Tag Archives: writing

on writing, rewriting, & taking notes

What it looks like now

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a longish view

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from the right

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new columbine blooms, and one fern taking root.

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after cutting down the iris, it began to sprout again.

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hidden basket

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more of the same

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Hidden miniature rose and pansies, salvia, & bee balm.

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From the right

So, here is what the Secret Hanging Gardens look like now.  To lemon balm*, iris, pansies, rose geranium, columbine, anemone,solomon’s seal, bee balm, wild violets, alyssum, million bells,  I’ve added a coleus, two types of Salvia, a bit of fern and sweet woodruff.  A protecting Crow Godess* watches. It is a garden of singles, of onesies, when wisdom says plant three of each, or five.  I hope in time, the violets and columbine will spread, as will the solomon’s seal.  I want to scatter some bulbs in the fall.

Does it represent my novel’s current state? My novel looks at a tragedy, which is couched in other events of a scattered extended family, during 1991-92.  That is, it is an assemblage of various plants (characters) in relationship to each other, but does it  an overarching harmonic scheme

Is it at all political?  Does it say anything?  This slender novel, I mean, garden,  beats back the wilderness with a view to free some trees.  Creating a garden; creating a novel?

What does it need, friends?

 

 

 

 

*Lemon balm from my friend, Alla; and a Crow Goddess medallion purchased from Sarah’s etsy shop.

These days

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I am feeling lighter these days, not only because winter seems to be heading out.  The leave-taking is slow; rain and hail this afternoon.  But I am glad to report that I do not yet have to take leave of where I live, that I can stay a little longer.  In some ways I feel I am living off the grid, though obviously I am not, as I haul huge sacks of gourmet groceries out of the trunk of my not yet paid for car.  But then I don’t think I ever imagined to be in my mid-fifties in the place I had been in my mid-twenties.  I had been so miserable then.  I am not so miserable now, nor do I think I ever could be in that way.  But I was fully caught up in my work, unselfishly, un-self-consciously, because everyone around me, then, was caught up in their work, writing or painting.

So here I am, once again not receiving any of the grants I applied for this year, and thinking ,maybe next year. Or maybe no; time to retire for asking for more.

 A more radical idea would be to say that I have been lucky to receive what I did then, and continue to receive now.  I am still sheltered by the same arts institution as in my twenties, as i said, and I work with working writers at another institution. I am teaching Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse where there are more than enough phrases to circle the world with the sheer joy of language.  

And yet.  Is this exactly all there is? What exactly else is there?  I don’t seem to be climbing up anymore in my career, but walking laterally.  I have two cats.  Family and friends.  Great students.  I still miss Boulder.  I think about my old dreams of moving to England for a spell or France.  How can I have not seem Rome? Or Greece?  I know there is more.

So the task is to see how to make sense of what I have and what I want.  

For a long while, I used to, to be honest,  think, how can people they help me.  Using people–it is not a way I want to live. Certainly not, would say a character from a book I love, in an English voice.  But I’m not English; American: brash, obnoxious; friendly.  Oh,and Indian, another thing altogether. Or not.  If I had a grant, would I be able to sort through my ideas any better?  Is writing a blog like writing a diary, only the publishing occurs before death? 

 April: when the land ought to be green, where patience is required.

 

 

Dallying

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James Galway, 2014

James Galway, 2014

 

I dug up the last of the dahlias, and tackled my  first attempt at dividing and storing. The results were not pretty.  A bucket full of rejected bulbs (thin, soft, shriveled) stood at my side while a paltry number of possibly productive tubers emerged for labeling.  I am thinking I don’t have a storage space to keep them at the recommended 45-50 degrees F.  I am thinking could I not be spending my time better? I am thinking I need better tools. After digging and dividing, my fingernails black with compost, for who wants to wear gloves when one is already in the thick of it, I leaned back, and swore to forgo this bit of alchemical puttering in the future. But  I loved the way Hamari’s Accord spread its pointy pale yellow blooms, and the Edinburgh kept flowering.

Once again, I am uncertain where I will live in the fall, where I will write.

I distracted myself with bulbs last month.  I devoured rare tulip catalogues which offered twelve and twenty-eight dollar specimens which would yield one perfect bloom the first season, and more the following. These are legacy bulbs.   I let my pocketbook rule, and opted for handfuls of the lower-priced and popular choices. Intuitively,  I wanted to root, lay a semblance of permanence on rented ground.  For two years I resisted planting roses thinking I was a temporary boarder at best until I rescued three end of the year throw-aways.  This fall, I bought an English Rose, David Austin’s James Galway, dreaming of Gertrude Jekyll and Constance Spry for the summer.  

Now the garden will rest, unless I get restless and plant a few more bulbs.  I will let it rest as it gathers its strength, with roots growing quietly.