Category: Behind the Stories: Inspirations and Encounters

But I HAVE to Finish It: Cleaning One’s Literary Plate

My book club met last night and one member was debating whether or not to complete a Pulitzer Prize winning modern classic that was last month’s selection. A good book, but it didn’t engage her. We all admitted to our discomfort about not finishing a book. I’m the only one in the club who writes reviews, so the other members’ reluctance has nothing to do with that. It’s the relationship with the book. We respect them, and feel guilty about giving up on them.

 This came up on the same day I posted what I think may be my last two star review. I don’t regret reading the other books I rated that low because they had strengths that made me care, and made me want to critique them like a beta reader. This last one exhausted me. I never should have made myself finish reading it, and reviewing took hours of self-torment about how to say what I thought without being cruel or snarky. The only thing that kept me going was that I had agreed to review it. Even though the group I was reviewing for says it’s okay to stop reading, no questions asked, I felt obligated due to a shortage of reviewers.

Other people have liked this book. I didn’t. How important is that, compared to the stress of reading it and the greater stress of reviewing it? I think there are some people who take pleasure in writing bad reviews, but I’m not one of them.  If I’d cut loose and verbally torn the book up, that would have been easy but self-indulgent, and no use to readers in deciding if they might like the book or not. I revise reviews obsessively for days, especially the bad ones. I enjoy polishing the good ones and the in-between ones, but the bad ones are torment, out of proportion to their importance. My opinion is not that valuable, and I’m not being paid. Reviews are useful, but I can stop reading and write “did not finish” and be done with it. If everyone did that, though, no one would ever get a bad review, just a “did not finish”, which is uninformative to prospective readers. Some get distrustful when an author has only good reviews. They think that the writer must have bought them, or had friends and family write them, even if the good reviews are genuine.  Also, I’ve read many posts on Goodreads in which people say that the things a reviewer disliked in a critical review made them want to read a book. The mean, vitriolic reviews get disregarded. The thoughtful bad reviews don’t.

Still, I hate writing them. It’s much worse than getting them. I can read a critical reaction to my own work and be done with it. I decide if I see a valid problem pointed out that can make me a better writer in future books, a perception so at odds with most reviews that it’s not important, or simply an expression of taste for a different kind of book. It takes a minute. But when I’m reviewing I don’t think of it as something the author or potential reader will move through that way. Maybe I take it too seriously. For now, I’ll review what I finish, and I’ll only finish what I find valuable to read, whether it’s for pleasure and entertainment or for making me think and learn, deepening my perspective. If I don’t like a book, I’m letting it go. I need to spend my time writing, and reading other books.

How do you feel about not finishing a book?

 

The Ruler in the River

It was six feet deep today. At this time last summer I didn’t even want to look. The river was more empty space, dirt and algae than a Rio Grande. The powers that control its flow from the dam at Elephant Butte had shut it off early. This summer it’s wide, fast flowing and full, reflecting blue sky and the green of the narrow band of thick vegetation that clings to its banks. In the powerful heat, the trail smelled like sage, and butterflies and dragonflies floated by.

So did noise, and trash. I normally like my fellow humans, but I like nature better without them, except for the silent, contemplative fishermen standing on the banks. The rafters, with plastic water bottles and sunscreen bottles spilling out of their bobbing crafts, were such an obvious source of litter, even if unintentional, that I didn’t want them there. The rope swing crowd whooping, splashing, floating a ways downstream, and going back to the swing by land, scared away the wildlife. I didn’t see a single heron or even a lizard.

I found a spot halfway between the fishermen and the rope-swingers, and waded knee deep. The water isn’t very cold. But I could see how incredibly fast it was further out. Gazing at the stillness of the desert  hills on the other side, I had the dizzying feeling of being the one moving while the river held still, like being on a train and watching the land fly by.

In other parts of the country this wouldn’t be a grand river, even when it’s six feet deep. The ruler goes up to ten feet ten inches, at which point the trail would be partly submerged, making the river a little wider and no longer walkable. Still, it could only be a major body of water in the parched Southwest. I remember coming to the east and crossing the James River Bridge in Newport News and being stunned, almost terrified, that a river could be that enormous and deep and blue. It wasn’t that I thought I could fall off the bridge or anything like that, it was just the strangeness of such a river. In Snake Face Jamie gets lost and crosses that bridge by accident, and being prone to panic attacks, it troubles him far more. If there was ruler in that river, it would be a deity, some god of water, not a stick.

And then there’s the Santa Fe River, whose empty bed is a major location in Shaman’s Blues. Sometimes it has no water at all.  I get excited when I see water in it, especially when there’s enough to flow, not just trickle. Other times, I can walk in the riverbed as easily as on the trails along the banks. It’s a river of memory then, the path made by a river that once was deep enough to measure

Dancing In New Mexico Part Three

Hillsboro New Mexico is one of the many barely-there towns in the southern part of the state. A former mining town, it’s now a self-described “living ghost town” with little more than a main street, some historical sites, beautiful scenery, and a lively community center. In the middle of nowhere, people come out for the arts, from wherever these culture-lovers hide in the desert. I took the winding mountain road into the town, and found the community center by looking for a place with cars in front of it. There were no signs, not even one naming the street.

I could hear the music already rolling through the adobe walls. When I came in, the audience was seated, except of course for my ever-ready dancing buddy. He was standing, a fit early-sixties white guy wearing a sort of African-ish shirt, and as soon as we saw each other, we cut loose. At first we had the whole back of the community hall to ourselves. West African drum group Agalu was sending out a song so exciting, so energizing, I don’t know how anyone could sit through it, but they did. The publicity had said, “this is music that will make you want to dance.” More than want—I don’t know if I could have chosen to hold still.

At last, a graceful, well-dressed woman, youthful in every way except her salt and pepper hair, joined us, and I told her my friend was now in heaven—two women to dance with. My relationship with him is platonic, and he always tells me all about his latest attempts to break the dry spell in his love life. She seemed to flirt with him, and he later claimed the man she’d been sitting with kept giving him dirty looks, but maybe that added to the fun, a little sense of risk and adventure.

The music was frenzied with joy, and yet it took a few more songs to break the dry spell in Hillsboro’s dancing life. And when it did, it was like a monsoon cloudburst. From the audience came a wave of women, all but one of them gray-haired, most of them full-figured. Pardon my sudden shift of imagery—the ladies caught fire. They waved and shook and swayed and stomped. It made the music seem even more vibrant, as inhibitions fell away and people merged with the beat. The happiness level in the room skyrocketed.

I have a painting at home of an African village dance, showing a line of women proudly shaking everything they’ve got. These joyous elders reminded me of it. The musicians must get their energy up when the audience responds to the music. Something seemed to build.  One song made me feel absolutely possessed, as if the drums were dancing me. Agalu means “spirit of the drum” and that spirit took over. In my forthcoming third book Snake Face, during one of Jamie’s performances on his troubled tour, he gets respite from his problems when he has that experience of being “propelled by a kind of electricity in his spine, hips, and feet, driven by a dance that danced him.” If you’ve ever felt that, you know what I mean, and now you know the word for it. Agalu.

I caught the attention of the only under-forty woman in the crowd as she danced near me, and suggested we circle the room. The women—and my dancing buddy— followed us, each dancer improvising a solo at the front near the stage, honoring the drummers, thanking them.

Outdoors during the break between sets my friend told me he sincerely believes the way he will die is to be shot by a jealous husband. A friendly stranger, a man with long dark hair, didn’t look up from taking a picture of the artwork in front of the community center, as he said, “I hear you. Always look at the man she’s with.” I’d noticed he walked with a cane, and imagined an injury received from the man he hadn’t looked at, the one who taught him to check first.

After the break several men joined the dancing. One gentleman of about seventy, a small trim white-bearded man, looked amazed and a little confused, as if his own public dancing was the most surprising thing he’d experienced in a long time. Am I really doing this? It’s fun, but… He kept dancing. The man whose female companion danced in trio with my friend and me never did get up and join the fun. Of all the people in the room, that couple and the photographer with the cane are most likely to end up as characters in a story. I already have a fictitious African drum group based in Santa Fe in my books. They could play in Hillsboro. The possibilities are endless for what could happen next.

From Agalu’s web site:

Agalu is led by Akeem Ayanniyi, who is the ninth generation of his family to play the traditional Yoruba talking drum. Ayanniyi, from the Western Nigerian town of Erin Oshun near the historic art center of Oshogbo, has been performing since the age of five and has toured much of Africa as well as Germany, Brazil, Sweden and the United States as a performer and teacher. He settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1993 and founded Agalu in 1998.

Music:

http://www.agalu.com/music.html

 

Dancing in New Mexico Part Two

Sacred dance is part of the indigenous culture of this place, from the sunlit feasts on the Pueblos, and to the starlit dances of the mountain gods and the girls’ coming of age ceremony on the Mescalero Apache reservation. In two works in progress I’ve written about these dances as seen by Mae Martin, in a psychic vision of a feast at Cochiti Pueblo, and as a first-time visitor to Mescalero, her friend Bernadette Pena’s home reservation. To stay on topic and avoid spoilers, I’ve cut the dialogue and plot material, leaving only the imagery of the dances. When you get to these dances in the books, there will be a lot more mystery going on. For now, I’m sharing only the mystical.

The corn dance at Cochiti, from Soul Loss, work in progress, to be Book Four in the series:

Women in one-shouldered black dresses with colorful sashes and turquoise and coral jewelry danced across from men in white kilts with red and green trim and foxtails down the back. Heavy necklaces and strands of shells bounced on the men’s bare turquoise-painted chests. Tufts of parrot feathers waved on their heads. Shaking rattles and waving pine branches, the lines moved in unison in an elaborate weaving pattern except for small confused children shuffling at one end. On the far side of the plaza, a fat man painted with black and white stripes, wearing a black vest-like drape and a belted loincloth with a turtle shell on the back, seemed to guide and care for the group. Feet keeping the rhythm set by a single huge drum, he lifted a woman’s long hair off her neck as if to cool her, and then retied a child’s loose legging. 

             A thin man in the same striped body paint and turtle-backed loincloth, his whitened hair in high pigtails stiff with cornhusks, danced between the lines of dancers in the opposite direction of their progress around the plaza, as if he were invisible to them. His movement had an eerie, floating quality. Squared black lines around his eyes and mouth gave his face an otherworldly expression.

             The pounding of the big blue and yellow drum sounded like a giant heart echoing off the walls of the pueblo. The drummer turned it on its side, and then over, never losing the beat. A chorus of men in bright shirts sang with it, in a slow, subtly rotating procession. A stout man swept a banner over the dancers, on a pole so long it looked impossible to handle, and yet he did so with grace. On the banner were symbols of corn, sun, clouds, lightning, and rain.

The Mescalero Apache Ga’an dancers, from Haunted, work in progress, to be Book Five in the series.

Masked men in leather kilts, their bodies painted black with lightning bolts on their chests, wore towering multi-pronged headdresses balanced on their heads. Boys, painted ashy white, wore strange masks like a cross between a bucket and bird.

            Mae left the bleachers to join a small cluster of people standing behind the singers and drummers who sat on the red benches in front of the big tipi. The dancers nearest to the musicians began to smack their lighting-painted sticks against their kilts as they initiated a vigorous jogging-in-place dance step. The rest began to move, and glorious chaos broke loose. The four groups circled the fire together, each man dancing to his own inner spirit. A lean, muscular, youthful dancer, his face masked in smooth black fabric with glittering shells above the eye holes, began to leap side-to-side, swaying his torso in deep lateral bends, holding his lightning sticks up, and rattling his towering multi-pronged headdress.

            His athleticism and physical power was so extraordinary, and the surge of life force through him so raw and electric, Mae felt it in her body. Jamie had said, lighting will strike your bones. It did. She was mesmerized. Each dancer who passed in front of the singers danced with a burst of force and passion, as if the spirits they personified possessed them.

            The boy clowns in ragged shorts, ranging from scrawny little fellows of seven or eight to a big, fat lad of around twelve, also moved with greater vitality when they neared the drummers, comically exaggerating their steps. The fat boy was good, and he made a few people laugh with some secret joke he conveyed in mime. On the edge of the crowd, two tiny children with sticks in their hands imitated the dancers, serious in their endeavor, as absorbed as the men and boys in the ceremony.

            From the direction of the long arbor and the family tipis, a procession silently appeared, the beginning of the girls’ coming of age ceremony. The medicine men, the four young women in beaded, fringed white deerskin dresses, and their godmothers walked slowly into the big tipi behind the drummers. The moment made Mae catch her breath. She was in the presence of something sacred, archetypal and outside of time.

Part three to come: an African village dance—of sorts—in Hillsboro, New Mexico.

Dancing in New Mexico Part One

This is going to take two or three posts to cover, because dancing has roles in both social life and spiritual life here. It plays a big part in my books, too, because dancing is how Jamie communicates when he experiences life at its highest intensity, as in the Santa Fe Bandstand scene in Shaman’s Blues. I’m a barely adequate ballroom dancer myself, but I enjoy it anyway, especially the flow when I have a partner who can lead, and I love to watch people who are better at it than I am.

Part one: The perfect partners.

No matter what kind of music is playing, there are people who will dance to it, and dance well, whether the Santa Fe Chiles are playing Dixie jazz and swing dancers from the Rhythm Project are cutting loose in creative kinetics at Bandstand, or the Bill Hearne Trio is playing “alt country” at the Best of Santa Fe block party, inspiring older couples to dance in the elegant flow that embodies a whole history of partnership.

Sometimes at Sparky’s in Hatch it takes an icebreaker to people out on the floor, or the right kind of music—Western Swing. Then those couples who dance the way old married couples finish each other’s thoughts start moving their boots. When the Renegades played a couple of weekends ago, I enjoyed one man’s smile even more than I enjoyed dancing with my dancing buddy. We took to speaking of this tall, gray-bearded, Hispanic cowboy as The Smile. He bowed over his lady, cradling her in the shade of his body, with a look of radiant bliss glowing over her shoulder. If only she could have seen that look.

When I left the Best of Santa Fe block party Saturday to go pick up my car at the Firestone place on St. Francis, the man who’d taken care of my car knew where I’d been and he came dancing out of the garage with a smile on his face as if there were music. I danced too. Why not?

This is my new favorite song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96UkbM6cII4

Picture the older guy, Bill Hearne, and the two guys to his right, as a trio, outdoors under a mixed cloudy-sunny monsoon season sky, the Railyard water tower to one side, and the free food and coffee and books and other festivities to the other side, and in front of them those perfect partners swaying along.

Next installment, sacred dances.

Coyote on Broadway

Broadway, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, that is. I saw the little canine trotting past the Bank of the Southwest after Art Hop on Saturday night.  He seemed in a hurry to get out of town, crossing our main drag and hustling down a side street toward the river. I hear his relatives across the river in the desert sometimes. The other night they were singing on Turtleback Mountain. They’re so musical, especially compared to the dogs who try to answer.  A few years ago I used to hear a donkey who tried to sing back—not very melodious either. Wildness has a sweeter voice.

One thing I love about my town is its closeness to the wild, though I’d rather not join the ranks of people who’ve found rattlesnakes in their yards. I can walk to the Rio Grande in a few blocks, the same route the coyote took, and watch the bats come out over the wetlands at sunset, or go into the desert and look for tarantulas coming out of their burrows after a monsoon rain. I only found one once—a velvety multi-legged shadow half-way out of her hole. When I run in the desert at Elephant Butte I encounter quails and lizards and jackrabbits on the trail, and very seldom any of my own species. I once surprised a mule deer that was sleeping under a juniper. With its size and the speed of its explosive take-off, it gave me an equal start, but probably a lot more pleasure than I gave it.

Santa Fe has a little wildlife, too. Gunnison’s prairie dogs are inclined to live there. The city has a relocation program, catching and releasing them into select wilderness areas, but there’s still a little dog town above the almost waterless Santa Fe River on Paseo.  I like walking past them. They’re smart, and have a complex language. I’ve heard that they recognize people and talk about us. Standing upright at the edge of their holes, paws folded on their little bellies, they stare back at me a long time before they scamper and squeak. Maybe to them I’m the wildlife that’s wandered into their city.

 

 

A Visit to my Old Home, the City Different, Santa Fe

My favorite statue of St. Francis in the royal city of his holy faith is the one near City Hall where he’s shown as a lean, bearded monk standing and looking down at a prairie dog, while the little creature looks up at him in that curious, fearless way they have, paws on belly, making eye contact. I spent a little time with this sculpture while waiting for the street party in front of City Hall that never materialized on June 28th—or maybe it did, but every time I wandered back in hopes of free music, there was still only a block of Marcy Street closed with orange cones, security people on the corners, and a lone man break dancing to recorded hip hop. I suppose the live music eventually showed up, but I went to Blue Rain to look at new works there, came back—no party—and wandered off and discovered the new RC Gorman gallery. Still a lovely evening, being a tourist where I used to live.

One of my goals on this trip—along with a workshop and classes at Yoga Source—was to see the Judy Chicago exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Art. Chicago has lived in New Mexico for twenty years. With her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, she has created some powerful, thought-provoking images in Nuclear Wasted, and in the Holocaust Project, some portions of which are in the NMMA exhibit. http://www.judychicago.com/gallery.php?name=Holocaust+Project+Gallery

This article in New Mexico Magazine made me want to see it, and it describes the nature of her work so well, I won’t try to do it over. She’s astoundingly versatile, and  can shake you up, charm you, or touch your spirit.

http://www.nmmagazine.com/article/?aid=85934#.U7DWKNhOXMw

After leaving the museum, I walked around town letting intuition guide me. The local artists’ show behind the bank downtown is always good. I acquired a tiny print by Joseph Comellas that is so radiant and deep I could fall into it. I’ve loved his work for years, and wish I could find images online to share. His style is unlike anyone else’s. I could try saying O’Keefe-like for colors and landscapes, but he uses shapes very differently. Each of his paintings is an experience, a moment in light and land so intense it’s like he found the true nature of the place in colors seen by the soul.  I kept turning around to look at the print as I wrote this. It makes my heart glow.

When I stopped by Whole Foods, the small one on St. Francis, I noticed a bookshelf on my way out. It was labeled Good Reads for a Good Cause. Donated books are sold to support something charitable—Whole Planet Foundation projects, I think. I felt compelled to put a copy of Shaman’s Blues on that shelf. (I happened to have books in my trunk.) If you’re in Santa Fe you can grab it for a very low price if it’s still there. When I donated the book I wasn’t thinking about the fact that a scene in it takes place in that store. I like to imagine the reaction of the reader who snags that bargain when they get to that part.

I ended the long weekend with Country Night at Bandstand on Monday. As the crowd warmed up, dancers of all ages and ethnicities and shapes and sizes gradually filled the dance space in front of the gazebo on the Plaza, partners’ arms weaving a pattern of twists and turns in time with the music. I got a kick out of three little girls in red cowgirl boots, and their mother who had apparently taught them how to dance. The children partnered with each other, or with Mom, who looked like the happiest woman on the planet that night. If I still lived in Santa Fe, I’d go to just about every Bandstand show all summer.

Check out these acts:

http://www.jamescarothers.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn2aDfsKqRc

The YouTube video is last year’s performance by Sim Balky and the Honky Tonk Crew, and it’s the whole show. You can see the dancers, the Plaza, and of course one heck of a good band.

Happy Feet: Celebrating Four Years of Barefoot Running

Four summers ago I was staying in in the same eccentric roadside motel in Maine where I am now, and I’d brought  Chris McDougall’s Born to Run as my vacation reading material. I loved everything about the book—the colorful characters who take part in ultra-marathons , the Tarahumara runners, the settings from Leadville CO to the depths of Copper Canyon in Mexico, and of course I was fascinated by the research. Having spent much of my working life in either the fitness industry or in various colleges’ departments of Health Sciences, I paid close attention to the information on the development of the modern running shoe and on the mechanics of barefoot running. I had to try it.

I’ve never run on pavement except in my few races, even when I wore conventional shoes. I always ran trails and parks. This motel has a huge lawn all around it, a green perimeter bigger than quarter-mile track. One day I ran in my conventional, cushioned running shoes, and the next day I ran barefoot. Born to run? Born again! I didn’t want to stop. This lawn was the perfect place to run with no shoes at all. Most places have too much in the way of thorns, rocks, sticks or dog poop for me to want to run skin-to-earth, but this was a cool green carpet all the way. I knew better than to do my usual distance with this new technique, but my soul wanted to. Flying on the rebound from that soft landing reminded me of the way I felt back when I was a ballet dancer, taking off in a soaring leap or a springy allegro, wearing only those pliable slippers.

When I got home I invested in Vibram five fingers, and I soon felt like I’d gotten a new right knee. After running in the old cushioned shoes with a heel strike, my right kneecap used to stick so badly for thirty minutes or so that I could hardly go upstairs. Barefoot, no sticking. Because of that I couldn’t bring myself to transition as slowly as I should have, so I earned sore calf muscles and a cramp in my flexor hallucis longus (a big toe muscle) that I could feel all the way up the back of my lower leg. The scene in Shaman’s Blues where Mae overdoes her first two barefoot runs, with a cascade of consequences, was informed by that experience. I didn’t cramp my legs as severely as she does, but then I didn’t go to Santa Fe Bandstand and dance for hours afterward. The worst thing that’s happened to me running in my barefoot shoes has been stepping a big thorn that reminded me to update my tetanus shot. Compared to the sticky patella or the sprained ankles from falling off those old high-heeled marshmallows, an occasional thorn isn’t bad at all.

I celebrated my barefoot running anniversary today with four miles of mindlessly blissful laps around the grass. I did go dancing afterward, but with four years of training my legs and feet are up to it. Cap’n Frank Bedell and the Torpedoes were playing at Schooner Landing in Damariscotta. People of all ages, locals and tourists, partied to great old rock’n’roll on the pier with a view of the Damariscotta river and the boats on the blue water. I danced with happy feet.

 

A Strange Beauty

New Mexico Magazine has recently been featuring items from its archives on its back pages. This poem from the June 1953 issue was resurrected in the June 2014 issue. There are lines in this poem that ring so true I wish I’d written them and others that sound forced or stilted to me. I’m sharing the whole thing so the gems can shine in their setting.

 

Where Whisper the Rocks

 

“Which state is your favorite?” the man asked

            “New Mexico …”

Sharp-clipped the answer came, and positive.

“Which part?”

            “The Southern part, the desert.”

As sharp the syllables, as positive as before.

“I love it. The Northern part, too—

That stretch, now, from Santa Fe to Taos,

The Sangre de Cristos, the Cimarrons—

There’s beauty and grandeur there—

But the desert …

That part from El Paso to Lordsburg,

And up to Santa Rita where

Prays the Kneeling Nun at nature’s rocky altar …

I’ve never known wherein lies its allure

Except that it takes hold of man

Like the spirit of the one woman he cannot do without.

A strange beauty the desert has

And a harshness that’s soft as love itself

To the heart that feels it …

            Yes, I’ll take the desert, friend

            And I’ll take it in New Mexico

            Where Whisper the rocks themselves,

            ‘Vaya con Dios, amigo.’”

By Sam Lesky. New Mexico Magazine Vol. 92, issue 6, p. 72

 

The words that grabbed me are these:

“… it takes hold of man

Like the spirit of the one woman he cannot do without.

A strange beauty the desert has

And a harshness that’s soft as love itself

To the heart that feels it …”

It takes hold of a woman, too.

Here’s a picture of the rock formation the poet refers to

http://www.pbase.com/aw11mr2/image/87186372

A Comic Digression

 

This satirical doggerel was originally posted in a discussion on Goodreads. I received a request to post it where it was easier to link to it, so here it is:

 

The Author’s Patter Song

 

(With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan)

 

I am the very model of a modern indie authoress.

My editor is excellent, my formatting is not a mess.

I’ve hired top professionals for proofreading and cover art ,

And hope that that I will join the ranks of authors who discovered are.

 

I don’t engage with trolls or drive-by one-stars on the internet.

I’ve never said so far a thing on Goodreads that I might regret.

Real readers wrote my good reviews not sock puppets or family.

I hope this will promote me since I must not do it spammily.

 

I can’t afford for Foreword or for Kirkus to approve me

And if I were to push hard would-be readers would remove me

From their to-read lists, and so I keep my self-promotion minimal.

With marketing so subtle that it borders on subliminal.

 

I’ll hang on with obduracy and get discovered anyway.

To languish in obscurity would be a terrible cliché.

But …

I’m at the very bottom of the Amazon best seller list

Where almost every other model modern indie author is.