My One Day

It is my one day, my one day

is today to be lifted from the stack

where I’m carefully kept, paper

napkins between us so we don’t

scrape or chip or abrade. I am

lifted and separated, carefully

washed, hands in yellow gloves

feeling my heaviness, for I am not

ordinary glass but crystal imagined

and blown and shaped and cut. I sit

on the table, next to a cutting board,

and I listen to the peeling and paring

and cutting and dicing and halving as

into my interior is emptied apple

oranges tangerines grapes (red and

green) pecans maraschino cherries

and whatever else is deemed worthy

and appropriate. I am covered

in clear plastic and placed in a box

that is cold, not icy but sufficiently,

until I am removed and carefully

carried to the table, where my contents

are spooned out and whipped cream

topped to murmurs of “ambrosia.”

It is my one day.

Over at Tweetspeak Poetry, we’ve been discussing Spin: Taking Your Creativity to the Nth Degree by Claire Burge. One of the suggestions Burge makes in this book is to take an everyday object and personify it in an art form of your choice. To see the discussion and what suggestions and questions others tackled, please visit Tweetspeak Poetry.

And may you enjoy your own ambrosia this Thanksgiving Day.

Photograph by Maliz Ong via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

From the Dark Times – Creativity

Twice in my professional working life I experienced two dark times, and the results were as unexpected as they were confounding.

The year 1987 was a trifecta of convulsions. My father died suddenly in March, leaving behind a business that was a colossal mess. My church figuratively blew up in June. Then my job blew up in October, and I walked away from what many considered the best part of the company to work for.

A little over twenty years later, my job blew up – and for all the wrong reasons. Success in doing new things had outstripped the organization’s ability to deal with it, and so the team was broken apart.

Both situations led to self-doubt, loss of sleep, emotional turmoil, and ruptured relationships. For a time, it all looked dark.

In the first situation, within two short months in a different job in the company, a job that several people had turned down because it was largely about dealing with negative stuff, I realized I had walked into the equivalent of a professional gold mine. I had really good people working for me, and huge opportunities in front of us. I simply had not expected anything like this. A lot of work, yes, and dealing with negative stuff, yes, but the opportunity to change an industry? How did that happen?

I did some of the best work of my career. What we accomplished won national recognition and awards.

In the second situation, the critical thing was to keep as much of the team intact and functional as possible. Which we did, but it would never function like the old team had. Some people left, others were dispersed, but enough of the understanding and philosophy of work survived to allow people to continue to flourish.

But also born during this time was my decision to publish this crazy manuscript I had been playing with for three or four years. Eventually, that decision led to the publication of Dancing Priest and its sequel, A Light Shining; becoming involved with poetry (and a new book – due out this December – Poetry at Work); and writing for The High Calling and Tweetspeak Poetry. None of that could have been foreseen at the time.

I’m doing some of the best writing of my life.

My purpose here isn’t to celebrate the dark times. They are awful to experience. But what came from them was something better, something I never would have believed possible, something I never would have imagined.

What came was creativity and accomplishment.

Over at Tweetspeak Poetry, we’ve been discussing Spin: Taking Your Creativity to the Nth Degree by Claire Burge. One of the questions Burge asks is, what dark places have developed your creativity? To see the discussion and the questions others answered, please visit the site.

Photograph by Emma Ivanova via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The little wooden bridge

A power ride, it was

165 miles, graveled and

pounded flat, with rutted

stretches appearing

unexpectedly, like

the occasional snake

and critter darting

across my path, uneventful

until the little bridge,

the little wooden bridge

across the little creek,

the bridge with its construction

sign, narrowing the way,

slowing the ride, dutifully

I slowed the ride, the handlebar

hooked the board, hooked it

hard, the bike slammed down,

slammed down hard, I’m

thinking I’m seriously hurt,

I see the blood on my leg,

broken mirror, I stand up

on the little wooden bridge

and walk for a time, then

climb back on the bike

to finish the final 15 miles,

not much else I could do,

not bad for someone (as

it turned out) with four

broken ribs and a partially

collapsed lung. It did

hurt, though, once I got

off the bike.

Over at Tweetspeak Poetry, we’re discussing Spin: Taking Your Creativity to the Nth Degree by Claire Burge. One of the exercises asks the question, when have brake figuratively failed you with surprising consequences? In the true story recorded above, the brakes didn’t literally fail, but the resulting bike crash (2009) led eventually to an overnight stay in the hospital and reading Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places by L.L. Barkat straight through to 4 a.m. the next morning. And that led to being part of something called Tweetspeak Poetry, and that led to a book called Poetry at Work being published next month.

Who would have thought a bike crash on a little wooden bridge would lead to that result?

So check out the discussion on Claire’s book at Tweetspeak Poetry. However, I don’t advise bike crashes as the easiest way to creativity.

Photograph via Pryor Area Cycling Enthusiasts.

Snapshots and Fragments

My earliest memories come from when I was in the vicinity to two-and-a-half- to three-years-old. My family lived in a duplex in suburban New Orleans, a neighborhood called Azalea Gardens. It was solidly middle-class modest, the kind of neighborhood you began on your way to the next economic step up. Most of it is still there.

My father worked for a company that published trade magazines, like “Shrimp Boat” and “Work Boat.” My mother was a housewife; my half-brother (older than I was by almost eight years) was a pain, like all older brothers.

The memories are like snapshots, disconnected photographs, fragments imprinted ona child’s mind.

The elderly couple next door, giving me a square of Kraft’s fudge, sometimes vanilla and some days chocolate.

The washing machine in the garage, with its roller apparatus.

A stash of black licorice on a shelf in the garage; one taste was enough to convince me I didn’t like it.

Wearing my Davy Crockett coonskin hat.

Our dog, a Boston terrier, the one I snuck into the house and then hid when my mother came looking for him. “He’s not in the oven,” I said.

Playing with the boy next door through the fence – he had measles.

My father coming through the front door, home from a business trip, carrying a jack-in-the-box. I learned later that he had searched toy stores all over New York City until he found one.

My mother making root beer floats with vanilla ice cream, in tall glasses with a red-and-green floral design.

I don’t remember the story my mother often told – that I had poured black shoe polish on the fabric soda.

The first family vacation dates from this time – going to Biloxi on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The only thing I can remember about it was the sulfur-tasting water that came from the tap.

Why do I remember jumping from the back of a pickup truck, yelling “Bombs away, Tokyo”? My father was a World War II veteran, serving in the Navy in the Pacific. Perhaps that was the reason, or the desired connection.

While the memories are simple snapshots without a connecting narrative to sustain them, all during this time my attitudes and personality and thought processes were being shaped, molded and directed.  I still don’t like the noise of vacuum cleaners; my mother says the only way she could keep me still was to turn on the vacuum, forcing me to take refuge on the sofa, perhaps the one with the black shoe polish.

These were the early years of my parents’ marriage; I arrived just over a year after they had married. Certain themes were established in these years, family themes, that I would come to understand only much later, when I was older. From the fragments is a mosaic fashioned, and a mosaic discerned.

Over at Tweetspeak Poetry, there’s a discussion going on about Claire Burge’s new book, Spin: Taking Your Creativity to the Nth Degree. In one of the sections for this week’s discussion, she challenges the reader to descrive a childhood experience that especially surreal or dreamlike in its unfolding. I can say what I’ve written here is either surreal or dreamlike, but this is what the challenge brought to mind. Check Tweetspeak Poetry for more discussion. At the time of these memories, I would have been about the age that my oldest grandson is now.

Photograph by Amateur Pic via Public Domain Pictures. Used with Permission.

Saturday Good Reads – TweetSpeak Poetry

Little did I know that when I improvised a short poem (contained within one tweet on Twitter) back in 2009 that it would me to a regular Twitter poetry jam; editing the tweets from the jams into poems; a blog created to contain the poems; other stuff (reviews and features) being added to the blog; and then a business enterprise that goes by the name of TweetSpeak Poetry.

Currently, I’m a weekly columnist for TweetSpeak (Tuesdays) and one of the things – just one – we’re up to is beginning to get our heads around the idea of poetry and business. I do reviews of poetry books, reflections, recollections, whatever sounds interesting.

I love being a columnist.

I work with a terrific team, led by chief instigator, central plotter, primary conspirator, writer, editor, publisher, poet, mother, wife, blogger, tea expert, lighthouse climber and who-knows-what-else Laura Barkat. Laura, or L.L., is the Grand Poobah of TweetSpeak (that sounds like a title from a Gilbert & Sullivan musical opera). She has three blogs: Seedlings in Stone, Love Notes to Yahweh, and Green Inventions Central.

She’s also written a memoir, Stone Crossings; a book of spiritual exercises, God in the Yard; a book of poems, Inside/Out; and a novella, The Novelist.

The editor for TweetSpeak is Lyla Lindquist, who is not only editor but also chief publicist, social media captain, writer, promoter, columnist, book club discussion leader and skunk works leader. Lyla is here, there and everywhere, and all at once. What she’s capable of doing leaves me in awe. She blogs at A Different Story, and also has a collection of reports and meditations about weekly visits to a Benedictine monastery for six months, called Making Headroom.

Then there’s Claire Burge. Claire is young (at my age, virtually everyone I know is young) but knows everything and how to do everything. She knew about Pinterest before Pinterest knew about Pinterest. She takes beautiful photographs (I used one for the cover of my novel Dancing Priest, and will be using another for an upcoming novella), travels to exotic places, knows everything about social media, and lets nothing intimidate her. She blogs at Claire Burge.

Monica Sharman has an official title of Editorial Intern, but she’s all over poetry, all over the business of poetry, all over our poetry jams on Twitter. Monica blogs at Know-Love-Obey God about faith, family, poetry and writing. She’s also a contributing writer to online publications like Bibledude.

Tania Runyan is a columnist for TweetSpeak, and is also a published poet, with three books of poetry: A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air. Her poems have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, and she received an NEA Literature Fellowship in 2011. Tania is a tutor, writer, gardener and fiddle and mando player. Her web site: Tania Runyan.

Charity Singleton, another contributing writer, is a poet, writer, blogger, and works in online media for her Midwestern employer. She blogs at Wide Open Spaces, and I have to say it’s one of my favorite blogs to read.

And then there’s my friend Seth Haines. Seth is an attorney (but a nice guy in spite of that); he and his wife Amber are raising four boys in Arkansas. Seth is a writer, poet, and sometime theologian. He writes TweetSpeak’s weekly poetry prompt on Mondays. Seth blogs at Seth Haines.

TweetSpeak Poetry is a fine group of people – and a fine group of writers. Despite its origins as a place to deposit poems from poetry jams, it has become a presence in the field of poetry, and has plans to become even more.

A Day Full of News

Today started with seeing an interview of me talking about writing posted the The High Calling: “A Man of Many Good Words.” Maureen Doallas did the interview, and she is one of the best, if not the best, interviewers I’ve come across.

Maureen continued with the interview at Tweetspeak Poetry: Writing the Priest, Part 1.

Then I received an email from the site host that http://www.dancingpriest.com/, my author’s site, had gone live. Thank you, Claire Burge, for designing the site and making it happen.

And then the doorbell rang. It was the man from UPS. In his arms was a box from the publisher.

It was full of dancing priests.

It’s been a day of dancing priests.

Dancing authors, too.

The best laid plans

We had a plan for Dancing Priest. We expected the ebook versions to begin going live on Thursday. Instead, Amazon processed everything quickly and the Kindle version went live on Monday.

I had a plan, it had just been bypassed, and I didn’t care. It was an exciting thing to see.

I had planned several posts about creating the book, but the Kindle appearance superseded that idea. But part of the plan was to recognize four people who were intimately involved and helped make the book happen, and I still want to do that.

One was Adam Blumer. To say that Adam edited and proofread the manuscript is accurate, but it understates his contribution. I selected Adam because (a) he was a published writer, (b) he also works as a professional editor and has tackled numerous manuscripts, (c) he is extremely familiar with both the publishing industry and the specific audience I am writing for, and (d) he would give me a critical review, and I mean “critical” in the good sense. You live with a story for as long as I have lived with this one and you come to realize that you’re too close to it to know how it might be received.

Here’s what Adam said: Dancing Priest is “an unusual story, but I mean that in a good sense.” He liked the writing; he stayed engaged with the characters. And he asked very perceptive questions about various scenes and events, which suggested some rewriting or that I was assuming too much. (One example: I had fallen into cycling jargon, and he told me to simplify and explain.) I was more than pleased with the job he did.

The second person was Claire Burge. I knew I wanted a photograph for the cover illustration, and I was scouring web sites all over the internet. I knew Claire from my work with The High Calling; in fact, she and I had been part of a scavenger hunt team in San Antonio last year. As I searched web sites, I found a photo she posted on her blog of a coffee shop in Dublin. As soon as I saw it, I told myself that this, or something like it, could be the cover. I contacted Claire; we emailed back and forth and back and forth; she proposed several different photos.

Enter the cover designer, Jeremiah Langner. I had worked with Jeremiah on an illustration for a post I did for The High Calling – the drawing of a dragon (he likes to draw dragons). He’s the brother of Kelly Sauer, who’s the assistant photo editor for The High Calling. Kelly was the one who told Claire and I that he had done book covers. He got engaged in the project, helped figure out which photo would work best (turns out it was Claire’s favorite), and came up with an outstanding design.

And then there’s the publisher. A year ago, Mark Sutherland heard me talk about the manuscript and asked to read it. He read it and liked it (and even cried at the right part). He said, “You’re going to have let me publish it.” We laughed and went on with life.

Mark has established a small publishing house, Dunrobin Publishing. It’s published two previous books. One a children’s book on Easter and the other a commentary on the book of Malachi. In August, Mark finally said, “Are you going to let me publish your novel or not?” And I said OK, surprising both of us. He’s now read it at least five times – reading, proofing, checking, rereading and formatting. He told me this morning that every time he’s read it, he’s enjoyed it.

Mark was also something of an acid test. A good chunk of the book is set in Scotland. Mark is a native Scot and naturalized American. He grew up in Edinburgh. He turned out to be the ideal publisher for the book.

There’s also an international diversity to this team. Adam lives in upper Michigan. Claire lives in Ireland. Jeremiah is in South Carolina and Mark in Missouri. The idea for the story started on a plane to San Francisco as I listened to a Greek tenor on an in-flight music program. Parts of the story have been written in Chicago, New Orleans, St. Louis, Shreveport, Washington, D.C., Amsterdam and several other places I took my laptop.

But I owe heartfelt thanks to Adam, Claire, Jeremiah and Mark. They took this project on as their own, and the quality shows.

The Seventh Day of Christmas: New Friends

For the seventh day of Christmas, I want to highlight some new friends I’ve found via blogs, comments on blogs, Twitter, and various web sites.

Doug Spurling. Doug lives in Minnesota. He has a blog called Spurling Silver (I like that name), where he writes about family, grandchildren, life, faith and God. He had two posts last week, one entitled “Frozen” and the other “The First Christmas Tree,” which will give you a good indication how he can surprise a reader, and take you where you didn’t expect to go. You can follow him on Twitter, too.

Susan Etole. Susan lives in Minnesota, and posts about the “three Ps” on her blog, Just…A Moment – poems, prose and photos. She’ll take the simplest of ideas and combine a few words with a photo to blow you away, like she did with “No Storm Here” and “The Riven Heart.” Susan and I have at least three things in common – faith, a love for poetry and a love for good mysteries.

Randall David Tipton. Tipton is an artist in Oregon, and he posts his oils and watercolors on his blog, Painter’s Process. He does some beautiful work, painting in a luminous way. His subjects are often nature – woods, trees and other natural settings – but he also did this recent work of “Steam and a Mill” on the Willamette River. And thanks to my friend Maureen Doallas for introducing me to Tipton’s work.

Phoenix-Karenee. Phoenix-Karenee is an artist, a poet and an author. I don’t know her or his real name or (obviously) gender; the blog site is something of a mystery and that’s part of the enjoyment. I suspect it’s a she, but I could be wrong. But I really enjoy the poems and the art that’s posted occasionally.

Claire Burge. Claire, who lives in Ireland, writes a blog called My Memoir of You, and she posts her poetry and photography. She also has a tutoring business, a blog devoted to her photography, and a blog about family, where she posts occasionally. I tweet her poems whenever she posts one – they’re good.