Deep Quiet

It’s something that hardly anybody experiences anymore. I go looking for it, and I can’t find it: the deep quiet that comes in the complete absence of all manmade sound. The subsonic rumble of the city pursues us almost everywhere—so pervasive that you don’t even notice it until, suddenly, the weight is gone, the pressure lifts from your ears, and you can breathe. You breathe softly, afraid to disturb the stillness, in which a rock shifting or the step of a chipmunk sounds as loud as the ringing of the phone.

And that is when I hear my muse speak.

Have you ever experienced that? Have you really?

The last issue of Writer’s Digest made me wildly impatient, quoting its “literary hot spots,” in which one of the authors talked about the hiss of espresso machines, the buzz of ambient conversation, and the music playing, and how any author would be in Heaven. A loud, noisy, distracting, bustling coffee shop. The perfect place to write.

Well, whatever floats your boat, people. Whatever. I guess the laugh’s on me, since there are coffee shops on every corner of every city and town, and virtually nowhere is there quiet.

I challenge you—-those of you, particularly, who live in the big cities (by that I mean anything St. Louis sized on up). Find a vacation spot where there is no ambient human noise. Spend a week there. Or a day. Or even an hour. Spend your time sitting quietly, with nothing more than a piece of paper and a pen. And if, at the end of that hour, or day, or week, you don’t feel like a whole new person--full of hope and inspiration and energy--then go back to your coffee shops, your dens of white noise and distraction, and feel free to ignore to the hick Midwestern writer/mother.

And I’ll keep the quiet places for myself, thank you very much.

This morning at the library

Julianna is getting tired, Alex's ibuprofin is wearing off, and it's about time to leave when I hear a solid "THUMP" from the children's stacks, and a woman starts repeating, "Oh no, oh my God, oh no, oh my God." Over and over, this dull panicky tone of voice, not screaming--just that particular timbre that brings people running. I realize that her kid has bumped his or her head. And I can't help thinking, Calm down, lady, it's just a bump on the head. We've had five this morning already.

When my children and I pass the children's desk on the way out, she's got a 5 month old baby over her shoulder, a girl on her way into unconsciousness (or sleep, who knows?), and the mother is on the phone with 911 saying that she was carrying too much and the baby slipped out of her hands and fell 5 feet.

By the time we make it outside I know that the distant sound of sirens is headed right for us. Alex is jumping up and down. "Can I see the fire truck? Can I see the fire truck?" So we stop at the corner and wait for them to arrive. A ladder truck (why, I don't know), and a Universtity Hospital ambulance scream around the corner, not twenty feet from us. It's surreal to be excited for Alex and covering Julianna's ears, simultaneously hoping that that woman really is flipping out for no reason whatsoever.

And all the way to the van, I can't talk around the lump in my throat.


love me

When life intersects Hollywood--however tangenetically

(Is that even a word? Spell-check doesn't like it.)

Last night, Christian & I finally got to watch “Michael Clayton.” We’ve tried to rent it three times, but it was always out. And then after we finally got it home, it took us three nights to get all the way through the movie. But anyway, last night we did finish it, and the most interesting thing happened right as we turned it on (Scene 18 on the DVD), when George Clooney is saying goodbye to his family members after a birthday party, and in the background I heard Mike Kelley’s voice saying something about the Tigers.

I looked up from folding laundry, and sure enough, there was a basketball game on the TV in the movie. Christian didn’t catch it. He had to back it up and listen again.

Nothing particularly earth-shattering—just cool. The Kelley’s have moved on now, but they used to sit in the second or third row at Lourdes every 10:00 Mass—we even had their daughter in the choir for a few short weeks—and it was pretty cool to have something so close to home show up in a movie.

Change of focus

Well, not really. But I wanted to codify the purpose and focus of this blog, which, by its title…well, has no focus.

This blog is about the intersection of parenthood, writing, and faith.

Thanks to those who comment or email me so that I know you’re reading.

Finished!—Signed, Supermom

On Thursday night, just at dark, I finished the back yard. This was supposed to be an intensive weekend project that Christian and I would do over spring break. Instead, it rained for four weeks, and when we finally got a four-day stretch of clear weather, I just had to dig in and do it myself. Hence earning the label: “supermom.”

Well, I should qualify. I sort of did it myself. Actually, my uncle Jerome came over and spent most of two days with me. And Christian took 2 hours of it on Wednesday night so I could go lead choir practice. :)

The project involved a garden tiller, a walk-behind trencher (now THAT is a serious piece of machinery…good thing I have an uncle who can figure out and fix any piece of machinery ever invented!), 250 feet of buried corrugated pipe, a roller, an old, borrowed riding mower (which Uncle Jerome also tuned up), and a spreader full of grass seed—not to mention a lot of dug dirt and aching shoulder muscles.

My kids didn’t get much attention last week, and I did virtually zero writing of any kind. But the project is done, and we got two days of nice, gentle rain on it as soon as we finished.

And hopefully, six weeks from now, we’ll have a nice smooth back yard, without potholes or a swamp in the middle.

It's in the genes

Alex made up his first story today.

We had just come home from the library when he padded over to me with his new books and said, “Mommy, I want to read you a story. Will you listen?”

“Of course I will!” I closed my book.

He flipped through his book and found a photo of two fire engines emerging from a fire station. “Once there was a fire engine,” he said. “Once there were two fire engines. It was getting dark. It was night. Then they all went to bed.” He finished in a whisper, then slammed the book shut. “THE END!”

Is this writer's block, or just procrastination?

I’m finding myself in a strange position the last few days. Strange for me, at least.

I don’t want to write. Or, more accurately: I do want to write, but I’m terrified of the project I’m working on.

As a mother, flute/voice teacher, liturgical musician, choir director, NFP teacher, composer and writer who has a new house to landscape this spring, I am very smug about never getting writer’s block. It’s a luxury that I can’t afford. In fact, I told a reporter last week that I spend all day thinking about what I’m going to work on, so when I get the time to sit down, there’s no fumbling about-—I just plunge right in.

About a month ago, I made a list of all my projects. Not the ones I want to work on (like the novel ideas or the children’s books). Just the ones I already have in process. The count was:

Nonfiction—4
Short stories—5
Novels—1
Music projects—6

Maybe this isn’t much, for a full-time writer. But with my splintered schedule, I decided that I needed to clear the plate a bit. I can’t focus on major revisions to my novel when I have fifteen other projects demanding my attention. So for the past several weeks, I’ve been a busy little bee. I’ve finished two stories, one nonfiction essay, and one piece for my “Walking in the Woods” flute & piano collection. (And submitted the prose pieces. Very important. Very time consuming.)

And now it’s time to face The Novel.

I know what I have to do to the novel, at least in general terms. The trouble is, the list is overwhelming. At least three times this week, I have pulled out the binder and begun physically trembling. So I push it away, bury it under some papers, pretend it isn’t there, and work on something else that I can still call “writing,” but which really boils down to procrastination.

At last I decided enough is enough! So I sat down on my deck, put a sticky note on the binder and began breaking the job down into small tasks. First: merge all the comments from critique partners into one MS. (Whew! Start with something fairly brainless.) Second: title the chapters. (Oh yes, this is procrastination.) Third, figure out what to do with those pesky in-laws who aren’t important to the story, but should be. Fourth: resolve the hero’s brother subplot…

And now I have a list of eleven jobs, relatively small, all of them involving brainstorming rather than typing. As a bonus, I got a whirlwind tour of my novel, re-familiarizing myself with the characters and events. The cogs have begun turning again, slowly but surely. Today when I sat down to begin, I still got a little trembly, but now at least, I have a list. And I can cross things off, darn it. One at a time!

Rejoicing and Rejection

Part A: Rejoicing

Yesterday as the kids were playing in the living room, Alex suddenly shrieked, “Mommy! Mommy! Juweenanna just sat up ALL BY HERSELF!”

Later in the day, I witnessed it myself. And when I put her to bed for the night, she woke up and began howling with predictable outrage. When I came in to comfort her a few minutes later, she was sitting up in her crib, absolutely furious. And this morning Christian went in to get her up and found her sitting up, too.

We have decided to set very narrow goals, and to hit them one at a time. Transition to sitting was the first. It took two weeks. The next one, we have decided, is crawling. I think it’ll take longer than two weeks, though. Nonetheless, it was a very good day.

Part B: Of Rejections

Two weeks ago (more or less), I sent a story off to the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Yesterday I got a short rejection letter in the mail. The editor said it “didn’t interest him.”

OUCH.

Christian laughed at me. Not to be mean, but just b/c he never did "get" this story. --much like 4 other people who have critiqued it. Their words, not mine. But I have faith in my story. Thus, I was kind of offended that someone had the gall to say it “didn’t interest them.” Offended, and hurt, and laughing at myself for being so. Trying to focus on the positive, which is that the rejection was very quick! How can I complain?

Marketing is the pits.

And I don’t feel like writing anymore today. I feel like scrapbooking. So I think I will.

On a lighter note....

...I wanted to share a family picture. Not the most picture perfect one ever, but certainly it illustrates everything you need to know about our family. :)

More on the Bible and Literalism

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post about the Church and the seven deadly sins. I’ve been thinking about this, and I want to add to one of the points I made--namely, that you can’t read the Bible word-for-word literal. This assertion is heresy in many circles--even I cringe at putting it into black and white (or pink on pink, as the case may be). So I’d like to offer this example, to explain what I mean, and what my Church means.

Christian tells this joke that he calls “The Three Beers.” The basic story is: a man walks into a bar and orders three beers, one for him and one for each of his brothers. One day he only orders two, and people offer him condolences on losing his brother. The punch line is that “it’s Lent, and I’ve quit drinking!”

Neither Christian nor I remember where he got this joke; he thought it was so funny that he claimed it as his own, and for more than a year, he told it to EVERYONE. This means that I heard the joke something like 400 times. As unbelievable as it sounds, that number is not an exaggeration. I heard the joke at least once a day for a year, and frequently more often.

My point is this: “The Three Beers” matured in the telling. The essentials never changed--not one bit--from what you read above. But the words used, and the details of the story, did. By the time Christian had been telling the joke for 6 months, the words were virtually the same from one presentation to the next--but they were not the same as when he first heard the joke. He added dialogue, and expression, and made it his own.

The words changed--the story didn’t.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

In the Gospels, each evangelist was writing to a different audience; thus, different details were more important to one than to another. Matthew was talking to Jews, so he focused on the fulfillment of the Old Testament. Luke was writing for Gentiles. Luke’s Gospel is the only one in which the Magi appear; this was the first time God’s salvation was proclaimed to the non-Jewish world. John skips the infancy altogether and goes right to the meat of the message: the proclamation of the kingdom. He goes into great, agonizing detail about the Passion, death and resurrection of Christ.

This does not make one of them more true than another. But if you try to read the Bible word-for-word--even assuming that you could somehow surmount the translation of a translation of a translation problem--you find literal contradictions. Did Mary Magdalene, alone, see the stone rolled back and run back to tell Peter that someone had stolen the body? (John 20) Or was it Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and did they have a conversation with the angels first, so that they went back and told Peter that “He is risen!” (Luke 24)

Does it matter? No. Either way, the essential story remains the same. But this illustrates that context is important, as is an understanding of the literary forms used in the Bible.

Tiger Terror

Two days ago, Alex, fearless explorer, discovered tigers in his bedroom. And although tigers are funny, fascinating creatures during the day, at night they are terrifying—or at least, an excuse to stay up later. Consequently, we have added a new dimension to the bedtime routine. I have taken to opening drawers and doors, lassoing tigers and shooing them out the door and back to Africa, where they belong.

My children put their heads together sometime about 10 days ago and concocted an evil plan to shred Mommy’s nerves. The conversation went something like this:

Alex: “OK, Juweenanna, I’ll get scared of tigers and make Mommy sleep with me. Then you wake up 4 times a night for no reason at all, okay?”

Julianna: “Eehheeeeeheee! AAAAAAAAA!”

Alex: “Great. Then I’ll wet the bed every night, so Mommy and Daddy go crazy wondering why I’m not toilet trained anymore. And when it’s Daddy’s night to get up with us, you sleep straight through. You only get up on MOMMY’S nights. Understand?”

Julianna: “EEAAAAAAAaaaaAAAAaaaaAAAAaaa!” (I know she bounced while she said it.)

Thus are the most insidious conspiracies born.

I can laugh about this today because last night, they actually both slept through the night—and so did I. For the first time in two weeks.