Snow on the Sand

I have always loved the beach during the off-season. The serenity, the vastness, the ability to retrace my lone footprints in the sand. But I most love it when it snows, the white powder drifting across the sand, melting into the sea. It is so lovely, and, yet, seems so out of place; and it is this feeling of displacement that I so identify with. As a writer, I am a drifter. And, yes, the flower farm has grounded me, but I fly in my mind to so many different places each day, still searching for that definitive destination: home.

Visualization

Let me introduce you to Jonathon J.J. Sebastian Cabot Kitty (aka The Fud, short for Fuzzy Wuzzy, which turned into Fudda Wudda). Two years ago it had been five years since Don and I lost our last orange cat, and I was thinking it was time for an orange kitten, much to Don's dissent, as we already had three cats. But I kept seeing this orange kitten in my mind and looked on-line at all the little orange cuties, though I was having no luck in convincing Don. But then I went to my grandmother's farm in Pennsylvania for a week that summer, and the first thing I saw when I walked in the door was this little orange fuzzball on her back deck. "One of the male strays found him in the woods and brought him up here for food," my grandmother said. "I call him Pee Wee," she said. "He needs a good home." Done. It didn't take long for Don to fall in love with him, or my other cats. He is the sweetest soul, with a trill for a purr (characteristic of a Maine Coon). And a peacemaker--he will go right in between my two males who have no love for each other and say in his gentle way, "Come on guys, fighting won't solve anything." In short, he was just what we all needed. And I have to believe that just the right literary agent will come along soon. Nothing, really, ever comes out of the blue. Prepare the soil, plant the seed, then water and fertilize what will be.

Audience

So I received my first rejection from one of the agents I pitched at the Writing Conference in NYC. She said she read the first 50 pages of my novel and came to this conclusion: young girls in their twenties wouldn't be interested in it, because it was written in present tense and about a young girl in the late eighties, not gritty enough for current days. And women in their forties and fifties wouldn't be interested in it--they would only be interested in it if it was written in past tense, with a narrator now in her mid-forties, looking back on her days in her mid-twenties. . . hmmm. . . . When I wrote this novel I thought nothing about audience in such a specific way, okay, I didn't think about my audience at all. . . Someone very wise once told me to put all marketing aspects out of my mind when I write, and it's the only way I was able to write a novel from the heart . . . Another wise person told me that you have to write for yourself--the publishing business is too competitive to count on. Writers are weeded out for a million different reasons: one common one being that the agent is already representing a novel too similar to the one in question. . . maybe one about a woman in her mid-forties who goes back to the Jersey Shore and reminisces about her time spent there in her mid-twenties. . . Another wise person said, and this one was an agent: "The chaos theory is at play here". . . Who would've guessed that all ages, young and old, of both sexes, would be drawn to Harry Potter? Or that women of all ages are being seduced by Twilight. I honestly don't think it's about relating to a character--it's more about being transported to another world.

Marketing 2

Inadvertently (while learning how to post pictures on this blog), I deleted my last post about marketing my novel at the "pitch slam" in NYC. So for those who didn't get a chance to read it, I was stressing over the fact that I had to distill ten years of hard labor into one tiny paragraph. . . And that it would have to be me that made the sale, rather than the novel itself, to the agents. . . I've really only ever sold things that sell themselves: records, grilled cheese sandwiches, flowers. . . my husband is the one that can sell ice to Eskimos. . . he's the talker, I'm the writer. . . But I had to step up to bat and do the best I could this past Tuesday at the Writer's Digest Conference, and I was surprised by how calm I was. . . I took the advice of many and just spoke from my heart. I believe in this novel. And I believe I conveyed it to the agents I spoke with. Time will tell now if they have the passion I do for the characters I've lived with for so long.

Volunteers

It is that time of year in the garden when all the little volunteers start popping up--plants that were self-seeded from last year, blown in the wind and scattered seemingly willy-nilly. Last year, after the daffodils were done, the entire patch became a bed of daisies, all volunteers from nearly half-an-acre away. Easy money one would say, unless the volunteers drown out a more valuable crop, but this rarely happens. It is as if they know where they can unobtrusively take up space, where they have the best chances of thriving: i.e. shade loving plants never self-seed in the sun and visa versa. Volunteers are not weeds, as the original plants were cultivated and planted at one time, such as a theme in a work of art that proliferates--in the garden of words they are the repeated motif. Once planted, the design will continue to emerge in the work, a subtle design that doesn't wish to over-power, just provide that nuanced color of meaning.

Truth

Recently, I had my seven-year-old niece, Ella, over for an artist's weekend. Ella is a budding painter, so I took her to visit a few of my artist friends. First, Evie, who paints portraits and animals and still life, and then, Paula, who is more of a visionary artist. Ella said, "Evie paints what's on the outside, and Paula paints what's on the inside. A sharp observation for a young soul, though not entirely accurate as Evie makes what is on the outside even better--her subjects are softened, made more radiant, perhaps one could say created in their perfect form. Paula brings to life raw emotion and the inner working of the mind, but she, too, is starting from some common point we all recognize. It is why when we look at her work we have that glimmer of recognition--or as it happened to me, a feeling that she had painted my very being. These artists approach their work in different ways, but they both share that ability to capture what "is" and then infuse it with higher meaning. In the words of Chagall, "Great art picks up where nature ends." It is no different for writers--whether we look outside or in, we are searching for the truth.

Enlightenment

Eckhart Tolle in his book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, says that flowers can be looked at as the enlightenment of plants. And can also lead to enlightenment. He tells the story of the Buddha giving a "silent sermon" once during which he held up a flower and gazed at it. After a while one of the monks that was present broke out into a smile--according to legend, that smile was handed down by twenty-eight successive masters and much later became the origin of Zen. I get that. I have felt that deep, inner smile when working or just being in the flower garden. And I feel that as well when reading the words of Proust, his descriptions are a flowering of enlightenment. And it is this very thing that I have been struggling with as an artist for the past week. How to create this enlightenment on the page. The late David Foster Wallace is quoted in The New Yorker as saying, "Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilites for being alive and human in it." Chekhov's powerful little story, "The Student," seems a perfect example of this. It begins in the desolate, darkness of the forest and ends with this student's enlightenment--the feeling of the past touching the present in an unbroken chain, brought on by this darkness, the realization that we are connected by the darkest of moments. An epiphany that leaves him filled with an unknown, mysterious happiness. It's not that all of our characters need to have happy endings, but something, it seems, must transcend the illusion of our dark realities. . .

Expectation

On this cusp of spring, expectation is in the air, the buds quivering on the trees, the green of the bulbs pushing their way through the frozen ground. It is as if we all, on this side of the hemisphere, take a collective breath and hold. . . and it seems to me that a good story elicits this same response. We read with anticipation, expecting a flowering of insight or understanding when we reach the end, and, if not, we are disappointed, let down by the writer. Not that every story must lead to some great epiphany, but there must be at least the slightest shift in pereception, like the setting sun casting its rich hues on the garden, and then, swiftly, night falls.

Energy

The only place I can really run is along the beach, by the sea, its energy invigorating me, saturating every pore of body. It is similar to the energy in the garden, the explosion of life in the middle of the summer, bugs buzzing, flowers humming, swallows soaring, cats hunting. . . How else, but for all this energy I absorb, could I harvest bucket after bucket of flowers every Friday eve? Energy begets energy. But is it the same with writing? In writing workshops a common thing to say is that there is such energy in the language. But how do we transfer physical energy to the page? Is it merely our choice of words? Our punctuation? Our rhythm? Proust lived mostly a sedate life when he worked on his masterpiece, "Remembrance of Things Past," yet there is such life, such energy in his work, as if all the energy he received in his youth, all his pereceptions, imagined and real, were released from his being like an explosion. But I believe energy can spill directly onto the page from the waves, the moon, the festivals and the trees. . . not just from the realm of memory, but as a direct transfer, where we are the medium, tapping into the pulse of life that with a little alchemy brings our characters to life.

Necessary Art

In a recent article in Poets and Writers an editor uses the word 'necessary' as one of his criteria for choosing a book to publish. He was using it in the sense of originality, or possessing that quality that will increase sales by word-of-mouth, but it is still such a vague, subjective word. Perhaps 'spark' is a better word. Or 'resonance.' But 'necessary?' Every year, during this time, my husband and I pour through seed and plant catalogues, trying to decide what flowers will be needed on our specialty cut flower farm. What colors will turn the most heads? What fragrances? There are some flowers, like the sweat pea, that always evoke a story, a memory. While others inspire and are taken home to be arranged into art, then painted or photographed. Still others that provide comfort or grant forgiveness or just plain bring a smile. It is with great pain that we leave out some beautiful varieties, and it has more to do with money than necessity. It is true there are subjects over-visited in the world of writing, and that some writers have such a magical gift for language they could write 500 pages on rock formations and we would still be awed. But who can truly judge what is necessary? Doesn't the creation itself make it so?

Seasons

I have always been a person in need of the seasons--to grow wild, then settle, then incubate for the new birth. My visit to Maui left me wondering how one can live in paradise. . . how one can remain in one phase of life, be it heavenly, for an extended or eternal phase. For me, I know it wouldn't take long for ennui to set in. . . I would like to experience a long, harsh Russian winter to appreciate the spring more, but this mild Maryland winter must do for now. . . I can hear the murmering below in my flower field--the incubation period nearly over, life readying to burst anew. Winter, for me, is a time of thought, of great productivity in my writing, but there's a lack of vitality in my words that only vibrant living can bring--that pulse of energy that the spring heralds and the summer exudes. This is my first blog post. Good night and namaste.