More Renaissance Center, inside looking out

Here's another shot inside the same room I posted yesterday. This is from balcony on the opposite side of the room looking out toward the Detroit River.

Oops, this was posted to the wrong blog. I meant to post it to Detroit Daily. I will post it there also, sorry about the duplication.

Testimony by Anita Shreve

Testimony by Anita Shreve Mary's review Aug 20, 10

rating:

This is not a happy book, but it is excellent and thought provoking. It tells the story of a "mistake" involving 5 students and two adults at a private school from the point of view of each of the students, the parents, teachers, headmaster, and other characters. The consequences of the mistake, which is of a sexual nature, are far-reaching and devastating. It might be slightly overdone, but probably not. It's pretty amazing. I don't want to spoil it. The voices and characterizations are very well done. I really enjoyed/appreciated this book.

Oh NO! Another new blog!

I am trying out yet another new blog where I am posting just artwork (at this point). there are thumbnails and you can click on them to see them bigger and then, bigger yet. Donno if it will prove useful or not.

It's called MORE SCRIBBLES and is at tumblr.com.

Homeless and Hungry #100818-1147

Homeless & Hungry #100818-1147, watercolor. (by me, today.) Click image to view larger.

Mama Bear with Triplets

This is my collaboration with Steve, a splotch monster of sorts. Top: Mama bear with triplets, bottom: original splotch by Steve.

new painting: Yellow Lady's Slipper

Creative Every Day. I am creative Every Day. I'm working on a poetry Ms, writing a novel, painting, participating in a mole exchange--I'm so creative that I haven't much time to post about it.

The fire of August in the creative every day Challenge is the SUN which gave energy to this flower to grow and to me, though the food I ate--all energy comes from the sun, from fire--to paint the picture.

WeekWord: Collection

When I first saw the WeekWord over at Textilspanieln, I thought to myself, I no longer collect anything. I was remembering my old stamp collections which I gave away, my insect collections (which I still have, but no longer add to it), my coin collections and rock collections, that sort of thing. I was thinking of people who collect figurines or dolls or stuffed animals. Frog figures or pigs or elephants. Nope, I don't collect any of those things.

But I do collect things. Not always on purpose.

Cameras, for example:



And this is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg. Between us, my husband and I have hundreds of cameras. I don't collect them intentionally. He does. But I have almost as many as he does. He collects olf vintage cameras (even if they don't work). I want cameras that take good pictures. I want cameras that fit in my pocket. I want a spy camera, that no one can see me using. Yep. That's a confession--I want to be able to take pictures without disturbing people. Or making them angry.

Some of the things I collect might be considered a little odd. Like skulls. Once again, this is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg of my skull collection. But remember, I worked for 33 years as a naturalist and science educator. Skulls can teach us a lot about animals, their diet, their lives.

These are one goose skull and some gull skulls. I have deer and horse and cow and snake and hawk and rabbit and 'possom and raccoon and muskrat and many others.

Another group of things I "collect" (have a collection of) is house plants, including African violets. I guess this makes me officially and "old lady." Here are just two (three?) of many that grace my house and office. I love their colors and beauty, they cheer me up!

I also collect toilet paper tubes for someone who uses them in preschool!

White Horses, by Douglas Milliken

White Horses by Douglas Milliken

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Dreamlike and druggy, poignant and sad, deeply disturbing, a wonderful read. This group of stories is so poetic as to be almost prose poems. Reading it makes life seem unbearably sad, yet deeply important. Excellent!

I asked Douglas Milliken a few questions:

Q: White Horses is so powerful. It clutches me, wrings me out, leaves me with a deep melancholy. what kinds of syntactical choices did you make to inject it with such utter sadness? (or, how did you do it?)

A: To answer this by means of a tangential anecdote: in the process of refining WHITE HORSES for print, Andy (Lyman, of NaDa Publishing) and I have developed a pretty close relationship. We get together a few times a week. We ride bikes out of the city and into the woods. We make asses of ourselves in public. During each of these little get-togethers, Andy updates me that another reader has contacted him by one means or another to tell him that, if nothing else, the book has left them weeping. In one instance, the reader (a close friend) called him in tears the moment she was finished reading. She got the book in the mail, read it straight through, wept and called him weeping. Which is very overwhelming! My objective in writing--not just WHITE HORSES but any story or poem or song, in drawing a picture, in cooking dinner for a friend--has always been to simply create a scenario wherein someone--anyone--might feel something. Feel anything. Just feel. WHITE HORSES definitely explores some dark and challenging territory, so I'd assumed that people would have a melancholic response. But actual tears? I'm blown away every time another report comes in. I don't know how I did it. I had read an interview with Gary Lutz around the time I first started writing WHITE HORSES. There was a lot of discussion on his process, which I found really inspiring. The way he writes a story like a stonemason building a wall. Only one stone can fit between all the others. Only the correct works will tell the story correctly. Any substitutes are just filler. I know I did not come anywhere near the expert finesse of Lutz, but then again, I wasn't aiming to. I was pushed by the idea of Lutz's work, not the possibility of recreating it. I was also morbidly depressed while writing WHITE HORSES. It was a cold winter, and the woman that I lived with was slowly falling out of love with me, which was sort of like watching a car crash in slow-motion. I was haunted by nightmares of her and my brother and all the other people I loved disappearing or being murdered or simply leaving me. I think WHITE HORSES was my attempt to create something that might possibly make all these bad things better. Like I could weave a safety net out of words. Like I might be able to save what little I still had. I think all these desperate factors together created a sort of poetry.

Q: White Horses seems to be a series of dream-like yet very realistic stories. It's also very poetic. Yet it somehow hangs together, almost like a novel. How would you define it, or, would you prefer not to?

A: I don't know of any succinct term that can sum up whatever literary form WHITE HORSES might be. "Interconnected short stories" doesn't seem to cut it. A patchwork novella? Whatever. I'm not terribly concerned with labeling my work. From a traditional writer-publisher standpoint, being unable or unwilling to define what you do is almost always a near-fatal pitfall. Luckily, NaDa is not traditional by any way, shape, or means. Andy read the manuscript and immediately got behind it. There was no real talk about its potential marketability. There was no conversation as to how it should be defined. As far as either of us was concerned, WHITE HORSES was label enough.

Q: Would you say that your writing was more "psychological," as in, a pouring out of angst or more "constructed," as in the stone by stone you refer to "above?" If angst, do you feel that your previous training as a writer allowed you to construct your outpouring in such a way that it has such incredible impact?

A: Well, I've never been the sort who writes for the sake of therapy. Writing can be a valid way of coming to terms with events, but rarely is that the sort of thing anyone would want to read. The first story that I wrote was the title piece, which came out of a conversation with my ex about how I was suddenly able to afford life insurance but not health insurance, that I was worth something dead but not necessarily worth anything alive. The next piece was "On Marriage," which was based on a dream. Then came "XXVI," which was based on the horror of accidentally revealing yourself. We're all so embarrassed about ourselves! It hurts when we can't hide who we are. Inexplicably, these three stories--told by different people about very different circumstances--all seemed of a whole to me. These voices were all singing the same song. I began to imagine an alternate version of myself and an alternate version of the woman who I considered to be my wife though we were in no legal sense married. What would I be like if I gave myself up completely to my dreams and my fantasies? What would it be like to live with and be married to someone like that? I pushed my current circumstances to an extreme to see how horrible it could become. I could have taken it much further. Maybe I should have. Maybe I wimped out. But I grew to like these people, who had at some point become unique individuals, no longer stand-ins but actual people in their own right, if only in my own mind. I loved them. I didn't want to hurt them any more than I already had. I saved them from their circumstance when I could not save myself from mine.

Q: When revising the work, did you revise most for poetic construction, plot, character, or emotional impact. I realize you probably wanted to maximize all of these, which you did successfully, but how did you make choices as to what to leave, what to cut, what to embellish?

A: There were two entire stories that didn't make the cut. Andy never even saw them. Neither was strong enough to hold its own weight. "Naked Light" almost got axed as well, because the language was originally really opaque and clunky. I'm glad I was able to save it, though I still consider it the least-readable portion of the book. Ten minutes before we sent the final manuscript to the printers, I was still making edits to that story.

None of the changes made were for the sake of plot because it isn't a plot-driven story. A lot of the re-reading focused on consistency in tone and rhythm. If something sounded wrong or felt wrong in my mouth, it needed to be fixed. A lot of attention was given to making sure the female character was real and rounded and believable, partly because of her limited air-time but mostly because of the simple nature of my own maleness. Female characters are hard for me. I tend to construct them with more care and attention than the males. I still don't think she's as complete as she could be. Certain things are universal among all people, but some things aren't. You can't just shrug off these considerations.

More than anything else, though, I wanted to make sure that there was no point in the story where anyone could ever say that these two people (or any of the auxiliary characters, for that matter) aren't full of love, that they do not love one another. Things get bad and things get worse, and all the crazy mean destructive things they do to each other, they do out of love. People do horrible things while screaming "love love love," and people do beautiful things while singing the same dumb song. It's probably a really cheesy theme to emphasize these days. I hope it doesn't come across as cheesy.

View excerpts from White Horses here.

This is a great book, a wonderful, startling, fascinating rad, and you can get it now for 15% off through August 13. See coupon below:

Read more about it here at the book's website!

Read another interview here at Thoughts in Progress.

Bye bye barn coat

Back when I used to raise chickens, my hens liked to create stealth nests. If the hidden nests had too many eggs, I usually let them sit. Other wise, I rounded them up, cracked them into an "egg cup" (glass custard dish), and if they looked OK, I ate them. Or we did.

In cooler weather, I had a barn coat and when I went to the barn to collect eggs, I put them in the pockets of the barn coat.

One autumn day, late September, I put on my barn coat for the first time in a couple months or 3 or 4, and I went out to the barn. As I was sliding the door to the side to enter the barn, there was a huge loud sound, like a gunshot or a bomb and then a terrible smell!

I had accidentally left an egg in one of the pockets the barn coat ALL SUMMER in the heat! It exploded and smelled horrible. I threw the coat into the lake (I was living at Beaver Lake then). Later I hosed it off. Then I washed it many times and never completely got rid of that terrible smell. I finally abandoned that coat!

Nora Nora, by Anne Rivers Siddon

I just finished Nora Nora, by Anne Rivers Siddon, and absolutely loved it! Excellent, poignant book, deal with relationships, love, betrayal, education, poverty, racial issues, through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl. (Not a kids book!)

My 73rd book of 2010.