Sometimes birthdays don't need
any words, just candles to light
and a breeze to blow them out.
the novelist and the sea
N.C. Wyeth's illustration from The Yearling
John Gardner states in On Becoming a Novelist, "Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. If you have a plan and a course laid out, that's helpful. If you drift off course, checking the stars can help you find a new course. If you have no map, no course laid out, sooner or later confusion will make you check the stars." Right about now, it's very cloudy and I've a feeling I'm heading in a more southerly direction than planned. Say, the Caribbean. It's a good thing that there's only another month or so to hurricane season. Ophelia, perhaps through the calming of rue, is still a tropical storm. The novel, the ocean canoe, the ride across the blue-green waves. Still, I'm heading out.
Ode to Sweet Tea
Deep and dark with syrup and tinges of sadness and pure ecstasy, the tumbler of crushed ice and sweet tea. We brought it to our lips, like we couldn’t live another day, another moment without. The end of the hottest summer day, the moment of realization, the Spiritus Sanctus of southern beverages, the kind that address salt-laden, fried foods with grace, decorum, and even a little dishonor. We lied to each other, said it was okay to drink glass after glass, a wedge of lemon, a fistful of mint flattened against the side. A hush puppy, a cornmeal-laced oyster, a toasted triangle of bacon-lettuce-tomato. And then the tall tilted glass at our lips, the sweet dreams of tea and surrender washing past any second thoughts, the rushing delight, the memories lasting forever and ever and ever.
Writing Retreat in Gambier, Ohio
Surrounded by cool, green views and birdsong. So tranquil that it took this city girl a little while to get used to the calm factor, but I finally gave in to the quiet immersion of reading and writing and restructuring. Slowly, surely, the novel is coming together, apart, and together again.
For Clarence
Clarence Clemons.
The heavens parted when he played: for Thunder Road, for Jungleland, for Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.
Thank you Clarence, for sending my soul skyward. May yours fly that way, too.