Check out my story, Stealing Dirt, in Brain, Child, the magazine for thinking mothers… http://www.brainchildmag.com/2015/06/stealing-dirt/

It’s springtime again in New England. A brutal winter, more snow than one could imagine, folks in Boston walking amid drifts higher than their heads. It all looked like Norway, or somewhere in the northlands. We skied, made snowmen, snow shoed, and spent many, many hours indoors. Folks got cranky. School was canceled and then canceled again. Therapists had lots of calls. People were deprived of vitamin D and all that comes of that. Depression, anxiety, despair. It was a classic New England challenge.

So spring this year will be welcomed like nobody’s business. Already people are starting to smile… daylight savings time has turned the corner for us. It’s light after seven pm, and the party can begin.

I, for one, have been thinking dark thoughts about the violence surrounding our moment of awakening. Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket, rallies in Germany with boisterous ‘Gas the Jews’ slogans, ISIS and the beheadings, Ferguson and the evidence of our culpability as a nation that espouses equality, justice, pursuit of happiness and all that virtuous stuff. I am weighed down under a heavy coat of despair. It doesn’t warm me. I cannot get distracted by discussions of blame. We are all to blame. We are all the victims.

Are we not all Jews? Or Marathon runners? Or journalists? Or cartoonists? Don’t we all suffer from the condition of being unjustly beheaded, stoned, enslaved, colonized, displaced, firebombed, shot, pummeled, knifed, humiliated, shamed, abused?

If this is not the truth, it is also not untrue. Monica Lewinsky takes back her pride. Noteworthy. She speaks out against shaming. It is a shame that, just as the sun offers its renewal after so much chill and ice, we are bombarded with images and words of violence and assault.

It has been a time of hatred, perhaps an anomaly, but more likely a perennial human state in response to difference, misunderstanding and the inevitable consequence – aggression. Is it about race? Religion? Economics? How can we achieve equanimity about such things?

I want to say no to all of it – targeted or generalized hatred and the actions resulting from it. A tsunami of blame and retribution, revenge and original sin.

I want to lie down on this bed of thorns and close my eyes, to block my ears and hum loudly to not hear. I’m as sad as I’ve ever been, and there is no vision of a future path. Perhaps I can just rest here for a while. I ought to have been born a bird. I will return as a bird. To fly above or dig for worms. A piping plover by the sea, scurrying hither and yon, in and out, no progress required. Back and forth in the big sky of it all.

And yet, there is the question of possibility, of impact. I stand at the shore, one bird, a plover, and dream of transcendence. No, I dream of calling a halt to the flow of the sea, a reversal of tide. I raise one wing in the universal signal of stop. Then, as the ocean crests and crashes its powerful wave upon me, I bow my head in submission.

I would like to glide above fear, to rise high on the thermal air current of history and soar, free to observe and not project, to hold what is without flailing. There simply is love and there is hate. I cannot change the rhythms of the universe… the yin and the yang. I am awed and then blinded by the possibilities. A flock of gulls pass in front of my window, and I gaze at the formation, the knowing, the cohesion. And all that flapping. I am flapping and flapping in the wind. Perhaps it will carry me aloft and place me down again in a new order. I do not think so. I think this is the way of the world, our burden to bear.

I don’t have any solutions. I sit in an old bookmill watching out the window as a cascading waterfall does its thing, the water pressing its way under snow and ice to reach some destination out of sight – a bigger river, a lake, an ocean. Can one question the why of a waterfall pushing down and around and beyond? It simply is. I wish for wisdom, and yet I come up wanting. I am wanting to be the bird that flies with its friends overhead right at sunset, sweeping across my vision. Gliding past the beauty and the horror. No need to solve puzzles, dilemmas. Its job is clear – dive for food, fly for a living. I hide my head under my feathers and close my eyes. They are wet with tears, a tiny waterfall washing out to sea.

May, springtime

Time for blogging… Sitting by the Duxbury bay view, slate water flattening into horizon line, in a house by the sea rented with six other Boston area poets and prose writers, every year for be it thirty seasons for them, maybe ten for me. A time to be in relation with notebook and computer screen for a week and also laugh til you hurt dinners that taste better than anything ingested at home.
I forgot to bring the graphic memoir work so I will ‘have to’ write anew. A new piece or the beginnings of that nonfiction book about growing up with… well, growing up with whatever it was I grew up with. Everybody’s got something, the name of a new memoir by a contemporary tv reporter, says it all.
It’s spring in New England, a very appreciated time, this year in particular after a heavy-duty winter. It’s also when everyone feels that pressure to do everything, plant everything, prune everything, mulch and fertilize and mow and deadhead and water and water and water. Everything. And then it will all die. Again. A metaphor for one’s life. All that energy spent and then we die.
I take a long walk on Duxbury outer beach at low tide, finding the winding path among the multicolored beach rocks, skirting the ebb and flow of the crashing surf. It’s on this walk, as it is along other walks, that I begin to imagine what I want to say in my next writing project. An amazing thing – that the right brain yearns for times spent doing other things than thinking about the particular problem to be solved. Times like in the shower, or driving to somewhere, or maybe digging in the garden. There it is, the very idea that has seemed so illusive. Maybe it’s not the best idea, nor the most unique, but it’s an idea appearing when there was none. The brain is limitlessly surprising.
I’ve been thinking of connection. Connection to children, to lovers, to friends, to family. They say it’s all that matters in the end. I say that it is a huge piece of what matters, but maybe it’s connection to oneself that trumps it all. I am working at listening and responding first to myself, and then going out and doing the same with others. Writing and art are one way. Blogging is another. Maybe sitting and hearing a heartbeat is another. It could be mine. It could be yours. Kabump. Kabump. Kabump.
Gloria Steinem spoke at Smith College last week at a conference about women. Many young women from India and Africa and Moslem nations attended. Gloria Steinem is as graceful a person as I’ve seen in ages. Stunning in her elegance and smarts. She spoke about domestic violence and its being the foundation of warring nations. About women being a threat to males because we own the means of reproduction, the only thing men can’t do. About the hundreds of schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria. Everything she said seemed pithy. I long to be pithy. Pithy. Pithy.
Another pithy woman, Irene Butter. A member of my manuscript group is writing a young adult book about Irene and invited us all to meet the protagonist of the story. Irene is a Holocaust survivor who was interned at two concentration camps and then survived. She became an economics professor at the University of Michigan and also began speaking at schools about her experience during the Holocaust. A most impressive woman who has won awards internationally, and most noteworthy has hundreds of letters from school children, mostly middle school aged, who tell her about the impact of her story on their lives. I wept watching a short documentary about her life, full of her speaking to these children and their enrapt faces. Inspirational.

August, summertime

I couldn’t find my library card amidst all the flotsam and jetsam in my wallet. I continued to rifle through the stack of cards… AAA, the free entry to all state parks I’d scored at age 62, the Mass General Hospital blue card for the mammogram services I didn’t trust my local hospital to handle correctly, the Holocaust Museum membership and the AARP card.
“So many cards, so much junk,” I announced, nodding my head back and forth.
“Yes, it’s true,” agreed the calm library staff member. He was young, fairly nondescript male (is that a requirement for library staff, that they be modest, not stand out?) wearing a plaid shirt of some sort and a pair of chinos, average height – what was that for a male, 5’9”? I was average for a woman, 5’5”.
I continued to look down into my wallet’s bowels.
“But some of it is beautiful,” he countered. He didn’t mean the stuff in my wallet. He meant in life.
And at this I looked up and saw him. He was a person, be damned, a particular, unique human being. We locked eyes and I smiled with pleasure.
“It’s true,” I said. “You are so very right.”
I had found a kindred spirit, a soul who gloried in the wonder. I would have wandered off into my own inner chatter about serendipity or karma or some such spiritual natter if he hadn’t continued.
“I was looking at this book the other day about moths. All these moths. Amazing…” He seemed spellbound.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m afraid of moths.”
“Hmmm,” he reconsidered. “They were just photos, not live moths…”
“Yes,” I said. “I can imagine they must be beautiful.” I did not want to rain on his parade.
“They were unique, mostly symmetrical patterns…”
“Artistic displays, huh?”
“Yes,” he answered.
I looked behind me. There was a small line forming. “When I first learned to drive I had to take my car on a freeway every day to drive to college,” I explained. “And all these moths would come flying at my face from inside the dashboard.”
“Oh, I see.” And with that we figured out how to handle my missing library card.
As I left with his instructions about what to do next time I came in, he threw out, “Just come find me. I’m on it.”
I felt incredibly taken care of. Think of it, my own private library person.
Two days earlier I had gone to get a bagel at the local coffee shop, and as I walked up to the counter, the young, gangly guy sporting one of those partial goatees called out, “Lisa, right?”
“Oh my god, you have such a good memory,” I said.
“Plain bagel, scooped and toasted with cream cheese,” he announced confidently and with a hint of pride.
“You are amazing. How can you remember everyone who comes in here?”
“There aren’t that many folks who ask for a scooped bagel.”
Was that it? When I got to the car and found a toasted scooped bagel with no cream cheese, I ran back to the café.
“I only have selective good memory,” the young man joked.
“Yes, I see,” I said with a smile. “But you select for the important information.”
I knew this was the truth. Something about getting older made it more than obvious. It was all, every damn thing, about relationships. Those with the people we love, but even those with the guy at the library and the coffee shop.
I had seen them after they had shown themselves as the specific individuals they were.

It is summer and, while spending time at the Cape, I remember the research article I recently read about the sound of water being soothing. No surprises there. I am lying down at the shore and listening to the waves hit. It’s windy at the beach. There are few visitors, scattered widely along the small dune leading down to the breakers. It’s the moment that the waves curl over, even here in the brown Atlantic, that I covet. I could sit and watch for eternity. Is it a universal pleasure? I know people who live on the coasts, both coasts, who never bother to come and see the glory. They live in Hollywood or Pasadena, or even Santa Monica, or Manhattan, Brooklyn, Newton and Cambridge. It mustn’t call their names.
It’s in my genes, the love of the sea. A childhood image… there I go, barreling into the waves, fearless, swimming for the cold of it, for the rocking and the floating and the I could swim to China and no one would notice of it, out, out past the jetties, past the little old men snoozing in the swells, hands folded over pregnant bellies, eyes closed, trusting the waves to pull them home. Out beyond the marathon swimmers doing their relentless crawls, one arm snaking past the next, head to the side, sea pouring out, the mouth open like a cistern, and then down into the deep again. Out past where the lifeguard could find me, so far that I couldn’t hear the whistle even if one thought to blow it. Would I have listened? Come back, you’re too far out, return to shore – the bullhorn warning, a big open mouthed pantomime I couldn’t have witnessed even if I tried. That far, I tell you.
You wouldn’t catch me attempting that today. This breezy moment at the shore I go up to the tush and no further. A lot has happened to tamp down my courageous streak. I think long and hard about death, about risk, about benefit and loss. I’m an actuary of life’s possibilities.
Shush, roar, quiet. Shush, roar, quiet. Silence. I lie still and write and read for hours. A different sort of connection… to the natural world, and to the self, I suppose. Something about the curl of the wave, the hiss of the water over pebbles, creating sand. It’s all epic. An epic story. I’m fine with that.

Sad, sad. An ending of a quite spectacular residency. The artist group has become ‘family,’ and last night partied the night away in a celebration of our month here at La Napoule. Everyone has finally finished presenting his or her work to the group, always after a huge French meal offered by the lovely chef and all around housekeeper, Lise. Once dinner was over and we plopped ourselves down on the huge green couches in the Villa Marguerite, it was a challenge to remain awake for the slideshows and talks, but aside from the contest of who could put the most folks asleep the quickest, it was a treat to see and discuss each other’s artwork. For those of us writers, part of the challenge became finding a way to describe our work for people who didn’t understand our language. Also a lovely experience… how does one tell a story knowing that the listener has minimal English? With Carmen, the Romanian, we listened to her poems in the Romanian language just for the sound, the music, and she attempted to translate into English, which gave us simply a taste, un gout, of the possibilities.

As for the proletarian yacht, it launched successfully, leaving its berth, not the accurate nautical term I am sure, between other large yachts and managed a spin around the marina, parking here and there to make a statement. The three sailors, yachtsmen, drank wine in wineglasses and spread cheer as they maneuvered the wooden platform, more like a raft than a boat, through the choppy water and carried messages of international cooperation, with their flags from all our various home countries. Given the scene in the world as we end our residency, this may be the best spot to be for glasnost and cooperation. I have been keeping track of the Ukrainian situation, especially since our Russian artist, Tatiana, lives near the area of conflict.

I, also, had my moments of great elation. My graphic storybook is going great guns and is exciting for me, albeit it won’t be a best seller given the subject matter… growing up with a Holocaust survivor mom who becomes mentally ill. But, hey, lots of graphic books are about hard stuff, right? And I came up with an outline for my next real book, similar in fact to the graphic book, but more research oriented about the legacy of mental illness on the ensuing generation. Not a ton has been written about that, as compared with children of alcoholics, etc. I also managed a couple quick trips to Menton to do archival family research, since my father lived there at the end of his life. Lots of time weaving my way around the maze of winding streets in the old city trying to find a specific house, and also dealing with various town officials. I don’t think they enjoyed my less than impressive French…

As for the found object part of my work… I managed to create a scroll of our adventures here at La Napoule, which I will share at open studios tonight, and wrote a long short story related to the history of the chateau and its owners. This one is an homage to Molière and a farce, and, most importantly, it’s fiction.

What will I take from this time? Something about beauty, something about the cumulative value of having day after day open and free for making art, contemplating, imagining, and, perhaps most surprisingly, something about the amazing changes that can happen, like chemistry, when you gather together nine completely disparate people and ask them to live for a month as a group. Assumptions are challenged, connections are made, irritations come and go, but something is created that has its own form, larger and more profound than the nine individual parts.

I will leave this place with rich memories and the sense that when I look back at my time here at La Napoule, it too will remain almost a fiction, like in a dream.

(The image below is from Salle Ecole de Nice at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art at Nice, France)

Chateau and Alps

Arrival at La Napoule residency next to Cannes in France. I had already spent four days with my cousins in Paris, also meeting with some folks about possible future projects in France for me. So far just thinking.

So I arrive by plane in Nice and then to La Napoule, a medieval chateau that was refurbished completely by an American family, Henry and Marie Clews, in the early 20th century. Henry was a sculptor and Marie a singer with architectural chops who directed the renewal. As you can see by the photos, it is beyond belief gorgeous. The artists stay in the Villa Marguerite next door to the chateau, facing the Mediterranean Sea. Yes.

This is clearly the most beautiful residency I have ever attended, and the group turns out to be varied and sympa, French for sympathetique, I think. There is a Russian, a Romanian, a Spaniard, a Canadian, three from the U.S., and an Italian. Mostly visual artists, but a poet and I fill the writing category. I will actually work in both media. A choreographer from San Francisco is due to arrive today to finish the group of nine.

The group almost immediately leans in the direction of trash art, or more politely put, found object art created in situ (on site). An idea emerges… let’s make a boat, a socio-economic commentary on the yachts surrounding us at all the docks on the ocean. A proletarian boat, but it has to be seaworthy and travel at least long enough to deposit some of us on a neighboring quai. Should it be a catamaran for stability, or a canoe shape? A group enterprise. And the found object/trash angle seems quite hip.

The Romanian poet comes bearing gifts from her country. I am very moved… there is a flag, a red and white beaded bracelet for each of us representing the spring flowers and the light, or spirit; there is a glass orb containing various beautiful colored pieces of glass inside, and most impressively, there is a real egg for Easter hand painted… absolutely gorgeous and fragile. And Carmen offers us each a book of her poems in Romanian and French. Amazing. We will all wear the red and white bracelets as our symbol of unity.

I had imagined working on a small graphic story book about my mother, and also divorce. Maybe two separate stories. And I had brought images from early paintings that express some feeling about particular moments with my mom. And in the marriage. But the trash angle begins to influence me, and I think perhaps I need to find something here, something found, with which to create work. Will it come to be? Like the proletarian boat, I would like to believe so.

Three men hanging my drawing… now that is a first.  I have hung shows on my own, with friends, and even had very generous gallery helpers in the past, but this was a new experience.  I started out in the midst of the gang, doing my part, but very quickly discovered that these guys were better on their own.  So I stood back and just directed – ‘please don’t leave a gap,’ ‘please redo this one, it’s sticking out’ – that kind of thing.  Amazing.  And don’t get me started on the benefits of an electronic lift.  I am not going back to ladders, ever.  As soon as I finish this blog, I am looking at Craig’s List for my own crane.  Finally.

Apparently there is a strategy to blogging effectively, and I probably should do some research to inform myself.  But here it is a rainy, gray, somewhat sleep inducing January day when I would have preferred to be out walking at the Knightville Dam or the Northampton Reservoir, but was delayed by a series of unfortunate small, mundane life events.  So this blog will be my journey outward for this Saturday.  Untutored but hopefully satisfying.

The day began with a somewhat disconcerting chirping bleep at regular intervals from 3AM on.  Of course, it was the new hardwired smoke detector outside my bedroom door.  In my sleep sodden state I first dismantled the free standing carbon monoxide detector, hoping to solve the problem quickly and return to bed.  It was not in fact that simple, and the beeping continued until the time I emerged from a far away bedroom, figured out online how to turn off the correct circuit breaker, take a hardwired thingie apart, find what kind of batteries it needed and replace them.  Before going to the hardware store, however, to buy new perfect batteries to avoid a replay of the middle of the night issue, I decided to also remove the sump pump which had broken recently and bring it to the hardware store for a replacement model.  My friend Dan sweetly and generously dismantled the sump pump, and we brought the wet rusted thing to the bathroom to make sure it was broken.  In that process a plant managed to fall over on the floor, and the bathmat in the bath was soiled with sump pump juice and oil, now needing to be replaced.  I cleaned up the mess.

We went to the hardware store, found the correct sump pump, bought batteries, returned home to find that we needed a large wrench to take apart the old sump pump before attaching the new one.  Dan was about to go to find a larger wrench but came out to the driveway where his car had a flat tire.  He replaced the tire in the snow, I put the new batteries in the smoke detectors, turned on the electricity, went to open my window shade which seemed stuck in the down position, it unwound in my hands, cutting a finger and blood managed to leak over the whiteness of the shade.  Red blood on white snow.

Okay, I say.  There is a lesson here.  It is definitely not a good day to take any risks, for one.  A drive anywhere would be tempting fate.  I will not leave the house, at least until a reading of Linda McCullough Moore’s short story pulls me to a local venue.  But, I ask, is there some message when days like this occur?  Should we take heed?

In the meantime… I have a huge 22 foot drawing going up at the Mass Mutual Convention Center in Springfield Ma in a couple weeks and dropped it off yesterday.  My studio in an old mill in Holyoke was closed down in December after my being there for 25 years, so I will be looking for new space in the Northampton area this spring.  And, most exciting,  I am off to a writing residency at La Napoule on the Mediterranean near Cannes in France for the month of March.  It’s at a castle right on the water.  I am thrilled.  I guess there have to be rainy days like this to let the other days feel like magic.  Uh oh… is that a chirping sound I hear coming out of ….

Here I am at my new website…. and I will be blogging.  A new trick.