Santa Clara Review
In the mail on Saturday — two copies of the very fine new issue of The Santa Clara Review. (Click on this link to go to an on-line version.)
My poems, “Where She Lies Down,” and “In Her Dream of Winter,” appear on pages 59 and 61.
“And she started being a cat again…”
My friend Susan recently told me an inspiring story, and she gave me permission to share it here.
Susan is an utterly sane cat lady. Bona fide. Not long ago a friend at a shelter called her to ask if she would take a cat that had been traumatized. “This cat is going to die if we don’t get her into a home,” Susan was told.
The kitty’s master had died, it seems, and his body had not been found for four weeks. Four weeks! Kitty (let’s call her “Kitty”) survived by drinking out of the toilet. She was emaciated and terrified. She was not improving.
Susan was already at her cat limit, but because her friend was a few cats beyond, she agreed to be a temporary way station. Kitty was put into a guest room, with a hiding place crafted out of boxes so that Susan could get access to her. She had all the food and water she needed. She did not have to worry about other cats (as they were shut out of the guest room), and she was given, to the best of Susan’s ability, just the right amount of affection. All she had to do was eat her catfood, drink water, and slowly get better. After a few days, Susan reports, “she started being a cat again.” Susan began to fear falling in love.
Fortunately a call came that day announcing that a permanent home had been found.
This is the part that fascinates me. They moved Kitty immediately (before she could get any more acclimated to Susan and her safe haven) with as many of her familiar objects (dishes, boxes, litter box, toys) as could be carted along to make her feel at home. And yet, despite human efforts, it was a set back. Kitty spent several days cowering in the bathroom beside the toilet — remember, drinking toilet water had saved her life! — and not acting like a cat at all.
The happy ending is that eventually Susan’s foster kitty did begin, again, to act like a cat, and to thrive. The shelter worker who had announced, “this cat needs a home” was right.
We are all like this cat. We didn’t have enough to eat in childhood, so we overeat. We worried about money in the house where we grew up, so we continue to fret about money. We are not easily talked out of these behaviors. We often are not willing even to examine them.
I used to not have enough time to write, and I continue to feel pressured and threatened, despite my 
early retirement and my amazing writing life. Yes, I do have my mom to keep an eye on, and my teenager. But I don’t have a lot else that absolutely demands my time. Even so, I feel as though I don’t have enough time. Isn’t this the definition of PTSD? I’m acting as though the old trauma — that inability to stand up for myself and my writing that I experienced years ago — is still true. No great, insurmountable power is standing over me and threatening to take my writing away. I have to say no to some things, of course. But how hard is that?
Your writing does not need a safe cage to protect it. It needs love and tenderness and compassion and affection. It needs understanding. It needs time and patience. It needs a home.
And it has all of these things.
Life Hungers to Abound
This evening I am attending the wedding celebration of my cousin’s daughter. In that spirit, here is an audio clip of Richard Wilbur reading his poem, “A Wedding Toast.” (See the link.)
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/wedding-toast-audio-only?mbd=1
Station Eleven, revisited
When Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, Station Eleven, first came out in hardback, I resisted it. I picked it up a few times, reading the opening (I loved the opening), but — oh, gee, it was another dystopian novel, and did I really want to read or watch one more story about the end of life as we know it? I mean, after The Road, I was kinda done.
So I mentally counted up the number of books on my TBR (to-be-read) list, already waiting at home, and I left Station Eleven on the bookstore shelf.
When it was released in paperback, I went through this process again. The prominent display of it on CD at my local library, however, caught me at a weak moment. I grabbed it.
I loved Station Eleven.
I listened to it (at least, large parts of it, more than once) and then I bought a copy and read it again. I thought then that it was a debut novel, and it is such a rarity for a debut novel to hook me not only with the first 50 pages — “audacious, darkly glittering” pages — but to keep me hooked all the way through to the last page. No fifth act problems here (quite an accomplishment, considering that it begins with a staging of King Lear).
It turns out that Station Eleven is not Mandel’s first novel. But never mind. The structure is magical. It’s ambitious and startlingly collaged, hammered together like a shack out of civilization’s leftover scraps, and yet it completely and totally works.
We move from the story of Arthur Leander (it’s his enactment of King Lear that gets us rolling), then follow a man slipping outside the theater into a snow storm, and a flu epidemic; we pick up the story 20 years later with a child actress now grown; we move back to Arthur’s first marriage and the creation of an amazing graphic story that will survive civilization’s collapse. And so on. It’s all intricately woven together. Mandel moves so deftly between time periods, and from one character to another, that I simply had to tell you about it.
And to add to this vignette, my family spent the last few days in our own post-apocalyptic bubble that sort of brought some things home for me.
We thought having a tree fall in our back yard last week — and miss all the outbuildings (hitting only the fence) — was enormously lucky. But the storm brought other, less immediately visible problems. On Saturday, our main sewer line backed up. On Sunday, we lost power. So by Monday morning (the morning of my birthday, mind you), we had been living for 36 hours without toilets or washing machines or drains of any kind, and for 18 hours in the dark, without heat. Power was restored late Monday afternoon, but we learned that the sewer problem was not going to be simple. I couldn’t help thinking of the ordeals of the characters in Station Eleven (and so many other such novels and movies and TV shows), how I in fact have sort of romanticized their stories, wishing (at times) for simpler, pre-Internet (and pre-fully wired offspring) times.
Gradually, it dawned on me that this is the world the characters I’m writing about — both in Puritan America and circa World War I — inhabit. Oh! (Insights abound.) No flush toilets!
Of course, in my real life, I could still drive to Caffe Ladro and order my usual almond milk double latte. I could come to the library and check my gmail. I could get a very lucky cell-phone call from a friend offering us the use of her house while she is away. (Birthday dinner saved!)
And, a little money down the road, we will get access to our plumbing again.
Interesting, isn’t it, what we take for granted until we don’t have it. As Garrison Keillor says: “Nothing bad ever happens to writers; it’s all just material.”
Please, please read this book!