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Eight Candles

Eight Candles

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Today A Walker in the Suburbs celebrates its eighth birthday. This is hard to imagine — that for eight years I’ve been writing posts at least every weekday and often more. But I need no better reminder than the one starting this weekend. The blog’s beginnings are entwined with the vast snowfall we had that winter and watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics on the TV in the basement (when there was still a futon down there).

I’ve been reading some of my earlier birthday posts and thinking about how important it is to keep things fresh. A blog facelift is definitely in the works (at least in my own mind if not yet in code) and the writing itself can always be liberated.

How easy it is to get boxed in, both in life and in blogging, and if there’s one thing I don’t want for A Walker, it’s limitations.

Eight-year-olds are full of life — skinned knees and messy projects. And so I hope it is for this eight-year-old. And with that, I raise a glass (actually a cup of tea) to say, “Happy Birthday, Blog!”

(Photo: notonthehighstreet.com)

The Byline

The Byline

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In my full-time freelancing days my byline appeared frequently in national publications. My name in the big slick magazines, something I never dreamed could happen when I was growing up in Lexington, Kentucky.

But the byline lost its luster through the years. What mattered was the story — not the glory.

Still, I kept signing my name to pieces through my university publishing career: articles on hovercraft and soul craft and the Affordable Care Act.

Now, I work for an institution whose work I believe in and admire. I’m happy to put their story into words. They pay me well for those words, which are almost exclusively without byline.

Yesterday, for the first time in several years, “by Anne Cassidy” appeared on an article outside my institution. It might seem like a small thing — in many ways, it is. But when I saw it there at the end of the story (which makes it technically a tagline!), I realized how much I’d missed seeing it. Guess I’ll have to do something about that.

(On assignment in Bangladesh last summer, notebook in hand.)

Ursula Le Guin 1929-2018

Ursula Le Guin 1929-2018

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Ever since I heard the news this morning of Ursula Le Guin’s passing on January 22, I’ve been searching for a book of her essays. Having not yet found it, with the day ticking away, I’ll do the best I can without the hard copy.

I came to Le Guin’s work not through her science fiction but through her essays. One in particular sticks with me, “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter,” which is about women writing.

“Where does a woman write? What does she look like writing?” is the question Le Guin poses, after beginning with an image from Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Strangely enough, it was through a Google Doodle of Virginia Woolf (in honor of her 136th birthday), that I happened upon Le Guin’s obituary.

Woolf, of course, famously said that a woman needs a room of her own to be a writer. But Le Guin, a mother of three, writes here of women who produce great works of art without so much as a broom closet to call their own. One of them was Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote her husband a letter saying, “If I am to write, I must have a room of my own,” but who then went on to write most of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from her kitchen table.

There is much more to say here, but I’m sitting at my kitchen table — and, though I no longer have young children clamoring for attention, have a paying job that does just the same.

To be continued …

Hooray for Analog!

Hooray for Analog!

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Steven Spielberg’s movie “The Post,” which I saw yesterday, was a rousing paean to the press. But it was also a loving tribute to an analog world.

Reporters pounded out their stories on manual typewriters. Copyeditors used pencil on paper, making those marks that once seemed like a secret language to me — and are now a secret language to almost everyone. Typesetters set lines of type in hot metal, loaded slugs into plates. All the weighty, tangible things of a world left behind.

Now we live a digital life, ones and zeroes. We skitter on top of ice that we may at any time fall through. On Saturday, the people of Hawaii were on high alert for 38 minutes, thinking they were under imminent missile attack — a glitch made possible by one person making the wrong selection in a drop-down menu.

Are some things easier now? Yes, I type, my fingers tapping keys that don’t have to be pounded, correcting errors with a click instead of a messy white  liquid. Is it just my imagination, though, or do the stakes seem higher in this unweighted, digital world?

War of Words

War of Words

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One of my favorite scenes in the movie “Darkest Hour” follows the rousing speech Winston Churchill delivered to Parliament on June 4, 1940. This is the speech where Churchill exhorts his countryman to stand firm against the Nazi threat, the speech in which he says, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets … we shall never surrender.”

This scene was constructed to give us chills … and it does. It’s by no means guaranteed that Churchill will be able to build momentum for his plan, which seems almost daft. A flotilla of pleasure boats to evacuate soldiers across the English Channel? Fighting Hitler’s army to the death if need be?

The lines I loved most came right after Churchill’s speech when a member of Parliament asked, “What just happened?” and Viscount Halifax responded, “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”

At a panel discussion about the film, Director Joe Wright said the movie is a “recognition of the power of the word and the power of political speech to move nations.”

I tried to imagine that speech being given today, the sort of sacrifice it was asking for, the moral purpose it presupposes. It came from an era of words, not of pictures. Maybe that had something to do with it.

(Photo from “Darkest Hour”: Wizardworld.com)




Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article190595739.html#storylink=cpy
Paper Courage

Paper Courage

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Here at the short end of 2017, I awake as always with writing on my mind. I have my mentors, my sages, ones whose words lead the way. So this morning as I struggle with the words on my screen, I turn to words already set down by another. Words that reach across time and distance to encourage me, to set me straight.

No one has yet made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more like to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge. 

Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. 

Mary Oliver, “Of Power and Time” from Upstream 

R.I.P., Writer’s Almanac

R.I.P., Writer’s Almanac

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It always seemed too good to be true, a radio show just for writers. And now it’s gone dark. Every link I click leads to a Minnesota Public Radio statement about Garrison Keillor’s alleged sexual misconduct and the organization’s decision to terminate its relationship with him, Prairie Home Companion and the Writer’s Almanac.

The show had a 24-year run, debuting in 1993. I don’t remember when I first started listening to it on the radio, but I do know I’d turn up the dial whenever it came on, would glean some historical fact or the other, that it was birthday of George Eliot or the anniversary of the publication of Walden. When my own muse was on holiday, the Writer’s Almanac muse would step in. In one month, November 2011, it came to the rescue several times.

That was the fall I took the wonderful class A Sense of Place, whose professor, Charlie Yonkers (who became a friend), urged us all to have the Almanac delivered to our in-boxes. I did, and have never stopped.

My radio show station, WAMU, stopped airing the program a  few months ago, so I’d been paying even closer attention to the emails. The last one arrived November 29, which was, it informed me, the birthday of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott and C.S. Lewis. How will I learn this stuff now? Even the archives are gone.

So I re-read this last entry, pondered its power to inspire, my eyes lingering on the last line. It was the way all the Almanacs signed off, and I can hear Keillor reading these words in his distinctive deep baritone: “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.”

NoFiWriMo?

NoFiWriMo?

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November is National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, 30 days in which
would-be novelists are encouraged to apply their bottoms to chairs and produce
50,000 words. A contrivance, true, and one I was originally tempted to
disparage. A novel in a month? Really?
But when I thought about it, I realized I was probably more
envious than anything else. Where is the NaNoWriMo for nonfiction writers?
NoFiWriMo? Don’t we also need to apply our
behinds to chairs? Don’t we also need writing places like Come Write
In (a feature of NaNoWriMo, which I realize has now become an industry)? Aren’t our tortured souls also
yearning to Finish Something?
Of course, nothing is stopping me from signing up for
National Novel Writing Month and writing, say, a memoir. Nothing except the sheer terror of having to produce it, of course. And since it’s already November 17, I would have to crank out thousands of words a day to make the 50,000 word deadline.

No, thanks …  I’ll  just keep writing the old-fashioned way, word by word, page by page … blog post by blog post. 

Seeing Stars

Seeing Stars

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It was warmer this morning than the last few days, high 40s. Reason to pull on tights, sweatshirt and reflective vest, grab the flashlight and take a pre-dawn walk.

The crescent moon was out, the one that lets you see a faint image of the rest of the orb, like an eyeball pulsing beneath an almost-closed lid.

But that’s not what caught my attention. It was the stars.

I noticed them on the return, when I felt comfortable enough in the dark to look up. And there they were, so far away, so bright, so essential. I took a mental snapshot, have them with me now in the fluorescent-lit office, where I’ve found a quiet, unlit corner to write these words, to try and see stars again.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

The Green Chair

The Green Chair

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When the children were young and needed a time out, they were sent to an out-of-the-way place in a corner where they could cool down and ponder their misdeeds. We called it (in a fit of creativity!) … the green chair.

Not a green chair, but the Green Chair, a place of banishment and shame. Cue the Dragnet theme, add the moans and excuses of  misbehaving children. “But Mommy, I didn’t mean to  …” And factor in the exhaustion of a parent trying to write magazine articles while her young children played underfoot.

It’s been years since the green chair held a squabbling, out-of-control preschooler. Now it’s for a different type of confinement. It’s where I sit if I have a deadline or phone interview when I’m working at home; it’s my go-to spot for complete concentration.

I almost never scream and cry there, but I do get something done. In fact, if there wasn’t already a Green Chair … I would have to invent one.