It has always been so scary to think about this, and of course the reasons are obvious. As long as I don’t try, I don’t have to face failure, if I’m not actually very good. As long as I don’t try, I don’t have to be uncomfortable in that way. As long as I don’t try, I can keep doing all the wonderful avoidance things I do. Like “well, I’ll just run through facebook/google reader and then I’ll do it.” Ha, of course.

It occurs to me quite often that the only difference between me and creative people I admire is that they do it, they don’t just think and talk about it. They might be better or worse than me, but the important difference is that they’re doing it, and I’m just thinking about doing it. Or talking about doing it. Or talking about thinking about it. Oh I’m so clever at this avoiding business.

So here it is, my big dream. At the highest level, my big dream is to finally live a creative life. Me being me, I’ve made an Excel spreadsheet, breaking this down into a number of areas, but they all fall under this umbrella. I can so easily get lost in the pleasure of spreadsheets and multi-level outlines, with footnotes and cross references, but for this post I focus on just one very big piece.

I want to write a book. A novel. This is my desperate big dream. Working as an editor has really helped me get closer to this goal; I am so much better at understanding what makes a story work, what makes a story move or stall, what makes a character come alive or remain flat. I have a lot to say, and I believe that if I can just get out of my own way and unclench my jaw a little bit, I can do it. But I’ll never do it if I don’t begin.

I’ve thought a lot about what stops me, and one thing that almost always pushes the pause button is my elevation of authors and novels to such a vaulted place. Books saved my life as a child, and that’s not an exaggeration. To think that I might write something that a reader would keep in his or her heart, something that would give someone an idea of other ways of living and being, that’s about as noble a thing as I personally know. Art can do that for us, it saves us and creates us and helps us understand the world and our own experience. But thinking of it that way is intimidating.

One thing I want to do to help myself is to develop a creative routine. For a few weeks I wrote a minimum of 750 words every morning — morning pages — and boy did it cut something loose in me. I felt like a different kind of observer in the world. I’m also organizing my week so I do at least one expanding thing a week: go to an art exhibit or one of the fantastic museums here in town; go to a performance of some kind, theater, talk, reading; if ever there were a place that makes this goal easy and do-able, it’s Manhattan for heaven’s sake.

This is part of a bigger project, so it’s a kind of interlocking puzzle. It’ll be hard to make it work, since I also need to resume my strength training and I have other physical goals that require time, other social goals that require time. I’m scared and excited, and more than a little bit intimidated.

Thanks for the support you give me by visiting and reading my blog, and by leaving comments when you do. You’ve helped me on my way more than you know.

The items are sold, and the quality is apparently exceptional; the first part of the video is too long, it’s there to emphasize just how great their work is, so be patient through it. One of the guards said, “we can’t just keep them locked up anymore.” What a concept, rehabilitation.

I didn’t really grow up with my father, but when I met him when I was an adult, I realized all kinds of tiny ways I was just like him, things I couldn’t have picked up from seeing him. Like the way I wipe both corners of my mouth unconsciously, the way I used to search the personals section of the newspaper (back when that wasn’t code for porn), looking for something someone might’ve written for me – he did both those things too. OK, big deal, so do many people, but to see that we did both things in the exact same way, it was a little eerie. Gifts, characteristics, invisible threads connecting us across time.

So all my children received many things from their father and from me, and I think about them, and am struck by them now and then. There’s a very clear example in my daughter Marnie. Marnie’s dad draws these little cartoons – always has, as long as I’ve known him. He draws a waving guy, and a dog, and they have not changed over all these years. The only variation is that now and then the waving guy has a palm tree behind him, or something like that. Here’s a new example, he signs all his letters to his kids like this:

he's been drawing this since i met him in 1978

He and Marnie used to spend hours drawing together, filling up page after page with cartoon line drawings, fantastic creatures, all kinds of things. (I can hardly draw a breath, or a straight line with a ruler, so Marnie’s visual art talent didn’t come from me, that’s for sure!) So Marnie took this very small gift from her dad, and some other small gifts from me, and turned them into this GIANT thing. She’s creating a graphic novel now, and it’s staggering and will be staggeringly beautiful. Here’s a seed of it:

something marnie describes as a "sketch"

The link to her professional site is there to the right –> do check it out.

Life is really wonderful in this way, these tiny invisible threads and bonds gathering and growing over time, and changing by the aggregation. I love this stuff.

In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.
~~Herman Melville, Art

OK, it’s imperishable or a world as Will
& Idea, a Hindu illusion that our habits continuously
Create. Whatever I think, it
Keeps changing from bright to dark, from clear
To colored: Thus before I began to think and
So after I’ve stopped, as if it were real & I
Were its illusion
~~Philip Whalen, from The Same Old Jazz

Her pencil poised, she’s ready to create,
Then listens to her mind’s perverse debate
On whether what she does serves any use;
And that is all she needs for an excuse
To spend all afternoon and half the night
Enjoying poems other people write.
~~Leslie Monsour, The Education of a Poet

Flesh of the sky, child of the sky, the mind
Has been obligated from the beginning
To create an ordered universe
As the only possible proof of its own inheritance.
~~Pattiann Rogers, from The Origin of Order

I don’t know what to expect, exactly, but it might show up in my blog posts during that period.

My kids are extremely creative; my oldest daughter teaches 1st grade (and is Teacher of the Year, hell yeah) and she can whip up the coolest things without even thinking about it. The kids in her classes are lucky ducks. My second daughter is an artist (buy her work here please, at monkeyrope press…but you have to move quickly because her stuff is selling like hotcakes!). The work in her shop is her commercial stuff; she’s very much a conceptual artist too, but that work shows up in galleries rather than in her etsy shop. My son is just so gifted verbally, and he’s hilarious and creative without giving it a second’s thought.

Their father likes to draw, and I make a lot of stuff, so I guess they came by it honestly, but they took our meager gifts to new heights. I wish I were more creative; I’m a pretty good technician, but I wouldn’t say I’m creative, except with language now and then.

So here’s to boot camp, and to more creativity in the world!

“If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.”

It’s coming out in paper, and in Kindle, and I just preordered the Kindle edition which will release April 13.

It is hard to do that, to be as gentle and compassionate with ourselves as we are with others. (Well, for most people anyway – discounting the truly mean and sadistic.) Of course we know our own true hearts, our own sometimes cruel and mean-spirited thoughts about other people or the world. We know those things about ourselves, and I believe we would be stunned to be let in on the internal dialogue of people we know…..we’d be stunned to learn the things they think, the things they think about us, even though we know we have the same types of thoughts. But we think we are the mean-spirited one, we know that about ourselves. There is a saying in AA (I think?) that goes something like “don’t judge your insides by other peoples’ outsides.” That’s brilliant! We do that, all the time. We struggle, but it looks like other people don’t so we must be failures.

I have a friend who was trying to learn how to knit – to offer a very simple example – and she made mistakes in her first scarf. She had to rip out rows. Her work was flawed and didn’t look all that great. And she thought there was something wrong, she didn’t have the makings of a knitter. But we all make mistakes, and rip out rows, and are aware of that weird place under the arm where we had too many stitches and tried to fix it by doing some strange decreases that really don’t look all that good but if we keep our arm at our side maybe no one will notice and anyway I don’t feel like ripping back so many rows I just want to get the damned thing done.

Of course there’s a fine line between being compassionate with ourselves and excusing ourselves a little too easily. I usually err on the side of keeping myself on the hook, flaying myself with recrimination for every lazy thing, every uncaring thing, I shouldn’t be so harsh, I should’ve I could’ve I would’ve. I don’t want to fail to take responsibility for what I do and say, probably to a pathological extent. But compassion….I could think about how I try so hard, and how I mean well and struggle with my own difficult places just as others do.

All at once, spring appeared in the trees and flowers in my city – it sure helps. The pale greens and bright yellows and pinks make me feel expansive, compassionate, open – even with myself. I wish I’d had my camera with me this morning to  show you, but someone else’s photo will suffice for now:

[photo courtesy of newyork808]

festival!

#2. Tonight is Night of Knitting at the City Bakery Hot Chocolate Festival. Am I excited?! I’m restraining myself from rampant and later-embarrassing overuse of exclamation points. I’m a very shy person who rarely leaves home, except to go to work, but I’m looking forward to being in this place tonight, full of strangers who also knit and love hot chocolate. For $30, City Bakery provides a full (and sumptuous, I’m sure) dinner, plus dessert, and unlimited wine, beer, coffee, and 10 kinds of hot chocolate. Plus, knitting workshops galore, local yarn shops representing, and a spinning workshop. The event sold out weeks ago, so I’m glad I hopped on it as soon as it was announced. I don’t know a soul (unless I don’t know that I know you through rav), but I cannot wait.

#3. Very sadly, since there’s just not enough time in the day/week, I don’t get to read nearly as much as I’d like. I belong to a book club that meets once a month, and it takes me the entire month to get the book read. Some months I can’t even accomplish that. Last month’s book was just wonderful – Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri, as was this month’s book – The Partisan’s Daughter, by Louis de Bernieres. It’s not always the case that I like (or can even bear to read) our group’s selections, so it was great having two in a row that were rich and wonderful. I even finished The Partisan’s Daughter a few days early, so I flipped to the menu on my Kindle en route to work this morning and started reading The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life, by Twyla Tharp. It’s written with an easy tone, as if she’s just talking to you, and so far it’s good – about the discipline and routine that feed creativity. I am a creative person, but in the realm of craft, not art. I have loved books and words with great intensity, my whole life. My mind spontaneously produces wonderful images and metaphors. A couple of weeks ago, I described a feeling of being a hollow shell full of birds. Wow! Evocative, powerful, and apt. But when I sit down to write, everything flattens. All psychological depth disappears and I write “and then she blah blah blah, and then he blah blah blah. And then they blah blah blah.” BO-RING.

Like many people, I have a sense that if I could just let go, I could be more creative. Of course, that’s easy to say! But when you sit at your desk, how do you “let go?” I do like the idea of discipline and routine as an entry to a creative process, so maybe I’ll try that. Anyway, the book is good, applicable to anyone who is (or wants to be) creative in any way, and not at all New Age-y or mysterious. You might be touched by God, as Mozart was said to be, but he also worked harder than anyone else, and was much more disciplined than the movie Amadeus suggested, so his gift worked because he worked it.

And, it’s Thursday – halle-flippin-lujah!

knitting in croatia

If you met me, you’d see a tall 53-year old woman with a big smile and bad posture. You’d hear my deep Texas accent, which people up here in NYC describe as a “cute southern accent.” (oh.no.it’s.not!) You’d also hear about the people I love, my husband and kids: my husband goes unnamed here to respect his privacy, but he’s there in everything I do; my oldest daughter Katie and her husband Trey, who live in Austin; my 2nd daughter Marnie and her husband Tom, who live in Chicago; my son Will, who lives here in Manhattan and who is a dashing man about town; and my stepdaughter Anna, who is a college junior at a fancy school far away. You’d hear about social psychology, since I have a PhD in the subject and until very recently, acquired books in social psychology for a famous university press, the one that published the very first book. Now, I am a writer and editorial consultant.

Obviously, you’d have to listen to me prattle on and on about knitting, and other handwork. My Aunt Meecie taught me to crochet when I was 5 or so, and I specialized in skein-long chains of acrylic yarn. I took up embroidering pillowcases in kindergarten, and generally made shit throughout my growing-up years. I took up knitting when I was 23, followed by spinning and weaving, quilting, bobbin-lace making, sewing and smocking. And woodworking. I’ve never met a type of handwork I didn’t love. Yet.

And now, me by the bullets:

• I’ve been to 612 cities in 20 countries (that number is constantly getting bigger).
• I’m 5’10″ (that number is consistently getting smaller).
• I have 2 graduate degrees (that number won’t be changing, though I do periodically toy with the idea of going back for a 2nd PhD [philosophy] or taking creative writing classes).
• I’ve moved 80 times. I’m done now.
• I have more than 15 tattoos (changing? perhaps).
• (I love parenthetical comments; also, semi-colons.)
• I love Cap’n Crunch and Pop-Tarts.
• I am a social psychologist. Before I started college, I thought it was just like 13th grade or something. My family did not have any education.
• Inside, I’m poor white trash. Outside, I’m fancy. Kinda.
• I am a photographer.
• I love odd-ball instruments like the accordion, banjo, and bagpipes.
• I’m pretty cool if you get to know me.
• I’ve suffered. A lot.
• Places I’ve lived: [texas] Graham, Tyler, Kilgore, Abilene, Austin (back and forth lotsa times), San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Richardson, Irving, Wichita Falls; [connecticut] New Britain; [virginia] Fredericksburg; [alabama] Huntsville; [arkansas] Fayetteville; [new jersey] Ramsey; [new york] Rochester, Manhattan.
• Cinnamon toast makes me happy.
• I started college at age 36, and grad school at age 40. NOT EASY, when you have 3 little kids.
• I didn’t get out of Texas until I was 29 years old. (Mexico doesn’t count, when you’re a Texan.)
• I am a baker.
• Learning new things makes me happy.
• I have an intriguing relationship with light.
• I used to think of book ideas and find people to write them.
• I am a jealous person, and it makes me suffer terribly. I wish I could not be jealous. Ideas?
• I love clouds and big skies, they make me feel like I can breathe.
• My favorite places in the world are Manhattan, Santa Fe, New Orleans, Paris, Hanoi, Cusco, Arequipa, Vancouver, Luang Prabang, Phnom Penh, and San Francisco. That list is not in order of favoriteness.
• Annie Lennox is my favorite singer and songwriter, and so is Lyle Lovett.
• I love live theater and modern art.
• Singing and dancing make me so happy I cry.
• I love to sing, but only do it privately these days. I used to be that girl with a guitar in a bar.
• I’m an 8th generation Texan. You read that right. My kids are 9th. My grandkids (some of them, anyway) will be 10th.
• I have a sweet tooth. Duh, given the food faves above. I love Easter because of Peeps. (PEEPS!)
• I am writing a memoir of my father.