Ok, so I have been surfing the internet lately checking out all of these beautiful and wonderful blogs by designers, artists, photographers, etc. It makes me want to delete mine right away. They are stunning and wonderfully exciting. Inspiring, of course. But I can’t help but frown at my inability to create something similar, in a sunny studio with a cup of tea. Me and my hands. Me and some art. Some visually stunning print or photograph or card. Alas, I work in words. And they are not always visually stunning. At least not in the same way as other art forms.

But I can’t get rid of this itch. I recently came across artwork by Jennifer Khoshbin. Words are a part (if sometimes just a small part) of her projects. And I am feeling this need (desire?) to infuse, transform, migrate my poems into larger pieces of artwork. So here’s to trial and error and jumping into a boiling pot of exploration.

As I quickly make my way to the end of Embers by Sandor Marai, I stumbled upon an action that I thought so clean and simple. It really stood out.

He lifted a pale hand and pointed vaguely to a spot in the air as if to locate the place in the universe where he had once lived.

Lovely.

I just got back from Montreal. Beautiful city. I only wish I could have stayed longer. Why do these times away always seem too short? These times when I think I could be the most productive, creatively? These times when I am surrounded by stone walls, flower boxes, cafes and wine bars? Shadows of old colonial pasts whispering stories to me….

I didn’t have time to just sit in Vieux-Montreal and free-write. But no worries. I did have time to sip cappuccino before strolling arm and arm with my beau, looking for a gift for my lovely niece. Or stopping for pizza and beer and gourmet cupcakes. Or seeing the wonderful Leonard Cohen in concert. So I guess I can’t complain.

But I know that I am unbelievably affected by the landscape around me. And I keep kicking around the idea  of living abroad for at least a year. So maybe I should start taking that into consideration, in a more serious Hemingway kind of way. I think there’s something to being an expat. There’s got to be.

]]> http://munchkintree.com/2008/06/26/expat-on-my-mind/feed/ treetmd http://munchkintree.com/2008/06/20/exercise-2/ http://munchkintree.com/2008/06/20/exercise-2/#comments Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:17:09 +0000 treetmd http://treetmd.wordpress.com/?p=154

imitation…

quick poem inspired by “This Moment” by Eavan Boland

A time capsule
in summer

Glass bottles
sway and
chime

Turquoise and lava
Love wrapped in labels

Holding on to.

The mosquitoes grow and divide
the neighbors dance at midnight

She kneels to touch the
sky who has dropped
stories to find her.

Moons smile
the neighbor laughs
the wind carries leaves
on to her feet.

poem is mine, photo from here

My short story is coming along just fine. It’s tense. Weird. A little violent. Romantic. But…one thing that keeps eating at me is naming. I can’t seem to find the right names for my characters and I am nursing some desire to name them right now. I suppose this comes from a need to own them, as if naming them makes them mine and mine alone. Or maybe it just makes me feel like I know them better. Besides, isn’t it more productive when you are on a first name basis with your imaginary people?

Of course, patience is a virtue. All writers know that naming their characters is like naming their children (hopefully I avoid such cliches in my writing).

Bonni Goldberg writes in Room to Write:

A few of us are naturally gifted invented names. Henry James was brilliant at it: his characters included Henrietta Stackpole, Ralph Touchett, and Lavinia Penniman. The rest of us work at it.

Yep, I am one of the “us” that has to work at it. And so this morning I took out all of the names in my story, inserting he and she everywhere. Then I typed in “names in writing” into google, which led me to, what else, Wikipedia. Wikipedia tells me this:

The names of fictional characters are often quite important. The conventions of naming have changed over time. In many Restoration comedies, for example, characters are given emblematic names that sound nothing like real life names: “Sir Fidget”, “Mr. Pinchwife” and “Mrs. Squeamish” are some typical examples (all from The Country Wife by William Wycherley). Some 18th and 19th century literature such as Les Misérables represent characters’ names by the use of a single letter and a long dash (this convention is also used for other proper nouns, such as place names). This has the effect of suggesting that the author had a real person in mind but omitted the full name for propriety’s sake. A similar technique was employed by Ian Fleming in his 20th century James Bond novels, where the real name for M, if spoken in dialogue, was always written “Adm. Sir M***”. It is still common to echo an adjective or idea, if slightly changed, to suggest qualities of a character; Mr. Murdstone of David Copperfield suggests “murder” and unpleasantness. A character’s name will sometimes reference a real-world, literary, or mythological precursor. This can be as simple as calling a character in love Romeo, or naming a character who seemingly comes back from the dead Phoenix.

I don’t think I will go the Romeo route, but I think I just might play around with the Restoration comedy route and see what happens. Or maybe a dash of Restoration comedy and a pinch of David Cooperfield. Yes indeed…such names would add something a little strange and evocative to the story. Either way, my mind is already spinning with ideas. I need a post-it. I need to start a list.

My grandfather is hiding on the left. Every Christmas, he helped build the nativity scene in my small town. He was a mechanic.

My grandmother’s father is on the left there - he was quite the musician.

]]> http://munchkintree.com/2008/06/17/dad-part-ii/feed/ treetmd http://munchkintree.com/2008/06/11/dad-part-i/ http://munchkintree.com/2008/06/11/dad-part-i/#comments Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:16:47 +0000 treetmd http://treetmd.wordpress.com/?p=146

With father’s day coming up and all. This photo answers three questions about me: 1. Why are you so skinny? 2. Why are you so cool? and 3. Why do you write? (he’s a newspaper man) . . .

Ok, so as far as exemplary female writers go there’s Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Sylvia Plath, Zadie Smith, Louis Erdrich, Alice Walker, etc. etc. etc. I certainly look up to all of these ladies, but I was recently reminded of my first writerly role model:

Yes, it was Kathleen Turner as Joan Wilder in the Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile movies.

Sure she wrote trashy romantic novels but there was something about her that appealed to me. I wanted to be Joan Wilder. I liked to think that if I found my life on the line in the Colombian jungle I would become a sexy writer woman with gun in tow, leaving men smitten with my long legs visible after my peasant skirt was torn during a mud slide in a torrential rainstorm, which I encountered after defeating a hungry crocodile.

I would return to my Manhattan apartment and write it all down, make it a bestseller. Then, attend cocktail parties and snicker as people compliment my exotic imagination. Little do they know that it is non-fiction, these boring little urban dwellers. They would know my secrets, of course, when a snake eating Micheal Douglass appears in front of my building with a boat.

Here’s to you Joan Wilder.

Maybe it was the extreme heat, but when I scanned my bookshelf this weekend I grabbed Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. I was off to the West Indies for inspiration.

Rhys brings to life the “mad woman” (known as Bertha; Antoinette in WSS) in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, concentrating on her life in the Caribbean, before and during her marriage to Rochester. These past few days, I was interested in finding references to the lush world of the islands, a landscape on the verge of Emancipation (in the British West Indies, slaves officially became apprentices — on their way to full freedom - in August 1834).

note in margin pg. 19:

landscape is one of the main characters

I later shortened landscape with the abbreviation ls. Another note in the margin reads:

Unfamiliar ls’s, even just in thought, become unreal ls’s. Familiar ls’s can become too real, too embedded in living bones to be altered

During his time in the West Indies, Rochester longed for England at the same time he desired what was foreign to him - his new bride, “the scent of the flowers by the river.” Simultaneously, Antoinette actively lives out the changes that make her familiar landscape something of ruins. In this vulnerable state, they drink rum under alien moons, breathe in the intoxicating fragrance of “frangipanni, of cinnamon and dust and lime tress when they are flowering,” listen to the sound of the “crac-cracs.” They are made and reflected by the surrounding landscape.

The author, Rhys, was born in Dominica. Do you have to be of a certain landscape to be able to write about it authentically? I found this photograph of her, which I love:

I wonder what would happen if I created the landscape(s) before the characters? I wonder if I could infuse the same sense of intoxicating suffocation into the short story I am working on now? Ms. Rhys was not giving up any answers.

After WSS, I continued exploring, thumbing through the catalog to Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Issac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, an exhibit that was on display at the Yale Center for British Art last fall.

Belisario’s (1795-1849) lithographs are extraordinary, especially the ones which depict island masquerades or Jonnkunu, popular festivities with long histories. These lithographs visualize a creolization of multiple cultures (African, West Indian, British, Irish…) on the Jamaican landscape during the Emancipation era - the same time period as WSS. The landscape is a major ingredient in the mixing.

I tore out the page with the above image and tacked it to my wall. Landscapes are becoming the central theme of my creative world. I need to spend more time doing landscape sketches before and during story creation; I think it might be more important than the characters.

Photos from bbc.com and Yale Center for British Art.

We finished as the thunderstorm moved east, beyond the city. We…me and Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje. Years ago, I fell in love with Ondaatje while reading The English Patient. So when his next book Anil’s Ghost came out I was first in line, anxious to fall once again into the arms of a master storyteller. Disappointment followed. Sighs of desperation. It just didn’t do anything for me.

So I avoided Divisadero for months. Many, many months. The hold-out ended recently and, my goodness, I was enchanted. Such brilliant passages, phrases, sentences, story lines…I found myself dog-earing page after page, ready to return and reread. Such obsessive dog-earing is something I love as is the chance to eye the bookshelves of friends and family, looking for such books that are marked. As if they would tell me leagues about them.

…while he knows scarcely a thing about her. Who is she? This woman who has led him into this medicine cabinet of a room where most of her possessions exist–books, journals, passport, a carefully folded map, archival tapes, even the soap she has brought with her from her other world. As if this orderly collection of things is what she is. So we fall in love with ghosts.

- Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje