Poetry Friday - Top 'O The Mornin' To Ya!

Or in my case, afternoon. St. Patrick’s Day is coming up on March 17th, and if you’re from South Boston, it’s a pretty big holiday. Everyone in town is suddenly Irish, the world turns green, and beer - also green for the day - takes on extraordinary importance. So in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I’d like to offer up a poem about beer by an Irish author and poet, James Stephens.

















A GLASS OF BEER

The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there
Nearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer;
May the devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair,
And beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.

That parboiled ape, with the toughest jaw you will see
On virtue’s path, and a voice that would rasp the dead,
Came roaring and raging the minute she looked at me,
And threw me out of the house on the back of my head!

If I asked her master, he’d give me a cask a day;
But she, with the beer at hand, not a gill would arrange!
May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten, and may
The High King of Glory permit her to get the mange.

James Stephens

For more poetry by James Stephens, click here.
For more poetry of all sorts, visit today’s host of Poetry Friday, Becky’s Book Reviews

Women of Wednesday - We'll Miss you, Granny!

Doris Haddock, also known as Granny D., died last night at the age of 100. She was an ordinary woman when the times called for it. She went to school, fell in love, married and had children.

But there were times when she felt something had to be done about particular issues, and at those times, she was a most extraordinary woman.

Granny D. took part in efforts to save an Innuit village from being bombed by it's own government, and she walked across the country, beginning at age 88 and finishing at the age of 90, in an effort to bring attention to campaign finance reform. It couldn't have been easy because she suffered from arthritis and emphysema, but she did it anyway.

She was a woman who did more than talk. She went out and she acted. To learn more about her, see a previous blog, written almost one year ago.

You'll be missed, Granny!

Mentor Monday - Reaction

For every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction.

I learned that in fifth grade Science. It was one of those things that went in one ear and out the other because I was never going to use it in real life. Little did I know it would apply to writing, as well as the working of the entire universe.

Most of us use this formula without even thinking about it. In an action scene, if Dick throws a ball to Jane, we know enough to have it bean Jane in the head. Or she could catch it, I suppose. But something has to happen to the thrown ball, and someone should react to that event. Dick can’t simply throw the ball and walk away. The reader will want to know what happened to the ball.

Reaction also comes second nature in dialogue. If Lassie barks, Mother responds with, “What’s that, girl? Timmy’s in the well?” And of course, Lassie barks her acknowledgement. If someone speaks to someone else, they should reply, or ignore, or react in some way.

But maybe you don’t want the speaker to know the other person’s reaction. Maybe Mary says, “I hate you, Tom,” and does walk away. In that case, we need to see the effect Mary’s words have on herself. Is she glad she said it? Is she wondering how Tom took it? Does she regret saying it? How do her words affect her?

Even description needs reaction. Let’s say Jack wakes up and looks out his window.

The sky was the bluest sky he had ever seen, with not a cloud in sight. He put on his baseball uniform and headed for the game.

That description tells us what kind of day it is. But that’s all it does. It’s nice, but it’s not relevant. If we cut it, nobody would miss it. Jack would simply wake up, put on his uniform, and head for the game. But if we add Jack’s reaction to the description --

The sky was the bluest sky he had ever seen, with not a cloud in sight. Jack sighed. He had hoped for rain. He put on his baseball uniform and headed for the game.

Now the description affects the story. It affects Jack. It becomes relevant. Jack’s reaction lets us know he isn’t looking forward to this baseball game. It also makes the baseball game a bit more interesting because we now want to know why Jack doesn’t want to play, whereas, the first version didn’t make us wonder at all.

Reaction is what keeps a story moving. If you’re writing a story and suddenly find yourself stuck and don’t know what to write next, chances are, your characters haven’t reacted to anything for a while. One or another of them may have gone on a thinking binge, or maybe you got caught up in the back story. Whatever the reason, the solution is often as easy as going back to the last point where someone did react and carry on from there. Let another character react to the previous action/reaction and you’ll be up and running in no time.

Women of Wednesday: National Women's History Month

March is National Women’s History Month, and according to the National Women’s History Project, the theme for 2010 is “Writing Women Back into History.” Which, I would like to think, is part of what the America’s Notable Women series is about.

If you want to encourage observance of National Women’s History Month in your state or school district, here’s a link to the brochure.

There’s a great website, hosted by the Library of Congress and supported by several other institutions including the Smithsonian and the National Park Service. Exhibits feature women from Laura Ingalls Wilder to Mary Cassatt to women astronauts and women in the military. Worth exploring.

The National Women’s History Museum, although still striving to establish themselves in the physical world, have some very interesting cyberexhibits to explore and a lovely collection of brief biographies.

The American Association of University Women is promoting a host of activities in cyberspace, tapping pretty much every social media forum to spread the word and raise consciousness.

Scholastic has a lot of nice material up, designed for use in classrooms but quite interesting for anyone, although you do need to have Powerpoint to watch them.

In a semi-related thought, I had several occasions over the last two weeks to think “we HAVE come a long way – who would have guessed, just a few short years ago, that the Olympics would focus rapt attention on women’s alpine skiing and hockey and the costume gossip would be about men’s figure skating?

Happy Women's History Month to all!

Mentor Monday: Thoughts on habits, routines, and the (occasional) value of disruption.

(Nashua Telegraph photo)
Along with nearly half of the households in New Hampshire, most of the Sisters lost their electricity in last Thursday’s storm: and along with it, of course, such necessities of daily living as internet, cable tv and phone service (not to mention water and heat, of course . . .)

An extended power-outage can be many things. A pain in the neck, obviously. A massive obstacle to productivity, if you’re in the middle of researching a new topic or trying to get in touch with editors in far-flung cities or sources in other states. But the challenge of a major disruption can also provide a push to try something new – or old – that may just be the jumpstart your writing has been looking for.

It is, of course, completely true that there is tremendous value in developing a writing routine. Not only is there the fabled discipline of “write every day,” but most writers will tell you that they have developed certain steps that they repeat at the beginning of a writing session – cues that tell the brain it’s time to get to work. Putting on a specific piece of music, pouring coffee into a certain cup, laying out a particular number of sheets of paper or re-reading the last three paragraphs from the day before are common cues. Sharpening a handful of pencils used to be a favorite, although today that might be utterly useless—unless you’ve had a power outage!

If you always work at a keyboard, writing longhand is a completely different experience. It’s tactile, it’s silent, it’s slower than typing. You cross out things instead of erasing them, which means they linger on the page and may reassert themselves later. (Many people who write poetry will tell you that they ALWAYS start out in longhand for just these reasons.) Writing longhand is inefficient, but it triggers different parts of your brain than typing does. And that can be stimulating.

If you are also accustomed to being interrupted by all the connectivity your computer offers – whether noticing incoming emails or stopping to double-check facts or spellings as you go along, the forced disconnect may push you into longer uninterrupted trains of thought. You may arrive at a destination you would never have reached had you kept getting off that train. Or, to abuse the metaphor, you may find that the train is derailed and the ensuing detour takes you to someplace you hadn’t intended to go at all, and it may turn out to be better than your original destination.

Inefficiency can have its own rewards. I spent Thursday (or was it Friday? Being disconnected is rather disorienting) reading through a stack of biographies I had been fortunate enough to have collected from several libraries earlier in the week. The fact that virtually every obligation I had was cancelled made this a much more indulgent, luxurious experience than it might have been: rather than just flipping through, taking notes on my subject, I actually read the narratives as their authors had intended. In the process, I was reminded why we do this after all!

As a non-fiction writer, I would never complain about either the computer or the internet. Most of what I’ve written in the last 15 years would have been impossible for me to research without them. But the trade-off for efficiency can be costly. We can lose the sound of the inner voice that leads us. We can forget the richness of immersion in our subject. We can even become immune to the joy of creating something new. So thank you, Mother Nature, for the reminder. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll make it a point to pull the plug myself once in a while!