Art and the Muse of Travel

What better way to get the writing juices flowing than to take a trip? Add into that trip a stop at the Edgar Allan Poe House, a few hours in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (featuring an exhibit by Arshile Gorky), and plenty of time wandering the boutiques in Old City and it's a wonder I made it home before tackling my keyboard.
I wish I could write of every nuance, every type of architecture, every accent overheard, everything that made my mother, sister & I giggle. I wish I could wrap Poe's anguish, Gorky's depression, and the city's triumph into one twisted mystery. I wish I could sit in a picture window writing as I look out over the bustling "Filth-adelphia." For all its dirt, it is beautiful.

But I am home and my fingers can't seem to get the words out that I have in my head. The history is colliding with the meaning. And I am saying nothing. So I'll break it down.

Edgar A. Poe House. He barely lived a year in the house and the city makes no pretense that it meant more to him than that. Instead of filling the rooms with furniture of the period, they have stripped even the paint and wall-coverings away, leaving pitted cement and patched ceilings. It is a cold house that is small enough to give the idea of comfort. In the basement is the setting for Poe's tale The Black Cat. The crumbling chimney and central stair beckon the imagination and send chills up the spine. Information cards like "this is where Poe worked" and "this is where Virginia slept because of the tuberculosis" bring humanity to the barren walls. It is a house. But it is Poe's house. It is sad as Poe was sad.

Arshile Gorky. An Armenian immigrant who lost his mother to genocide, the painter struggled to find himself in his art for nearly thirty years. But he created masterpieces that crossed genres - from surrealism to abstract expressionism. He believed his paintings were never finished, just set aside for a while. He killed himself in 1948. Gorky's work was fantastical, violent, even sexual, and sometimes subdued and very personal.
Philadelphia. This one I can't even pretend to tackle in one post. The city is of course Independence Hall and Betsy Ross, Benjamin Franklin and the Liberty Bell. But it is also a city of numerous boutiques, fabulous independent restaurants, outdoor markets and the great Reading Market (pronounced "red-ing"). It is a city of young people, gay people, straight people, Italians, blue collar, right wingers, Marxists, and tech startups. It's a city. And it has beautiful architecture.

More to come

I will be back later today with something more interesting...I have been out of town and seem to have re-injured and old knee injury that may require surgery. I'm off to find out! Wish me luck! More later...

Michele

Uncommon Goods

When one "becomes" a writer the very idea of finding others in the craft is exciting. The online community is amazing for meeting those with this "affliction." We spend our days staring at computer screens and living in our imaginations. We create characters who become like family, friend or foe.

But we still think of ourselves as unique.

We write and write and write until one day it is time to find that agent. Find that publisher. Find that place in the world for our book to be born into the hands of the reader. Who will that lucky reader be? Which greedy hands will first turn our pages and smell the glue that binds our world of words?

And we still believe we are unique.

The more I delve into the writing community, the more people I meet online who write or want to write or have written, the more I realize I am not unique in this aspect. I thought this would be disheartening, but it is not. It is encouraging that there are others like me. But it does push me to distinguish myself from the crowd. So how do we do that?

What device to you use to make yourself marketable? What makes you an uncommon good? What makes your book unique, your character singular?

Favorite Indie Bookstore...Do you have one?

Jemi Fraser of Just Jemi responded to my Wishful Wednesday post with this comment:

"[I] Love Indie Bookstores - don't you just love finding a new one?"

Well, I love finding things: new things, beautiful things, old things, take-me-away-to-another-world things. Which is why I love books, reading and writing them.

Where do you buy your books?

Barnes & Noble is easy. Even their shipping is free to members. I love how big their stores are and how many different books they carry. I think most of them are beautifully put together. And they have good resources for authors, especially on a local level.

In college there was the hole that smelled like mold and I sware the bookshelves were going to collapse. (They probably have by now, only to be replaced by similar decaying ones.) I don't know what diseases walked in and out of that door, but it was still a magical place. Books on witchcraft coexisted with tomes on monkshood, mystery classics and DIYs.

Tuesday I found Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, NC. It is an Indie bookstore celebrating 25 years of business. It is not a college bookstore. In fact it's in a rather nice area of town. But its selection is magnificent. I look forward to many more hours of browsing the stacks.

Another great one (though not one I can visit often) I found on vacation in September. The Island Bookstore in Corolla (at the Outer Banks, and pronounced cuh-RAW-luh for non-Carolinians) is a world unto itself. The wood floors even creak! There are window seats to lounge upon, and a balcony for outdoor reading on balmy days. Actually, my sister did just that and got locked out! The store is so packed with books the storekeeper didn't even notice a customer was missing. I highly recommend the trip, to both the Outer Banks and The Island Bookstore.

Where do you buy your books? Have you "discovered" a great Indie bookstore?

Wishful Wednesday: fulfilled, granted, on the way

Brooke of The Bluestocking Guide has taken over Wishful Wednesdays, and here are my picks this week...

I am happy to report that I fulfilled two wishes, one that I've had for a while, one that I had forgotten I had.

The first. I stumbled across the Indie bookstore (Quail Ridge) for which I've been looking in Raleigh on Tuesday. It turns out it is on my route to and from my weekly volunteer event! How fortuitous. Build up my karma, comes right back to me! So I immediately squealed my tires turning into the parking lot and scrambled inside before they closed. I wad disappointed to find they did not carry Elizabeth Spann Craig's Pretty Is As Pretty Does, but they did order it for me! It should be in by Friday (also the first day of a major sale, more karma?).

While they were ordering the book, I browsed. They have beautiful Penguin classics, jacketless hardcovers I was dying to buy. But it was something else that drew out my credit card: Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I had heard a review of it on NPR a while ago. I can't even remember when it was so long ago! But can you really go wrong with a Pulitzer Prize winner? (My luck was good with Geraldine Brooks.)

So I fulfilled two wishes. And on this Wednesday I sit pretty satisfied.

The other thing I picked up in Quail Ridge is a pamphlet called "ABC Best Books for Children." I am very excited to peruse this and start a wish list for my kids. I don't know who gets more excited when Scholastic forms come home, my son or myself!

So I wish for peace this Wednesday. Peace to read my finds, time to get back to Quail Ridge, and guidance in leading my children down the path of the book-lover.

How Eyeshadow is like Writing

I was readying myself for a baby shower yesterday, picking the right color palette for my eyes when I noticed I had put the eyeliner on a bit heavy. This happens occasionally and you basically have two choices: start over or make it work (thanks, Tim Gunn). I tried blending, but the liner became a dark, smoky shadow that, for any other occasion, would have been sexy and appropriate but for a Sunday afternoon baby shower was decidedly inappropriate.

Decision time again. Do I erase or keep going? I tried applying a lighter color on top. Some shimmery purple at the base with a creamy white above and at the corners. This had the desired lightening affect, but overall the lids just looked heavy. And they felt heavy, too.

I find writing is this way as well. There are so many points in a novel when you can make a choice to keep going or start over. Maybe it's not as cut and dry as eyeshadow, and you definitely have more invested in your fiction (though MAC gets pretty expensive). But the books we all stop reading are the ones that seem heavy. They are the ones the writers should have said to themselves, "Stop piling it on. Stop and erase. EDIT!"

That's what I am thinking today. Invest in some Almay, or the word processing equivalent.

One of those days. Today.

I've been working on a post since yesterday and it isn't coming together. Oddly enough, it's on synchronicity. So I decided to be a slacker and use Halloween as my excuse. Here are my crazy children in their costumes. I call this picture "The Buzz at Our House."

Enjoy. This is the kind of candy I like: the most innocent eye candy. My babies in a moment of pure joy.

And here's a better picture of my youngest. She had just opened the door to my crystal cabinet and I gave her devil horns. Aaaahhh, the things you have lying around at Halloween...Did I say better picture? I meant more accurate. Shame on me!