The Writing Life

Sitka Day 27: Southeast Alaskans

2012-01-26T16:32:00.001-09:00

I've been keeping a little list as I explore and delight in Sitka and Southeast Alaskan culture these past few weeks. As with any outsider looking in, it's easy to misjudge a few observations but it's also easy to pick up on things that others simply take for granted. Here's my humble stab at a few particularly Southeast Alaskan things of note...

You know you're in Southeast Alaska when:

You fill out a library card application and there is a line for the name of your Captain or boat.

Forest Service publications include bear safety practices that state: "Whenever a Tlingit person was to enter the woods where he knew bears were present, he announced out loud saying in Tlingit, 'GRANDFATHER, (read bear) I am here to get my food, just like you, I am not here to bother you.'"

Nobody thinks it's creepy to invite you onto their boat. In fact, it's standard and hospitable. (To landlubbers, an invitation onto a stranger's boat feels--at least at first--not unlike an invitation to get into a stranger's car.)

You go to a dance party and most people are wearing XtraTufs as they boogy to "Ice, Ice, Baby."

At that same dance party, those who aren't wearing XtraTufs are dressed as pirates.

It is unwritten law that you don't ask hunters where they get their deer, nor those in the fisheries industry where they score their halibut/sea cucumbers/king salmon, etc. In this part of the country, that's sort of like asking a Wyoming cattle rancher how many head of cattle he has, which is sort of like asking a NY stock exchange broker how much he's worth on any given day.

Finally, for those Sitkans who have been following The Writing Life this month (thank you!), please consider coming to my final public event:

Sunday, January 29 @ 7pm at Yaw Chapel

(on the Fine Arts Camp / Sheldon Jackson Campus)

$10 at door (includes dessert)

I will read a few reflections on my stay here on Baranof Island, as well as the concluding story to my manuscript Flashes of War titled "Into Pure Bronze."

Sitka Day 26: Totem Park

2012-01-25T20:02:00.000-09:00

I have walked the loop in Totem Park (Sitka National Historic Park) almost every day since my arrival and never tired if its straight-as-an-arrow trees, its rocky viewpoints, and its quiet pockets for reflection and awe featuring trailside Alaska Native totem and mortuary poles.

According to Carved History, a guidebook for the totems in Totem Park, "totem" is actually an Algonquin word for crests that show natural objects or animals that represent a family group. A memorial or mortuary totem (shown at right) is different than a totem pole and often has a spot in back for the ashes of the honored dead. The figure on top represents that person's moeity (raven, eagle, wolf, etc.). Interestingly enough, the totems in Totem Park didn't come from Sitka Tlingit. They were donated by (mostly Haida) Southeast Alaska Natives and, according to the NPS website, "Between 1901 and 1903, [they] agreed to donate poles to Alaska’s District Governor John G. Brady for the people of Alaska. After exhibiting the poles at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition, Governor Brady sent the poles to Sitka where they were erected..."

I've been researching Tlingit culture during my stay and originally intended to write more about it. But other than mentioning the Battle of 1804, I have found myself at a loss for words. Unlike my stay in Wallowa County, Oregon as writer-in-residence--where hardly a Nez Perce native remained due to [long list of impossible things to explain], many Tlingit are still here in Sitka. Perhaps their presence has made me more all the more aware of how little I know and how carefully one must tread when trying to recount history that is not one's own. In either case, their influence on the place and the land here has not gone unnoticed by this writer, despite my near silence on the subject.

Although many of these poles aren't Tlingit, almost all of them are replicas of the originals. Those replicas were completed by Tlingit carvers, mostly as CCC volunteers from 1938-1942. In May 2011, the Wooch Jin Dul Shat Kooteeya pole was erected, commemorating the park's centennial. The details of this totem's "story" are really interesting (I found the intersection of Native and white cultures on the pole fascinating) and are best described clicking here.

Sitka Day 25: Aleutkina Bay and Beyond

2012-01-24T16:42:00.000-09:00

It's a small world when you're 4,000 miles from home in a town of 8,000 people and you run into someone at one of your events who knows Hannah Branch Road in Celo, North Carolina (population 300?)...knows the family that lives there on the river and runs Camp Celo...knows the school you used to teach at...even knows the man who built your parents' house in the Black Mountains. But if ever there were a place for coincidence or connection, lately it seems to be Sitka.

And so it is that I found myself in good company on a 20' skiff cruising across Sitka Sound for a long-anticipated exploration of some surrounding inlets. I hadn't worn a Mustang Survival Suit yet, but I zipped one on and between that and my borrowed XtraTufs I felt, for brief moments, almost as if I belonged. The attire seemed an initiation of sorts, and when the clouds parted just long enough for us to glimpse the outlet of Silver Bay from our spot in the Eastern Channel, with Bear Mountain cutting the skies high above, it was easy to believe I could die feeling as though I have lived quite fully and fortunately.

We left Crescent Bay and navigated (by my host's keen memory) through islands with names like Kutkan, Morne, and Galankin, then into the Eastern Channel toward the Kutchman Islands and Aleutkina Bay. Onward around Martin Island and into Leesoffskaia Bay where the water suddenly quieted and thickened. Ahead of us, ice crept forward off the closed edge of the bay and, alongside us, trees bent toward the water as if in prayer. There are places here that quiet the mind into something beyond stillness. There are colors that defy imitation. Deep, frigid teal. Black-lit-green, electric gray. Perhaps Alaska's greatest gift is its ability to startle us out of ourselves at almost every bend in the road, fork in the trail, turn into a cove, or break in the clouds. It is and shall remain my greatest muse.

Later, a squall rolled in and we were left with about 200 feet visibility. In the middle distance, we spotted a boat trolling for King Salmon. The world slowly shrunk around us into a flurry of white and our attention shifted from the distant to the near--a sea otter floated with ease in alongside the boat, cormorants wrestled for purchase on rocks, and all the while groupings of murre ducks huddled here and there.

We found our way back without trouble, and even made a pit stop at Twin Island to see how my host's cabin faired during last week's deep freeze. Though sunset back on the docks was more than rewarding, I've added something new to my life list of things to try: spend the night on a small boat at sea, anchored to nothing but hope and the deep, unseen bottoms. I can only guess from this Joe Upton quote how humbling and new such an experience might feel:

"I can hardly describe the blackness of these steep-sided northern inlets on such a night. After moonset, I turned out the masthead lights and stood out on deck for a few minutes in the rain. One's eye searches for a point of reference, a faint star, the dark horizon, but there was nothing--even my net light, a thousand feet away, was lost in the gloom..." (Alaska Blues)

Sitka Day 24: Deer Hunting

2012-01-23T19:20:00.000-09:00

There's one week left of deer season here in Sitka and it seemed only fitting that when an opportunity to go hunting arose, I should take it. We took half a day and six miles and walked a path into the woods. To say what path we took (and more importantly, where we left that path and bushwhacked by compass) would be to break a cardinal rule: you don't tell people where you got your deer. But I will say this: the peaks rose around us through cracks in the canopy, water wove and bent and narrowed, and eventually we found ourselves amidst old growth hemlocks and the lovely, rushing silence that comes with falling snow.

The weapon was a bolt action thirty-aught-six with a black walnut buttstock and stellar spotting scope. The objective was one deer, should we be so lucky, because this hunter already took five this season and six would put him at his limit.

What I found most startling was how similar walking like a hunter felt to walking meditation. We moved slowly and deliberately. Quietly. We noted chewed buds and rubbed bark. We angled around Devil's club (and tasted a sliver of it, too, its cinnamon flavor strong against the rush of cold winter air) and stood high on nurse logs. We looked and looked again; scanned, ducked, waited. My breathing slowed and my mind slowed with it...and then--

That rush of spotting freshly laid tracks! A buck judging from the toe drags, and a very nearby one at that. Snow fell rapidly and yet these tracks lay undisturbed. We froze and looked. Looked again...then followed the tracks until we found an animal "superhighway" where many deer had passed before. Was it minutes or half an hour before we found the spot where the buck had bedded down? My pal took off his gloves and felt the ground for warmth. He looked at me and shook his head, whispered: "He's probably watching us right now."

And perhaps he was, though try as we might we couldn't spot him before sunset and with miles to hike out, we had to turn around. Somewhere over Sitka Sound the sun went down but we were deep in the valley, the snowy, forested world settling into the rich, dusk colors of slate gray, winter white, and deep green. I dropped my pack and laid on the forest floor, letting fat snowflakes alight on my face. My pal did the same and together we lay where the buck had bedded down, breathing in the forest, letting it work its magic and lull us into considering another life--what wonders Thoreau felt and saw, what beauty Aldo Leopold beheld, what awe John Muir inspired.

It made a good spot to rest indeed, and had I come prepared with shelter I would have offered no objection to making camp for the night...for the rest of winter...for that matter, until all of spring comes rushing forth from these mountains and with it new life. They say in order to hunt well, you have to think like a deer. Maybe for a few moments, we did.

Sitka Day 23: Skiff Rescue at John Brown's Beach [Video]

2012-01-22T13:00:00.000-09:00

Here's a story that isn't mine, but that I caught the conclusion of, and so it's one I get to tell:

A few fellas were out hunting on Kruzof Island on November 11th--the night of the windstorm that brought down a slide of trees along Beaver Lake, among other things--and they anchored their small MacGregor skiff at the Fred's Creek outlet into Sitka Sound. They holed up safely in the National Forest shelter, but outside, the storm rallied and by morning that little MacGregor skiff had sunk. Never mind about the hunters--they hopped a boat ride home and the owner thanked his stars for insurance. But no less than two weeks later, that MacGregor skiff showed up again...more than five miles across the sound, slamming against the rocks at John Brown's Beach on Japonski Island. [Japonski is connected to Baranof Island by way of a bridge. It's part of the Sitka city limits and is where the airport is.]

The skiff owner promptly got a call from the Coast Guard: Come get your boat. Totaled, it was, that much had already been determined. But that the boat still floated (sort of) was a marvel altogether. Almost six weeks later, my pal calls me on the phone to say he's found an opportunity for me to get out on the water. I've been three weeks in Sitka and haven't found anyone who can take me out yet (tugboats are great, but being tied to the dock doesn't give perspective of the Sound the way a little distance can). The only catch to my coveted skiff ride? I'd have to be along for the adventure of rescuing the MacGregor skiff on John Brown's Beach. The tide and weather were right, the helping hands all had a day off, and so it was promptly agreed that it was now or never. Did I want to go along? You bet!

Here's a video I put together of the excursion. You'll see I'm in the back of a small skiff with two others who are tossing a line to Rick as he ties super buoys (the big orange balls) to the MacGregor. You'll also see us try several times to tug it free (notice the two gentlemen in my boat as they gaze to the right at the nearby rocks, always aware, always safe). You'll see us very low on gas, too.

What you might not see is the ease with which Rick tied those knots in ice cold water (no gloves). No wonder he's an Alaska Marine Safety Instructor. You might also miss that the tide was rising the whole time--over half a foot in the hour or so that we were out there--or that the guys all knew how many minutes until high tide and how fast the wind was coming (14 from the east). This video doesn't show the first few attempts, wherein the bow of the boat ripped free and they had to start all over again with new knots. It doesn't show up close the jagged aluminum edges of the skiff that could slice skin in a second. But it does show how they got the job done and...if you watch the whole video...you'll even see some good ol' fashioned fishermen's singing.

Sitka Day 20: The Space

2012-01-19T21:33:00.000-09:00

Some days this work feels as simple as anhonest calculation. You wake, you stretch, you drink coffee. Then the mind joinswords into sentences, like winter's gently accumulating snow drifts. First oneflake, then another, then a flurry of movement like insight and sigh--the settling.

Itis a gift to know this rhythm of the writing life and to have worked with it inso many tremendous landscapes these past 25 months. No place is likeanother, yet the discipline of writing stays with me like a pulse wherever Itravel. I have found the space where I am not separate from the work that I do,and that space is endless. Each day dawns like an invitation, each nighthumbles with its unknowns.

Haslife always been so vast? Looking across Sitka Sound, it’s easy to think so.

Sitka Day 19: Mount Edgecumbe & Porky Bickar

2012-01-18T21:06:00.000-09:00

In 1775, Don Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra first spotted Southeast Alaska's premier volcano from his ship Sonora and wrote that there was a mountain "of the most regular an beauitful form I had ever seen. It was also quite detached from the great ridge of mountains. It's top was covered with snow, under which appeared some gullies, which continue till about the middle of the mountain, and, from thence to the bottom were trees..." He named the mountain San Jacinthus.

Never mind that the early Russians called this mountain Saint Lazaria (a name that would later be transferred to a nearby island and avian refuge). As early discoveries go, only some things would last. In 1778, Captain Cook spotted the mountain while journeying with the Discovery and Resolution and dubbed it Mount Edgecumbe.The name stuck, and although locals know full-well this volcano is inactive, it wasn't too many years ago that one particularly dynamic Sitka resident played the most convincing April Fool's joke Baranof Island had ever seen...

According to pals I've met here in Sitka, as well as the Sitka website, in 1974 a man named Porky Bickar went down in history: "Residents of Sitka, Alaska were alarmed when the long-dormant volcano neighboring them, Mount Edgecumbe, suddenly began to belch out billows of black smoke. People spilled out of their homes onto the streets to gaze up at the volcano, terrified that it was active again and might soon erupt. Luckily it turned out that man, not nature, was responsible for the smoke. A local practical joker named Porky Bickar had flown hundreds of old tires into the volcano's crater and then lit them on fire, all in a (successful) attempt to fool the city dwellers into believing that the volcano was stirring to life. According to local legend, when Mount St. Helens erupted six years later, a Sitka resident wrote to Bickar to tell him, 'This time you've gone too far!'" (For a longer version of this true story, click here.)

The results of Porky's prank were pretty convincing:

Sitka Day 18: Tugboats, XtraTufs, & Writers

2012-01-17T20:41:00.001-09:00

This photo collage is long overdue, dear readers, but many thanks for your emails and social networking these past few weeks that have made those late-night posts all the more doable. Alaska is my greatest muse--it has been since the moment I first visited in 2009--and I love knowing that these posts might, in some small way, bring a little of The Last Frontier to folks "down in America" (as an Alaskan would say). Without further a-do, a little catch up from the previous week's adventures:

Introducing, THE ADAK and it's proud owner. This tugboat is 91' and was built in 1944. The engine room (part of it) is pictured next. And if you haven't seen a photo of Southeast Alaska's official uniform yet, consider it done. Those there boots are called XtraTufs, and they're second skin around here.

Besides being on a boat, being in Alaska in any season always involves food. In winter, that means local meat more than anything else. Left to right, here's halibut green curry soup, backstrap (deer meat from either side of the spine), and venison chilli (with secret ingredients of bittersweet chocolate and ground cinnamon). Next up you'll see our typical, delightfully filling and fatty breakfast, followed by a photo of me slicing halibut. If the pics look muted or blurry, that's because they were taken on a boat with limited lighting and...you guessed it...a little bobbing motion.

Fed and warmed, we began the daily ritual of revising. At first, that meant deep workshopping with the three of us sitting around the table, manuscripts beneath our elbows, pens in hand. It also meant killing characters, trying to reenact occasional gestures to prove their physical impossibility, patting our own backs a little for the good lines, and supplementing with dark chocolate whenever possible.

Notice all the layers of clothing? It's been cold. Single-digit temperatures made for mighty chilly nights on The Adak, so many-a-morn was spent beside the fire warming up. A cold boat sure makes for good motivation to keep your butt in the chair and get the job done, eh?

But no matter the temps, the outdoors beckoned. Be it a walk along the docks, sledding down a mountain, or at the very least gazing at the long and lovely views--these days of sunlight and dreaming and the hard work of words have fed my spirit. New adventures and devoted company complete the picture.

Sitka Day 17: Revised Sledding

2012-01-16T22:00:00.001-09:00

One sentence announces the possibility of the next.

You get one God-given sentence for every story you write. The rest you have to chisel on your own.

Work from a first line you can believe in.

Imagine. Now, imagine deeper.

These words of wisdom from writing mentors floated in my mind on the Adak today, a day of deep revision with Flashes of War. One writing companion took the day off to snowboard, the other hunkered down alongside the fireplace and together we wrote. And deleted. And hemmed and hawed and, when necessary, put our heads together to deal with the occasional tough scene.

Alongside the docks, ducks crouched with puffed feathers atop sheer sheets of ice in Eliason Harbor. Some boats were completely iced in, fissures crisscrossing from dock to stern. The sun barely warmed the day into the teens and in the distance, wind whipped powder-fresh snow in whirls around the highest peaks. Three straight days of sun and three more along the way--virtually unheard of in Southeast Alaska and worthy of cancelling plans, calling in sick, changing events, and all-out rejoicing.

I could have kept writing all day, but sunlight beckoned and my knees ached from sitting, so we headed up Harbor Mountain for some good ol' fashioned sledding. It's nice having writing companions to remind me to keep things balanced in this way. With temperatures in the single digits, we bundled up in countless layers and hiked up the mountain until sweat warmed our bodies. It's always faster on the way down, but that doesn't mean we didn't stop to take in the steal-your-breath views. This photo was taken around 4pm--extended daylight here in Sitka without a cloud in the sky to shorten the day. In the distance is Sitka Sound and a handful of tiny islands along the Alexander Archipelago. More photos will be posted once I get a night off the boat and back into my apartment.

Later, I couldn't help but think about that free-for-all flight down Harbor Mountain, friends laughing along the way. Sure, we could steer and lean and aim for the ruts--but by and large sledding is a leap of faith that something glorious and intangible awaits all those who surrender. Not too unlike revision, come to think of it. Perhaps I should add a new mantra to my opening lines: Revise like you're sledding down a mountain.

Sitka Day 16: Birthday Morning Walk

2012-01-15T18:07:00.001-09:00

Friday morning, I woke early to blue-infused blackness--dawn in Sitka. Ravens called, snow unfurled across the campus walkways like a blanket, and I breathed deeply strolling down to the docks. Within an hour, the sky was lit from end to end, a crystal clear day with dry air that made the world feel cold enough to crack. This is my favorite kind of winter weather and, on my birthday, it felt like a gift.

I walked and walked, snow squeaking beneath my boots. By the time I reached the Adak (a ninety-one-foot tugboat), I was filled with gratitude for the freedom to write, the determination to shape my life to my highest aspirations, and the company of fellow artists to share in the journey. For several days, writers Jenny Pritchett and Brendan Isaac Jones and myself have hunkered down with manuscripts in hand and workshopped their two novels and my collection of short stories, happily floating at the duck on Eliason Harbor.

Even tied to the dock, being on the boat felt like a borderland--as if everything else could wait while we three sat and did the good work of arranging words. Long views and big windows, the gentle lapping of the waves (not always the case), the coming and going of fellow boat owners--all of it compressed time into a lovely immersion. I loved being on the boat, but more than anything it made me want to move on the water--to leave even more of myself behind. The metaphor of writing on a boat is not lost on me. Revision requires casting out into the black, trusting something will be on the end of your line at the end of the day. It requires letting loose those knots that inhibit.

On my birthday, I couldn't have asked for a more fitting reminder. Add good company, stars later that evening, sending off of 4' candle trance lanterns high into the sky (for birthday wishes), and suffice it to say it seems like 33 could be nothing but a banner year. Thanks, Sitka, for making the moment possible.

(Boat photos to be posted in the near future...The pic at right is of me lighting my birthday trance lantern, making a wish. I didn't make my go-to wish that I always wish for. Not this time. This birthday wish was Alaska born, thank you very much. My, what a great place to be.)

Sitka Day 13: Video & Radio Promo

2012-01-12T17:00:00.000-09:00

A big part of being Writer-in-Residence for The Island Institute is participating in public events. If you missed my 10-minute Raven Radio interview upon arriving in Sitka, that's archived here. A few days later, I gave a public reading at Kettleson Memorial Library downtown. Here's a 1-minute video of my opening flash fiction story, "While the Rest of America's at the Mall." This story was short-listed for the International Short Story Prize sponsored by Fish Publishing.

For those interested in a more in-depth understanding of why I write about war and how I came to write about war without traveling to the Middle East, without serving in the military, and without living in a war zone, I'd be honored to have you tune-in to my upcoming 60-minute radio interview on Raven Radio.

The interview is Sunday, January 15th from 1:30-2:30pm Alaska Standard time. That's 2:30-3:30pm Pacific Time, or 5:30-6:30pm Eastern Time. The link for streaming is RIGHT HERE. It will also be recorded and archived online sometime next week, I believe.

Sitka Day 12: Food for Thought

2012-01-11T16:05:00.000-09:00

Don't try to do the math on this one, but if you want to get a sense for just how many inlets and bays there are in Southeast Alaska, consider this: the panhandle of Southeast Alaska is only 250 miles long, but has over 11,000 miles of shoreline--that's more than the shorelines of the continental United States! What this looks like on land is that you can be standing on the shores of Baranof Island and looking across a very large (or small, for that matter) bay and see another island. "What island is that?" you might ask. The answer, of course, is that it's the same island you're standing on...it just winds and cuts and folds and bends into and out of itself over and over again until even best mariners get a little dizzy from attempting to orient.

Like trying to imagine 40 tons of herring, I also struggle to imagine large statistics like that, until I can see and feel a place for myself. Some numbers and theories of geological and ecological history are just too darn unfathombale for my conceptual brain to really get. But other people get it, and having read a few summaries about the area I thought I'd try to paraphrase some of what I have learned. Ready for more? Here's another one that gives a sense for just how drastically the landscape here was formed:

About 20,000 years ago, the entirely of Southeast Alaska was buried under more then 2,000 feet of ice. But today, there are places in downtown Juneau that sit 400 feet above high tide. Likewise, there are bays that were walls of glaciers only 200 years ago, and today those glaciers have receded more than 50 miles.

Temperature has a lot to do with that (the Little Ice Age ended "not too long ago" in human history) but so does water, that imitable force. Here in Southeast, the tides shift every 6 1/2 hours, rising and falling over 20 feet (that's 3 feet an hour--better turn that beach stroll into a beach run!). The native Tlingit have a saying here that seems fitting: "When the tide is out, the table is set"--and indeed it is, with all kinds of good eats!

Nowadays, Southeast is made up of bays and inlets and fjords and chucks and mudflats and...the list goes on. As more and more land reveals itself, more and more evidence of humans is discovered. Just east of downtown Sitka, for example, Hidden Falls holds the remains of a campfire that is more than 9,000 years old. What did Baranof Island look like then? How many other relics have been washed away? How many more are yet to be discovered? Thankfully, people are still trying to find out. In the meantime, modern civilization has supplanted itself quite successfully on these shores. Consider Japonski Island, for instance, which is accessed by a 1,000+ foot bridge from Sitka to the US Coast Guard base, a boarding school for Native Alaskans, the airport, and a few miles of man-made causeways connecting a series of smaller islands.

I'm sure it didn't look anything like this 9,000 years ago, but I like the view (because of the sunshine, of course). Now if I could just get out on the water somehow and look back at this tiny dot of Sitka, I might start to get a feel for--no matter how long humans have or haven't been around--just how darn tiny we really are.

Sitka Day 11: The Digs

2012-01-10T16:35:00.000-09:00

It somehow escaped me on this most recent leg of my journey to post photos of the writer-in-residence digs. Over the past 25 months I've stayed in houses, off-the-grid cabins, residence halls, and the like. I've been down at the bottom of a canyon and up in the high desert, along a river and now an ocean, deep in the woods and in small downtowns. Here in Sitka, I'm on the campus of Sheldon Jackson College (no longer operating) in a little buidling with 9 apartments. Maybe this is an Alaska thing, but I find the hallways to be quite unique. My college dorms/apartments certainly didn't look like this:

The apartment is small but absolutely functional, and the big window is really helpful for writing. Two blocks from the shore, even fewer to the National Historic Park, and walking distance to just about every basic errand. It's a sweet set up, and those of you out there considering residencies might take note: the next deadline for the The Island Institute's residency program is April 15th.

Sitka Day 10: The Death of Time

2012-01-09T15:27:00.000-09:00

Where did time go on this island? Caught up in "old man's beard" as it dangles from these hemlocks? Eddying in whorls of ancient wood? Creeping down veins of moss? History outruns the present in Sitka, greeting me at every turn.

Here, the Indian River pours into Crescent Bay of Sitka Sound and I listen to the blending of fresh water meeting salt.

Here, this rocky shore was bloodied in the 1804 Battle of Sitka--Russians, Aluets, Tlingits--a fight whose consequences still infuse this city from its street names to its cemeteries to its churches to its parks.

Here, I watch as fog exhales between mountains, lifting around islands in constant illusion.

In a place where entire mountains can hide, where one minute the horizon is there and the next it is sopped in, where the surrounding ocean outsizes the island an immeasurable number of times--where does one go to gain perspective?

Perhaps like time in Sitka, perspective also cannot be trusted. Better to greet each day as if it were your first: to assume that where there are clouds there will be mountains and that where there is water there might soon be solid land. Bury time at sea, so that together with the tides it comes and goes by its own good clock, always tugging a little at the mind as if to say: Now you're here. Now you're gone. It's all the same.

Sitka Day 9: Seafood Producers Cooperative

2012-01-08T11:24:00.000-09:00

Thanks to the helpful Directors at The Island Institute, on Friday I got to tour the Seafood Producers Cooperative (SPC) fish packing plant. It's winter, which is prime time for repairs--not harvesting or packaging--but I still got a glimpse of one part of the fishing industry that is the lifeblood of many people living in Southeast Alaska. The hardest thing for a landlubber like me is to wrap my brain around the sheer amount of fish coming through a place like SPC at any given time. For instance, in a few weeks SPC expects a delivery of 35-40 tons of herring. Jeff, plant manager and generous guide, showed me the over-sized tube draped over the docks that's used to suck the fish up and into the processing plant. "Hold on," I said. "Did you say tons? Thirty-five to forty tons?" Jeff smiled, nodded. "And that's a small run," he said.

Course the first thing to do after offloading is get those fish on ice. Here's a glimpse of SPC's ice machines, which can make 1 ton of ice in 1 hour (the photo shows 3 machines). The perspective is hard to gather from the photo on the right, but a drip tray (right side of photo) gathers water and sends it down the metal spokes and by the time it gets to the bottom it's frozen and shaved off, then drops below. The ice you see in the background-middle of the photo is actually the bottom of the gigantic machine, some twenty (?) feet below.

A quote from author Joe Upton (Journeys Through the Inside Passage) offers some sense of history with the fishing industry:

"In the mid-1980's, when it seemed the Japanese would pay any price for herring roe, a lot of money was made here during those few days. At the peak of it, when the price approached $2,000 per ton, some of the hot shots were putting in 25 or 30 tons in a 48-hour opening!...Here, more than any other place in the region, may be seen evidence of the entrepreneurial blood that flows so strongly in the veins of Alaskans. Ruins on the shore are stark evidence of ventures that started, boomed, and finally failed. There were whaling stations, fish meal plants, salmon salteries and canneries, mines, mink farms, and fox farms. Go ashore in any bay; poke around. You'll find old piling rotting on the beach, rusting equipment hidden by devil's club thorns, and pieces of someone's failed dream."

SPC is on the other end of things, and as a cooperative is able to provide independent fishermen and women with a stake in the business and steadier payment (and lifestyle) over time. Cash buyers (just down the dock here in Sitka) offer other pros and cons, and in the end it's sort of question of how quickly you need your money and whether or not you're in it for the long haul or the season (or just a few days, for that matter).

All kinds of fish come through SPC. About 95% of the black cod harvested in these waters and processed at SPC is sold overseas (and probably 70% of that to Japan alone). By contrast, 60-70% of the salmon coming through SPC is sold at home in the United States. Running at full capacity, SPC can process and package up to 100,000 tons of fish in a single day--and they're a "smaller" operation. They can move 20 tons of fish per hour off the boats as they roll in, storing them in these huge blue ice bins called totes. If the fish aren't stored in totes, sometimes they're coming in off of smaller trollers (trolling is a type of hook and line fishing). The boat pulls in and folks on deck load buckets of fish by hand that get cabled up to the plant where workers can tell by the look, size, color (and probably five gajillion other things I don't understand) just what species of fish they're dealing with and how much value it has. Based on this, they sort quickly and send the fish down the line (so to speak). Some fish come whole ("rounds" they call them), while others are gutted or partially prepped on deck. Halibut are huge and come whole. ("You could set up camp in here!" a line worker was said to exclaim upon lifting the side of a gutted halibut and peering inside.) Their first stop is this pneumatic halibut header. Look a bit like a guillotine? That's because it is.

(At right, that warehouse Jeff is walking to is actually cold storage. An entire freaking building of it. In season, it's kept at -10 degrees Fahrenheit, if I recall correctly.)

What I can show next is what amounts to several million dollars with of equipment that, together with line workers and the crews that do the catching, produces no small miracle from fish to frozen fillet. Jeff explained how it all works. I don't dare attempt a replay for fear of total inaccuracy, but take a look and let the mind wander. Pretty soon you're likely to see fish flopping in all forms, from silvery traces of life to fat, pink, market-ready fillets.

One machine I do remember is the Baader 988, which SPC purchased several years ago. In almost Wilky Wonka Chocolate Factory style, the gutted fish goes in one end and comes out magically filleted on the other. But not just one fish...more like 20 fish per minute are being transformed into computer-perfect, razor-sliced fillets thanks to the Baader, and that's moving "slowly," according to Jeff. Lesser quality fish and cuts, and this Baader can fillet fish in under a second. Oh yeah, and it goes without saying: Watch your fingers!

What can I say? The information seems as endless as the industry itself, and this post isn't even the tip of the iceberg. There's politics and pressure, lobbying and regulations, pros and cons, good cuts and bad cuts; there's dog salmon and there's kings, there's a "weather-breeder" day that yields a storm that costs a crew thousands of dollars in catch, there's picture-perfect runs where an entire year's living can be made a few days...Although it's dated, I've no doubt this quote from Mont Hawthorne (as told by Martha Ferguson Mckeown) in The Trail Led North sums up the lore that, as far as I can tell, still floats in the eyes of Sitka's fishermen as enticingly as the open ocean itself:

"Whenever a bunch of fellows would get together, someone would start talking about going up North...Things were pretty much settled to the south of us. We didn't seem to be ready for steady jobs. It was only natural we'd start talking about the North...The fellows who hadn't been up was hankering to go. The rest of us was hankering to go back."

Sitka Day 6: Herring Cove to Beaver Lake

2012-01-05T19:33:00.000-09:00

Hark! There be sunshine alighting on this island! And so it goes, that when the clouds part all tasks must come to rest and any good Sitkan must attend to the opportunities immediately at hand: glimpsing great views and hiking unburdened by rain gear.

Today, that took the form of a 5 mile snowy loop hike on the newly expanded Herring Cove to Beaver Lake trail in the Tongass National Forest. But in order to get my map and meet my new hiking buddy, I had to find his house...on a tugboat. If you're from here that's not a big deal. To me, it's quite astonishing. Needless to say I enjoyed a morning cup of tea sitting at a table that seemed to teeter...or was it the walls that moved? Or the good company I kept--maybe he was moving side-to-side? All of it was moving, of course, as the boat gently bobbed. This required no act of concentration for the host. My concentration, however, was another matter.

The trail was clear down to the rocks in places, in others the snow knee-high, and still a few other times if I missed a step or two I found myself thigh-high in white stuff. With air temps in the high 30's, I didn't mind and it made for a bit of adventure. Here's a glimpse:

And here, as the trail seemed a bit unclear, our fearless leader Colorado

guided us for nearly half a mile with impressive accuracy.

Later, we encountered this surprise: a massive windfall of western hemlock and Sitka spruce. Apparently, on November 11 an uncustomary northwester tackled Baranof Island with gusts up to 60 miles per hour. I'm told a few hunters were out at Beaver Lake that night, and they said the sound of these trees crashing through the lonely dark was indescribably powerful. We contoured and climbed and got over without too much trouble, slow and steady.

Finally, the short drive home afforded a nice view of the fjords that characterize

Southeast Alaska. So nice to see the Tongass today in delightfully uninterrupted light!

Sitka Day 5: North Pacific Current

2012-01-04T15:41:00.000-09:00

I've walked at dawn and midday, walked at twilight and late at night. I've walked in rain, snow, and sun; along sidewalks, groomed trails, the rocky shore. Still, no matter where I go in Sitka, I cannot seem to smell the ocean. Strange, being on an island in the North Pacific without the scent of saltwater or rank kelp. Is there something about winter or living along a sound that I don't know?

I stuck my fingers in the North Pacific just to say I'd done it and also to test a fact--that the water's warmer here than one might think. At a potluck the other night, a helpful librarian told me about the Kuroshio Current, which brings warmth from its origins near the equator and combines with the North Pacific Current. It's impossible to live on an island and not consider the vastness of the deep, dark, wet thing looming all around you. All of which is to say, lately I've been thinking about the enormity of the oceans and how, as Ivan Doig puts it in his stunning novel about 4 Swedes who escape Russian servitude in New Archangel (modern-day Sitka), our daily workings in this vast environment "amount to a worker ant on the rock toe of an Alp," (The Sea Runners).

Incidentally, just south of the West Wind Drift pictured above, floats a disastrous human-caused monstrosity twice the size of Texas called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Though our activities as humans are as tiny as Doig's worker ant, the impacts are exponential. A woman guzzles a Diet Coke at a gas station and doesn't recycle the container...so it begins. The ocean's tendrils reach far and wide, and one drop of greed leaked from our coast inevitably piles back up on shore.

Though I cannot smell the North Pacific here, I can see it. I can hear it. I can meet delightful groups of people who live along its shores and have made rituals, customs, and careers out of this great force of nature. The ocean is everywhere in Sitka, undeniably. Let us rejoice at its enormity, and, like the worker ant, be ever-vigilant in our duty to fulfill a cause--that of protection, that of security, that of survival of all species dependent upon clean waters.

Sitka Day 4: Darkness

2012-01-03T17:54:00.001-09:00

When you hear folks say that Alaska is all light half the year and all dark the other half of the year, what you're hearing is an exaggeration of a basic astronomical fact: in winter, the sun is in the lower hemisphere and it does not light the north pole. In Barrow, Alaska, that means the sun doesn't rise above the horizon for two consecutive months. But here in Sitka, much farther south, that means around the winter solstice (12/21) there are roughtly 7 hours of "functional" daylight. Keep in mind that "functional" still includes dawn and dusk, which tend to be very gray. Also keep in mind the annual precipitation here is 86 inches, so even days that could receive "normal" amounts of light, don't always get it. All of that being said, the darkness of an Alaskan winter--anywhere in the state--is indeed something that takes getting used to.

In 1918, Rockwell Kent, American painter/printmaker/illustrator, spent 9 months on an uninhabited island near Seward, Alaska. Other than the company of his young son and an old man named Olson, Kent lived and breathed for his paintings (many of which were later turned into woodcuts). He also wrote beautifully of his adventures in his book, Wilderness. Of the darkness, he wrote:

"The Northern wilderness is terrible. There is discomfort, even misery, in being cold. The gloom of the long and lonely winter nights is appalling and yet do you know I love this misery and court it...Who has ever dwelt so entirely alone that the most living things in all the universe are wind and rain and snow? Where the elements dominate and control your life, where at getting up and bedtime and many an hour of night and day between, you question helplessly, as a poor slave his master, the will of the mightly forces of the sky?" (Rockwell Kent)

Or perhaps more direct, the young and brave (if not somewhat entitled) Emily McCorkle FitzGerald--an Army doctor's wife who lived in Sitka just a few years after the United States purchased Alaska from Russia--wrote home to her mother in December, 1874:

"I forgot to tell you of our short days. We breakfast at half past nine with a candle and by half past three in the afternoon it is too dark to see and we light up again. I think it's disgusting! Mrs. Campbell says as soon as we light the lamps she feels as if it was evening and begins to be sleepy by five 'o clock." (Emily FitzGerald, An Army Doctor's Wife on the Frontier)

I had to laugh when I read this today, seeing as how I cooked dinner myself at 3:45 yesterday afternoon and had to force myself to stay up until 9pm for want of a "regular" schedule. As I write this just after 5pm the rain pours down and it is a dizzying black outside. Even still, after dinner I'm going on a walk (with my headlamp).

Sitka Day 3: Sunlight!

2012-01-02T20:20:00.000-09:00

On third day, there is sunlight and my is it worth the wait! This photos was taken around 10:30am. There's nothing I can say that can top what John Muir wrote in Travels to Alaska about his first glimpse of Glacier Bay, just a bit north of where I am right now:

"How long we gazed I never knew. The glorious vision passed away in a gradual fading change through a thousand tones of color to pale yellow and white, and then the work of the ice-world went on again in everyday beauty. The green waters of the fiord were filled with sun-spangles; the fleet of icebergs set forth on their voyages with the upspringing breeze; and on the innumerable mirrors and prisms of these bergs, and on those of the shattered crystal walls of the glaciers, common white light and rainbow light began to burn, while the mountains shone in their frosty jewelry, and loomed again in the thin azure in serene terrestrial majesty. We turned and sailed away...and our burning hearts were ready for any fate, feeling that, whatever the future might have in store, the treasures we had gained this glorious morning would enrich our lives forever." (John Muir)

A few other photos are below as teasers (more on the new totem pole later) and if you're online Tuesday at 8:19am Alaska Standard Time (that's 9:19am Pacific Time and 12:19pm Eastern Standard Time), tune into live streaming on Raven Radio to catch my 10-minute interview.

(Miss Day 2? Click here.)

Sitka Day 2: Adjusting

2012-01-02T17:10:00.000-09:00

"The woods and the sea--in no place in North America are the two as intertwined in the lives of the inhabitants as they are along the coast of Southeast Alaska." So says Joe Upton in his excellent book, Journeys Through the Inside Passage. The woods and the sea, most certainly, but had Upton been writing about winter he might have added darkness to that list.

I wake at 5am to pitch black; not a star, not a light, not a hint of dawn. By 9am rain clouds roil in slate gray with hints of light coming through the depths. It is as though someone holds a thick quilt between a sideways sun and this rainy island. In this kind of light, the snow and the sky look similar. I haven't really seen where I'm living yet, having landed late at night, so if this is sunrise, I'll take it.

I head out for a New Year's day walk along Lincoln Street to find the city rightfully still asleep, but the ravens are out and it doesn't take long to decipher that they are the cawing keepers of this town. Their presence is pervasive, but not in that Hitchcock sort of way. No, the ravens of Sitka maintain a more crafted presence, as though they're perfectly aware of this other human thing called "city" going on along the shores of Sitka Sound, but they've got better things to do. Interestingly enough, the Southeast Alaska native Haida and Tlingit clans are organized into two major moieties: Eagle and Raven. At the end of Lincoln Street, I find myself at the headquarters for the local public radio station, fittingly: KCAW 90.1 Raven Radio.

By 10am it's as light as it's going to get on this particular day, but already that's more light than I'd been anticipating. I guess folks were trying to prepare me for the worst, but so far I haven't been able to stop smiling. The air is cold and wet and bone-chilling here, just the kind of Pacific Northwest feel I grew up with as a kid. Of course, that's what an Oregonian might say, but someone from Sitka knows better. Later, I ask someone at a potluck whether or not "Pacific Northwest" correctly describes this area. "When I'm trying to keep things simple," she says, "that's what I tell people who aren't from here." But, she goes on to explain, Southeast Alaska is indeed it's own region and that's how folks around here describe it.

The day stays wet and gray and the light stays hushed. At 3:30pm there's a slight burst of color, as shown here from my writer's desk. I hustle outside to stare at the sky and within minutes, the light is gone. Not long after 4pm, the city is entirely dark again.

Sitka Day 1: Arrival

2012-01-01T16:41:00.000-09:00

For me, Alaska always begins at the departure gate. This trip, I fly Tri-Cities, TN to Atlanta to Seattle. Waiting in the Alaska Airlines concourse for the final leg of my flight, signs of life in The Last Frontier are readily apparent:

First, I notice the broad-shouldered father wearing an Alaska fisheries hoodie and hand-stitched sandals made of tire and webbing. He's traveling with two young daughters and together they sleep on the floor at Gate C9. The girls are draped across his chest like cubs, his head propped up on a canvas duffel. The three of them breathe together in a little cave of sleep, airport buzz all around.

Of course there's also the prevalence of Xtra Tufs, those indispensable all-weather waterproof boots that any good Alaskan knows how to make look sexy. They're mid-calf, skin-tight, duck-brown, and all rubber. Add in the fact that 8 out of 10 males at Gate C9 have beards (yes, I counted), there's a passenger named McKinley waiting on standby, and not a dress suit or coat can be spotted and, well, I know I'm in the right place.

When I board the plane, it feels a little like showing up at a reunion. I squeeze down the aisle and load my luggage into an overhead bin, while all around me folks chat and call each other's names, glad for the chance meeting. You know you're on an Alaska Airlines flight when a) you're stopping at least once (but probably two or three times) before you get to your final destination, and b) even though you're a stranger flying to a strange land, as soon as the person sitting next to you asks what you're doing, they've either heard of you or knew you were coming or know somebody who knew about you or all of the above. You can't sneak onto a sparsely populated island in the middle of winter. Not this one, anyway, and not by flying in.

It's twilight by 3:30 and we bank toward Ketchikan. All I can see are deep, green islands and white-fluffed peaks etched out of the dark sea. Very shortly afterwards, it's as dark as night and I wonder about kids getting out of school, walking home in the dark. When I de-plane in Sitka, I'm greeted warmly by The Island Institute staff and the arrival gate, too, seems to be a place where neighbors catch up on news. I meet ten people before I've picked up my bags. In less than an hour I've showered in my sweet little apartment and the Directors take me to a New Year's Eve dinner party. I might be jet-lagged, but I'm stoked. There's salmon on the table and venison sausage and, well, it all seems just about right. My favorite part? Trying to get in the door…

The Island Institute, Sitka, AK

2011-12-29T12:31:00.001-09:00

On Saturday morning I head out for nine weeks of adventure in Alaska. Cold, dark, and snowy--yes--but also wild, quiet, and inspiring. I'm honored to begin my trip as Writer-in-Residence for The Island Institute in Sitka, AK on Baranof Island. The image below marks A) The Island Institute on the campus of Sheldon Jackson College, which is right next to Writer-in-Residence furnished apartment and B) the dojo I intend to train at while living on the island. The locations are 2/10 of a mile apart.

One reason I am so eager to connect with this organization is because their mission aligns with a lot of the issues surrounding my current manuscript, Flashes of War. As quoted from The Island Institute website:

We use the literary arts as a means of inquiry into the core values of community, and promote collaborative leadership as an avenue to deepen democratic principles of civic engagement. The dialogue we nurture is at once community-based and national and international in its scope, and aims to identify common ground between diverse perspectives. Our programs involve nationally recognized writers, thinkers, and community leaders from the U.S. and abroad...

The apartment looks like it's a stone's throw from the shores of the North Pacific to the west and Sitka National Historical Park to the south, so my interest in the tides and in snowshoeing should be piqued during my stay. I spent September, October, and November generating new material and December doing physical labor and socializing. This winter will be a time for exploring and filling my well back up as I engage with community in public events. Since Alaska is my greatest muse, I can't think of a better state to be in as I ring in the New Year!

(Interested in previous posts about Alaska? Each of the following links corresponds to the first photo and post for that part of the trip and the others can be accessed by scrolling chronologically. My first journey was in 2009, which led to its own unique series of posts. In 2010 I flew into Anchorage, then spent roughly 2 weeks in Fairbanks with another author, 1 week backpacking in the White Mountains, 2 1/2 weeks in Denali, including time with sled dogs, and 1 week in the Chugach.)

My Top Ten Books for 2011

2011-12-28T14:46:00.000-09:00

I woke with a start this morning, thinking How could I forget?, realizing I failed to add Oregon author Craig Lesley to yesterday's list of books read in 2011. So, for the record:

47. Winterkill by Craig Lesley

48. River Song by Craig Lesley

Onward to My Top Ten, culled from yesterdays' list. Note that old favorites such as Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac are exempt from My Top Ten list because they are, effectively, all time chart-toppers in and of themselves. Without further delay and in no particular order...

MY TOP TEN BOOKS for 2011:

Winterkill by Craig Lesley
Temple of Air by Patricia Ann McNair
Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peele (Dear Lydia: Please write more books!)
The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek
An American Map by Anne-Marie Oomen
The Cowboys by William H. Forbis
The World Made Straight by Ron Rash
War by Sebastian Junger
The Room and the Chair by Lorraine Adams
Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction edited by Tara L. Masih (this book is also an anthology of stories)

And a few other categories for good measure:

Fiction that continues to keep me thinking: Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Nonfiction that taught me the most as a writer: An American Map by Anne-Marie Oomen
Fiction that taught me the most as a writer: The Room and the Chair by Lorraine Adams
Favorite literary journal (besides TRACHODON): Electric Literature.
Easiest read with highest payoff: The World Made Straight by Ron Rash
Most useful book as a teacher of writing: Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction edited by Tara L. Masih
Most useful book as a person trying to make a living as a writer: Listbuilding for Bloggers by Phil Hollows

2011 List of Books Read

2011-12-27T18:44:00.002-09:00

I'm packing and tidying here at my parent's house in NC, prepping THE CLAW for it's upcoming vacation (I'm flying--not driving--to Alaska) and getting my ducks in a row for 9 weeks of living out of a backpack. But it wouldn't be a proper end to the year without recounting the books I read in 2011. In some cases, several books are listed as one because they were shorter and along the same subject matter. Tomorrow's post will list mt top ten culled from this:

1. Wayfairer: A Voice from the Southern Mountains by James Dickey

2. Electric Literature (vol. 4, 5)

3. Loooking Back at Wallowa Lake: A Photographic Portrait, ed. Mark Highberger
Chief Joseph and the Nez Perces: A Photographic History by Bill and Jan Moeller
Angel from Paradise: The Life and Times of a Wallowa County Cowboy by Barbara Jean Price, Beverly Anne Davidson and Ruth Kelsay Berland)

4. They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Persuasive Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein

5. Nuts and Bolts: A practical Guide to Teaching College Composition, ed. Thomas Newkirk

6. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (abridged)

7. Pioneering in the Wallowas: Four Frontier Tales by Lloyd W. Coffman
Bits of Wallowa County Lore by Claudia Killough
The Train Comes to Wallowa County: A Brief History by Bear Creek Press

8. Smile at Fear by Chogyam Trungpa

9. Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peele

10. Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, ed. Tara L. Masih

11. The Life of Milarepa, trans. Lobzang Jivaka

12. You Have Time for This: Contemporary American Short-Short Stories, ed. Mark Budman and Tom Hazuka

13. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

14. Choosing Me Before We by Christine Arylo

15. Four Lines A Day: The Life and Times of an Imnaha Ranch Woman by Janie Tippett

16. The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek

17. The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi Durrow

18. Nonfiction and fiction from issues of: Creative Nonfiction, Hunger Mountain, River Styx, Third Coast, and Gettysburg Review

19. Driving with Dvorak by Fleda Brown

20. An American Map by Anne-Marie Oomen

21. A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

22. The Truth of the Matter by Dinty W. Moore

23. Temple of Air by Patricia Ann McNair

24. The Alamo by William W. Lace

25. Houston 1860-1900 by Ann Dunphy Becker
Houston in the 1920's and 1930's by Story Joanes Sloane III
Historic Photos of Houston by Betty Trapp Chapman

26. Del Pueblo: A Pictorial History of Houston's Hispanic Community by Thomas H. Kreneck

27. The Cowboys by William H. Forbis

28. Unearned Pleasures by Ursula Hegi

29. Exploring Game-Changing Tactics of Online Marketing by E-Junkie

30. Listbuilding for Bloggers by Phil Hollows

31. All that Work and Still No Boys by Kathryn Ma

32. Texas Heartland: A Hill Country Year by John Graves

33. War by Sebastian Junger

34. Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Kim Barker

35. The Room and the Chair by Lorraine Adams

36. The World Made Straight by Ron Rash

37. Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell

38. Fiction from: Kenyon Review, Our Stories, Electric Literature

39. Distance Between Us by Masha Hamilton

40. You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon

41. Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words of Fewer, ed. Robert Smartwood

42. The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq by Helen Benedict

43. Sand Queen by Helen Benedict

44. Sea Level by Roger King

45. The Story of Sitka by C.L. Andrews
Sitka and Its Ocean/Island World, ed. Robert A. Henning

46. Alaska Blues by Joe Upton

47. Winterkill by Craig Lesley

48. River Song by Craig Lesley

Twists and Turns

2011-12-22T13:40:00.003-09:00

If 2011 has been anything, it has been a year of twists and turns. One way to read that is literally: I drove over 10,000 non-commuter miles in my Volvo THE CLAW this year (crossing the Rockies twice) and indeed there was many-a-twisting mile along the way. But as much as I like to talk about my car, what I'm getting at here has to do with something bigger--that timeless notion that no matter how hard we dream, push, pray, persuade, or try, sometimes life has something else in store for us.

The original intention of putting my life on the road for two years was to finish a book and get a post-graduate fellowship. Twenty months into the tour, although I'd published over 15 stories and won a handful of awards, it became startlingly clear that neither of my dreams was going to come true. At least not on my timeline. I decided I needed to re-frame failure, apply to more residencies, and add another year to the tour...

That decision, as hard as it was to make publicly and put into action, single-handedly set in motion more than I ever thought was in store for 2011. I ended up in Texas for 7 weeks, even though Texas hadn't been on my radar. While there at Madrono Ranch, time to write lead to a total epiphany in my process, which in turn led to new stories written at VCCA, which in turn led to deepening my respect for the depth of the writing profession. While I'd felt somewhat defeated in summer, by fall I was bolstered and humbled by all there is to discover as a writer. This encouraged me to plan for the future, and voila, the Airstream trailer materialized (ok, it was a little trickier than that) and I'm now elbow-deep in cleaning supplies.

If life had gone "as planned," none of that would have happened. No Texas. No Airstream. No new stories for the manuscript. Sure, I might have nailed that fellowship I'd wanted and/or gotten the book deal I was dreaming of, but as I head into 2012 both of those things still await as very real possibilities. In the meantime, I feel enriched by the experiences life ended up throwing my way. I know I've picked the right profession for me when it's not only something I love, but something that also helps be grow as a person. I'm a better person for all the things I didn't get in 2011, and a better writer, too.

As for 2012, I still have hopes and dreams, but I also have a healthy dose of flexibility.

The Writing Studio: We've Got Power!

2011-12-20T17:02:00.000-09:00

Today was a moment of truth for The Beacon, our Airstream Sovereign we’re slowly but steadily turning into a writing studio. It’s no small wonder what one little univolt adaptor for $6.97 will do, converting 120 AC power to 12 volt DC. Using that, Dad plugged The Beacon into the side of the house and we dashed inside the trailer to see what worked and what didn’t. Upon entering, we heard something roaring in the back bathroom and something else buzzing up front…

The roaring was the bathroom fan on high (it works, check!) and the buzzing was the fridge and living room light with dimmer switch (check, check!). Next up, we tried the air conditioning fan (check!), the microwave (check!), the bedroom and bedside lights (check, check!), the panel control lights (check!), the exterior body light (check!), the living room lights (check - but we need 16 mini-bulbs), and most fun of all—the original stereo and 8-track player (check!). So pleased with ourselves we were, we made a video demonstrating the future domestic capabilities of our little trailer slice of heaven. Note the surround sound speakers; the mold-free, squeaky-clean fridge; the brillo-pad-scrubbed stovetop; and the original light up control panel.

Of course, there’s the back end of the Airstream, which Dad diligently tackles each day and which I just as diligently deny is there: the bathroom. Dad's already ripped the carpet up, extracted the toilet and water heater (taking the latter to the dump), and gutted the insulation and piping from the bottom up. Working on his back with safety goggles and a Sawzall, he released the Airstream's "belly skin" (as it is called) to find this ugly mess. He sawed the rest away beneath the bathroom and junked it all before I even had time to finish letting the Pledge dry on the indoor wood paneling. It's been one week of ownership and my, are we having fun!

The Writing Studio: A Father's View

2011-12-19T05:14:00.000-09:00

Dad started an Airstream journal, keeping track of our expenses and repairs and listing questions or concerns as they arise. Of course, he knows a lot more about all of this than I do and he's not running a blog that tries to see the silver lining in everything. I'm sitting here claiming small victories because of the gas burners (and now the fridge is working, too!) but he knows how to spot things beneath the surface. Luckily, he knows how to fix them, too. Dad's journal caught my attention and I asked him if I could reprint some of it on the blog. Go, Dad:

12/14

Katey and I continued deep cleaining. Found left bed frame needs rebuilding. Overall inspection of trailer so far shows much to be done:

1. No batteries

2. Loose wires

3. Water supply lines broken

4. Condition of black water, gray water, and fresh water systems unclear

5. Belly pan under bedroom shows damage and is sagging

6. Under carriage shows rust

7. Something attached to the furnace has been cut away

8. 2-3 windows need to be replaced

12/15

Unwrapped the electrical cables from rear bumper. Opened back door and rear side panel. Pulled out all the insulation--some of it wet--to expose hot water heater compartment and rear plumbing compartment. All the copper piping has been replaced with plastic. Connection to hot water heater seems in tact but floor under heater very wet. With Katey pulling on the pipes inside the trailer, I was able to trace which ones go where...Back rear corner has a box with a button in the middle. Out of the box comes a short, stout, two-pronged cable which might be the hook up for the battery. Plate on back of camper says it is a 110-120 AC and 12v DC system...Waiting for a manual to confirm many assumptions.

[Look closely for Dad's face!]

The Writing Studio: Gas Burners!

2011-12-15T17:19:00.000-09:00

It's the little things, right? Today we got both front burners working on the gas stove! The rear burners work but we need to run to the hardware store for a small part first. I finished sanitizing all the surfaces in the kitchen--fridge included--while dad stripped a sheet of old insulation from beneath one of the beds to discover much of the wiring and gas lines we'll need to access for future repairs. Pictured at left is the bunk on the same side as the kitchen--you can see the heating duct from the gas-fired furnace, the copper tubing for propane for the original water heater in the bathroom, and wiring for two thermostats all stored under the mattress board. Note the original puke-green carpet (glad that's gone!) and the lack of support bars for the mattress (easy fix). Pictured at right is the bunk on the same side as the pantry and it's pretty much ready to go once we replace the fronts of the storage drawers that slide from underneath the mattress board. When it's all said and done, hopefully the one on the left will look as nice as the one on the right.

The deeper we worked our way toward the back of the Airstream, the more we discovered. Little parts here and there--a bolt, a screw, a hardware rivet, an oddly cut piece of paneling--started to pile up on the kitchen table for later use. We've never done this before, but we know enough to know that most things are there for a reason, even if that reason isn't immediately apparent.

Tomorrow? I'm treating all the wood with Pledge, Dad's going to decide whether or not to rip up the bathroom carpet and, depending on AC/DC requirements, we may be able to test the microwave and refrigerator to make sure they work. So far, we haven't found anything we can't fix with a little effort and, even better, we haven't found any costly or impossible repairs. Fingers crossed!

This is my last pitch for MONTHLY FICTION for a while. I have residencies secured through the end of summer 2012 and need to earn a minimum of $400 per month with my writing if I want to make ends meet with what I have saved, what I have coming in, and what I have going out. Monthly Fiction is 12 of my stories for $12 over the course of 12 months--delivered right to your inbox! It makes a great gift for budding writers or online readers. I've made it as affordable and accessible as possible in the hopes of sharing my work and earning gas money along the way. Here's a sampling...

From "We Owned it All" in Monthly Fiction:

Down in the catacombs, we owned it all. Tiz juggling fire, Pierre with his rat-a-tat bucket beats. I played trumpet, high notes sending invisible vibrations through ancient walls that reeked of mold and death. Walls that crumbled against your fingertips, left your jeans stained beige the next day. Cybil sang for us. She had a cleft palate and a miniature bulldog and her voice echoed off the limestone like a ghost choir’s, eerie and resonant; the kind of sound that left me haunted in that junkie sort of way...(read more)

The Writing Studio: Airstream Sovereign Arrives!

2011-12-14T18:35:00.000-09:00

Hardly any of us Schultz's slept a wink last night, eagerly awaiting the arrival of our new-to-us 1970 Airstream Sovereign. We hired Bobby DeCola of Burnsville, NC to do the tow and he sure made it look easy. This video doesn't show the 270 degree turn he took without a flinch at the bottom of the driveway, but he handled the hairpin up above nicely and backed The Beacon (as we're calling it) next to Dad's wood shop with ease.

We spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning surfaces, vacuuming, sweeping, and washing windows. As we worked, we discovered things that needed repair in equal measure to cool features we hadn't noticed before. The vintage stereo has an 8-Track player, for instance, and the kitchen lights have a retro switch with dimmer installed. Also: the cutting board is custom fitted to go over the second sink to double the amount of counter space when needed, the bathroom has two swinging doors, the bedroom has an accordion sliding door, and built-in brass-plated round halogen lights adorn the curves in the walls in just the right places. The carpet in the bathroom needs to be torn out, the fan over the stove looks rusty, the pipes are cut underneath the kitchen sink (we knew that), some wood trim needs securing, and one bed needs a new board under the mattress.

Tomorrow, we'll get the propane tanks filled and test the stove. We've got our fingers crossed that the manual will arrive in the mail soon. In the meantime, we're using Bob Livingston's top-rated RV Repair and Maintenance Manual.

This week I'm promoting Monthly Fiction as a gift idea or general purchase to help support my writing life on the road. 12 stories for 12 bucks in 12 months--delivered right to your inbox--the gift that happens all year long!

From "The Naming of Things" in Monthly Fiction by Katey Schultz

Jet was tired. Bull-screwed, hound dog tired, as the cab driver spun out, left him heaving against the entry sign to Appleglen Apartments. He curled a tight fist into the dappled apple image inked along the border of this month’s banner: Voted Laurendale’s #1 Apartments for Seniors. Appleglen. Jesus, even the name sounded like a remake of a remake, precisely how his entire summer felt, what with his girlfriend, Sweetie, gone and all the hot sunrises of a Carolina summer thick with that same, choking, humidity.

He toiled up the stairs to his second story apartment, fingering the keys, clumsy at first, then aligned them with the lock by sound and feel. Even drunk he knew enough to piss first, drink water until he had to piss again. He set his keys on the counter, let loose his belt, the button on his scrapped Levi’s, filleted the zipper in one fell swoop and the fabric dropped to his ankles.

“Christ,” he said to the dark apartment. “Damn shoes.”...(read more)

Call for Support: Monthly Fiction

2011-12-12T17:26:00.002-09:00

In addition to documenting the AIRSTREAM saga, this week I'm promoting Monthly Fiction as a gift idea or general purchase to help support my writing life on the road. 12 stories written by me for just 12 bucks, delivered right to your inbox over the course of 12 months.

From "Poo Mission" in Monthly Fiction by Katey Schultz:

When we got back to the main room, most of the guys were asleep. I could hear Ruiz snoring and right next to him laid Sergeant Fisher, twitching away in some sort of half sleep. It’s an odd thing, seeing your squad so vulnerable like that. They almost looked like strangers—my brothers, my fellow Marines—the way the moonlight cast a blue light across their bodies. It made them look holy. More than anything, it made them look dead.

From "Paddy the Albino" in Monthly Fiction by Katey Schultz:

That’s when I started crossing myself. One foot on the sticks, another on dry land; the arms of God be ‘round my shoulders. Then two feet, side by each, moving in slick circles as the logs rolled beneath my boots, hungry water biting at my heels. Let it be known that I never once drowned my peavey on the open waters. That I never once lost footing, the arms of God be ‘round my shoulders. That though I crossed myself at every bend in the river, I kept two eyes on the current. That on my first drive, I saw a man clamped halfway underwater in a jam, the entire river pressing logs into his guts. He begged me to shoot him, the arms of God be ‘round my shoulders, Heaven’s company upon my lips. I rolled on by, the logs gnawing into him like teeth.

Monthly Fiction is 12 for 12 in 12, the gift that happens all year long. Please help keep my writing life on the road and consider a purchase. Buy now!

The Writing Studio: Felling the Widowmaker

2011-12-11T18:00:00.000-09:00

Dad and I worked on tree number two this weekend, a standing, dead maple that folks usually call a "widowmaker" for its likeliness to fall at any moment and kill somebody. Hollowed out almost completely from the ground to about fifteen feet up, the tree was top-heavy and canted downhill, slightly opposite the direction we needed it to fall. Using the chainsaw to notch the tree, Dad finished it off with a good ol' fashioned wedge and mallet.

Since this one was particularly unpredictable, I stood far away in the driveway and sat down with the dog, making sure he didn't get in the way either. What else to do than shoot a little video? After it came down, I hauled brush and branches and stacking the widest limbs into a pile for re-use. Two trees down, one more to go! Meantime, the AIRSTREAM Sovereign should arrive on Wednesday. Stay tuned...

This week I'm promoting Monthly Fiction as a gift idea or general purchase to help support my writing life on the road. You'll find one quote per day and by following this link you can read more. 12 stories for 12 bucks in 12 months - delivered right to your inbox!

From "Amplitude" in Monthly Fiction by Katey Schultz

Hacking through the barbed wire was a cinch. And we both knew about climbing chain-link fences. But taking hold of that first rung of the maintenance ladder at about eye level was another matter.

“Ladies first.” Ben gestured.

“Fine,” I said. “But I need a lift.” My heart dropped to my stomach and I could have punched him. How could I be so brave and so chicken-scratch at the same time?

Ben put his hands on my waist. I wanted to stop right there with all his strength wrapped around me; just keep that energy for my own and use it someday...(read more)

The Writing Studio: ...Is Now an AIRSTREAM Sovereign

2011-12-08T18:26:00.001-09:00

Sometimes you pursue one thing and just as you put it into action, a parallel path you've had your eye on all along suddenly converges with your own. Abstract, I know, but it's the only way I can describe the events of the past 24 hours. If someone told you: a) In three years you could have a little 16'x16' cabin (no bathroom, no electricity) for $6k-$10k plus countless hours of your own family's physical labor, OR b) Right now you could have a liveable 1970 Airstream Sovereign 31' International Land Yacht (with a bathroom, furnace, hot water heater, fridge, air conditioner, two beds, storage space, a sofa, and a gas stove) for a fraction of the cost. And that the same trailer could be delivered some time next week and that you could live in it this spring if you didn't get any residencies or this fall if you don't get any fellowships. And that trailers of the same make and model typically sell for 3-4 times what you could get it for...

Which would you choose?

Yes, this week Dad and I felled and hauled the first tree on the land to clear a spot for what we planned to be a 16'x16' writing studio. Yes, I understand I don't even live anywhere right now and perhaps the writing studio is a key to "settling down." But still...today, Dad and I drove 70 miles to Canton, NC and...well...we bought that AIRSTREAM and yes, that is going to be the new writing studio. Of course, my parents have talked about getting one for no less than thirty years. And of course, every time I come home Dad and I check the I Wanna classifieds for AIRSTREAM travel trailers. What can I say? The forces aligned. The deal is done. We're moving ahead!

Here's a tour of the AIRSTREAM as we saw it today--no smoky smell, no mouse poop, no stains, no peeling linoleum, no hideous wallpaper--and here's to leaping into the adventure! We can't wait to get it up the mountain, clean it, drink a little moonshine in it, and get started so we can plunk it down into the very same spot we staked out for the cabin.

The desk (above, right) folds out to double in size or collapses entirely for a broader living room space. And here's the kind couple that we bought the AIRSTREAM from. We chatted with them for a while as they prepared a handwritten bill of sale in carbon copy:

And like all good AIRSTREAMS, it has it's very own number: 4864

The Writing Studio: The First Hemlock

2011-12-07T17:53:00.001-09:00

Taking the first tree didn't quite feel like cutting an artery, like I thought it might. It was a hemlock, after all, and a hemlock in the Blue Ridge sadly also means a woolly adelgid infestation. This pest is single-handedly responsible for major devastation to hemlocks in what seems like record time. When I moved here Fall 2002, I backpacked up to Deep Gap to a "designated camping site" in the National Forest only to find that so many hemlocks had been felled by the blight there was hardly a clear place to pitch a small tent. A few years later on a day hike the same site looked worse, with downed trunks blocking the trail.

The hemlock Dad cut down a few days ago was alive and well in 2004 and in pretty good shape in 2006, with three strong, sister trunks shooting up into the sky. But by 2011, the hemlock stood dead upright--pale brown bark, brittle branches, not a trace of green in sight. The cutting went pretty smoothly, considering that the trunk was canted heavily toward the northward (downhill) slope of the land. Dad cut the first two sister trunks without incident. The third snagged, so Dad made a second cut, but it snagged again. With some jerking and twisting of major branches, though, within a few minutes the final top third of the tree came crashing down.

The air was filled with the scent of gasoline from the chainsaw, but as I approached the downed trunks and tangled branches, I was struck by the scent of life. Fresh, sharp, evergreen-laced air filled my nostrils and the tree, for a moment, seemed alive and healthy again. I said a private thanks to the tree, the patch of land, and these great mountains that let us cut and haul and build right over their skin.

With his part of the job done, Dad headed back to the house and I hauled branches and started a new brush pile. I loved the way the twigs snapped beneath my grip, reminding me of the backcountry survival techniques I studied as a teenager (which explain that the lowest branches on hemlock trees--healthy or otherwise--are always dead and dry, making perfect kindling even in a rainstorm because they are tucked beneath all the other branches and shielded from moisture).

We've had two days of rain and now snow and 50 mph gusts of wind...but later in the week looks like chainsaw-safe weather and we'll either buck up the hemlock or fell the second tree. Meantime, we're researching whether to set the writing studio on wooden or concrete piers.

Back at the Dojo

2011-12-05T18:00:00.001-09:00

The other part of coming home is training full time in Okinawan Shuri Ryu Karate and Shintoyoshinkai Jiu Jitsu. I haven't written about my passion for martial arts in quite some time, so bear with me as I do a brief recap. I blogged about the first karate class I ever took in my life here, back in 2007. For two solid years, I trained as hard as I knew how, spending 10 hours a week in the dojo at my peak (and training for hours on "off" days on my own). My teacher Hanshi's style is motivational, unforgettable, insightful, and inspiring. In 2009 I trained for and passed my White Pine Tree Test, and shortly thereafter my purple belt test. Just weeks before I hit the road in 2010 to start the three-year residency tour, I tested for Sankyu - first degree brown belt - which proved to be more of a psychological challenge than a physical one.

When I hit the road, the hardest thing to leave was my dojo. But I vowed not to be one of those students who gives up training. I joined alternative dojos in cities that I traveled to, trying different styles and reporting back to Hanshi by mailing him my training log and calling him once a month.

The brown belt has three different levels in Shuri Ryu Karate because it is considered the "seasoning" of the karateka before he or she advances and matures to black belt level. Several months after Sankyu, I flew from Michigan to Georgia, earning a promotion to Nikyu, the 2nd brown belt rank. Ten months after that, on a broken foot that I didn't know was broken at the time, I attended a conference in South Carolina. The next week I was still limping and didn't know why, but that didn't stop me from leaping into the air when Hanshi called to say I'd been promoted to Ikkyu, the final level of brown belt. Typically, promotions are accompanied by tests, but because I mailed Hanshi my training logs, conferenced with him on the phone, and traveled to improve my training (he was always teaching at the conferences I attended), Hanshi considered these my tests and watched me closely each time our paths crossed.

Then, the broken foot for most of 2011. It was shocking. Horrible. Utterly devastating to my training and my writing process. My recovery took 12 months, including one "scare" this August that had me back in a mini-cast temporarily. But throughout that year of re-couperation and re-training, I still sent Hanshi my training logs--some notes detailing doing exercises on my back while I was in cast--and stayed in touch via phone. I gained weight and lost weight, and am now more muscular than I have ever been in my life, with one of my all-time lowest weights as a curvy, athletic adult.

In the meantime, Hanshi and his wife moved to Florida and Sensei Nate, his senior student in North Carolina, took over the classes. Participation went from small to smaller, but those still dedicated are training now and tonight I got my first glimpse of them during our two-hour class. It's at once scary and invigorating being back on the mat. But the instant rapport between karateka is priceless: Where else can you toss each other around, work joint locks, throw punches, work kata, and laugh all at once? Sensei Nate and I stayed late into the evening, sparring and gabbing about old moves I was trying to remember. I have so incredibly far to go and I only have one month to do what I can, but I'll take it. Slow and steady, I'll take it...

The Writing Studio: Putting in the Stakes

2011-12-04T16:56:00.001-09:00

To put a stake in the ground. It's a simple act, yet imbued with so much meaning. Today, after several years of casual discussions, Dad and I walked down to the southeast edge of my parents' five acres and put not one, but four stakes into the ground to indicate the four corners of my future writing studio. The stakes are temporary, but as Dad hammered them into the ground and I walked from stake-to-stake with a tape measure, almost immediately we both started envisioning what would come next--the double pane windows, the south-facing views, the built-in bookshelves, the private back deck and small front porch...

The mind races much faster than reality, of course. The building we're planning will take several years as time, our physical labor, and budget for materials allow. We intend to build a 16'x16' simple cabin with a sleeping loft. No bathroom or plumbing early on, but insulation, electricity, and a wood stove. My parents' own house has one spare bedroom, so building the writing studio has the dual purpose of housing guests (c'mon, cousins!) as well as my writing life. As Dad put it, "When you're home, the place is yours." Aside from a private place to write and sleep, my parents have also decided that this will be a place I can put my things. Meaning: unpack. Meaning: not have my life in boxes or in my car. Meaning: a place to settle down for a while if I so choose. After 24 months on the road and with another year of travel ahead, the idea both thrills and frightens me. More than anything, it fills me with gratitude.

Many people have said that reading Thoreau changed their lives and that doesn't make it any less true for myself. When I read Walden at sixteen, I was ready for change. The path Thoreau set me on is still the one I walk today. To believe, despite most common and societal advice, that I can and will earn my living as a writer. To believe that I can live peacefully yet without isolation, that I can see beauty no matter where I am, that my life choices can make positive social and political impact through the activism of engaged daily living. These are maxims I base my life decisions upon. They are my foundation. Perhaps Thoreau said it more succinctly when referring to his time at Walden Pond, "I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

Today we put four stakes into the ground. We stood where the windows of my writing studio will be and gazed at this view of the Black Mountains and Pisgah National Forest. We selected three trees that need to be felled before a foundation can go in, and that seemed more than enough. But as we turned to go back up to my parent's house, Dad looked at me and said, "Well...Do you want to start now? We could cut that hemlock down."

He didn't have to wait for my answer.

Lost Crossings for the Holidays

2011-11-30T16:17:00.001-09:00

Hot off the press:

The third printing of my nonfiction chapbook

Lost Crossings: A Contemplative Look at

Western North Carolina's Historic Swinging Footbridges

Lost Crossings was reviewed in Our State, Now & Then Magazine, the Johnson City Press

following its 2009 debut. It has been circulated throughout the WNC-regional public libraries and will soon be featured on UNC-TV/PBS in a short documentary.

Preview the book's site here, and buy now using PayPal.

Spread the word, spread the love, buy local, buy now!

Farewell to VCCA

2011-11-29T17:00:00.000-09:00

Today involves the easiest, shortest drive of my 23-months (and counting) residency tour: the drive HOME. Farewell, VCCA! I wish every artist I know could come here and experience the magic.

Stay tuned for holiday updates, Alaska preparation

(January = Sitka Island, February = Anchorage), and more!

Day 35 VCCA: Relics of a Residency

2011-11-28T17:00:00.000-09:00

Leaving is never easy, but I'm getting better at it. Goodbyes can still be hard. I often look inwards for answers. Did I reach my goals? Make good use of my time?

Here's the quantifiable answer:

Read 7 books
Finished an in-progress draft of 1 short story
Wrote 2 new short stories
Started research for a 3rd new story (featuring a devout Muslim Iraqi male in Baghdad)
Revised and submitted 17 flash fictions (non-war stories) to a chapbook contest
Applied for 4 fellowships, 1 residency, and 1 teaching position
Submitted to 11 literary magazines or anthologies

But of course, there's the unquantifiable. Did I learn something new about my process? Yes. Did I forge meaningful connections with other artists? Yes and yes (and on and on). Have I answered any of the "big questions" I had regarding craft or career? Yes. Do I want to come back? Yes.

When I pack of THE CLAW and hit the road, my load won't be any lighter than when I arrived. But my spirit will be filled! My manuscript (on my computer) will be heftier! And I'll have a few paper-thin relics from my time at VCCA safely tucked into my journal.

[Relics of a residency: a map of Morocco with instructions to visit Rahim and Aziz, a paper cut-out invitation to Fellow Katherine Fahey's puppet show cranky performance, a dollar bill stamped "When Will Enough Be Enough?" from artist Delanie Jenkins, and a four-line poem written for me from Conrad Hilberry.]

Day 34 VCCA: Sweet Briar Slave Cemetery

2011-11-27T17:00:00.000-09:00

Last week I wrote about the Crawford Cemetery, high on a hill above Sweet Briar College. A few days following, I ran into an archeology professor while biking around campus and he told me how to find my way to the slave cemetery. "Cross the damn at the bottom of Boathouse Road," he told me. "Then stay on the path that goes uphill. You'll see it in about 100 yards. Can't miss it." A few other Fellows that were here last month told me they, too, had found the cemetery without trouble--so off I went, for my final bike ride as I near the end of my residency here at VCCA.

But try as I might, I couldn't seem to find it. I thought there might be a good chance the graves--probably without headstones--were covered by the thick leaf fall here in the Shenandoah woods. But there might also be a good chance I simply missed it, as I was delightfully distracted by traipsing wild turkeys, squirrels fussing over their middens, and the unusually balmy air. What I did find was this--clearly evidence of human activity (look at the stacked rocks) and also in approximately the right spot according the professor's directions--but I can't say I even knew what it was. Little did I know I'd find out more at supper time and end up on a night visit to the real spot, across a different damn, where the cemetery sits in a clearing on a hill.

A little dismayed, I rode back, stopping to see the President's House (formerly the slave plantation owner's main home). Behind it sits a small 19th Century rustic cabin that housed slaves. At one point in time these grounds were scattered with 16 such cabins. Looking across the campus and beyond, one can only begin to imagine the complicated history these hills hold.

Later that evening, my fellow Fellows set the record straight, telling me where I'd gone wrong on the walk and exactly how I could find the cemetery on my next visit. But why wait? After a few rounds of ping pong, we loaded up in THE CLAW and headed over to campus, headlamps a-glow. A simple, open clearing revealed nearly sixty stone markers, according to the interpretive sign, but to a novice's eye these stones were hardly recognizable as grave markers. It was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, so none were marked, but a dedication ceremony in 2003 scouted out around numerous depressions and headstones, indicating the burial grounds. A nighttime photo hardly captures the stories these stones must hold, but here it is nonetheless.

Day 33 VCCA: The Friends We Make

2011-11-26T10:20:00.001-09:00

For the most part, I've stayed on an early morning schedule, rising at 6:45 am and sharing breakfast with a few other early birds. Aside from getting a head start on the day, this ritual has also come with the unplanned benefit of mentorship from novelist Roger King. Without fail, no matter what my state of mind was at breakfast, Roger seemed able to answer my questions and offer kernels of advice as easily as one pours a glass of water in the morning. When you're used to living and writing alone, outside advice is a high commodity.

"I'm afraid I'll miss my moment," I confided to him one morning over oatmeal. We'd been discussing published authors whose work also features the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hadn't realized this was a fear of mine until I plunked down in the seat next to him and heard myself say it.

"There will be more than one moment," Roger told me. He has a soft, deep voice with a British accent, so you can imagine the nice delivery of this line as the sun rose outside the dining room window and our coffee slowly started to kick in. His advice rang true. What had I been worrying about? Of course there will be more than one moment. Life is filled with an abundance of moments! There's no need to worry about grasping for a single one of them and it's not as though there are only a certain number of moments for authors who write about war, either.

A different morning, I confessed I was afraid I was getting too picky. "Everything I read lets me down," I said. "It's like I'm wearing X-Ray glasses and can see right through the story to the bones of the craft. It's annoying because it makes everything seem contrived...even by writers whose work I normally enjoy."

Roger thought for a moment, then offered this: "What you're reading seems that way right now because you're reading everything as though you were the one writing it." And of course, he was right. I'd been reacting to the creative decisions these authors made based on what I would have done, which is really the fastest way to ruin any book for yourself. Roger's advice helped me remember that when I'm in highly generative modes with my own work, reading the work of others--while important to my process--often involves a tricky psychology.

And perhaps most revealing of all was Roger's feedback for me after my reading at the Fellows Residence last Wednesday night. One of the stories I read was titled "Kabul Stadium" (which you can read along with 11 other stories by signing up for Monthly Fiction through my website, here). I got a lot of positive feedback about the story, including some from Roger. But he also told me, "I don't know if it's of any use to you," (remember the accent) "but, you know the goal posts you had in your story?" I nodded, yes. "Well, at least in England we call the horizontal part the crossbar, so you could use that terminology if you wanted."

Roger had picked up on a scene at the conclusion of my story where two characters shimmy up to the top of a goal post (and sit on the crossbar). Roger's suggestion helped me change repetitions of the word "goal post" in the scene. A small but priceless thing and exactly the kind of feedback a true writing friend doesn't hesitate to give. Anyone else who slaves away the hours each day at the desk knows how hard it is to see the nuances in his/her own work...and knows that we share our work with others as much to feel bolstered by the stories as to also improve them. For your advice, for your kindness, for your friendship--Roger--today's post is dedicated to you.

And to the other friends, so delightful and too numerous to mention here, a photo collage:

Day 30 VCCA: International Table Tennis and Saying Thanks

2011-11-23T18:00:00.000-09:00

Of course, as dedicated and monastic as daytime life at VCCA appears (it's possible to go an entire day without speaking to anyone, if you happen to eat meals very early or very late and keep to yourself in your studio), there's also loads of fun to be had. We can't talk about and make art ALL the time...

So lately, spontaneous rounds of international table tennis have erupted after dinner. Andrew and myself (America), Rahim (Morocco), Barbara (Germany), and Roger (Great Britain) go at it with varying levels of talent and focus, but always with a healthy dose of competition. Between the five us us, we keep score in French--the common language--and curse in everything from Arabic to Pig Latin.

Andrew, a.k.a "Gunner Palmer," has such "mad skillz" that even rookie players like myself can tell he's holding back for the sake of the the game. Every once in a while, however, he unleashes the inner beast, as evidenced by this 19-second video clip.

Thanksgiving will bring cocktail hour with classical music performed by Fellow Andrea Clearfield on VCCA's $50,000 grand piano, followed by an exorbitantly rich meal, followed by fireside readings/offerings, and what I hope will then lead to an evening of debauchery. Since this will be my second Thanksgiving away from home since the start of the tour, I can feel my desire to make memories that last swelling as the holiday approaches. Where does that need come from? A human tendency reinforced by tradition? A growing loneliness? A little eye for something mischievous? Perhaps all of the above.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow friends, readers, and writers out there in cyberspace. If you're with your families, be grateful. If you're making art, be grateful still. And if you have a moment, consider offering a blessing of safekeeping for all those who don't have enough, who are serving overseas, or whose livelihood is in danger.

Day 29 VCCA: Source Material for War (2)

2011-11-22T17:08:00.001-09:00

Aside from the images posted yesterday, several quotes have echoed in my mind's ear off and on these past two years. They come from soldiers and civilians from all walks of life, but they have something in common. In their own way, each quote has a cadence or rhythmic symmetry that is interesting to me. Likewise, each presents a stunning pairing of objects, images, or sentiments. Short and to the point, it is voices like these that have compelled me to immerse in war as much as one can from a protective bubble of a privileged, safe lifestyle...and to try and write about it with literary and imaginative merit.

Here's a selection:

"America's not at war. America's at the mall."

--U.S. soldier speaking to VBS embedded reporter Ben Anderson

"You may be there all night. You may be there the rest of your life."

--Benjamin Busch, Harper's Magazine

"Smoke. Fire. Blood. Nothing."

--Benjamin Busch, Michigan Author Homecoming online broadcast

"I wanted a book. I wanted a book and my son was killed."

--Afghan woman in Sima Simar's women's school, Daughters of Afghanistan DVD

"We should be driving up-armored vehicles instead of a Goddamn tin can with the windows down."

--U.S. soldier, Off to War DVD

"It's a nice change to have him home and have him goin' to a prom instead of goin' to a war zone."

--Specialist Hertlein's mother upon her son's return, Off to War DVD

"Since my brother died, I cannot taste my tea. Since my brother died, I cannot taste anything."

--Afghan man speaking to documentary filmmaker, DVD unknown (I forgot)

Day 28 VCCA: Source Material for War

2011-11-21T16:57:00.001-09:00

I've been looking over what visual artists call "source material" for my war stories. That is: the sights, sounds, and facts that feed my obsession with the global war on terror and what it leaves behind. Many VCCA Fellows give a presentation or reading near the end of their stay and I'll be offering one this Wednesday night. Typical me--I've gotten myself all worked up about the presentation for no good reason. I could read something tried and tested, such as "Kabul Stadium," which was recently accepted for publication in Talking River Review. But just as soon as I settle on that, something starts to itch in the back of my brain. Why play it safe? Shouldn't I make myself more vulnerable? Shouldn't I share something new, a sort of badge of my efforts over the past month?

In my indecision, I went back to my source material. After all the hours of war dramas and documentaries I've watched... After all the war-themed nonfiction and fiction books I've read... After all the maps I've looked at and facts I've double-checked... It is actually just a handful of images and quotes that continually strike me the most when I close my eyes, forget about the pressure to publish a book, and let my mind go back to the source.

For tonight's post, I'll offer a brief glimpse at a few such images, all readily available through Google Images searches. War is impossible to fully capture, and different things will strike a chord (of dissonance, of empathy, of horror, of victory, of loss... ) in different people. For this writer, over the last two years, here's a sample of what's stayed with me.

Day 27 VCCA: Yalla Yalla and Beruit 39

2011-11-20T16:12:00.001-09:00

"Yalla, yalla!" These two words in Arabic have traveled with me from residency to residency and state to state, for twenty-three months. In English, this translates to "Let's go!" and it's written on a long piece of paper tacked to my wall next to many other long pieces of paper that contain all my notes on Afghanistan and Iraq. Until recently, those words in my notes didn't mean anything to anyone but me and the characters in my stories.

But yesterday afternoon, Rahim and Aziz (the two writers from Morocco) came to my studio to look at my notes. They lit up when they saw those two words--yalla, yalla--in their own language, so many miles from home, in this little writer's studio in a small town in Virginia. I told them I also knew inshallah (God willing) and shukran (thank you), but that was all. They taught me "hello" (which I've already forgotten) and goodbye (salaam, or peace...much like the greeting, asalaam alaikum). Between our afternoon visit, and their public reading and banquet a few nights ago (which involved translations from Arabic into French into English and back), life at VCCA these past few days has felt delightfully international. I'm soaking up every minute of it.

Rahim's latest book of poetry is titled "Friendly Fire," and refers to the personal wars we wage on ourselves. Although both he and Aziz speak French and English, their primary language is Arabic (and even some Berber). Between my extraordinarily rudimentary French, Aziz's English, and Rahim's growing English, we're able to carry on a conversation well enough. It was interesting talking about "friendly fire" across cultures, and seeing how it shows up in Rahim's contemporary poetry and my thematic fiction.

I also showed Rahim and Aziz my submissions logbook and talked about sending work to literary magazines and they described the same process in their own country. I gave them copies of my little zine of war flash fictions and they signed their Beirut 39 anthology to me. "Katey, it's a great moments with you," Rahim wrote. "Good feeling." And Aziz signed "Kind and friendly Katey, happy to know you and see you in U.S.A." Rahim and Aziz are true gentlemen; delightful, talented, and good-spirited pals. I'm grateful for the little glimpses of this vast globe that their presence affords.

Day 24 VCCA: Crawford Cemetery at Sweet Briar College

2011-11-17T13:03:00.000-09:00

One thing I always take great pleasure in wherever I go is exploring my surroundings. This year of the tour, I’ve been able to do lots of that on my bike. I usually start with the immediate roads and paths around wherever my new home is. Then, I try and find a loop. Since I don’t always use maps, this often involves getting voluntarily lost. That, of course, is when the fun begins.

In the Wallowas, I got “lost” enough to find a five-mile loop that turned into my favorite long walk. Once the snow melted, I got lost enough to find a 19-miler for my bike, which I repeated a few more times before I left the valley. In Michigan, getting lost involved getting my bike stuck in sand, because backroads in northern Michigan don’t turn to stone, they turn to sand. Now that was an adventure…almost as much as startling up wild boars while “getting lost” on Madrono Ranch in Texas.

Here in Virginia, my explorations have been tame in terms of terrain, but to my delight, surprises have awaited me on almost every ride. One day last week, I was trying to get lost on the gravel roads behind Sweet Briar College when I stumbled upon a ridge top cemetery. As soon as I found it, I knew where I was: the graveyard for the Crawford family that started Sweet Briar. As I huffed up the steep gravel turnaround, the peak of afternoon light angled through oaks and maples along the ridge. When I touched the wrought-iron gate, I felt an electric cold current zip through my hand. Nothing ghostly, but certainly something magical filled this space and I made sure to walk reverently as I explored.

Later, I learned that the Sweet Briar campus was a slave plantation:

“The Sweet Briar Plantation was owned by Elijah Fletcher and his family between the 1840s and 1900… He and his wife, Maria Crawford, [named] it ‘Sweet Briar’ after Maria's favorite rose. The success of Fletcher's farm relied on the labor of enslaved individuals, both African American and Native American (from the nearby Monacan Confederacy). Although initially opposed to the ‘peculiar institution,’ Elijah owned over 110 slaves upon his death in 1858. In 1858, his daughter Indiana inherited Sweet Briar [and in 1900], she died and gave the plantation and a generous cash donation to found a college for women in honor of her own daughter who died at the age of 16 in 1884.”

I also learned that there is an African-American slave cemetery somewhere on Sweet Briar’s campus. Now I know where my next bike ride will have to be…

Day 23 VCCA: Help from My Readers

2011-11-16T16:51:00.001-09:00

Alright you writers out there...what's your secret?

How, oh how, do you get your short stories past 12 pages? Past 15?

I've been blogging about process, I've been trudging along (quite happily, actually), and yet...

My characters are stronger and their traits more believable, but I can't seem to break the 3,000 to 5,000 word range.

Don't be shy! Share your thoughts, from prompts to authors you love that write long to hair-brained ideas. Even if it borders on witchcraft or suspicion... I'm all ears!

Day 22 VCCA: Going on Record

2011-11-15T17:29:00.001-09:00

Where else can a firey-eyed cabaret singer and composer eat Gummi Bears, drink wine, and talk books with a 90-year-old gem-of-a-poet?

Where else can that same poet ride an exercise bike in the basement while the "youngin's" play table tennis? Then later, take the paddle himself and wow us all with his hot-to-trot serve?

Where else can a man play what he wants to play, on whatever instrument he's in the mood for, while wearing a horse mask?

Where else can I read, write, make hot cocoa, ride my bike, and write some more all in one day without having to get in the car, use the phone, or talk about anything other than art all day long?

I'm going on record, folks. After 23 months on the road, of all the non-teaching residencies I've had, VCCA is now tied with Jentel at the top of my list. It's places like this that make me want to win the lottery, just so I can pay back every day they've funded me for and then some. Thank you.

Day 21 VCCA: Checking In

2011-11-14T16:26:00.001-09:00

It’s been a fulfillingthree weeks. I’ve applied for three fellowships, submitted to four literarymagazines, and maintained my editing duties all the while. The fellowshipapplications, of course, took the most out of me emotionally. I’m making asincere effort to approach this process with a little less anxiety than lastyear. To that end, I’m only applying to things I really want and that I feel very qualified for. The market issaturated and funding is down, so positions are more competitive with loweravailability. Everybody knows that. I’m an optimist but I’m also seasoning thatwith a bit of reality—therefore I see no reason to fling myself at every opportunity just because it might pan out. I’m saving my energy and focus for thepositions I think will put me in the top 10% of the applicant pool.

But back to my three weekshere at VCCA: I came here to write, specifically, with the goal to complete twonew short stories. I started one at Madrono Ranch that I finished up andrevised here at VCCA. It’s called “The Quiet Kind.” I’ve since started thefirst draft of another one, tentatively titled “Getting Perspective.” It needsanother half day before I’ll call the first draft “done”—and even still, itwill need work after that. But for now it’s where it needs to be. With only twoweeks left of my fellowship, today seemed to be a turning point. If I wantedgoing to meet my goal, I’d need to start a story. Pronto. I’ve been stewing fordays, trying to court the muse head on and sideways and by surprise. Finally,this afternoon, after a few hours of a good work out and a few hours of goodreading, then a brief session of free-writing—I stumbled into a new shortstory. Within three hours, I had 2,000 words. (That’s about two days worth ofwriting done in one afternoon—extraordinarily unusual for me.) Tonight, after afew Fellows present a poetry reading, I’ll be back at it. For now, here’s the firstparagraph of the very beginnings of this first draft. I can’t wait to get backat it!

"Oneminute Bradley’s at the dinner table shoveling homemade cherry pie into hismouth and the next he’s tearing down the driveway in his Ford Ranger, theclean, Arkansas air slapping him across the face with that unmistakable feelingof home. It’s been ten months and twenty-three days, but who’s counting? NotBradley. Not anymore. Not since he kicked off his combat boots, hugged his mom,and split a twelve pack with his old man and not since now—miles clicking alongthe county road as the Ranger pushes seventy—Bradley, trying to make it to hisfriend Jared’s house in under ten like before..."

Day 20 VCCA: It's Not Easy Being Green

2011-11-13T09:13:00.001-09:00

It's darn near impossible to capture the fleeting yet meaningful connections forged at a place like VCCA, but picture this: we're all situated around the fireplace after dinner, twenty-odd artists from across the country in varying stages of their careers. We're there to hear a poetry reading, or a novel excerpt, or a new composition as the case may be. A few nights ago it was a poet and a ukelele player. Last night it was a composer who loves pop tunes and cabaret, paired with our jazz trombonist/composer/good-at-everything kind of guy. They hadn't rehearsed, but who needs to? When one of the musicians played trombone on a Norah Jones album and has a children's show on PBS, while the other can sing with a voice as smooth as water for three hours straight, who needs to rehearse?

Imagine now that the evening has grown long in that slow, wine-drinking kind of way. The buzz is on, the lights are low, and good vibes fill the air. We've heard everything from covers of Bowie and Gershwin to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Then someone mentions the Muppets...and the visual artist working on a puppet show music video brings out her horse mask...and then the cabaret singer remembers that he knows "It's Not Easy Being Green"...and of course the trombone player is game for anything, and so it goes.

Here's a poorly lit, unedited, battery-running-out snippet from that moment. Listen for the apex of that lonliness in Kermit's song, the way the trombone (with mute) wails across the room, then lifts the air. It can't capture how much I admire the artists here. It can't even demonstrate how inspiring life at VCCA feels. But it's something. It's surely something...

"I Was With You" - Flash Fiction

2011-11-10T18:00:00.000-09:00

Readers, in a rare use of my blog as a platform for fiction, and in an attempt to spread the word about this competition (which requires a post for entry), I'm sharing this odd little number, "I Was with You." It's very different from my other flash fiction, and this required 200 words or less for the theme. Here goes...

I Was with You

You should know that I was with you during that in-between time when your body still bled but your spirit had flown. I could tell you were deciding and that the part of you that always liked to be contrary would never withstand all the tubes and life support and bedside weeping, so you let go. Left me here.

Car accidents seem so cliché and that, more than anything, bothers me most. You were everything but, which is why I hate telling people that’s how you died. Hit by a car. One minute folks are making small talk at a dinner party, sipping Diet Cokes and eating Triscuits, the next they’re staring out the window, embarrassed or shocked or both. What can they say? This many years later, I still don’t know how to respond either.

Is it possible to feel closer to you now than when you were still alive? I carry you beneath my skin, imagine you’re sensing the world through my pores, feeding off my pulse, resting with me when I sleep. It’s not that far of a stretch if you think about it. You started, after all, inside of me.

This is an entry for the Mookychick blogging competition, FEMINIST FLASH FICTION 2011. Enter now.

Day 16 VCCA: Meeting the Moroccans

2011-11-09T18:00:00.000-09:00

It's another dinner at VCCA, with four round tables filled with artist chatter, people getting up and down for seconds or dessert, and miraculously this evening--wine on every table. I'm sitting with Barbara and David, the two artists who permanently reside here as staff on call (among many other things). Joining us are Rahim and Aziz, just in from Morocco. Rahim is a poet and speaks very little English, but with help from Aziz--a fiction writer--we all seem to have enough to say to make the dinner conversation move along.

We get past the formalities of who lives where and how long everyone is staying as a Fellow and then Aziz asks me point blank, "How many books do you have?"

I bite into my salad and think this question over for a moment. It's great being at a place prestigious enough that the working assumption is not only that one has a book, but books. It can be hard answering that question, though.

"None," I say. "I mean, I've edited two anthologies and I have another anthology coming out next year. But really I just have a little self-published chapbook that did alright and is going to be on TV this summer and..." I cut myself off. Aziz is only getting half of what I say, if that.

"No books?" he asks, looking confused. He says it with an accent, like a Halloween boo plus a sharp ks.

"No, no books. Just a chapbook."

"A chapbook?" Rahim chimes in. Now I've got both of them confused.

"I don't understand," Aziz says. "How many books?"

"One book," I finally decide. "Just one."

The dining room grows louder and the Moroccans consult each other in Arabic, shaking their heads. Aziz asks again: "How many books?"

"Just one," I say.

They lean in, as though they can't hear. Rahim cocks his head. Aziz waits expectantly for me to answer his question. Again. It's endearing, really...they have no idea how truly awkward this repetition is for a little pea like me. It feels almost like a lie, but I can't think of how to say chapbook in Arabic, Portugese, or French so I stick with my blubbering American English. I smile a little this time, saying it louder: "Just one. I have just one book."

"I have five books," says Aziz. The oo's in the word sound even longer now.

"I have three books," adds Rahim.

"Wow," I say. I eat more salad.

Later, I ask them how you might say the name Katey in Arabic. "Kee - ahh - dee," they both say. "Kee - ahh - dee."

"Kee - ahh - dee?" I try the sweet syllables.

They smile, growing excited. "Yes! Bon!" They nod their heads.

"What does it mean?" I ask.

Aziz clears his throat. "Good feeling. It means good feeling. Kee - ahh - dee. Yes."

"Good feeling? Hey! That's great," I say. "Kee - ahh - dee. Are you sure? Kee - ahh - dee." I want to be certain and when I look to them for confirmation I see they're already gesturing approval.

"Kee - ahh - dee, Kee - ahh - dee," they say in unison, tapping their hearts. "Good feeling!" And for a brief moment I relish the image: two soft-eyed, handsome Moroccans tapping their chests and saying my name. Good feeling. That definitely works well enough for this just-one-book author!

Day 15 VCCA: Visiting Sweet Briar College

2011-11-08T18:00:00.000-09:00

I gave a guest lecture at Sweet Briar College last week to two classrooms of freshman English students. Or maybe I should say freshwomen, since it is, after all, an all-girls school. In either case, strolling the lovely grounds of the Sweet Briar campus (which is just one mile across the highway from VCCA) sure took me back to my days as an undergraduate at Whitman College.

What is it about tall buildings with presumptuous yet inviting entrances? About rolling, fertilized, green hills and excellently placed deciduous trees? Rows of bicycles and campus trash and recycling bins, bulletin boards busting with announcements and flyers? It all conjures opportunity, to my nostalgic eye, and meeting the inquisitive students only helped reinforce my view.

I was there to teach about flash fiction, a genre I've published in and lectured about and published authors of many times before and one that--despite my recent addiction to longer works of fiction--still holds my heart. What can I say? It's just so darn fun to write!

As an undergrad, I had my fair share of being loud and rowdy, but I also sought out places on campus for their quiet. The top floor of Penrose Library, when its renovations finally finished my senior year, became such a place. If I were at Sweet Briar now, maybe it would be this lakeside view. I might actually get something done while enjoying the fall colors, highlighter in hand. Might even stare at lovely reflections on water and think to myself, Oh, the places you'll go...

Day 14 VCCA: Conrad Hilberry and Other Inspirations

2011-11-07T14:08:00.000-09:00

And so they leave: Goodbye Mark. Goodbye Sharon. Goodbye Ronit, Martha, Belle. Goodbye dear poet Marjorie. But hello! Hello Conrad Hilberry, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Masha Hamilton, and (OMG!) Alice McDermott!

This is the ebb and flow of VCCA, where most folks stay for two weeks and the rest stay for one to two months. I fall somewhere in between, having been granted a 5-week fellowship. Another handful leave this week, a small boatload arrives tomorrow, in a few days my "VCCA bff's" Ester and Ingrid depart. It's almost enough to drive one to distraction...except that life here is not unlike a nunnery, so delightfully devoid of distraction. The only good thing about a fellow Fellow's departure is that it is often preceded by a public reading or open studio, which in addition to fine company and crafted work, also involve wine and chocolate.

But still...to steer my mind from the departures, I'd like to invite you to join me in meeting my delightful new studio neighbor, Mr. Conrad Hilberry. We tend to overlap for tea in the Studio Barn kitchen in the afternoons and it's all I can do to keep from pinching his cheeks every time I see him. Saturday night I got to watch him toast a marshmallow. Sunday he accidentally rode my bicycle all the way to church and back, mistaking it for one of the public bikes. Today I caught him sneaking some chips from an unclaimed bag of groceries (so dear!). What's not to love about a man who smiles every time you see him, who doesn't let age change his ambition, and whose writer's desk is as humble and honorable as they come:

Conrad Hilberry. God help me. What a guy. And if that desk isn't striking enough, how about this smile? Mom, Dad: I think I've found a man I'm finally willing to bring home. Hah.

But an introduction to Conrad wouldn't be complete without a poem. Here's one I got to hear him read in person the other night when he and two other Fellows delivered a fine poetry reading fireside in the Fellows Residence.

CONRAD HILBERRY: Cherry Pie

We’re all acquainted with the airy

crowd—a stalk of celery dipped

in cottage cheese, a thimble

of soy milk, a few green grapes.

I invite them over here: between

two butter crusts, my sour

flesh so deeply sugared it

astounds the mouth.

To coax it all to bed, a downy

pillow of whipped cream.

Try me, you organics.

Light the oven.

Let me show you how

the juice can leap, when nature

shares the sheets with art.

Day 13 VCCA: Payoff in Process (Conclusion)

2011-11-06T18:00:00.000-09:00

{Part 1 and Part 2 of this essay were published last week.}

For the first time since I began writing fiction (in 2008), I’m allowing sentences like this one: “It made him want another child…” (from my latest draft of a new story). Coming from a background in memoir writing where I wrote primarily in present tense lyrical, short form, I had all but forbade myself to use TO BE verbs in my writing. Taking advice from my thesis advisor in grad school, I activated my verbs and my writing came to life.

What I hadn’t bothered to realize more than three years later was just how limiting my adopted rules about memoir were to my fiction. Just because I loathed reflection in memoir (In my case, reflection just didn’t fit my content. Perhaps in twenty years it will.), didn’t mean that I couldn’t reflect and give back-story to my fictional characters. Just because I slashed and burned TO BE verbs as an editor didn’t mean I couldn’t allow them, occasionally, in my own stories.

Slowly but surely, my gears started turning as I wrote my way into a new story called “The Quiet Kind.” I made myself stop after just 300 words and go outside or do yoga indoors if it was too hot. I read more. I paced the room. I would not, no matter how good I thought the next sentence might be, rush into my first compelling idea. For three weeks straight at Madrono Ranch, completely alone, this process seemed painstakingly slow…yet rewarding in a very new, refreshing way. My words on the page were dizzying. I had no sense for how well written or precisely imagined they were and I found that encouraging. For the first time in a while, writing a new story started to feel a little like walking on Mars, and that’s a good thing.

I knew for certain I had the “characterization bug” when I wrote my main character’s name – NATHAN – down in bold, black letters on a large sheet of paper. Then I started writing down things about him. Not complete sentences. Not a life story by any means. But little phrases or concepts that seemed to capture just the kind of man he might be. As I continued writing “The Quiet Kind,” I referred to this often during my breaks between 300-word bursts of writing. When it was all said and done, I had a new 20-page short story in my hands—the longest piece of fiction I’ve ever written and perhaps the most succinct representation of these past 23 months on the road.

I wouldn’t be out here doing what I’m doing if it wasn’t making me a better writer. Thanks to authors like Lorraine Adams and Ron Rash, and the echoing words of my MFA professors, I’m still completely in love with what I do and…even better…the more I do it, the deeper I see I can go.

Day 10 VCCA: Payoff in Process (Cont'd)

2011-11-03T19:00:00.000-08:00

News Flash: THE CLAW and I were featured on "View from the Keyboard" this week!

I began by studyingLorraine Adams’ latest collection of interconnected short stories, The Room and Chair. To studycharacterization I found I had to study transitions. How did a writer get inand out of dense narrative passages? What circumstances had to surround a tell-allsentence in order for it to feel convincing? I compiled a list of sentencestarters that I believed might help me work my characterization muscles. Hereare a few examples that I wrote down in Texas, and now they’re on my studiowall here at VCCA:

“If she could just…[intoflashback]”

“But maybe it had alwaysbeen that way…It upset him…”

“Anyone would rather[activity]…but…”

“She tried to imagine…”

Once at VCCA, I started anew list of similar sentence starters lifted from my study of Ron Rash’sexcellent novel, The World Made Straight:

“What held Travis’attention was…”

“When he was a child…”

“He looked at herface…[reaction]”

These quotes may seeminconsequential on their own, but to me they represent possibility. These areall doors I can walk through with my stories, each opener like a prompt itself.I changed what I needed to for my own characters and their circumstances, sowhat I ended up using in my work hardly resembles the source, but looking backover my own drafts I can see the traces of how I have been teaching myself toget from, point A to point B. It feels good.

(Part 1 of this essay can be read here. Part 3 will be published on Sunday…)

Day 9 VCCA: Payoff in Process

2011-11-02T19:00:00.000-08:00

To be fair, it started in August. I received feedback from two literary agents that even though the writing in my war manuscript was strong and "you're obviously a talented writer," both agents didn't feel they could connect the characters as much as they were hoping. My first reaction was to chalk this up to form: flash fiction is, after all, the story of the moment (and perhaps less so the story of the character). It's rhythmic, memorable, poignant, genuine...but is it character-driven? Not always.

But by the time I got to Texas in September, this notion of characterization grew even stronger in the back of my mind. The agents had a point. I had to ask myself: Out of all the short stories I have ever written, do I have any characters I can really say I know well? Not especially. But there was a little hope...I had Lillis from "Amplitude" and the narrator from "That Sunday Morning Feeling." I had Dobson from "The Ghost of Sanchez" and even Sanchez, too (ghost as he was). When I'd thought long and hard about all this, realizing I could only count the number of characters I really felt I knew (or could at least imagine getting to know better) on one hand, I had to confess: I love language more than I love story.

It was a scary moment, but one that I believe this past 23 months on the road made possible in the best way. It's lovely, isn't it, when we finally see something illuminated in the room that's been there all along? Even though I felt scared, I also felt lucky.

I pushed through a flurry of flash fiction in Houston (one story per day), all the while fantasizing about the time I'd have as a Resident Artist at Madrono Ranch. There, alone in Texas Hill Country, I'd have the time, peace, and quiet, to start working this new muscle called characterization...

(Continued tomorrow...)

Day 8 VCCA: Getting Out

2011-11-01T16:15:00.000-08:00

Ingrid Floss is a VCCA Fellow on exchange from Munich, Germany. She's an abstract painter who uses acrylic and oil on canvas in bold, layered swatches of color. Walking into her studio feels like stepping into magnified spring in full bloom. Likewise, her personality is joyful, curious, contributing. Barbara Krohn is also on exchange from Germany, and she's best known for her crime novels and translations of poetry from Italian into German. She's tough, pleasant, funny, and smart. Together, these two brighten my days here at VCCA, the sounds of their fluent-but-accented English like a sweet rhythm all its on. Today we laughed as they tried to say a new Fellow's name: Karl. Kahl, they said, then looked at each other and mocked the American "r": Kah-rrrr-llll. More laughter.

And so sometimes you just have to go. Get off the mountain. Mess up the valley a little. Buy some dark chocolate, fergodsakes. I had a productive morning and by the afternoon I was ready to hit the road for a few hours of errands. It felt like sneaking out and my two new friends met me in the lobby at 2pm. By the time THE CLAW navigated down the steep driveway and hit US 29, we were all smiles.

See the three of us crammed into a Goodwill changing stall, trying on dresses, the absurdity of polyester or the occasional appearance of a sensible dress. I told Ingrid she would be a "knock out" if she wore that tiny, blue, strapless dress to this Saturday's party. She laughed at the term, knock out, said it out loud. She tried on another dress, another, another. Meanwhile Barbara found sweaters, one with a slanted collar made of silk and cashmere. Like any Goodwill store, it was a score--just three dollars for the good find.

Afterwards, we went to Food Lion. Like I said--being in an artist colony can make the simplest errands seem like the greatest adventure. We found important things: cocoa powder, discounted Halloween candy, and of course...dark chocolate.

Day 7 VCCA: Slow and Steady

2011-10-31T16:00:00.000-08:00

Some mornings, it feelslike Mount San Angelo (the knoll VCCA sits on top of) is all tucked in, artistsstill asleep in the Fellows Residence and the starlings not even rustling yet.As in Texas, I’m finding morning is a powerful time to write. SinceI’m composing a new story, this also means I spend several hours a day reading.I don’t know the exact ratio, but I do know every time I’m in the first tenpages of a new piece I also read hungrily.

Last week’s fiction? RonRash’s The World Made Straight.

Last week’s nonfiction?Kim Barker’s Taliban Shuffle.

This week’s fiction?Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River.

This week’s nonfiction? Helen Benedict’s The Lonely Soldier.

It's slow and steady here as I adjust my fiction-writing process (more about that soon), but it feels worthwhile. I'm adding full-length short stories to the war stories manuscript even though it's already out at a few presses. If it gets rejected, I'll feel like I have a head start on making some of the changes I want to make in the manuscript. If it gets accepted, I'll have things I can add in place of a few stories I'd like to take out.

Meantime, I had my first-ever interview as an editor go live on the web recently, and I have to say it feels really good. Oregon writer Jim Harrington interviewed me for his Six Questions series, which can be read here...and please, if you write flash fiction, consider submitting your work!

Day 6 VCCA: A Little Pea

2011-10-30T15:49:00.000-08:00

Across the courtyard from me there's a writer with a Pushcart Prize. Two walls over? A national bestselling memoirist with a contract for book two with Scribner. At dinner? Poets with more books than I have fingers on my right hand, an author with books being made into movies, and an accomplished professor poet from NC State. Next week, Conrad Hilberry and Masha Hamilton (!!!) arrive. I am a little pea in a garden of talent. It's not overwhelming so much as humbling. It's not daunting so much as realistic. It's not competitive so much as an invitation to rise to the challenge.

My studio wall is signed by Denise Duhamel and Lia Purpura, to name a few. Someone has also signed as Hemingway, to give perspective. Twenty-two months on the road has taught me so much, not the least of which is how to stay the course when surrounded by what, to my little pea eyes, are unfathomable fame and accomplishment. I can be my own coach now. I have the confidence to trust my process in new terrain, to question my tricks at the first hint of boredom, and to understand that the only difference between me and a writer who isn't published is some combination of good luck and discipline.

Late Friday night, I walked into the living room at the Fellows Residence in as Laurie Foos and Mary Kay Zuvraleff (best writer's smile ever) debriefed their fevered one-week residency of fingers-to-the-keyboard, pure, hard, work. I wasn't a fly on the wall. I listened, but I also had something to contribute and whatever it was I said, they cared enough to listen. In a place where a takes a bit of something to get accepted, it's nice that at the end of the day those somethings don't actually matter. We're all just doing our thing, one word at a time. The only difference is, here we don't have to do it alone.

There are as many ways to measure a writer as there are writers themselves. Do I look at dedication? Accolades? Fervor? Dollars earned? All I can hope for in the long run is to publish writing I feel proud of, to be respected by a respectable audience, and to make a living as a writer at large.

[A little pea in a pea green coat.]

Day 3 VCCA: Birds as Leaves as Progress

2011-10-27T18:30:00.000-08:00

The starlings are migrating south by the thousands and each sunrise and sunset, hundreds of them alight on the trees and silos here at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Walking from the Studio Barn to dinner last night, ceramic artist David Garratt and I marveled for a long while at the clamor and clatter coming from the sky. Everywhere we looked, the trees seemed to be full of leaves again, as though Fall had only just begun. But of course the leaves weren't leaves, they were birds, and Fall is indeed making its final descent into winter.

I couldn't help but think about how one thing gets replaced by another, by another, by another. We lose the leaves and just as quickly something comes in their place. But as a reminder of all that's temporary, the birds too will leave the trees and something else will come in their place: the cold, skeletal silhouettes of branches in the winter. I received a lot of rejection letters lately. I've got a tough skin, but I still took a beating. With last week's great experiences I slowly feel myself being lifted back up. Bad news gets replaced with good news. Good news changes perspective. Perspective leads to insight. And so it goes, from leaves to birds to progress.

This just in: My war stories manuscript was listed as a semi-finalist in the Black Lawrence Press Saint Lawrence Book Award. I don't get to advance to the final round, but out of thousands of submissions it's nice to know at least I got a little nod. The way these things go, my manuscript has changed (right down to the title) since I long-ago had to send this to them for consideration. I'm still hopeful. If I cane make it this far in a book contest, surely something will give soon enough...

Day 2 VCCA: Photo Tour

2011-10-26T15:50:00.004-08:00

We live dormitory style in the Fellows Residence, a single bed and small, functional room for each Fellow with a shared bathroom in between. Most rooms are upstairs, and downstairs are the kitchen, dining room, large living room with a piano and grandfather clock, and a library.

Fellows Residence

My room

Two-tenths of a mile down a winding gravel path and chipped up old road are the Barns and Studio complex. Add in a few sound-proof composers' huts and you have the main studios for Fellows at VCCA. There are about 20 of us here at any given time.

Here's the approach to my studio--W3, The Nancy Hale Studio--

as well as the sweet view from my porch steps.

Inside W3, there's ample space for books, yoga, a large desk, a reading chair, and even an extra bed for midday napping or nighttime sleeping flexibility.

Last but not least, there's the signature wall (above right). Here, every writer that's stayed in W3 signs his or her name with the date. There are writers of all tricks and trades, all levels of fame and otherwise, who have made W3 their home as a Fellow at VCCA. This photo only shows a third of the signatures on the wall, but they're legend enough to motivate me to work hard and make the most of every minute I have here.

Day 1 VCCA: Getting Perspective

2011-10-25T16:24:00.003-08:00

This summer was hard. I made that no secret. I pieced together a fall schedule in Texas thanks to a generous friend and a new residency--Madrono. While there, I was able to make serious progress in my development as a place-based nonfiction writer and an emerging fiction writer. But I also had a voice in the back of my mind the entire time: You're here because you didn't get a fellowship. You didn't get any of them. Not one.

That's a tough voice to listen to and not one I engage with very often. Thankfully, last week I took refuge with my parents in North Carolina and had three very uplifting experiences: First, I was hired as a fiction editor and creative writing instructor for Our Stories. Second, my manuscript was requested in full by a university press (fingers crossed!). Third, UNCTV/PBS spent two days with me making a documentary feature of the footbridges featured in my chapbook, Lost Crossings.

And today, my first full day on a 5-week fully funded fellowship at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, I feel as though I've exhaled for the first time in months. Four hundred acres of protected land on a knoll in the Shenandoah foothills. Twenty visual artists, writers, and composers. Three meals a day prepared and served to the Fellows. Occasional readings and open studios in the evening. Silence. Stars. Space to write. A really great office chair.

But here's the secret: I've been here before. When I was laid off from my job slinging coffee not long after I finished grad school, I applied to everything under the sun--jobs I didn't want, jobs I really wanted, residencies I never thought I'd get...and I got accepted to VCCA for two weeks. I was a different writer then. I hadn't written a war story. I hadn't taught at the college level. TRACHODON didn't even exist yet. When I was here before, it was so evident to me that I was in the space of master writers and artists that I worked really hard to listen to what others had to say.

I overheard conversations at mealtime, during long walks, after readings. There were other places out there like VCCA. There were some writers who did residencies every year. Some did it twice a year. My gears started turning. I set to work with applications. I got called for an interview at Interlochen Center for the Arts and interviewed with the Dean over the phone while sitting in the VCCA library. A week later I was hired as their Writer-in-Residence. And that, essentially, is how the tour started. I went home feeling like I could go anywhere, that I could carry my writing on my back. Four months later I hit the road and I haven't stopped since.

Is returning to VCCA like coming home? Not physically--I've learned to make wherever I am my home. But is it the home of dreamscapes? Of thinking that anything's possible? Of believing my highest aspirations might come true? Without a doubt.

Virginia Center for the Creative Arts

2011-10-24T18:39:00.000-08:00

Today THE CLAW hits the road for perhaps the shortest journey yet in these 22 months (and counting)...

Here's the route from Celo, NC to Amherst, VA and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I'll be there for five weeks with 20 other visual artists, writers, and composers. More info to come!

Meantime, please visit my new OFFERS page for an exciting launch of a new fiction newsletter!

Lost Crossings Shoot: Day 2

2011-10-23T18:34:00.002-08:00

We finished up on Fridaywith great weather, great luck in on-the-spot interviews, and great cheer allaround. We interviewed local legend Byrl Ballew of Ballew’s Country Store andthe one-and-only Corrine Canipe, wife of George Canipe who designed and builtall 13 of Mitchell and Yancey County’s historic swinging footbridges.

For all those hours spentin the field, the feature will be 9-11 minutes long. I can only imagine thework the film crew has ahead of them with regard to video editing, etc. Butthey obviously love what they do…it showed right down to the cameraman’swillingness to climb the side of a rotting footbridge just to get the rightangle for the shot!

Lost Crossings Shoot: Day 1

2011-10-20T18:28:00.001-08:00

I'm moved nearly beyond words tonight, having just spent the day with a professional director, cinematographer, and audio specialist who believed enough in Lost Crossings to turn WNC's footbridges into a featured slot on their television show. The "Our State" show is broadcast on UNCTV, an affiliate of PBS. This show has won 7 regional Emmy Awards and the director who selected my project has worked on PBS documentary films for decades. The episode featuring Lost Crossings will air on July 5th at 8pm and my ten-minute segment is allotted 1/24th of their annual budget (over $8000) for completion. Wow! In addition to airing on PBS, the episode will be available on YouTube.

I know for some folks out there this would all be small potatoes. Those folks dream of screenplays and big contracts and press packets. That sounds nice, in some cases. But I wouldn't trade today for anything. For me, today affirmed one of my deepest hopes: that if you work hard, if you listen well, and if you dream big, even the smallest seeds can grow into something bigger than you ever thought you'd planted. Today, three people believed in my work. They believed in the significance of these mountain footbridges. They believed in the power of a good story. I couldn't feel more fortunate.

Here's a photo collage from the sidelines...

We started at my parents' house with an interview:

And I got fitted with a wireless mic at the Depot Bridge:

I even got to do a little reading from Lost Crossings for snapshots and voice over:

There were lots of long shots:

And plenty of being called back to do something again (Take 2!):

And some seriously impressive balancing acts:

A little bit of off trail:

And some discovering of new places (the cemetery on the far side of the Honeycutt Bridge):

Who knows what tomorrow's shoot will bring!

Looking Back at Lost Crossings

2011-10-19T17:04:00.000-08:00

In 2008, I got a hair-brained idea. I called my hair-brained friend Shane and together we decided to embark on a year-long writing/photography collaboration without pay, just to see what happened.

What happened?

We ended up generating a lot of interest from the surrounding Mitchell and Yancey Counties in North Carolina, raising $2,000, and using those funds to publish a chapbook, print and frame large photographs, and put on an exhibition at Crimson Laurel Gallery.

Our focus? Thirteen forgotten, beautiful, swinging footbridges.

After the gallery exhibition (which sold every copy of the first edition, every photo, and every map), things only got better. Lost Crossings: A Contemplative Look at Western North Carolina's Historic Swinging Footbridges, continues to sell today. It was reviewed in local papers, written up in regional magazines, and this week a film crew from UNCTV is driving all the way out to my parent's house to spend two days with me as we traipse around the counties and film those famed footbridges for a TV segment.

All of which sounds wonderful until I tell you this:

When the Producer called and told me about the TV segment, I cringed. Not because I don't believe in the project. Not because I didn't want to do it. But because it meant I'd have to go back and actually read my own book.

Many writers will tell you that once something is published, it can be painful to sit still and read it start to finish. Most of us simply refuse to do it. I suppose this is partly because once it's published, there's no going back. There's always the terror of finding a typo you can't do anything about, an error in logic you'll have to live with forever, or--gasp--a misquote that burns a friendship. When it came to re-reading Lost Crossings, my fear was that it would sound quaint. That I'd read it and be able to see a recent MFA graduate still playing around with creative nonfiction, touting it as the real deal when everyone could see it still needed polishing.

The camera crew shows up tomorrow, and I had to spend today sitting very still on the couch re-reading my own book. It required two cups of coffee and some chocolate chips, both of which were great. But what was even better was discovering that, well, Lost Crossings really did do something right. A couple things, actually. The aesthetic is there, it's complete, and it's consistent. The intentions are clear and relatable. The prose is informative but pays more attention to creativity and language than reportage. And when it was all said and done, the essays felt...well...like little, lovely, visitations. Which is exactly what I wanted when I got that hair-brained idea in the first place.

Sure, I didn't turn the book into a travel guide. I didn't turn it into a coffee table book. I didn't even turn it into a through-and-through historical document. But the photographer and I turned it into something with staying power, and now that I've gone back and done the hard part, I might even be ready for the big screen.

Footbridges, here we come!

Don't own the book? I'd be honored to share it with you. I'd even like to give it away for free, but the costs of printing are too prohibitive. But here's a preview of the project, and here's a link to buy the book, and here's my word--published publicly--that if you don't like what you read, I'll give you your money back.

Editor on the Upswing

2011-10-18T19:00:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to report that I've been accepted as a paid fiction reader and creative writing instructor for Our Stories Literary Journal, one of the only peer-review literary journals that offers professional feedback to emerging writers, publishes a high quality online magazine, and offers a variety of courses for all levels and creative minds. Like much of my contract work, I'll be able to fulfill these part-time duties from any location, thanks to the Internet.

I've been working for a number of years on developing the editing side of my business. I can now say I serve on the staff of three literary magazines: TRACHODON, Memoir (and) Journal, and Our Stories. My services page details the independent editing I offer and right now I have four memoir students that I work with monthly via correspondence, 1 arts group I serve as Press Manager for, and 1 independent artist who employed me to write website content. I'm actively seeking more students to work with.

It's all slow and steady, and that includes not just writing stories (my favorite part) but also working the build a viable business. I'm self-employed and have been for several years. Just this summer my blog (after six years) gained enough momentum to start persuading me that The Writing Life offers something unique and worthwhile. After all, over 4,000 monthly viewers are supporting these words and that's not something I take for granted. This September I was finally able to afford health insurance for myself as the self-employed founder of my business, Writer at Large. This week, I'm prepping to meet with a film crew from UNCTV for two days of shoots featuring the stories detailed in my chapbook, Lost Crossings.

Here's to the long haul and the mini-victories along the way!

Home

2011-10-17T16:03:00.000-08:00

There's nothing that says home in Appalachia more than the wind-blown gold, red, and orange leaves that greeted me at the end of THE CLAW's latest 1300-mile journey. The car cruised seamlessly, I encountered no bad weather, and was welcomed home joyfully by my brother (Gus, the elk hound) and parents. It's been 10 long months since I got to see these mountains. Too long. Yet already my time grows short and the days fill with work. Here's a peek at what I've been missing. My parents live in a 1,000 square-foot home at 3000-feet elevation in the Black Mountains, a spur-chain of mountains off the Blue Ridge in Western North Carolina. You can see why it's a hard place to ever want to leave:

On the Road Again

2011-10-16T19:00:00.000-08:00

THE CLAW hits the road for another journey, this time traveling 1300 miles in 3 days from Medina, Texas to Celo, North Carolina. The first day will be a short haul from Medina to Lorena (just south of Waco), where I get to stay with the Cook's--two fantastic former students of mine from the week-long memoir workshop I taught at College of Creative Arts this summer. The next two days will be 10-12 hour days back-to-back but I'm not worried in the slightest. I haven't been home in over 10 months, and if that isn't incentive enough to get there, I don't know what is. My parents tell me the leaves are still hanging on in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I hope I can get there in time to see it.

The visit will be short and busy--two days of television interviews with a film crew that's going to traipse around the mountains with me as we explore the footbridges I wrote about in my chapbook. A few doctor's appointments, a few reunions with pals, and hopefully lots of dog-walking...then onward to the next residency.

Before leaving Madrono, THE CLAW was adorned with another set of antlers (on the grill, this time), then promptly christened by an ogling doe. If this keeps up, I may have to officially enter the realm of "car art."

The route I'm taking is mapped below. Meantime, please enjoy this interview or this article about The Writing Life. Or better yet, sit back, relax, and listen to a few stories. I'll read them to you over the (digital) Michigan airwaves. Click here and begin at time 26:45 for a 20-minute reading and interview. Thanks, as always, for supporting The Writing Life!

Bounding Bison: A Photo Collage

2011-10-13T19:00:00.000-08:00

R's daughter picked me up in the four-wheeler the other morning and I got to help feed the bison. The only way to illustrate this is photographically, and I'm not sure even that can do it justice. Suffice it to say it was a sensation never before experienced: You're on a four-wheeler, rolling through water and grit, and you crest a small hill. As though synchronized through one gigantic set of lungs, 30+ bison swivel their triangular heads your direction and audibly exhale at the same moment. Then they start running. Right. Towards. You.

In an instant, they've arrived.

It's fantastic, really, these ridiculously large mammals with bouffont hairdos and flat faces and foreheads big enough to build a house on. My immediate response is to laugh, though every cell in my body said flee. R's daughter is hardly phased, moving around the four-wheeler with ease, handing me a bag of feed. I did, after all, insist on helping. And once I get over the chest-rattling, utterly earthly resonance of 30+ bison saying "I'm hungry" at the same time, I coordinate myself enough to scatter some feed. The sound of their chewing is no less intimidating. I get off the four-wheeler and marvel at the beasts for a few moments. It's shocking how oddly shaped they are, how thoroughly large, and how each is truly different from the next. Can a head really grow like a triangle? Can a body really look two dimensional from one angle and gargantuan from another? Apparently so.

Next, she takes me to the ranch manager's digs, where show pigs have been delivered just this morning. The largest one, a Hampshire, is fat and loud and his eyes are circled so tightly with flesh I wonder if he can see anything at all. But he's actually a little cute. And as I come to discover, downright silly.

Oh, and there are rescue fawns, too, their noses feel like wet salamanders and their teeth nibble like a toddler's. They're so tiny you could mistake them for figurines. Compare the size of my thumbnail to this little one's nose. Notice the crooked posture of the one in back. I wanted to stuff one into my pocket and take it back to the Lake House!

An hour later I'm back at the desk, head spinning. And that's a good thing. My character awaits and time is running short here at Madrono. Back to work before I have to hit the road. It's been short, but in no way shallow. I hope some day I get to return.

Sunrise at Madrono

2011-10-12T19:00:00.000-08:00

Sunrise at Madrono Ranch.

Enough said.

Birds by Day, Bucks by Night

2011-10-11T19:19:00.000-08:00

The past several days have been a-buzz with activity at Madrono Ranch and I've appreciated this for the balance it provides to my fiction-writing process. This morning, the ranch owners took Margie (a new resident here!) and I on a two-hour birding hike around the lake and up one of the canyons. I woke early for my yoga and coffee, got a couple hundred words in, then hit the trails with them for views like this.

It's good to get perspective--and that's a metaphor, for the way I've been thinking about my new story as well. Here's a shortlist of the birds we saw: Say's phoebe, belted kingfisher, canyon wren, golden-fronted woodpecker, titmouse, pied-billed grebe, hairy woodpecker, kinglet, Tenessee warbler, Wilson's warbler, Bewick's wren, Western scrub jay, and a blue-winged (or green?) teal. That plus bass leaping in the lake and a waddling porcupine in the shrubs. Quite a morning!

Two weeks ago, I had to stop every 300 words and take a break to think about my character in the short story. I kicked stones in the driveway. I stared at birds. I looked at the clouds. All the while mulling my character over in my mind to really consider what kind of person he might be. Now, 17 pages into the story, I've been able to write about 1000 words in one sitting the past two mornings. It's not bulk that I'm after (I'm using those numbers by way of convenient measurment, nothing more), but richness. It's a good sign that I can write about my character for longer now, and perhaps an even better sign that I'm still surprising myself on the page. It's still slower than my normal "pace" but the quality is different. And in the end, quality wins.

I was rewarded doubly today when R announced he'd be counting deer that night using a gigantic, remote-controlled spotlight mounted on the top of his truck. This light runs off the vehicle's battery and can illuminate up to 700 feet away. With two of his kids in tow (one with a clipboard, the other with an additional handheld spotlight), we bumped along the old roads to see what we could see. Not much, of course--it was quite dark. But enough to get a sense for a lower number of bucks and higher number of does. "There should be five deer per acre once you add it all up and figure it out," R told me. But it's still a guessing game, he admitted. Because the roads only go high and low on these hills and not between. Furthermore, they don't provide access to all 1500 acres. Conducted three times a year over the span of three nights, these informal surveys do provide something, though. This year, the verdict is in: it'll be time to hunt does, not bucks. The drought has taken its toll. There's still a sufficient population to hunt, but as R says, "We gotta keep the breeders."

Cowboy Fact of the Day: A favorite past time of many-a-cowboy was a sporting event called "pulling the chicken." It started with a rooster buried neck-deep in the ground. As reported by a Texas newspaper of the day, "...the young men and boys dash by, one after another, and as they pass the rooster each man swings himself down from the saddle and reaches for its head." You can guess what it took to make a winner...

The Majestic Buck

2011-10-10T19:00:00.000-08:00

It's been cooler the past several days, which means I can hop on my mountain bike before dusk and get an hour's ride in before the world turns grainy and gray. I'm struggling with depth perception when I ride here, and I finally realized it's because of the limestone roads and pathways. It's difficult to distinguish between white, light gray, and anemic brown--and for most of my ride, that's what I'm on. I'm easily distracted when I ride, scaring up packs of wild boar and countless deer. Mostly, I enjoy the feeling of movement and power when I'm on my bike, but here where the heat and drought still feel deadly, occasionally my mind turns sour.

I'd be lying if I said I don't scan the trees and fence lines for a quick "way out" should a boar decide to turn on me or if I've judged the fields wrong and the buffies are actually in the one I'm hurtling across. Not that I'd stand a chance. I like to think I'd pedal hard, then at the last minute leap from my seat and turn to face the enraged creature, positioning my mountain bike between my body and any array of tusks/horns/teeth. I blame things like this for such distorted day-mares, but just as quickly as the thought arises it fades away.

One thing that struck me about tonight's ride was the sharp, single-syllable hiss that white-tailed deer emit when they're startled. I probably scared up over fifty deer without even trying and that sound always precipitated their mad, illogical dashes through the cedar and mesquite. At one point, nearly twenty of them loped through the forest parallel to the road, some staying alongside me for half a mile. R (the ranch manager) is right--some deer are just plain stupid--and they run straight until they're scared breathless rather than cutting right and ducking over a hill.

At the end of a particularly deer-laden stretch, the forest cleared into a pasture with mature trees. The timing seemed so perfect it's almost hard to write, but as the does and yearlings darted through the field, one majestic buck turned to me and held his head very still in a single beam of light. I got off my bike, approached another ten feet, then snapped a photo. Everything about this should have gone wrong--the sunlight was ferociously bright, backlighting the buck with an almost blinding quality. My camera's zoom lens is broken and the edges of the frame are usually darkened. (Dear PowerBall: Please can I win you so that I may a) purchase a new digital camera and, b) maybe buy a house some day.) But for once these failings enhanced the image. Here was the reward:

With the buck holding court, the pasture really did seem that illumined, the creature more like some patient messenger from another time, and those healthy-looking trees some kind of blessing in this landscape where every inch looks parched.

Cowboy Fact of the Day: An experienced cowboy with an easy hand on the reigns could ride as many as 70 miles in a single day. An impatient one, however, might wear out his horse in just one mile.