How to Catch A Mole

/3 Comments/in , /by

When my friend Madelon told me about this book, I was skeptical. A book about catching and killing moles? A philosophical, poetical book?

Every summer, Madelon and I get together — at least a few times — to write. Admittedly, we don’t always write. We sit in her garden and talk. We sometimes walk. If the weather is damp (or the heat, excessive), we sit in Madelon’s living room, surrounded by her books. She told me about Marc Hamer’s How to Catch a Mole (Greystone Books, 2019) on one visit last summer. At the next visit, she read aloud from it.

 When I am out in the countryside, walking or hunting, I become solitary and leave my man-nature behind. I become a different kind of creature: something more fluid, free, adaptable and instinctive. This is something developed in me when I was young and living in the wild. Living moment to moment with no thought or feeling, no ideas or obvious mental process going on, just instinct, an awareness of the field, but not a separate awareness of myself being in the field. We seem to become the same thing. (p. 49)

Each time I visited, I heard more. Finally, Madelon handed me the book. “You should read it.”

Marc Hamer lives in Wales. He has done other things — art school, notably — but How to Catch a Mole, his 2019 memoir, chronicles his years working as a twrchwr (Welsh for molecatcher) and brings to vivid life his love and awe in the presence of nature.

It’s hard to share examples when there is something worth quoting on every page:

There are no people to watch, to see, or to know that I am here in the early light with the singing birds. There is winter sun and websilk woven through the silhouetted branches, and it sparkles like rippling water. (p. 110)

You learn a great deal about moles in the book, and at moments the lens focuses only on moles. But more often the lens widens and you see that Hamer’s subject is always life itself:

The closer things are to being nothing, the more tender they become, and the more tender are the feelings they bring out: a newborn child, a hatchling, a dying old man. A dried seed head surrounded by others; a skeletal leaf floating on a pond; a piece of broken pottery in a pile of soil; half an eggshell lying on the grass; a small bone from a rabbit’s leg lying in the sand dunes. Small things that are near their end. (p. 146)

Hamer is now retired from mole-catching, an event he chronicles in this book. And I can’t skip telling you that each chapter ends with a poem, often to or about his wife, the beloved Peggy, waiting at home (who is also — I was pleased to learn — the suspense novelist Kate Hamer).

He is still writing. In 2021 his Seed to Dust was published to acclaim. But I want to end this review with this longish (and ominous) passage from How to Catch a Mole, in his chapter “The Future”:

A fine-looking garden is a sterile place. A perfect green lawn is only kept that way by continually dosing it with chemicals. A lawn that is not treated will naturally become home to a massive number of species of birds and worms and native wild plants, crane-fly larvae, beetles, invertebrates. There are people who do not want living organisms in their gardens, and they spray their lawns with chemicals that kill the worms so there are no worm casts, moles, or birds pecking at the grass, then they spray it with chemicals to kill the crane-fly larvae so there are no magpies, jays or crows digging up the grass to get them, and so there will be no daddy longlegs in the summer; in the spring they spray it with chemicals to reduce the growth of the grass so they do not have to mow it so often and other chemicals are used to kill the moss and weeds and make the grass greener. For some, even mowing is too much, so they pay to have the grass stripped off and replaced with plastic grass that you can smell as it warms under the hot summer sun and will last until the world ends. (p. 190)

He calls his life “a small life,” and “a life handmade by me.” It is a life that seems as far from plastic grass as one can get.

 

Where You’ll Find Me

/5 Comments/in , , /by

On my to-do list for today is “write blog post.” So, here goes. What I’ve been up to, and a little of everything else.

I have finished my poetry manuscript. “Finished”? I finished it last April, too, and sent it out, then withdrew it from several contests. I couldn’t say why it didn’t feel ready, it simply didn’t.

A friend suggested that I not think globally, condemning the entire ms, but to instead focus on individual poems. What I actually did was ignore it. I took a class. I worked on my send-out practice. I (finally) returned to my mystery novel. Then, in October, I finished the rewrite of the mystery.

And the poems were still sitting there, muddy and neglected, their unwashed faces looking up at me.

I again found useful distractions. A short story re-write, notably. Then, I broke my arm and was unable to type.

I had been fantasizing about a writer’s retreat, or just a week anywhere in an Air BnB alone with my story and…maybe…my poems. With the retreat option off the table, I made a decision to resort to my practice from when my three daughters were small and writing felt like an edifice without a door, impossible.

I would sit with my poems for 15 minutes every morning.

Even in that first awful week with the immobilizing splint, when I couldn’t type, I could page through poems and reread them. I could mark them up and scribble revisions. After a day or two, I began setting my timer for 25 minutes-on / 5 minutes-off (the Pomodoro method) and I often found myself putting in an hour or two.

Every. Morning.

Even Christmas Eve. Even Christmas Day. If I didn’t break through to the hours, I at least set my timer and did the 25 minutes.

Last summer — while working on the novel — I gave up some time-wasting habits (TV on my iPhone; Spider Solitaire, which is my crack cocaine; listening to audio books). Or, I mostly gave them up. While working on the poems, and perhaps feeling sorry for my poor broken self, I slid back into all these habits. It took several weeks before I recognized I was self-medicating.

During my halcyon months on the novel, I had hit on a method of reworking a chapter, then recording it, sending it to my phone, and listening to that (instead of an audio book by anyone else) on my walks. This was genius, by the way. I don’t know if it will work for you, but it was a huge breakthrough for me.

At some point early in January it dawned on me that I could record the poems — especially the most troublesome ones — and listen to them while I walked. Again, big breakthrough. I was almost … there.

Then, sometime in the last week or so I found myself back at that edifice — the big, blank, doorless one.

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but it felt as though I wasn’t at the foot of a blank wall, but stuck up high, poised to jump. It was despair. The poetry book — which is about the extremely emotional topic of my childhood on a farm, my parents’ deaths, the loss of the farm —  would never be done. I was trapped. The book would never be good enough. I would never be that person, that writer, who can do my story justice. Then, like someone waking up from a bad dream, I recognized where I was and I knew I had been there before.

In the past, whenever I felt this sort of despair over a writing project, I floundered around searching for someone to save me, maybe a whole committee — my steering committee — some august body to weigh in with all their considerable authority and tell me what to do.

I woke up one night — from a dream? into a memory? — of sitting in the hayfield beside our barn, and watching a foal die. (“A” foal? The foal, Brandy’s foal.) I experienced exactly what Bessel Van Der Kolk describes in his book, The Body Keeps the Score. I wasn’t remembering it, I was living it. My heart was pounding. I was wide awake, terrified, horrified. I could see my uncle’s face, hear his voice: “That mare has plenty of milk.” I could not just see him turning to walk away, I could feel him walking away from me. I could feel my own words stuck in my throat, choking me.

I am strongly considering not posting any of this.

In essence, in my pit of despair with the poetry manuscript, I saw that I needed what I needed when I was a kid on a farm — what I wasn’t able to do when I was that skinny, freckled girl who couldn’t or wouldn’t speak up and insist on her own voice, her own truth.

I needed to listen to my own counsel.

That foal was not the only loss I’ve experienced in my life, and I’ve often tried to deny its importance. But the truth is it was important, and early, a preface to adulthood and adult cares. It changed who I was, who I would grow up to become. I’ve written this story before — in poetry and prose — and sometimes I think I will never be finished writing it. The foal is (perhaps strangely) absent from this new book. In short: including her this time around seemed to tip the book over and unbalance it. Even so, whenever I fall back into this visceral memory, I know that I’m being asked to wake up to some reality and, well, own it. I am being asked to speak up.

Is the poetry manuscript now perfect? No, not even close. But it has reached a point where I’m pleased with it, where it feels possible to share it. It is out to four contests, and I have a spread sheet with several more to send to as they open and deadlines loom.

I had planned to say more — maybe something about how AI apps can’t write with your peculiar history, your emotional depth, or your brilliant sarcastic humor. I had meant to share a poem. But — for today — I think this is enough.

So that, my friends, is where you’ll find me.

Edmonds Bookshop Events

/2 Comments/in /by

It has been a busy week and a busy day, but I wanted to take at least one minute to invite you to Edmonds Bookshop — tonight, optionally (as you have almost zero notice), but whenever you’re looking for quality books, great customer service, mail-order (!) and, generally, an opportunity to support and enjoy an independent book store.

I’ll be there 6-7:00 this evening, joining Priscilla Long in the continuing launch of her new book, Dancing with the Muse in Old Age. One focus of this evening’s talk is long-time Edmonds area poet John Wright, now 92 years old (and, I’m told) still writing!

Wright’s poetry chapbook, On the Loveliness of this World, was reviewed here in April of 2020. He has several books (available at Edmonds Bookshop!) and will be attending via Zoom this evening. You can join the fun — even if you can’t travel on such short notice — by going to their Facebook page.

An exciting thing about seeing a nonagenarian poet still at work is knowing that he’s not alone. For instance, well-known poet Linda Pastan just put out a new and selected poems, Almost an Elegy, at age 90. A great website for you to investigate further is Passager, which publishes and promotes only writers over age 50. They recently did a podcast on centenarian poets!

And, of course, if you are in Edmonds — perhaps already planning to check out their Thursday evening Art Walk — do stop in!

Blessings for a New Year

/0 Comments/in /by

Our Advent book takes us through Epiphany, so we are still meeting, and I am still sifting through poetry to find something apt to share with the class each week. This morning I read from John O’Donohue’s book of blessings, To Bless the Space Between Us, and found a poem titled “For the Artist at the Start of Day.” It includes these lines, which I wrote into my journal:

May this be a morning of innocent beginning,
When the gift within you slips clear
Of the sticky web of the personal
With its hurt and its hauntings,
And fixed fortress corners

A morning when you become a pure vessel
For what wants to ascend from silence,

–John O’Donohue

Yesterday’s email brought a new edition of On Being, including a 2008 interview with O’Donohue (well worth a listen).

This morning’s email brought me an update from Abbey of the Arts and I learned that Christine Valters Paintner has a new book of poems available for preorder. Click the link to find audio files of several poems from her previous collections. (“Listen” made my day!)

May your morning, too, be blessed!