Memoirous

Our Lady of the Last Festival Bless us Lady. Be with us one more time. Come to us in your pink-pearl sunrise With your yellow smile And blue-sky eyes. We are grateful for all that you are. May your gentle spirit Ripple over the surface of the lake. Shine down upon us, Your billowing robes Shielding us from the blistering sun. Lead us through fields of Encore, Past the Underground stage and skateboard ramp, Into the Imaginarium of Artrageous Weaving labyrinths of prayer Out into Flickerings of Creation Station. We look for you In shaved ice and that black bean veggie burrito. Beneath the garish glow of the Pasta Palace With the buskers and smokers, You can be found. Each a part of each other. Body surfing at Five Iron Frenzy And head-banging to P.O.D. When the Crossing finishes with a jig, Circle dance with us. Your heart is a flaming sunset, Streaking gold and red, Bursts of fireworks above Main Stage, Showering us...

Memoir Where the ordinary ceases to be ordinary Anyone writing memoir is familiar with the passage from Proust where his memory is suddenly inflamed by madeleines, a French cookie. And so madeleines have become an icon, memory wrapped up in the human senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. We understand that most of what we recall is channeled through at least one or two of these. So what are these madeleines which evoked the Master of Memoir? A visitor the other day from France was in the kitchen making us a treat—a butter cookie. There are plenty of ways to mess up a butter cookie, but the ingredients are fairly basic: butter, sugar, flour. You can flavor with almond, lemon, or vanilla. I picked up the recipe, written in French, and suddenly was inflamed: madeleines! The taste was far less exciting than the mere thought—yet I savored them for days.

New work up and loaded at FreeRange Nonfiction. A story that breaks all the rules (because it's fiction, and because, even though we titled it, I untitled it) Today's Special: http://freerangenonfiction.com/?page_id=3860

Now is all there is. We never once thought it would change. There would always be dusty roads and distances to cover And egg water and mildewed hay bales and volleyballs hitting us in the head. There would always be long lines, too many people, and heat That descended like a sweat fog covering the land like a pestilence, Or like a brick of congealed gummi bears left out too long. Every year there was summer and there was Cornerstone, We lived all year planning, scheduling, debating, Coming up with a theme, making T-shirts, producing press kits, ordering doughnuts, And yet we were never ready. Never prepared with enough golf pencils at registration, never enough volunteers, never enough This and that and so we made Wally-runs. Back and forth, there and back. And always we added on, just one more thing to the list Or stopped for a DeeQue, or brought back coffee or a water gun Because there was always so much cash floating around; we could never run out. ...

I volunteer at Cornerstone Community Outreach a homeless shelter in Chicago. I do two programs there with both the men and the women. If planned budget cuts go through there is the possibility we will love at least 58 beds from the shelter. At this point we serve at any given time 500 people daily through the shelters we staff and Leland Building, a next-step program. We house, feed, and provide clothes and other necessities in order to assist families, men, and women to get back on their feet. Here is a link to CCO Life where you can view a really sad video about what it is like to be a homeless school student. Please call these reps before 5pm today! You could simply say, “Please don’t cut homeless shelters out of the Illinois budget!” The reps know the issues and you don’t have to talk forever or sound like you know all about it. If you get voice mail leave a message. Cuts ARE happening we need to let them know that the poorest of the poor shouldn’t be losing servic...

The politics of memory we can choose our past reconstruct it so as to change our future. The way we feel/is the way we remember: ebb and flow, running like the tides, cutting new channels, erasing what once was. Lacking a record, we simply make it up.

Got up at 6 a.m. Sunday (5 central time!) to ride my bike to Antiques on the Bluff in St. Joe to help Jan and Mark set up. They had things pretty well in hand. The event was huge. And the nice thing is the rain held off. Mark and Jan go to quite a few of these shows and know many of the other dealers. It is a guild of sorts. Anyway, Mark told me they know of one woman who gives her pieces a made-up provenance. She’ll tell her customers, Oh I got that piece out of an old barn. While this isn’t exactly true it isn’t exactly a lie. It most likely did come from a barn and since it is an antique it, of course, came from an old barn. It would be false advertising to claim it came out of Napoleon’s barn. The point is: Customers want a story. Yes, they are buying an old pulley, but they know it is more than that; they are buying history. As a writer and memoirist, I know this as well. We can get caught up with how something actually happened and miss the story—or we can lose the exact ...

My Starry Night sojourn in New Mexico last year early spring was one of sunny days. The mornings started off cool, but once the sun peeked over Turtleback Mountain the earth warmed up. By noon it could be 77° or thereabouts. Then came the wind and the whirling dust. Whereas here at Blueberry View, I have never been on a wetter retreat. It has rained every day except for the day I arrived. Thank goodness because I had boxed my bike and tucked it into the bay of the bus. When I got off in Benton Harbor Sunday afternoon I pulled it out, reassembled the bike, put on the panniers I’d packed, and rode up here to Blueberry. Last night a thick fog rolled in, obscuring the blueberry fields surrounding me. Even the ever-present drone of the trucks on the highway was muffled. This a.m. it was misting. I am here to attest: Creative energy can be wrung from rain.

So settling in here at Blueberry View—almost wrote Blueberry Hill, like the song—I’m retreating and recouping. In fact a Blueberry fairy brought me some just baked whole wheat bread and a spring flower on my front steps. Many of you already know but for those just now joining us, I lost both my mother and father this past winter. Routine smoothed over the grief, as well as just being with people, but I knew sooner or later I would have to go through a process, a time of examining and reexamining. I’ve been going through a book I bought at this year’s AWP called God in the House: Poets Talk about Faith. I brought it with me on the retreat and have been spending time with it each morning. The book encompasses all beliefs—even one I’ve never heard of before Quaganism, which is about pagan Quakers. It is amazing what I can lift off the page. After the chapter on Wicca and Zen, I fell into thinking about Dad. The two are not related. And wrote this in my morning journal. Between We...

Sorry blog readers—all three of you—I have been out of touch, though anything but slacking off. I’ve been hard at work while on an artist residency revising an OLD ms, a YA novel.   Funny. Things you think will be hard have turned out with a modicum of effort to be easy, while the stuff I thought was going to be easy is turning into road blocks. Still, 10 chapters down. I may be hitting one of those bumps this afternoon. Blueberry View is awesome. My view is literally row upon row of rust-colored blueberry bushes. Not so blue in the spring. I feel like I’m at a bed and breakfast—sweating words. Something I wrote this a.m. after spending time with a bit of reading:   New Evangelical Until I entered a cathedral I did not understand space. Until I sang an 18 th century hymn I did not feel the notes in my mouth soar. Until I had walked in cloister gardens I was not healed of all my unrest. Until I visited the stations of the cross The path to de...