Saturday, July 25, 2009

I Remember series...and giveaway


I received a recommendation for Writing Down The Bones~Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg last year and promptly purchased it and it was read in a week. I did many of her prompts in the book and they opened up so many new thoughts to me. Very fun, and exciting, to write about something you feel deeply about but didn't even know you felt that way until someone encourages you to write about it. (Something I'm sure all writers try to help others experience)~ If you haven't read this amazing book, you should definitely, run out and get it! Right now!! Run!

Goldberg's WDTB has a chapter entitled: A List of Topics for Writing Practice. Goldberg says, "Sometimes we sit down to write and can't think of anything to write about. The blank page can be intimidating, and it does get boring to write over and over again for ten minutes of practice, 'I can't think of what to say. I can't think of what to say.' It's a good idea to have a page in your notebook where you jot down, as they come to you, ideas of topics to write about."
She goes on to give you some prompts to get you started. One in particular caught my eye and sparked my imagination. It was this:
(pg 22 WDTB Goldberg)
'Begin with "I remember." Write lots of small memories. If you fall into one large memory, write that. Just keep going...If you get stuck, just repeat the phrase "I remember" again and keep going.'
I began to think about this lately and revisited it in one of my blog posts. I've got so many more that I have already written. I will go back to those "just keep writing" entries in my notebook and edit/adjust so that I can continue my I Remember posts. Who knows how many will come of it. Writing then is very freeing and at times wonderful! Some of the memories are welcomed and others of course take you to a dark place. Either way it's a freeing experience.

I thought in particular of, what I think would be a really fun and exciting way to bring others into this series with me. This is what I propose:

I will give away a copy of Writing Down The Bones~Freeing The Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg to the person who writes the most thought provoking, touching, memorable "I remember" essay...lets say no more than 500-600 words. The deadline will be September 1, 2009 and I will announce the winner (possibly 2-3 winners, depending on the responses) by September 15, 2009.

Here's how you submit: just post your essay as a comment to this post.
I'm so excited!!! Okay, so what do you guys think? Anyone up for it? It should be lots of fun and a chance to get your juices flowing when you're stuck.

Happy Writing!
Lydia


Thursday, July 23, 2009

Bedtime Qualms


Somewhere between the ages of 18 months and 29 months, my daughter has:


1) learned how to open doors

2) pee in a potty

3) talk A LOT


All of these combined make for a child that won't go to bed. Well eventually, but after much work!

Our bedtime routine: I usually get her into bed around 8:30 or 9pm, read (what feels like 25 books), take her potty, brush her teeth, go back to the bedroom, lay her down, say our prayers together, turn on her soothing music, dim her lights, do our "I love yous", hugs, kisses (from each family member, including our dog Bordeaux), and then close her door. Sometimes she fusses a little bit but most often she's fairly quiet, laying there, storing up energy, in order to start the real bedtime routine.

~Cut to ten minutes later~


Uttered from the most precious mouth ever, we hear "Mommy" or "Daddy" followed by "I pee pee" or "I poo poo." So we take her back to the bathroom and the entire potty process (which is usually a good seven to ten minutes long due to the fact that our 2 1/2 year old has mastered the art of stalling), then we're back in bed a second time, hugs, kisses, I love yous are repeated, "night night", door shuts.

During the following ten minutes I start to relax (rather silly of me really), have began to do some reading, writing, or just plain vegging in bed with hubby. Oh the joy! Knowing your child is comfy, safe, and tucked in for the night is a wonderful feeling.


~Cut to ten (maybe fifteen) minutes later~


"Mommy...Daddy, I pee pee, I pee pee." Now mind you, she's wearing a pull-up to bed still because we haven't completely finished potty training. So when she says she has to go we listen, even though, I really want to let her just go in her pull-up. It's not a good idea because every mother knows that during potty training consistency is the most important part. However, patience is the most tasking part. How she's able to hold her pee pee and even poo poo for intermittent potty visits as the moment of bed time is still a small mystery (babies must go to some secret society stalling school before the potty training starts).

Again, after second potty visit in last twenty or so minutes it's time to lay my sweet down into her bed a third time with all the vigor of our original bedtime routine (kisses, hugs, I love yous and the whole bit). The door shuts and I slowly wind back down into my little piece of bliss hoping that sheer exhaustion will gently guide (if not hold down) my sweet child.


~Cut to ten minutes later~


This time seems different...has it happened? Has she actually fallen asleep? As the twenty minute line has passed I'm almost positive she's amid her first dream. Just then, I hear a door open (listening closely because I'm positive it can't be my lovely...she's fast asleep by now)...then...I hear some banging and thrashing in the bathroom. I must explore. In the bathroom I find my child, with poo all over and a proud, gleeful smile across her face. "I poo pooed Mommy!!!" she exclaims. I can't help but smile and congratulate her. After all she's my baby, but she's growing up so quickly. These bedtime qualms, although exhausting, won't last much longer. Soon she won't need me as much.


During the next ten minutes I give her a good cleaning and sanitizing and then again, place her into bed. This time I can tell it's the last time, she's pooed and peed herself empty and her eyes are droopy. With my daughter, she sucks her two middle fingers on her left hand when she's ready...speaks slowly and so sweetly. "I love you the most," I say. "I love you the most," she repeats.


So now it's a little after ten usually and the bedtime routine as come to it's conclusion. Any idea of writing or reading is out the window and I'm down for the count. Even so, the thing is, with all the work that goes into making, carrying, birthing, and raising a child, it is the most rewarding, fantastic experience a person can be privileged to have. I wouldn't trade it for anything.






Here's to: my Amelia - potty training - and the every night Bedtime Qualms!!

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Random Thoughts

Before there was texting, twitter and all other forms of computerized conversation, abbreviation was reserved for quick note taking and list making. Now though, it's a form of communication that includes letters and numbers, sometimes even punctuations that form faces that are supposed to equate emotion.

For example: B4 there was txtg & twtr & all other frms of pc convs, abb. was rsrved 4 quck nte takg & lst tkg. :-)

Crazy - through one generation, we have managed to belittle the beautiful English language into mere letters. What would Virginia Woolf, T.S. Elliot, Emily Dickinson, and Ernest Hemingway say?

Instead of words expressing emotions, a complex human response to various conditions, we've replaced the with: ;-) (wink, playful,) :-( (sad) :-O (shocked) ;-P (tongue out, silly) :-/ (confused, upset, embarrassed) :-D (happy, joy).

Reminds me of when I was in grammar school and all of us kids made words out of the numbers on the screen of a calculator. (8008= BOOB) (1134=hell (upside down). We thought we were so clever, now we've lost all wit to simply save time.

I'm by no means saying I'm not just as guilty of this, I send out tweets and texts every day of my life with absolutely no vowels. I myself have contributed to this phenomenon. Saving time while still communicating is better than no communication at all. Right?!

A thought I needed to voice

I'm sort of lost lately between my reasons for wanting to write. On one hand, I want to write for the art of it. On the other hand, I want to as a means to make some kind of income in this horrible economy as a stay at home mother. On the other hand, or I suppose we're on feet now, I want to write to be read. This is new for me. I've always wanted to write to share myself with others. Help them to feel and see things in a new way, a way they have never felt or seen before. This was always how I felt about writing, unwaveringly. Now, I'm torn between all the other reasons and feel like I've sold out on myself. Not a good feeling.

My hope? To write for the art, for the capability of sharing myself with others in an honest and moving way, while, being read and therefore making some income for our family.

hmmmmph!

Saturday, July 4, 2009

Signs I need some sort of REATREAT!!

1) I'm angry with love bugs - they get more action than I do lately and they feel the need to do it on me, near me, or around me. Little basards!

2) My daughters naptime is something I secretly hope for every morning when I open my eyes.

3) My husbands breathing pisses me off.

4) Randomly I want to rip off someones face, sometimes they're loved ones, other times strangers, I don't discriminate.

5) I'm forgetful, weepy, pissed, irrational, emotional, and feel as though being in a coma might not be...so bad.

6) I beg for a disease or sickness that will force me into the hospital for a week or so, just to get some sleep and have food brought to me in bed.

7) I long for lonlieness.

8) I actually pray for #6.

9) Hate the sound of the words: mommy, Lydia, or Baby (husbands nickname for me), when it's uttered in regards to summoning me.

10) I get completely crazy (see #5) when the coffee table or chaise are out of line with the rest of the furniture.

11) I'm cussing (not something I do on a regular basis)...honestly this one was an afterthought of writing this list.

Friday, July 3, 2009

I remember (part one)...

I remember snowy days in Idaho. Waking up to beautiful silence. Outside my window, pure untainted snow.I remember leaving Idaho many times, sometimes for fun, but mostly for crazy reasons. I remember leaving for Oregon once I had left my ex-husband. I remember leaving another time, for Las Vegas, to marry said ex-husband. We left at four in the afternoon on a weekday to go start our life together. It would be the beginning of something sad and lonely. I remember a few days after we were married, being slapped across the face by said ex-husband. I remember the moment, that moment, that I had made the biggest mistake of my life.

I remember going to sleep with the sound of the Oregon Coast seeping in through my apartment window. Smelling the cool and wet fishy air. That was absolutely a dream. I remember my first night, in my own place, at twenty-six years old. I had never had my own space (besides my bedroom in my parents house) so this was very scary but more exciting. I remember walking on that perfect beach with the tide around my toes.

I remember the exact second in time that I realized that I definitely did see a positive sign on the pregnancy test. I remember the first time I heard my unborn babies heartbeat. I was alone with the midwife. I was wearing red, a red dress, pulled all the way up over my stretch pants to expose my belly. I didn't care, it was the most amazing, breathtaking sound I have ever heard. I remember the first time I felt my baby kick hard for the first time. I was startled and it made me say "OH." I remember the sheer and absolute of child birth, 'they' say you forget, but 'they' lie! Nevertheless I want to do it again. I remember the first time my daughter said "mama" - her first word (as it should be).

I remember the first time I got paid to write. I still have that $13.00 check framed. For an article I wrote for a college paper.

I remember the night I found out that one of my dearest friends had been in a horrible car accident. We weren't sure if she would make it through the night.

I remember so many things...moments in time that stand out in my life thus far...these were just a few...more to come.

Women, Fiction and the Voice of Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1814 when she was only nineteen years old, having grown up in a household vibrant with writers’ energy all around her. Her father was William Godwin, a well-known author, and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was also a writer and predominant feminist. Although coming from such a background, Mary Shelley was forced to publish her first novel, Frankenstein, anonymously. Women at this time were appreciated largely for their ability to birth babies and fulfill their duties as scripted by the men in their lives. Indeed, John Langdon Davies warns women in A Room Of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, “that when children cease to be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary” (112). In a regulated culture such as this, many women writers were unable to publish their writings under their own names, or, quite frankly, at all. As a consequence of this, women writers began writing in a male rather than female voice in order to fool the audience and therefore become accepted. Woolf suggests in A Room of One’s Own, that since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial.’ And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction…One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation. She was admitting that she was ‘only a woman,’ or protesting that she was ‘as good as a man.’…She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others (73-4).
Virginia makes a valid point in her statement. Men and women are distinct in the way they think and live. They make decisions based on different ways of seeing the world. Therefore it makes sense that their writing styles would be different. It is as if, when writing Frankenstein, Shelley was in constant conflict with the feminine voice that was trying to escape but being held back, muzzled in some respect by the male voice that the public demanded. These gender-coded contrasts are striking and numerous.
In Frankenstein, when the monster is narrating his journey to Victor Frankenstein, he discusses at length his encounters with the De Lacey family. Shelley uses beautiful, poetic language to write portions of the monster’s regaling yet abruptly changes her tone mid-text, causing the narration to become cold and unconcerned seeming. For example, when the monster sees the family members one by one for the first time, he describes their appearance. Shelley’s linguistic style in this section might be considered as “feminine.” When the monster sees the young girl, he describes her as having a “gentle demeanor” looking “patient yet sad” (107). This is a lovely way of describing a character rather than simply saying the young girl was quiet and seemed upset. Further on in this same section, when the monster is telling Frankenstein how he felt while watching this family, he says:
The young girl was occupied in arranging the cottage; but presently she took something out of a drawer, which employed her hands, and sat down beside the old man, who taking up an instrument, began to play, and to produce sounds sweeter than the voice of the thrush or the nightingale. It was a beautiful sight, even to me, poor wretch! who had never beheld aught beautiful before. The silver hair and benevolent countenance of the aged cottager won my reverence while the gentle manners of the girl enticed my love. He played a sweet mournful air, which I perceived drew tears from the eyes of his amiable companion, of which the man took no notice, until she sobbed audibly; he then pronounced a few sounds, and the fair creature, leaving her work, knelt at his feet. He raised her, and smiled with such kindness and affection that I felt sensations of peculiar and overpowering nature: they were a mixture of pain and pleasure, such as I had never before experienced, either from hunger or cold, warmth or food; and I withdrew from the window, unable to bear these emotions. (108)
A rush of feeling and sensitivity move through this piece, enabling the reader to relate to the monster’s pain, joy and confusion. Shelley creates a tone here, overflowing with warmth and comfort. The monster uses words such as “benevolent countenance,” “gentle manners,” “sweet mournful air,” and “sensations of peculiar and overpowering nature.” It’s at this moment in the book that the monster becomes human, indeed, perhaps even feminine, to the reader rather than a gruesome creature. Soon after this passionate description delivered by the monster, Shelley in a moment of sudden realization of her own sex perhaps, changes the tone of the monster’s words by writing, “they sat down to eat…the meal was quickly dispatched” (109). Moments such as this clearly show an abrupt change in voice causing a virtual slap in the face for the reader, quickly waking them up from the splendor of the monster’s previous feminine narrative. This demonstrates Woolf’s statement: “It is fatal for any one who writes to
think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly” (104). Shelley implies by her work that she thought about her sex frequently, preventing her from writing out of truth. If only she had been able to hear Woolf’s opinion: “The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his (or her) experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace” (104). Shelley couldn’t have been free or at peace if she was unable to write in her own gendered voice.
To further compare Shelley’s shift in voice, Frankenstein contains many letters from various characters in the novel. Shelley had a challenge in writing these portions, because they go back and forth from male to female narrators. Shelley’s voice, when writing a letter narrated by Elizabeth, ironically suggests a masculine undertone. Elizabeth’s letter to Victor pleading him to write of his health contains such language as “For a long time I have thought that each post would bring this line, and my persuasions have retrained my uncle from undertaking a journey to Ingolstadt” (63). This sentence disputes a feminine narrator: Elizabeth sounds abrupt and distant, while another letter, narrated by Victor’s ailing father, suggests femininity. Shelley’s use of language as well as punctuation in the letter from Victor’s father (telling Victor that William has been murdered) implies a feminine narrator. “William is dead! -that sweet child, whose smiles delighted and warmed my heart, who was so gentle, yet so gay! Victor he is murdered!”(71). Punctuation in this quote is extremely important in indicating a feminine writer. The linguistic style would represent itself better if Elizabeth rather than Victor’s father had written this letter.
Even though Shelley’s voice transforms many times in Frankenstein, the novel remains a classic. She ought not to be looked down upon for these variations, but on the
contrary, one should only be convinced further of her talent. However, Woolf might disagree, for she pointed out in A Room of One’s Own when speaking of Mary Carmichael’s first novel Life’s Adventure that Carmichael “wrote as a woman, but as a woman who had forgotten she was a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself” (93). This point raises the following question: Is Shelley’s female writing voice more enjoyable for the reader because it’s natural? Perhaps the real trick is, if you’re going to write as a man, as Shelley did, it’s best to write as a woman writing as a man, declaring a vicious catch twenty-two in the complicated world of women and fiction.








Works Cited
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1998.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, 1989.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Homeless & Without Conversation

Okay, so I'm not technically homeless.
I am however missing out on a space to call my own of any sort, for writing. Space as in the physical sense as well as in the mental sense. I'm chasing a three year old around by day, exhausted by evening and obliteraed by night (or now so it seems, so excuse my blabbering).
I'm writing my first novel, well I've been writing my first novel for what feels like a decade but it's probably been more like five years. I know! I know! that's crazy! I should have had it done by now.
I went away, for the first time in my life, to a place for writers to write, a retreat, Wellspring House, in MASS. It was absolutely wonderful! I was there an entire week, completely alone, in silence most often, in a tiny room of my own. It was a dream. The town was beautiful, it was fall and the leaves were turning. I mean a DREAM!
I wrote, I read, I slept, I barely ate, don't know why but I didn't need to...I was full on inspiration. I got several pages written, good pages too.At the end I was positive that I would come back home and remain focused and on key with my schedule to finish this book.

(((sigh)))

Yep, I froze! Got home and now it's been far too long to admit and I haven't touched it. Granted I've written other things and will have an article published in a new online magazine soon...but my novel...my beloved novel...sits, waiting, homeless and without conversation.

Twitter

Here a twitt there a twitt everywhere a twitt twitt!!
Twitter is a forum to make you feel lonely if you have no followers. I feel as though I'm walking down a street, able to look into every store I pass. Within each store is a different story, different music, different vibe. I stop and watch for a bit. I knock on the glass..."hello?" "oh hey I love that too" or "I have an opinion on that."
No one hears though, I'm talking to myself. I'm tweeting to twitters who can't or don't seem to hear me.
Oh the madness!
Why do I still log in every so often during my day to see what's happening?Human Nature, it must be, we all love to look into the lives of others. We want that connection.
My mission is to have at least 10 followers (which is a funny term for this because I feel like a puppy following the tweeters - oh someone throw me a bone) by August 1st... is that unreasonable?
Tweeters twitters, whatever!