Spring brought cut grass and bones.
Six Word Story No. 2
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Spring brought cut grass and bones.
Tag Archives: imagination
everything’s new again
Tom Dury’s debut novel, The End of Vandalism, is a quiet book about ordinary people living in rural Minnesota. Not much happens in Grouse County, and that’s kind of reassuring in a time of climate change, uncertainty, and uncivil presidential elections.
Originally published in 1994, The End of Vandalism was compared to the works of William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson. At the heart of this fine novel is love, a love triangle actually, between Grouse County sheriff Dan Norman, his sweet and somewhat remote wife Louise, and her former husband, Tiny Darling. Beautifully written and artfully crafted, Dury’s novel lures the reader in for a glimpse the human condition up close.
Dan Norman is a good man, an upright citizen. He manages the criminal element of Grouse County, which isn’t much. He mainly performs worthy acts, and discourages the criminal element from disturbing the pervading goodness of his town.
“One fall they held the blood drive in the fire barn at Grafton. Sheriff Dan Norman was there mainly as a gesture of good will, but one of the nurses didn’t make it , so Dan agreed to place the gauze in the crook of everyone’s arm. “And I thank you,” he would say.”
Louise is an enigma. She runs Keeborg’s Photo Studio, but doesn’t seem driven by her work. She enjoys photographing the local kids’ graduation photos and certain elected officials, but she seems to sleepwalk through it all.
These are people that you feel you somehow know, or are maybe related to. Mary, is Louise’s mother, is everyone’s mother. On the day she marries Dan, Louise is at Mary’s house, preparing for the ceremony. She negotiates with Mary’s neighbor, Heinz Miller, about whether he will attend her wedding. It’s a toss-up. Heinz is hiding out from his wife at Mary’s house, watching the Twins playing the Tigers. Heinz’s wife has discovered a bad bet he made and he isn’t anxious to be outed at Louise and Dan’s nuptials.
The lyric quality of Dury’s prose is at once calm, and compelling as he spills the secrets and trials of the citizens of Grouse County. All of the large and small moments are given equal weight, so that that the daily motions of life in rural Minnesota all become monumental, as when Louise dresses for her wedding:
“She brushed out her hair and put on her dress. It was yellow with white flowers and a low back. She tied a rose-colored ribbon in her hair, spread her arms, and turned toward the mirror. Her hair was long and brown, and the ribbon made it look coppery.
After she and Dan marry, Louise moves a small trailer onto the farm property where they live. She fixes up the trailer as a place for Dan to retreat to when he wants privacy, but instead, she occupies it. She sleeps in the trailer at night and during the day they live as any married couple, sharing meals, making love, discussing current events.
When Louise suffers an unsuccessful pregnancy, she becomes untethered. She travels with Mary to visit her aunt and uncle, Carol and Kenneth Kennedy, who run a campground on Seldom Lake, in Minnesota. They intend to stay just two weeks, but they extend their stay to four. At the end of a month, Mary returns to Grafton, and Louise stays at the lake. Eventually Louise’s heart heals for the loss of her stillborn daughter, and she returns to her husband.
“Dan like the colors of her hair and skin, the long smooth arc of her back, the sound of her breath. He thought that he would never know anyone like her. . .wrapped in each other’s arms and seeming to summon everything that had happened to them, good and bad. Their lives rushed in at them, and this is what they were holding on against.”
In the end, The End of Vandalism isn’t about vandalism at all. It’s about the gift we give to the people we love, every day. Whether we realize it at the time or not.
C. Gregory
Read the World
I always felt that I wouldn’t have anything to say as a writer until I had lived a little. Apparently, I’m not the only one. To that point, Persephone’s Step Sisters is pleased to share this post.
Source: Read the World
The Egg Tally
This is too lovely to not share:
Source: The Egg Tally
a book is a dream
Journaling as Sacred Practice is on the way!
Last weekend, I co-faciliated a labyrinth, meditation, and journaling retreat with my partner in Yoga Retreats Napa Valley. We spent the day with 15 women–and it was fabulous! During one of our writing sessions, I urged my tribe to journal about “my dream.” It was so powerful. This is what I wrote:
My dream is the success of my book on journaling, Journaling as Sacred Practice: An Act of Extreme Bravery.
I see myself being interviewed by Terry Gross. “What a great book,” she says. I laugh. “I had a bad break-up,” I tell her. “Instead of getting sad or getting mad, I started to write. I wrote 48 chapters in 48 days. And then I put the book in a drawer. I moved to Portland, Oregon. I moved to Napa Valley, California. When it was ready, it hatched.
Oprah calls. I don’t do the interview.
Louise Hay calls. She says, “Come to I Can Do It!”
Elizabeth Gilbert calls. She says “You go, girl!” We become besties.
Dreams, dreams, dreams. A book is a dream put down on paper. A song is a dream you can listen to. Did Mozart dream in color and did his dreams come with a soundtrack? My dream is for 2016 to be like one long, rolling, lazy summer day; an impressionist painting of picnics and watercolors clouds; of bread and wine and honeybees. I dream of the sound of water, the touch of a lover. The year 2016 should be a dress floating on a breeze, the sound of a train in the distance, a piano recital, the smell of apple pie through a window.
In my dream I rise up. I lift my heart and swallow the turquoise sky, the emerald river, the comb’s teeth of a vineyard row. I will calibrate my breath on the hush of waves. Let me rest there.
My wish for my WordPress friends is that 2016 is BIG and BOLD! Decide who you are and do it on purpose.
so long 2015
Before setting intentions for what lies ahead, we always like to take a minute to reflect.
this drought is no joke
::REVIEW::
For anyone who has watched firestorms devour entire towns; who has watched farmland wither and die for want of water, who has wondered if our current lack of water is not just temporary, but indeed the Mother of All Droughts, Claire Vaye Watkins’ debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus is familiar territory.
In a hazy future, LA-born Luz lives in “Laurelless Canyon” with her boyfriend Ray. They are squatters in a once-famous starlet’s once-elegant house where Luz spends her days dressing up in discarded ball gowns. Ray makes lists, scavenges for gasoline, food, anything worth trading for something else.
“Your people came here looking for something better,” Ray tells Luz. “Gold, fame, citrus. Mirage. They were feckless, yeah? Schemers. That’s why no one wants them now. Mojavs.”
In Vaye Watkin’s future, California is a wasteland. The rivers are dry and the underground aquifers are dust. The sun blazes and when it does rain the air is so hot the water evaporates before it reaches the ground. The state is dry as death and anyone with any money at all has long since abandoned it.
Vaye Watkins’ prose is powerful, and her narrative true. The story is as real as it is terrifying, because in a place where water has become mythic, geography is all that’s left.
“They ate crackers and ration cola and told stories about the mountains, the valley, the canyon and the beach. The whole debris scene. Because they’d vowed to never talk about the gone water, they spoke instead of earth that moved like water.”
One night, Luz and Ray go down to the bonfires, a place where the climate refugees gather to drink, dance, forget. Down among the drifters and the druggies, the drinkers and the plain dangerous, Luz finds a strange toddler who whispers in her ear that her name is Ig, and she says “Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell, okay?” The child appears to belong to a clutch of grifters, or to no one at all. Driven by instinct she doesn’t understand, Luz picks up the child and tells Ray they’re taking her home.
Luz and her family escape Los Angeles, heading east, seeking a place more hospitable, somewhere safer, somewhere with water. Their car breaks down in the midst of a borderless sand dune so vast it spreads and grows with all the desiccated bits of earth and stone and mountain that was once the Central Valley.
They join a band of misfits led by an enigmatic leader who is either a visionary or a madman, or both. The collective lives on the edges of the dune, surviving somehow as an outpost of civilization, moving their temporary desert city as the sand shifts and threatens to swallow them alive.
Gold Fame Citrus is a complex story of connection and belonging, of outcasts and survivors, of climate change to the extreme, and about the very small scrap of nature that humanity manages to cling to, in the most adverse conditions. Part science-fiction, part cautionary parable, it is a book worth reading if ecology means anything at all in the future of the West.
Cynthia Gregory is an award-winning author who lives and writes in the Bay Area with her rescue pup, Winston The Wonder Dog. Her new book, An Inspired Journal: the Art & Soul of Creative Nonfiction, on Green Tara Press, will be available in 2016.
Girls and Other Mysteries
::REVIEW::
That you can never truly know another person is the central truth of Rufi Thorpe’s debut novel, The Girls of Corona Del Mar, but the book is so much more than that. It is also a coming of age saga, one where the narrative begins with two golden-skinned teens in sun-drenched Corona Del Mar, and it ends years later and universes away.
At the onset, best friends Mia and Lorrie Ann share lives as intertwined as any pair of young girls. So close are they, that they can’t see the stark difference between them as anything but symbiotic. Mia’s divorcee mom scrapes by in a second-rate apartment to make ends meet. Even after she remarries and Mia’s brothers come along, they remain planted in the same spot, as if by gravity. Lorrie Ann’s parents conversely, a divinely bohemian couple, sink roots steadfastly in love and music. To Mia, Lorrie Ann’s family represents the happy ideal of an intact family.
It turns out that Mia gets pregnant in high school, and naturally, it is to Lorrie Ann that she makes her confession. Seemingly chaste Lorrie Ann, the saint to Mia’s sinner, helps her through the subsequent abortion. At the end of high school, Mia is the one who goes to Yale to pursue a degree in the classics, while Lorrie Ann becomes pregnant herself, and chooses to give up on dreams of college to have the baby.
But Lorrie Ann’s baby is born horribly deformed and from then on, she can’t seem to catch a break. She marries her baby daddy, who when his restaurant job can’t cover the requirements of his special needs family, enlists in the army. Then he is deployed to Iraq and is killed. Poor and struggling, Lorrie Ann eventually loses custody of her son.
Alternately, Mia becomes a scholar. Fifteen years later, their two lives intersect in Istanbul, where Mia and her fiancé, Franklin, are transcribing ancient narratives about the Sumerian goddess Inanna. Lorrie Ann calls Mia out of the blue and Mia goes to the marketplace to meet her, only to find her old friend traveling with a clutch of jet-setters, and addicted to heroin.
The reunion is predictably strained. Mia is just beginning to realize that she may be pregnant. She confesses as much to Lorrie Ann, who promises to keep the secret until Mia comes to terms with which path she will ultimately choose. Mia is afraid to tell Franklin, who is the best thing that’s ever happened to her. She is afraid that he won’t be ready to be, much less want to be, a father. But Lorrie Ann betrays her confidence and reveals all. One could say that as her friend, Lorrie Ann does what she feels is in Mia’s best interest. She can clearly see how much Franklin loves Mia. One could also say that as friends go, it isn’t Lorrie Ann’s secret to reveal to the fiancé of a friend she hadn’t seen in a dozen years.
Friendship. Betrayal. The nature of love, and the powerful lure of ancient mythology. Thorpe’s novel is a deep and layered journey, and for anyone who has ever deeply loved a bestie, it is well worth the exploration.
–Cynthia Gregory
Watch for my upcoming book: An Inspired Journal; the Art and Soul of Creative Nonfiction. Available soon on Green Tara Press at Amazon.com
a novel to die for
::REVIEW::
Who knew publishing was such a dangerous and glamorous profession? Though A Murder of Magpies is journalist Judith Flanders first novel, her whip smart bravura and droll sense of humor make this Murder a fun read.
“Oh, just kill me now!” I didn’t shriek that out loud, just clenched my teeth more tightly. It was eight thirty, and already the day couldn’t get much worse. I’m always at my desk by eight not because I’m so wonderful, although I am, but because it’s the only time of day when no one asks me anything, when I can actually get on with some work, instead of solving other people’s problems.”
Meet snarky book editor, Samantha (Sam) Clair. Sam has managed a fine career in the publishing business, working with a stable of writers, several of whom churn out predictably good best sellers. San is a sensible kind of gal. She’s the type of no-nonsense person who, when a meeting is disrupted by an unexpected visitor, will deal with it in her own sensible way.
“It was probably a friend of a friend, or someone who’d got my name somehow and was trying to flog a manuscript, no doubt about how his mother had abused him, or proving that his great-great-grandfather was Jack the Ripper. We don’t have to deal with real live members of the public often, but every now and again, one sneaks under the radar.”
One of Sam’s favorite writers, gorgeous Kit Lovell, is a reliably gorgeous writer. Kit covers fashion and can dish about the great design houses with the best of them. But this time, he’s written a potentially libelous biography of a fashion icon whose death appears to have been murder. While covering the human interest story about one of the largest and most respected fashion houses in Europe, Kit unintentionally uncovers an international money laundering ring. Big fashion is inextricably linked to big money and neither are pleased with Kit’s revelations.
The manuscript proves incendiary. Before long, Sam finds herself embroiled in a hot mess. Kit vanishes, a copy of his manuscript is stolen, a courier is killed, and Sam’s flat is ransacked. This is quite a lot of excitement for a woman who spends her days reading books.
After the break in Sam begins to investigate her good friend and best author’s disappearance. Companions in her quest include her corporate lawyer mother, Helena–who is astonishingly adept at untangling the kinks of the criminal mind—and a hunky police detective, Jake Field.
As a single professional woman, Sam is aware of her options. She’s had relationships, and is currently satisfied with her quiet job, and her quiet flat, with its quiet upstairs neighbor, Mr. Ridigers. She tolerates her young coworkers with a thin layer of patience while plotting ways to get her authors placed on the best book club lists. A romantic entanglement with a cop isn’t exactly her cup of tea.
In the end, Sam and Helena and Jake solve the murder of Kit – and Helena uncovers hard evidence to corroborate Kit’s fashion house money laundering scheme. Sam takes Jake as a lover, much to Helena’s approval.
Murder of Magpies is a great, fun, smart read. Don’t miss it.
leaping dogs
I have the best commute in the world. I travel nearly daily from Napa Valley through Sonoma County to Marin County, CA. There are spectacular views of the upper San Francisco Bay wetlands, across the lush Carneros region with vineyards for miles, the coastal Mayacamas Range, Mt. Tamalpias, and Mt. Diabo. As pretty goes, it’s off the charts. The only other commute I’ve had to match it was 20 years ago along the Pacific Coast Highway from Long Beach to Newport Beach, with the blue Pacific practically at my fingertips.
I started a new commute three weeks ago. I had just come off a lovely, lazy summer vacation. I was about as Zen as I’ve been in years after spending four months meditating daily, taking long walks, adopting a puppy, and generally finding ways to revel in happy. Weirdly, the day I suited back up and started commuting to work, I stepped right into the old habit of taking myself Very Seriously. I drove fast. I cursed red lights. I started driving like a maniac on the devil’s raceway. It’s embarrassing to admit, but every other driver on the road was either a) stupid, b) blind, c) ignorant of my supreme mission to arrive at my very important place in the world. I couldn’t get where I needed to fast enough, or efficiently enough.
And then, gratefully, before I got too out of control and gave myself an aneurism, I recieved a cosmic thump on the head. I was driving to work one morning last week, raging against every slow driver between me and the Golden Gate Bridge. The line of traffic was (finally!) moving swiftly along, we had gotten a green light through a three-way intersection near an abandoned dairy in Sonoma and were picking up speed for an uphill climb. Suddenly, out of the overgrown bushes of the ghost dairy on my right, a beautiful golden coyote darted toward the far side of the road and to my horror, leapt straight into the grill of the car in front of me. There was not time for the driver to even slow, much less react. Impact was a foregone conclusion. I watched, horrified, as time slowed and the scene played itself out.
The driver did not stop. Traffic did not stop. We swerved and eddied around the carnage, but we did not stop. I reached for my phone and made a lifeline call. I called B, my friend, crying and shuddering. “Pull over,” she said. As soon as I could, I did. I did not see anyone else pull over. Bless her, B helped me through those first few minutes, until I could breathe and continue driving.
Later that day, I called her and we talked. “Coyote is known as the trickster in Native American legend,” I told her. “It wasn’t funny.”
“There, there,” she said to me, “There, there.”
I know enough about stuff to know that seminal events like my catastrophic commute are never about what they seem to be about. They are always about something deeper. That night, while on the phone with B, I sat at my computer and did a Google search for “coyote totem.” The page I found said that the message from Coyote is “to not take things too seriously, to remember to have fun.” I was stunned. I looked at my behavior leading up to the incident of the commuter coyote, and I was indeed taking the world waaaay to seriously. It was as if the spirit of Coyote had orchestrated the whole show just to get my attention, as if to say, “Really? REALLY?”
Since that awful day in Sonoma, something has shifted in me. I’ve decided that ten minutes one way or the other doesn’t matter. Slow cars don’t matter. Rude drivers don’t matter. What matters is how in-tune I am with my soul, and nothing is important enough get in the way of that. Period. I show up for my commute, and whatever happens, happens. Sluggish cars, silly drivers, et al.
A side benefit of my tragedy/epiphany is that I have been dumbstruck by my travels. I am lucky enough to get to traverse some of the most beautiful natural scenery on the Pacific coast. It is lush and dreamy and fecund in a hundred ways. It is splashed by farm ponds that turn silver and reflect the rising winter sunrise. It is dotted with working barns that have withstood wind and rain and sun. My route is part of the original El Camino Real, the path driven by faith, one that Padre Junipero Serra took through Alta California more than two hundred years ago to bring God to a wild land. I didn’t see that before. In my rush to be important, I had ignored this amazingly beautiful place. Coyote, in his wily wisdom, knew that, and brought it to my attention in a way that was impossible to ignore.
So now, I am reminded of Ram Das’ famous admonition: Be Here Now. Thankfully, I am. Here. Now. And the view is amazing.
persephone's step-sisters 