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From Place to Words and Back Again

From Place to Words and Back Again

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I learned from the “Writer’s Almanac” that today is the birthday of Sarah Orne Jewett, born 1849 in South Berwick, Maine. A descendent of doctors and sea captains, Jewett wrote poetry and historical fiction but is best known for her short stories.

She is a rare writer for me, one I came to know through her home rather than her work. I had yet to read Jewett’s stories when I wrote an article on historic homes of New England that took me to her house in South Berwick.

I’ve never forgotten the upstairs writing room, what it was like to look out those thick glass windows, imagining the world Jewett knew, the New England shipbuilding culture that was vanishing as quickly as she could describe it.

It’s a funny thing, meeting a writer first in her house. It’s not unlike the acquaintances you form when traveling on a train or airplane, seat-mate confidences. There’s a quick and easy intimacy that flows from the place that then lingers when you read the words.

After that trip, I read what many consider Jewett’s masterpiece, the story collection Country of the Pointed Firs. And there it was again, the place I had seen, the lowered light of that northern clime, the herbs, the dark firs. From place to words and back to place again.


(Photos: The house now and then, courtesy Historic New England)

This Feather Floating

This Feather Floating

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This hour along the valley this light at the end
of summer lengthening before it begins to go
W.S. Merwin, Seasons

I read these lines this morning and find in them some consolation for the days that are passing, that are spinning us so surely into fall.

For how better to face the next turn than to capture what is fleeting, to pin it down on the page?

this whisper in the tawny grass this feather floating
       in the air this house of half a life or so

Residual Delays

Residual Delays

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This was one of those mornings on Metro. Not the worst, certainly not the worst. But a lurching, stop-start, running-late kind of morning.

Often when this happens the explanation is “we are experiencing residual delays due to an earlier incident.” So I’ve been swirling that phrase around in my mind this morning. Residual delays. Residual. Delays.

In this case residual means what is left after the larger part is gone, of course, but there is another definition of residual, one used in the entertainment industry — payments for past achievements.

What are the residuals of riding Metro? It’s greener and healthier — I drive less and walk more — those two come immediately to mind.

But aren’t there delayed residuals, too? Metro gives me time to write and read and think. A friend of mine, a poet, has completed a book’s worth of verse in her last few years on the Red Line. I write in my journal, rough out essay ideas, edit articles.

Though it often tries my spirit, there is no doubt that Metro nurtures my mind. Not shabby for a delayed residual.

Room of One’s Own

Room of One’s Own

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As a work deadline nears I’ve been spending more time in the office — 11 hours yesterday. Though I’ve become an office nomad at home — and I prefer it that way — I find myself sinking into the quiet here. And it strikes me, not the first time, that the office is a “room of one’s own” for me.

When Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman must have “money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” she probably was not thinking of an office in a modern workplace, clicking and typing, moving text with a cursor, putting out an alumni magazine. And I certainly don’t pen novels in my office. I write and edit articles about faculty and alumni accomplishments.

But what I do have here is freedom from the hurly-burly of home. Not just from the dishes that need washing and the carpet that needs vacuuming, but from the world of the family with all its attendant joys and worries.

What I have here is separation, and on the best writing days I carry that separateness around with me like a wonderful, warm cloak.

Details

Details

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Last night, a conversation about writing. About finding the time, setting deadlines, asking for help. Setting scenes, learning dialogue — these things aren’t easy for the journalist turned memoirist or the short-form writer turned long-form writer, my friend and I agreed.

But there are universals. The scrap of paper a child played with today in her stroller as her mother wheeled her up the Metro elevator. The bald woman in the flowered dress who waved to the conductor. Every day, a barrage of details finds its way into our brains. How to preserve them? How to honor them?

The details we seek as reporters are within us, and it’s up to us how we use them. One day they may surprise us.

En Plein Air

En Plein Air

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Never use a long word where a short one will do. Never use a foreign phrase if you can think of an English equivalent. I looked up George Orwell’s rules for good writing when I thought of this title.

Yes, “en plein air” is longer — and more French — than “outside.” It may seem like an affectation. A highfalutin phrase.

But it seems more appropriate than “alfresco,” the other choice. “En plein air” is the French term for “in the open air” and used primarily to describe setting up an easel and painting outdoors.

Writing was my “en plein air” activity yesterday.  And the French phrase captures the deliciousness of it, even the setting-up-the-easel of it. Yesterday I gathered paper, pen, laptop and phone and moved them all outside to the deck. Suddenly my work was part of the larger scheme of things, no longer crabbed and shallow but open and expansive.

Or at least it felt that way. The first warm days of spring have a way of turning one’s head.

After Love

After Love

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In memory of the poet Maxine Kumin, who died eight days ago, and of St. Valentine’s Day:

After Love

Afterward, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.
 
These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.
 
Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.
 
The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar
 
and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.
 
Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when
 
the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self
 
lay lightly down, and slept.

Maxine Kumin, “After Love” from Selected Poems, 1960-1990. Copyright © 1970 by Maxine Kumin.

Day Job

Day Job

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Eight years ago today I began working at my current job. This is a fact I’ll ponder today — but it’s one I notice every day, given the framed snapshot of the girls on my desk. It’s 2006, our summer trip to California, and they are 11, 14 and 17.

What I’m thinking about now, though, is not just the improbability of their current ages — 19, 22 and 25! — but the fact that for half the years I’ve been working this day job, I’ve been writing this blog. I like the heft of this ratio, and will like it even more when it grows from 1/2 to 3/5 or 3/4.

This is not to disparage the day job but only to say that for me, and for many others, the creative work that happens before and after the eight hours is what matters most. It’s a funny, bifurcated way to live, straddling worlds, but there are compensations.

I savor them however I can.

Mottled Sky

Mottled Sky

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Most color has drained from the earth. Now that our white snow cover is gone (though not for long perhaps?), we are left with brown leaves, gray trees — a monochromatic world. On walks these days my eyes are drawn toward the sky, source of light, source of color.

Here, from yesterday, a swirl of blue and white, which brings the word mottled to mind. Splotched, blotched, swirled, streaked.

I like the word mottled, mostly because it reminds me of soft skies like these. But also because I like how the word sounds. Like marbled, which reminds me of sleek granite or fine paper. And rhyming with coddled, as in egg, or child.

But mostly the word, like the sky, stands on its own.

A Walker Continues

A Walker Continues

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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. 

Four years ago today I started this blog with a post entitled “A Walker Begins.” Since then, there has been a “slow, patient accumulation” of at least 20,000 words. Other than that, “Walker” hasn’t changed much, other than my learning how to make the photos larger. One of these days I’ll figure out how to switch templates, which will make it easier to follow and comment.


Otherwise, I imagine I’ll keep plugging away as I always do: walking, thinking, noticing.


Writing about the world in an attempt to make some sense of it — though not too much, of course.