Writing Salon Mistress Muses

The Last Reading I Went To

I attended a reading at Borders bookstore on Union Square, the night before last. It was organized by Loren Rhoads, publisher of the magazine Morbid Curiosity.  The goal was to raise money ($1800) for the Avon Breast Cancer Walk, something Loren has committed to doing — partly, she says, in my honor (that is, in support of my recent/current  face-off with breast cancer). She'll be walking 39 miles in two days, folks, in July - and she's still in need of donations, which you can give via her personal Avon Walk link, above.

I am truly touched by this. In addition, Loren has said some very nice things about The Writing Salon in her blog. There were a couple of times—times when I was drowning in a vortex of fear and exhaustion— that her kind words lifted my spirits immeasurably.

Every one of the the six readers had (has) a connection to the Writing Salon. Four have taken my personal essay class and/or my Round Robin class — Ruthann Spike, Seth Flagsberg, Beth Touchette, and Mary Ann Stein — one, Rachel Trachten, has taken other Writing Salon classes, and one, David Booth, is a Writing Salon teacher (who has also participated in my Round Robin class). I had already heard all the pieces that they read on Tuesday night, which ranged from Seth's true story about defending an insane murderer (Seth works as a public defender on the Peninsula) to Mary Ann's also-true story about her harrowing experience managing a Halloween retail store, and I was completely happy to hear them all again.

Oh yeah, and one more thing. My Jack won a Morbid Curiosity tee shirt AND mug at the raffle Loren had going between readings. You can find more of her morbid shirts and mugs online.

High Heel on Fire

My friend Karen who lives in NYC, and who I often refer to here as Ms. K, recently self-published her first chapbook of poems, which has the same title as the blogsite (One Foot Out the Door) that she started a couple of weeks ago (finally). Because I have been so self-absorbed as of late, I haven't yet ordered a copy of Karen's book. But I plan to. Meanwhile, I love looking at its cover (click on it to enlarge).  The flaming high heel speaks to me. :-) I love it.

Check out Ms. K and her book. (She's also a great memoirist, and is writing her own version of a Tale of Two Cities - that is, her choice to move to NYC even though she was in the midst of a love affair with San Francisco.)

Literary Map for San Francisco

There's going to be a party tomorrow, Sept. 7th, celebrating the first ever "literary map"  of San Francisco.
All proceeds from the party admission ($15) and sale of the map ($7) will go to benefit 826 Valencia and Litquake. The map is a handy resource that pinpoints local literary landmarks, and includes resource lists of everything from  local bookstores and annual literary events, to literary organizations ranging from the SF Writer's Grotto to the Writing Salon. Check it out!

Corny but True

This has always been one of my favorite Writing Salon photos. A shot of people who came to one of our readings that featured both students and teachers sharing their work. Everyone looks so happy, like they're truly enjoying themselves. Whenever I look at this photo, I feel a surge of joy.

Surprise Publicity!

The San Francisco Chronicle Sunday pink section (datebook) did a feature story yesterday called Get Creative, and it ended with a three-paragraph section called "Write On!" that spotlighted none other than ye old Writing Salon.  I didn't even know we were getting a mention. A friend saw it, called me up, and said "Go check out page 23 of the Sunday pink section."

What a nice surprise. It came at just the right time, too. I was still in my pajamas at 2 p.m., blearily working away on trying to get the new fall session classes up onto the website - a project that always takes me several days to do. When I got the call, I was in the process of tearing my hair out strand by strand, because half the course descriptions on the website had suddenly, mysteriously gone from normal font to bold font, and I'd been trying to figure out how to fix it for, well, hours.

I needed a positive moment, something to help my hair grow back in. And I got it.

Not long after that I figured out how to fix the website glitch. Somehow or other, a whole bunch of extra gobbledygooky html code had insinuated itself into the course description for Willa Rabinovitch's fiction writing workshop. The confusing thing was that Willa's course description looked fine; it was all the other course descriptions that came AFTER Willa's that were so boldly messed up. I'm sure a web savvy person would have known, right away, to look where I didn't know to look until the universe finally decided to have mercy on me by waving a magic wand over my head that made me look at (AND SORTA EVEN UNDERSTAND!) the code in Willa's description.

Needless to say, this non-techie writer was very proud of herself. 

Poem by Marie Howe

My Dead Friends

I have begun,
when I'm weary and can't decide an answer to a bewildering question

to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.

Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?

They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling-whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,

to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy's ashes were-
it's green in there, a green vase,

and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes.
Billy's already gone through the frightening door,
whatever he says I'll do.

by Marie Howe

Get Your Mind Turned Inside Out

I know next to nothing about science fiction/fantasy/horror writing or writers. In fact, I may have read only two "horror" books in my life, both of which, I suspect, were more like hybrids that combined horror, science fiction, fantasy and erotica into one highly original mix. The books I read, years ago, were written by a friend of mine, Michael Blumlein.

I knew Michael because, at the time, his daughter and my son were both acrobatics students at the same circus school. Also at the time (I'm talking 10 or 15 years ago...), we lived in the same SF neighborhood, Noe Valley, where I worked as a writer/editor for the Noe Valley Voice newspaper, and often wrote feature story profiles of neighborhood artists. When I found out that Michael was a sci-fi/fantasy/horror writer as well as a doctor at UC Medical Center, I was fascinated and asked him if I could profile him in the Noe Valley Voice. This led to my reading a couple of his books - a short story collection called The Brains of Rats, and a novel called X/Y. I thought both of them were great, and they made me see that my patronizingly dismissive attitude toward all sci-fi/fantasy/horror writing was narrow and ignorant. Writing in any genre (or mix of genres) can be fabulous. It just has to be good writing, duh.

Anyway, I got an email from Michael (who I eventually talked into teaching fiction classes at the Writing Salon for a while) a couple of weeks ago telling me that he has a new novel out called The Healer, and will be doing readings at Dark Carnival bookstore in Oakland, on Sunday, Aug. 14 at 2 p.m. and at  Borderlands Books here in SF on Sunday, Aug. 21st at 2 p.m.

I haven't read The Healer yet, but I want to....just read a review of it in The Agony Column, edited by Rick Kleffel, who says:

". . .Readers who like their fiction dark, biological and surreal  will find a surplus of those tone colors here, along with wonderfully direct prose. What kind of creatures we'll encounter,  what kinds of horror and wonder we'll see remain unknown, but it is certain that readers will have their brains turned inside-out by this writer. Whatever you think you expect from this brief description, un-expect it. Blumlein is the sort of author who manages to make all sort of left, right and U-turns when you least expect them."

If you want to read the whole review, scroll all the way down; it's at the very bottom of the page.

I think it's amazing that Michael has managed to pull off being both a doctor and a serious, practicing writer (not to mention a father of two). Yay Michael!

 

 

The Heavy Jar

I religiously read my friend Mary Ann's blogsite, No More Commas Period. I've always admired MA's brevity, her positive outlook on life even though she never sugarcoats it, and her ability to focus on the simple everyday stuff. I also enjoy the occasional poems that she tosses into her blog mix. (MA is one of the few people I know who reads poetry even though she's not trying to be a poet, herself.) Yesterday she posted a poem by Mary Oliver, which inspired me to go looking for a favorite poem or two of my own.

Here's the title poem from Heavy Jars (Toothpaste Press), a book by Anselm Hollo. I've managed to hang on to Heavy Jars, and periodically re-read it, for twenty-eight years.

given the heavy jar full of all relevant informa-
tion, he dropped it on the sidewalk and burst out
laughing as the container & its contents shattered
and scattered in the raging blizzard. he had been
on his way to present it to her, for her to dispose
of as she wished, but with the surreptitious ex-
pectation that they might "go through it" togeth-
er. now, the absurdity of the undertaking had
become blatantly apparent, & he vowed to tell the
next full moon that he abjured such subterfuge
for ever: silence & starkness, these were the pe-
rennial conditions of birth, & love, & death, the
so-called great subjects, the ones no one could
ever say anything but the dramatically obvious
about.

Here's one more, written by the poet Jack Gilbert:

       Highlights and Interstices

We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional
and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children,
vacations, and emergencies. The uncommon parts.
But the best is often when nothing is happening.
The way a mother picks up the child almost without
noticing and carries her across Waller Street
while talking with the other woman. What if she
could keep all of that? Our lives happen between
the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.

from The Great Fires, poems 1982-1992
 

I'm Looking Foward to This Book

Here's a book I'm looking forward to reading when it comes out (Bantam, coming soon). It was written by Writing Salon teacher Michelle Richmond, who has taught both fiction and memoir here - and will be teaching an eight-week memoir class this summer. The title of the book is Ocean Beach. Here's an excerpt that was printed in the SF Chronicle.

Blogland, Kim Addonizio, plot, etc.

Novice blogger that I am, I only just learned that I can easily and quickly "subscribe" to my favorite blogs simply by clicking on a little orange icon in the lower righthand corner of my screen (when I am AT the blog I like), and a box pops up asking me if I'd like to Bookmark this site. I had to do some minor setting up, after reading the instructions on Firefox (my browser), in order to be able to do this, but it was worth it. (I don't know how other browsers work in this regard.) The "minor setting up" allowed me to create a special tab at the top of my browser page that I have labeled "Blogland." Now all I have to do is click on Blogland, and a drop-down menu appears that shows all my favorite blogs. If I click on one, I can see a list of all the most recent posts for that blog. Very handy for quickly finding out if someone has posted something new, recently.

This morning I revisited Too Beautiful, where Kim Addonizio's new book - a novel - got a mention. Kim's a poet, as most of you probably already know, so I was intrigued and impressed that she has now written a novel as well. (Kim and I were roommates for a while, back in the early '80s when we were both single moms. Her daughter was a toddler, my son was a baby. So long ago. . . so sleep-deprived, so NOT in my fifties!).

I  went to Kim's website to read more about the novel, not only because I was intrigued and impressed but because I've been toying with the idea of trying to write fiction, myself. This would be a HUGE leap for me, as I am mystified by the idea of writing fiction as opposed to what I've always written: poetry, personal essays, erotica, and "lyrical prose" that I'm not sure how to classify, genre-wise. I suppose the prose comes closest to resembling fiction, and now I'm trying to figure out if I want to attempt to turn it into bonified STORIES (thus my periodic references, as of late, to PLOT, a word that scares me mightily.)

I could ramble on about Kim, novels, fiction, my fear of plot, etc. but it'll have to wait. It's 8:15 a.m., and I've got an appointment in San Anselmo at 10 a.m. Haven't even gotten dressed yet. Oy.

Anyway, Kim's website led me to this interview with her in  the online journal, Slow Trains. Have a good Monday, all (whoever you may be). :-)