How I spent my summer vacation

Some of our memories are buried; others rest just below the surface. And then there are those that inhabit some nether world from which they’re chivvied out by a picture or a place, a familiar taste or a song, a word, a prompt from the unconscious. My “adventure” in the summer of 1980 was hiding under some bad times that I had no desire to recall, but once it popped into my head, I could hardly wait to write about it.

The other thing about memory that struck me as I worked on this piece in particular is that you may think you don’t remember much about a time or event, but once you start dredging it up, more and more detail surfaces, things you never expected to appear.

So here’s “Fruit Tramp” - a story that even my nearest & dearest haven’t heard. I couldn’t be happier that it was selected for publication in the University of San Francisco’s outstanding literary journal, Switchback.

 

Call it sleet

I was besotted with the online journal Sleet as soon as I saw it, first because of the line (a true exchange from a writing workshop) that gives it its name:

“Ice crystal rain fell from a gray-black sky.”

“Ice crystal rain? Why don’t you just call it sleet?”

And then by the content. I submitted an essay, but the editor, Susan Solomon, informed me that they don’t publish straight-on nonfiction. She steered me to Sleet’s “Irregulars”–a category for vignettes, odds & ends. I went to the folder I call ”Orts and fragments” (from Virginia Woolf of course), where I stow writerly musings, responses to prompts, starts & fits, snippets to save for possible future use.

“Word of the Day” (linked here)  is one of these, and I’m happy to have it in the new issue of Sleet. I’m in good company too–click on “Irregulars” (after you’ve read mine, of course) and check out some of the other pieces.

Susan also solicited a recipe from me for her Winter 2012 Sweet Sleet Supplement. My “Hello Dollies” are immortalized in the archives.

 

500 Words

Exactly–not 499, not 501. That was the challenge put out by Marco Polo Arts Magazine last year. I thought it would be a terrific editing exercise, and it was: slicing and dicing a 3000-word essay down again and again, until it was just a shadow of its former self, while trying to keep the essence intact. Writing in the second-person plural was my other challenge with this piece, using the voice of “we”–a kind of Greek chorus–that I so admired in The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides.

The result is ”Kissing Frogs,” linked here, which was one of the winning pieces and just published. It’s about online dating–a true story, though fortunately not my personal experience; I’m just a bystander, coach and chronicler, one of the chorus. Names and identities have been changed to protect all of us.

 

Anticuchos to Zucchini

My friend and mentor Priscilla Long introduced me to the abecedarium, a collage format in 26 sections, “a considerable space to contain and thankfully to restrain a large subject,” she says in her excellent manual, The Writer’s Portable Mentor. Two of Priscilla’s alphabetical essays inspired me to try my own. There are a lot of ways to look at life from A to Z, but I seized on food as the natural choice, the source of much of my writing and the ideal way to encapsulate some highlights and lowlights, from the comfort food of childhood to the haggis in Scotland.

An additional treat was to have my essay, “Leftovers on Lettuce: ABCs of a Life in Food,” published in Middlebrow, with its play on Virginia Woolf’s snooty but tongue-in-cheek essay in which she castigates “middlebrow” as “the bloodless and pernicious pest who comes between” the highbrow and the lowbrow, “the bane of all thinking and living.” The editors seek to reclaim it as a positive concept, calling Woolf’s own essays middlebrow, so I consider myself in good company on their pages.

My piece opens with an epigram from Woolf, who wrote frequently and evocatively about food. So, in homage to Virginia and with thanks to Priscilla, here’s my latest.

 

“Ode to Basil”

I sometimes say that I don’t like to write from prompts–I’m a slow starter, & brilliance doesn’t flow at the drop of a hat or a word. I need to mull it over, let it steep. And yet. And yet, a number of my successful essays have come from prompts, especially the ones from Judy Reeves’ Saturday retreats. Back in the summer of 2011 a theme was food, one of my favorite topics in life and in writing. My notebook section from that day is marked with a red-stamped strawberry. At one point during the day Judy distributed some paeans to food from Pablo Neruda’s brilliant Odes to Common Things. We read them aloud–I remember bread and tomatoes, onions and artichokes. When we finished, Judy said, “Now write your own.”

Last summer I sifted through my old writing notebooks, where I sometimes find hidden gems, what Virginia Woolf calls “orts, scraps and fragments” that I might stitch into something new. And there was my long-forgotten “Ode to Basil.” I rewrote it in prose form–I don’t think I changed a word–and sent it to Susan Bono’s charming Tiny Lights Journal. A feature at Tiny Lights is the “Flash in the Pan,” what Susan describes as ”those shining flecks of pure gold that often appear when we least expect them, when our hunger for bigger prizes is temporarily sated, when we relax and take the time to look at what’s really in our hands.”

I’m delighted to have “Ode to Basil” (linked here) in the latest “Flash in the Pan” from Tiny Lights. With thanks to Judy for stirring the pot of creativity.

 

Three in print

Last year I had three essays published in print journals. Print, as in words on paper, volumes that I can hold in my hands, flip through their pages. And yeah, to see my own stories in print.  Unlike online journals, though, I can’t pass them on with links, and I can’t expect people to buy these somewhat obscure journals. I thought it seemly to wait before posting them here, but as this is the repository for my writing, it’s time. It’s a new year and I have more work coming out this spring, so I want to “go public” with these recent forays into my life. The titles will link you to my reprints of these works, with credit – and thanks – to the original publishers.

“Love at First Bite” is a story of love, life and sushi. It was published in City Works 2012, the journal of San Diego City College.

“My Space” pays homage to Virginia Woolf, as does much of my work. It reflects on my quest for “a room of my own.” It was published, appropriately, in the first issue of a new journal, Killing the Angel, “a literary experiment inspired by Virginia Woolf.”

“Walking in the Light” is about my love affair with opera. It was published in an Australian journal, Skive, in a special memoir issue in September 2012.

 

Fishes with feathers and hanging out with Amy Bloom

I was a little skeptical when I first came across The Feathered Flounder, a literary journal that publishes writing by authors who are 60 or older. There’s no question (and no choice) that I qualify, but would I want my work segregated by age? Well, the site won me over. I was instantly enamored with the logo, then impressed with the people behind the scene and the work published. I was especially delighted to see that Amy Bloom, a well-known contemporary author whose work I admire, was a recent contributor.

The piece I submitted has an aging focus–I find myself drawn to the topic a lot these days–as well as some reflections on being the mother of a daughter and the daughter of a mother. I was delighted when it was accepted for the Winter issue, which is now online and linked here: “On the Road Again.” 

And because the contributors are listed alphabetically by first name, not only am I first, but I’m immediately followed by Amy Bloom. That’s what I call keeping good company.