Day: April 29, 2013

It is an especially humbling experience for me, tilted upside down in a dentist’s chair, my mouth forced open with clamps and filling with saliva – hoping the dental technician will notice and put in the sucking tube – waiting for my root canal to begin. I don’t recall often feeling much more helpless, exposed or useless than at such a time. The root canal  wasn’t so bad, it was a lot easier than dealing with Verizon and less painful, but in the long interval between the needle and the numbing, I thought about a beautiful e-mail I received from Clay in Georgia. He is pondering a move from Atlanta to a small town in North Carolina and has been following my own run to the mountain for years. He wrote that my blog is like a wise old friend whose observations are both comforting and unsettling but which ultimately made the thought of changing his life a little less intimidating.

That was a lovely message to get, it means I am doing my job. A lot of people fantasize about living on a farm, there is something about a farm that touches a deep yearning in many of us, although not usually in real farmers who tend to live without fantasies and can’t afford yearnings. It is a great irony of our times that so many people want to be on farms, so many farms are collapsing. I wondered, sitting in my dentist’s chair, hoping  for the best, why I set out on my own hero journey, whether I was running away from life or towards it. As it turns out, I think, it was something of both.

I was fleeing an unhappy and cowardly life rather than facing up to it, and as Joseph Campbell warns, on the hero journey you leave the familiar and set out into the realm of adventure. You cannot hide from yourself. There, you fall into a dark place, and you either come out unscathed or you never come out. Along the way, you confront yourself, find out who you are really are, and if you are lucky, you encounter mystics, prophets, guides and magical helpers, often in the form of animals. All of this, all that Campbell prophesied,  came true for me, it was a profoundly spiritual and life-altering decision beyond my imagination. Once you set out on the journey, you can never go back, you will never be the same,  and that is the beauty and the terror of it. You will always be a refugee, in the old world and the new, stamped for life with the mark of the wanderer.

Yet ultimately, my running to the mountain brought me to my true life. To knowledge, strength, spiritual reward and love, all the things I had always been seeking but could never seem to find. Clay has been reading my blog since the beginning, I can tell, messages from those people always come through like old and dear friends, we have a connection that is strong and clear, even through the digital divide. I fell into a dark space and almost did not come out. And I saw so many magical helpers along the way – Carol, Orson, Izzy, Rose, Frieda, Simon, Rocky and now, Red. And so many people to guide me, my departed friends in hospice, many of you, most of all Maria.

I feel sometimes as if the animals handed me off, one by one to one another, each one taking me to another place along the path, bringing me to Maria, where I was destined to be. Beyond that, the journey into my life challenged me to be honest, to be strong, to take the leap of faith out of one life and into another. To life life, rather than exist in it or survive it. That means leaving the familiar behind, leaving people behind, most people don’t want to come and fear people who do.  Along the way, I have met so many other travelers on the hero journey. I have never met one who ever went back or who ever wanted to.

Sitting in the dentist chair, I settled in, was calm. I closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. The wonderful thing about taking a leap of faith is that it always leads to another. And another. Run to your mountain, Clay, take a breath and take the leap.

The former girlfriend has added vintage hanky scarves to her line of fabric arts. They are graceful and beautiful and she is, of course, nervous because so many people like them. How many should she make? How much to charge? (she always charges less than everyone tells her she should), how to ship them properly? There is a fine line between conscientiousness and anxiety and she likes to have every detail right. It works for  her. You can see them on her website. I’m not proud of many things in my life, but I am exceptionally proud of seeing the artistry in her the first time I laid eyes on her. My grandmother always warned me never to marry a Christian. They don’t cook or clean well, she advised. I always thought this was curious because, to the best of my knowledge, she didn’t even know a Christian.

Last year I took Maria to Providence and we visited my parent’s grave and my grandmother’s old house. I did marry a Christian, I told Minnie Cohen, and you were right. She doesn’t cook or clean much, but she is a wonderful artist and a wonderful wife. I think my grandmother heard me. She would sure have loved Maria’s scarves, she always wore scarves.

You are invited to come and meet the Hubbard Hall Writers (and me and Red) talking about our very successful workshop and reading from their surprising, powerful and very poignant and uplifting work. Dr. Jen Baker-Porazinksi, John Greenwood, Rebecca Fedler, Rachel Barlow, Diane Fiore and Kim Gifford have written about pugs, relationships, memory, Alzheimer’s, the challenges of dating in various ways. I will also be offering a sneak preview from my next book “Second Change Dog: A Love Story,” and Red will be along, he is the workshop writing dog. There will be a reception with food before the reading so people can look at the poems, blogs, photos, drawings and artwork that has come out of the workshop.

At the reading, we will use screen projections to talk about our blogs and explain how we are exploring new technology and platforms to get our work out into the world. Some of the group are moving to be professional writers, others just want to write for other reasons. The evening is being held for the benefit of the Hubbard Hall Scholarship Fund, so if you come, you will not only hear some wonderful writing and support the writers, you will help kids enjoy Hubbard Hall’s great educational activities and programs.

Thanks to Hubbard Hall’s generosity, we are pricing the reading to make sure everyone can come – kids and young writers are especially welcome. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Advanced ticket sales are $10 and are available at the Hubbard Hall website. Tickets are free at the door but donations to the Hubbard Hall Scholarship Fund will be welcome. Writing workshops are complex and challenging, but this one has really worked. It was supposed to be a six-week workshop, we are heading into our second year, and I don’t think this group will ever disband. We meet almost daily on Facebook and have all explored the ways in which we can use writing to make a living, explore complex issues in our lives, and to use blogs to advance our work and reach new audiences.

I am very excited about the work this group has gone. For years, I’ve wanted to figure out how to reach writing in a positive and effective way, and this is the group that showed the way. You will be hearing from the milkman who writes poetry and memoir, the doctor who is struggling to find her humanity, the housewife and mother who writes like Erma Bombeck, the artist/photographer/writer and teacher whose life revolves around pugs, the young poet raised on a family farm.  Their work ought to be shared with the world. These people are a light unto the world. In the way that independent bookstores need to be support, so do writers started out and working to find their voices and communicate. So please come if you can. We will have fun, share what we have learned, touch some hearts and souls. The readings will take place at the Freight Depot at Hubbard Hall. Reception at 6 p.m., readings at 7 p.m. Hope to see you there. Readings are supposed to be a dying art form, but so are bookstores. Both will be around for a good while.

Not too long ago, the writers and artists and successful people of the world were chose, picked, anointed by  the institutions of the elite – the New York Times, the Washington Post, local newspapers, magazines like Time and Newsweek, powerful publishers, gallery owners, critics. We all wanted to be picked, waited to be picked – I was picked, my first novel was lavishly praised in the New York Times and elsewhere, reviewed all over the country, touted on NPR and I was anointed as a writer, a novelist and then a chronicler of dogs, animals, rural life.

I try and tell my writing workshop students that this world has changed, these institutions are not powerful any longer, they do not  anoint the chosen, that we have to choose ourselves, anoint ourselves.  My books hardly ever get reviewed any longer, and I am rarely interviewed by anyone who even pretends to read them.

The chosen are not happy about the new and leveled world of the Internet, there is great whining and complaint, and it is a chaotic and distracted and jarring kind of world. Everywhere, you hear the lament of the picked, the world is changing, culture is dying, the quality and value and coherence of things is eroding. What does this mean for me?

It means that I can’t wait to be chosen any longer, that kind of world is fading. I have to do the choosing, the picking, the anointing of myself. I have to find new ways to communicate, to be relevant, to draw the strength from inside of me to believe that I am worthy of being picked, I choose myself. The bad news, I told my students recently is that there is no point to wanting to be chosen or waiting to be chosen. And that is also the good news. We can choose ourselves, we can find a way, we can do the work. Frightening, sure, but also empowering, exciting and the very definition of being creative. When people ask me for advice about being a writer, being an artist, being an creative, it is almost always the same. Choose  yourself.