if it were false, or belonged to someone else.

And this:

The next day Mr. Earbrass is conscious but very little else. He wanders through the house, leaving doors open and empty tea-cups on the floor. From time to time the thought occurs to him that he really ought to go and dress, and he gets up several minutes later, only to sit down again in the first chair he comes to. The better part of a week will have elapsed before he has recovered enough to do anything more helpful.

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman. I have kijjohnson to thank for introducing me this series, because she wanted me to read it so badly that she sent me her paperback copies–she went out and bought hardback copies for herself. It's been several months since I read the first, The Golden Compass. This is equally as good, but I know, from remarks that people have told me, that All Will Not End Well. Today I picked up a copy of the third in the series, The Amber Spyglass but will hold off reading it until I first read that novel I've been asked to blurb.

I am also partway through What If Our World Is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick, edited by Gwen Lee and Doris Elaine Sauter (with a foreword by one of my Clarion teachers, Tim Powers), which Bruce minnehaha kindly lent to me. I will undoubtedly have this finished for the next month's report.

I note with approval that only two of this month's books are re-reads. I find I'm enjoying this process of reporting in my LiveJournal what I read each month, an idea I picked up from kijjohnson. I've noticed an interesting side effect: I find that I am being a little more willing to try new directions, and to read books that I've always felt I should read but have been lazily putting off cracking open. There's definitely an observer effect at work here when I know that I'm reporting my choices for comment by others!

Cheer