This Year, What I Will Do

The other day my friend Angie sent me an e-mail, and I always love getting e-mails from Angie. She has great ideas, for one thing. And when I read her writing, I can hear her soft South Carolina accent in every word. It never fails to make me smile.

Anyway. Back to the e-mail. Here's part of what she wrote:

I believe we are bound by the universal nature of our personal stories. ​By sharing them, we inspire, we entertain, we connect. We learn, we grow. We realize that our flaws and our screw ups make us more normal than we thought. Our secret hopes and dreams suddenly seem possible.

She writes about a friend and fellow blogger who invited her to answer five questions - and while she plans to answer them one by one on her blog this week, she has sent the invitation out into the world as well. "I saw it as an opportunity to try something here that I've wanted to try for a long time," she writes.  "And that's build a community of shared stories."

"A community of shared stories." Bloggers do that so well, I think. We share our stories, our beliefs, our hopes and dreams with the wide world. And in doing so, we definitely learn and grow, are comforted and encouraged, supported and inspired. Even though Angie and I are a generation apart in age we share the same vision about the importance of personal stories.

But I'm going to tell you a truth here...when I read today's question, I heaved a big sigh. Here's the question -

What is one thing you’d like to accomplish (professionally or personally) in the next year?

If I'm honest today (and since we're telling our personal stories I'm going to be brutally honest)...I'm tired of trying to accomplish things.

I'm also tired of thinking about trying to accomplish things.

This year I want to simply LIVE.

I want to soak up every minute of sunshine that God allows me to feel.

I want to savor every word of every book I read.

I want to kiss my Grandson's silky smooth cheek nine hundred million times.

I want to sit on the back step and watch my little dog come racing up the yard with his tail flying like a banner in the breeze.

I want to listen to my mother tell me stories about growing up with all her cousins and the games they used to play in the blue Kentucky grass.

This year I want the soundtrack of my life to be simple folk songs with singable melodies, not three-part inventions or finger twisting toccata's.

This year I want the epigram of my life to be a Mary Oliver poem, not a Tolstoy novel.

This year I want to just BE.

Happy. Yes.

Alive. Yes.

True to myself.

Yes.

Let's see if I can accomplish that.

How about you? What's your story? To join in Angie's initiative to create a community of shared stories, go here and add your link to the chain.

Reading Revisited

A few weeks ago when I finished arranging all the book on my new bookshelves, my husband asked me how many of them I had read. "Well, all of them, of course!" I answered, somewhat surprised that he even had to ask. I do have a separate shelf for library books and review books, and I've been doing a great job of keeping that under control (yes, that's me patting myself on the back). I might have a huge TBR list in my mind, but  everything placed on my shelves right now has been read - at least once, and often more than once.

I'm a big re-reader. In fact, as I was unpacking books and organizing them, I started getting all kinds of urges to re-read this one, and then that one, and then this other one...

It all started me thinking about re-reading, and thinking led to writing, and   - well, here's the result, in an essay at All Things Girl today. Here's a snippet to get you started. Read it, and maybe you'll be inspired to revisit an old friend from your bookshelves too.

Why shouldn’t we return to those wonderful stories we loved the first time we read them? Would we consign a Monet painting to a dark closet after seeing it once? Would we leave the concert hall after hearing a Beethoven Symphony and say “I know how that sounds so I need never listen to it again”? Of course we return to the music and works of art that move our spirits, bringing fresh eyes and ears to the familiar melodies and images. Why shouldn’t we do the same with literature?

Write On Wednesday: Just Desserts

Money and writing don’t need each other. We can do all kinds of things to make our living – shining shoes at the airport, walking dogs in the city, teaching 6th graders how to write really good sentences.  Those are all worthy and wonderful occupations, and they may even be your vocation. But you don’t need to do them in order to have money to write. Writing is free.  And while we hope, love, dance joyously when we get paid for our writing, we don’t need the pay to value our work. That value comes in the way it shapes us as people, in the way a reader writes an email to say, “yes, just that, yes,” in the way someone, someday keeps a copy of something we’ve written tucked into his Bible and reads it with teary eyes on a Sunday morning.  Writing and money are mutually exclusive. ~Andi Cumbo, To You, Writer

Although I get paid (a little bit) to write, the writing I get paid to do isn't the writing that feeds my soul. Still, I take pride in making sure that it's concise, accurate, and that it conveys the pertinent medical information in an accessible way. Sometimes it's necessary to say things carefully in that writing so that it doesn't legally implicate people in the wrong way. And sometimes that writing must spell out hard medical facts which clearly denote wrongdoing that must be rectified.

This is my professional writing, and I do it well.

But then there's my real writing. The writing that takes me down meandering roads of thought, that sends me to the library to research something that's caught my interest (right now that's reclusive women writers). The writing that searches my soul, that helps me uncover feelings I never knew existed. It's the writing I share in my stories on the blog and as a contributing editor at All Things Girl. The writing I get lost in for hours at a time, until I look at the clock and wonder where the day has gone.

There's no remuneration for that writing. Unless you count the satisfaction I get from doing it, which can't be quantified with dollar amounts in the bank account.

Do I wish I made money from writing? Sure. Who doesn't wish they could make a living from doing the very thing which feeds their soul? Writing is my dessert at the end of full day, the sweetness that comes from thinking about ideas and feelings and expressing them on the page.

But as Andi says, I don't need money to write. The value comes from the way writing makes me feel, the pure pleasure of doing it and sharing it. For the love of it.

And in this consumer driven society, we writers should loudly proclaim our willingness to work for love.

For more thoughts on the relationship between art and money, check out these posts at Andilit.

To You, Writer

Art and Money - Why We Write

TLC Book Tours: The Tale of Lucia Grandi

When an old woman is asked to recount the story of her life, she tells an intense and poignant tale about growing up in and surviving a warring suburban family during the 1950s and 60s. ​Written as a memoir, each chapter describes a particular incident in Lucia’s life which shows the constant struggle between her parents and the perverse effect it has on her and the family. From her complicated and unwanted birth, to her witnessing a suicide at age 3, to her stint as a runaway at age 14, the story progresses to the final crisis where as a young woman, she is turned out of her house and banished from her family forever.

Told in breathtakingly beautiful prose, this is a powerful and timeless story of a dying woman's courageous attempt to come to terms with her past and the troubled family that dominated it.

This is exactly the kind of book I love to read - a woman's personal life story, one that explores legacy and interwoven with family history. Set in the period of time I myself grew up in, it has all the elements to make it fascinating reading. Author Susan Speranza uses the device of a fictional memoir to tale her tale of Lucia Grande, and she writes beautifully, setting the scenes and describing the emotions evocatively.

But as I read,  I wished desperately for some happiness for Lucia. Her life and relationships are so filled with emotional pain, and there never seems to be a relief from it. I could not fathom so much cruelty in this family, and, sadly, found myself needing to set the book aside from time to time because the relentless unhappiness too intense.

Susan Speranza is an excellent writer, and while I'm sure there are family situations as intensely miserable as Lucida Grande's, I wish she could have found a way to balance the pain in this story with some positive outcome.

Thanks to TLC Tours for the opportunity to read this book.

Author's website, Facebook page, and Twitter account.

The Sunday Salon: Spring Forward

Having dutifully set my clocks forward last night, I was prepared for the shock to my system this morning when my body clock awakened me at what seemed like the normal 7:00 a.m., but was actually 8:00 a.m. I was prepared for it, but not happy about it.

Admittedly, I don't like the sensation of losing an hour, especially when what gets cheated is usually my reading time.

Boo.

Daylight savings time notwithstanding, I've been clipping along with my various reading projects. This week I'm mid-way through Nobody's Fool, a Richard Russo novel I picked up on the library sale rack (50 cent trade paperbacks make me very happy.) Russo has a knack for presenting the quirky, down and out, everyman types with such warmth and affection you can't help but root for them as they bumble through life and relationships. This novel (published in 1987) is populated with more sad-sacks than any of his others, most notably Donald Sullivan (Sully), a half-hearted construction worker who's been carrying on a lackluster affair with the wife of another man for the past 20 years. Russo's requisite down-and-out town, North Bath, is as dismal as its residents. Somehow, though, Russo can make the reader laugh at and even love these folks, for if we look closely we can find pieces of ourselves dwelling within them.

I'm also re-reading Care of the Soul, by Thomas Moore, a guidebook of sorts for finding sacredness and meaning in everyday life. I purchased this book when it was published in 1994, but never finished it. Life was hectic and busy in those days, with a teenager and a job, and I don't think I had time to consider (or, truthfully, even care) about the sacredness of it all. But now "everyday life" is very present in my mind, and I'm rethinking the concept of seeking a more meaningful approach to it.

Up next is Amanda Coplin's The Orchardist, which I'm eager to read. I'm reviewing it for TLC Tours, and also reading it for a book club meeting with some friends here in town.  If you've read it, I'd love to know what you think!

I'll be spending the afternoon at a concert, but am tucking a book into my purse as usual :) You never know when a spare minute might crop up, and I need all the reading time I can muster today!