Memoirous

EMPATHY AND NEW YEAR James Schuyler A notion like that of empathy  inspires great distrust in us, because it connotes  a further dose of irrationalism and  mysticism. Lévi-Strauss Whitman took the cars all the way from Camden and when he got here or rather there, said, “Quit quoting,” and took the next back, through the Jersey meadows which were that then. But what if it is all, “Maya, illusion?” I doubt it, though. Men are not so inventive. Or few are. Not knowing a name for something proves nothing. Right now it isn’t raining, snowing, sleeting, slushing, yet it is doing something. As a matter of fact it is raining snow. Snow from cold clouds that melts as it strikes. To look out a window is to sense wet feet. Now to infuse the garage with a subjective state and can’t make it seem to even if it is a little like What the Dentist Saw a dark gullet with gleams and red. “You come to me at midnight” and say, “I can smell that after Christmas letdown coming like a h...

Recently an American Masters about Laura Ingalls Wilder aired on PBS. Her life spanned Conestoga wagons to the nuclear age. Maybe not apples to oranges but my life has gone from television to streaming. Anyway, it sparked a memory of the time I was first introduced to the LIW books. My big brother Steve had taken me to the library. Of any in my family, Steve shared my affinity for reading. He said, Let me show you a book you might like. I can still envision the corner, the row, its location on the shelf because I returned to it again and again, first one book, then the next, the whole series, then rereading it. I was quick to buy a biography of LIW by William Anderson. There was the controversy over Rose Wilder Lane and the mother/daughter collaboration. There was Rose’s Libertarian politics and odd decisions over the Wilder literary estate. I could have told PBS the story of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She was no angel, as is the story with every writer. Yet she told her story and that ...

 My daughter used to spend hours playing with her Fisher-Price peoples, the one’s with the wooden head, lining them up and world building. In fact by dinner time and she was asked to pick up and get ready to eat and then bath and bed, she’d cry—“But I was just getting started!” I knew exactly what she meant. I’d do the same thing with my Barbies. I’d go over to a friend’s house with several carrying cases and we’d sit on the floor and dress them and decide who was who and what was what and then my mother would call and say she was on the way to pick me up. I’d wail—“But we haven’t had a chance to play!” I didn’t know that world building was play. That the actual narrative was subordinate to the setting up. All the time invested in dressing and characters, stage setting WAS the play. Sometimes we lose the forest through the trees. We forget that it is all part of the fun, the eventual outcome=all those fuzzy details. I think 2021 is going to be about mindfulness to the proce...

                                                                            Jane riding away

 I remember as a little kid waiting in line for Santa. This is one of my earliest memories so I was very young. I must have been told who Santa was and that he was responsible for bringing my presents. I understood I had a duty to tell him what I wanted. So we showed up at the department store and rode the elevator up. We got off into a cottony world of sparkly snowflakes. We wandered through colored lights and fabricated gumdrops. We winded through what looked like a workshop manned by elves with jingle hats and bells on their toes. It seemed to take forever. Finally we made it to a studio where there was a camera and helpers, and sitting on a throne was a fat man in a red suit with a fake beard. The Big Kahuna. The main event. Santa.  I climbed aboard his lap and whispered what I wanted for Christmas and then it was over. Leaving, I realized that all those places we walked through, Winter Wonderland, Elf Workshop, Santa World was all part of the experience and I had missed...

A friend and I (we’re both old ladies) have developed a habit of calling each other at dawn to tell the other all the stuff we’ve already accomplished before sunrise. We’re in that post-menopausal period of life where we wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. worried about the state of the world and can’t go back to sleep. So I get up and putter. Sandy clears out the basement and puts up the Christmas tree, hangs garland, and strings lights under the cloak of darkness. When others are just getting up or thinking about getting up we’re halfway through out day. I didn’t ask for this, but if it is my reality I might as well use it. It’s how I’ve written almost 200 blog posts this year, ridden my bike 2,400 miles, and finished a manuscript and revisions, plus published some stories and flashes. So we each check in and give the morning report, vying with each other for the most insane list of activity like vampires feasting before the sun sends them back to the crypt. It is our way of taking control...

 Lately, while listening to Christmas music—yes, I begin listening way before Thanksgiving—I’ve been struck by the relevance or how certain lyrics have taken on new significance. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, written in 1943 during war-time is just as relevant today under a pandemic where we cannot travel, must stay socially distanced, and DO NOT eat figgy pudding together! Have yourself a merry little Christmas Let your heart be light From now on Our troubles will be out of sight *** Through the years We all will be together If the fates allow So hang a shining star Upon the highest bough A merry little Christmas now O, Holy Night is another one. I’ve blogged about this before—here is a link ,  https://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/2019/12/o-holy-night.html Some bright (not really, maybe a little) examples:  Long lay the world in sin and error pining Till he appeared and the soul felt it's worth The thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices For yonder breaks a n...

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(Adapted from a talk I gave at the 2019 Illinois Reading Council Conference for teachers and librarians.) After writing and publishing my middle-grade novel, Cloud of Witnesses ( Golden Alley Press ), I discovered that it is but one of a handful of books currently being published that represents rural life. Most books coming out today for youth is set in cities or suburbia. Think Jason Reynolds whose books address themes of gang violence and inner-city living. I’m also reminded of Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver, herself a product of the exburbs of New York City. Books such as these transport readers into their world very successfully, and are indeed very popular. Yet, it seems that forgotten landscapes, hard-scrabble, rural, rust-belt are falling away from the American consciousness. After the Election of 2016, journalists and political analysts sought to understand what they termed “fly-over” country. Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance shot to the top f the bestseller list and was a...

A short story: my friend’s 11 year-old daughter said that she has to leave her cell phone in a bucket by the door to her classroom. Like some old lady I said that they didn’t have those when I was in school. She responded, “Buckets?” Yeah, it’s funny, but also speaks volumes into our current political/global situation—without context there is no understanding. We shake our heads: How are we going to describe someday life under a pandemic? I can add to that a long list of other things that unless you lived through it no one would understand. I certainly don’t understand and I’m living it right now. How 72 million people could have voted for a man who said he likes to grab pussy, paid off porn stars, and even said his own daughter was hot. How Christians can vote for someone so diametrically opposite of what/who a Christian should be and say they are voting their conscience, their values. How folks can vote against their better interests by trying to overturn the Affordable Car...

I sort of hate it when movies, books, media reduce complex issues down into easily digested bites. That’s the trouble with Hillbilly Elegy, the movie now playing on Netflix: distilled into the Hatfield and McCoys. In fact that piece of mountain myth is referenced in the first 15 minutes of the film. My book Cloud of Witnesses and Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance follow the same character arc—sort of. Hillbilly Elegy came out in an election year, 2016, and talk shows turned to it as a way to understand how Trump became President. I’m still not sure how that happened or why still 74 million people voted for him this time. Vance’s memoir served as an in-road to understand people who live paycheck to paycheck in forgotten, dried up manufacturing towns. I guess. I was simply irritated by the book. Because no one story tells the whole story. But from Elegy people (media, Ron Howard) derive memes. The truth depicted just as in Cloud of Witnesses is that Appalachia births resilient peop...

 Yesterday while walking past the Jewel parking lot I smelled pine. Already the Christmas trees have arrived. Suddenly I was engulfed in a James Schuyler poem “December” by James Schuyler The giant Norway spruce from Podunk, its lower branches bound, this morning was reared into place at Rockefeller Center. I thought I saw a cold blue dusty light sough in its boughs the way other years the wind thrashing at the giant ornaments recalled other years and Christmas trees more homey. Each December! I always think I hate “the over-commercialized event” and then bells ring, or tiny light bulbs wink above the entrance to Bonwit Teller or Katherine going on five wants to look at all the empty sample gift-wrapped boxes up Fifth Avenue in swank shops and how can I help falling in love? A calm secret exultation of the spirit that tastes like Sealtest eggnog, made from milk solids, Vanillin, artificial rum flavoring; a milky impulse to kiss and be friends It’s like what George and I were talkin...