Tag: moods

Soundtrack for Gaia’s Hands

Every time I write a book, I put together a playlist (or as us old-timers call it, a mixtape). I try to capture the book’s moods in a list of music that plays for between half and hour and an hour.

The style of the playlist varies by the moods and general tone of the book. Voyageurs, a time-travel mystery of sorts, goes from a late 1880’s German wind ensemble place to Indigo Girls and Hoobastank. The energy of Kat Pleskovich and Ian Akimoto’s Buddhist calm exchange importance on the mixtape.

Gaia’s Hands, on the other hand, is a mystical exploration of permaculture, love, and the greening of the earth. The soundtrack is funneled through Jeanne Beaumont’s experience of having been young in the 70’s and introduced to a wide range of music. Here’s that playlist:

Voices — Cheap Trick
Brass in Pocket — Pretenders
Big Yellow Taxi — Joni Mitchell
Doctor My Eyes — Jackson Brown
Ancient Forest — Clannad
The Host of Seraphim — Dead Can Dance
The Book I Read — Talking Heads
For What it’s Worth — Buffalo Springfield
Mother Earth (Provides for Me) — Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

I would love it if you could share playlists with me and the reason you use the playlists!

Seasons

When I’m not writing, teaching, or petting one of the four (!) cats who own the house, I garden. Specifically, I grow edible plants — not just the summer garden of tomatoes and squash, but herbs and edible flowers and little-known vegetables from past times. In fact, I have a rule in my garden: everything I plant, even landscaping plants, should be some sort of edible. (The plants that predate me aren’t edible, and I leave them be because they were there before I was.)

In the end of summer rounding toward fall, my garden has rioted. I didn’t expect the trombocino squash vines to overwhelm everything to the point where I can’t see anything else, but there you go. The squash themselves measure over a foot long. Spiny achocha and teeny cucomelon weave in and out of the squash vine, and if I bravely stick my hand in among the bristly vines, I can pick ripe tomatoes the size of two fists. The basil? There’s one brave plant in a corner.

In a month or so, the frost will turn this overgrown vegetable garden into clumps and twists of blackened, wilted vines, and I will plot where to grow everything next year so that it doesn’t strangle each other. In the winter I will dream of plant catalogs, and in the spring, I will plant new plants and pray they make it through the summer heat.

This is Jeanne Beaumont’s world as a botanist. Seasons mean that the whole world changes, subtly in the tropics, more noticeably the farther one moves from the equator.  She designs food gardens that go dormant through the winter and still provide food in the summer, year after year.

Jeanne’s life also follows the seasons in the book. In the spring, she meets Josh and begins a friendship with him after falling into bed with him. In summer, Josh leaves and returns to her like a fickle bird. In autumn, the action is dark, following threats to Jeanne, while winter explores holidays and family. The following Memorial Day, spring creeping into summer, Jeanne and Josh plant an extensive food forest with frightening results.

Their ages also denote the seasons — Jeanne representing autumn with her age and experience; Josh moving from spring to the beginnings of summer.

I didn’t know I had done this at first — thank goodness for subconscious! But how could I change this serendipitous occurence once I started to notice it?

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.