Unsung Poetry

If you find yourself writing about a Beat Generation girl who wants to become a poet, you may get her poems popping into your head (now and again.)

And, now and again, you might need to write them down, even if they don't make it into a book like the Beat Street series.

Today, that's what I'm doing, and sharing with you.

Ruby's latest poem (song)? is still a work in progress, but here's what she's whispering in my ear:

New songs leap in before you wake, saying take me

To a store

To a party

To a place you want to go

Even if you're gone already

New songs burrow in like cats on your pillow

Teasing until you give in and try to sing them

All they want is to go home

To your room

To your party

To wherever you don't want to go even if you've been there 

To find out if they're your songs

Feed them all your dry grass and rain on them when you're crying

Also teach them to someone else and it can't be someone

Who loves you or even likes you all that much

If that who-ever likes your song and tries to sing it then you know 

It's yours, saying take me not 

To a store

To a party 

To a story

Just take me

Take me home

***

This won't be in book three, but I thought it could still be something Ruby wrote. Sometimes her poems leap in and burrow, too.

Imaginary Ruby photo:  Christina Welsh

Heightened Moments

 

When my husband and I moved to this neighborhood (three and a half years ago), I joined Next Door to see what people were writing about. Today I decided to conduct an experiment and see how we stack up against the rest of the country for exciting times in our neighborhood.

Nationwide posts:

• A woman fell flat on her face leaving Target in Sun City, California, but was helped by fellow shoppers until the ambulance arrived
• A family's lame, very elderly dog was found and returned in Columbus Ohio by police who had to carry the dog inside
• White swans jazzed up the Charles River in Dover, MA (my favorite)
• Firemen put out a snow plow fire  in Mamaroneck
• Someone is celebrating his birthday in Huntsville Alabama at seven a.m. (I'm impressed!)

My neighborhood:

Around here people are reporting garage thefts, attempts to steal catalytic converters, lost pets, found pets, and recommendation seekers for a variety of house repairs.

The lives aren't small, but some of the details can seem, well. Not exactly dramatic, right? Fiction, movies, teleplays and theater are so very different, making us think life has to be made up of heightened moments all the time.

Well, it isn't, but--

Maybe these notices are the beginnings of stories--for writers, playwrights, screenwriters. The woman who fell on her face has been fighting with her grown children for months about staying in her home versus moving to assisted living. What will they say now?

The lame dog had been with his family 11 years and was the same age as their boy. How will they tell him the dog isn't going to live much longer?

The swans are secretly people who come to life and dance at night (Oh, yeah, that's been written centuries ago, thank you, Tchaikovsky).

The woman who witnessed someone breaking into her home tackled the intruder and her neighbor jumped in and they got the guy arrested. (My own little fantasy).

So what's happening in your neighborhood (and mine) isn't just happening. It's the bedrock, the mother of invention, and a way to find your fiction. 

If you want.

Swan photo: Emilian Robert Vicol

Plumber Dilemmas: a Beat Street Giveaway & Fool's Errand 99 cent sale

In the early years of my marriage, I found a how-to book for do-it-yourself plumbing and excitedly gave it to my newlywed husband. My hope was that he'd open it and read voraciously about plumbing.

I have no idea why I was thinking this, except I'm the kind of person who believes wholeheartedly in magical thinking. Maybe that's because I write fiction, but it rarely (if ever) works in real life.

Nonetheless, I wish my wish had happened when I look at the bathroom sink these days. It's now at the point where you have to wiggle it to one side or another to shut off. If you don't, it will drip, drip, drip forever. Husband has told me in no uncertain terms he does not know how to fix it, though he assumes it needs a washer.

That means inviting a plumber to our house, in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a surge of said pandemic, in the middle of winter. It means trying to open the window while the plumber is working in the bathroom, which probably won't be much fun for the plumber. Or me, if he/she leaves.

While I'm thinking of this, I start thinking about my Ruby character in The Beat on Ruby's Street, who describes drip, drip, drip of her bathroom faucet when a social worker is visiting her home. I started writing about Ruby, an 11-year-old growing up in 1958 as the child of Beat Generation artists, because her life was the one I wanted to live--drippy faucet and all. 

I was the child of suburban parents in 1970s New Jersey who had very little interest in artists or bohemia. I think my choice to become first an actor and then a writer was not what they wanted for me, they did learn to tolerate it. But for me, trips to Greenwich Village were the equivalent of my heaven--and meeting a real, live artist and his wife at the same age Ruby did sealed the deal.

I even remember the artists' names--Peter and Carol. He painted and she danced and I was in love with both of them, or at least their lives (which were also in suburban New Jersey, by the way). I think that was the start of Ruby's journey, or at least, of my journey in writing about Ruby.

This week, I'm offering you the chance to read The Beat on Ruby's Street for free, and to get Fool's Errand (part two of the Beat Street series) on sale for 99 cents. Quick summaries are below - but you have only a week to take advantage of these offers, which start Saturday January 16 and end Saturday January 23. Click on the pheading link below for the giveaway:

The Beat on Ruby's Street Giveaway:

Gold Category Winner for the Wishing Shelf Award and Finalist in the 2019 Minnesota Author Project! The last thing eleven-year-old Ruby Tabeata expected to happen on her way to a Jack Kerouac reading was to be hauled to the police station. It’s 1958 and Ruby is the opposite of a 1950s stereotype: fierce, funny and strong willed, she is only just starting to chart her course in a family of Beat Generation artists in Greenwich Village, New York. Ruby dreams of meeting famous poets while becoming one herself; instead, she’s accused of trying to steal fruit from a local vendor and is forced to live in a children’s home. Join Ruby on her journey as she finds unexpected friendships, the courage to rebel against unjust authority and the healing power of art in this unique historical middle grade novel. Fool's Errand picks up where book one leaves off -- when Ruby’s best friend Sophie and her mom Annie flee so Annie won’t be forced to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The Committee persecuted countless artists for decades due to misplaced fear and hysteria. Fool's Errand 99 cent-sale may be found at the following seller links: Amazon Barnes & Noble Apple Kobo

If you do read one or both books, I'd love to hear your thoughts on them. 

And if you know any plumbers who don't mind working next to open windows in the dead of winter, can you let me know that too?

Cover art: Gwen Gades

Women's Roles: Writing and Living Them

 

When I first studied acting in college, I had a teacher who loved old plays from the 1930s and 1940s. I hated these plays when I had to use them for scene study in class, even though I had to admire some of the writing. The one I most remember was called Blithe Spirit and was written by Noel Coward.

I think it made an impression on me because it had a ghost lady at the center of it, and I've always been a ghost story fan. This ghost was determined to break up her former husband's new marriage after coming back to his home via a séance. 

(I love how people in plays and movies have seances time and time again even though we all know they're nothing but trouble).

In the scene I did for class I had to play Ruth, the new bride, instead of Elvira, the ghost wife, who was SO much more interesting. I was having terrible troubles at the time with a cheating boyfriend and all of Ruth's anguish was bleeding into my own. I guess what I was looking for was the kind of power the ghost woman had in messing with her (cheating) husband--even though he was cheating with her.

What really bothered me was how the two women were fighting over this guy--who didn't seem very bright, to start with. I wanted to see women in charge of their lives, not dependent on a man's love or admiration or whatever it was.

At some point I gave up on trying to find those characters in existing plays and started writing them myself. I hope now when younger women are looking for scenes to use in their acting classes, they have stronger women to choose from. Thanks to more and more women playwrights, I think they do.

Yet, I still hear women actors say they wish there were stronger roles for women. I'm glad they're pointing out they want more--and hope playwrights of both genders will continue to write them.

Of course, Noel Coward was a spectacular playwright and I only wish I could write comedy a tenth as well as he did. I know in the time he was writing, women had so many fewer options and their roles were extremely limited.

At the same time, actors like Katherine Hepburn managed to break through the stereotypes and created fascinating characters for us. The 1930s and 40s movies were like a war between strong and weaker women, but a lot of times the stronger women won. 

The gains they made were overshadowed in the 1950s (when women were expected to stay home and wear pearls while they vacuumed like June Cleaver in Leave it to Beaver. But at least the women in 1930s and 40s movies gave us a glimpse of what we could be.

Looking back, I'm grateful I had a teacher who liked the old plays. They taught me a lot about writing, banter, snappy dialogue and tension than I ever would have learned otherwise. They also taught me what I didn't like about women's roles, and how to make them better.

Maybe we should pull out more of those old chestnuts every once in a while, at least in acting school? You can still learn a lot by listening to a ghost.

Ghost arms photo: Soffie Hicks

Long Game Summer

I was born in August, two days more than halfway through the month on the 17th. If I was in charge, I'd have picked June, but it doesn't matter. I will always be summer's child.

People who know me laugh sometimes that I choose to live in the Upper Midwest, where summers are short and quickly over. They don't know how I start counting summer in mid May and go straight through the start of October, no matter what the weather may be doing.  But they are right about summers being short.

Still, Midwestern summers are truly glorious because the rain makes the ground bloom with every sort of northern flower and the greens are as lush as anything Hawaii can offer. Houses too, look better in the dusk and porch light in June, when the lengthening day is almost over--but not quite.

Summer is a writer's season, because it knows the long game. Summer will wait as patiently as a cat for its shining moment and then shine as if it's going to forever.  It sings of lakes and swims and overpowering heat that promises to sweep you off your feet into a hammock.

Summer also brings pool parties and sandals, long grass, running rivers, secret talks and rekindled friendships you might think were gone but are not. It brings you time to walk at night and think of what you want to say, twice, again, a dozen times. It lets you play, and writers need to play more than anything.

The long game extends to baseball and golf, barbecues and sleeveless dresses. Cupcakes at birthday parties and ice cream cones after long, meandering walks.

Summer in the city. Summer in the country. I'll take it anywhere, and I will always remember it. As the longest day of the year approaches, I hold out my arms to catch it, smell and taste it, drink it in. Summer will never disappoint, no matter how long you have to wait for it.

Summer knows it's coming. And it knows, somehow, I'm here. When it does come, it will have my childhood memories wrapped inside it, unraveling them around  my shoulders and ears. Nights when I didn't want to go to bed and told myself stories. Mornings when the sun seemed like a new friend and brought me outside to dance.

Summer knows I'm waiting for it. Freckles, lawn mowers, iced coffee and waterfalls. It knows how the first summer of my engagement, neighbors complained that my fiance and I were kissing on the beach. It knows we still go out there periodically to kiss, neighbors or no.

The longest game will never stop playing. All we have to do is say yes to it, like Molly Bloom.

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Kids at Your Wedding? Read to 'em

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post about marriage and mentioned a book I read (to my son) during the wedding. Readers have asked me more about the book, so this week I’m naming names and giving you the scoop:

First – in case you’re having a wedding this month and need to read a story (to your kid or anyone else’s) – my choice was (and still would be) The Queen Who Couldn’t Bake Gingerbread by Dorothy Van Woerkom. I found it at the library a few weeks before getting married and fell instantly in love.

I think the story resonated with me because I was coming out of at least a year’s time as a single mom and afraid I’d lose my independence. Reading it, I realized that even though picture books are structured simply, that doesn't mean they have to be simple minded. 

The Queen who Couldn't Bake Gingerbread focuses on King Pilaf, who is trying to find a wise, beautiful wife—who can, of course, bake a mean gingerbread. He turns down two stereotypical princess choices and ends up with a more down-to-earth wife called Princess Calliope. She is looking for a husband who is wise, handsome and plays the slide trombone.

As Calliope can’t bake gingerbread and Pilaf can’t play trombone; they agree never to mention these words again. Things go pretty well until one day they erupt at each other. But after their quarrel, the king decides to bake his own gingerbread—and the queen starts to play slide trombone.

Ultimately, they discover they can have a very happy marriage while giving themselves what they want. As soon as I read the story, I realized it was exactly what I wanted—as a writer, mother and wife. Husband, son and guests agreed (and if they didn’t, I didn’t know it.)

Other favorite picture books my son and I loved – pre and post wedding:

Sam’s Worries

Sam worries about possible earthquakes, volcanoes and witches. He confides his worries to his teddy bear, who comes up with a great solution: Sam can go to sleep and the bear will stay up all night worrying. Then Sam can worry all day (which of course he forgets to do, because he’s busy at school). This is a perfect book for an inveterate worrier (and her children) – even if you don’t have a teddy bear. In fact, a cat will do very well (and I bet a dog will, too).

Amadi’s Snowman by Katia Novet Saint-Lot

Full disclosure: I met Amadi’s author at a book conference once and heard bits and pieces of this story before it was published. What I didn’t anticipate was how intriguing the book would be. Amadi and his family live in Nigeria and though he doesn’t see the sense in reading, he runs into an older boy reading in secret (which is, of course, the best way to discover anything). The book piques his curiosity about a snowman and opens up a world that changes his life.  What I love most about this book is the author’s voice, which is beguiling but never preachy. Illustrations are gorgeous, too.

The Nightgown of the Sullen Moon by Nancy Willard

“But the moon’s promises, what are they worth?”

That may be one of my all-time favorite lines, and this book about the moon becoming obsessed with a flannel nightgown is one of the most enchanting stories I’ve ever read. So much so, I wish I’d written it.

I’d also highly recommend Mama, Do you Love Me? by Barbara Joosse about a child testing limits and her mother’s unconditional love and Love You Forever by Robert Munsch about the undying connection between a mother and son. My son and I read that at least a bazillion times, and teared up every time.

We’ll get to the tween favorites later, but if you want to share any of your favorite picture books, well… you know. DO.