Take it! Take Another Little Piece...
"Take it! Take another little piece of my heart now, Baby..." That line, sung in Janis Joplin's rasping, soulful screech popped into my head today as I was tallying purchases. My friend Sri is having a moving sale. She and her husband Jamie have to move houses-hopefully not away from Jakarta, but that depends on where Jamie gets a new job.
Let me begin by saying that contrary to what you may think upon entering my house, or snooping in my closets, I am not a big shopper. I do not enjoy mall shopping and am quickly overwhelmed by department stores and rack-upon-rack, floor-upon-floor, shelf-upon-shelf of choices. That being the case, I love buying treasures on holiday, especially handicrafts from their creators. And, I love, love my buying friend's castoffs.
Several of us met a Sri's the morning of her moving sale. The music was playing, coffee was brewing, and the table was laid with tasty cakes and treats. We jibber-jabbered for a while, while each of us sneaked side-long glances at the sale items. The furniture for sale had been left in place, but the smaller pieces were artfully arranged in a mini-shop along one side of Sri's living area.
In mass, at some unnamed signal, we girls rose to the occasion. We managed to paste our personalized "SOLD" stickers on much of Sri's "for sale" items even though they were not great "bargains." In some cases, as with the Lombok serving dishes we divvied up, we could have purchased them new for the same price. Sri explained away our purchases saying maybe it was easier to buy hers because she had already taken the time to weed through all the not-so-great serving dishes in the shop and hand-selected the best of the best.
Sri is correct: Shops stuffed with dishes, handicrafts, or fabrics, like extensive menus, can be overwhelming. It is easier to make a decision when you have limited choices-especially when a friend with exemplary taste and an artistic eye has limited the selection. (In restaurants we, meaning me and most everyone we dine with, often let Curtis do the selecting for us because big menus don't daunt him.) With menus, I'm happy to leave the selection to Curtis; when it comes to Indonesian anything, I'm delighted to leave the selecting to Sri. Not only does she know what everything is and what it is used for, she also has a flair for color and design.
However, today, while mentally screeching away with Janis, I realized there is much more to this Friend-to-Friend selling than Sri's explanation suggests. Everything that has gone into making an artist is woven into anything he or she creates. So, when I purchase a piece of art or handicraft from an artisan, I am in essence buying a "little piece" of that artist's heart. Just as anyone who buys one of my books is buying a little piece of me.
Sri talked about how happy she was to have us, her friends, buy her treasures. Not because she wanted the money, or because she wanted the stuff gone. It was because she didn't really want to be selling anything at all. Sri is a collector. She remembers each place she bought something, who she was with when she bought it, and who she bought it from. And many of her treasures, including those she is selling, she bought from other friends. So it is not as much as moving sale as a Friend-to-Friend hand off. An adoption service. She said she didn't mind selling her treasures to her friends because she knows they are going to good homes, to live with people she loves.
And I love buying things my friends have bought. Yes, I love, love, love that Sri weeded through the piles and stacks and shelves to ferret out the loveliest, most original, and well made, interesting items and I don't have to. But more, I love buying from my friends, because when I take those treasures home, I am taking a "little piece" of my friend's heart, too!
Dance, Y'all, Dance coming to Texas this Fall!
My new picture book, Dance, Y'all, Dance is on its way! It's official launch date–Birthday–is November 1st, 2009 at the Texas Book Festival in Austin, TX. All sort of events are planned including Book Signing, School Visits, and Story Times. I hope you'll come out to see me and to help welcome Dance into the world! Dance, Y'all, Dance Kick-off Schedule:
Oct. 24, 1:30-3:30: Book Signing at Katy Budget Books in Katy
Oct. 27: Visiting schools in the Sugarland: Cornerstone Elementary, Brazos Bend Elementary, Walker Station Elementary
Oct. 28, 10:00 am: SCBWI-BV Schmooze, Society of Children's Writers and Illustrators, Barnes and Noble, College Station, TX
Oct. 31-Nov. 1: Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas
Happy Birthday Dance, Y'all, Dance!
Nov. 1, 11:00-1:00: Book Signing at Texas Book Festival, Writer's League Booth
Nov. 2, 7:00-9:00 pm: SCBWI-Houston Meeting, Society of Children's Writers and Illustrators, Tracy Gee Community Center, Houston
Workshop: "Picture Books -It's What You Don't See That Counts"
Nov. 3:
Hastings Elementary School in Duncanville, Texas
Nov. 5, 10:00-11:00:Children's Story time at Blue Willow Books, Houston
Nov. 5, 1:00 pm: Visit Calvary Episcopal School
Nov.; 6: 8:00-1:00 pm: Visit the Kinkaid School
Nov. 7: Sam Houston Book Festival, Huntsville, Texas
Workshop: "Picture Books are Like Icebergs: Harvesting Crystals"
Nov. 9, 5:00-9:00 pm: Family Book Night at the Kincaid School
Dance, Y'all, Dance Postcards, Bookmarks, Activity Sheets and Teacher's Guides are available! If you'd like to have any of these materials, visit the "contact me" link on my website and send me your mailing information.
Come on! Dance y'all! Whoop it up! I sure am!
Walking Into The World-And Over The Edge
Mondays, the GGs (my Girl Group)–a Sisterhood of Creative Explorers–gather. We are working through Walking Into the World by Julia Cameron. It is a follow-up to The Artist's Way, her twelve-step guide to creative living. One component of Cameron's creativity recovery program is the Weekly Walk. "Most of us spend life on the run, too busy and too hurried to walk anywhere," Cameron writes, maintaining the solution to many of our problems will arise if we make time to walk. "Native Americans pursue vision quests, Aborigines do walkabout. Both of these cultures know walking clears the head." And so, for the duration of the course, she asks us to commit to weekly 20-minute walks. "You will find these walks focus your thinking and instigate your breakthroughs," she concludes.
According to her instructions we are to put on comfy clothes and shoes and just go out walking-"go far enough and long enough that you feel both your body and your mind "unkink." Jakarta is many things, but it is not walker-friendly. The streets are busy, loud, cloudy with fumes, often rutted and potholed. The sidewalks-where there are sidewalks- are riddled with holes and loose stones and catawampus paving, or are crowded with parked motorcycles and food carts. No matter how many kilometers I walked, my mind and body would never "unkink." And so, I have taken Cameron's proclamation: "Where you walk matters less than that you walk," as permission to take my weekly walks on my backyard treadmill.
Giving due credit, the image "backyard" conjures is far from the truth. The area beyond my French doors is better described as oasis or resort-a delightful place to "unkink" even without the walk.
Oasis or not, it takes me longer than the proscribed 20-minutes to warm up my creative world. First I have to examining my garden, looking for weeks that need pulling, bushes that need pruning, twisted flags, untidy vines (Oasis are the bottle-blondes of gardens). The twisted flags can eat up 10 minutes easily as I imagine myself untangling-untangling-untangling them. I follow the yard survey with a run through of everything I could be doing if I were not walking on the treadmill and chase that with everything I plan to do when I finish. Eventually, after breaking the cycle with a 3-5 minute run which leaves me nauseous and too oxygen deprived to think, I drift into that mindless, floating place from wince solutions come.
I was there, totally there, last night -completely unkinked and free, drifting, bouncing, floating from thought to thought to...the solution. I had walked into the World, Julia's World, so lost in my alpha that I forgot where I was-and stepped right off the edge.
Fortunately, the treadmill backs into the corner of the patio and the walls stopped my fall.
Julia Cameron should paste a warning label on the next edition: Creative Recovery Can Be Dangerous.
- See, the pink flag is tangled in the vine--and who didn't roll up the hose?
Jakarta Bombing Victims--You Can Help!
Victims of the July 17th bombings at the Marriott and Ritz Carlton Hotels in Jakarta are still suffering. Many are still in the hospital--here in Jakarta, in Singapore, and some have returned to their home countries. Many, along with the physical and mental anguish they and their families are suffering, are additionally burdened by money worries. Even expats, gainfully employed and supposedly well-supported by company benefits, who were in those hotels-on company business-are encountering financial difficulties as costly medical treatments quickly gobble up their benefits. Word is that the Ritz and Marriott dare not offer monetary assistance to the victims or their families for to do so would be to admit culpability. Fortunately others have stepped up to help:
The British Chamber of Commerce has begun a fundraising campaign for the victims and families of the July 17 bombings. The money will be used where it is deemed most needed. Some will be used to assist with those receiving medical treatment for their injuries and some to help the families of the victims. One such example is the family of the Banquet Manager whose wife gave birth the day after he died in the bombing. If you would like to help this very worthy cause please contact bisnis@britcham.or.id
The Indonesian Netherlands Association in conjunction with CastleAsia have also launched a fund raising campaign for CastleAsia employee Max Boon who was severely injured in the bombings (For more about Max Boon see the Aug. 19,2009 posting). Max Boon lost both of his legs in the blast. Not only will he be permantely disabled, he also faces a long and difficult recovery and rehabilitation period. (And I have been told his insurance is, or has, run out.) If you would like to contribute towards his fund please contact: messagetomax@castleasia.com
While we may not be able to stop terrorists, we can help to alleviate the suffering they cause.
Info courtesy of WNJ (What’s New Jakarta) Newsletter 3/09/09
The Day the Rainbow Died
Make a wish/Have a ball/Dream a dream/Be it all…/If you want it, you can get it/But to get it, you’ve got to want it/Anything you want to try…../Just let go and you'll fly highhhhhhhh.../And Make a Wish!*
I’m making a wish. I am wishing, dreaming, hoping someone, or a lot of someones, realize how gray our world will be without rainbows—especially this rainbow, the Reading Rainbow…
On August 28th Reading Rainbow died. After 26 years of celebrating books Reading Rainbow is off the air.
Why in the world is Reading Rainbow—a program celebrating books and reading and ideas--going off the air?
“Because no one — not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show's broadcast rights,” explained, John Grant, who is in charge of content at Reading Rainbow's home station.
What’s a few hundred thousand dollars in the grand scheme of things? Consider how much more than that we, the United States of America, spend on other things—war, for instance--wars against things like drugs, poverty, pollution, people...oh yeah, and illiteracy.
Grant noted that while the decision to end Reading Rainbow had to do with funding cuts to PBS, it “can also be traced back to a philosophical change about TV and reading. He says the change started with the Department of Education under the Bush administration, which wanted to see a much heavier focus on things like phonics and spelling, the basic tools of reading”….And PBS and CPB and the Department of Education want to put funding toward programming that would teach kids how to read. They think “teaching the mechanics of reading should be the network's priority.”
Silly me, I thought that was what teachers and parents were supposed to do…maybe that’s why funding for education is not of highest propriety…why pay teachers? Heck, let’s let TV teach our children “the mechanics of reading.”
Reading Rainbow is not and has never been about teaching children to read. Reading Rainbow does something more…something huge: “Reading Rainbow" Grant notes, “taught kids why to read, you know, the love of reading, encouraged kids to pick up a book and to read.”
We don’t seem to mind spending heaps of money to bully people into doing the “right thing.” So why not peel off some good old American greenbacks to do a really right thing: Bring back Reading Rainbow.
Better yet, skip PBS. PBS will go on to create other, wonderful programs—that’s what PBS does, provide “quality” programming for television viewers, programs like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, the only programs with longer runs on PBS than Reading Rainbow.
Let’s turn instead to those “for profit” TV program producers, the one who bring us “quality” TV shows packed with plenty worth learning to love: violence, rage, anger, slaughter, decapitation, blood, cussing, crime, crime, crime…
ABC, NBC, FX, CBS, Fox, HBO…why don’t YOU bring back Reading Rainbow?
Come on, use a couple of hundred thousand of those dollars you charge sponsors to air commercials for products they want us to buy—and buy us a program we want to watch—and want our children to watch. One that celebrates reading and imagination.
Butterfly in the sky/ I can go twice as high/Take a look/ it's in a book/ -- Reading Rainbow...
For the full NPR story go to: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112312561
*Theme from “Make a Wish” with Tom Chapin, the 70's morning show that fostered my grand ideas.)
Earthquake! Gempa!
An earthquake, gempa, just hit Jakarta. It was a big one--basar sekali! I was sitting at my desk writing. First my vision started swirling and I felt myself swaying. The earthquake lasted a long time, long enough for me to wonder why I was dizzy? Why was my vision blurring? Hadn't I eaten enough? Was I getting sick? Then I heard clinking--glasses, bells or some metal--clanging, the walls creaked, the walls undulated. The pool water sloshed and splashed like a wave pool. I ran into the doorway. Called to Rusnati, "are you all right?" Yes, yes she was. She stood in her doorway and we looked at each other, pointed to flags waving, trees swaying, the Papua people teetering, the world wobbling.
"Call your house," I demanded, when it stopped. "Call your daughters. See if they are all right."
My phone rang then. Curtis. He was fine. His tall tall office building seemed fine. They had all run downstairs and outside. "You ran fast," I remarked. "It was a long earthquake," he replied.
It was a very very very long, rolling quake. Not one of those jerky, vicious ones that hit like a car smashing into a wall. We can only hope that means that everywhere it was felt the quake passed as gently as it did here.
An afternoon earthquake: one more reminder:
Love freely; live joyfully; play and sing with gusto! This is the time we have.
Doing the Hemingway
I read somewhere that Ernest Hemingway wrote 500 words day in and day out, "wife in and wife out." For years I have resisted imposing that kind of structure on myself. There have always been enough "have tos" and "must dos" in my life, I didn't feel I needed anymore. Forcing myself to write would take away the joy and leave me with just a job. But now I am rethinking my position. Talking Books by James Carter, is a collection of interviews with mostly British contemporary children's writers." The writers discuss their journey to becoming authors including schooling, favorite books, writing habits, family life, etc. etc. I keep the book in an orange metal magazine rack in the loo, along with other pick-up-and-put-down periodicals. One of my favorite interviews in the book is with Phillip Pullman. Each morning, Pullman he goes down to cluttered, filthy, messy garden shed "and generally write[s] three pages by lunchtime, always by hand." Pullman is very specific about the type of paper he writes on--never recycled because it's "too gritty and full of bits of twig and stuff." He selects a type of paper for "each particular book and it's got to be used for only that book and nothing else." He color codes the corner of each piece of paper: Subtle Knife's color was yellow; Northern Lights color was indigo.
John Cheever, the short story master, used to go downstairs to the boiler room of his apartment building, take off and put back on his suit and then return to his apartment, thus beginning his writing day. (I also recall reading that he wrote naked in the boiler room of his building.) I prefer the first scenario.
Cheerer's and Pullman's routines sound OCD, Hemingway's less so, until you consider that along with "wife in and wife out" he purportedly kept this 500 word commitment war in and war out, safaring, fishing, binging whatever. I prefer to think of it as ritualistic--like baseball players who don't change their socks during a winning streak or my daughter who kisses her fingers and touches the ceiling of the car whenever she goes through a yellow light--mindful.
"As a writer," Pullman says, "you have to write whether you've got ideas or not, whether or not you're feeling inspired. He notes that people who do not write talk "as if it all depended on inspiration" and the way they say it makes it seem as though they too could be writers if only this "mysterious inspiration" would strike them. "The trick is to write just as well when you're not feeling inspired as when you are" --Do the Hemingway.
Pullman believes that success in writing is due to three things: "talent, hard work and luck" and the "only one you have any control over is the hard work" --Do the Hemingway.
So I am rethinking my writing life. Maybe these rituals are good things. I ritualistically brush my teeth everyday--and put the cap back on; I eat breakfast, make coffee, make phone calls first thing every morning--day in and day out. Committing to write a certain number of words, pages, minutes could be a good for my writing life. And on some days, if I'm lucky, if I work hard--Doing the Hemingway-- inspiration will strike.