Symphonies On the Sand

One Blade's Delicate Touch

Windy Waves

When I was very young--probably four and a half--my mother went to the hospital to deliver my sister. It was early July and, as my parents already had three children, I and my siblings were dispersed among the relatives. I stayed with my father's sister's family about twenty minutes from home. They had a girl two years older than me which seemed then like a decade instead of a couple dozen months. Suffice it to say I was never comfortable in that household. Even less so when a tornado was predicted during my stay. My mother, I was certain, would perish in these winds. Would be taken from me not for just a few days but forever. I envisioned her being swept up into the roiling black sky like Dorothy's house and all her belongings. My mother did not and she and my new sister arrived home safely and I should have recovered from this trauma.
I did not.

Stipples and Grooves

My next encounter with high winds was during a family camping trip. They tore through the state park as we were trying to set up the huge tent that would house us all--now numbering nine. It was an impossible task and after enduring my father's rantings, curses and fits of rage we gathered back into the station wagon and spent the night in a hotel room. Another trauma indelibly etched into my soul.

Feather Strokes

Early into our marriage my husband and I opened our flower business. Two years later, when success seemed ensured, we took the plunge and a large loan to move to a larger space. We hired an architect (big money for us) to design the style of the exterior. He didn't change much except the colors and beautiful new awnings with our business name proudly displayed on them. Two months later a storm blew through town. Tornadoes touched down in several places but spared the downtown. The winds however were not so kind. They ripped our beautiful new awnings to strips of pathetic canvas; wrenched the metal frames as though they were the bones of bird wings.

Contemporary Improv

Southwest Florida is often besieged by high winds off the Gulf of Mexico and this morning was one of those times. Walking the beach brought to the surface all these events that still simmer at the bottom of my soul and cause my heart to pound. I want to fight back. I want to fight back in a way as huge as the waves that roiled into shore but I have no idea what it is that raises my hackles. The wind and the waves get more intense and I get more uptight.

Then I get to the turn in my walk and look down. There on the sand are tiny patterns made by the wispy blades of saw grass that protect the beaches from the winds. You wouldn't think flora so delicate could protect an entire dune but they do because there are so many of them. Some blades stand erect, others are broken and bent and then there are the ones that have lost their utility but even in their withering are gracefully curled. All of them make these patterns in different ways...feathers, staccato pecks and sweeping swirls.

Mixed Media

All of this to remind me that it is the details, the small notes that dance to the spirit of the wind, that really matter.

Removing Chaff--Not So Easy

 I had a bumper crop of anise this year. 

The lacy-leafed bush that I grow as much for the monarchs it attracted one season as for its seeds. Sadly, the pudgy, iridescent green caterpillars have never returned to frolic amongst the sea-green gossamer that looks as though it would be equally happy submerged in some land-locked lake.

Monarchs or no monarchs, my anise bush has flourished. No matter, the birds like the seeds.

This year I harvested some seeds taking care to leave a fair amount for the goldfinches. I dried the seeds on a tray in my kitchen for a week, along with their fibrous leaves and delicate stems. Then it was time to get biblical-- to separate the wheat from the chaff.  

Oh what fragrance filled my kitchen! Reward enough for my efforts thus far.

The next task was not difficult but it was time consuming. I gently crunched the dry heads between my fingers and, with tiny tinkles, the seeds fell to the tray. So did many of the broken stems. As I have great plans to include the anise seeds in a Christmas cookie recipe, the stems had to go. This was when the clock seemed to stop ticking.

           

Finally I had removed enough of the stems to sift the remaining pile through a strainer. Of course some stubborn stems determined to offer up extra crunch to my cookies wound up amongst the seeds and these I removed as well.

                                                            *****

I find myself removing lots of sticks and stems from my days as well. I am increasingly aware of the limit to my days. The pressure to make them as fruitful as possible overwhelms me at times. I should relax--should enjoy the extra time I have post retirement. But I cannot. I have so many miles to travel before I sleep.

Unlike my effort with the anise seeds, this task is difficult. It requires that I give equal attention to my passions and to the significant people in my life---not necessarily an inclusive equation.  To balance them fairly means to eliminate some of the chaff that has accumulated. I can see that there might be pain associated with this elimination process. I encountered none with my little anise seed project.

I haven’t resolved it yet but my sanity will soon demand that I get started. There are only twenty-four hours in each day. I need to simplify my life so as to have quality time to pursue my favorites. Sounds like an internet thing…my favorites.

Meanwhile the leaves are tumbling outside my bay window--delicate reminders that the seasons are changing. That summer will soon be a memory.

I gathered an entire spice jar of seeds today and now I’m thinking I won’t ever get to baking those cookies. That would be only adding chaff to the wheat of my life.

I’m glad I left some seeds for the birds. They may be the only ones who benefit from my fragrant anise bush.

           

You Say Goodbye and I Say Hello

Today Susan Dominus, in her BIG CITY column of the NYT, speaks to a topic never far from the lips of writers lately--the demise of the literary world as we knew it. She wraps her column in Joan Didion's famous essay, "Goodbye to All That," which as "an elegy to the passing of youth," talks to Didion's disenchantment with New York City and the literary culture that was her world. Written in 1967, Dominus writes that the essay still strikes many familiar chords.

Part of what has disappeared, Dominus says, is the "glittering, gluttonous self-indulgence" of the publishing business. It was a comment that struck home to me as I had been privy to the same self-indulgence by Detroit's corporate world back in the mid-eighties. As a florist, I was often hired to perform extravagant botanical feats for the conference and party tables of the executives--feats that often added up to $50 to the per-person tab picked up by stockholders and ordinary citizens. God only knows what the rest of the bill totaled.

It was, and is, the crux of our economic woes. The rampant wanton greed of the people in charge--often at the expense of the people at the opposite end.

Dominus comments that at least "The New York magazine and book-publishing scene is no Detroit." (How unfortunate that Detroit has become the metaphor for abject failure.) But, she goes on to mention the silver lining of all this. "People will keep making cars, only somewhere else; people will keep making literary culture, just not at the same scale, or in the same hallways, or for a living."

In part, I disagree. To the wanton greed I say, with relief, "Goodbye to All That." But unlike Dominus, who concludes that "even the most jaded among our ranks are not ready to say goodbye to all that," I say I am. and I am ready to welcome the era of the internet that will hopefully put more commercial endeavors on an even plane so that the executives and the foot soldiers are equally rewarded. The essence of cars--transportation--will not disappear; and the essence of literary culture will be just fine. People, by their very nature, crave to tell and read stories, to fantasize, to learn and to opine. So while the paper industry and the bookshelf industry might suffer, the new scene--the internet and the electronic media--will enable literature to thrive on an equal, if not larger, scale and it will be possible to make a living providing it. We just won't be able to gorge on the pocketbooks of the general public like we used to.

In November of the same year that Didion published her essay, the Beatles released their hit song, "You Say Goodbye and I Say Hello." Paul McCartney's summary of his lyrics was this: "The answer to everything is simple. It's a song about everything and nothing. If you have black you have to have white. That's the amazing thing about life."

That sums it up better for me. Life goes on and what we are passionate about will survive--might even get better!

Inspiration or Discipline?

Is inspiration or discipline more important in creating art?

This is an ongoing discussion in two of the online writing/reading groups I've joined--Backspace and Goodreads.

In my first life, as mother to three daughters and florist for 34 years, I followed the discipline road and reached some level of success despite frequently being singed by both ends of the candle. I hadn't placed much emphasis on inspiration mainly because I didn't have the confidence that it would take me anywhere. Don't get me wrong, I placed an extremely high value on inspiration and the art it nourishes. I just didn't believe I had any seeds to begin with. And I was extremely frustrated.

Then about six years before I retired I gathered the courage to create inspired floral creations rather than pump out cookie cutter FTD designs. I had admired for over a quarter century designs by florists all over the world but never thought myself capable of attaining that level.

I guess I liken this to the difference between works by Stephanie Meyer or Nora Roberts and those by Jayne Anne Phillips or Andre Dubus III. All certainly very worthwhile reads but I have to think the two former authors are more focused on discipline and are probably more commercially successful whereas the two latter focus on inspiration (no doubt combined with discipline) and are more artistically successful.

I will grant that floral designs are in a different world than fiction. But I learned something during those last six years--I learned that if I had the courage to allow inspiration a seat on my wagon I could, indeed, create more artistically successful designs. I had the seeds all along! What a surprise when that art was validated by my clients who then inspired me to reach even higher.

So now here I am holding both ends of a new candle--the 'chronological one' that says I should retire, not rewire. The other--the one desperate to create. Does that mean I discipline my self to crank out fifty novels between now and the end of the rainbow (even assuming I find an audience!) or do I discipline myself to sit down every morning and listen to my muses and follow their inspiration?

Yep, you guessed it.

I'm an old friend to discipline--a newer one to inspiration. Who knows--maybe the three of us will be surprised with an audience. If not I have these two friends who've helped me enjoy the process of trying.

GRACE NOTES Moves Forward

I am excited to report that I have reached a milestone of sorts with my first novel which I am entitling GRACE NOTES. After twelve drafts, I think it is decent enough to push it under the doors of some of my friends for critique. Meanwhile, I will work on my query letter to entice agents near and far to fight over representing it. This is what I have plan to send to them:

Dear Ms. Smith,

In reading your blog I see that you represent authors of works similar to my literary novel, Grace Notes. In it Billy Mann, despite a moonstruck mother and alcoholic father, is an attentive big brother, popular athlete and talented musician. He is also the heartthrob of his pretty next-door neighbor, Evvie.

When driving home in a snowstorm Billy’s car strikes and kills her little sister. His life goes into a skid that doesn’t stop until he’s lost everything--his promising band, his nurturing mother, his friends and Evvie, who’d become his bride.

Billy replaces them with drugs, crime and an eight-year prison term. Evvie’s decision to leave breaks her heart as much as his; but she is pregnant and fears that life with him mirrors the same abusive path that destroyed her childhood.

After thirty years, Billy discovers his daughter, a classical violinist, who teaches him what his mother could never convey. It isn’t drugs or a stage that will give him the strength to win back everyone he’d catapulted from his life--it is the huge heart he’s always had.

Grace Notes is set in Detroit where a dying auto heritage is shadowed by endless turbulence but also great music. It tells of heart-wrenching trials like those endured by Jodi Piccoult’s childhood sweethearts in The Pact. My theme of music as healing force takes its inspiration from Andre Dubus III’s Bluesman. And themes of undying love and forgiveness echo Kristin Hannah’s True Colors.

I have been an independent bookstore owner, reported for my university newspaper and edited a Detroit weekly. I have been published in Women’s Day and other national magazines.

At 106,000 words, Grace Notes is complete. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Jacqueline Carney

Reflections on Motherhood, Perfection and Forgiveness

As some of you know I took an emotional plunge this spring and entered my novel, now in its 8th revision and NOT really ready for pitching to an editor, in Amazon's Amazing Breakthrough Novel Contest. Theoretically they accept 10,000 entries though they don't say how many actually enter.

The first phase eliminates all but 2,000 entries. The second phase eliminates all but 500. This is where my novel landed and I was pleasantly surprised. True confessions---I wanted to get some feedback from total strangers, specifically to the plot's potential and generally to my writing...which I know is amateurish at best. My writing is, however, improving and I do see light at the end of the endless tunnel.

Anyway, one thing this little exercise taught me was the power of the written word to reach people in ways I never expected. My novel contains a fair amount of pretty uncomfortable issues--alcoholism, child abandonment, homosexuality and incest. I did not set out to address these issues --my characters took me there and I did not think it fair to deny them their soap box. You might think this is strange but if you are a writer you will have a better understanding of this phenomenon.

The biggest reaction came to the alcohol and incest issues--mainly because the excerpt printed on Amazon contained such scenes. I was taken aback by how many persons have had experience with both of these human problems.

So, what is motherhood? And more importantly, how does it fail those it is supposed to nurture? There are as many answers to these two questions as there are mothers and children.

The bottom line is that even mothers, human ones that is, are human--yes, children, I hate to be the one to reveal such an overwhelming truth, but we are. This is not to say I am excusing what horrific or less than horrific failings most of us have as mothers--it is to say we need you to forgive us.

We need our children (and this can be extended to the most generic relationships) to accept us for what we are, make peace with us, and move on.

I think this is the essence of Mother's Day.

As a florist, which I was for 35 years, Mother's Day is by far the biggest holiday. Everyone has a mother. Children may only sneak out from under the woodwork on the second Sunday of every May--but they do sneak out. Let's be honest, some are driven by social pressure more than anything else. And, these were the customers who, I can admit now being retired, as a florist I looked upon with no small amount of skepticism.

But much of the country, in a collective quest for inner calm, recognizes their mothers and Mother's Day regularly and with a sense of compassion and affection and perhaps only a pinch of resentment over the eighteen or so years of putting up with our shortcomings.

I am not saying go out and buy your mother flowers, although that would help out the few remaining shop owners I knew. What I am saying is, if you feel that pinch (or more) of resentment, take a good hard look at it. You'll have to look inside to find its source and when you do, toss a rock at it. Surely, as your mother's child, you're perfect and will not miss your mark.

Then, when you feel a little better take another look inside. You might just find something about yourself that isn't so perfect either--you have no idea how it got there, but it did.

Then tell yourself that's okay. "If it's okay for Mom to be imperfect maybe its okay for me too."

And before you move on with the rest of your day, pick up one more rock, maybe a little larger this time, and kill two birds with it...the ones named 'Mom's Mistakes' and 'My Mistakes.'

Happy Mother's Day!

Exciting News about Amazon's Novel Awards--And a plea for your help!

I am very excited to announce that my novel, BREAK SONG, has made it to the quarter finals in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards!!!!

This is the writing world's equivalent of American Idol so now that I have made it past the original 10,000 entries to 2,000 and down to 500, I need your reviews to make it to the next level.

So, please, click on the link below and download the excerpt to my story and rate it. You can review it as well. My success depends on the number of good ratings. Hopefully there will be something in it that you find worth while!

My story is about a musician whose life takes a tailspin when his mother, Maria, abandons her family, but two things keep him on track--his childhood sweetheart, Evvie, and Maria's mandolin, which she'd taught him to play better than anyone in the Midwest. The band Adam forms has a promising future until his father destroys their recording contract.

The story follows Adam and Evvie in Detroit from the sixties to the present. Distraught after his band's breakup Adam turns to cocaine to soothe his soul and not even Evvie's affection can bring him back. He loses her to Michigan's north woods where she raises their child, and his addiction lands Adam in prison.

25 years later Adam is assaulted by his nemesis after a high school reunion and Evvie's lost letters surface. Now recovered from drugs, Adam reconciles with Evvie and his daughter he knew nothing about and he goes back to playing his music until his past has its final revenge.

So, here are the steps:

1. Click the following link to Review BREAK SONG
   
2. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001UG3CF8
   
3. If the link doesn't work copy and paste it into your browser.
4. The download is free and is accessible by clicking the button on the upper right corner. Sign up for free to become an Amazon member if you are not already.
5. Write your review.
6. After scrolling down to the bottom of the customer review section, click to create your own review.
7. Return to the above link to give me a review...hopefully five stars!
   
8. If you have any suggestions about my writing or the story line, I would love to hear your comments... write me at jacquelinecarney@sbcglobal.net.

Book Review: Water for Elephants

I have a thing about fog. While grey skies in Michigan take me into a hole that is difficult to deal with, fog intrigues me. Maybe it is its ethereal nature, as if by poking my finger into it the greyness disappears like air in a balloon. Maybe it is the calmness that it invokes.

Southwest Florida had a rare dose of extended fog early this month...it crawled in off the Gulf late one afternoon while I was driving home from the north and thought maybe a gigantic fire was raging in a palmetto forest but I could not smell smoke. It was like an opaque cocoon that both comforted and unnerved me and it didn't roll back out to sea for five more days.

About that time I finished reading Sara Gruen's WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, released in 2006,
which I would recommend to anyone. It is a delightfully romantic story set in the last depression
(to separate it from our current one!) told from the memory of 93 year old Jacob Jankowski whose parents are killed when he is finishing Veterinary School in New York. Though he had planned to join his father's thriving veterinary practice, Jacob learned not only that his parents had mortgaged everything they owned to send him to school but that even his father's practice was dissembled to pay their debts.

Penniless and unable to concentrate on his final exams Jacob runs off to seek solace and winds up on the train of a disfunctional circus at a time when any job at all, no matter how horrific, was worth keeping.

For seven years Jacob found his love of all creatures, his high moral standards and his passion for Marlena at life-threatening odds with his superiors whose personality issues ranged from
wanton narcissism to murderous greed.

Jacob is now a spunky old man whose mind is stronger than his body and who rails against the inane rules of the nursing home he calls home. He rarely recognizes his infrequent family visitors but remembers in finite detail his days in the circus. Sara Gruen deftly carries the story from Jacob's current frustrations back to his luscious recollections of what once was. His longing for his beloved Marlena, a beautiful equestrian and star of the show whom he eventually marries but who passes before him, sugar coats his memories that are not always so pleasant.

The third dominant character is Rosie, an elephant purchased for her promise to redeem the circus's failing revenues and who placidly endures her terrible abuse until her own sense compassion is uncontrollably violated.

What endeared me to this story was Sara's wonderful understanding of people and what motivates them to make bad choices. She juxtaposes horrendous cruelty against unbounded compassion but the last page left me with confidence that goodness is master and that all creatures, animal and human, deserve and benefit from it. Her research into a world of human and animal oddities that is foreign to most of us is thorough and her sense of humor softens the sharp edges of an often wicked world.

The circus world is a microcosm from our past but its 'rubes' and its stars teach lessons in WATER FOR ELEPHANTS that are universal and current with a pace that grabbed me within the first few pages and held me captive until the end.

Getting back to the fog...by the fifth day it began to unnerve me. The sun would peek out midday and then recede to let the greyness return. Maybe it was just to remind me of what I 'd escaped for two months of winter. Or, maybe it was to reassure me that fog is like a good read or the healing time spent writing--a lacuna that both embraces and tries to understand the sharp edges of the present.

Good Morning 2009

Well, it's here--2009. I have the same old New Year's resolutions I've had since bread was sliced mechanically but this year I also have some anticipations--some things I hope will happen.

So, in no particular order, here they are:
--that my novel, currently titled BREAK SONG, will be good enough to send to some patient friends to read...ideally soon enough to polish it and find an agent. WHEW...that's a big one.
--that Barack Obama will have a smooth transition into the White House.
--that my daughter, Jennifer, will pass the Massachusetts bar.
--that my daughter, Julie, will get a dozen new private violin students.
--that my daughter, Rebecca, will sell a dozen paintings.
--that my husband, Don, will perform a dozen times with his re-created rock band.
--that our country will begin to withdraw from Iraq.
--that my 60th birthday, and those of my peers, slide by in the company of good health, warm friends, fine wine, inspiring music and great conversation.
--that the world will return to an upward economic trend.

Tall order but nothing impossible.

I'd enjoy reading about what the rest of you are anticipating. Please share in the comment section of this post.

Monday Musings--Favorite Shoes

Since today is Monday, and not everyone is ready to jump right in to the work week on Mondays, I thought I would pose an exercise that might humor us, divert us from the news of the day, or perhaps give pause for reflection.

My question is: What is your favorite pair of shoes?

It is a fairly open ended question. They can be any pair you have owned but, as in my case, not necessarily have worn. They can be your ballet shoes when you were five years old, your Wellingtons, your saddle shoes (some might be dating ourselves here), your riding boots or whatever else you choose.

Then, tell us the story. If they are your favorite shoes, surely there is one.
Here is mine:

Grandma's Booties

I had two grandma's. Some people have none, some have half a dozen. I had two and my favorite one was Grandma Hilvers, my mother's mother. She lived in the same clapboard house on the first rise west of the Mississippi, where my mother grew up, in Dubuque Iowa.

Allow me to divert a minute. Two weeks ago, one of my brothers queried the rest of the family as to whether they remembered where that house was. Seems he recently met someone at work who hailed from Dubuque and the question arose. No one could come up with the answer despite spending at least a dozen summers there growing up. Two hours later the answer just popped into my head. Go figure. Hadn't written that address on an envelope in probably thirty years.

1460 Dodge Street, now cemented over by Highway 20 which runs east to Chicago and west through cities I recognized like Sioux City, Casper, Cody, Boise and stops at the Pacific Ocean in Yaquina Bay, Oregon...not far from Portland. I have a dear friend in Portland, have never been there, might follow Highway 20 in its entirety some day.

Anyway, the Hilvers family was basically impoverished. They didn't see it as a bad thing, but compared to my father's childhood with country clubs and fancy parties, the Hilvers' humble lifestyle with two entire families, grandparents, parents, and three kids, crammed into three bedrooms was substantially lower key. Every gift we received from Grandma and Grandpa Hilvers was endearingly hand-made including the booties I received when I was pregnant with my first daughter, Jennifer. They were so incredibly tiny I couldn't imagine they would ever fit a human, but they did.


And, as often happens with me, I lost track of them after our third daughter's first few months of life when I could no longer squeeze her tiny feet into the soft, cozy footware. I was sure I had packed them away but probably not as carefully as I should have, given their significance. My excuse was that I was a working mom, running my own flower business and raising three daughters, tending a husband, cooking, walking dogs, driving to soccer games and violin lessons, the whole nine yards.

When Jenny was a sophomore in college my husband and I decided expand our house, something we should have done years earlier but couldn't afford. To make a long story shorter many disasters befell us during this project including the wholesale deluge of our basement over our storage shelves in late September. I mean, we needed Noah's Ark just to navigate the waters that went straight from the grey, rain laden skies into our house with a force like Niagra Falls.

The clean-up process was a nightmare and, unfortunately, some of it was put off until after Christmas. The time frame for a florist from October through December 25 is hellacious.
So, in the calm of a dreary January Saturday I began to pull down the boxes of memories that still lay on the storage shelves. With trepidation I opened one, now slightly dusted with mold, to find layer upon layer of baby clothes, laundered, neatly folded and layered with tissue. Most of them were ruined, which broke my heart. But for some strange reason both Grandma Hilvers' baby booties and the christening gown she had hand sewn and embroidered, survived relatively unscathed.

You would have thought, for all the happy tears I shed, that I'd discovered a million dollars tucked away for a rainy day and then forgotten, when in fact it was a rainy day that had spared something that is worth a whole lot more.

If you have a pair of favorite shoes, tell us about them in the comment area of my blog.
I'd love to read about them!

Age, Dogs and Pomagranates

Three good things happened yesterday.

1. The New York Times reported that 60 is the new 40 (in terms of age, that is). Since I will turn 60 in a little over three months I am happy to know I am still 39! Better yet, I might actually accomplish what I now know I want to do when I grow up.

2. Ratchet, the mongrel befriended by Army Spc. Gwen Beberg, 28, of Minneapolis, was picked up Sunday by an animal rescue group and will be re-united with his human companion back in the states. The story underlines the special role dogs play in preserving the mental health of soldiers in combat. It also points attention at the military policy against keeping pets.

According to the AP story, "Baghdad Pups has brought 56 dogs and six cats to the U.S. to be with their owners since February. The group says it is both rescuing animals who face abuse in Iraq, as well as helping soldiers who benefit from the bond developed with the animals."
You can learn more about Baghdad Pups at: http://www.baghdadpups.com.

And, if you care to comment on the military's policy towards keeping pets in combat zones you can learn more about it at: http://info@mars-savehaven.net.


3. Pomagranates are in season...healthy, delicious additives for salads, yoghurt and muffins!