Anne Marie Ruff's Blog, page 13

How I Spent My Summer Vacation – Blog Touring

You might think from the paucity of blog postings here that I am either:

1) one of those legions of novice blog writers who embark earnestly down the path to fulfilling their need for expression online only to fall exhausted by the wayside when they realize that blogging actually requires effort, or

2) one of those people who has some fantastic teaching gig that affords them a summer off to frolick in the south of France without fretting about unemployment

I will assure you I am not the latter (and I know from watching my sons’ teachers that theirs is no easy gig), and hopefully this post demonstrates I am not one of the former.

Actually, I have spent the summer blogging, but mostly on other peoples’ blogs.  I guess you could say I did a blog tour – though I did most of it while riding the bus home from the office!  So below, I offer a sort of virtual slide show of some of the stops along the way.

June 22  I joined dozens others on We Wanted to Be Writers, offering each other the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing what books we have piled by our beds.  My list includes a treatise on omelets and some family memoirs.

June 24 The Next Best Book blog graciously shined their spotlight on me and I talked about the story behind the story of Through These Veins, fact-based fiction, and the fantastic Italian man.

July 19  I confessed on We Wanted to Be Writers that I am a recovering journalist addicted to the Costco Connection and Saudi Aramco World magazines.

July 27  Rachelle Ayala asked some great questions and I waxed on about travel to obscure places, mothers’ milk in Ethiopia, cross cultural marriages, and I even answered the question ‘chicken or egg?’

July 31  I just sat back here and let J.D. Jung of Underrated Reads do the talking aboutEthiopia, AIDS, and character/plot balance.

August 1  Even though I don’t write paranormal novels, which Laurie loves, she posted an excerpt from my book, and invited my fictional Ethiopian character, Zahara, to comment on books,Hollywood stars, and winning the lottery.

August 12  Amy Manemann asked about my past and my future and I got a bit philosophical about writing, laundry versus manuscript, alternative careers, work ethic, and the bus as writing studio.

August 17  Here I hopped the pond to theUK, where Jeanz asked me about my next novel, reading reviews of my own book, and my favorite authors – including Dr. Seuss!

August 24  In advance of the West Hollywood Book Fair I talked with Kim Fay, author of the recently released novel, The Map of Lost Memories, about our love of foreign places, cultural hegemony, making friends with people whose countries theU.S. government invades, and a few other nearly unspeakable things.  This one is in audio, and we will be talking more at the West Hollywood Book Fair on September 30, 2012.

Phew!  Writing again for my own blog feels curiously similar to the sensation of waking in a new bed, after traveling for a good long while, and thinking for just a moment ‘this is a nice hotel…maybe I should stay a while,’ only to realize with relief that you are actually in your own bed and won’t have to pack your bags…at least for a spell.

Talking Chicken -Tandoori and Tikka

I am no spring chicken, and I thought I had covered a lot of linguistic ground with my blog post about chicken idioms.  But I guess I had just been a little cocky, crowing about all those words.  Just as a fox should never be left to guard a henhouse, you clever readers reminded me I shouldn’t be allowed to monopolize any linguistic territory.  In fact, your missives revealed I had just scratched the surface.  One good egg even corrected my spelling, which made me about as mad as a wet hen.  Just a little more evidence that I don’t rule the roost. 

Since you were all so gracious in sharing your chicken chat I didn’t feel henpecked.  So I am going to ask you all to write back to me if you have experience or ideas for me to ponder.  But I am not putting all of my eggs in one basket.  Sure as a rooster announces the rising sun, I am moving on to another topic, cross cultural marriages between Indians and Americans or between Pakistanis and Americans. 

I just spent a long weekend in Northern California with a few of my husband’s Punjabi relatives – maybe 40 or 45 aunties, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews related through various degrees of marriage and blood.  So I am thinking a lot about the mixing of great global flocks (as an aside – a distant cousin really did experience a chicken tragedy: a flock of 32 chickens eaten over the course of three days by a hungry coyote).  If you have any friends who are not from South Asian origins, but have married into South Asian families, I would appreciate an introduction.  I am interested in comparing experiences.  Then maybe I can hatch a post that has more to do with bangra and basmati than chickens and eggs.

How to Talk Chicken

I am the proud new mother of four hens (thankfully I didn’t have to lay their eggs myself, we adopted them from a neighbor who had an overabundance of chickens in his urban backyard).  Predictably, our girls provide us with eggs and offer hours of amusement as we observe their bird-brained antics.  But an unexpected benefit of keeping chickens is the insight they have given me into the origins of some of the great idioms in the English language.  I can answer the question which came first the chicken or the egg?  The chickens came first, delivered in a cardboard box.  But of course, this is a situationally specific answer, the larger philosophical debate will continue to rage.  Less than 24 hours after their arrival the largest one flew the coop while I was at the office.  We tried to console our disappointed children about their chicken loss when a neighbor walked up with our runaway bird under his arm.  He had retrieved her as she wandered down the block.  Why did the chicken cross the road?  Our neighbor, a more established chicken owner, had the answer: she still had all her feathers.  He advised that we needed to clip their wings. 

The next morning, away from a discarded pile of clipped chicken wing feathers, the girls moved en mass (birds of a feather flock together) to their water dish.  I noticed that the black and white speckled bird suffered from her low status in the pecking order.  When she tried to dip her beak in the water, the others literally pecked at her and skittishly she backed away, waiting for her turn.  All of this would be enough to make anyone brood, so she eventually retreated into the henhouse (which is not guarded by a fox) and laid an egg amidst a series of clucks and squawks. 

In order to support their impressive daily ovulations, I provide them with chicken feed (which is very cheap) which looks like ground up grains.  Everyone knows they can’t chew tough stuff, because of the scarcity of hens’ teeth.  The boys always want me to catch one so they can pet her.  But you know the hens are chicken and they run away in fear.  When I do finally corner and grab one, we stroke her a bit, but by the time we let her go, her feathers are ruffled. 

As our flock is not coed, the eggs are not fertilized, so I won’t be counting my chickens before they hatch, and the girls won’t have little ones to take under their wings.  And now that we have named them and grown fond of them as our pets, I expect that I will have no experience of one of the greatest of chicken idioms, that of one of the girls running around as a chicken with her head cut off.   I will be content to contemplate my new appreciation for how to talk chicken over an omlette.

Does the world need even one more novel?

The piles of books around me keep growing – by my bed, on the shelf behind my desk, inside a cupboard that I try to ignore.  Everywhere I look there are books that I want to read.  Books friends have recommended, books I have read about in the newspaper, on Goodreads, at the library.  Then of course, there are the classics – books I should read to be a well rounded, well educated person.  Surely there are more than enough good books in the world to keep me reading for the rest of my life.  With this abundance of good literature, why do we need more, why do people keep writing novels?  In fact, isn’t the endless supply of new novels just contributing to our collective angst, the feeling that we will never be able to get through our reading lists, the growing piles by our bed?  Perhaps. 

But every once in a while, I come across an idea that I haven’t yet seen well explored in print, a story I want to read but haven’t yet found.  As stories are simply reflections of our ever changing world and lives, so we will always need more stories, written in our current vernacular, about our current questions, technologies, crises.

I am working on one of those stories.  I am asking the question; what happens when two people, who come from radically different cultures, with different ideas of justice and revenge, who marry out of a common love, must confront an act of violent injustice within their family?  This will be another novel, an incremental addition to the piles of books we all face.  But the world needs more stories.  At least, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Never too old for a bedtime story

I will be reading from my book tonight at Stories bookstore and café.  Actually, by the time I get this posted, that should be past tense.  Book readings are old hat for me now, I usually do two or three every night, but my audience is very small, two small boys to be exact.  And I don’t usually read my own book, instead I am making my way through the children’s literature at our glorious public library.  And I never need to publicize these readings, my children relish the nightly ritual, always showing up on time, ever requesting a third book. 

I think back to the years that my mother read me books at bedtime.  I remember when we graduated from picture books to chapter books.  I learned from her that books opened up worlds upon worlds for readers, and I have grown up to model her habit of always having a book on hand.  I cannot seem to travel further than a few blocks without a book in my bag, just as I could not seem to sleep without a bedtime story. 

In the years when my children were small, I despaired that I had no time to read, until it occurred to me that I was reading dozens of books every week, though mostly of the Hop on Pop genre.  Six years in, I can report that children’s literature is fantastic stuff, infinitely varied, amusing and enlightening for adults.  The converse doesn’t work as well.  The one night I tried reading my book of adult literature to my children – my eldest had proudly dipped into his piggy bank three times to legitimately purchase his own copy of my book (his younger brother told him to stop wasting his money) – they were both asleep before I could finish the second page.

Do you love a library? How about public radio?

I love my library – well of course it isn’t mine – it’s ours.  That’s the beauty of a library; by definition a collection of books to be used by multiple readers.  I also love radio, a medium simultaneously expansive and intimate.  This week I had the privilege of marrying those two passions.  I got to talk about how I love the Los Angeles Central Library on the radio.  Thanks to Sarah Harris for making that possible on her show Hear in the City on KPFK.  And that never would have happened if Sarah and I hadn’t run into each other (thankfully not literally)  while riding our bicycles in downtown Los Angelesa year or so ago.  What – you say – people actually bicycle in downtownLos Angeles?!  Yes – I say – this great global city is full of all kinds of unexpected delights…like the library.

Once again, here is the audio link http://soundcloud.com/hearinthecity/library-love

More art = more life

I have a theory that art actually confers upon humans an evolutionary advantage.  Given the confines of a single body and a single life, a single human is confined to a relatively narrow set of experiences (of course even that narrow set can be stunning and profound).  But art – whether literature, poetry, film, music, sculpture, visual arts, etc. – expands the range of experiences a single human can have.  By participating in art, by receiving it, appreciating it, experiencing it, a single person can live a multiplicity of lives.  So the more art a person experiences, the better equipped a person is to respond to the vagaries of life, the drama of human relationships, the rhythms of life and death.  At least that’s my theory.

Recently I actually came across some data that seems to uphold my ideas.  The Utne reader summarized an article from the Scientific American Mind (Nov. Dec. 2011). 

“Several studies confirm the heightened emotional intelligence of bookworms: In 2006 researchers found that people who read fiction rather than nonfiction can more easily decipher the emotions of others, simply by looking at their eyes.  The following year, researchers discovered that reading a single short story would temporarily improve subjects’ social skills.  And in 2010 they showed that exposure to stories made preschoolers more able to take on the perspectives of others….MRI scans show that when we read fiction, our brains mirror the protagonists’ actions and our emotions swell in response to their plight.”   

So go ahead and read stories, it will probably make you smarter, and it may just give you more life.

 

 

 

A Beautiful Day for Sowing Seeds

The sun was shining in the most delicious, not-yet-searing, way yesterday. I had just cultivated my vegetable fantasies at the garden store, purchasing a dozen packets of seeds, and I was itching to get some in the ground. So I dug up a little soil in my garden – not too much, just the row where I had pulled out the spent spinach – and I planted radishes and soybeans.

And I enjoyed all the promise that comes with such an action, the idea that in a couple of months I would be pulling up little red orbs with white flesh, plucking pods of plump edamame. I demonstrated what Thoreau called ‘Faith in a Seed’. I can be confident that my radish seeds will yield radishes, not carrots, or tomatoes or long-haired rabbits. And I can be sure that once a seed grows, it will transform, it will not remain dormant, life suspended.

Similarly, I plant my first seed, my first post on this blog. So welcome to my word garden, I hope you will come back every so often and see how things are growing. And please let me know if you have any suggestions, maybe your tried and true fertilizer, or your own cultivation rituals, maybe your grandmother’s favorite tomato seeds, and especially your questions. I will look forward to your company here.