My Teaching Voice

Since leaving Lake Arrowhead three years ago I’ve been having trouble hanging on to my voice. And not just my voice really, but also my words. Sentences and paragraphs and pages of text I should be writing but that I push aside for a good novel or a movie or a great new recipe involving bacon, sweet potatoes, rigatoni, mascarpone cheese and fresh sage (this, a recent distraction—the dishes are still soaking in the sink).

I’m sure it’s not only that I am in mourning.

Some of my writing inertia could be due to a mind busy with other things—new things, like teaching college speech and all that entails… learning innovative technologies, tackling a new curriculum, slugging through online faculty required “teaching”courses, trying to lacquer my wild mane into some semblance of what my imagination believes a professor’s hair should look like…oh so many time consuming diversions.

Still, I know I should also be writing creatively.

I’m sure it’s not only that I am in mourning.

When I left Lake Arrowhead, a pain planted itself firmly behind my breast plate and I can’t shake it. I can’t walk it off, though my dear husband and I take many beautiful nature walks every single week. I can’t read it off, though I take time to immerse myself in many an enjoyable book. I can’t yoga it off, or massage it off, or wine it off. It is sewn in, gorilla glued, bolted; it is chained to my heart.

But that cannot be the only reason I do not write.

I did, in fact, write quite a bit a year and more back. (The book is about Lake Arrowhead.)

Lake Arrowhead, CA

But I’m sure it’s not only that I am mourning.

I adore Wisconsin, and the weather here suits us perfectly. The vast greenness of the place in summer, the orange-red-yellow-green autumns, the take your breath away white frozen winters. A lake so big it looks Pacific. Lake Arrowhead, amplified.

Mourning comes to some of us for a visit. For me, without my children and my grandchildren, it stays. It has moved in to the quaint little Cape Cop home on the tree-lined avenue where we now live. It’s here to stay.

There, I’ve said it.

Missing Lake Arrowhead means missing a million moments that can never be regained—with my kids, with my grandchildren, with my friends, with all the people I was so fortunate to know. And as much as I love the cardinals and Canadian geese (and I love them a lot!), there is something sad about knowing that I will never happen upon a bear or be awakened in the night by the ungodly howl of a pack of coyotes closing in on its prey.

So, my voice began to falter a while back and has gone somewhat quiet of late.

My husband began to worry, so I finally forced myself to sit and write tonight, but as little as this accomplishment is, and as much as I love him, I cannot give him much of the credit for bringing me to my chair, for opening the blank page, for placing my fingers on the keys and letting them speak for me, expose me, help me… nor can I take any of the credit myself.

It came not from knowing that I should do it, it came instead as a magical gift from a miraculous profession.

Teaching.

Thinking I needed more family photos on my office walls, I drove over to Walgreens this afternoon to pick up some photographs I had ordered. They are beautiful photos of our newest granddaughter, Adaline Lorene, and her big sister, Jasmine, who visited us here in Wisconsin this past June.

As you can see, they are worth the ache. My girls.

     Anyway.

On my way back out to the car I stopped to ask a young man (who was coughing uncontrollably as if he might be choking) if I could help him. Just a simple, “Are you okay? Can I do anything?”

The young woman next to him, obviously his companion, said, “I recognize that voice! Do you remember me?”

The coughing continued, but she ignored it. She walked toward me. “I heard your voice and I said, ‘That’s my speech teacher!””

Of course, I remembered her, a lovely person and a good public speaker, animated and organized. We hugged. Her manfriend, ignored, coughed his way unaided to their car.

“Does he need help?” I asked. “Does he need the Heimlich? Because I’ll do it.”

“He’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s wonderful to see you.”

She recognized my voice. Here, in Kenosha, a town of roughly 100,000 people. She recognized my voice.

It seems silly, perhaps. To place so much value on recognition. But I do. I suddenly felt a little less alone. The sharing of a past. In Lake Arrowhead, a teacher never goes out without encountering a former or present student, which sometimes unnerved me. I never realized how important it was to my self-image, to my belief that I was connected to the community. I knew that I loved my students, but I didn’t perhaps understand how much I needed them.

Today I was given back a small piece of my voice, reflected through a young woman’s memory. I still feel the pain, I still crave the everyday closeness of my grandchildren, and I still miss the bears, but I can write, and that’s a soft and soothing salve for my soul. I’ll take it.

A Christmas Card Kind of View

I owe it all to Rachel. I’ve written about this before, the way she made her kids believe in magic—the way that, for a time when we were very young, she glowed with humor and energy and wonder and beauty in everything she did, and the way that all came together at Christmas time. As I sit writing this, a few days before Christmas 2016, my 60^th Christmas, it’s natural to look back upon other Christmases: childhood Christmases, falling-in-love Christmases, new-parent Christmases, teenage Christmases, grandparent Christmases, lonely Christmases…Christmases filled with family and friends—all of them precious in some way.

This year Mike and I will be in California and then Arizona visiting our kids and grandkids. We are so excited to be going together this Christmas, though our visits will be shorter than we’d like! (I have plans in the works for springtime…)

Every Christmas, since my first in 1956, when I was a six-month-old infant with a beautiful and entrancing mother—yes, Rachel, not to mention a kind and loving father, and a brother who loved me so much he called me “his present”—every December since, whether happy and relatively carefree, or saddened as I was while enduring hard times and loss, has left a lasting impact on my view of life. A Christmas card kind of view, Rachel Style.

The card is part Norman Rockwell, all homey and twinkly and smelling like home-baked Swedish spritz and candied oranges, but there’s a liberal dose of boozy smoke haze wafting over the rooftops and a neon tavern light or two blinking on and off in the distance just like Rudolf’s shiny nose.    

The house on Sheridan Road had a fireplace the length of the entire living room. One memorable Christmas Eve, Billy and I were sitting on the rug in front of the fire, drinking cocoa and talking excitedly about Santa already being on his way to Wisconsin from the North Pole.

“That sucker is going get a big surprise when he drops down the chimney into that fire,” Mom said, taking a long sip of egg nog.

“Don’t scare the kids, Rachel.” Dad’s voice was always mild, and he assured us that the fire, which was blazing in a newly menacing way, would be out long before Santa and the reindeer arrived. Dad was an excellent camper and he knew how to put a fire out.

We knew Mom was just making “a funny” about Santa. Mom loved Santa. We knew that. After all, she’d taken us to Dickleman’s Toy Store to meet him, spent hours helping us prepare his favorite cookies, and, other than this one slip, she spoke of him in glowing terms, as if he were probably almost as magic as she was.

“He knows everything, and he loves you both more than anything in the world,” Mom had said, which pretty much made Santa her chubby, white-bearded twin or something, because that description fit her like my Barbie’s velvet gloves fit her tiny stiff hands, easy to put on, easy to take off. Magic.

Of course, Billy explained, Mom didn’t really want Santa to burn up in our fireplace. Still, it was unsettling. Later, she tucked us both in bed, nuzzled us, told us stories about Santa’s big night, and about the times she’d glimpsed him in the past. She’d once caught him bringing Rudolf right in on her clean carpet, she said, and another time Santa was rolling around on the floor playing with our dog, Duchess.

“Duchess loves Santa.” She patted Duchess, who was on the bed with us. “Don’t you, girl?”

Duchess wagged her tail and stretched. Billy and I drifted off to sleep. In the morning, there were presents under the tree and Santa’s cookies were gone.

Mom and Dad looked happy.

Magic.

Billy caught the magic too, and no one else I’ve ever known has come so close to capturing Rachel’s spirit, style, grace, or humor.

“He’s a lot like me,” Mom often said, and she was absolutely right.

Billy didn’t just love people, he became their most loving and loyal supporter—celebrating with them and letting them take what they would, whether his love, money, home, possessions, or heart. For many years, on the day he cut down his Christmas tree, Billy jumped (I’m quite sure, naked), into a freezing stream in the High Sierras of Northern California. That night, wearing warm jammies and cozy socks, with the tree lit and decorated, and the fireplace burning, he would pile up loads of pillows and sleep underneath his tree. It was part of his magic, I guess.

So many memories. There are a lot more, but it’s getting late. Anyway, I know you have your own Christmas memories, your own pictures of the people who shaped your view of this truly magical time of year.

May you be at peace, in your heart and in your life. May you recognize the true gifts and hold them dear. And may you be blessed with abundant and unconditional love.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year to All!

 

“Reading with Ghosts” Some thoughts on a post by Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess: “Sometimes tattered and worn = loved” August 9, 2016

Like Jenny, I love used books, books that have a history of relationship with other readers that I can see and hold in my hands. The cover doesn’t need to be in great shape. There should be a name written in long hand somewhere within the first pages. Notes written in the margins. Words, phrases, paragraphs underlined. Exclamation marks, hearts, question marks in the margins. Old shopping lists stuck between the pages. Dedications to lovers, children, grandchildren, friends on the title page. This book reminds me of how very much I love being your mom.

Despite my librarian grandmother, my own library training and teacher training, and my years working in libraries and public schools, I’ve always been much more of a book sharer than a book protector. This doesn’t mean I condone random doodling, especially not of the tasteless variety, or nasty vulgarisms of any sort in any book (and I’ve seen plenty of those, believe me). And I am not advocating writing in any book that you do not own—please, respect all library books, and school texts! But I do appreciate a pithy comment that pertains to the content. I love knowing that I am sharing the experience of reading a particular piece with someone who found something striking enough to comment on right then and there, in the moment.

Jenny Lawson says, “…reading those found books is like reading with ghosts, ones who eagerly point out their favorite passages or share their thoughts or questions in the margins.”

Books that I can remember writing in that are sitting around my house right now include:

Jane Eyre, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Catcher in the Rye (probably my first!), The Diary of Anne Frank, Man’s Search for Meaning, Teacher Man, Rebecca, Atonement, Prodigal Summer, The Glass Castle, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and lots of poems—“The Raven” comes to mind along with some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. And memorably, the teacher edition of a literature anthology I used in my classroom for many years (not sure if this qualifies as defacing a public school text, but it did raise a few eyebrows during department meetings).

Funny story there. I was told, “That’s not your book! You can’t write in that!” back in 1998 by a wonderful teacher I respected and admired. Even so, I continued to write in the book. I planned on outlasting the book adoption cycle, and I wanted to remember what worked, what went flat, what insights, funny or touching, or what “light bulb” moments were expressed by my kids. When I retired in 2014 a young English teacher retrieved the same teacher anthology from the school library that I had written notes in for years. There hadn’t been a new book adoption in all of those years because the budget was just too tight for the district to purchase a new anthology. This new teacher wrote me a letter. “What a treasure!” she said. “Thank you for writing all of that down.”

A reader after my own heart. A teacher after my own heart. I hope she never forgets to write in the margins.

Sometimes tattered and worn = loved

Source: Sometimes tattered and worn = loved

But Night Crawler is so much more Evocative

Our yard in May contains the world. Wisconsin teems with life. For many of us living in climates where the temperatures are at or below freezing for so many months of the year, this is a heady experience. One day you’re wearing your jacket and mittens and looking at everything brown and gray, and almost like Dorothy’s arrival in Munchkinland, the next moment goes blindingly Technicolor.

A Few Minutes Ago…

It is grass that melting snow washes to emerald green. Tiny lime-colored leaves on black branches. Tulips, orange, and pink, and red. Daffodils, deep yellow and apricot. Lilacs, deep purple, lavender, and white.

Munchkinland

Robin’s breast russet, and then those impossibly lovely blue shells their babies shed in unexpected places. I find one on the metal chair on the front deck. Cardinals, still here, looking tropical now, the crimson against the green. Red-winged black birds. White herons. Orioles, as orange as the fruit we feed them.

The sky at day, a brilliant blue, at night diamonds and velvet.

 

My husband calls me out to the yard.
“You have to see this.”
It’s dark and slightly cool. Wet.

“Look.”
He shines a flashlight across the lawn, catching the quiet, clandestine movements of thousands of earthworms.
They are everywhere. The lawn is undulating like the surface of a lake. I’m afraid I’ll hurt them.

He bids me come. “Step slowly. Lightly.”

I’m sure I shouldn’t be out like this, could never tread lightly enough. I say a quick prayer. “Please don’t let me do any harm.”

We stand together watching the glistening movement as the worms slide back into the ground. Everywhere the light hits them, they move. We talk about what they are doing. We’ve never learned.

I suspect they come up out the earth and the rich dark loom to gulp in the sweet, sweet air. My husband suspects it’s for sex.

We know very little about the life of worms. Such a common thing to know so little about. We feel silly, and are sure these must be things our parents were born knowing. Like the call of a mockingbird.

Then, a voice inside me says, This is why they’re called night crawlers, Lori. And I know I am a complete dolt. How could this simple fact have escaped my attention all these years? Though it’s no excuse, night crawlers is not a term I ever remember being used in my family. Just earthworms, or simply worms. We didn’t fish, and we didn’t garden much. Out of sight, out of mind.

But “Night crawlers” is so much more evocative. Briefly, I picture little worm-sized, worm-shaped zombies crawling out of tiny worm-graves, marked by little crosses and a mausoleum or two—“Here lies Squirmy, Beloved Father and Husband”—our entire lawn a movie set for a new Tim Burton story.

                   How could I miss this?

“They’re good for the garden,” I say. (We’ve just planted tomatoes, peas, beets, onions, peppers, lettuce, and broccoli.)
“Yes.”
As we walk back to the house, I think, “And fireflies will be next.”

 

Rachel “Lori” Pohlman, Copyright 2016

*For some interesting facts on worms, such as the fact that, yes, there is some sex involved in night crawling (but that’s not all they do), go to: http://blog.nwf.org/2014/02/ten-things-to-know-about-earthworms/.

Fireside Chats in Springtime

 

Silly me. I had this idea to write a WWII-era literary fiction novel a while back. Quite a while back.

I spent a lot of time researching in between writing scenes. I felt I had a decent grasp on the time period; my dad was a WWII marine—I grew up waking to The Marine Corps Hymn–and though I majored in English, not history, I spent a good deal of time learning about and teaching the Holocaust to my eighth-grade classes when I taught The Diary of Anne Frank. I even wrote a YA novel about a Polish boy falling in love in war-torn Poland for my Master’s thesis in creative writing.

I’d just need to check a few dates here and there, maybe read a few more books and immerse myself in the movies and music of the 1940s, and presto! I’d be good.

Not so true.

What is true is that old saying about “the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know.” Today’s epiphany: Go Deeper. I stumbled into going deeper today almost by accident. I was looking up a few Roosevelt quotes for a scene in my manuscript where my protagonist listens to the president on the radio. Just a few lines, you know, to add realism and texture to the scene.

                                                                                                   GO DEEPER

And I find myself, hours later, too torn up to write the scene. I’ll write it tomorrow, or maybe the next day. You see, I found recordings of Franklin D. Roosevelt speaking to the American public. I listened to them. Then I found recordings of the broadcasts made by the journalists who had followed him throughout his long presidency talking about him on the day of his death.

These recordings are priceless. You will need Kleenex. And maybe a dog. Or a loved one nearby. Luckily, my protagonist has a hankie, a dog, and a brother.

           (Not my photo)                 Silly me? Yes. But also grateful me.

If you haven’t done so, and you’re interested, go to http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/collections/utterancesfdr.html to get started.

Three dates you might be interested in:

January 11, 1944: Radio Address to the Nation- State of the Union message to Congress (30 min.)

November 2, 1944: Campaign radio speech from the White House—“The World is Rising” (15 min.)

December 24, 1944: Christmas Eve Address (5 mins.) Make sure to stay tuned for The National Anthem that immediately follows.

Rachel “Lori” Pohlman, Copyright2016

 

Give Me Land, Lots of Land

I lived most of my life in the West, quite a departure from the early Wisconsin years.  I write this on a United Airlines flight, rocketing across a black starry sky back into the West yet again, a vast desert landscape dotted with mountains and strip malls and the constantly pumping veins of freeways clogged with anonymous western humans.

Funny that I’m happy to be going this time.

For the first time ever I realize this, I am going by choice, I want to go. The West came to me as a young girl so suddenly that I had no dreams created to soften it. The journey there, several non-stop days of riding lodged into the back of a sixty-four VW Beetle, stuck into an area as narrow as my skinny-kid hips, clothing and personal belongings of all varieties, belonging to myself,  Dad, and Billy piled to the ceiling, covering the floor up to seat level, and totally obliterating the small oval back window.

It was hot. The heat was the most salient quality of the ride. That, and I did not know why or where or for how long I was being taken away from Kenosha and my mother. Just a knobby -kneed kid going along for the ride.

Blue Diamond, Nevada is quite an amazing place. Or, at least it was to me. The desert in summer. So stark. Cactus? Never saw those before. And it was nearly treeless. It was as if green was a forgotten color there. The long, silent two-lane road. Mirages wavering ahead of us, always staying ahead. I thought, if we could just catch up to one, I’d hear the splash of our tires going through the water like back home at Pet’s Woods.

Mountains made of naked red rock. Country music. And at night a dome of shooting stars like I’d seen at the Planetarium in Chicago once.

Off in the distance, a glow. “That’s Las Vegas,” Dad said.  “A bad place. We’re not going there.”

He took us to Blue Diamond. For a visit. Aunt Honey and Uncle David lived in a small stucco ranch house. Not an actual ranch, but there were horse stalls just a few blocks away. Aunt Honey was my mom’s sister, a smaller red-ponytailed version of my mom. When she tucked me into bed, I closed my eyes and imagined she was Mom; her voice sounded nearly the same. Uncle David was a tall man, with dark hair and crinkles around his eyes, crinkles I would soon learn that were both from living in the bright desert sun and from laughing.

They were animal crazy, these cowboy relatives, and this probably sealed the deal for me when I came to learn that Dad was going to drop Billy and me off there indefinitely. I could definitely stand to live in a house with an actual chipmunk named Mike who sat on our shoulders and ate out of our hands at meal times, a huge German Shepherd named Rip, a white Persian cat named Idgit, a goat named Easter, and a horse named Christmas.     I was allowed to go to the stalls alone and feed and groom Easter and Christmas. I fed them the wrong grain for a while and they put on some extra weight, but I didn’t get in trouble about it.

Aunt Honey and Uncle David seemed happy together and also happy enough to have us with them. Billy and I fell rather easily into life on the desert. Though I cried a couple of times initially, Aunt Honey was always proud to remind me in later years that I cried even harder the day Mom showed up to get us.

By this time summer was over and we were attending school, making friends, learning to square dance and ride. We’d also each been given our own pet to care for, Billy got a puppy and me a kitty. Billy dressed up as a Vegas showgirl for Halloween, and I was a nun. We began to look forward to the next holidays, and a promised camping trip over Christmas.

So, it was a surprise when Uncle David drove off one day and came back several hours later with our mom. She swept into the house, smiling a smile so brilliant that I immediately wondered how I had ever thought she and Aunt Honey looked alike. I took in her blonde hair, cut in a bob just like my Barbie doll’s style, navy blue capris, crisp white midriff top neatly knotted at the waste, and high heeled sandals.

“Ally, you look fantastic!” said Aunt Honey.

Mom laughed. “I feel fantastic.”

This was a woman no one could ignore, no one could leave, no one could resist loving. I wished Dad were there to see her.

Billy and I gaped at her, unable to move until she moved in front of us, stooped down and enclosed us tightly in her arms. She smelled wonderful, like soap and spice.

“I’ve come to take you home,” she said, deeply dimpled.

Welcome to WWA!

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Source: Welcome to WWA!

Sitting Shiva

In seventh grade, when I was still new to Orthodox Judaism, the general studies principal at my school lost his mother, and the students were bused, grade by grade, to visit him at his home,…

Source: Sitting Shiva

Are your first 10 pages ready for an agent?

Great, practical advice from Christine Desmet, one of my favorite teachers.

The Writers' Institute

Are your first 10 pages ready for an agent or other reader? Here are 10 Tips from Christine DeSmet

I help a lot of writers fix their opening pages. I witness many writers revise and then go on to feeling great about their progress, or they secure agent representation, do well in a contest, or publish and get reviewed well.

These pointers for the first 10 pages might help you move forward faster, too.

1. Avoid opening with clichés such as a weather report, a character waking in the morning, dialogue from an unknown character, or a flowery description. Avoid having characters fall asleep or black out at the ends of scenes. (Yes, famous writers do this stuff. Yes, there are exceptions. And yup, you can do this in the middle of your book, but please don’t do it in the opening 10 or even first 50 pages. Just don’t, okay?)

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