Sink Your Teeth Into Pete -- Jennie

There are swarms of vampires in the Young Adult section of Barnes and Noble: good vampires, bad vampires, prophetic vampires, romantic ones.

Who knew that bloodsucking would become so literarily lucrative?

Among the bats are dragons, too, mostly about existing as the last living fire-breathers. The covers are shiny and scaly, with shadows inside the dragon’s eyes or eggs.

And then there is the smut – the best-selling chronicles of cliquey/mean/rich teens who (and I’m sorry to even have to write it here) have sex in airplane restrooms.

These are the options our young readers have when browsing the bookshelves. No wonder they say, “There’s nothing I want to read.”

Frankly, there’s not much I want my kids to read.

But there is Pete Hautman.

Raise the roof, readers and parents! Pete Hautman can write! His novels are diverse and well-crafted, with – get this – no airplane sex. Hautman won the National Book Award for Godless, a thin tome about a middle-American group of teens who create their own religion. It has all the elements of a sophisticated novel: originality, irony, and multi-dimensional characters. Hautman urges his readers to think.

Remember when all books did that?

Another Hautman fave is Rash, a futuristic and extreme look at America’s safety-obsession. The thriller is scary and sad and often hilarious. And again, it is very thought-provoking.

Of course, Hautman did drum up one story about a vampire: Sweet-blood. But it has, of course, a spin. You can see for yourself what it is.

Mr. Hautman has been spitting out a book every year or two for what he calls on his “Ugly-But-Informative” website a “long” time.

Check him out at petehautman.com.

There are even tips for writers. I’m lacing up my running shoes to try the second part of Number Eight right now.

On Where I Write - Julie

When I first started writing for fun, not homework, I was living in Portland, and quickly discovered that I was unable to write at home. In my apartment, I was surrounded by too many different aspects of my life – a disconcerting VISA bill on the counter, a St. Patrick’s day card from my mom containing six newspaper clippings, the remote, etc.

So began my fondness for writing in coffee shops, a cliché, of course, but I defy anyone to live 42 years without becoming some sort of cliché.

When I moved back to Ashland twelve years ago I started writing at the Beanery, the coffee shop where I wrote my high school Anatomy paper, “Skiing Injuries,” and where I read my entire American History textbook during one Winter Break from OSU, crying softly into my coffee when George Washington died. The place was perfect, it sort of matched my mind: dimly lit, carelessly painted baseboards and trim, thick with coffee smell, and staffed with surly employees. I sank into the wooden chairs, balanced with wads of newspaper, and wrote and wrote.

I took a break from writing for about three years, trying to get my postponed-for-the-sake-of-the-child teaching career back on track, and now that I appear to have done that, and now that it’s summer, and Sam is pursuing his Pokemon/Swimming/Legos/Playdate career in earnest, I find I have some time. I abandon the corporate cleanliness of Starbucks and the subtle Christian overtones of the other local coffee shop for the imperfect perfection that is the Beanery. And I write.

Garage Band --Christy

My first reaction to the newly formed garage band next door was ****!

It's as if a sound engineer had designed the distance and placement of my office window from their practice area for perfect acoustics—though they seem far away I can hear them with astonishing clarity even when they whisper, which is not often. Mostly they yell. Mostly they yell "Tequila!" three times every two minutes and ten seconds, which is how long it takes to play that song.

These are young boys, early teens, who wear their hair in the fashion of Shaggy and speak only in voice-cracking insults. They are gangly and disproportionate, with large heads and feet like puppies. They seem fairly new to their instruments but they’re getting pretty good, and fast, because they are nothing if not dogged. The record so far is 4.5 hours playing one song—you guessed it, Tequila! by the one-hit-wonders, The Champs.

They simply play until they get it right and the joy of playing does not diminish one bit between the first time the song is played and the 122^nd time the song is played (I did the math).

So I’ve grown to like this garage band next door. I need a little tenacity right now and they’ve got it to spare.

Just keep playing until you get it right. And enjoy every bad chord along the way.

Goalposts: Willamette Writer's Conference - Kerry

I set the goal, now I have to run the race. The race of preparing for a writing conference amidst three kids home for summer, camping trips and carpooling for various lessons is intense.

"Mommy I'm ringing the doorbell why aren't you coming?" yells my four-year old.

I tear myself away from the computer screen and walk to the door. She is standing on the front porch holding a neon pink purse and wearing a brown and pink flowered sundress. Her luminous blue eyes look at me with a mixture of frustration and impatience. I hesitate, torn between two loves - my children and my writing. I hug her and smell her chlorine-tinged swimming lesson hair.

Somewhere in the eye of the storm, I pull out my computer and write furtively. Often that means I am the only mom at the outdoor pool sitting in the shade with a nerdy laptop. Other times I find myself writing early in the morning as the kids eat their breakfast. Yesterday I wrote as I sat in the car waiting for Max to be dropped off from boyscout camp.

Whatever it takes, writing something, anything, every day makes me feel better than taking the self-flagellation that follows if I don't.

Plus, I have a goal, which is partially motivated by the fact that I have actually paid for the conference and partially motivated by raw fear. I do not want to be caught empty-handed in the long fifteen minute session that I am scheduled to pitch my writing ideas to agents. I hear those fifteen minutes can get really long, and I have three separate ones with three separate agents.

So back to my goal I go. Nothing like a little distraction and fear to help motivate my inner writer. Whatever it takes.

W_iting -- Jennie

So, I wrote a book. Two books, actually.

When people find out, they’re amazed.

Why? I wonder. It wasn’t difficult.

The hard part has been selling the thing(s). I’m now one month into pitching to agents and editors. Not the fun part. I’m biting my nails and watching reality TV and checking my email every five seconds while The Business pours over my
manuscript(s), deciding my fate.

This has made me realize: It might seem as though there’s a vast distance between “wRiting” and “wAiting.” Really, though, it’s just one letter space.

A big RRRRR!!!!!

Food for the Soul -- Christy

I’m leaving again for the wilderness. It has been a good week, a very good week, and camping along a beautiful river under a full moon is the perfect way to extend the goodness.

Not much time to write, so I leave you with this bit, which fits my current state of mind:

The best food for the soul
is a mixture of love, beauty,
and excursions out of time where
we glimpse the eternal.

And eternity is the proper time frame of the soul,
whose immortality is ever present and
whose endurance knows no limitation.

—Thomas Moore

Altered Perspective-Marcia

Saturday, we celebrated the end of the Little League season with a party at Bear Creek Park. When the party was over, Daniel put his cleats and glove away, and said goodbye to his first season in Minors. It was a good one. He’s a decent pitcher, a good catcher, and he can hit homers. But that’s all behind him now. He’s off to his second day at football camp. He and his best friend have been trying to decide who gets to be Quarter Back and who gets to be Wide Receiver since they were in the first grade. The grooming begins.

The night before the Little League party, I was stripping white butcher paper off folding tables after preschool graduation, when a breathless kid appeared at my elbow.

“Hey,” the little guy says, “James is a pretty good football player.”

“James can’t play football,” I say, picturing my lumbering five-year old melting into the curb after walking a block.

“Yes, he can. You should see him catch. And he can really throw.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” teacher Rebecca says as she swoops by with a basket full of stray crayons, “he plays every day.”

“Wow.” My couch potato has been playing possum as well as football.

I step outside to see James chugging up a grass hill with a water bottle tucked under his arm. He passes it to another boy, who starts to run for the imaginary goal posts. James takes off, elbows flying, dives at the boy’s ankles and sacks him! Boom. Let the scales fall from my eyes. The sackee, it turns out is an athletic fourth grader. Double boom.

Men--complete strangers, guys at the Deli, even my brothers have drooled over my children from as soon as they could toddle.

“Gonna be football players, Mom.” They say pulling the brim of their ball caps.

“Whoa, you gotta linebacker on your hands lady.”

“Go Ducks.”

“Look at those shoulders! They gonna play for North or South?”

Even the twenty-year-old girl who scans my gym card says, “Wow! Do they play football?” She eyeballs James and says, “Nose Tackle.”

I don’t even know what this means. I have spent every day of my life from about five years on, trying to screen out football.

I grew up in one of those loud male-dominated families where all the men screamed at the TV and asked mom/wife to get them more bean dip and beer. It seemed like every beautiful sunny moment I could’ve spent with my dad, he was lying on the couch shouting at the television or hooting over the Dallas Cheerleaders. I think this was considered male-modeling for my big-ape brothers.

I screened boyfriends, including my husband, on how much football they watched. I did not want to spend my weekends inside, glued to a television. I always declared that I had no problem with live sports. If they wanted to go to a football, basketball, or baseball game, golf, bowling, or pinochle tournament I was all for that. Get your keys, let’s go.

I want to have fun, not watch someone else have it. Sitting around watching dust motes while a bunch of guys behind a glass screen scramble around doing things I cannot fathom is my idea of hell.

When I was not working “real” jobs, I was a true bohemian living on the cheap in Paris, New York, and San Francisco. I fancied myself an unclassified artiste in my flowing skirts and long-long hair. I wrote stories and songs, played guitar, did the occasional collage and acted a little. I was always recovering from some tragic love and having a grand time in my recovery with my fabulous friends.

I did everything I could to run away from a suburban American life, full of football- lovin, steak-eatin’, nut-scratchin, fart-lovin, burp-makin, boob-watchin boys.

The universe is a joker. Because, of course, I wound up right in the middle of a suburban American life full of nut-scratchin, fart-lovin, burp-makin, not-yet boob-watchin boys who are crazy for football.

Nose Tackle, Wide Reciever, Running Back—It looks like I will be learning a lexicon my father taught my brothers a long time ago. I am hoping my sons can teach me now, cause I am crazy for them.


.

Summer writing environment - Kerry

One child is bleeding from a scooter collision.
The other is crying because she forgot her pajamas at home.
The third is limping from a scooter accident sustained earlier in the day.

We are at my parent's house attending to a stroke victim in the hospital that cannot speak and our rental house, which is about to be filled with summer tenants.

Somewhere in the foray I sit down and write this. Amidst the swirl of life around me, I decide to meet Christy's challenge and explain what my writing environment looks like right now as I write.

I am sitting in a room painted buttercream yellow. It is filled with pictures of family members smiling in various graduation or dress-up garb, or even no attire at all; but always smiling, regardless. I am writing this post on the computer that my mother learned to use at age 75. Now she checks her email and my blog with ease.

To my left is a large Asian desk from the aforementioned Chinese godmother. Farther over against the wall is a 20-foot long bookcase crammed from floor to ceiling with books including two 1950's "Oregonas", which are my parent's student yearbooks from the University of Oregon, along with various art, music and architectural tomes and lots of Oregon history documents.

They are a hard act to follow. The bar is set high.

To my right is a toybox crammed with toys for small and large hands. And now I am cradling our four-year-old daughter in my lap and writing with one hand.

Summer is here.

Why I Love My Dad -- Jennie

Ten years ago, my dad lost his wife. Her suffering was lengthy and slow, and along with a post-chemo, blue handkerchief on the bedpost, her death left behind a heartbroken man and eight kids.

I am the oldest of those kids. The youngest is now sixteen, and there are the grandchildren my mom hoped for but never saw. My dad loves them – really loves them – and he loves the eight of us. We pitch in where we can, giving him all kinds of unsolicited advice. But he knows what he’s doing. He’ll make it.

After all, my dad is no stranger to tragedy. I won’t spill his whole life, but I will say that even surviving polio is not one of his major triumphs.

Nothing has stopped his perseverance.

In the decade since my mom’s passing, Poppa has retired from a career in corrections, run a junior football league, visited Finland and Italy with his brother, fixed a billion broken computers, and sent off four collegiates, not to mention making bagged lunches and folding laundry and checking homework – by himself, every single day.

He’s been busy.

True, Poppa is still obsessed with the capacity of his sewer system, and if you visit, make sure you call first, show up after noon, and clean your coffee cake crumbs off his counter. But unless you borrow a tool either without asking, or for an enormous amount of time, you’ll win an extraordinary man’s fairness and pragmatism and deep belly-laugh.

I love my dad because of all these things, but mostly because of his love for my mom. He has kept her with us, through his sweet memories and his incurable sorrow, and also through his laminating machine.

Pictures of our favorite angel are preserved between thin sheets of plastic. Her light eyes and bright smile seem to say, “I’m still here for you. Here, have a cookie. And give a few to the UPS guy.”

It’s not hard to see why Poppa misses her so badly. I’d do anything to bring her back to him.

In The Middle - Julie

Last week I packed up all my belongings in Humanities 39 at Ashland High School, marking the boxes in black sharpie: "To Ashland Middle School Room 204 -- Inada" for the district maintenance crew, who are tasked with relocating my teaching career. Yesterday I went back to H39 to make sure I hadn't left any feminine products in the desk drawers and saw that the room was empty, echoey and still. So I buzzed the seven blocks down Iowa Street to the middle school to make sure my career had landed safely. It was nowhere to be found. I poked around in my new teaching partners' rooms, in the cafeteria, in one of the gyms, but then figured I would just have faith that the universe would eventually get my Nancie Atwell books and graphic organizers and solid gold writing prompts where they need to be.

I think it's a good time to go camping and to write.

Writers' Rooms

There's a really interesting article in The Guardian that features photos of rooms where writers do their thing, along with a short explanation. It’s fascinating! I was intrigued by the weird collection of stuff (including part of his own hip bone) neatly displayed beside Roald Dahl’s customized writing chair and I loved the spare tool-shed-cum-office that George Bernard Shaw used, complete with a bunk for “Napoleonic naps.”

What I want is an office like Jung Chang or Siri Hustvedt but mine is closer to Charlotte Mendelson. Piles. I’m a piler.

Of the past five home offices I’ve had, this—although by far the smallest—is my favorite. It feels like a cockpit; I slide into my chair and everything is literally within reach. I painted it Scottish Thistle, which I think is beautiful in any light. And there’s an enormous window in front of me. The view is obscured by two large bushes that are refuge to the creatures that inspire me the most right now.

Six important things to me:

1) Two framed New Yorker cartoons from fellow writer Julie that make me laugh every day. One of two bored, middle aged people on a couch at home. The man says to t he woman, "I suppose we could burst onto the literary scene." The other is of a man in a chair reading the paper while his wife types on the computer. He looks annoyed and says to her, "Joyce Carol Oates seems to have no problem coming out with book after book."

2) A small ceramic milk jug that says “kindness” on it (a gift from friend Peggy years ago) filled with Nag Champa, a scent I enjoy more when it’s fresh than when burning.

3) My “Fetish Garden” to the left of the computer with important bits and bobs.

4) A large cup of coffee (trying to quit, not going well) sipped from what a friend recently called a flower pot. I’m pretty sure I picked it up from the kitchen section at Ikea, but you never know.

5) Cookie fortunes taped to my printer. I started this and my daughter Juliet has continued it whenever she finds a suitable fortune. But we are very selective, they can’t the generic ones you get all the time. My favorite is: Pull the universe inside you. Make it your own.

6) A photo taped to the printer of a dolphin kissing my son Hank. Cuteness overload.

I propose that for the next week, all members of the Lithia Writers Collective post a photo of where they write, with an explanation of six important things about the place or its contents. For some, I think, we may see photos of beds or coffee shops. Maybe even Donut Country. Wherever it is, you are not allowed to clean up first. This was difficult for me but as you can tell by the photo, I restrained myself. It is in “as is” condition.

Note to Marcia: Don’t miss Beryl Bainbridge's office! So you.

(Thanks to Stuart Neville for highlighting this article on his blog, which I found via Editorial Ass.)

Do I Dare to Eat a Peach--Marcia

Steam rises from black coffee in a midnight-blue cup swirling with Art Nouveau peacock whorls of sky blue, green and apricot. The cup sits on a thin porcelain dessert plate rimmed with Icanthus leaves.

A peach rests on the plate. A Saturn peach perfect in its peachy rosiness, one bite missing --symbolizing, if this were a Dutch painting, the fleetingness of pleasure. Its nub of a stem hides in the peach folds like a shrunken old man mocking the ripeness of youth.

I love this peach, this coffee, this moment. A summer morning moment suspended in air, like my fingers over the keyboard. I am writing.

From Canton to N.W. 23rd Avenue - Kerry

My godmother is Chinese. She had a stroke a few days ago. Now she cannot speak. Obviously, I hope this is a temporary situation. This occurrence leaves a palpable silence in my heart.

I have helped her write countless invitations for anniversary parties, Chinese New Year Banquets and gala events at her oriental antique shop in Northwest Portland while we sat at the ornate teak wood table her father carved in Canton in the 1940's, surrounded by seven-foot high ancient urns and jade plants. Now she cannot write.

She is not easily silenced. Her work ethic, combined with her courage and confidence, propelled her to millionaire status at age forty and venerable positions for various Chinese associations at age sixty.

"I never complain, because that brings bad luck." she once told me.

Scenes from her life flash through my memory. Her story is a vivid kaleidoscope filled with lush scenes often only seen in movies. She arrived in the United States on a freightliner with her merchant marine husband, who her family had decided she needed to marry. She was only fourteen, but she told American officials, including her husband, that she was eighteen. Her family had sewn money into the lining of her jacket. As the freightliner pulled out of Hong Kong harbor, she tried to jump off the railing of the top deck. A crewman restrained her.

She came to our wedding in 1995 in her boxy silver Cadillac, dressed in a fur coat in the middle of July (in her mind weddings and funerals merited fur, despite the season). Neither the weather or a slight fender bender two blocks from the church deterred her from attending the ceremony.

"My neck only hurt a little bit," she confessed later on.

I sensed her incongruous presence in the church as I stood in the shadows waiting to walk down the aisle. A slight murmur went up from the seated crowd, as it often does when she enters a room. A Chinese women sporting a fur coat, black sunglasses and several large diamonds is hard to miss.

Summer started officially in my house on Monday; it's d-day, which means all day childcare provided by me for my three children. This puts a kink in my writing schedule, my schedule in general. Now that Sue is laying in that hospital bed, my day doesn't look so tedious. Just another phase in the flow of life.

Copying Catcher - Jennie

This weekend, I finished the latest book to claim Catcher in the Rye-ish-ness. And although the snarky little read, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, was profound in its own right, it was, alas, no Catcher.

So I wondered: What is it about Holden Caulfield that makes us want him replicated?

Is it that he’s real? That he’s deeply pained, both literal and existential, wise and weighed down by a sorrow so great, he’ll never get out from under it?

Whatever it is, we can agree that it’s something.

Since 1945, writers have tried to craft the next Caulfield. None have succeeded. JD Salinger still has the monopoly.

“I have an idea for our next family read-aloud,” my ten-year old son announced a month ago. “It’s right on the shelf. How about The Catcher in the Rye?”

No, I told him. Not yet.

He’s not ready.

But there will be a time when my son is lost in his adolescence, when he is misunderstood, seeking definition and purpose, simultaneously resisting and demanding change.

That will be When.

Dominic will read the book and love it, because he’ll see that he’s not alone in the world. There’s Holden, right there with him. Only Holden. Only Holden.

Not a single other person. Or character.

Can You Hug a Rinpoche?

Whenever I tell people I’m a Buddhist, I cringe a little. Even now, as I write that, little cringe. It makes people assume things about me, like I meditate everyday, that I have my shit together, spiritually, and that I could give a clear definition of Buddhism. Well I don’t, I don’t and I can’t.

But this week I did have a dream about my teacher, the Rinpoche (a Tibetan Buddhist title given to a spiritual teacher). He spends part of his time in the Bay Area, where we have gone to see him whenever we can over the last ten or more years.

And in my dream, when I saw him, my whole body broke into a smile and I ran to hug him, and I had that feeling like when you’ve had a couple bad days in a row, then you wake up one morning and somehow something has just shifted, overnight, and everything feels different, fresh, and okay. It felt just like that. And that’s why I’m a Buddhist.

And no, this post doesn’t have much to do with writing. Or does it…

Today’s non sequitur: Writing = India -Christy

I’ve been thinking a lot about India lately. Scott and I traveled there a little over ten years ago but my memory of it is as sharp as it was the day I left. It is a country that leaves an impression. I said I’d never go back. India assaults you in every way—with its crowds, with its smells, with its heat, with its swindlers, and with its beauty.

Anywhere else in the world you can get in a cab and say, I’d like to go to X restaurant please, and you’d actually be taken to restaurant X. In India you say, I’d like to go to X restaurant please, and then you are taken to the cab driver’s brother-in-law’s parents’ restaurant. “Is much better here,” the cabbie will say, unapologetically collecting your money even though he’s taken you someplace you didn’t ask to go. “And tell them Dinesh sent you,” he’ll add before zooming off.

The one place I really wanted to see in India was Sarnath, where Buddha gave his first teaching and introduced his doctrine of peace. Sarnath is outside of intensely populated Varansi, which is, at about 3,000 years old, one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. It's situated on the banks of Ganges River where throngs of Indians come every morning, descending the stepped ghats to bathe, pray, and brush their teeth. No one seems to mind if the ghat they 're using is next to a crematorium where relatives wait next to burning funeral pyres for bodies to become ashes so they can scatter them in the Ganges. There might be more DNA in that river than water.

When we got to Varanasi, Scott didn’t feel well so I set out on my own. I was going to save the big sightseeing for when he was better, so I thought I’d check out a sari silk shop. I got the name of a good one from a guy at our hotel who gave me a card with precise directions for the cab driver to follow. Of course, the cab driver ignored the address. Instead of going deeper into the labyrinthine city, this guy started driving me out of town. I leaned over a couple of times, pointing to the name and address on the card I clutched, and the driver would nod vigorously. When we finally stopped it was at a wholesale fabric warehouse far from the city. “This is best silk in India,” he said, pointing to his meter to show me how many rupees I owed him. “And tell them Pradeep sent you.”

The man in the warehouse helped me call a cab to get back, but of course the driver had other plans for me. This time, though, it was not about commerce. “To Rishipattana?” he asked. I shook my head and handed him a card with my hotel’s name and address. He looked at it and handed it back. “You have been to Rishipattana?” he asked. I said no, but I wanted to go straight back to the hotel. He started driving and in less than two minutes I understood; Rishipattana was another name for Sarnath. The driver stopped, rightly assuming I'd want to visit this sacred place, and put his palm over the meter. It couldn’t have been much—it turned out the fabric warehouse was only about a mile away—but in my experience of India, not accepting money was rare.

At last, I had been taken somewhere I had planned on going. Just not that day. Or in that way.

I suppose I’m thinking of India because it’s very much like writing a novel. You know where you want to go, you just don’t know how you’re going to get there. Or if you’ll be taken somewhere else entirely.

I’m about 40 pages from finishing my current work in progress and I feel like I’m stepping in to a cab in India. Despite having a good idea about where I want to go, I have no idea where I’ll end up.

Balancing Act --Marcia

I am watching the French Open while I write. I am an obsessive tennis fan and player and this is one of my four favorite times of year. The others of course are Wimbledon, The Australian Open, and the U.S. Open.

I've never tried to write in front of the TV before. Televisions, radios, lawn mowers, phones, leaf blowers, even the garbage truck backing up drive me crazy. Sound takes up all the space in my brain and renders me mute. A refrigerator humming or the sound of numbers on an old digital clock sliding into place have been known, in the past, to throw me into fits of despair.

I live in a small house bursting with extroverted, physical, and friendly children, multiple animals, a big husband, and the comings and goings of a thriving neighborhood of revolving door regulars. We love popping in on each other. This is the life I and my family have created. We wouldn't wish it otherwise. It does, however, make it a challenging place to write.

For several years, every morning at 5:00, I rolled out of bed, into my husband's sweats and down the street to Donut Country. Everybody here knows Donut Country and, baby, Krispy Kreme can't hold a candle. I called the Country my office. It was great sitting there in the dark of winter at my self-assigned table, hunkered down in my giant sweatshirt drinking scorchingly bad coffee and editing my gargantuan manuscript, writing notes, making outlines, and trying to write more.

Despite my efforts to avoid eye contact and keep my mouth shut (I was not here to make friends), within three months I was being heckled by some of the wise-acres for my anti-social and high-falutin' ways. Yeah, in my husband's monster sweats! Well I rose to the challenge and started cracking wise with the men who drove the giant street sweepers, the old timers who came in early to avoid their wives, and the cement cutters who needed to jolt their systems up with a few good jelly donuts before their day got too hard.

At Donut Country at 5:00 A.M., if you are a woman under 59, under 300 pounds, dressed in anything other than a rayon housecoat, you are considered pretty and young. I became the wild card that all those crusty buggers could hone their edge upon. We had fun, we laughed, told yarns, got loud. On way too many mornings I'd have three sentences scratched onto my legal pad by the time I packed up to go home and start the get-'em-all-to-school-and-work routine. Many mornings all I did was record the banter. But I left happy. It was good banter. Seriously.

Those years of writing elsewhere, fighting to screen out small-town socializing, the piped in "worship" music, and the enticing perfume of the perfect glazed donut taught me how to focus despite distraction. I might not have produced my best work, but back then I just needed to stay in the game.

So the beautiful Rafa Nadal can muscle and glide his way over the red clay at Roland Garros while I watch and write and it won't bother me one bit. Not at all.

In Pursuit of the Ineffable - Kerry

She/he flies through the air with the greatest of ease...

Our ten-year-old daughter, Claire and seven-year-old son, Max are performing in the upcoming June 7th Le Cirque "Cats" performance here in Ashland. They are fearless and funny as they swing from the rafters on trapezes in their unitards. I am in awe of their natural ability to be in the moment, to savor the joy as they fly, effortlessly.

I try to apply this same ability to my writing sessions.

"Kiss the joy as it flies and revel in tomorrow's sunrise," my mother wrote on a card she keeps on her desk.

"So what if joy is ineffable," I think as I sit down to write.

I'll always be able to find it in the still moments when I am lost in a paragraph, despite the din of the bulldozer next door or the barking dog.

Envy and Empathy - Jennie

What draws throngs of flip-flopped Oregon women to the theater to see a flick like Sex and the City?

It's Carrie Bradshaw.

We want to be her. Why wouldn't we want to be her? She is funny, and successful, and loved, as well as the Queen of What To Wear. Who wouldn't want to walk a mile in those Manolo Blahniks?

My sixteen year old brother has no intention of seeing Sex and the City. It's because he has no desire to be Carrie Bradshaw. Crazy, I know.

But after the non-reader recently reviewed my YA manuscript, the first thing he told me was how much he liked the main character: "I am him! And all of my friends are him! And I know a dad just like his dad!"

Interesting.

Sure, I always knew that character development was of astronomical importance. But at 37, I'm finally understanding why.

It's either because we are or know her, or because we want to be her.

Right now, I'm Carrie Bradshaw - Virgina Woolf - Bridget Jones - Rachael Ray. In flip flops.

Who are you?