Imaginary Critters I Have Known

At age 3, I could not talk. I could only utter “Ducka ducka ducka.” I think I cemented my reputation as the “weird kid” at that time, and it has never really gone away. I’ve gotten used to it.

My one-word vocabulary did not impair my creativity. I would lay at night in my bed, my hands becoming puppets, their dialog high grumbles or low grumbles. They would tell jokes to each other, something like this:

“RRRGGRRRGG.”

“rrrggrrgggrg”

“hehehehehehehehe”

High comedy.

By the time I arrived at Kindergarten, I had gained language and lost some of the playfulness — probably because my parents instructed me not to talk with my imaginary critters in public. I was still weird, but not too weird.

So, for several years, I exchanged my own imaginary menagerie for a precocious vocabulary where I used words like “flabbergasted” in fourth grade. Still weird, but not too weird.

At age 28, I discovered my imaginary playmates again. I dated someone who was, in a word, silly. My imaginary critters flourished. Let me introduce you:

The Spidies. Imagine your hands crawling up someone’s back like spiders. (My sister had a spelling list in third grade with the words “tiny, silent, spider). They talk in squeaky voices, except for Freudian spidie, who misinterprets every phallic symbol in a bored professor voice. My favorite is very tiny very silent spidie, who is very shy.

Mr. Snail. Make your hand into a snail with index and middle finger sticking out. He talks in a slow, mellifluous voice. He has daredevil tendencies, enjoying slamdancing and mountain climbing — S-L-O-W-L-Y. His goal is to run a marathon.

Cute Fluffy Wide-Eyed Things That Love You. These are fifth-dimentional creatures made of iridescent fluff, like round dandelion silk. (For the Trekkies out there, think of Cute Fluffies as the souls of Tribbles.) We can’t see them. Pantomime shaping these with your hands while chortling or cooing, then throwing them at someone with a perky “pop!” People usually laugh. Sometimes they raise eyebrows.

The Monsters. Make your hand into a fist. Big Mean Monster growls; Beefcake yells “Beefcake” in a village idiot voice, and Little Brother says “Grr” in a much less convincing voice. They all will fall into a happy puddle if you hug them or tell them you love them.

I didn’t know if I could write this. I didn’t know if I could admit sending Mr. Snail across a dinner table to drink Richard’s coffee (Mr. Snail had ADHD, so he falls asleep) or walking the spidies up my niece’s back when she was six (Robyn, this one’s for you!). I didn’t know if I could admit throwing cute fluffies at my students on request when we worked the soup kitchen together back in Oneonta (I’m too scared to throw them at students here).

I’m still a little weird, because my inner child is at the surface. Maybe I’m a lot weird. But imagine what this does for my imagination and for my writing!

Incidentally, my husband wrote a children’s story about Mr. Snail and a freshly-rescued Augustus T. Cat — who really existed — so imagination can be contagious. Would you like to catch some?

I’ve killed my darlings thoroughly dead

You may have heard that no less than Allan Ginsberg (or Faulkner, or Eudora Welty, or Stephen King) said about writing, “Kill your Darlings”. In actuality, a man named Arthur Quiller-Couch in 1915, and what he actually said was, “Murder Your Darlings”. (Slate, 2017). By “darlings”, he meant those cherished ideas that the writer put in the first draft of the book that don’t improve plots, themes, or readability.

Yesterday, I thoroughly killed my darlings in Gaia’s Hands, my first book and the one that just went through its latest round of rejections. Knowing what I know now about plot, theme, and readability, I proceeded to take my knife and do the following to the first third of the book:

1) Reduce the number of “first person characters” from four back to the original two. The story really belongs to Josh and Jeanne anyway.
2) Tweak out parts of the story that related to Eric and Annie’s first person viewpoint. Many words were lost.
3) Put more emphasis on the escalating threat to Jeanne and her reasoning not to tell anyone. If there’s a “main” character of the remaining two, it’s Jeanne.

There’s a lot of work to do, because I’m likely to lose 1/3 of this book cutting out some of the “fun” but uninformative scenes, and will have to fill in with things that better advance the story.

It’s going to be impossible to show you the changes, because it’s difficult to point out what’s missing and why this hunk of deleted prose deserved to die. Instead, I will give you the first threat Jeanne receives, which seems really par for the course for an academic:

Jeanne arrived home to check her email, and noticed among the beginning of semester administrivia and invitations to write in dubious online journals an email from S. Troll. Figuring that some ag student was feeling his oats and wanted to troll her anonymously before classes started, she opened the email with an indulgent smile.

She realized she shouldn’t have as she read the terse missive:

Dr. Beaumont,

There are ways of getting around problems. One of these is to eliminate the problem. My advice: lay low lest you stick out.

Jeanne had had threats before. At a large regional university, students threatened to sue for grades, get their parents involved in an academic dishonesty charge, and one student even stood on her porch declaring that he would “do anything” to get a better grade. This was just a troll, just an idle threat — he hadn’t even threatened anything.

The threat seemed so fake, so melodramatic, so empty. At the same time — it was clearly a threat. And she felt a creeping dread curdle her stomach. She hadn’t felt that dread since her childhood, from an incident she had buried from memory.

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She deleted the email with a sense of satisfaction.

"I am coming dangerously close to killing you off in my novel."

No, honestly, I’m not.
I know I’ve said this before in this blog, but a poem I wrote the other day might have made people wonder who it was about. A couple of you might have thought it was about you, in which case, we have a far more interesting relationship than I can recall!

If you’re ever wondering if something you’ve read from your writer friend is about you, first, ask two questions:

1) Is it about me?
2) Do I identify with the character/situation?

If you really want to know the answer to the first question, ask the author. Luckily, most characters have been shaped from several different people the writer has known. Most situations have been shaped by many situations the writer knows. I know of only one case where a character was directly created from a real person and given a bit of a whooping, and boy, did he deserve it. Most authors do not want to kill you off in their next novel.

If you want to know the answer to the second question — that’s more interesting, isn’t it? Writers want you to identify with what they’re writing, both good and bad. They want you to feel the love, the happiness, or the frustration of a situation. They want you to see both the hero you could become and the villain you might become, the angel and the devil and the screwed-up person in-between.

Writers want to transform you.

If you ask yourself “Do I identify with the character/situation?” and you answer, “Yes”, rejoice. You have been given a gift that only those who truly look at themselves can claim, the gift that opens you to self-acceptance.

Magician

A bit darker than the last poem:

Magician,
I’m the only other one in the world
When you call me from the audience
And pull a flower from behind my ear,
Ruffling my hair.

I’m the only other one in the world
When you play for me,
In a dark room,
showing me illusions.

I’m the only one
Till the show must go on,
Elsewhere.

When the curtain falls,
You have thrilled everyone
But touched no one.

A Short Poem

This, as always, may get revised. I like how it started being about one thing and ended up about something else:

Ephemera

I do not see pictures in my head,

Or not as you do – this old slide

Of yellowed Kodachrome slides past my mind

I see hair or expression, never both.

I stare at you when you are here with me,

I memorize your patterns: swinging hair,

Glasses, a squint, a laugh, a lumbering walk,

All of those together equal you.

I fear to lose you in a crowd;

Too many people almost look like you

I live on faith that you’ll come back to me

The Stories We Tell: Oral Tradition

Before the development of writing systems, storytelling was one of the only methods of communicating the wonder of the world. Storytellers would regale the gathered people with tales about gods, about successful or unsuccessful hunts, about their history. Someone in the next generation would memorize the stories so he could take the storyteller’s place around the fire someday.

The tradition continued around the world even after the invention of writing, with the Gaelic shanachie, family stories at holiday gatherings, sermons in churches all over the world. Even social gatherings have their share of swapped stories.

I grew up in a family with a rich oral tradition. My father’s side, a mix of Welsh, French Canadian, and Ojibwe, told stories about their lifestyle, which centered around the North Woods and hunting, reckless adventures growing up poor in Milwaukee, and a certain amount of bravado and subsequent error. My mother’s family told stories with word play and puns, with my grandmother serving as the straight man.

A hunting story on my father’s side:

Grandpa had decided to teach his sons how to hunt pheasant. “Boys,” he said, “What we do is line up in this field here, and spread out aways from each other. The dog’ll flush up a pheasant, then each of us has a try to shoot the pheasant flying by.

“Unless it’s a hen pheasant — they’re the brown ones. You’re not supposed to shoot hen pheasants. So if you see a hen, shout down the line so that nobody else tries at it. Got it?”

All three boys nod.

It was a bad day hunting — the hunting dog stayed listless and quiet. The spirits of the hunters drooped, because the pheasant was to be their dinner.

Suddenly the dog yipped, running toward a tussock. A pheasant burst out of the grass.

The youngest, my Uncle Larry, who was no more than four and wasn’t even armed, yelled “Hen” in a quavering voice.

The middle son, my Uncle Ron, at 7, again not armed, yelled “Hen!” miserably.

My father, age 9, kept his shotgun down and sighed, “Hen!”

Grandpa thought for just a moment, raised his gun and shot —

“Hen! Heh heh heh.”

The family had supper that night.

A story from Mom’s side of the family:

Seventeen-year-old Aunt Marie approaches Grandma with a proclamation: “I’m going to marry Wayne.”

“I forbid it,” Grandma snapped.

“Then I’ll elope,” Aunt Marie countered.

“You can’t elope!”

“You watermelon!”

(If you don’t get this, read it aloud.)

I have changed these stories by writing them down. I have tried to use the language of the people involved, but my writing techniques have crept in. In the spoken story, I could merely use tone of voice and gesture and not provided cues to emotion. However, these changes would have happened even in the transmission of the stories from generation to generation. For example, a Native American cautionary tale about white animals being sacred, one passed down in my family, has morphed into a story about a hunter shooting a white deer and being arrested by Wisconsin Conservation.

I have changed these stories by writing them down in a way that freezes them in time and place. When you read a written story like these, you read an “official” version of the story, and you will go back and read this again to get the story right. It has no way to adapt to the needs of the generations to come — a change in the settings, a change in the consequences. Grandpa will always be the one to shoot the hen. The elopement story will always be between a mother and daughter.

This is why, when someone suggests I collect my family stories and save them so others can read them, I am reluctant to do so.

Dancing with Words

Writing involves the desire to dance with words.

Novel/essay writing resembles choreographed dance, with steps defined. The writer hones her ability to hit the steps just so, so that she doesn’t detract from the feeling the dance is supposed to convey.

Poetry writing looks more like interpretive dance, where there’s less direction yet even more need for precision, as poetry and interpretive dance both seek to convey impressions that crawl into the subconscious and affect the reader from the inside.

Lyrics derive their power from their deep roots in the chants of the oldest peoples. Through rhythms and melodies, they become a common prayer to God or nature or life itself, one shared from mitochondrial Eve.

Technical writing has the most regimented steps, seeking as it does the utmost clarity of thought. Its structure of “tell the reader what you’re going to say, say it, summarize by telling the reader what you said” thoughtfully takes the reader through a journey of education and provides signposts to where they can find the information again quickly.

In all of these, the words are important. There’s a difference between dancing the nae-nae, slam dancing, grapevining through a Jewish folkdance, or mincing through a minuet. The differences in written forms comes from the words chosen. The words present the music for the dance. A thought exercise: imagine a couple making love through Pink Floyd’s “Run Like Hell”, or Ed Sheerhan’s “Shape of You”, or Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, or “Latcho Drom” by Tony Gatlif (if you don’t know some of these, listen to a preview on iTunes). Different moods, different feels, right? In writing, the words chosen represent the music.

Choices made in active vs. passive verb forms, length of sentences, point of view (omniscient, limited omniscient, or first-person) change the steps of the dance. Some of these things, like passive verb form and sentences all the same length, put stumbles in the step.

In conclusion, writers dance with words — and invite their readers to the dance.

Writing, Teaching, and The Golden Age of Chicago’s Children’s Television

I must confess that I write these blogs off the top of my head. I edit as I go along, but I don’t prepare ahead of time:

“Richard, what should I write about today?” I grumble as I stare at the computer screen.

“Why don’t you talk about how TV influences your writing and teaching?” Richard inquires, leaning into his bowl of cereal as if properly slurping ramen noodles.

“I haven’t watched TV since fifth grade. Netflix doesn’t count.” It’s true — my attention span varies from too short to too long, depending on the situation. Writing — long attention span. Watching — about the length of a 30-second commercial.

“Chicago improv,” Richard replies as he slurps the remainder of the milk from his cereal bowl.

Ah! When most people think about Chicago improv, they think of comedy clubs, from the obscure to Second City. Improv remains one of the delights of Chicago comedy. However, the Chicago improv scene extended itself to the lowliest of mediums — children’s television on local TV stations like WFLD and WGN. I lived in the “Super Boonies”, the rural towns just close enough to hook onto Chicago stations by cable, so I grew up with Chicago’s rich children’s programming.

By this, I mean Bozo and Cookie at the circus, who improvised whole scenes and sometimes cracked each other up to the point where they had to stop the scene temporarily. I mean Frazier Thomas, who deadpanned erudite conversations with a goose puppet — and had to interpret his beak clicks for the audience, which meant he improvised for himself and the goose. I mean Ray Rayner, who not only entertained the children during the go-to-school time slot, but quipped for the adults and relayed school cancellations. And Bill Jackson, my first crush at age 7, who served as the mayor of a town full of eccentric cartoonish residents, including a clay statue that wanted to be reimaged on a daily basis, a contrary dragon, and a kid named Weird. I cried when BJ’s show went off the air, but luckily it re-entered the station’s lineup under a different guise.

My imagination lived in Chicago’s children’s shows. I subconsciously picked up the patter and the timing and the riffing off each other that made Chicago children’s programming more involving than much of what adult TV had to offer. I learned that one could connect with an audience by understanding what the audience thought as they watched and voicing that thought. I intuited that there was a fine line between gently teasing the audience and insulting them. I don’t know when or how I learned all this, but I know where every time I stumble across clips of Bozo’s Circus, BJ and Dirty Dragon show, The Ray Rayner Show, or Garfield Goose and Friends on YouTube.

As I mentioned above, I improvise when teaching. I keep a loose script with the “what” of what I want to teach, and as illustrative examples come up, I use them. I act concepts out occasionally. Improvisation requires that one does not censor oneself, does not accept feeling stupid, and lives completely in the moment. Introspection waits for later. (Note: I do work hard at censoring a small list of things: opinions on politics not supported by data, and swearing. I do not always succeed at not swearing, given that my French Canadian ancestors considered swearing as punctuation.)

I improvise when I write this blog, somewhat. I write now and read it over later and tweak a few things. But like classic improv (“Whose Line is it Anyway”), I start with an idea and have to flesh it out.

Writing novels is the least like improvisation. I may write the rough draft spontaneously through fits and starts, but editing requires refining, tightening, and sometimes even eliminating a plot line. And sometimes, that’s not enough. I’m looking at my first book, which came back from a prospective agent with the comment “The time stamps take me out of the story”. The time stamps she refers to are the fact that the story has four points of view and we need to move between the four. I can see this could be confusing, but what can I do about it? Rewriting the whole book from the beginning is as far from improvising as I could get. And I love improvising. It’s a dilemma — needing to step from a strength to a weakness to get to my goal of getting published.

Random Thoughts

I’ve been having trouble writing over the last few days because: 1) I’ve been feeling down; 2) I’ve been starting the less obvious beginning-of-semester prep (going through my work wardrobe, setting up my calendar, accepting 8 meetings for this week, cleaning up my chaotic mess of an office; fielding emails from students who MUST get into my courses at the last minute.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. Here are my random thoughts:

It’s easy to feel down with the events in the US lately: domestic terror from white supremacist groups (that the government refuses to call terrorism), the obvious differences between how a white person like me and people of color have always been treated in this country; a president who shows all the signs of sociopathic narcissism and megalomania slowly tearing down the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

As a Quaker, I have been schooled in nonviolent resistance; I just have a wonky health issue right now (side effects from meds) that prevents me from marching. What can I do? Speak truth to power (while not getting political at school); hold the supremacists in the Light; take care of myself.

What can you do for yourself? Do what you can; do what you’re called to do; check your leadings in the Light.

I spent part of the weekend feeling lonely and isolated. How could this happen in the era of Facebook? Facebook works very well to touch base with the people you like and the people you love, but it’s not very nurturing. You can be one of a number of someone’s Facebook friends, but if there’s nothing to your contact but emojis and memes and likes, do you truly feel connected to those people? I suspect this is why we see so many “tell me how we met in one word”-like memes; everyone feels the void.

How do we fill the void? By reaching out. I remember when Leonard Nimoy, about a week before he died, got on Twitter and broadcast to the void that he was adopting nieces and nephews. Think about how wonderful that is! I am now one of his nieces, and I’m grateful for that.

Several people reached out with warm fuzzies, prayers, and hugs over the past few days. Thank you! I need those sometimes, because stress ups the ante for quick-descending depression. But I also need it because nobody should have to live in the void.

I choose to live my life deeply. Connect with me at the depth to which you are comfortable. Coffee is a good start.

What do these have to do with writing? These tap into my two favorite themes in my writing — diversity, equality, and connection. This is part of the reason I get so frustrated with not being picked up by an agent or publisher — writing on these themes are (I think) part of my calling, and if I don’t get picked up, I cannot change the world even in my little way. Yes, I find fulfillment in just writing, but if you don’t tell the world you love it, will the world know?

Just random thoughts.

Last Few Days of Peace

Next week, the faculty and staff at my university make their translation to the school year. On the train, I watched my calendar next week fill with meetings: All-employee meeting, all-faculty meeting, division meeting, back-to-school picnic, training for new software, fireworks on Sunday…

Although some of these meetings will be high on the educational model of the week and the continued poor outlook over education funding, I will still be optimistic — it’s hard being pessimistic when facing a new school year.

Those of you out there who have children understand the rituals behind the beginning of the school year: the shopping for back-to-school clothes and shoes and supplies, the beginning-of-school introduction letters from the teachers, the first day of school photo in front of the house with the neighborhood kids … to be fair, some of us didn’t have those things; some had second-hand clothes and shoes, some didn’t stand in front of the porch for the beginning-of-school year photo — yet we stayed optimistic, because the year became shiny and new the moment we walked into that building and met the new teacher, if only for a moment.

Many of us teachers (PreK to professor) feel the itch to shop at Office Max in August just because. We re-clean our offices to prepare for the school year. Many cultures have cleaning and shopping rituals to herald the new year. Faculty have the same, but the new year starts on the first day of school. Our class rosters have come out, and some of us will send them a beginning-of-school note to introduce ourselves.

I will prepare by enacting my rituals. I will clean and organize my office. I will travel down to St. Joe and buy another teaching outfit and maybe some new pens at OfficeMax. I’ll make sure my online course access is trouble-free. I will attend the meetings. I will let myself feel the shininess.

******

What about my writing? I still write during the school year. I wake up early — and I mean early — in the morning to get writing done. Sometimes I write during coffee hour on Friday when nobody shows up.

I will write. I will find inspiration to write.