Uncluttering

Today I did something that I've been putting off for awhile: I gathered up the volumes of notepads and notecards and journals and audio tapes that constitute my novel in the making, and packed them all away in a huge plastic tub upstairs. This does not mean that I've given up on getting my novel published--I just needed to clear the way for the new. I am now working on a short story cycle set here on the eastern shore of Maryland, and every new project takes complete concentration. I realized I was still bogged down in my novel (no pun intended, as the Jersey bogs are part of my novel). Just as we clear the flower fields this time of year to make way for the new, my mind, and shelves, are now clear of past clutter. Onward.

Going Native

This is a lovely flower, native to the eastern shore of MD: Eupatorium perfoliatum, 'Boneset'. We are making a transition to cultivated natives here on our flower farm, not that we have never used native flowers before. When we first started out, ten years ago, I would send Don out to gather flowers in abandoned fields, or along the roadside (where he had to explain what he was doing to more than one local cop--but, sir, I'm just trying to get lucky this eve. . .). I love native wildflowers--I always have. I spent the morning of our wedding in PA (20 years ago), picking my bridal bouquet on my grandparents' dairy farm. I have always picked flowers. And now that I grow flowers it makes such good sense to grow what is natural to the area, what the soil likes, the good bugs like, flowers that flourish in these hot, humid summers, and live in a symbiotic relationship. It connects with my writing as well, as I am working on a short story cycle set here on the eastern shore. As I dig deeper, I am finding what it is that makes the people of this area unique and what it is about them that keeps them happy and hardy and living together in a peaceful, and sometimes, not so peaceful way. . . but the natives are still here, still thriving. . .

Focus

Look closely to see that amazing colorful worm attached to the fennel. I wear my reading glasses now when I harvest, the bugs so closely mirroring the flowers, holding on for dear life. It's what we see when we look closely that is so amazing, that takes our breath away. So much missed in this precious life as we rush through our days. I remember a writing mentor at VT College once said to me, that it is a mistaken belief that nothing is lost on a writer--as if we walk around filling our minds with everything that comes into view. That isn't the case at all: it is that one miraculous thing that comes into focus, that alights our imaginative fire.

The Gathering

Last week I attended The Gathering literary conference in La Plume, PA. It was an amazing four days of lectures, workshops, wine receptions and delicous food. I met wonderful people and was inspired, humbled and awed by the talks of Greg Maguire (author of Wicked); poet Nancy Willard; Loung Ung, who wrote the memoir First They Killed My Father, from a chilling five-year-old perspective of her early life in Cambodia; and the great Sir Salman Rushdie, who has received almost every major literary award as a writer, and who had to live in hiding for ten years during which there was a death sentence placed on him by the Ayatolah Khomeini. It has been almost eleven years since the lifting of the fatwa, and he would rather put that period of his life behind him, but people still question him about that time, and his book, The Satanic Verses, that created much ado about, really, nothing (the passage that caused the uproar was merely a dream sequence meant, Rushdie said, more for humor. It suggested the prophet Mohammed once prayed to a mystical bird goddess), and his publishers would love for him to write a memoir. But as he said, he didn't become a writer to write about himself. For him, writing is as much about social change as it is invention. He believes it is more important than ever to write books that reveal what our governments try to hide from us, quoting Abraham Lincoln's remark to Harriet Beecher Stowe : "So you're the little lady that started this big war. " Citing the scene in Saul Bellow's, The Dean's December, in which an incessantly barking dog demands, "For God's sake, open the Universe a little more!" Sir Rushdie asserts that it is the artist's weighty task to be the expander of the Universe. Amen.