Writing Memoir

When the train sounds its level crossing in the wee hours, the coyotes howl. Why? I don't know, but I like it. I know the coyotes are always there, though I may rarely see them. But when their ruckus starts up, there suddenly seems an impossible number of creatures just outside my window.

Think of animal tracks. Summer trails show only a few traces of animal life in the mud. But winter - winter transforms and conceals even as it provides revelations. Snow reveals a super-highway of wild activity. Snow provides the evidence of abundant life. When the snow melts, you have to go back to believing without proof - back to a kind of faith.

Elk, deer, even the bighorn sheep confirm their presence regularly. It's the pine martens, mice, siskins, coyotes, wolves, lynx, cougar, and white-tails who recede and emerge from awareness seasonally. The shy. The nocturnal. The furtive prey, and the stalking predators.

And now here I sit, awake hours earlier than everyone else to make my own tracks in ink.

Writing about my life is like all that - the snow, the tracks, the train and the coyotes howling. Within me lurks a longing to share my life through words. I merely believe there is something of value to express. There's no evidence that's true - until I face a blank page.

I hitch one word to another with deliberate momentum and hear the animal cry of my authentic being. I have been placing a notebook on my lap for thirty-five years. That simple act camouflages the mundane signs of my passage - bills and "to-do" lists and schedules, trash and used tissues and dishes and laundry - and my life is transformed by being hidden. The proof of a deeper, more meaningful existence is exposed, ironically, by drifts of paper accumulating over my life. Without fail, within moments of placing pen on paper, I'm breathing deeply and rhythmically - as though I were asleep. But it's a much better rest. One that even coyotes cannot disturb.

post-MFA advice: with pants around ankles, begin again

The bathroom stall walls where I work are covered in magnetic words. For months, I've been pulling my pants down, then pairing magnets together. Two magnets to please only me with their assonance, alliteration, rhyme, unpredictability, or peculiarity. Why is this important?

When soil is very dry, it cannot absorb water. Some moisture must be present because, if I recall my biology lessons, H20 molecules attract one another thus drawing moisture into the soil. So if you have a plant that is very dry, first you must place the pot in a dish of water and allow the roots to draw some moisture up into the soil. Only then can you douse the soil surface with water and expect it to infiltrate.

Since finishing my MFA, my brain was like that dry soil. I tried to pour books upon it months ago but they pooled uselessly on the surface. But those word pairings were the trickles of hydration below the roots.  And now, it's possible to splash my cortex with the written words of others, but gingerly. I can take a bird-bath of reading, no more.

That little bit of moisture has been enough to nourish a few new leaves to share with you. I must be a cactus.

Luck has Uck in it, too

I'm busy with prying my ass from the muck of suckitude. I had been humming along for months but have recently fallen into the bog of eternal stench. As a perk, I tell myself I'll quit writing forever as soon as I get my degree. So, like, you know, nurturing the usual delusions.

In September, my friends

In September, my friends

drink deep the dregs of summer, the honey

light and backlit leaves.

Let your bones be wild

strawberries beneath the waning awning.

Let summer rise

away like dust around hooves

heading home.

Let your hands shed their tan

finger by finger

like velvet gloves after the masque.

Let these weeks like rivers

glide past as though buoyed by an inkling of oil.

Then, when frost creeps in on green grass

you may glimpse your beloved's hair

suddenly white.

In September, my friends by Monica Meneghetti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.monicameneghetti.com.

Pink King

Imagine it's 1988. Michael Jackson is King of Pop. He's still black and no one's wondering if he's wacko. You're a writer in Disneyland, pregnant with her third child.  On your way out of seeing Captain Eo, you're handed a visor with flashing lights.

Flash forward to 2011. MJ is dead. You've published four books in five years. You're sitting by the banks of a mountain river with another writer, no books and no kids. You hand her the visor. Two severed wires, black and red, protrude like antennae from the flaccid elastic headband. Small yet significant feelers of support.

She takes the visor. Ignores it for weeks as she rides a creative roller-coaster and wants to get off, pukes over the rail.

Eventually, she remembers - the visor. Holds and examines the silver plastic. Is that the scent of make-up lingering on the cloth lining? Who is Captain Eo, anyway?

Googles. Okay. A male superhero played by a man who moves like a sentient ocean. Whose emblem is the inverted pink triangle...

And not for the first time she wonders about the King of Pop. What happened?

-35 Celsius at 51°10'N, 115°34'W

...and the pachyderm jumped over the natural upward projection of the earth's surface...

Sunlight emerging onto mountains outside my window. Conscious breathing. Hot cocoa from scratch. Mary Oliver's poetry. I'm re-creating my morning ritual, one dawn at a time. Sunrise dawdles in the winter at this latitude. 7:30 is early enough. I'm grateful.

snapshot challenged

Glee cozy of the week! Taken during a morning ski on the Bow River.

I'm snapshot challenged. I detest short-circuiting my lived moment to step away and deal with a machine. Also, my appearance displeases me in 99% of photos. But I do like wandering around with the express purpose of looking at the world. The digital camera I got for Christmas made me remember a fascination with textures and things that can look extraterrestrial when taken out of context.

Meanwhile...I'm developing a screenplay that involves human clones and emancipation.

gathers moss

Guess I should have kept the stones rolling...look what grew on my head during the break!

On to feature film now...Three ideas pitched and awaiting feedback. Overwhelmed by the notion of developing one into a script. Don't think about it. Just keep rolling.

a strange new compulsion

Behold, the Nipple Hat!

The Glee Cozy Project has cultivated a strange new desire in me. I find myself donning all sorts of things not intended for headware. This time, I looked at my half-finished crochet project (a hot water bottle cover) and thought, "okay now, THIS will look funny..." What do you think? Happy Solstice to you all.

It's not serious. Seriously.

My third eye tells me everything I need to know.

Bill Pollett described my screenplay as "a satirical Cronenbergian fable set in an eco-friendly dystopia that has much to say about both sexual taboos and political intolerance."

Here are some of the projects that are feeding my imagination as the story plays out on the movie screen of my mind.

Biosphere Home Farming
www.design.philips.com/probes and click on FOOD for more info.

www.ekokook.com

Toronto-based source of velomobiles. More at www.bluevelo.com

a kind of jester

Courtesy Last Temptation Thrift.

Writer warps words in her Wernicke's area. Her hat-bobs bobble between banter and bathos. She dances, dodges, dips and doodles down dangerous drive-thrus of astounding antonyms and stunning synecdoches.  Even her extraordinarily effervescent eyes exclaim "excellent". The bells of Onomatopoeia jingle. Are you not entertained?

Cozy from the past

Mom is keeping my head cozy, even though she's been gone for more than half my lifetime.

My mom knitted me this hat when I was about twelve. It's a scarf with a hat built into one end of it. I remember wearing it on my walk to ballet class. The snow drifts were high, the wind was pushing against me. I felt like a Russian ballerina on her way to the studio.

Revision is the process of ruining a piece of writing in order to make it better. The toughest, most anxious stage for me is when the piece is ruined but not yet better. I'm there now with my screenplay. Only one thing for it: keep going until it is better, or at least better enough.

Hair is cozy enough

Sometimes my hair can be a Glee Cozy all on its own.

No hat arrived from my supporters on time for this week's post. So, here I am. My bare-headed, bed-headed self. Often, writers need to funk it up on their own.

turned on its head

Queen of Glee or margarine commercial? You decide.

When a Fibre Goddess from Nelson felted this Creamsiclesque handbag, she had no idea it would be warped into a Glee Cozy. It seems like the right thing to wear during my first screenplay critique.

pandas don't hibernate

shape-shifter? or just shifty?

This week's Glee Cozy is giving me warm fuzzies while I finish the first draft of my short film. Donated by a Hip-Hop Dance Goddess, it made its way all the way from Calgary into my mountain studio! I resonate with bears in general, so this hat is giving me a real boost. I need that boost right now.

weird enough to work

lurking in the penumbra, a strange creature was sighted....

Donated by Banff's Fine Art Maven and twisted by yours truly, this week's Glee Cozy makes me feel like a mutant mouse/Martian hybrid. Will it produce interesting writing results? It may be just weird enough to work! This week I wrote my first pages of film script. Finally hearing how my characters talk and interact. My anxiety is lessening and my enjoyment growing. If this trend continues, I could be having too much fun by December.

things you can have a thing for

Upon seeing a fake-fur sasquatch costume in a shop today, I said to the clerk without so much as a how-do-you-do, "Did you know there are folks with a fetish for people dressed in fursuits?"

"No, I didn't," says he.

"Yup. And some folks have a fetish for plush toys, too. It's called plushophilia. It may even be listed in the DSM-IV. How much are these tube socks?"

"Ten dollars."

"Okay, thanks. People in the furry fandom community refer to such a fetish as 'yiff'. Have a good one."

Let this be a cautionary tale for other writers out there. Not everyone is walking around thinking about human-kind's range of sexual fetishes. Just because the main character in your screenplay needs you to be obsessed with such matters, the local store clerk doesn't. He'll just spend the rest of his day texting his friends: "OMG, u'll nevR guess what this weird customer said 2 me 2day."

Spanky Poodle sat right down

a-writing on a story

put a feather in her cap

and called it allegory!

This week's glee cozy was handcrafted from our local newspaper by a Culinary Goddess(pictured Right) but it has never contained fish or chips. 

 

This week's Glee Cozy

 

warming my brain this week...

As I mentioned, I'm writing my first film script. I'm researching paper alternatives and fetish psychology. If anyone has suggestions of books or links on these topics, send 'em my way! Also, I don't have a Glee Cozy for next week yet, so send those my way, too!

Glee Cozy of the Week

"Over any extended period of time, being an artist requires enthusiasm more than discipline. Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process, a loving recognition of all the creativity around us." ~ Julia Cameron, in The Artist's Way

Me, I've been functioning on discipline for too long. In the spirit of the above quote, I've invented the Glee Cozy. It's a zany hat that I wear while I'm writing.

If you have a crazy hat (or come across one) that qualifies as a Glee Cozy, donate it to me! I'll post a pic of me wearing it while I write. In this small way, you can support a creative mind. Think of it as being a kind of old-school Patron. This is cheaper. And more fun!

Here's what's warming my brain while I write this week.

I'm learning how to write screenplays! Just finished creating my first pitch for a short film. It's getting workshopped today. Oinkers aweigh!

who, exactly?

First Wild-Flour morning to be unwritten by visits. 1, 2, 3 amazing women & an incredible conversation each. All those times I've written uninterrupted. Why is today the day I can't get past my first stanza? Between "a woman like me needs/a mantra" and "a woman like me needs/ a rosary made of bubbles not beads/ and prayers to pop every one", I was offered guided Kundalini meditation and maybe found an actor to stage my nascent script. All witnessed by local art - this time, Lynne Huras' http://www.sillygoatstudio.ca/