tongue and groove

La Salonniere recap

i can hardly believe it's already been 10 weeks since i  launched my interview blog, La Salonniere. in lieu of a new interview this week, i'm doing a recap of the first nine interviews. what a wonderful group of talented and creative people! if you missed any of their interviews over the last couple of months, i hope you'll take a moment to catch up because each one is chock-full of insights and tips on how to lead a more authentic, creative life.

thank you for reading. more great interviews are on the way!

and now, here's the recap.

kick *ss on Kickstarter

brilliant example of how to create an extremely effective video using simple items already on hand:

discovered via this article at GOOD: How to Kick Ass on Kickstarter

February

it appears that by a fluke of library availability, i have designated February as Celebrity (Auto)Biography/Memoir Month.  ;)  it didn't even occur to me until this moment that these are all about musicians. huh. i guess i meant it when i said i wanted to incorporate more music back into my life this year.

didn't January go by in a blink? it's always such a bittersweet month for me and usually feels sort of jumbled...like it's a weird mix of post-holiday letdown, birthday celebration, depression over another year gone by with what(?) to show for it, resolution dilemmas (do i? don't i?), etc. then suddenly it's February and 1/12 of the year is gone before i even feel organized and fully grounded.

February feels like it will be a good month. i'm still taking one e-course and have two more coming up. La Salonniere is progressing nicely. i'm using my spirit notebook and feeling inspired. i didn't make any resolutions this year, but i did start making daily to-do lists. but these lists feel different. i write them more from a place of intention, so they're less a checklist of action items and more a smaller list of things i really want to be doing.

i liked this video from Gretchen Rubin about this month's theme of self-knowledge at The Happiness Project:

watching it, i started thinking back to my 10-year-old self and the things i liked to do...

* ride my pink & white Schwinn stingray bike

* teach myself dances by watching American Bandstand after school

* read Seventeen magazine and imagine that someday i'd live in Manhattan and work as a runway model/Broadway dancer/magazine writer

* help my mother run the local beauty pageant

* model in the local fashion shows

* sew and bake at 4-H club meetings every Wednesday after school

* practice my comedy by making my little brother perform skits with me and doing impressions for my grandmother

* play air drums to the Rolling Stones "Between the Buttons" album

* practice my hand-waving in the living room so i could be like my role model Carol Merrill on "Let's Make a Deal"

* lie on the grass in the backyard and stare up the clouds

hmmm...i don't see "cubicle" or "office" anywhere on this list...  ;)

Liz Lamoreux

i'm very pleased to tell you that this week's featured interview at La Salonniere is Liz Lamoreux, author of Inner Excavation - Explore Your Self Through Photography, Poetry and Mixed Media.

ever felt overwhelmed or scared at the thought of writing poetry? i was so afraid of poetry until a few years ago that i wouldn't even read it. know who helped me conquer that fear? Liz. she can help you, too, and in this interview she shares how 'poem notes' can do just that. you can read her full interview here.

thank you for reading and supporting La Salonniere. 

what questions should i be asking myself?

for decades i've been joking with friends, "why can't someone just pay me to be me?" so imagine my glee when i read this quote in Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World):

"Basically I get paid to be myself--and for my imagination. My job is to be as creative and as eccentric as I can possibly be, and my job changes every day because I'm obsessed with changes."

dream job, right? except it's not as easy as it sounds:

"Not trying to be anything other than who you are. That's an absurdly difficult thing to do, and it takes many years."

no shit.

this morning i had the sudden thought: maybe i should make a list of all the things i say i should be doing, but don't do. like writing, for example. for probably 25 years, people (the infamous "people") have been telling me that i should write. given that i have nothing but time on my hands these days, it seems like if i really wanted to write, i'd be doing it. (more than the occasional blog post, i mean.) do i say i want to write because i actually have the desire, or do i tell myself i should have the desire because others tell me i might have a knack for it?

at the library the other day, i spotted an anthology of essays, Mentors, Muses & Monsters - 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives. in the opening essay, the book's editor Elizabeth Benedict writes of her mentor, Elizabeth Hardwick, someone she studied with in 1970's:

She had been a towering figure to us when we were very young, the first real writer any of us knew at a time that's hard to imagine now, when "women writers" were an exotic species, and when wanting to grow up and be one put you in far more exclusive company than it does today. It was not as rare as wanting to be President--which no one wanted to do--but for either sex, it was far from the bustling, vocational school industry that it is today.

suddenly i was 17 again, in Miss M's junior English class and being handed back my modern, satirical take on the Cinderella fable. she'd given me an A- on the story and written in the margin: "The minus is because I doubt its originality." i felt like someone had kicked me in the solar plexus. she thought i'd plagiarized it? although i'd slogged through the horrible 500-word essays sometimes assigned to us in high school English classes about books i loathed (so-called classics), this was the first piece of original writing i'd ever dared to attempt. i can still remember lying on my twin bed in my childhood bedroom and smiling when it was done because (ohmygod) i think it might be actually sort of good and maybe even funny. my dear friend who sat next to me in class saw how crushed i was about the teacher's remark and tried to console me by telling me i should feel flattered that my writing would seem like a professional's. but i didn't feel flattered--i felt invisible. it felt like the message was loud and clear: you are not capable of doing this. and i didn't write again until i was 30.

going back to Benedict's description of wanting to be a writer in the 70's, it did seem exotic and rare to have those desires back then. (i was 17 in 1972.) i lived in a small town with a single father who to this day, i've never heard utter the words "creative" or "creativity." "art" was for a very select few and in those days i think i equated art with painting. (i had two friends whose dads were painters.) i'm not sure it occurred to me that performers were artists, even though i'd been performing (often secretly) since i was little, let alone that art could be associated with words. i wasn't a reader back then. in fact, i hated to read except for Seventeen magazine and i loved Seventeen for the images, not the articles.

in November i began keeping a 'spirit notebook' after seeing this video by Lori-Lyn (she talks about her spirit notebook beginning at the 1:30 mark). the other day i realized that there are more collages in mine than anything else. (i realize we call them dreamboards now, but i've been making them for 30 years so still think of them as collages.) ;) i've always been powerfully drawn to images, yet i often try to do most of my communicating in a more linear fashion with words. today i'm asking myself: do i do that because that's what feels most natural, or do i often use words rather than images because i think that's what others expect of me?

scrolling through all of the lovely messages left on my Facebook wall on my birthday earlier this month, it jumped out at me that the only two people who remarked on my humor or wit were two old high school friends, one of whom was the friend who tried to console me over that A-. the three of us reconnected at Facebook about 1-1/2 years ago and write to each other a couple of times a week there, so my humor is on display for them on a regular basis. in Mondo Beyondo we were asked to do an exercise to come up with our core values. humor is one of mine. that secret performing life i kept as a child? a big part of it was practicing my stand-up and impersonations. i live for humor, yet i'll bet most people who read here would be surprised to learn that. i don't often display my humor here because when i've tried to do that in the past (on any of my blogs), it's often been misinterpreted. so i keep that part of myself offline for the most part.

it's only just now occurred to me that Miss M not only snatched away my dream of writing, she may have also snatched away my dream of humor because the thing i loved most about that essay i'd written was its humor. the other day i read a post by Martha Beck, 20 questions that could change your life. number 10 stopped me in my tracks: "What's so funny?"

people are surprised when i say that i never had a teacher along the way who inspired me. the response is usually: well, surely there must have been one...? no. i had a lot of adults along the way tell me what i couldn't do and often what i should do, according to their beliefs and/or their perception of me. i think that's why sometimes i feel bothered by some things i've seen emerge in the blogosphere over the years. do we take on certain likes, activities and pursuits because they're really what we desire, or do we adopt them to fit in? do we choose our tribe, or do we let our tribe choose us?

the #1 question in that list of 20 from Martha Beck? "What questions should I be asking myself?" i guess i just answered that.

The Cowgirl Way

in Gary Shteyngart's brilliant satirical novel, Super Sad True Love Story, women in his future America wear transparent onionskin jeans that expose their genitals and porn is part of mainstream media. it seems a bit shocking at first, until you realize...wait a minute, didn't MTV just premiere a teen 'drama' called Skins that's now being called out for child pornography? when we live in a culture where Snooki can have a NY Times bestseller (and i know nothing about Jersey Shore or her book) and the Kardashian sisters are famous for, well, being famous, it's suddenly not such a big stretch of the imagination.

i love to scour the new releases section of our library to discover wonderful books i might otherwise not think to look for. last night i read a wonderful YA book by Holly George-Warren, The Cowgirl Way. who doesn't love cowgirls?! the opening line in the introduction:

"Always saddle your own horse!" That was the motto of Connie Douglas Reeves, a Texan who stayed in the saddle until her death at age 101 in 2003.

it's a wonderful book and i learned about an important slice of American history. while women back East were leading traditional, buttoned-up lives, women who came West in the 19th century were blazing trails:

...for most of the nineteenth century, no woman in America could vote, run for public office, or own property. This began to change in the West, however, before anywhere else in the country. In 1869, Wyoming passed legislation that gave women the right to vote and hold civic office...The leader in the fight for women's rights in Wyoming was Esther Hobart Morris. Esther helped draft the women's suffrage bill there with William Bright. When the legislation was signed into law on December 10, 1869, newspaper headlines declared, FIRST WOMEN IN THE WORLD TO WIN EQUAL SUFFRAGE! The women of Great Britain sent a congratulatory telegram: "To the women of Wyoming on the triumph you have won for all women by the emancipation of the women of your state from political serfdom."

Women were buying ranches and doing their own cattle drives. We've all heard of Annie Oakley, but there were so many other women who performed amazing stunts in Wild West shows. They had to fight to be included in rodeos, especially when they could beat the men at their own competitions. These were amazing women who could ride bucking broncos and rope steers. There are still cowgirls trying to make it on the rodeo circuit today, but given the decline in the ranching life, many have to leave their ranches to seek employment in more urban areas.

how did we get here? how did we find ourselves in a place where our cultural images of women are often ones that objectify rather than revere them? i see it all the time on Facebook, where girls and young women post self-objectification photos of themselves and it makes me so sad. this isn't about Puritanical values or about being a prude--it's about wanting to have female role models that inspire us through courageous actions rather than the size of their silicone breasts.

call me old-fashioned if you like, but i know one thing: the Women's Professional Rodeo Association has just gained a new fan. given a choice, i'll take The Cowgirl Way any day.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

UPDATE:  this NYTimes story was apparently published the day i posted this, but i'm just seeing it two days later via a journalist's tweeting of it. the title of the story? Only Cowgirls Run for Office

Maeve Brennan

as i crawled into bed last night, i grabbed the tall stacks of softcover books off my bedside table and began going through them to see which one i wanted to read next. i'd gone through about two-thirds of them when i came upon The Springs of Affection by Maeve Brennan. i remembered that i'd purchased it because of the glowing reviews on the cover, since i'd never heard of Brennan. i'd been thinking about Ireland recently, what with the financial woes the nation is facing, so i decided that next up on my reading queue would be Irish author Maeve Brennan.

i got settled into bed with the covers just so, opened the book and a folded-up newspaper clipping fell out of it. i'd purchased the book at the thrift store and hadn't noticed the clipping at the time, but i often find things inside of books i've purchased there...postcards, bookmarks, receipts, etc. the clipping was an oversized page from The Irish Times Magazine dated November 15, 2003. it was an essay from the High Life section entitled "In From the Cold" written by Angela Bourke. i began reading it and was astonished to learn that Maeve Brennan had once been the toast of New York. she had worked at the New Yorker for more than 30 years. the book of short stories i was about to read had been published after her death in 1993 through the efforts of  a book editor at Houghton Mifflin who had tracked them down. as you can see from this photo, Maeve Brennan was very beautiful, and by all accounts, a very talented writer. before the New Yorker, she had worked as a fashion copywriter for several years at Harpers Bazaar. it appears she was brilliant, witty, stylish and maybe even ahead of her time.

her life took a very sad turn. she succumbed to alcoholism and mental illness. she ended up homeless and at one point was reduced to sleeping in the women's restroom at the New Yorker offices. she died in obscurity in New York at the age of 76. at the time of her death, she was unknown in both the U.S. and Ireland. it made me very sad to read how her life turned out, since it sounds like she might not have received the help she needed for her illness.

Angela Bourke (who wrote the article i found in my book) wrote a biography of Brennan in 2004, Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker. here's a January 2005 review of it at Bookslut.

you can read more about Brennan at her Wikipedia page, and here's an April 2010 post about her at Colin Broderick's blog. at the end of both you'll find this remarkable tidbit:  Angela Bourke suggests Brennan may have been the inspiration for Truman Capote's Holly Golightly character in Breakfast at Tiffany's since they had worked together at both Harpers Bazaar and the New Yorker. we can never really know, but for it even to be put forth as a possibility suggests that Maeve Brennan must have been one-of-a-kind.

hunting

i love that moment when you've finished a book and are now in the hunt for the next one...that 'what am i in the mood to read?' moment. when i woke today, i rooted around in the two tall stacks of books on my bedside table to see what might strike my fancy. sometimes i go through three or four books before i hit on the one that feels right right now. this morning i opened up a novel, read a few paragraphs and thought, "hmmm, not now..." then i spied Melisssa Bank's book of short stories, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. i'd read it when it was first published in 1999. i'd seen her read, in fact, at Powell's on Hawthorne. i'd been living in Portland for several years at that point and it was nice to hear her read in what had been my old neighborhood Powell's...from my first neighborhood there. somewhere along the way i'd given away or sold my hardcover (signed!) copy. [sidebar:  it's nice to not be attached to possessions, but sometimes i could care just a little bit more. end of lecture to myself.]

i seem to recall her reading from a story set on St. Croix and i remember how exotic that locale seemed when i read the story myself. how ironic that seems now, since a year later we were living 40 miles from there on the island of St. Thomas. i remember enjoying the stories, but i'd forgotten how good they are and how much i loved her particular kind of wit. googling Bank this morning, i'm astonished to see all these years later that this book was compared at the time to Bridget Jones's Diary. they're nothing alike! a woman wrote it, therefore it must be 'chick lit.'  gah. in that Salon interview, Bank mentions that she enjoys reading Pam Houston. if you've read Houston, you'll understand when i say that this book is much more in a Houston, than a Fielding, vein.

some of the stories are set in Greenwich Village and it made me sort of miss New York. i've never lived there. have visited many times, but not for a very long time. and then i started thinking about all of the places i've traveled--often alone--and how the person who traveled to all of those places seems like a character in a book of short stories to me now. and then i wondered what that says about my current life.  ;)

but back to the Girls' Guide...i also discovered in my googling that two of the stories were made into a film starring Sarah Michelle Geller and Alec Baldwin. oh, no no no! Baldwin is completely wrong as the Archie Knox character! even so, i will now have to watch Suburban Girl via Netflix to see how it turned out.

*photo of Greenwich Village by surekat, licensed under Creative Commons

how not to be dream-bored

in 1978, Shakti Gawain wrote a book called Creative Visualization. i read it in 1981 (and i remember the year because i vividly remember where i was living when i read it). i don't remember how i came across it...maybe via my airy-fary mom, or maybe it was on display at my neighborhood bookstore, the one where Van Morrison used to hang out in the coffee shop. (it's published by a Marin County publisher a few towns north of where i was living.)

i was living in Mill Valley with two roommates...an old friend who was a dancer and choreographer and a woman who worked at a ceramics factory by day and took Scientology classes by night. i was spending my days making little more than minimum wage selling ridiculously-overpriced clothes (a la $400 blouses) in a snooty downtown boutique. i had devoted the previous year of my life to one of my biggest passions:  studying dance. i'd lived a couple of counties away then, driving two hours round-trip two days a week to immerse myself day and night in classes in technique (modern, jazz, Afro-Haitian, ballet), stagecraft and dance history. i'd supported myself by working the other three weekdays as a housekeeper for a wealthy chiropractor and his family. i was in my mid-20's and still trying to find my way. (and i suppose there's no need to point out the obvious...what's changed?!)  ;)

Creative Visualization was a revelation. it was a simple book and a quick read. i don't mean it's simplistic; i mean Gawain writes in a clear voice that makes the concepts easy to understand. as she noted in the 2002 revised edition (that Amazon link), she and her friend had very little money and almost no knowledge of the publishing business. the book had been placed in just a few bookstores and quickly sold via word-of-mouth. as of 2002, more than 6 million copies had been sold worldwide.

for a year or so prior to reading the book, i'd been making a lot of collages. i'd hang them on my bedroom walls for inspiration. when i reached the latter part of Creative Visualization and saw a chapter called "Treasure Maps," i got very excited. ohmygod, my collages had a name! i'd been making treasure maps all along and didn't know it!

fast forward a few decades and there's Oprah and The Secret and the "Law of Attraction" (precepts written about by other authors earlier in the 20th century) and dreamboards. Gawain wrote her book after visiting India in the early 70's. some of these ideas have been around a very, very long time. whether or not we hear about them depends on timing and marketing and the zeitgeist.

i love dreamboards as much as the next gal. hell, i've been making them off and on for 30 years! :) but given that i've been reading about them for such a long time, i don't often get truly excited about them. and then yesterday my friend Lori-Lyn posted this video. she begins with a brief introduction about why she's talking about dreamboards on 11/11. i love the way she lays out her thoughts here, and she radiates such a beautiful, calm, loving energy. watching it got me inspired enough to walk down to Borders yesterday afternoon (coupon in hand) to purchase a large spiral-bound notebook to use as a "spirit notebook." if you can spare 10 minutes, pour yourself a cup of tea or coffee and take a look.

 

lay down your somebody

November has brought extraordinary weather, with temps in the upper 70's. Tuesday afternoon i took myself to a local park. i'd done my civic duty in the morning and knew that the results of the election were likely to feel awful to many of us. i figured there was no point in sitting inside on a glorious day stewing about it, so i spent the afternoon sitting by a pond. i read and dozed and sometimes just took in the view. looking at these photos, i'm struck by how nature can change and brighten the colors on the foliage, while softening them at the same time.

as i was heading out for the park, i grabbed Unless by Carol Shields, which i'm really enjoying, and a journal from a small stack of them on a bookshelf. as i was reading, i reached for the journal to write down a quote from page 107:

The examined life has had altogether too much good publicity. Introversion is piercingly dull in its circularity and lack of air.

and then there was this, on page 144:

(This is why I read novels:  so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.)

that's why *i* read novels.  :)

the journal i'd grabbed off the shelf was one i'd had awhile and had hardly used. i remembered that i had  liked the design of it, but the paper was a bit thin for my liking. when i flipped it open to jot down those quotes, i saw that only a handful of pages had been used. and then i noticed that one of the few times i'd written in it had been exactly three years before...to the day.  that sort of intrigued me, so i read those three pages. it was clearly something i'd written upon waking and given the length, i suppose they were morning pages. i thought i might share it here in unedited form. (in other words, forgive some of the writing.)  ;)

from 11.2.07:

if you were not in fear, how would you live your life? if you stood inside a dread-free zone, what would your activities be? what could you accomplish? where would your thoughts go? would you be living your dreams...or would they be living you?

maybe it's not a matter of 'creating' our dream life...of manifesting our dreams (out of thin air). maybe our dreams already exist 'out there.' maybe it's just a matter of stepping into them...of slipping them on, like a super-shero's costume or an invisibility cloak. maybe our dreams take on extra oomph when we wear them. it has nothing to do with outward appearance...the outside is just a representation of the inside.

maybe one's 'dream life' isn't a thing, but a place. maybe i'm already living it on another plane. maybe my actual dream life is a distorted glimpse into it. maybe that's why i wake after a few hours' sleep. maybe that's all i'm ready for right now...maybe it's just a little too intense for my waking self just now. because lately when i wake, i feel an almost guilty pleasure...as if i shouldn't let on that i've been having this great life in my dreams. because even though it's bizarre, it's great...and i love it.

what can my dreams teach me? to take the lid off my life, dump out the contents and let all the unexpectedness fall out. i need to breach the dam that's holding in my unexpectedness and let it start flowing.

and i need to stop caring...about myself. not in a self-care way...that's always a good and necessary thing. but as in caring what anyone else thinks...of me. that's the phrase that's always left off, isn't it? we say we can't do something for fear of what someone might think...but it's think of me. as if we're somehow the caretakers or guardians of anyone else's thoughts. we limit ourselves to control others' emotions. we hold back so someone else might not feel something...about us. wow. talk about self-centered. it doesn't get any more egocentric than that. think how effortless our dreams might come to use if we could step into them having laid down our caring burden first. if we could choose to not be somebody. if we could lay down our somebody...and step into our magic.