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A Woman, Writing

A Woman, Writing

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This morning I passed a woman in the lobby. She was sitting in a chair, writing in her journal.

Not tapping on her phone, not scrolling down the tiny screen. But engaged with the paper and the pen.

I noticed this not only because I believe in it and practice it, but because it is so rare.

When you address the page, the page does not talk back to you. It absorbs your words, the wise and the silly. It gives you space, a blank expanse without spell-check or word complete. For that reason, it is serene, even empowering.

Today is International Woman’s Day. I just wrote and posted a story to celebrate it. But when I think of Woman’s Day 2018, what I’ll keep in mind is not a year of marches and #metoo. It’s the quiet communion of writer and page. It’s the image of a woman writing.

(Pensive, a painting by Edmund Blair Leighton)

Deadlines, Real and Imagined

Deadlines, Real and Imagined

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Writing this blog is completely voluntary, of course. No one is paying me to do it, no one is expecting me to do it. Which is why, when things are especially crazy at work, I post here later in the day.

Today has been one of those days. Having waited all day for a logical stopping point, I’ve finally given up. I’m writing now at an illogical stopping point — meaning that I still have work to complete before close of business.

Ironically, it’s often when I telecommute that I don’t post here until later in the day.  Overcompensation, a different routine, real deadlines interfering with imagined ones.

But which are more important? The real ones demand response, will get it one way or the other. The imagined ones can slip away. Does that not make them the ones that need me most?

Seems that way to me.

(Rushing here, rushing there. But at least I’m not riding Metro today.)

Post Patience

Post Patience

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As I slowly rebuild the blog’s home page inventory, I’m reminded of its original intent:

The snow has clung to every available surface. The most spindly branches of the forsythia have “Vs” of snow, and I can imagine the accumulation, patient and slow, crystal attracting crystal until little pockets formed. I hope this blog will be the same, a slow, patient accumulation of words.

Today I focus on the patience part of this equation. Patience has never been my strong suit. In the little inventory I sometimes take at the end of the day — when could I have been kinder or stronger? — many failures come down to impatience, wanting to check off a box, complete a task, rather than waiting a while, living with the the slight discomfort of uncertainty.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.”

That will be my mantra today, to live with what is unsolved, to love the questions themselves.

What Happened?

What Happened?

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Yesterday I wrote my entry as I always do, pushed “publish,” and checked to make sure the blog post was there. It was … but nothing else. Instead of 14 posts on the page, there was only one. The other posts are reachable, but you must click on them from the right-hand column. Not a catastrophe, but not what I wanted to see at the beginning of my day.

It was, as usual, a hectic morning. I was already late. So I came into the office, hoping that when I arrived and checked the blog, it would have magically fixed itself. This is something I believe in, by the way. I’ve known many appliances that have fixed themselves — phones and computers and maybe, once, an answering machine.

This was not one of those times.

So now I’m writing today’s post, hoping that when I push “publish,” it will appear on the page — along with its 13 lost cousins.

Here goes …

(Choosing a calm photograph this morning!)

Morning of Words

Morning of Words

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It’s a quiet morning, the stock market is tanking, the government open again after a five-hour shutdown during the night, and I sit here perfectly content with my books, journal and laptop. Not that I’m living in a bubble or anything!

But truly, what can you do? We live in concentric circles, do we not? And when the outer orbits are caustic or frayed, we pull inward, to what makes us happy, what makes us whole.

What’s making me happy now is reading Ursula Le Guin’s No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (2017). I was going to say it was her last book, but am glad I checked. Looks like there’s at least another one coming out.

Here is a passage I marked to copy later:

I know that to me words are things, almost immaterial but actual and real things, and that I like them.
I like their most material aspect: the sound of them, heard in the mind or spoken by the voice.
And right along with that, inseparably, I like the dances of meaning words do with one another, the endless changes and complexities of their interrelationships in sentence or text, by which imaginary worlds are build and shared. Writing engages me in both these aspects of words, in an inexhaustible playing, which is my lifework.
Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood. Words are my magic, antiproverbial cake. I eat it, and I still have it.

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)




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