Because I am writing fiction lately I am aware of the little fictions everywhere. I hear the stories my fellow riders on the bus tell and I wonder how true is this, how inflated is that. So much is made up for the telling. Yet when I try to tell a good story, all the flotsam and jetsom moves in, clogs the drain, warps the plot, confuses the whole dam thing.

It was sunny and warm around here so I attached the weeds and dead leaves in the back yard. Confusion again where I want a well plotted, planned and planted medly of veggies and flowers. Sure, there are some months of work again and I might have something like that. A growing backyard in which to sit in the sun and read.
I've been reading Ann Beattie's and Lorrie Moore's short stories a lot lately. Inspired.
I'm painting too but not quite ready to show and tell. I'm not making that up.
I promise.
Smart stories from Beattie and Moore in the New Yorker:

Beattie Coping Stones

Beattie The Rabbit Hole as Likely Explanation

Moore Paper Losses

Moore The Juniper Tree
That oughtta keep you busy while I do yet another re-write, re-paint, re-plant.

Rachael

Today was a day off of sorts, a day to recoup after one of the strangest work-days I've ever worked (which left me enormously grateful to my co-workers). I didn't have my regularly scheduled writing class and although I had every intention to spend the day writing, instead I wandered, rambled around the house, read some required and non-required stories, and began to pull invaders out of the ground and start the process of nuturing some little seeds. This year I have a grow lamp (an artificial sun) and a heating mat and a schedule. This year I have a plan. There are mostly peppers in the seed starting unit right now but also some strawberries, some marigolds.

The wild onion type grass that grew like mad under all the mats of dried leaves...well that's not part of the plan. Weeding feels like a physical, ruthless, version of the kind of revision heavy writing I've been doing. I am pulling whole chunks of stuff out of the ground, deleting entire pages, and hoping that the tulips and the tales will be better for it.

We can grow stuff no matter what else goes on in the big bad world. I was struck yesterday by the compliment a colleague gave me, she said "you have the best attitude." I hope to keep my attitude fresh with some careful seeding and weeding. Less onion grass, more strawberry.

Thanks,
Rachael

I spent most of my day today cleaning and sorting, tossing out random old magazines, and donating lots of seldom worn clothes, and trying to impose some sort of order in our little house. I still have piles of things and plenty of space filled by un-necessary objects, but maybe there is more room for new ideas.

Each time I do this kind of weeding cleaning, I find projects started but not finished, threads of the same paintings and stories. The best of these will get to some sort of a finish this year, I think. I can sort of see a way to tie up some of my paper-doll people with my short stories, the weedy leafy drawings with my garden, and the hands and feet with travel.

If every drawing was a story, every story a drawing, I might have something here. Something coherent, consistent, communicative as it is creative. I can dare to dream...



As it is all so ridiculously tied to the season of purging and starting again, I tell this and then I'll turn the computer off, go upstairs and start some seeds before bed. These sketchbook pictures probably serve as the truest record of the best of my cluttered working visual and verbal method. I never really clean my sketchbook, though I ought to harvest from it more than I do.



goodnight then,
Rachael

We drove to Syracuse this morning to retrieve some paintings, spend some time together, and as we did the trees were full of snow. I tried to draw the odd beauty of lacy snowy trees but the drawings failed. My friend Paul sent me pictures of his backyard which tell what I mean. The morning, the light, the snow, all the white stuff seemed heavy on those thin black branches.

No, it's not what we wanted to see in late March when we are all hungry for our gardens, but this morning was shockingly beautiful and we magically got to see it.


I've been trying to become a better reader, someone who retains more, who connects all the little pieces into some cohesive whole. I have friends like that, they read well. They are well. As part of that project, I went wandering around the literary journals online and I found an ear (a great little poem for Evander Holyfield) and a story about zebras making jelly. It has made me just a little better to remember all the creative out there in this snowy world. Not at all cold. Not at all frozen.

Snow melts, stories get forgot, paintings come down from walls and meals are prepared and eaten all in a day. All in a day.

A domani.
Rachael

I've been writing fiction (Polish plumber story is done, garden story begun) and drawing more in my sketchbooks. If I could tell the stories of the people on my bus. I can draw only a little bit of what I see.
I hope you are drawing what you see. What you can. What you need to. I'm trying.