Happy New Year

No, I am not operating from the calendar of an alternate universe. I realize that January 1st is a ways off, but aren't calendars man-made devices? Don't the trees see this as the end of their year? Thus, the beginning of another? And trees, like chickens, have strength in numbers, so who am I to argue? Therefore, I have decided to acknowledge November 1st as New Year's Day.

Since last October, I have felt as though I have been walking around with a sign that reads "Kick Me" taped to my forehead, and although my family and I have been spared serious illness and catastrophic loss, I am a little sore. But now that Halloween has passed, I am ready to approach the new year, armed with the lessons I have learned over the course of the past 12 months. I share them now in the form of a numerated Note to Self:

1. Inspect your bank statements. Don't allow them to pile up in a laundry basket. Open them, for the love of Mike. Or better yet, join the information age and enroll in online banking. Make certain that $4.99 is not being deducted from your savings account each month as a result of carrying a balance less than $300. Do this before your account dwindles to $14.99. Before the bank manager tries to sell you a low-interest rate mortgage when tasked with closing said savings account. When she tells you she is trying to do you a favor, offering you a great deal on a home-equity loan because you seem to be experiencing 'cash-flow' problems, speak to her as you would the dog: "Shame on you. Deep shame."

2. Do not assume it is safe to cross the parking lot of a grocery store, even after looking both ways. Remember that demons drive at the speed of sound. You will not hear them until after they've almost flattened you. Until they've unfurled their forked tongues. Shouted "You're a little too fat to be running out in front of traffic," in your general direction. In the future, park your car next to the cart return, thereby avoiding the crossing of any lanes on foot. Or better yet - stand in the middle of the road and wait for that woman to return. Wait through rain and sleet. Drive to the same store every damn day, and wait.

3. When someone in a position of power offers you 'the opportunity of a lifetime', say, "No. Back to the depths with ye!" Worship no one but the Hero upstairs.

4. Write thank you notes to guest editors who give sage advice to aspiring authors in the forewords of yearly anthologies. Be grateful for gems like these:

Go see the world. Stay there for as long as you can - maybe then, after you've shaken off the stink of your own living room - your preoccupation with food allergies and infidelity - when you've taken on the odour of foreign living rooms and become sickened by foods native to far-off lands - sickness which is inherently more interesting because it is co-opted - you will become a real writer.

Rush to the nearest travel agent. But, alas, remember that you are experiencing cash-flow problems, and a plane ticket to the world probably costs more than $14.99. Try not to despair. Eudora Welty said, "Write what you don't know about what you know." Remember that Alice Monro (hailed as the greatest short story writer since Chekov) writes almost exclusively about her native Canada. And Chekov, for that matter, was a Russian writer who wrote about Russian people. Russian babies and a Russian Lady with a Dog who runs off with a Russian man - not, by the way - her Russian husband.

5. Trust that despite the kicks to the head, the year will provide many wonderful surprises as well. Gracious, gifted writers who share their time and stories with you. Goodness in the form of unexpected emails from editorial assistants at large commerical magazines. People will like you. Really like you - you (and Sally Fields) for exactly who you are.

Clarity, Brevity, Simplicity, Humanity

For most of my adolescence, I idolized Barbra Streisand. Long before the talented young actors on Glee began popularizing songs from Funny Girl and Yentl, I was the Greatest Gtar...I was Second-Hand Rose...I was singing to Papa by candlelight and Nobody, No Nobody was gonna Rain on my Parade. In this way, I was sort of a weird kid. I can't explain exactly why I felt such a kinship with Babs, except for maybe I recognized that I, too, have a nose of distinction. But that isn't all. It was her strength that I admired. Her ability to entertain and her sense of the world. Even now, I can't help but weep when I watch her sing. It's involuntary. Like love. And I realize the real reason I related to Barbara is that she gave voice to every feeling I had - even as a small girl. She made it okay to be a clown. To laugh at yourself and at the same time to be a strong woman. To say what you want and expect to get it. And most of all, to speak out against injustice. To not apologize for your convictions.

I used to say I wanted to be the first 'woman' President of the United States, and amazingly, at age 9, I believed in earnest that this was possible. Even when another girl - a friend of mine, who was ever so slightly thinner and therefore more popular announced that she also planned to one day throw her hat into the ring, I wasn't deterred. Such was the power of my fantasy that when Geraldine Ferraro ran for Vice-President, I secretly rooted against her. I saw myself at a podium. Reasoning with Gaddafi, whose bombs I spent many many hours worrying over. World War III, we were told in elementary school, would be the last War. The nuclear war from which only the cockroaches would be left to write about. But on my watch, there would be no war. On my watch, there would be peace. Peace the way Barbra described it in her 1986 ONE VOICE concert.

Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro - who started out as a school teacher in Queens - lost by a landslide to Ronald Reagan, but upon accepting her nomination, addressed a crowd of cheering, tearing supporters with these words: "I stand before you to proclaim tonight: America is the land where dreams can come true for all of us." Indeed, she went on to do great things. As the Ambassador to the United Nations Humans Rights Commission in 1993, she condemned (for the first time) anti-semitism as a human rights violation. After suffering with an extended illness, Geraldine Ferraro died last March. She was only 75, and I wonder what she would have to say about Alabama's new immigration laws. Laws which permit police to "Stop and Ask" individuals within its borders to produce their 'papers'. Legislation which gives the green light to racial profiling and feels eerily like a movie set in Nazi-occupied Europe. Except it's real, and it's happening here - in the Land of the Free.

Today, I get to stand at a podium. I get to talk about human rights and raise awareness about social issues. I get paid to read and write, and maybe I don't have the qualifications - the Ivy League education or the bank account to run for President, but ironically, I am doing exactly what I envisioned. My dream, though in disguise, came true. And I never forget, despite my outrage, that because I live in America, I am allowed to question the leaders of my country. To run my classroom on the following platform: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity. A fortune cookie's description of the basic premises of writing and not too shabby a mantra for life.

Here is a video from Barbra's 1986 concert. I dare you not to cry.

Fowl Mood

I'm feeling a little bit better today; thanks for asking. My head doesn't feel like an excavated mine this morning, which is nice. Although, a bit of the ugly mood - the residual funk that accompanies phlegm - remains. Which is not so nice or I'm not so nice. And while I'm thinking about it - Please stop inserting commas before the conjunction in a sentence consisting of one independent and one dependent clause! You know who you are: you newspaper columnists, novelists and other so-called 'famous' writers. You seriously undermine my work as an educator when you whip those commas around like so many boomerangs. As if grammar were some kind of horseshoe match - as if being close counts. I'll tell you what I tell my students: Read the damn handbook. How hard is it, really? If the parts of the sentence that come before and after the comma can each stand alone - by all means, plop that comma down in there. Otherwise, keep your unwieldly punctuation to yourself.

And another thing: When visiting a bookstore near you, take note of the numerous jacket covers prominently featuring chickens. As I wandered through my local Barnes & Noble last evening, waiting for my daughter to finish with her dance lesson, I couldn't help but feel a bit of hope at the sight of so many books about these plucky birds. I thought - I have a story about a chicken. Maybe I've finally done it - written a literary short story about something people might pay money to read - I mean just look (I thought to myself) look at all these stinking chickens! Free-range, cartoon, vintage...certainly there's room for one more feather among the flock? But then I remembered that there are more chickens than humans walking the earth, so they can afford to be choosy.

For all I know, chickens are running the publishing houses. Chickens scratching behind the desk at the New Yorker. Chickens gathered around a table, discussing my story. "What does this chicken want? Has this chicken earned that cliche? This chicken has not been fully realized..."

Can't you just see the rejection letter? "Dear Fowl Writer:..."

Oh well. Cover your mouth when you cough. Keep your hands clean, and don't forget to say God Bless You.

From Poetry to Prose

Ten years ago, John Mayer performed a set from his debut album Room for Squares in the WYEP studios - an independent radio station in Pittsburgh. I heard a recording from that session this morning. "Will you want me when I'm not myself?" he sings. As it turns out, my answer is Probably Not.

I used to say that he was the poet nearest my heart - a line stolen from the movie Shakespeare in Love. A movie about the imagined life of Shakespeare and the reckless love - 'come ruin or rapture' - that inspires him to write both Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night (from which comes my favorite line in all of Shakespeare's writing..."If music be the food of love, play on.") And I really loved John Mayer. Before he made it to commercial radio. Before he became the playboy of the western world - before his words went from 'poetry to prose' -- to borrow a line from "Not Myself".

But then, as a writer of prose, how can I stand in judgement? Further, as a writer of fiction - creator of unreal realities - why can I not separate the man from the artist? Why should I care that he dated Jessica Simpson? That poor girl likes a doughnut as much as me - but at least I'm not on the cover of every magazine with the words 'Wide Load' plastered across my ass-end.

Originally, I was angry that he'd chosen her. I had imagined him with a girl who'd broken his heart in 6th grade. A plain but pretty girl who (as he sings in "Comfortable") could distinguish between Miles and Coltraine. The One. So, seeing him posed next to the platinum Simpson was a blow. But the real problem for me occurred when he started saying ugly things about Jessica and the other high-profile women with whom he'd paraded down the red carpet. How could this callous misogynist be the same man who wrote "Daughters"? Who seemed to keenly understand the complications particular to girls who'd been abandoned by the first man they ever loved? Who wrote about watching his parents age with unparalleled tenderness in "Stop This Train"? About high school reunions and St. Patrick's Day; hope and heartbreak? Who left track #13 blank - just in case. How John? Please, if you're out there, I really want to know. How do we know if we'll want you when you're not yourself if we don't know which self is really you?

Alice Walker once said, "Deliver me from writers who think the way they live doesn't matter..." I agree. And I disagree. Let's say I was to make it to the big time as a writer. Let's say readers were out there imagining my life - idealizing a set of ideals for me. Absorbing my words like gospel - holding me to an unattainable standard - and then one day, I was exposed. Caught in a contradiction between my public and private life - billed as a fraud and a liar and a jerk. But what if I really meant everything I'd ever written? In that moment in time, it was true - I felt every emotion that had plucked the soulstrings of those once faithful followers? Who could say which moment was me being 'myself' and which was me as 'somebody else'?

Maybe it's best not to know too much about the artists whose work inspires us to lift our lighters in a dark sky. I don't know. But I do know that when I heard him singing this morning, I couldn't stop it - that old reckless love.

Listen to "Heart of Life" and decide for yourself:

We're Closer Now Than Ever Before

This song was originally featured in Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas. Listen to this terrific version of "Our World" as performed by My Morning Jacket. What a treat for us all!

At the Top of the World...

...there is a place called Linden Vineyards. If you begin in Charlottesville, Virginia and drive along Rte. 29, it will take you about an hour and a half to arrive at the Top of the World, located, unexpectedly,on Rattle Snake Mountain...(why not Sparrow Mountain or Rainbow Range...etc, but I'll get to the 'why' questions later). En route to the Top of the World, you will pass through a series of small towns situated along the Shenandoah Valley. For example Madison and Sperryville, the apparent home of one of the biggest "slow-food" movements in the country, and mile after breathtaking green mile later, you will arrive at a gravel road. It is my opinion that this road was left unpaved to challenge the people who don't really care about wine. Or cheddar cheese which burns the roof of your mouth with its local sharpness. Or being so close to God you could almost ask him a question. Or three.

For the determined oenophile, however, there is no path too treacherous. No matter how wooded or narrow. How full of ruts like gaping jaws for gulping down little red cars.

This end-of-summer trip actually began in Washington D.C. There we visited the Holocaust Museum and the White House. Julia Child's kitchen and a statue of Andrew Jackson. We also stopped in at a place called "Busboys and Poets" named in honor of Langston Hughes and enjoyed a "Poet Pizza". Afterwards, we walked back to the hotel and passed a church with the following bible verse posted on its marquis: Wisdom is a tree of life to those who embrace her; those who lay hold of her will be blessed. (Proverbs 3:18.) Go ahead and chew on that for a minute while I sew this up.

History is full of contradictions. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence - decrying that all men are created equal - but over the course of his lifetime, some 600 slaves lived and worked on his Virginia plantation. During WWI, allied troops dropped leaflets from their planes onto the Germans - words written in their native language advising them to give up hope. That the U.S. and other armed forces were too great in numbers and prowess to be defeated and surrender was the only option. This tactic inspired a young German soldier. A frustrated artist named Adolph Hitler who tweaked the concept to sell anti-semitism to his citizens through one of the most effective propaganda campaigns ever created.

What else? About five blocks from the Holocaust Museum stands the statue of Andrew Jackson - the author of the "Indian Removal Act". By the end of his tenure, 46,000 Native Americans had been exiled from their homeland. He was, however, the only U.S. President to pay-off the National Debt. I suppose that's what's up with the statue. And it's funny (not ha-ha) how much of what I heard during my educational field-trip smacked of deja-vu. Not allowing German refugees into the U.S. because they might take 'our' jobs sounded strangely familiar, as a for instance. Why did the U.S. bomb the German factories first? Apparently they were afraid to raid the death camps because it might have pissed Hitler off and provoked him to do something really bad. Why oust Saddam Hussein and not the gang of misfit boys holding eastern Africa hostage? And what of the other nations of the world - where do they stand on genocide while wagging their fingers in our direction?

At the top of the world there is a place called Linden Vineyards. It is a place where you can drink some of the finest red wine being produced in this country in between bites of warm baguette and sharp cheese. You can say to yourself: I am blessed. I am lucky to be here - to have seen these mountains. Despite this, you find yourself wanting more. Wondering if you were granted an audience, invited to ask of God three questions - what would they be? Why me? maybe? But a why question runs the risk of soliciting the dreaded: "Because I said so". How is trickier to answer. How can we make things right for the homeless who sleep beneath the opulent buildings in our Nation's Capitol? How can we use our words as a force for good? How do we climb the tree of life, to embrace wisdom in the here and now, rather than when it's too late?

Dear You, Love Me

My childhood mailbox wasn't bolted to the house. It wasn't nailed to a wooden post at the end of the driveway, either. Especially in the summer, checking the mail was an event. At ten to 11, the streets of Virginia Hills emptied of kids long enough for us to retreive the mail key from inside our respective homes, taking care not to slam the screen doors before reconvening, filing one-by-one into the parade. A half-mile procession to the recreation hall, where once inside, we were rewarded for our efforts with a blast of ice-cold air. Staring at the wall of silver, we held our collective breath - hedging silent bets. When we turned the key, would there be a child-support check or a stack of utility bills? A letter from a boy or an empty echo?

Summer always makes me nostalgic for letters. Hand-written, stamped, and sometimes even S.W.A.K.ed.  What could be better than a letter? Better than reading words meant only for you, as if language had been invented for that singular purpose? A child-support check, of course. But other than that, not much. However, a letter in a story or book can be almost as satisfying, sometimes even more so, when it allows us to anonymously appease our inner voyeur.

Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Clearly ranks among my favorite books from childhood. Unfortunately, in modern literature, the epistolary form is often regarded as passe'. Often but not always, as in the case of a story called "It Looks Like This" by Caitlin Horrocks. Having read several of Caitlin's stories in various literary journals, I was pleased to find her collection of short fiction This Is Not Your City featured prominently on the "Discover New Writers" shelf at Barnes and Noble.

"It Looks Like This" is a story about an 18 year old girl whose mother suffers from crippling arthritis. A girl too busy caring for her mother to pass 12th grade and writes a letter to a former teacher, explicating the details of her life for extra credit.  Supplemented by clip art, a diagram of the Pythagorean Theorem, and thumbnail photographs, this story brilliantly acheives the look of a school report. But much like a Brandi Carlile song, it reaches a painful epiphany - like a guttoral scream - in the spaces the writer leaves blank.

Another solidly written story told in letters is "Luckily, Lucy Sims Has No Stamps" by Shellie Zacharia. A master of the flash format, Shellie reveals the sad story of Lucy Sims' life (to hysterical effect) through notes written to Bed Bath & Beyond, the Manager of  Primo Italian Cafe, a seventh grade English teacher, an ex-husband named Bill, the parents of Lucy Sims' elementary-aged students, and her former mother-in-law. I love intelligently written absurdity. It's like candied beets: a treat that's also good for me. This story and many fine others can be found in Shellie's book Now Playing.

Although not written in letters, Stewart O'Nan's latest novel Emily, Alone offers a portal into the mind of the book's namesake. Without giving anything away, I think it's safe to say that nothing really happens. There are no plot-turning moments. No cliff-hangars. No catastrophic highs or lows. But somehow, I don't care. Never mind the fact that the book is set in Pittsburgh, which is great for those of us on the home team - the references to Eat-n-Park and the Ft. Pitt Tunnels rended with as much loving detail as the descriptions of a Van Gogh exhibit and the array of dog droppings emerging during the spring thaw. What makes this book special is being privy to Emily's thoughts. Thoughts we might not think an old woman would have. Almost as if she's willed us her diary and rather than wait until she passes, we sneak a peek at the envelope - pretending to be upstairs in the bathroom while she makes us a nice cup of tea.

In an interview appearing in this week's New York Times Magazine, Nicholson Baker (author of several unconventional novels including The Anthologist, which is really funny) said this about trying to write a traditional novel: "I get to the point where there should be a major thing that goes wrong and I don't want it to happen. It doesn't feel true to me. I don't feel entitled, because very few bad things have happened to me."

When faced with photographs of emaciated children - literally starving to death in Somalia, most of us would be hard pressed to disagree with Mr. Baker. And maybe Stewart O'Nan had the same idea in mind - that nothing truly awful had ever happened to Emily and pretending that it had would feel false on the page. But there is one thing we can all be certain of, one inescapable similarity. One day we'll turn the key to find our final notice has arrived.

But hopefully, someone will find the letters we wrote to our mothers from camp; to our seventh grade boyfriends over a summer break; to our brothers and sisters away at college - long-distance friends, future husbands and wives - and know that we were here.