Melissa Wiley's Blog, page 14

Late April Doings

It’s Saturday morning and I’m lazing in bed, drinking cocoa and dipping lightly into social media, which I mostly ignored this week. Saturdays are the only mornings my alarm isn’t set for 5:45. I could sleep later on weekdays but my two boys get up around 6:45 and I really love having that quiet hour to read and write. I’m committed to the practice of poetry before screens, even if some days it’s a bit of a wrench to drag myself out of bed that early. This week was extra challenging because I take allergy medicine at bedtime, and its soporific effects last into the morning. Portland’s spring is spectacularly lovely but it also wants to kill me a little.

I could take the meds earlier but I’m equally time-greedy about my evenings. I try to use 7-9pm as another block for creative work, with a break in the middle to go tuck in my Huckleberry, for whom this is still an important ritual. (My last little kid, y’all…Rilla became a teenager this month. Can you believe it?) Then Scott and I watch an hour of TV, and then I read in bed for a while, where “read” means “hold my Kindle in front of unseeing eyes until Scott gently removes it from my hand.” Often I turn on the Kindle next morning to discover I highlighted random phrases as I dozed off, like:

tics. The simple action of sweeping

Or:

Norman was unaffected by her because

Uh, super helpful there, sleepy Lissa.

I learned last summer that as our Pacific Northwest evenings lengthen, I won’t be able to resist that magical golden-hour light, so the 7-9pm time block for creative work will give way to long walks, and I’ll have to find other ways to create room for playing with color and words. Of course in a way my whole day revolves around those activities: reading to and chatting with the kids, doing art projects together, working on various writing projects in the afternoons. But I’ve learned I need to give myself chunks of time for creative play that has no end-purpose—no deadlines, no expectations to meet. Lately I’ve been enjoying drawing houseplants—on index cards, mostly, because that’s the ultimate low-pressure canvas—or doing Procreate tutorials on the iPad. (I’m trying to catch up to Rilla and Beanie. Their Procreate skills far surpass mine.)

Not that I have any wish to hurry spring along! I could linger here for another three or four months. My bitterroot is just beginning to bloom, and the dogwoods are in full glory. I remember last May as a month full of swoons—the light, mostly, that miraculous glow illuminating the clouds every evening, turning the air blue and gold.

I may be getting carried away with photos—I have hundreds like this from last spring.

Some quick notes on things we read this past week:

[image error]—Began a readaloud of Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, a lovely novel by Grace Lin. I wrote a BraveWriter Arrow guide for this book last year; it was one of my favorites from the year’s lineup. I’ve been looking forward all year to enjoying it with Huck and Rilla.

—Continued our nostalgia-read of Brambly Hedge. It’s slow going because Rilla and I have to spend long minutes cooing over every tiny detail in the art.

—Rilla (my resident green thumb) and I have also spend loads of time poring over my treasured-since-college copy of Crockett’s Indoor Garden. Rilla has taken charge of the houseplant-watering schedule, which is marvelous since I’ve been…unreliable on that front these past two years. My goldfish plant is getting ready to bloom, we repotted the aeschynanthus, Rilla’s jade cutting, and a few other overcrowded treasures. Rilla has a small succulent collection that began with cuttings given to her by a neighbor whose cat she looked after for a week last summer, augmented by plants harvested from a beautiful succulent wreath my sister gave me for Christmas. And this week we inherited a large fennel volunteer that was taking over my friend Ron’s vegetable bed. Trying to decide whether to plant it in a pot or in the small raised garden bed out back. The latter was probably sundrenched when it was built, but now the neighbor’s magnolia is leaning over it, casting heavy shade over the bed for much of the day. Our fennel will probably prefer a spot on the sunny front steps.

My parents gave Rilla a big box of flower bulbs for her birthday (thirteen! did I mention?!)—dahlias, daylilies, glads, and I forget what else. So those will be going into pots this weekend. Luckily we inherited a dozen large clay pots from yet another neighbor who was clearing out her garage before a move. And a big bag of potting soil! Such riches!

My rosemary, thyme, sage, mint, and chives survived the winter. The basil, not so much. (Its demise was expected.) The potted blueberry has buds and there’s a nice fat poppy coming up where I planned to repot the dahlia tuber Ron gave me when we moved in. My yarrow is looking lush and the foxglove has gone bananas! No flower stalks yet but the leaves are huge and abundant. And my tulips, oh! I can’t get enough of them.

[image error]But I’m supposed to be writing booknotes here! Apart from things I enjoyed with the kids, I didn’t get much reading done this week—I had an unusual number of out-of-the-house events in the evenings. I’m enjoying Austin Kleon’s latest, though—Keep Going. Come to think of it, I read that one with the kids as well—they love his artwork.

I’m about halfway through Mike Monteiro’s Ruined By Design, which is thought-provoking and somewhat chilling.

The world is working exactly as designed.

The combustion engine which is destroying our planet’s atmosphere and rapidly making it inhospitable is working exactly as we designed it. Guns, which lead to so much death, work exactly as they’re designed to work. And every time we “improve” their design, they get better at killing….

Design is also a craft with a lot of blood on its hands. Every cigarette ad is on us. Every gun is on us. Every ballot that a voter cannot understand is on us. Every time social network’s interface allows a stalker to find their victim, that’s on us. The monsters we unleash into the world will carry your name.

This book will make you see that design is a political act. What we choose to design is a political act. Who we choose to work for is a political act. Who we choose to work with is a political act. And, most importantly, the people we’ve excluded from these decisions is the biggest (and stupidest) political act we’ve made as a society.

Fascinating and unsettling, and it feels like an important conversation for this moment in time.

Today I’m in the mood for some entertaining fiction—maybe another Terry Pratchett since I so enjoyed The Wee Free Men. My only highlight in the Kindle edition: “an egg’s worth of education.” I read it aloud to the kids so that fragment can’t have been the thunk of a sleeping hand on the screen. I guess I just liked the notion! (Tiffany barters eggs for knowledge when the scholars come to town.)

(Affiliate links.)

This week on Medium I shared a peek at how I used a Trello board to help with my novel revision. And squee—the most exciting moment of my week—my editor sent me the cover sketch for my new book and it’s fabulous! I can’t wait to share it. The artist is brilliant and the sketch just crackles with energy. I’m so happy. I think we’ll have final art for it quite soon. Of course the book doesn’t pub until summer 2020, but seeing the title in print makes it feel very real!

Happy last-weekend-in-April, my dears. I’d love to hear what you’re reading and planting!

Monday 22 April

Welp, I turned in the revision of my novel and I’m feeling…I don’t know how I’m feeling! Like a groundhog emerging from its hole, maybe? Hey look, it’s spring! Portland has passed cherry-blossom-and-daffodil season, and now we’re in the glorious throes of dogwood-and-tulip season. People are planting vegetable gardens. Robins are busy in my back yard. The whole city is a wonderland of bloom.

One exciting aspect of being finished with this stage is that I can turn my attention to some neglected side-projects, and some that aren’t neglected, just new. I’m working on a follow-up to my Medium post about digital minimalism and a new one about tidal homeschooling. I have some poems just about ready to send out and a picture book idea ready to fall out of my head and onto the page. And I want to do some spring cleaning here on the blog. I’ve read 42 books so far this year and I’m dying to talk about them!

For today, though, I’ll just take a deep breath and enjoy the wind in my neighbor’s pink dogwood. And the flowers on our little cactus!

Spring isn’t only a season, it’s a verb

This morning, two days after the photo above was taken and about a week after taking a spill on his bike, Huck burst into my studio at his usual sunrise moment and announced with excitement, “Mom, look! My leg is almost totally better!” He lifted the injured knee almost to his chin, Karate Kid-style, to demonstrate. “Now it only hurts when I do THIS!”

April 7

Sunday night, and I’m trying to think of something to say that isn’t a repeat of things I’ve posted elsewhere this week! I just sent off my weekly Patreon subscriber post—a diary of this week’s reading—and I wrote a longform post for Medium earlier in the week about my progress so far at a shift toward digital minimalism.

(An odd thing about Medium: I knew you could “clap” for posts you like to help boost them, but I thought the clap button was like every other like button on the internet—on or off. But no! You can clap up to 50 times per story.! This is…frustrating. I like to help give a bump to good posts, but I’m not inclined—especially in this minimalism mood!—to sit there mashing a button for several seconds to give maximum applause. At the same time I’m wincing to think of all the times I’ve given just the one clap, unaware it wasn’t a terribly enthusiastic response. Ah well.)

Anyway! That post was fun to write and I plan to follow up with more steps toward streamlining my screen time. One big shift this week that happened after I posted the article was that I ditched my habit trackers. All of them! Seems like I’ve been attempting to track habits or log progress one way or another (on paper, in apps, or both) since way back in early FlyLady days when it was a yahoogroup sending eight emails a day to remind you to drink your water. Sometimes it’s been just a few basic things: did I take my vitamin? did I take a walk today? Other times I’ve had a whole raft of daily trackable activities. Sketch! Read! Duolingo! Stretches! Etc etc etc. And of course I jumped on the Fitbit bandwagon at some point. But it all just suddenly seemed like unnecessary pressure. I read every day, whether I mark an X in a box or not. If I’m not in the mood to sketch, a habit tracker isn’t more likely to make me do it—it’ll just make me feel guilty for not doing it. And step-counting: well, let’s just say I’ve had one too many nights where I’m jogging in place in my pajamas just to get my Fitbit to turn over to a nice round number. (Scott has a particularly sardonic eyebrow lift reserved for these moments. And I’ll be like: “I know! [pant pant] This is ridiculous! [pant] …98…99…8000!”)

So I deleted the tracking app (more digital decluttering, yay) and put my Fitbit on a shelf. And then I went for a long walk, a walk measured in cherry blossoms and tulips, not steps.

Enter April

My parents were here for Wonderboy’s spring break, and Portland greeted them with an explosion of bloom. Their visit overlapped with the Association of Writing Programs Conference (AWP), which meant I had friends in town and poets I love, and though I didn’t attend the conference proper I found time to slip away to a few offsite events and spent most of Saturday at the book fair, aka heaven. Cherry blossoms, daffodils, good company, blue skies, and poetry at every turn.

Now I’m collecting my thoughts for the final push on my novel revision (two more weeks!) and plugging away at other work. It’s challenging at this time of year. When I’m inside, I want to be outside. The grape hyacinths and euphorbia are in bloom, and camellia and hellebore, and tulips are beginning to open! And tulip magnolias in their glory. Focus, Lissa. Focus.

On Patreon this weekend, I wrote about my weekly meandering through various books of poems and artists’ journals in my morning poetry hour. It’s a while since I’ve explained my Patreon here, so a quick refresher: you can subscribe for as little as $1/month, which grants access to a weekly post about my reading and writing life (including sneak peeks at the book in progress, as it begins to move through the various stages of publishing). At the $3+ tier, you’re invited to join my weekly coffee hour, a casual, chatty, unrecorded Google Hangout where you can pop in and pick my brain about anything you like.

Tomorrow I’m off to Salem for a monthly meeting of folks in the intellectual and developmental disabilities supports community. And then on Wednesday: it’s back to high tide for Huck, Rilla, and me. Another milestone today: it was Beanie’s first day of school—and college! Bean and Rose are taking an oceanography class together. We have a few more months before Beanie officially graduates from our homeschool, and then—gulp—I’ll be down to just two students here in Bonny Glen Academy. Talk about the tides!

I Heart Portland in Spring

Oh Mr. Cuthbert! Oh Mr. Cuthbert! Oh Mr. Cuthbert!

Portland puts on spring the way a five-year-old wakes up from slumber: suddenly, with energy, from zero to sixty. Today’s a chilly, rainy day but we’ve had several days of blue sky, warm sun, and pink fireworks in all the trees. I walked a mile along Klickitat Street yesterday and I had to stop myself from skipping like a Disney princess.

The AWP conference is here in Portland this weekend (perfect timing for this spectacular bloom) and I’m very excited about a couple of events I’m attending. Hint: Rachel Zucker! I’ll report back later in the week.

 

A few quick things

(Am I capable of being quick? Probably not.)

1—I took some time this month to assess the ways I’m using social media and other online activities—and that was before I began reading Cal Newport’s excellent book Digital Minimalism, which hit my Kindle a couple of days ago. Highly recommended; I’ll be asking my older kids to read it, for sure. I’m going to be changing the way I use several platforms, but that topic will have to wait for later because I can’t possibly be quick about it. But one fruit of my contemplations has been an idea for a change I’m making at my Patreon. Short version: starting tomorrow, subscribers at the $3+ tier are invited to join me for a weekly live chat via Google Hangouts. Before, I was offering a monthly recorded live chat; this new thing is weekly and unrecorded. You can read more about it here (it’s a public post; you needn’t be a Patreon subscriber to read it). Think of it as an invitation to drop by my studio for a gabfest once a week. (Starting tomorrow, March 1, at 1pm Pacific time.)

2—My friend Julianna Baggott has launched a six-week audio course on Efficient Creativity. You can listen to the first episode for free; the full course runs $25 (the price of a hardcover, Julianna points out). Julianna’s the most efficiently creative (and creatively efficient) person I know, and she’s endlessly engaging to boot, so I’m really excited to listen to this course.

3—I’ve just started three different sentences and scrapped them because they aren’t quick topics. Argh, this is always my problem! I’m forever trying to fit a novel into the space of a haiku (figuratively speaking). All right, never mind. Here, I’ll just say what else I’m reading. (When in doubt, etc etc.)

• lots of poetry, especially books by Olav Hauge (forever grateful to Holly Wren Spaulding for introducing me to him), Basho, T’ao Ch’ien, Maxine Kumin, Kimiko Hahn, Rachel Zucker, Nayyirah Waheed, Danez Smith, and Julia Hartwig (with regular doses of Mary Oliver and Billy Collins because OBVIOUSLY)—and yes, that’s a good many books, but that’s what’s nice about poetry; you can dip in and out. These days, I’m mostly in.

• When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams—I will have to circle back to this in a future post, because it is blowing me away.

• The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett—readaloud to Huck and Rilla

• also In the Beginning by Virginia Hamilton (collection of creation myths from various cultures)

• The Haunting of Hill House because it finally came in at the library, but then so did Digital Minimalism and I’ve been ignoring Hill House for a few days.

How about you? What are YOU reading?

I don’t like wattlesnakes

note: not a real snake

A WordPress update caused some hiccups for me yesterday and I broke my whopping two-day posting streak. The noive!

Ah well, here I am on a Thursday afternoon, finishing up my last BraveWriter Arrow of the year. I think that makes a total of 17 Arrows I’ve written in the past two years. Wow, it’s a lot when I add them all up! This one’s on By the Great Horn Spoon, a most beloved novel in the Wiley-Peterson household. I just revisited the old post in that link—written FOURTEEN years ago, can you believe it?—and am sitting here cracking up at poor little four-year-old Beanie:

It’s been a rough morning. Our wagon tipped over while fording a river, and we lost fifty pounds of salt pork and our only shotgun. Then Rose took sick—cholera, we think—and died before we could do anything about it.

My girls are undaunted by this stunning double tragedy. They push on across the prairie, estimating the number of miles to the next fort. Maybe we can trade our mule for a new gun.

“At least we still have the fishing pole,” says Rose. She seems to have accepted her own death gracefully.

“I don’t like wattlesnakes,” announces Beanie.

Jane cracks up. “Who does? Remember when I got bit, back before we crossed the Platte?”

Of course now I’m remembering our actual in-real-life wattlesnake (or racklenake, depending which of my toddlers you asked) encounters. We’ve had more than our share!

this one was all too real

February, 2012:

Then something will happen to remind me why I don’t go hiking more often, like OH SAY A RATTLESNAKE WILL APPEAR ON THE TRAIL THREE FEET FROM MY CHILDREN.

Rose and Beanie spotted him at the same time—they were in the lead, fortunately; they’re sharp-eyed lasses and I was distracted by a hot, red-faced, cranky Huck. If this had been the part of the trail where Huck suddenly charged ahead and we larger folk had to scramble to catch up, he’d have been on that snake before any of us saw it. It was lying quite still at first, stretched out across our path. Rose had just enough time to ask “Is it real?” before it twitched, and I took in the triangular head and the rattle and hollered EVERYONE BACK UP IT’S A RATTLER GRAB THE LITTLE ONES!! (I used more exclamation points.)

We edged back a yard and stood watching it. Huck, who’d been begging me to carry him, now clamored to be put down. Not a chance, pal. The rest of us were still and silent. After a long moment, the snake began to move; it slid across the trail into the underbrush.

“This is the best thing that EVER HAPPENED TO ME,” Rose declared.

August, 2012 (you’ll note Beanie’s shift to a more wattlesnake-inclusive position):

“I adore rattlers,” said Beanie.

The firemen raised their eyebrows. “Well, maybe don’t adore them,” one said.

“From a distance,” said another.

“Me don’t like racklenakes,” announced Huck.

“ME EITHER,” declared his big brother in the firmest of tones.

ME EITHER, reiterates their poor mother, all these years later. Neither the wattlers nor the racklers. Nor, for that matter, the rubber kind, which have given me no less than seventy minor heart attacks over the years.

best homeschooling purchase #1: discount markerboards

A quickie today:

I’ve been getting lots of queries on Instagram about our puzzle boards as seen in the background of the pic, a few posts back, of Huck levitating off the sofa. Katharine asked about them, here, too, and I answered in the comments:

They’re whiteboards! I bought them a zillion years ago from a website called markerboardseconds.com or something like that. Discounted for scratch-and-dent, and man, what a great purchase that has turned out to be. What you’re seeing in the pic above is the backside, which we use constantly for puzzles–that little card table is right next to the big dinner table, so we need to be able to lay out our pieces and move them off the big table when it’s time to eat.

The other side is the whiteboard surface. We use some for homeschooly things, but mostly under watercolor paintings. Again, it’s nice to be able to move the wet paintings off the table to dry. They’re coated with years of spatter at this point. [image error]

two minutes left so I’ll just hit send

Ha, joke’s on me: I carefully mapped out a new morning routine to allow myself a regular, daily (or near daily) blogging time, but here I sit and all the topics I thought I’d tackle have flown clean out of my brain. I mean, yes, I do keep a list of post ideas, but everything on the list right now wants more time (and brain) than I have free at the moment.

—newsletters I like (and actually read)

—books Huck is reading

—our most-beloved picture books that Scott read to the kids between long novels

—the fix-it fair (this one’s been in drafts for months)

—Chronologically LOST (much to say about this!!)

—my best homeschooling purchases ever (things we’ve used over and over)

—booknotes, especially about the poetry binge I’ve been on

—online art classes/sketchbook update

—recent handwork projects

…and that’s only one of my lists. All too time-intensive for this brief morning window.

Anything in particular you’d like to chat about?

***

Facebook flashback from this day in 2015:

Forget left brain/right brain. The two halves of my mind are the part with the foresight to stock up on extra cartridges for the 11yo’s beloved labelmaker, and the part with no earthly idea where I stashed ’em.

Still checks out!