I am completely, utterly, every whimsical note of my body, indebted to Terry Tempest Williams for everything she put on that blank page  while she wrote, When Women Were Birds.  (In fact, I would love to see her out takes basket).  This book is the landscape of writing, the geography of being a woman – how your body is indebted to fields, and seeds, and words unspoken, left mingling with the soft air puffed just before you open your mouth.  I have never felt more myself, and more a woman than when reading this book.  I know, I know, I have this affinity for birds and I metaphorically and literally believe women were probably once birds, but that has nothing to do with the hope, and power of the words that are voiced in this book.

I can’t even begin to type this blog.  It took me twenty minutes to convince myself that I had to share this book regardless if I had the words, or not.  The whole point of this book is to remind us that we’re women, and we have it, we’re made of it, we are IT.  We are feathered, and skinned, and silent, and lionesses, and remarkable.  If ever I wanted to know the mural of my own body, what the roundness of moles meant, and the sow of freckles, it was during this book.  I mean you have to pinch yourself over and over while you read it.

Am I a woman, you say.  Am I everything.

When Women Were Birds is the story of the secret lives of women.  Tempest tells the historical crow etchings of women in China that could only be read by other women, her own life surrounded by wilderness, her mother, her husband and Mormon tradition.  She is at one point sliced above the eye by a falcon on a river trip and so her connection to birds is physical.  It begins with the Mormon tradition (of women) to write journals for themselves and their daughters.  On her death bed, Williams’ mother tells Williams to seek out her journals only after she has passed.  Williams finds the journals, all stacked in their leather glory, she opens every single one to the white field of blank page.

My Mother’s journals are paper cranes.

My Mother’s journals are “just after.”

My Mother’s journals are a “harmony of silence.”

A few weeks ago, a dear blogger told me that although she was gifted with her mother’s journals when she passed away, she never read them.  I am the kind of daughter, and woman, that would scavenge the pages for the imperfections in my mom’s cursive.  I would learn how to read shorthand so I didn’t make mistakes with the swift movements in her margin notes.  I’d play a guessing game with food stains.  Where was she.  What was she doing while she wrote this. I would decipher her language, and like a sponge store as much of my mother’s internal life as I could.

Sometimes, when we write journals we imagine our daughter’s reading them and then the whole concept of journaling goes out the window.  A journal, is a moment within yourself.  A way to remember something twice, the way it was when you were there and the way it is on the page.  When you journal, or you write, you get to live every aspect of your life twice, whether you’re living it in reality, or in the lie that you’ve created it to be.  Writers have that odd ability to not actually live in the moment, but just secretly record everything that’s going on.  I used to go to parties in college and constantly say to myself remember this moment, remember the way that boy spilled beer on the table, remember the way “musty” smells, remember the way boys bicker with each other which isn’t anything like the way females bicker.  Writer’s don’t live, they soak, and prod.  They create something magic between the pen and hand.

Here, I am blogging my guts, and yet, I’m not writing what I would say about my family in a journal, what my dad sounds like when he sleeps, or my mom smells like after a day at the bakery.  Those are my private secrets, the ones I leave blank for you, but I fill to the brim in my stitched journal that goes everywhere with me.

My journal (Quotes from When Women Were Birds)

Throughout this book, I was weeding quotes of Williams and salting my page with them.  My journal is now covered in quotes that split the world open.  Quotes like:

“My mother’s voice is a lullaby in my cells.  When I am still, my body feels her breathing” (19).

“I have talked to myself for years in the privacy of my journals.  The only thing I’ve done religiously are keep a journal and use birth control” (43).

“It is winter.  Ravens are standing on a pile of bones – black typeface on white paper picking an idea clean.  It’s what I do each time I sit down to write.  What else are we to do with our obsessions?  Do they feed us?  Or are we simply scavenging our memories for one gleaming image to tell the truth of what is hunting us” (56).

“I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell” (204).

These quotes speak only a dribble of the weeping that this book holds.  It makes me fascinated by my mother, by my need for words and the lines of a page to smear into my own harbored print.  But mostly, it made me proud to be a woman, whether I keep silent (which is rare), or I test the waters. I yell, I screech sometimes to get a point across, but never does a screech work.  I should learn to be silent sometimes, or just quiet.  I should learn to listen to the birds harmonize and the orchastra of mumbles, and throat tickles.  Listen to the way my father coo’s when he naps, breathing out bays of air. I shared this even though I know you are reading, even though this is my public journal, and my mother will smell like knead and yeast when she takes off her apron and throws it onto the washer machine this evening.  She will have white icing stains on her pockets that look like finger-paint and the spiral print of her thumb.

—–

I hate it when I want to talk about a book and I don’t have the words.   I just watch the white space pile up like ocean froth.  It’s drowning.  The white expanse that I’m supposed to fill up with words that make you want to get in the car, even though it’s been a long day, and it’s bath night, and their are suds opening from the plastic bottle.

You need this book because it breathes exactly what you are.  I dropped chocolate granola bar in the binding and almost called-out because I wanted the library-goer who got this book after me to find it pristine for the picking.  To find their way through the book without a compass, the way all good books find you lost in the wild.  I want a reader to go in wild, go into the margins, go into the cracks, and the o’s, and the words, and the steam that comes off the pages of a book that takes you across valleys within yourself.

How do you tell someone how you are changed by a book.

Do you write a blog explaining that you can’t tell them because here, it’s too personal, and here the choreography of your body has taken over.  You are all feel, no reason.  You are exactly what we are meant to be, human substance: cells, atoms, water, free.

I am a bird on a wire.  I am wondering why the electricity is not surging.  Why is it that birds can sit on the cords and not be shocked.  How can they sit so still when they have wings.  And how do women (or people) conquer white pages, conquer their expected roles, climb through the square face of fence binding them, conquer centuries of silence, the smell of palm when a hand covers their mouths.

Tagged: birds, blank space, choreography, fears, journals, metaphors, morman, pages, silence, surge, terry tempest williams, utah, when women were birds, wild, women, words ]]> http://booksandbowelmovements.com/2012/05/23/when-women-were-birds/feed/ 17 cassiemannes 9780374288976 download FotoFlexer_Photo download (1) http://booksandbowelmovements.com/2012/05/22/newsday-tuesday-26/ http://booksandbowelmovements.com/2012/05/22/newsday-tuesday-26/#comments Tue, 22 May 2012 17:14:40 +0000 Cassie http://booksandbowelmovements.com/?p=3659 ]]>

Favorite Tweets:

My nephew’s name is Jackson Wolf A.

Favorite Search Terms

• empty schoolyard: flat basketballs, dust bunnies, tennis shoes hanging from electric wires by their perfectly bowed laces.
• yodas house: Holy Noodles, my imagination just blew up nuclear style.
• then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave from the penelopiad: I just love when people google things like that.  I mean, who googles this?  It’s like a Greek Goddess got a google machine in her tower.
• bagels and bowel movements: what a great foodie blog title.  You should go with this.  Spread the cream cheese love.
• my windows aren’t dirty thats my cats nose art: I just needed to share this one.
• best holiday in my mind description text use expressions lying, nosing around, potter around and must-dos: I hope you mean HARRY potter around.
• dresses for my friend caroline who is having a party on a ship but not a tight dress cause that’s bad: I feel like I’m fourteen and own a yacht when I read this.  Or maybe P.Diddy’s other 9 children are finally having their sweet sixteens.

Book News

• Write the Mayor and City Council to preserve the NY Public Library System.
• 

  Guerilla Library in NYC

  NY pay phones become guerilla libraries @ The Atlantic & Tin House (more recently)

• Make libraries statutory @ The Bookseller
• Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead – Questions @ EverydayEBook
• Young Lion’s Fiction Award @ NYPL
• Victoria Chang talks about what small presses excite her for contemporary poetry @ Ploughshares
• Books as Sacred @ Huff Post
• 145 Never Before Published Poems by Shel Silverstein @ LA Review of Books
• Tell The Rumpus the last book you loved and get on The Rumpus blog @ The Rumpus
• Q&A with author Melanie Benjamin who wrote Alice I Have Been and Mrs. Tom Thumb @ EverydayEBook
• Gracious Donor in Vermont replaces Book Mobile with over 100,000 @ Weekend Edition
• Hilary Mantel talks Bring Up the Bodies @ Omnivoracious
• 

  Harry Potter Decal

  Harry Potter Decals @ Etsy

• Recipes from Writers @ Brain Pickings
• Fitzgeralds in Hollywood @ Times Library Supplement
• Neil Gaiman’s commencement address @ Galley Cat
• 50 Creative Writing Professors on Twitter @ WorldWideLearn
• Updike Reissued in Paperback @ Tucson Citizen
• Groupon works with First Book @ Groupon
• Barack Obama fails Shades of Gray Test @ Galley Cat
• NY Times Best-Seller List
• 

  Bookfessions

  Bookfessions@ Tumblr

• Michael McGriff featured Poet @ Poetry Daily
• Game of Thrones Re-Cap @ The Atlantic
• Speaker list for Library of Congress Book Festival
• Anthony Hopkins as Hemingway @ Deadline Hollywood
• Joan Didion on Respect @ Brain Pickings
• Poe of Edgar Allen writes Mary of Had a Little Lamb @ Poetry Foundation
• Justin Halpern talks I Suck at Girls @ EW’s Shelf Life
• B&N Talks with Megan Mayhew Bergman @ Review B&N
• Book Review Worst Offenders @ Ploughshares
• Everyday Words Invented by Famous Authors @ Flavor Wire
• The Giving Tree Inspires Wedding Invitations @ Galley Cat
• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Files for Bankruptcy @ Huff Post
• John Steinbeck @ Paris Review (It’s enough to just put his name).

• 

  Nabokov | Butterfly Catcher

• Bookstore Cafe Authors in Shorts @ Pinterest
• Marissa Meyer (of Cinder) Talks How she Sold her NanoWriMo Novel @ The Office of Letters and Light
• Patti Smith will Interview Neil Young @ BEA
• Pet Owls Abandoned after Harry Potter Craze Ends @ Mirror
• Review of New Book by Marilynne Robinson @ LA Review of Books

Day 134: A Monday

Day 134 | My Sweet Linus.

Jack the Wolf can be really cute.  Other times he tells my mother her dingle can’t move like his.  In these moments, he pees onto the toilet seat and lets the yellow dribble into the bowl.

Day 135: A Tuesday

Day 135 | Water Color Curls

Sometimes I create works of genius in teen art.  Sometimes I draw fairies with curly hairs.

Day 135 | Scabby Daddy

My dad face planted in the driveway.  His post-plant quote, “I laid there for four minutes thinking someone might come by, or that I was dead, but eventually I got up.”  This was the worst of the face, knee, elbow and hand scabs.

Day 136: A Wednesday

Day 136 | Spider Cat

Apparently, I have a comic book cat.  He thinks he’s some sort of mighty haired villain.  This is him getting ready to scale doorways.  Can you tell he’s made of crazy?

Day 137: A Thursday

Day 137 | Putty Face

My coworker has a broken finger and this is what therapy gave him for the week.  When therapy gives you putty, make mustaches, unibrows, and smiles.

Day 138: A Friday

Day 138 | Just Another Sunset

Everyone loves a good sunset picture.  My ice-cream-partner-in-crime turned the car around to park towards the sunset so we could watch it flush away and I could put my toes against the pink and leave prints on the glass.

Day 139: A Saturday

Day 139 | Little Bird

I found my cat wagging and yipping over this small bird.  I want to hold it in my palms like river water.  Plus, look at that cool-kid mohawk.  He must have gone to the hair stylist.

Day 139 | HOLY SLUG

My parent’s grow the most ridiculous specimen in their yard.  I would salt the slugs, but who would want to diminish such an odd creation.  Let it ooze, buddy.  I have to remind myself of that thought when I step on them skipping to the door at night like Juliet after star gazing with Romeo.

Day 140: A Sunday (A Montage)

Day 140 | Guilty Face

Step 1: Look at mom guiltily.

Day 140 | Box Face

Step 2: Look adorable

Day 140 | Eat Bag Straps

Step 3: Be a kitten again.  Lick plastic bags.

I love poetry chapbooks because they fit into the back pocket of my jeans even with the stretch denim. (All ladies know how hard it is to even carry a pencil in those darn stretch blues).

Chapbooks are the ones you cradle in independent bookstores.  Their cover images just speak to you and inside the pages, there’s that quote about your soul, and how you keep it stored only in a cold climate.  (Okay, I made all of that up, but chapbooks are  usually breath-taking and more importantly, just enough).

In a world where things are literally flying at your head from the interwebs as if your Alice falling down the rabbit hole’s shoot of rocking chairs, glass bottles, status updates, and mindless gossip, chapbooks are the pockets where you can breathe.  They’re like small nooks of poetry.  Even if you aren’t alone, socked-up to your shins in bed, you feel that way reading chapbooks.

Lately, books are filled to the brim with poems that were used as fillers.  Chapbooks hold the best poems – the poems worth that delicate whisper you use because you’re reading poetry, alone, in your bedroom and it’s too personal to let your family members, or even your cat hear.  When I say just enough, I mean that all the lines, all the verses, all the rhythms, are doing the same amount of work, all the poems carry that push.  I’m not saying they hold the same emotional packaging though.

Poets today who have made a name for themselves ride their name into pastoral poems about daybreak.  I’m not against those poems, but are they really pushing the boundaries of contemporary poetry and making us look at ourselves differently, or more fully.

The four recent chapbooks that I’ve read are The Sad Epistles by Emma Bolden, The Book of Women by Dorianne Laux, Invisible Girls by Erika Lutzner who runs New Poets for Peace, and everything by Noah Falck.

Emma Bolden’s poems in The Sad Epistles were published by Dancing Girl Press & Studios which publishes contemporary women’s poetry.  They publish about 10-12 women poets per year and always produce stunning little packets of words.  It’s like the bubble gum of poetry.   You can purchase The Sad Epistles from their website for just $7.  Believe me, you’ll want to make that purchase because I said so, and because Miss Bolden has a beautiful blog where she makes hilarious commentary on her life, and words.

Bolden uses stunning language that must be felt in the mouth.  You must eat poetry, it is ingested no other way.  You must read it aloud, use pauses to take breaths during the immediate grief you feel for your own romantic relationship gone sour like Bolden’s.

What more can you say about love than, “An old woman’s garden, peaches lost in their rot”  (Bolden). The Sad Epistles is metaphorically driven and takes us through a strict series of sadness with titles like, “Attempting to Determine the Affect of Absence by Number,” and “An Answer to the Question Why are You Shaking.”  Yes, when you end something, you quake and shake, you let your eye liner puddle black as wet soil and drain onto your cheeks.  It’s more than that with Miss Bolden, but you’ll have to see.  She’s much more capable with words than I am, using them like a personal jungle gym in outer space.  I’ve never seen that many metaphors, or that many stark raving images (naked, running laps around your parents’ house on a dare) come together and unfold so slowly, and painfully.

Laux’s Book of Women is the automatic response to her current poetry hardcover from Norton, Book of Men.  Her explanation for the book is “how can you have a book of men without having a book of women?”  The poems in the book are eternal Laux.  Dolly Parton’s breasts make an appearance, a she-snake and the death bed of a wife.  Her poetry is always, and will always be beautiful, sensual, something to rub against your skin.  I really don’t have to expand, other than sharing a few poems from the collection.

Here is a link to Waitress in Blip Magazine.

Here is a link to Secondhand Coat in Blip Magazine, also.

Invisible Girls is terrifying.  It ignites everything I fear for the world in one poetry collection.  It’s about girls given as sex slaves in brothels.  It burns, still.  One of my favorite lines from the collection is, “he held her down like she/was made of gossamer/yet, she felt like her body/was full of tar” (Lutzner).  I love it not because of its form but because it places what’s happening to these small girls in our backyard.  How many years ago was it that we tarred and feathered our own?  The historical connotation of this one line is amazing.  It’s easy to chalk things up to “oh, that’s happening in third world countries,” but we need to remember that it’s happening to human kind.  The word No is two letters, but demands the same respect whether spoken softly or raging.

Noah Falck wrote one of my all-time favorite poems ever.  I’m sure I’ve talked about him before on this blog.  He is a fourth grade teacher as well as poet, and more importantly a bomb-ass prose poet.  Yep, bomb-ass, perfect description, blow your butt up.  I’ve never been to the Midwest, but I want to because of this poem.

THE MEASURING TAPE FOR THE MIDWEST

extends beyond the five flavors of boredom and further than the dimple-smeared children circling the food court could ever imagine. It cuts through the town where the pop-top was invented, the town of the backpack vacuum cleaner, the first electric street light and along the traffic island where the three-legged stray dog everyone feeds but refuses to pet shivers before stumbling somewhere out in the distance where several new roads emerge beneath a caution light blinking above teenagers who suck face and viciously trade bubblegum and mononucleosis as shadows of fertilized cornhusk sway like children on roller skates.  It stretches into those remote zip codes you’ve always wondered about, where your dreams take place, where a single tree silhouetting the horizon is not quite ready for rain, where every August there is a sunset that bleeds into September. It bumps down dirt roads and amplifies the people from one light towns and people hugging in small groups, their colorful fannypacks overlapping in smoke groomed bowling alleys where everything swallows like cigarette ash and sunburn appears unexpectedly like a sixth child and unfolds near funny red-lipped people drinking to get drunk because not everything needs an answer because breathing only stops after another double-bacon cheeseburger and continues down alleyways and crosswalks through tollbooths and potholes near chain-link fenced-in yards which hold children and plastic and innocence with storms on the horizon and horizons on the storm, the sounds like unhung paintings left in the closet, like snow filled landscapes and whispers in far out lawns where people are being born and people are dying, and people are laughing out loud and scaring hiccups out of their bodies beneath sudden gushes of acid rain.”

Thank God for Poetry Professors with Facebook. My broadside from 2010 Advanced Poetry with D.Laux. It’s Margaret Atwood. Yes, Marg Wood writes poems.  I’m an awkward goose.

Here’s a short history of the chapbook: The word chapbook came from bibliophiles, and peddlers.  If someone was particularly outraged by a new law, or the ladies gossip circle, they were able to print up little pamphlets to argue their side.  They’re almost always less than forty pages (usually poetry) and can be made at a low cost with paper and staples, or as a fine piece of poetic art carved from gold (although that would be quite heavy, so maybe their just gold leaf).  My favorite historical remnant of the chapbook is that they started with broadsides which were popular songs sold for half a penny.  Yes, that means you need to carry your kitchen sheers in your pocket to cut your pennies for words.

Don’t be put off by their tiny size, embrace the thin bind, imagine all the trees they saved.

Favorite Tweets:

Favorite Search Terms:

• attractiveness for a book: I’m looking for a perfectly bound man with a leather spine.  If you have gold paned edges and words that are in perfect Georgia font, I’d like to take you to dinner in my purse to mingle with my tissues, receipts and empty lipstick containers.  That Southern accented font gets me every time.  If your blurb reads “couldn’t put me down,” call me – 1800bokdate.
• poems for funny stories in relation to blood borne pathogens: The best thing I could find on google for this was a “Bloodborne Pathogens Rap,” here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hti4LBGaBXQ (Someone’s science teacher is awesome).
• books on hovercrafts: With those eyes, aliens probably need large print.
• short stories about glaciers: I’m not sure about short stories, but check out Glaciers by Alexis Smith, and Shiver by Nikki Gemmell.

Book News:

• Deborah Clearman talks about Workshops in Women Prisons @ Ploughshares
• Vintage Children’s Classic has a New Video @ Vintage
• 
• Giles Harvey Talks Literary Taste @ New Yorker
• Hemingway Writes Home @ Letters of Note
• How a Book is Born @ WeldonOwen
• Postcard 2 by Franz Wright @ Poetry Foundation
• 12 Super Story Collections @ Book Page
• Do E-Books Push Writer Productivity @ Christian Science Monit0r
• Would you Attend a Fifty Shades of Grey Sex Workshop? @ Huff Post
• Stories in Your Pocket: How to Write Flash Fiction @ The Guardian
• Seattle Public Library Hides 1000 Books for their Annual Summer Reading Program @ Boing Boing
• The Dystopian’s Guide to Positive Thinking @ For Books’ Sake
• Interview with Peter Carey @ Goodreads
• 

  A.A. Knopf Poster

  Julia Child Centennial Poster @ Book Seller Center

• In Honor of Zombie Awareness Month @ Harper Perennial
• Could the Internet Save Book Reviews @ The Atlantic
• Literary Death Match This Week
• In Defense of NY Public Library @ The New York Review of Books
• David Sedaris All Truth in Memoir @ Washington Post
• 

  I love this self-drawn portrait of Margaret Atwood. She’s clearly a bird lady too with a bird nest of hair, and scales.

  Silly Photos of Serious Writers @ Flavorwire

• How to Plot Your Book the Hard Way @ Meg Rosoff
• Unusual Reads about Mommy’s @ Everyday E-book
• Book Claims Zodiac Killer is Still Kickin’ at 91 @ LA Times
• State of the Bible @ NY Daily News
• Hipser Book Quotes @ Tumblr
• Man Freed on Bond but Must Write Book Reports (BEST JUDGE EVER) @ Fox News (I wouldn’t trust a damn thing Fox News says but, I thought this article was interesting.
• Field Notes of Grief (Self-Published) @ WV Public Broadcasting
• Printed Books Existed Nearly 600 Years Before Gutenberg’s Bible @ io9
• Book Fetish @ Book Riot
• 65 Read-Aloud Books for Boys @ 4 Tunate
• Narrative X-Ray @ Matthew Epler
• Map of Dickens’ London @ The Dickens’ Page
• 40 Books that Every Artist Should Own: Part 1 @ The Artinfo Bookshelf

Another week, another wash load of photos:

Day 126: A Sunday

Day 126 | I’m becoming my Mother

I found this magnet, and I quite enjoyed it, and then I decided I could make it myself, and I haven’t.  (Series-of-unfortunate-commas, oh man).  I totally regret not buying it on the spot for my new fridge.  (I got a big girl job).  I keep telling my friends not to be jealous of my big girl job because my mom keeps shouting, “Put on your big girl panties” throughout our house.    Plus, she has more fridge magnets than the big fridge in the sky.  I’m becoming my mother.

Day 127:  A Monday

Day 127 | Out of the Club Stripping.

I decided it would be really cool if I stripped my bed, not for washing, but for staining.  When I was a junior in college I  painted a giant white tree on the head board.  I was (am) really into nature and all that, being barefoot – you know.  I didn’t realize stripping your bed is a whole ordeal.  However, I did discover that at the bare wood, someone painted a lovely little bouquet.  I think my mom haggled our neighbors down to $15 on this vintage find when we got it.

Day 128: A Tuesday

Day 128 | I’m in the 39%

Like President Obama, I’m for marriage equality.  A lot of people think that this Amendment 1 was to ban the unions between LGBTQ community members, but all it did was prolong the inevitable.  Like Obama has said in the past, we are a nation that is evolving.  Here’s how I look at it: you don’t have to vote for Gay Marriage, you have to vote for equality.   This Amendment wasn’t asking for the holy rollers to let the LGBTQ community get married in the sanctity of their church, but under the government.  This is why we have separation of church and state, people.

Here’s a story:

Yesterday, I stopped at Food Lion on my way home to get Broccoli.  One of my teens who I hadn’t seen in a while was the cashier in my line.  Of course, I asked him where he’d been.

He said, “I have no reason to come up there anymore.”

“Why?”

“We got a computer at home and everything.”

Now, I’ve had a computer my entire life.  I never wanted for technology, or anything really, in my household.  I always had easy access to Microsoft Word to type my papers, and google search was available for all the examples I used in those papers.  However, to my teen at Food Lion having a computer at home was a remarkable thing.   Think about this story next time you imagine everyone as equal.  Ask yourself then how you can make this life more equal, more free for others.

Day 129: A Wednesday

Day 129 | “Tonight we Dine in Hell”

This is Jasper on the kitchen island.  THIS is Jasper the dictator.

Day 130: A Thursday

Day 130 | Spring, darling

“With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?” — Oscar Wilde

Day 131: A Friday

Day 131 | WantonCreation makes me wonder if bowling shoes are the same in every country.

I want to know where you can buy bowling shoes.  They looked cute with my summer dress.

Day 131 | Winning

I know that score says I’m not winning, but I just got a strike! (Strikes! are in need of exclamation points).

Day 132 : A Saturday

Day 132 | Daily Toes Cleaning

Sometimes, he’s cute, only sometimes though.  This blog is a Holy Comma Disaster.

Day 133: A Sunday

Day 133 | Happy Mother’s Day

On the side of the road a little goose family was munching on the propellers of dandelions.  Weird thing is, my mother loves Geese.  She giggles over gaggles (had to get it in there).  In honor of my mother, and all wonderful mothers like her, Happy Mother’s Day.

Tea Art | Ginger Pear

I don’t know how I muscled through this, how my eyes in the dark continuously focused on these words that weren’t beautiful, or even at all interesting.  I managed to amuse myself with a series called “tea art.”  See my newest feature, “Ginger Pear” to your left.

This is the second book of boring that I’ve read by Andrea Barrett.  Her stories in Ship Fever (which contained the Mendel Pea Story which I was so fond of) won the National Book Award and prompted me to give her a second chance at wowing me with The Air We Breathe.  (Yes, I expect to be wowed, I’m a book snob).  I was especially interested on how she narrates with the group (first-person plural) “we.”  While I think this is an imaginative concept and really outlines the group thought that goes on and becomes extremely important by the end of the book, it didn’t make the read worth it.

This is my frustrated face.

I think where my problems lie with Barrett are in pacing, and detail.  Her pacing is unbelievable slow.  It took me a wild 5 days to get through this book.  I wasn’t inspired to continue picking it up and not interested in the main characters enough to keep striving.  I should have just flipped to the family history at the end of the book to discover that Leo and Eudora (fabulous name) do in fact marry and live endlessly in love and without tuberculosis for the rest of their days.  Instead, I read on like a girl floating on a chunk of wooden barge during calm sea times.

The book is set in 1916 at a Tuberculosis Sanatorium.  The threat of war is imminent and by the end is upon everyone in the town.  I think this is part of the problem why the collective “we” didn’t work.  I hardly got to know the voice of any characters even though a main part of the plot are these Wednesday meetings when someone from the local sick speaks about themselves and anything they’d like to educate others on.  I thought this was such an interesting way to get people connecting in a story, set them in a meeting.  It’s like going to an AA meeting – of course you’re going to find characters, or a Bible Study meeting.  You can’t tell me their aren’t bonneted Baptist women with gray comb overs that are shouting to you from the page.  Just imagine their red face upon the latest town marriage, or the shrill of their voices as they gossip.

A meeting is such a great setting for a fictional environment and yet the meetings were inherently boring.  One of the things Barrett has been praised for is her use of science and technology in fiction.  However, in these parts where I should be dying to understand fossils, or really feeling the radiation of x-rays before they were perfected, I was left dulled and sighing.  The only time the x-rays really made my heart twinge was when Eudora x-rayed Leo and through this the reader was able to see just how biological love can be, just how scientific.  Doesn’t the wife of a husband who’s had a heart attack think about that heart afterwards, think about the vessels and how that thick red mud is sloshing through them, where the nutrients are, what he should eat?  Love, as inherently biological is another great concept.

Unfortunately, this may be a case of a lack in beautiful writing.  Not once in 297 pages did I feel the need to scribble down a beautiful phrase.  In a story of love, sickness and war, there should be beauty.  There should be beauty and not boredom in that loneliness, and that excitement.  Instead, I was neither taken with the word choice (the details) or angry with them.  I felt that this was just a story told straight, nothing fancy.  And where’s the fun in that?  Did Barrett rely solely on the “we” to make this a book of genius?

The Air We Breathe | Andrea Barrett

There were moments in Ship Fever where I wanted to eat the page; rip-it-broken down the binding, crumple it into my fist and shove it into my soaked mouth.  I didn’t, of course because I’m not a Destructor, but those moments are important in any book. All books should be held to beauty.  I know that everyone’s idea of beauty is different, but books should move people.  Books should make you stay up past lights out, and hold a flashlight past when your arm is tired and those sleep pins are pricking because your blood has stopped flowing.  They should make you want to EAT PAPER, eat words, eat.  Then on the other hand they should starve you, they should make you bleed to find out what the character will do next, what way the writer will describe a wooden fence in the country.

I’m not saying don’t read Barrett, or don’t read The Air We Breathe, just be forewarned that it isn’t something you’ll hold in your hands like gold.  Hey, maybe it would make a great movie. This book will move you to create art out of a draining tea bag, let the tainted water puddle over the scrap paper.

For the Wordy One:  These are the mothers that call you when you’re only ten minutes late from work, who send you massively long e-mails and notes reminding you not to party too hard in college (this is not Cassie’s new social scene.  Seriously, I could produce the note).  

Wordy Mother

• Top Left: It’s Your Mother by theMuckyDuck @ Etsy.  $10
• Top Right: Mom Rules by ForgottenPages @ Etsy. $8
• Bottom Left: Mother’s Day Letter Photography by FrittsCreative @ Etsy. $31
• Bottom Right: (My personal favorite because this.is.my.life) Keep Calm and Call Mom by EncorePrints @ Etsy. $10

For the Vintage Book Lover: This book lover should have been born in a different age.  Rather than place a million flowing Greek dresses up here, I stuck to recent vintage.

Vintage Mama

• Top Left: Crochet Pattern Book by Hexagon Crafts @ Etsy. $25
• Top Right: Vintage Fairytale Gift Tags by SweetTurquoise @ Etsy. $6
• Bottom Left: The Abandoned Farmer Book Purse by NovelIdeaBookPurses @ Etsy. $54
• Bottom Right: Vintage Sad Irons by Thooker @ Etsy. $95

For the Mother NOT Watching her Figure: These are the mothers who are going to eat that piece of cake, damnit.

Foodie Momma

• Top Left: If You Give a Mom a Cookie Mug by MomGoodz @ Etsy. $12
• Top Right: Stitch Pattern for Roadkill Diner by NewYorkNeedleWorks @ Etsy. $8.50
• Bottom Left: Mother’s Day Cookie by KatieDuran @ Etsy. $11.50
• Bottom Right: Mommy Mug by MissPottery @ Etsy. $22

Bookish Crafty Creation Momma: These are the mothers who like signature creations in their house.  They always want something unique, or are always cutting and pasting something.

Creative Momma

• Top Left: Book Bird House by booklooks @ Etsy. $40
• Top Right: Papercut Book Scenes by ohlalovely @ Etsy. $111
• Bottom Left: Personal Library Kit @ Shakespeare’s Den. $16.95
• Bottom Right: Love you Forever Necklace by Scarlett Sage @ Etsy. $31.50

For the Stylish Momma: This is for the momma who hasn’t aged (isn’t this all of them).  She lets her daughter borrow dresses from her closet and still wears them the next week.  She’s sexy and her legs still prove it.

Who’s that Lady

• Top Left: Composition Dress @ Modcloth. $189.99
• Top Middle: Hollywood Book Safe by GreenRstudio @ Etsy. $58
• Top Right: Fifty Dresses that Changed the World @ Modcloth. $19.99
• Middle Left: Fabric Covers @ Modcloth. $19.99
• Middle Middle: Hard Carved Block Print by HoneyCombPrintShop @ Etsy. $60
• Middle Right: Shoulder Bag of Notebook @ Modcloth. $54.99
• Bottom Left: Hipster Glasses Vinyl Decal by Therocketshop @ Etsy. $5.50
• Bottom Middle: Catcher in the Rye Snow Globe by BubbleRoll @ Etsy. $24.95
• Bottom Right: Great Gatsby Earrings by ShopNightOwlDesigns @ Etsy. $8.00

For the Organized Mom: This is my mom.  I’m 24 and she’s still making my dentist appointments.  Really though, my mom is every single one of these stereotypes.  You should see her address book. I’m not exaggerating, she has more addresses than an African herd of gazelle has legs.

• Top Left: Pro/Con Journal @ Modcloth $SALE$ 5.99
• Top Middle: Ready Set Novel @ Modcloth $16.99
• Top Right: Take Out Menu File @ Modcloth $21.99
• Middle Left: Creative Spelling Magnet Set @ Modcloth $12.99
• Middle Middle: Stationary Set (All Occassion) @ Modcloth $18.99
• Middle Right: Lego Moleskin @ Modcloth, B&N, and every bookstore ever. $16.99
• Bottom Middle: Upcycled Wood Magazine Holder by VintageInColour $24.95
• Bottom Left: Run a Tight Ship Bag @ Modcloth $49.99
• Bottom Right: Notebook Strap by MelissaTanAustralia @Etsy $16.00

For the Eco-Friendly Mother: This mother is watching her carbon footprint and the squirrels love her recycling bin the best on garbage day.

• Top Left: Monopoly Journal (or Scrabble Journal) by Peony&Thistle @ Etsy. $26
• Top Middle: Wool Coffee and E-reader Cover Set by WormeWool @ Etsy. $21
• Top Right: Milk Jug Earrings by twicecreations @ Etsy. $12
• Middle Left: Bookmark by Bookbelt @ Etsy. $12
• Middle Middle: Crochet Slippers by WhiteNoiseMaker @ Etsy. $19
• Middle Right: Upcycled Bag by SaltAttic @Etsy. $30
• Bottom Left: Mother Pillow by MyBeardedPigeon @ Etsy. $50
• Bottom Middle: Coffee Bag by ManillaExtract @ Etsy. $80
• Bottom Right: Earth Day Journalby WeeBinder @ Etsy. $42

The Ultimate Giver: Let’s be honest.  This is for every mother out there who ever nourished a child, loved a child, hugged a child.  This is for the daughter who wants to pass on that love to the next generation by sharing it with another.

• Top Left: Give a Girl the Gift of Education from Your Mother @ Save the Children. $70
• Top Right: Support Save the Children by Purchasing a Handmade Bookmark. $20
• Bottom Right: Stock a Library from Your Mother @ Save the Children. $100
• Bottom Left: Just remind your mom to give to herself.  Search Etsy for frame and phrase.

And that’s it.  I hope everyone’s Mom is appreciated on Mother’s Day.  On that day I expect huge amounts of love to float around our world.

Favorite Tweets:

Favorite Search Terms:

• bfg roald dahl monopoly: WHAT! WHERE!  Would the pieces be “BoneCruncher,” GizzardGulper,” and MeatDripper.”  And what about the places: SnozzCumbers Country, FrobScottle Stage, Phizzwizard Land.  How wonderful.
• man in holden caulfield winter hat: I feel like this is a want-ad on Craigslist (pre-Craigslist-killer era).  Look on e-harmony, hipsters really like to look like Holden Caulfield.
• cassie hunter gives a boy a terrible clanging: I’m just glad that there are powerful Cassie’s out there.
• books with “bird” in the title: Ah, so there are others like me.
• two birds were sitting on a barbwire fence and one had a typewriter and one was eating food, the one said pass the salt: this is a literal google.  (google as verb).  Someone has too much time on their hands.

Book News:

• “Just the Facts” an opinion piece about telling the truth in Creative Nonfiction by Danny Heitman @ NY Times.
• Scroll to the bottom to read Toni Morrison’s witty and biting remarks in interview @ USA Today
• Maurice Sendek passes away.  Let out your terrible roar & wild rumpus.  I’m going to read Where the Wild Things Are to my nephew this week and I will be reading it with extra fierceness so that he carries it on to the next generation.  Articles from NPR. Morning Edition Podcast.  The Guardian on Sendek.  Rosenbach Museum & Library Collection on Maurice Sendek.  Visit today for free.

• Interview @ The Paris Review with Louise Erdrich.
• Follow books live @ Books Depository.
• Top 10 Best Memoirs about Mothers @ Flavorwire
• Neil Gaiman does journaling and This American Life @ Neil Gaiman.
• Aimee Bender’s shelf @ Strand Bookstore
• Ten Best First Lines in Fiction @ The Guardian
• Brown’s Rare Book Store finds Paul Revere @ NY Times
• Book Club Girl offers GREAT E-books for $2.99 this week @ Indiebound
• Everyone loves a good statistic: What are your odds for winning The Booker @ The Millions
• Dymock’s 101 Best Books Voted by Australian Public.  I miss Dymocks.
• Tracy K. Smith & David Bowie @ 360 Studio
• 

  Chalkboard Mug

  Chalkboard Mug (I already have a dry erase mug so I might as well indulge) @ Book Riot.

• Watch Book People Unite’s campaign to get kids reading @ Goodreads
• Penguin not only designs classy covers, but erects historic monuments from books.  Visit Bookhenge @ Tumblr.
• The Pen Literary Festival runs through Sunday.  Finish your finals, and fly out.
• Kickstarter Campaign for WS Merwin documentary. Visit and learn here.
• The Loft Literary Center is having a poetry conference May 18-20.  Visit here for full details.
• Oprah’s 9 Lessons from Fictional Women @ O.
• Top 10 Books that take you traveling @ The Guardian
• Poetic Representations of the Holocaust @ 2 Jacket
• Five Stories about Jackie O. @ Christian Science Monitor
• Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry @ Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
• What America’s Reading: Best Sellers by City @ The Daily Beast
• John Updike on Ethics and Poetics of Criticism @ Brain Pickings
• Highlight of Poetry Finalists for Best Translated Book Award @ Three Percent
• ShamWow the book? Yes. Does it have a book Trailer? YES. @ Huff Post.
• 50 Things to Make from Old Books @ Pinterest
• Picking your tablet by your personality @ Yahoo.
• What Makes a Good Poem:  The Child Perspective @ Poetry Foundation
• Can Writing Nonfiction Hurt the Ones You Love? (Yes, duh).

Lastly; if you are a follower of this blog from NC, please vote today.  I would particularly like you to vote AGAINST Amendment 1 – The Marriage Amendment because NO ONE should suffer, or be treated unfairly, under the freedom of the US.  If anything, do your research.

This first photo is actually a video.    The video below is Taylor Mali who was an educator and was asked at a party “What he makes?” from a lawyer.  He didn’t have the wit to answer in the moment, so like all good artists, he lived outside of the moment and wrote this slam poem about the dinner party.  This is his ultimate response.  I want to say that not everything in this video is condoned, or should ever be used in the classroom.  It’s quite aggressive and has a few choice words, but it’s powerful and true.

Day 119 | Taylor Mali does slam poetry, “What Teachers Make.” Rather than taking a photo of me crying in my car over this video, just watch the video and cry in the comfort of your own safe place.  My safe place is in the car wash.  My mother taught me to dance in a car wash, so it’s special to me.  It’s all about the head bob.

Day 120 | Girls Day Out

The teen girls went to Meredith for the evening to tour a college campus.  I love the stairway prom poster.

Day 121 | Forbidden Fruit

When it comes to poetry you have to smell the topic to be able to write it.

Day 122 | Workin’ on her Fitness

This is Fergie, she’s everything that ends in -icious (delicious, auspicious, suspicious, capricious).

Day 123 | Writing Notebook

Just a jumbled page of notes from my writing notebook.  It also has my name tag on it.  Other stickers: Bartlett pairs, Gala apples with full barcodes, a post-it note that says “Bad Experiements.”

Day 124 | Super Moon

Saturday night was the biggest, and brightest full moon of the year.  Only 17,000 miles away.  Only eight back and fourth trips to California for me.  This is the moon from Hugo Cabret – the very first page, I think.  It gets bigger, and bigger.

For inspiration, read a poem by Dorianne Laux, “Facts About the Moon.”

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don’t tell me
what I already know, that it won’t happen
for a long time. I don’t care. I’m afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only child, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

See how that poem happened at How a Poem Happens.

Day 125 | Tangerorange

This is what a workshop looks like.  Poetry is for people who get loud on fruit, and salsa.