Determined/Humbled Writer Seeks _________

February 1st, 2011

What, exactly? What does a determined/humbled writer seek? What should one seek? Agent? Publisher? Awards? Readers? Security? What?

I have been working on actively calling myself a writer. You see, I – like most humans – could go by many different names: wife, mother, lawyer, businesswoman, dreamer, and on and on and on. I like all those different names. Yet, I want to call myself a writer. Like at the school bus stop. And randomly when I meet new people.

Today has been mostly about humility, though. I’ve been so focused on the process of writing that I forgot to write. Reading about the apparently awesome keynote speech at the SCBWI-NY conference, I found myself humbled, which started me asking questions, like:

Do I still write for myself first?

Am I so focused on becoming an author that I’m no longer a writer?

Here’s the mindset I want to have: I write the stories only I can tell, and if other people like them, fine. Yet, the regular restraints of a world fashioned from time and money make that mindset rather narrow and self-centered. My mind drifts, and I consider living in some romanticized past when being poor was the essence of fine art. Then I promptly remember that I like having a toilet that flushes, food that is fresh, and central heat and air.

Perhaps if I could just be happy doing some other kind of work – for now, you know, until I am in a financially secure position and can revert to art, or forever and never regret my life as a fill-in-the-blank. There’s nothing special about being a writer, is there? Very many people are or want to be, and many of those are published. None of us deserves an agent, or a publisher for that matter. And so I must be both more focused and more aloof.

Focus on the writing, the story. Not forcing it into a mold that I think might sell or I think might lure this agent or that publisher. Just letting the story be and become. Making friends and earning colleagues in the industry. Supporting others and allowing myself to be supported. Being a reader for others. Searching for the one agent most perfect for representing my work in that he/she believes in the story, in its power, in its transformative properties, knowing that it can be that one tale that fills a sacred place in someone’s heart.

I went to college searching for a career and I found a husband. I went to law school searching for knowledge and I found friends. I went home searching for the familiar and I found support.

I went inward, searching for the story to launch me as an author, and I found the story that only I can tell. Are those the same? I don’t have the foggiest notion.

Determined/Humbled Writer Seeks The Story, And That Complete.

Amanda Salisbury

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Freezing Bubbles

January 28th, 2011

Poetry hits reality just beyond my desk. Though the words pulse from me in metered time, I cannot capture them. The words, their cadence, all gone.

This time the dog barked at neighboring basketball players. Last time a parade of screaming boys, running a circuit through the house and my nerves, foiled my attempt. What next?

I studied soap bubbles in junior high. For my science fair project, I froze soap bubbles. Remarkably, yes, you can freeze bubbles. Or, is that unremarkable? After a month of blowing bubbles and watching them die, I realized that their demise is not so quick. I noticed that the heaviest bit of oily rainbow gathered itself at the bottom half of the sphere. Only once the oily rainbow had converged completely did the top half lose all substance, and that is when the entire form died. Capture it at its apex of function, though, and you may freeze it forever.

Now, sometimes, I think of blowing word bubbles and watching them glide serenely away. When my mind is keen, the scales fall from my eyes, and I can see that the words flow in some great orchestration. Gooseflesh overtakes me, and my fingers fly to peck or scribble out the message without bothering to know the meaning, knowing I must rush. Rush before the form gives way from lack of substance. Rush before life intervenes to kill the bubbles before they’re due. Rush so that the words can be frozen at the apex of their function.

I clear the distractions, feverishly recreating the exact moment of partial epiphany. But it does not come. It never comes. I read aloud the words I’d rushed and they – those beautifully oily rainbows of words – have turned to greasy stains marring my page. Senseless. Pedestrian. Wholly unorchestrated. Those blotches could be anything, the vilest or most virulent, the basest, most basic of all meanderings through language in all time everywhere.

My chest heaves, my brows knit, and I flop into the chair. Uncaring toward even the most ridiculous of present distractions. Fearing that I’ve lost the one truly great story I would ever tell. Unable to face the blank page, that page I forsook for no gain whatsoever.

But then there’s always Twitter. Blowing bubbles by the truckload. Too many to see any with much clarity. Too scattered and quick to find patterns. Just word bubbles – some new, others used – floating perpetually by, leaving nothing but the residue of so many. I watch, and it is fun for a while. Then, I recognize that I can watch others’ word bubbles until my own life is used up, functionless, or I can try again. Blow bubbles of my own. Catch some, watch some, kill some. Maybe even freeze some for later.

And I just keep my back to the wind.

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Poop Fairy, Come Back

January 26th, 2011

I had to do it. I didn’t want to. But I did. I called a plumber.

How is it, exactly, that a fully grown woman with three sons is still embarrassed about all things poop? Well, not all things. I’ve changed diapers in an airport, a waiting room, a store.

It’s just, well, it’s just that I want to rest in the knowledge that all that stuff works the way it’s intended. I don’t want to call a stranger and say, “hey, yeah, can I, um, pay you to come fix some poop problems?” To which the stranger answers, “what do you mean by some?”

Then, I have to say that not one, not two, but three toilets in my home aren’t working as intended. I am forced to admit that fairies do not come take our poop away and leave a water lily in its place. Oh, poop fairy, why have you forsaken me?

I don’t know how to reach our poop fairy, so I called Kaul-Hammond, and they dispatched someone quite quickly. Middling and Third met our brand new plumber at the door – Middling had on chain mail and bore a G.I. Joe sword, while Third still had on pajamas and wielded a knight sword. Mr. Plumberguy joked with them and they ran to get him a sword, which he took up with a good-natured laugh.

Within the hour, three toilets were augered, and we bade goodbye to Mr. Plumberguy.

And I warned the boys against turning their swords into augers, lest the poop fairy stay away permanently.

Amanda Salisbury

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A Date for the Records

January 22nd, 2011

With the boys tucked away at a friend’s home, we made our way downtown. The city had put out signs to try desperately to make sense of senseless construction and detours. The Oklahoma Thunder played tonight, and fans were out in force. We slowly looped up the spiral garage and found a space just before the rooftop.

Bricktown is a place much changed in the nearly sixteen years I’ve lived in Oklahoma City. From haunted, damaged warehouses and a few brave eateries, the corridor has bloomed into a bouquet of life and liveliness.

Deciding to be grown-ups for just tonight, my husband and I enter Nonna’s, where the eclectic, antique-ish chandelier collection makes me want to stare at the ceiling. But I mind my manners and scoot to the corner nearest my love, and he scoots to me. The meal was less than I expected, less than I remember from meals long past. Perhaps it is that my taste for rich food has waned in light of our self-restriction, our goal of health. The duck was fatty; I couldn’t cut it with a fork. It was not delectable and melty the way I remember duck to be. The sauteed spinach was scrumptious, though, and my husband enjoyed his two huge meatballs on a bed of spaghetti - the Nonna’s Special.

We ordered dessert – oatmeal cookie for him, bon bons for me – and I think I frightened the waitress with my unanticipated burst of laughter at the sight of the cookie. In the place of a cookie, two gigantic cookies, each the size of my face, rested on the plate. He ate a third of one, and we bagged the rest. My blueberry-almond bon bon was delicious.

We swam upstream, returning to our vehicle. He took the stairs to work off some sugar, but I elevated (by contraption, of course). Still giggling about the cookies, we drove and gabbed all the way home.

A movie was skipped in favor of making our children’s bare beds and relaxing a bit before they came home.

The three are sleeping now, my love is playing a game, and I am writing to no one. It’s a date for the records. We breathed. We laughed. We slowed down just enough for just long enough to miss our rambunctious lives.

Amanda Salisbury

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My Review of The Hunger Games, Book One (devolving into my own personal revelation)

January 21st, 2011

For Christmas, I gave the Hunger Games trilogy to my sister. She was cynical at first, but then she devoured all three books, and we’re not yet out of January!

Spoilers of a sort reside below: read at your own risk!

She loaned them to me; I finished Book One while the littles napped today. The read was intoxicating from first to last. Katniss Everdeen, our narrator and protagonist, convincingly pulls off the very difficult to show not tell evolution from “he’s playing me” to “maybe he isn’t” to “I’m confused” to “I now break his heart because it’s the only thing I know to do.”

At times I wanted to shake her shoulders (Katniss’, not my sister’s). I wanted her to explore love more. I wanted her to unleash her most deadly skills in the arena. I wanted her to mourn for Gale and for Peeta almost as thoroughly as she did for Rue.

Yet, I loved that she seemed so set in ideals. So determined to survive (a thing I don’t do well; see the post before this one). Katniss was, on the one hand, single-minded in her vigilance to get home, and on the other hand she undertook the complex job of ingratiating herself to everyone.

I wonder whether Suzanne Collins, as the creator, wished to force upon Katniss some of the same things I wanted to. Creators of any worth leave their creation with free will. As such, we find their tales all that much more compelling. As a reader, I wish Ms. Collins had incorporated a bit more world-building. In some ways I felt so at home within Panem that my breath caught upon certain unveilings of the morals and capabilities of the world. I am left to wonder about much more of the past than I’d like. And perhaps that is the point. Perhaps we are supposed to be unsettled just enough without explanation to examine the world in which we live today.

While I’ve not yet read the next books, I will. But I needed to capture my thoughts in the vacuum of immediate post-read.

As the pages thinned, an uneasy hesitation overtook my mind. I could not work out how the end could come with so very many ends untied and untidy. I willed myself not to jump ahead, not to read that crucial last page, as I am wont to do. But the end came anyway. My eyes widened, responding to that part of my brain that is always working, always compartmentalizing, ever molding the stories I have not yet told, ever folding new information into stories I’ve already committed to data files.

My own personal revelation. As the higher functions filtered into my consciousness, I realized a beautiful resolution to something that has plagued me for the last few months.

THE END JUST CAME. Fraught with tension. Loose ends flying in all directions. With a period, no less. The end came. An end that requires me to read Book Two. An end that ties my stomach in a knot of mixed emotion. The End.

Now. I breathe. My own story is all at once safe. As I started my own Book Two write, this vague and prickling sensation nagged at me day and night. Could I ever sell a book one if the ends weren’t tied in bows? Would I be outright dismissed for offering a book that was less than resolved? I still don’t know the answer to that. But I don’t care either. My job as a writer, as a creator, is to be true to the story. It moves at its pace and anything else would smack of contrivance.

Thank you, Suzanne Collins. Not just for a terrific read. But for wings to write untethered once more.

Amanda Salisbury

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Survival

January 21st, 2011

I was born into a LARGE family. Though I only had one brother and one sister, I grew up as the youngest of twenty-six grandchildren. It was a coveted space, and when one cousin was adopted, I was so relieved that her birthday was 11 days before mine. A result of being the youngest is that many of my cousins now have grandchildren while my own children are under six years old. And so, I grew up with my cousins’ children, mostly.

We played and fought and listened and so needed to be part of the grown-up world. It seemed that the adults were so comfortable in their roles, and my child’s eyes imprinted on my Self the way a big family can be, should be.

I never got to attend one of the parties as an adult. Not really. Not the way they used to be, with people everywhere and dominoes clinking as my grandfather’s great big hands shuffled them for playing Shoot the Moon. A slice of my soul will always yearn for that which I cannot have. It was a mere moment in time, untouchable, irretrievable, incapable of re-creation.

Oh, we still have an annual family reunion in June, and some live in close proximity. But increasingly we see each other in hospitals and funeral homes. Though I never heard anyone boast about it, we really considered ourselves healthy. Aside from banal, every day problems and the rarity, there was relatively little suffering.

As I write this, we have been afflicted, submitted to cruelty at the hands of merciless disease. It’s too much. I want to rage and rail against it all. Instead, I write. And I write. And I write.

I also pray and keep contact and make subtle changes to my lifestyle. But when I feel wholly bereft of power, I channel what little ability I have. It’s a survivalist thing. And, ironically enough, I’ve not long consider myself a survivor.

You know that will to live even though everything is pain and terrible strife? I’ve never expected I had it. I would watch others, in real life and in fiction, and I would think, why on earth would they keep going? Why don’t they simply lay down and die? I would. Given the option of staying to fight or leaving to peace, I would choose leaving every single time.

But here I am. A recovering quitter, as I’ve written about before now. The recovering bit means that I’m to survive. I’m to fight. I’m to make a way. It is new and uncomfortable, ripping at my former self and tightening my chest, constricting my mind. I look to my many examples of grace and endurance and survival. I study them with my writer’s brain so that I can mimic them, and thereby bring about those qualities within myself.

I can do little under my own power, and so I look to a power greater than myself. And when the answers to my prayers are still no, I grieve, but I don’t quit. I can’t. I left that behind, remember? Besides, what disservice would it be to the ones truly suffering if I quit? Even as their bodies betray them, I will not. I know the answer could be yes, and so I ask with boldness. And, still, I live my purpose today. Right this effing minute. Because I’m not promised any other minutes.

May it never be said of me: she did not deign to live for fear of dying.

Amanda Salisbury

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For the Love of Ancestors

January 20th, 2011

When snow falls in Oklahoma, everything grinds to an ugly halt. The flakes make me think of atoms bouncing around, such is the fury of their fall. You know that tranquil image of flakes softly falling, seemingly innocuous? Yeah, no. That is not snow in Oklahoma. If all you had was a picture of snow without landmarks, you’d have no idea which way was up.

And, usually before any flakes can form or fall, the ground is encased in ice with meticulous care. Let us not forget the wind: sustained at 25 mph this morning for a negative windchill factor.

It is that nasty combination – frenzy snow, ice, and wind – that cause hundreds of closings, hundreds of traffic accidents, and thousands of power outages. But the thing that interests me is how did our forebears sustain life in this place? My mind falls backward into the tidal pool where fact and legend meet, and I imagine myself as a pioneer.

Frontier days exist in an only slightly removed time. My grandmother, born 1916, lived in a sod house, traveled by wagon, attended play parties, chopped cotton, birthed babies at home and stayed in bed for two weeks while the other womenfolk tended her house. During the Dust Bowl, my grandparents hung quilts on the interior walls of their two-room house and covered the children at night, head and all, to rebuke the dirt that threatened their breath of life.

By contrast, I was born in 1978. My house had a tin roof and a fireplace, both closely connecting me to the elements my ancestors survived. Rain on a tin roof is a lullaby; hail on such roof is a curse. We hid in dirt cellars with oil lamps to hide from tornadoes and hurricane-strength straight winds. Most homes used water-coolers in the summer. Can one truly appreciate central air conditioning until they’ve survived a humid, hundred-plus-degree day with air blowing over water as the only comfort? Hmm. I wonder.

Why did people come here? “Free” land? Fresh start? Escape from a life that wouldn’t work anywhere else?

Why did people stay here?

The thing is, Oklahoma is a beautiful place. The red dirt gullies contrast the golden wheat fields. Sunsets ooze unobscured until earth herself consumes them. Mesquite trees prickle the landscape. Desolation and country hospitality coexist. Oil pumps rise and fall in fields, parking lots, and on the capitol grounds, keeping time for us all. Entrepreneurs thrive in a place ripe for development and growth.

Oklahoma is also a real place. A checkered past ripples through time and can be seen in areas even today. The hardy nature of our ancestors resounds within us, especially in times of crisis. Oklahomans are varied and also bound together as a people.

Would I love to sit amid a winter dream, my own personal snow globe? It does sound nice. But, then, it’s kinda fun to never know what might greet you when your feet leave your threshold.

Amanda Salisbury

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Balance: Myth or Legend

January 11th, 2011

So far, 2011 has (for me) been dedicated to balancing the moving parts of life. And, sometimes, in the cold, flat plain of my existence – both figuratively and literally – I begin to wonder whether this fabled balance is no more than myth, which is far less than the to-be-sought legend.

I take care of my boys and get little else done. I write with boys climbing under and on me, and the neglect of simple household chores threatens our comfortable lives. I haven’t the resources to push from pre-dawn to post-dusk with every little compartmentalized agenda item.

I write because I must; it is the air I breathe. I mother because I must; it is length and breadth of me, my very countenance. I wife because I must; it is the blood that flows through me. I give because I must; it is my honesty, my trust in things bigger than myself. I sister and daughter and friend because I must; they are my skeleton, by which I am whole. I believe because I must; it is the musculature that moves me.

What, then, shall I do without? What shall I cast off? My breath? My countenance? My blood, or my honesty, or my bones, or my muscle?

It takes all these working parts to make the rest worth anything, and so I will seek balance. I will strive, not for a better body, but for a healthy body. What more can I desire?

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A Real, Live, Actual Date

January 7th, 2011

Tonight I’m going on a date.

Ahem. Perhaps you did not hear me, world: A DATE. ME. WITH MY HUSBAND. IN THE UTTER ABSENCE OF OFFSPRING (well, ours, anyway)! Will you not sing the hallelujahs of pure joy on my behalf – er – our behalf? Sing, world.

Alas, I know what a cold, cruel world you really are.

Hopefully, my boys will have a wonderful sleepover with friends. Hopefully, my husband and I will have an excellent dinner with friends and a movie. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, as my grandmother would say, we’ll all be a bit better adjusted and a sliver more joyful to see one another when the fun of being apart wanes and we embrace our untidy, comfy life.

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Okay, so…

January 6th, 2011

…we cleaned out a tall cabinet that locks and filled it with activities for the boys and supplies for ShyJot. Soon, we’ll drag the two-shelf bookcase and the student tables in to set up weekly activity time. Meanwhile, I got rid of a bunch of plastic bags and cardboard boxes and stored colored pencils, labels, glue sticks, stampers, highlighters, and stuff in clear glass vases and jars – sooooo pretty!

I have a jar of beans and a jar of rice for fine motor play, and they are pretty to boot. The card line I hung for holiday cards is permanent and repurposed for the boys’ artwork and such.

We cleared so much out of the “activity closet” (a long hallway closet where everything from croquet to Candyland to capes can generally be found) that I think I might not need to lock it anymore. Now that there aren’t spools of ribbon and popsicle sticks and warbly little stick-on eyes, maybe the closet will stay contained. I said maybe!

I love to be organized. Clutter and I do not play nicely with each other.

Clutter Dragon, I slay thee!

Who/What have you slain today?

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