fiction valentine 1.4

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Cynthia G.

Love. It’s everywhere. Some would even venture to say that if you haven’t found it, you’re not looking.We don’t know if that’s true. We do know that sometimes fictional love is better than no love at all.

Excerpted from “Jesus, Mary, Buddha”

Over warm olives and crusty sourdough, Helen learns that Nick’s third wife parked her Range Rover at the edge of town on the banks of the Snohomish River and washed down a handful of pentobarbital with a bottle of flinty Oregon pinot gris.

It was his first year of mourning and he still hated her and loved her in ways he hadn’t yet explored. “I don’t know how I can do better than that,” he told Helen one night. “I mean fucking look at her.” He gestured toward a framed photo of them on his living room mantle. “She’s gorgeous.”

On Earth Day they up-cycle a pair of antique windows and build a table out of them. Later, they eat salmon with their fingers, straight out of his backyard smoker. After dark, they sit in deck chairs in the garden and watch shooting stars. Eight weeks into their affair, she drives home through the city streets late at night with the windows down, with air warm as a lover’s breath sliding up her arms, through her hair. The rhododendrons are in bloom. The azalea, lavender, chives, strawberries, raspberries, pear, five kinds of apple, chestnuts. Even at 11 pm, there are couples walking, cyclists peddling down the quiet evening streets in thin cotton dresses, short sleeves. It is evident that even in the dark, they are sucking the juice out of the first days of summer, taking shy steps toward the grilling season.Through the car windows, Helen Okabe breathes in the perfume of lilac.

For his birthday she gives Nick an anatomically correct chocolate heart spiced with habanero pepper. He makes his signature clams and beer. Afterward, he builds a fire in the backyard firepit and they recline on deck chairs, watching the sky. He talks about his men’s group, about getting in touch with his feelings.

“I’ve been wondering,” he begins. “What if I’ve been sabotaging relationships my whole life?” Unlike so many middle aged men, Nick is messed up on love and he knows it. To his credit, he is actually trying to unpack that baggage.

Helen sucks an ice cube and lets the water slide down her throat. “I was just wondering that myself,” she says. She has. She has been doing her spiritual inventory and counting up the number of times that, when the going got tough, she got gone. She was up to four. It wasn’t pretty.

“I think I have intimacy issues,” he says.

“Wait,” she replies. “You said you and Reina were simpatico. You were married ten years. You renewed your vows every spring for God sake. That sounds awfully intimate to me.”

“Nah,” Nick waves the idea away. “That was only appearances. I checked out after two years, if I’m honest about it.”

Appearances, her Zen master said, not only fool, you they aren’t even real. Helen still hasn’t wrapped her head around that one.

She offers the only solace she has, something from a piece of research she is working on. “The top five fears of most people are public speaking, followed by flying, heights, fear of the dark, and intimacy.” She counts them off on the fingers of her hand and refrains from adding that following this list, the fears continue with death, failure, rejection, spiders, commitment.

“That can’t be right,” Nick says.

“It’s from a university study,” she replies.

“I would say fear of intimacy is number one,” he continues.

“People are scared to death of intimacy. Just think what it means if you are right.”

“I am right.”

“If you are right, and I’m not saying you are, it means people would rather sleep with strangers than speak in front of a crowd of them.”

“It doesn’t mean that at all.”

“People are more afraid of emotional honesty than talking,” he says. “Look,” he says, pointing to a light moving across the night sky, “a satellite.”

It is a clear spring night and the sky is shy of clouds and the moon is new so they have space to shine. “Anyway. That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.”

(c)

Cynthia Gregory

fiction valentine 1.3

Posted on February 10, 2014 by Cynthia G.

we’re having fun sharing love stories this week. they come in all shapes and flavors. what’s yours?

It is not as you believe, my Angel. I am not a bad man. You may think it odd that we have never spoken. I stand within ten feet of you, my Love, and the words falter, trapped in my throat. I wait for you on the platform this morning and when I don’t see you I begin my search.

You are in the last car, walking to your seat. You prefer the solitude here in the “quiet car” over the chattering up front.

I juggle my briefcase and my coffee, taking up more than my allotted half of the aisle, but I see that you are nimble, my Love Light. I stop, and wait, and hope, but you have contorted yourself into a time-space continuum where anything is possible. You glide past me without so much as our arm hairs touching.

Now the interminable ticking of my watch is all that separates us. The train slows; the doors open. I walk from the platform to the street, jostled by the nameless, the faceless, carrying backpacks and briefcases. Their eyes do not shine like my Love’s.

And then you are there, barely yards from me, my Aphrodite, your white dress resplendent in the morning sun, your lush hair tousled by the gentle wind, surrounding a face that would make Venus jealous. Your long, sinewy legs stride with an athlete’s grace. I must hurry!

You sense me, but do not turn as I close the gap and we cross the street in tandem. What bliss! The sidewalk is deserted; just you, my Madonna, and me, our destinies intertwined, inevitable.

My footstep behind you, adoration at a glance. Did you notice? I run a hand through my thinning hair and smile. But what is this? What’s that look in your eye? Are you upset this morning, my Goddess? Perhaps tired? I walk on, exactly one half-step behind you, but your pace quickens. You are determined. The heat rises to my cheeks; the odd bead of sweat now joined by half a dozen others. I take several shallow breaths and plunge in; we walk side by side.

My ecstasy knows no bounds. How many times have you looked away? A hundred? A thousand? My Love, my Captive; now you cannot ignore me. We walk, not an arm’s length apart. I would encircle you with my own two, would you give me the slightest signal.

My eyes implore: LOOK AT ME; but your eyes look only ahead, my Angel, as you float along on winged feet. We cross the bridge in tandem. Your proximity is intoxicating. You smell like a breeze off the ocean. I open my mouth to speak, but you are looking away, to the river below, some distant prize on the horizon. Your feet belie their wings, my Love. Are you flying? My heart pounds the narrow walls of my chest seeking an audience. Another bead of sweat careens along my cheekbone before dive-bombing to the ground. I think I hear it plop. More stand ready. I steal a glance, but you do not notice.

Another breath, this one more shallow. Your pace is unwavering and I struggle to keep up. My lungs scream for a rest, a cigarette. Your pace is maddening. You pull away. Don’t leave me! Not now. Now that we are so close.

I glance at your face, a goddess carved by Michelangelo himself. Are you not tiring, my Love? My arms and legs pump wildly, valiantly, trying to match your stride. My love swells and my heart wrenches, threatening to burst its walls. You show no signs of slowing. Soon we will be at a cross street, the moment lost forever.

“It’s a lot easier walking than I thought it would be this morning. I thought it would be hotter.” Was that my voice? I do not recognize it.

You turn your head to face me, the Goddess in you saluting the God in me. But what is in your eyes? Hostility? Rebuke? Or maybe just the heat. Eternity passes. Did you hear me, my Queen?

“Just wait until midday.”

Your first words! But…now? Sarcasm? Vowels and consonants hang, suspended like greenhouse gasses. Your eyes lance my skin.

Beads of sweat form armies on my brow. Some disband, trekking out on reconnaissance missions. A millennium passes much too slowly. You walk faster still, if that is at all possible. Our thirty year age difference wears on me. I pray for rain that I might offer you my umbrella, but the cloudless sky just laughs. I am at a loss. We stop at a light and I squeeze all the words clawing their way up back down into my heart. I am reeling, all six acupuncture pulses echoing in my forehead. I suck in ambient air like a vacuum; it pummels my lungs like shrapnel.

The light turns green and I charge ahead, taking the first step, knowing you will match my pace. Half a block by I cast a cautious glance over my shoulder. But you are not there? I whirl around to see you buying fruit from a vendor. I retreat into the shelter of a doorway and from there watch you unnoticed. Your pace has slowed considerably. Are you tired, my Beguiling One?

You arrive and I am standing before you. You recoil, drop the fruit. Fruit salad sprays the sidewalk. Pineapple and orange and strawberry splatter your shoes. You mouth goes slack. The world tips on its axis. I stand there, silent, pleading. Your stare melts the glaciers.

“What?”

I swallow, but my throat burns like wildfire. I stoop, gather the fruit. Remnants of melon and cantaloupe and mango trip through my fingers. I offer them to you, my outstretched hands my reply. We could lie on the beach, my Sweet One, eat fruit until our bellies were full….

What’s this, my Beauty? Are you annoyed with me?

Juice slips through my fingers as a thousand needles pierce my arm. My vision diffuses, my chest seizes. I want to press my heart, but it’s my balls I grab. I leave a sweet, sticky hand print on my khaki trousers.

“I thought so,” you say, and turn to leave.

I open my mouth to speak, to cry, to confess, but the words splinter as my heart explodes. Oh, please, PLEASE, wait. Not this way, my Delicious One. I drop to one knee, then to the ground as my cheek buries itself in a slice of golden pineapple. The sharp, sweet aroma drifts into my sinuses. I watch your fruit-splattered shoes recede. I hear the distant wail of a siren. They come for me, I know. Will you ride with me, my Love?

(c)

Pam Lazos

fiction valentine 1.2

Posted on February 9, 2014 by Cynthia G.

we’re sharing stories of love this week because love is so big and one day is so small. today we’re starting a little catalog here. sort of . decide for yourself.

excerpted from “ALMOST CANADA”

She moves up the aisle toward the dining car to pass the time until the train resumes its forward motion. At the narrow counter, she takes a stool beside to a dark haired man, orders a glass of ginger ale. The man is working on a burger. He shifts his eyes toward her, measuring. His hair is glossy, black as a raven feather and close-cropped above his collar. One long border of bristled hairs makes a ledge over his eyes, his nose hooking sharply over a pretty mouth.

“Gotta love ther rail, right?” he said. He hitches a smile in Antonia’s direction.

“Excuse me?”

“One goddam delay en anerther,” he explains. There is a mole on his neck, just behind his left ear that moves as he chews and talks. It is the size of a grain of rice.

The man tilts over the counter toward his food, hooks his arm around his plate forming a border between his fried potatoes and Antonia. He is not a small man, or bird-like, but his movements suggest the motions of the ravens that inhabit the tree outside of her office window. Antonia watches the bubbles rise in her glass of pop, thinks about what she knows about ravens, which begin to court at an early age, and then mate for life. In part of the mating process, a male raven will demonstrate intelligence and a willingness to procure food or shiny objects. Egg laying begins in February so courting must take place in early to mid-January.

Antonia is a vegetarian more by disposition than philosophy. This is to say, she will eat meat to avoid hurting her neighbor’s feelings if invited for dinner. In a restaurant, she will select venison if the side dishes or greens are inferior. The man makes the hamburger vanish, chunks at a time, washing it down with pale beer. When he finishes, he wipes the corner of his mouth with a large, square thumb. His eyes rake her face, drop to her sweater. “Wheer ya headed? Goina Canada?”

Antonia stares at the chip bisecting his incisor, wonders what it would feel like to run her tongue over that rough surface. Her mouth forms a watery smile. Common ravens are highly opportunistic. “Almost,” she says, leaving money for the pop and spinning away. “I’m going to Almost Canada.”

She is mutable, an object of desire. She is a screen upon which projections are made: a bold maiden, a volatile spinster, the girl with the long grey skirt and the blouse with pearl buttons.

The man swipes twin circles of pickle from his plate and drops them on this tongue like holy wafers. He watches the twin moons of her rump as she moves away.

Antonia returns to her seat to find that in her absence, the pair of facing seats across the aisle has been occupied by three girls, sisters, traveling on their own. The oldest, a teenager with sleek black hair, presses out text messages on her phone, while the two younger girls share a laptop computer and review the Facebook posts of friends. They are fundamentally beautiful in the way of youth and by heritage; their ancestors inhabited these coastal meadows centuries before Europeans arrived with their fur trades and their thirst for whale oil. Antonia peers beneath her own lashes at the contrast between their dark hair and their alabaster skin, the curve of their lips above the slow arcs of their chins.

She feels a rush of gratitude for such vigorous charm, such tender virtue. As the train begins to slow for the next station, the oldest, the managing sister, switches from texting to making a call to determine at which city the trio will depart the train. The girl says It’s me. We’re coming to the station. Do we get off here or the next one? Antonia wonders how there can be confusion about the care of beautiful dark-haired girls. Mom, the girl says. Mom, please don’t yell at me. I just need to know, which station? And like that, a picture develops; the first one, the responsible child, the good girl. Antonia’s heart breaks a little for these sylph.

(c)

Cynthia Gregory

fiction valentine 1.1

Posted on February 8, 2014 by Cynthia G.

here is an except from a story I wrote called, “Not My Suicide.” It’s about how nothing is what it seems: not love, not time, not nature.

Some people, those who are either marginally motivated or marginally skilled, don’t manage to close the deal the first time and try again, compulsively. Psychologists say that some people go at it up to fifty times before actually making it. Strangely, you could say that one success in fifty is respectable. One hundred in-vitro attempts will statistically result in eleven babies. Edison, who was afraid of the dark, made three thousand attempts to create the light bulb before he succeeded. It’s a matter of perspective.

Finally, Viola had had enough. “Can we talk about something else?”

Marina straightened her spine, pointed toward the light fixtures overhead. “Global warming.”

Bibi choked on her biscotti. “Are you off your meds?”

Marina wagged her chin. “We’re murdering the planet.”

“Calm down.”

“Don’t mother me.”

Peace begins with me, I thought. Peace begins with me. “Please, ladies.”

“She’s in denial,” Bibi insisted. “A victim of the liberal media.”

“Liberal — are you nuts?” Marina was not having it. “They’re saying that global warming is a myth, that alternative energies cost too much.”

“Geez Louise, don’t have kittens. You want an almond cookie?”

“I don’t want an effing almond cookie. I want rain forests and tree frogs and glaciers.”

“You’ve never even been to a glacier.”

Water pooled in Marina’s cerulean eyes. “Scientists in Norway are finding industrial flame retardant in whale blubber.”

“Stop.”

“It’s true. Poly-something –they use it to make furniture, clothing, computer chips.”

“How did it get in the whales?”

Marina folded Bibi’s hands in hers, squeezed lightly. “Through the water table, Beeb.”

“What? That doesn’t even make sense.”

In the ‘twelve simultaneous versions of Now’ world view, it is possible to be both dead and alive at the same time, both here and there. As if our so-called lives aren’t complicated enough.

(c)

Cynthia Gregory

getting past the gatekeeper

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Cynthia G.

Journal THAT

Cynthia Gregory

Resistance is a funny thing. You may have heard the adage: what you resist persists. In the same way you know that if you resist writing in your journal for maybe one of a million reasons -it doesn’t simply go away. Oh, no. It sits on your desk all poised and proper, waiting patiently for your return. It sits there all quiet and nonjudgmental, not saying anything but oh what it is not saying. Its cover is so beautiful, its pages so crisp. It haunts you. It mocks you. It’s no use, the journal cannot be ignored. The journal will have its way. You may avoid it for a day or two, or even a week. Sometimes a month will go by, but if you are attuned to your inner journalista, you will return to the journal, you will write. As the Borg insist, “Resistance is futile.” So go ahead, surrender.

Resistance is the gatekeeper in your mind, the lonely id, the unpopular kid in kickball, who doesn’t want you to enter into the place where all the creative ideas, fond memories, and vivid dreams are stored. Because if you did that, then what would happen? Contentment? Bliss? What on earth would you do with all that? On that side: big ideas, big dreams, gumdrop and fudge ripple pleasure domes. This side: a steady diet of leafy greens. That side: Ferris wheels of ingenuity, zipper rides of imagination. This side: a rope swing. The gatekeeper lives between this side and that side. The gatekeeper occupies the margins of can’t do and done. The only thing wedged between you and your untamed imagination is the gatekeeper. You must devise ways to slip past the gatekeeper and get to the fecund spaces of your vast interior.

There are so many ways to give in to journaling if the inspiration is temporarily MIA. The simplest way is to make it jolly and fun. You infuse your journal time with a sense of whimsy, of literary whipped cream and frosting. Write each entry with a different color of pen. Doodle. Treat yourself to a cupcake for each ten pages you complete. This is the easy way to slip past the gatekeeper. Essentially, its bribery, but we’re not above enticements, and besides: yum.

Another way to get past the gatekeeper is by accident. Say for instance that in order to fulfill your journaling goals, you need to write four journal entries per week, but on the third day you meet up with resistance, and don’t feel like spilling your guts. You have the sniffles or had trouble sleeping last night or your favorite song hasn’t played on the radio all day, whatever. So you pick up your journal and sigh. You look out the window. You tap the pen against your teeth, make up snappy little rhythms.

So just when you’re ready to give in, cajole yourself by telling yourself something like this: Okay, just one page. Write one dumb page and get it over with. Write about the funny thing the dog did with your slipper. Or write about how when the neighbor went out to retrieve the morning paper, he leaned over to pick it up and unintentionally mooned you. Start with something small and maybe it will lead to something bigger, and before you know it, you will have written a full blown journal entry by accident. You didn’t mean for it to be so big and so interesting and so conversationally spellbinding, but you did it. You started out with mediocre intentions and wound up at the intersection of Genius Ideas and Good for You. You can now give yourself permission to feel superior.

Then of course, the most aggressive way to get by the gatekeeper is to straight-out push your way through. I personally endorse this method because it is energizing, and empowering. It’s also the most fun, in case that matters, because it yields the most surprising results.

To establishing ‘the push’ for your journaling exercise, you need to set up a goal that is challenging enough, but that somewhere in the back of your mind you don’t think you can accomplish. Maybe it’s something you haven’t done before; something you suspect may be beyond your skill level. Give yourself a goal of: write ten pages on why I like blue cheese. Or list seventy five things to do with popcorn. Or: the one hundred qualities I most appreciate in my mate. You see where I’m going with this. It’s easy to make a short list of just about anything. But a little longer list is tougher, and this is where the magic comes in. Maybe you’re rolling merrily along and just when you get to the point where the gatekeeper steps in and says, ‘oh, I think you’re done here. That’s quite enough out of you, madam.’ And you begin to think that maybe you’ve run out of gas, that maybe that’s all the ideas you’re capable of.

Hint: this is the exact place where you should not give up. This is place where you’ve almost reached what I call the stage of the absurd. This is where you just start writing any old bald idea down, just slap it down to fulfill your goal. You stop trying to be clever, you stop trying to be brilliant, you’re just dropping ideas on the page like hot rocks one after another after another. You stop trying.

At this point in the process, you blow out all the carbon residue in your creative engine and enter into a whole new creative zone. And then you’re off like a hotrod. It’s an exhilarating, thrilling, goose-pimple-y ride, because you’ve just shot past the point where you suspected you might stop, where you feared you’d fail, where you couldn’t see your way out of that fix, and then the ideas just bubbled up into your head and flowed out through your pen like a pure stream of imagination, and it is better than good; it is delish.

You slipped past the gatekeeper like a superstar. And you know what? You’re dazzling, darling. You’re a journalista.

assault the page

Posted on December 24, 2013 by Cynthia G.

Journal THAT

Cynthia Gregory

Here is a writing challenge that is completely over the top: write with your non-dominant hand for one page. No more. More than one page is just torture.

The reasoning behind this exercise is similar to the logic behind writing by hand and not relying on the computer keyboard for one hundred percent of your writing output. Writing with your dominant hand allows your thoughts to flow unimpeded from your dazzling brain, down your graceful arm and onto the page in a liquid script. You learned to do this type of writing so long ago that the muscular memory is well established and you no longer need to think about how to grip the pencil, focus like a mountain lion, rear back, and assault the page. This type of writing is automatic, never requiring a second thought to secure a type of fluency, and elegance of process. You pick up the pen, you write.

When you write with a computer, you access both parts of your brain and manage a fairly linear process of calculating thought, interpreting electronic impulses, dashing off messages with lightning speed. You are capable of producing great amounts of written material quickly; if you are an accomplished enough typist, your fingers can almost keep pace with your thoughts. Likely however, you are able to dash off great tracts of prose produced at a formidable rate, interspersed with small interludes of calm while the thinking apparatus generates more material, whereupon the typing commences at high speed.

Alternately, writing by hand slows you down by a least half. The statelier pace of recording thoughts on the page also slows your mind down, and everything relaxes. Your brain has time to linger over thoughts, to meander down lanes of memory and drowse in the dapple shade of summer trees. You can write quickly, but you are still operating at about half-throttle, and there is a more reflective quality to your thoughts and ideas. You can immerse yourself into an idea, you may actually visualize it, take it in with your senses, spend some time with it, date it, get to know it’s quirks, understand the sweetness of it, savor each nuance of meaning before moving on to the next idea. Writing by hand is a tactile and timely experience. You feel the gravity of each word, pushing your pen around the paper. You smell memories; you taste nouns. The idea in your mind merges with your heart and produces lines on a page that more or less mean something. Writing by hand actually means writing by body. It’s not as if your hand is a separate unit from your shoulder, elbow, neck, or heart. You write with it all; because it’s all connected.

If writing by hand is a physical experience, writing with your non-dominant hand is meta-physical. It requires a concurrent focus just to grasp the pen, to align yourself with the paper, figure out at what slant to approach a line of dictation, how firmly or lightly to squeeze the pen. Suddenly, words with billboard-sized letters loom in your mind, waiting, while you work out the downward loop in your cursive f and move on. What an accomplishment!

Don’t try to be perfect –you’ll frustrate yourself– unless you were born a leftie and a well-intended but completely disconnected nun forced you to be normal by learning how to write and color and cut paper chains with your right hand. If this is the case, allow me to apologize on behalf of teachers everywhere. You were perfect the way you were, and no one had the slightest right to alter your natural impulses.

Write with your weaker hand –and as you do, you will notice that you have to loosen up. At first you’ll be all stiff and stilted, which will be of no discernible help at all. Struggle less, write more. It’s almost as if with less effort your writing becomes more legible, and the mess of spaghetti on the page begins to resemble actual letters connected to convey meaning. Start by practicing writing your name, then the names of the ones you love. Then gradually, work your way up to words and sentences. A paragraph becomes a grand achievement. Once you master the paragraph, work your way up to a page. Don’t worry about speed, it takes as long as it takes, and it isn’t a competition.

As you write with your weaker hand, you may begin to notice simplicity of thought emerging in your writing. As your neural pathways struggle to fire and connect, you may find your writing taking an intuitive leap, a creative catapult toward new meaning. While writing with your non-dominant hand is awkward, difficult, unseemly, unruly, undignified, it is also as unimaginably liberating as a good walk in the summer rain, as a slice of pizza for breakfast.

We all walk around with a virtual circus playing in our heads and hearts. We carry a lifetime of memories, and a universe of potential. We are at once a young child, and a wise mentor. We are co-workers, and doting grandparents. We are friends and dog-trainers. Vegetarians and comparison shoppers. We are none of us completely and one hundred percent just one thing or even the face we show the world. This is maybe just one of the things that make us such interesting and complex individuals. When we write with our dominant hand, our worlds remain intact, there is no color outside of the lines; all personalities more or less behave as expected. When you write with your non-dominant hand, buried thoughts may rise up to the conscious level, may veer outside the lines in splashes of magenta and vermilion. It becomes messy and a trifle chaotic, but it becomes something beautiful, too.

Writing with your non-dominant hand is a bit of a magic trick; now you see it, now you don’t. While you focus on your inelegant claw struggling to grasp a pen, hidden thoughts may trickle in; tiny hairline fractures may appear in the wall you’ve built around the creative juices; the wall itself may start to crumble just a little, and ideas you’d forgotten you had may just trickle in. Et voila! A dove materializes from a handkerchief.

I believe in magic. I believe in illusion. I believe that coloring outside the box is not just fun; it’s an innate responsibility of the creative heart. So get out there and write with your less popular, ugly step-sister, non-dominant hand. You won’t like it at first. In the beginning it will be as difficult and awkward as a poodle in a tutu. But once you relax and flow with the process, you’ll learn to know yourself in a whole new way, chances are pretty good you’ll like the other, less dominant you.

orange you glad

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Cynthia G.

Journal THAT

a guide to writing

Cynthia Gregory

The beauty of the journaling process is that it can be simple or it can be complex in a way that reveals itself as a personal, daily, moment-by-moment choice. What enriches the journaling experience (if you’re willing), is variety, is texture.

Imagine eating the same salad every day of your life. You can argue that rich, leafy greens provide minerals and nutrients essential to optimum health. You can also argue that periodically a bowl of thick, smooth, mocha fudge ripple ice cream has the capacity to transport you to your happy place, to a time when summer afternoons sprawled under the shade of a leafy maple counting squirrels in the branches above was the most important assignment of the day. Variety. Texture. Sometimes the best you can do is bolt down a protein bar on the run. Other times, you want to immerse yourself in the sensual, primitive pleasure of a feast of market fresh produce, a plate of pasta cooked perfectly al dente and smothered in an aromatic sauce of eggplant and basil and roasted peppers.

Sometimes your journal is where you lock in and unload your thoughts of the day, the dramas of your life, your hopes for your lover, your future, your Self. Sometimes your journal is a train and each entry is a station. Sometimes the station is the destination, sometimes it’s the jumping off place, the place where adventure begins. Neither place is superior to the other, it is enough that they are what they are. However, this journaling assignment is about the jumping off place, about getting to the end of everything you know, standing poised on the edge with your toes hanging over, a yawning expanse of never been-there-but-open-to-the-possibility. This is the station where you disembark the train and immediately jump into a waiting cab and vanish into the landscape.

This drill can be accomplished using any number of ordinary household items, a hammer, a clothes pin, a plum, or in this case; an orange. Choose any orange you like; choose a sweet as candy Clementine, sometime that rests in the palm of your hand like a tiny jeweled box. Or select a bouncy navel with its nubby button and thick peel. A secretive blood orange, interior cloaked in a plain wrapper. Don’t agonize over the choice; one is as good as the other. Remember, this isn’t about the orange. The orange is only the station platform, the way in.

Remember before, when I suggested that you enter a room and stay there until you’ve achieved the mission of full emotional disclosure? Of going to that place where you blink into the darkness, open your ears to the music of the silence, of letting the air move over the surface of your skin and registering the sensation with words on a page? This is more of that. It is probably easier to make this a timed writing, because the level of difficulty might otherwise persuade you to pitch in the towel long before you get to the juicy bits, the place where you discover something new. With a timed writing, you are not focused so much on the content of the writing, as in the endurance of the time.

A funny thing happens with the timed writing exercise. Generally, you take off with great alacrity, writing everything you know about a subject. Interestingly however, if the time is of a challenging length, the writer finds that she runs out of known material in a relatively short period of time. She finds she has a surplus of minutes, and a surfeit of words. How does this happen? It is a trick of the mind. No matter, this is where it gets interesting.

Find a quiet place to write, free of distraction. Set a timer and begin. First, pick up your orange, close your eyes and inhale its tart-sweet fragrance. Really smell it. Roll it over the skin of your throat, across your chest. Toss it from one hand to the other, examine the surface of the peel, each dimple, every blemish. Experience the orange with your senses as fully as possible, then set it down nearby and begin to write. You may begin with a literal description, and you may actually get a paragraph or two from the physical presence of the fruit, the weight of it. Then what? Then we meet the cousins of “reality” namely imagination, and memory, we are about to move beyond what is and approach what if.

Here are possible ways to go from here. Write about:

Your first memory of citrus fruit
The girl you knew who smelled like orange blossoms
The texture of the creamy white pith beneath your fingernails when you peel it
the camping trip you took where after three hours of steady hiking you stopped by a creek and tore the flesh of a tangerine and drank the pulpy juice with absolute gratitude for the miracle of orange-ness the way the skin split, revealing the color of a ripe sunset on a honeymoon cruise and dancing under a full moon and the feel of sin on skin, of succulent, sweet juice dripping down your chin at dawn

You see -it’s not really about the orange. At least, not necessarily so. The orange is a trigger; it is the beginning place that has the power to transport you to another time and place for the duration of whatever time you establish at the beginning of the writing.

It’s important in a timed writing to stick with the intended time. If you establish a fifteen or twenty minute limit, stick with it. If you find you run out of preconceived ideas of what you think you should be writing about, stick with it. Let go of the idea that you choose the words to commit to the page. Let the words choose you. Let the idea pick you up and shake you loose of everything you thought it should be. When you come to the place where your treasure chest of “good” ideas is empty, be patient. Be calm. Wait. Let the ideas float into your mind and don’t judge them, don’t try to shape them. Write them down. Let the ideas flow and allow the gentle waves of the stream of consciousness lap gently at the shores of your mind. This is the place where new ideas are birthed. This is the place where imagination and memory merge, form something new, and your job is to write it down. It sounds simple; it is. It sounds difficult; it is not. All you have to do is be willing to let your subject: the orange, the plum, the paper clip -reveal a story to you, and then your job is to introduce it to your journal.

count on love

Posted on December 15, 2013 by Cynthia G.

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Posted on November 3, 2013 by Cynthia G.

Don’t you just hate it when you spend the time looking for a yummy read, a book to fire your imagination and sooth your sense of adventure, only to find the heroine completely unlikeable in the end? We all know the pain of flirting with a book we think we will love only to break up with it half way between the covers because it’s a big fat dud. What if the story is good, but the writing itself is dull or just one bald cliché after another? Fear not, gentle reader. We have tools and search engines, and even clever strategies to make good book choices.

So how do you judge a book by its, er, cover? As in any endeavor, it’s important to know what you like. Just now, I pulled a Google search for “debut novels, 2013.” Many selections popped up. I clicked on the one entitled, “10 Dazzling Debut Novels to Pick Up Now” because I love to be dazzled, and it sounds like a promise. How do I choose? I know my limits. I know what I love and know what I won’t go near with a red hot poker.

Here is a small sampler of the “dazzlers,” a brief description of the storyline, and my reasons to adopt or reject them.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: “A neighbor saves an 8-year-old Chechen girl from the Russian soldiers who have taken her father, and together they seek shelter in an abandoned hospital.” Reject: too sad.
Crazy Rich Asians: “Opulence and zaniness reign when one of Singapore’s richest bachelors invites his American-born girlfriend to travel from New York to vacation in his native country.” Reject: Zaniness aside, I’m not terribly interested in fictional adventures of rich bachelors.
The Golem and the Jinni: “Two supernatural creatures accidentally unleashed in 19th-century Manhattan forge an unlikely alliance in this fantastical work of historical fiction.” Adopt: Magic + historical fiction. Yay!
American Spirit: “In this first novel from the outrageously funny host of The Moth podcast, a 40-something media exec goes rogue after losing his job in the recession, taking up drunken residence in his car before embarking on a vision quest to Bali by way of Los Angeles and Yellowstone.” Adopt: Vision quest + Yellowstone + Bali. Oh, yes!
The Execution of Noa P. Singleton: “In this grippingly off-kilter thriller, a young woman sits on death row after being convicted of murder until a high-powered attorney—the victim’s mother—intervenes, leaving everyone to wonder why.” Adopt: a young murderess saved at the 11^th hour? Hells yes.
Golden Boy: “A good-looking, athletic British teenager’s seemingly idyllic life gets turned upside down when his oldest friend betrays him, revealing a closely held family secret just as the boy’s father is about to run for political office.” Reject: Politics + betrayal. Zzzz.