End of August

 My former writing group invited me back for an August Write-A-Thon. Write something every day. I'm sharing this one here:

End of August

Yesterday I saw an airplane, the kind of airplane I usually would have boarded by now to visit my parents across the country. 

Tonight I went for a walk on my street, the same neighborhood I’ve walked almost every day for the past six months. I heard crickets, the same kind of cricket sounds I usually hear by now when we meet up with my college roommate from out of state and go camping, a camping trip we promised ourselves annually as soon as I moved to the east.

Just now I had a hug, a hug I’m grateful for, from my husband, the only person allotted to giving them to me right now. 

Writing Fire

I did it. I spent almost every day of November writing for at least 15 minutes every day. The one day I missed, I made up the next day with double time.

Most of what I wrote was towards the goal of revising the novel I drafted in 2013 during Camp Nanowrimo. I had taken a year off from that process during 2014-2015 and have been gung-ho to return since my WAC (writersandcritters) writers' retreat in spring of 2015.

So I was feeling great at the end of November, proud of my stick-to-it-ness and thinking if I kept up the pace I could get through the entire draft again by summer.

Then the first Saturday night of December I sat down at my desk and I felt my heart start to race and my stomach to clench. This was ridiculous. To finish a novel with any quality at all at 15 minutes a day? For one thing, I also need to parent, stick to my goals of regular yoga and meditation, other short writing projects that I feel driven to write, another project due in July (to be discussed later - related to my 40th birthday), a healthy amount of exercise and, uh cleaning and, oh wait, yeah, I also teach 30 hours a week not mentioning prep. time, tutoring and my additional role this year as a mentor for new teachers in my grade.

Even 15 minutes every day is too stressful.

To do it with depth is ridiculous.

So I tried a new take. First of all, I took a break from the novel. WAC expects me to submit two writing samples and four critiques of other people's samples every month. However, they take two weeks off at the end of December. So with the freedom of nothing due, I sat down last Friday and wrote... just wrote, by hand, in a notebook that no one will see but me. I write by hand rarely because it's less efficient when I'm ready to submit something, but now I had fallen out of love with writing and I needed to get back in. To love a person it really helps to actually be in the same room with them and not remove yourself with a screen.

(I'm not even going into what I've learned as a special education teacher about the different neurological process of forming letters and words by hand instead of by typing.)

That Shabbat instead of reading a novel I flipped through Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg for the first time in years, and began rereading cover to cover from my favorite writing book, Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott.

I wrote again Saturday night, and then again Sunday morning, finishing one draft that I hope to look at and maybe revise, but maybe I won't as I don't know yet what's there.

A writer friend said we are defined by the things we do every day... so to say you are a writer you must write every day. However, I'm a teacher too, and don't show up to work on weekends. I certainly don't want to be the kind of person who romantically claims to be a... a writer... and never writes anything, but even when I can't write, I know that ultimately I will have to write. I just have to. So even if I quit for days, weeks, even months at a time, I will come back to it.

I will not necessarily come back to other things I've thought I was: bicyclist, basket maker, musician. I like to bike and make baskets and play music, but they are not in my blood. I only dabble. I don't ask or need them to be part of my identity.

So right now I'm trying to compartmentalize my week a bit. Instead of spending a little of every day on all of the things I love, I'm trying to group some things and weekday activities and some as weekend. It's not as easy as it sounds. My physical and mental health depend on daily yoga and meditation, and the weekend gets very full with everything else that can't happen during the work week, like laundry. However, I think I really can spend some more real time on writing on the weekend, at least for now. Some other things will suffer, no doubt, but right now this isn't negotiable. I have to do this. If I can pour my writing more into Friday through Sunday, I think I can do it better. If some of it is for show and some of it is not, I'm entering writing headspace again. If I can maybe jot down something during the week that writer's see, then I'm tapping it too.

One final note, halfway through my writing this blog post I had to take a break to go to a friends' birthday party. Someone at the party remarked that she used to have hobbies but just haven't time in this stage in her life.

I started to feel a little guilty, that I can do this and she "can't." And I'm not judging anyone else's choices, but I just need to be clear. Writers have to write, however they do it, even if it means having a messier house or leaving parties earlier or getting up extra early or even only devoting certain weeks of the year to their craft. We just have to. How other desperate writers make this happen is their business.

This is how I'm handling it right now.

Welcome, 2015!

So it's the secular New Year, a time when lots of people make resolutions. I don't have any new resolutions to share right now. Rather, I find myself checking in with my intentions as of Rosh Hashanah/2014-2015 school year.

This year has been designated as a scaling-back year. The biggest part of that was taking a hiatus from my writing group and, hence, my novel as well. I've done very little volunteering and am taking stock of some questions about my work.

Instead, what I find is I'm settling into inhabiting my life. This has become a major phrase for me. It means
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Art

I came to the alarming conclusion recently that not all people think of art in the same way that I do. I don't just mean a single work of art and that two people shouldn't have diverse reactions to it. I mean that I have discovered not all people see art in the same life-defining soul-wrenching way.

I'm going to talk primarily about movies here. Yes, movies are an art form. A few months ago U went out with some friends to see a movie that I'm not going to name for reasons which I will explain below. In any case, he went with these friends to this movie, all of them thinking they were going to an action movie. They were planning to come home afterwards and just go on with their lives as if nothing significant had happened other than them having a fun night out together.

When they came out of the movie they talked about it. His friends chattering away about nitpicky details and saying
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Hoshanot Article

And here is the aforementioned Hoshanot article, printed through JOFA.

One Week In...

Just sent this to my writer's group;

Need some Nanowrimo cheerleading please. I need to average 2,500 words per day (skipping Saturdays) to finish before my vacation deadline.

I've just put my characters through a painful experience that is going to lead them towards being hurtful to each other.

I'd rather be out playing with my family right now but I'm trying to keep moving forward.

I don't trust my writing perspective because I'm having to change POV between two different characters and I hadn't wanted to keep it to one.

And I'm hungry but refuse to get out of this seat until I've at least finished 1,000 of today's words.

And going back to what I said before, I really hate putting my characters through pain, but I realize it's necessary.

And yesterday I was glued to a book written by a WAC member that is so much better than I can do that I just don't know if I can measure up. (Angie, that's yours.)

Augh! The martyr-ish self-satisfied agony of writing! What a weird way to spend my summer vacation!

Wake Up Typing!

 Camp Nanowrimo starts tomorrow! I'm psyched!

IPads In The Classroom

Another article of mine up as of yesterday -- Using and Not Using iPads To Teach Reading.

The Movement Of Water

I had a second piece of fiction published this week. I'm very proud of this.

I also got a rejection letter last night from the same group. No, not a rejection... a tentative acceptance if I make some revisions. No, not a rejection at all. I'm on a role, but it's hard work. The story I'm referring to is one I already worked on for about a year and a half and I don't want to have to go back into it, but I know they're right in what they said.

Ah well... flying to Austin to visit family today. Maybe I'll have some inspiration on the long flight.

Hurricane Sandy Final installment

In Hurricane Sandy Part 14 I mentioned an article I was writing. Here it is.

Making a Difference

Tonight I had some friends over to celebrate my 9 year remission anniversary. (That's one-fourth of my life that I've been a survivor.) Somehow I'm connecting it very strongly to the loss of my mentor, Michael this year and I spoke about him to my friends.

Throughout the night we talked about many things and it kept coming up again and again, the idea of people who had made a difference in our lives, often by a single interaction among many. I keep feeling like the work I want to do in healing the world will not happen through teaching. But maybe I've been wrong. Two of the friends there tonight are my friends because I taught their daughters and made a difference to them directly. I've sometimes been thinking I want to get out of the school environment because it is so intense, rushed and stressful in many ways, but maybe I'm needed there to help kids navigate it. Also, I care more about emotional landscape and survival than I do about teaching reading and writing. But maybe that's the very reason I need to continue.

I've just been published at the PLP network where I wrote about my childhood and compared it to contemporary suburban NJ childhoods. Maybe taking the question and knowledge I have of my ideal world, and taking it with me when I enter the world in front of me, can provide some small amount of respite or change or possibility to the children who enter the room to work with me each day. And maybe writing about this reflection can make a difference to others further away.

Maybe I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing and don't need to worry about it so much.

Time

Amazing article by Anne Lamott on finding time to write and for other creative pursuits. In short, this is an article on how to live.

Seminar

Geez I'm far behind on here. I didn't tell about ND's birthday, but part of that is I'm trying to give her more and more privacy. I haven't told about... well, anything for a bit.

My parents are in town now for Channukah. Mom and I went today to see Alan Rickman (and the other actors too of course) in Seminar. Later I may post my photos from outside, though we didn't get to see him afterwards or get his autograph. (Nope, just Jerry O'Connell's. I hope you're able to detect that I think that's cool too.) We had front row seats which was often given that we came primarily to ogle over one of my mom's very favorite actors and yes, he was very much within reach a few times.

The play, though, was about young writers trying to break into the world of writing. There was very much the tone of wanting desperately to be found, be good enough, to be big enough to be noticed, and not to lose that fame. It made me sad. This is definitely one way to view a writing career, but what a depressing one. How hard to be constantly at the mercy of the public or critics. My career, if you can call it that, is so much smaller, but like the other writers in my group, it's realistic. We all enjoy our craft, have some talent, and can always benefit from feedback that can help our work. We face a lot of rejection, but most of us have income that allows that rejection to be only emotionally trying rather than financially devastating.

That's all I can say on that tonight. I enjoyed the play. Like "Life In The Theater" that I saw last year, it juxtaposed young and old characters within the arts. Moving and funny and sad all together. And awesome to be around some famous faces.

In Time For ND's birthday

I'd love to write about the actual details of her birthday when I get some time, but meanwhile, here's a link to an article of mine that was published today. The website belongs to a doula friend of mine who asked if I could contribute an article with reflections on ND's birth. I didn't mean to finish the process with her right on this date, but I guess birth is on my mind near the birthday!

Inspiration and Agony

A friend of mine recently got a job with Teva and has been ecstatic since. On Yom Kippur he told me about a transformative experience he had davening Shacharit with a leader in the woods. He wrote a lovely blog post about it.

I listened as he told me about this and found myself exclaiming internally, "Oh oh oh! You've never davened shacharit in the woods before? Oh, how sad!!!! Oh, you know now about the light inside us all that comes from G-d... you hadn't had that before either?" I am so happy for him to have discovered this and feel a simultaneous plummeting inside me as I'm realizing just how few have ever even touched this. It feels as natural as water to me. I grew up in Corvallis, OR with nature and incense and touchy-feely Jews who loved Judaism for its connection to life itself and not just to text or walled-up inside shuls. To me this is what it is.

Over the years my day-to-day view of Judaism has changed, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, but that connection between nature and the soul and Torah are already inside me. It makes me so sad when it's obscured by materialism or simply by the devoted black hat suited culture that is passionate about G-d but disconnected from land and sometimes from their children because they don't always know how to connect their spirits together. What torture to imagine that it's not for so many people who want that connection so badly, sometimes without even knowing it.

Before this friend told me this story, we were sharing how grateful we both are to have jobs in where we know we daily engage in passions of our life that make a difference in the world. But there's a piece of me that still feels something is missing, a potential connection isn't meeting. Is this just the norm that comes of not being able to do all I want all at once -- change the lives of children while still writing and meditating and being present in my own free time and being a fun mother too. Or is it a gap I need to heal? I don't get to teach spirituality. I teach reading, writing, math and how to be a citizen from a child's perspective. The passion of teaching comes through connecting with children and families, particularly when there are barriers to overcome just as social or behavioral differences.

That's just it... I love connection. I'm connecting with them, sometimes helping them connect to each other, but are we connecting to G-d? Am I connecting all the parts of me, are we connecting all to each other, to nature, to our inner spirits? Or must the writer and meditator parts of me be reserved for different times.

In short, am I doing everything to the best of my abilities exactly as I should be? Or someday should I do it a little differently... the writer, meditating environmentalist teacher of behaviorally challenged children...

who loves to just sit and be alone sometimes in the woods.

And who already does that sometimes, returning to see the perfection in the present exactly as it is right now.

Summer Summary 2011 - Cancun, Haines Falls, Portland, Alaska

What a fabulous summer this has been. Unbelievable.

Things I accomplished around the house: cleaning out a few rooms (no, not as many as I thought, but more than if I had done none), finally clearing plastic flowers from flower boxes left here by previous owners, lots of time with ND etc.

Things I accomplished in writing: Had hoped to write for 40 hours, but got to about 32, not counting whatever I might squeeze in in the next few days. Sent out over a dozen pieces of writing. To date have received 2 rejections of a story and 4 poetry rejections, but accompanied with one acceptance to The Aurorean. (Fall/winter issue... maybe I'll post a link for that if it becomes available later.)

Then there are the trips.

I already wrote a plethora about Mexico. See previous posts labeled "Second Honeymoon" beginning with "We Actually Did It!"

Then there was the camping trip with emarcy with whom we've gone every year since I was pregnant with ND in 2006.

After that I had a few weeks of home to finish some things up and get ready for Portland. In Portland I visited a few friends... strange because there are fewer of them I want to see, less to talk about, etc., but I still feel so refreshed after returning to my roots.

In Portland (click on "Portland" for pics) we hit The Enchanted Forest (incidentally, I've been trying for over a decade to figure out how to write about my obsession with this place and now, as a mom, I think I finally know my hook. We also did The Oregon Zoo and Seaside. (You Jersey shore people know nothing of beach beauty. Nothing. Please forgive my arrogance on this, but it's too entirely different worlds.)

The second week of our Portland trip, ND attended Tryon Creek Day Camp.

Then... off on Alaskan cruise!!!!

Here are my parents' pics.

Here are ours.

We were together for nearly everything, except in Juneau. There my parents and ND went to a nature center at the bottom of the Mendenhall Glacier. U. and I took a helicopter ride to the top where we hiked with crampons. Probably the coolest thing I've ever done in my life.

Now we're back and I have just a few days left to scramble together doing things like unpacking and blogging about the summer. Then onto a new year with new students, new fulfillment and an occasional glance both backwards and forwards at summers.

(8/29/11) Please note I've just added an addendum with one more event at this blog post.)

Hardly Any

Home sick today. Felt hardly any guilt about it. After all, I've had a much healthier year and I went in yesterday only to find myself so fatigued I needed to leave by afternoon.

That doesn't mean I didn't obsess today. I spent plenty of time wondering whether I should be sleeping, writing, watching a movie, starting Shabbos cooking, doing yoga. Plenty.

But no guilt. At least, hardly any. That's progress.

I-Interactions

I've been thinking of writing an actual article about this... consider this a brief draft.

As a parent I have discovered that a sure way to make for an incomplete, dissatisfying or downright distressing evening is through too much multitasking. Well, multitasking of the wrong sort anyway. I can cook and interact with ND, but I can't do anything school related. It's been a blessing for me as, when I come home, I devote that time to her and my household instead of work. This has been as good for me as for her.

Multitasking takes us out of the moment. It works against anything inside us that is trying to be present at all and to actual enjoy what is transpiring or what we are doing (however mundane).

I hate iphones and the like because of this. I hate being in a room of people while some small part of them is wired out of the room and away from me.

There is one small exception to this.

U. got an ipod Touch recently. It's mostly been a little less useful to us than we had hoped. Fun to have, but definitely a toy rather than a tool at this point. We've gradually developed some rules or routines about when to use and when not to, because we don't want it getting in the way of our family interactions.

So it has been a lovely surprise to find one way in which it actually brings me closer to people. My parents and half-brother live 3000 miles away. I talk to my parents once or twice a week, although often it's hard to know what to talk about. I talk to my brother far less frequently. I would prefer to be with them, sharing an activity, but that is seemingly impossible at this distance.

Now here's the thing... There is a game on our i-gadgets called Words With Friends. It's basically Scrabble that you can play long-distance. It is now a part of my weekly routine to be engaged in a game with any one of them... sometimes multiple games. And when I play a word while on the exercise bike in the morning, or right after dinner in the evening, I'm interacting, however briefly. Sometimes, too, U. and I conspire together, helping to figure out what move to make, and sometimes we let ND actually move those letters onto the "board."

It can become addictive, and I have to be careful I don't jump away from my immediate family mid-conversation when I hear that little chime go off on the iPod, telling me it's my turn. We have to keep each other in check sometimes. But I have to admit, this is one time when this little home-wrecking piece of metal is bringing me closer to someone, instead of further away.

What We Give Up

David Baker, the poet I met with on my post about Chautauqua, said to me that one of the ways we can call ourselves writers is by asking what we give up in order to write. I had planned to do a lot of writing tonight, but I've been so enjoying this evening with U. exercising, planning our summer trips and watching a little TV together. I'm going to put in a little time now on a new piece of writing that I'm inspired to start, thanks to my new writer's group. Obviously also putting some time in here on the blog. What am I giving up? A little sleep tonight, I suppose.

It's OK. I may not be writing a ton, but I'm writing.

Goals Gradually Coming To Fruition

A wonderful thing happened about a week ago. One night when I was too tired to get off the couch, instead of browsing Facebook, I went to LinkedIn and clicked around in a Writer's Cafe I once found there.

I asked a question about how I could find an online writing group, and, a few days later, was invited into one. I couldn't decide at first whether I could do it. It takes a commitment of two submissions and 4 critiques per MONTH. I was sure it was irresponsible for me to take on this extra work as I simplify my life.

But I couldn't say no. I applied, they accepted me, and I've spent this whole week spending stolen minutes reading posts and previous submissions.

This morning I got up before 5 and spent my first hour actually working on it... sent in two critiques and a poem I began in November.

It's 6 now. I have time for 10 minutes of yoga before I move on to the rest of my morning agenda.