Xianna Michaels's Blog, page 10

Goodreads Giveaway

In honor of my book launch for Mindel and The Misfit Dragons, we are giving away a book now on Goodreads. Go enter today!

 

Goodreads Book Giveaway


Mindel and the Misfit Dragons
by Xianna Michaels

Giveaway ends November 10, 2014.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

 

The post Goodreads Giveaway appeared first on Xianna Michaels.

A Sukkot Family Tradition

October 8th, in addition to being the birthday of one of my daughters, this year begins the weeklong Jewish holiday of Sukkot. On Sukkot we eat in a temporary dwelling, a sukkah. Some people (one of my sons-in-law and assorted grandchildren included) even sleep there!

Our Sukkah is a wooden pergola with fabric walls and a roof of palm leaves. Decades ago we started a special tradition as a way to decorate the sukkah. I got this idea from my dear friend Linda. Her oldest child is ten years older than mine, so she’s way ahead of me. I draw pictures in black marker on poster board and the kids color and embellish them. They give me their requests for different symbols of the High Holidays: a shofar, a Torah scroll, the lulav and etrog (ie, palm frond and citrus fruit) we use on Sukkot, etc. I always write each child’s name on the poster and date it. Then each year I have them laminated before hanging them up.

I have spent countless, delightful hours with my children and now with my grandchildren, creating these posters in anticipation of the holiday. And by now I have quite a collection. The posters date back to 1982! My grandkids love to see the artwork their parents, aunts and uncle were producing when they were still writing their names with backwards letters.

Lately, in honor of my new book, Mindel and The Misfit Dragons, the kids have been asking for a  new drawing motif: a  sukkah with a dragon in it! I’ve been happy to oblige.  (See two generations of Sukkah artwork below.)

The post A Sukkot Family Tradition appeared first on Xianna Michaels.

My Automotive Adventures: A Sonnet to my Green Ford Mustang on our Anniversary

I’ll let you know if I ever decide to go shopping for another car. In the meantime I’d like to share with you a poem I wrote three years ago when my green Ford Mustang and I celebrated 20 years together.

Anniversary Song

Twenty years and they all make fun

And call my loyalty misguided.

But haven’t we had a glorious run

That surely ought not be derided?

You’re still pristine, inside and out;

You run just like a well-groomed mare.

I’ve never had a moment’s doubt

That what we have is truly rare.

You respond so gladly to my touch;

I keep you satisfied and sleek.

You don’t require all that much

Beyond your sustenance once a week.

The most gorgeous one I’ve ever seen –

My ninety-one Mustang in deep jewel green.

 

The post My Automotive Adventures: A Sonnet to my Green Ford Mustang on our Anniversary appeared first on Xianna Michaels.

Accounting of the Soul

My birthday comes at the very end of August. I did not particularly appreciate this when I was a child. I could not have a birthday party in school, since there was no school yet. Everyone was focused on Labor Day and back-to-school, and it seemed a very inconvenient time to squeeze in a birthday. But years later, many years later, I came to love my August 31st birth date.

Forty in Judaism is considered the beginning of the age of wisdom. I can’t claim to have suddenly acquired wisdom at that time. But I did acquire a great desire for self-evaluation. So when I turned forty I began what in Hebrew is called Cheshbon HaNefesh, an Accounting of the Soul. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Of Blessed Memory, taught that this should be done on your Hebrew birthday. My Hebrew birthday is the 29th of Av. This is just one day before the beginning of the month of Elul. As the last month of the Jewish year, Elul comes just before Rosh Hashana and is a natural time for contemplation.

My English birthday always falls in there somewhere, so I have for many years undertaken an extended Cheshbon HaNefesh. It’s a time to review where I am in my life spiritually, and I extend it to other areas as well. I review the past year and meditate on where I want to go in the next. What have I accomplished? Not accomplished? Have I done things I wish I hadn’t? Have I grown closer to G-d? My best friend Deborah, a Chabad rabbi’s wife, first introduced me to the concept of the Cheshban HaNefesh. Every year when we go out together for our birthdays, we take time to share our progress in our respective Accountings. It is a ritual I cherish.

I know very well that December is the end of the year on the secular calendar. In January we change the date. However, September in many ways has always marked the beginning of the year for me. Not only does it bring Rosh Hashanah, but it is the beginning of the school year. And I have just about always marked my life by the school year, first as a student then as a teacher, parent, and grandmother.

Back-to-School is always a new beginning, always exciting. So my August 31st birthday is right on the cusp and I have come to greatly appreciate this time.

So have I acquired wisdom over all these years? Maybe some, but I believe I’ve developed enough humility to know I have a long way to go. My Cheshbon HaNefesh becomes more intense with each passing year. I give myself the gift of extra time for writing poetry, especially the Xoem™ – mandala process I’ve developed, and for spiritual reading and meditation.

And the fact that school hasn’t started yet has brought an unexpected gift. My oldest grandchildren have begun taking me out for lunch on my birthday. And what could be better than that?

Wishing everyone a Healthy Happy New Year, a Shana Tova!

The post Accounting of the Soul appeared first on Xianna Michaels.

My Automotive Adventures: When I first laid eyes on my Green Ford Mustang

So, as I was saying previously, in my delightful search for a new car, I set my priorities. I had to have a green car. In those days that was not an ambiguous concept – it referred to a color, not an ecological ideology. There were no hybrids, no electrical cars on the horizon. And in my case the color was very specific – it had to be a blue-green teal, my eye-color. Why, you may ask, did I insist on this?

Everyone knows the eyes are the windows to the soul. I’ve learned just about everything I know about color from my very dear friends Marjorie Bird and Deborah Gordon. Marjorie, an interior designer and organizer, teaches that order is the first law of beauty and that color is the essence of a person. Deborah, a Chabad rabbi’s wife and the founder of Flying Colors in Encino, California (link), is a color designer and color healer. She teaches that the eye color is, indeed, the soul color. It is the color in which we feel most centered, most ourselves. It is our middle C. It’s always been my favorite color to wear, so, naturally, it was the color I wanted to be surrounded by in the many, many hours per week that I, as a typical Angelino, would be spending in my car.

Now, the early 90’s was a time when car dealers had apparently just begun to realize that women not only drive a lot of cars, but also make a lot of car-buying decisions and sometimes even buy them on their own. Without a man. Imagine that! So they figured they ought to treat potential female buyers seriously and respectfully. I am sorry, fellow females, but I may have set the cause back a bit.

You see, I researched a lot of cars before I bought my lovely Mustang. In those days you didn’t do that with your fingers on a keyboard. You did it with your feet, by walking into a dealership. So I would walk in, by myself, and four eager salespeople, usually men in those days, would converge on me, competing for my business. What kind of car did I want? What was I in the market for? I would stand there confidently and say, “I’m looking for a green car.”

“Yes, but – but what sort? A sedan, a mini-van, a –“

“What sort do you have that comes in green?”

I would pull out the swatch of the exact color I wanted. “This green.”

By this time one or two sales people would have melted away. The remaining ones would say plaintively, “But don’t you want to see what features –“

“No, I want a green car. It’s silly to waste everyone’s time discussing features or configurations of cars that don’t come in green.”

By now there would be only one man left standing, usually to admit, very apologetically, that no, in their entire fleet there was not a single car to match my swatch of green, the color of my eyes.

So I would leave, I think the salespeople were relieved. They thought I was a crazy lady. I’m sure it’s no accident that when I finally bought a car, my salesperson was a woman. She thought my color priority made perfect sense.

So how, exactly, did I get to Ford? It was partly a process of elimination. As I was just coming off the trauma of the mini-van, Chrysler was out of the question. The utter callousness of GM was still reverberating. It happened that BMW made a beautiful, perfect green, but it was too high-end for me. Besides, my in-laws were Holocaust survivors. My mother-in-law had been a slave in a Nazi labor camp. It was visceral. I couldn’t buy German. Jaguar made their classic racing green, but it was also high-end, and notoriously unreliable in the bargain.

My husband lobbied for the Japanese. He loved – still loves – Japanese cars. He waxes poetic over their high quality, attention to detail, value for money, excellent service! So I tried Japanese. I truly did. But they had talking ladies in the dashboard – long before anyone had ever heard of Siri – and who needed that? Besides, I found the controls completely counter-intuitive. And then there was the matter of size. At the risk of being accused of profiling, is it possible the Japanese carmakers think all Americans are tall? I am not, yet every car I test drove seemed geared to someone much taller than my 60” high. I couldn’t see properly. I couldn’t comfortably reach the steering wheel. I would have needed training blocks on the pedals. And the whiplash guards hit my head, not my neck, in just such a way as to start a migraine right there on the test drive. So, the rising empire of Japanese cars was not for me.

And then there was Ford. At just about that time, Ford had gotten he bright idea, apparently lifted from the Japanese, that quality control mattered. Built-in obsolescence wasn’t going to cut it anymore. And, lo and behold, they had a beautiful deep metallic teal blue-green, which they called deep jewel green. And there it was – a green Mustang 5.0 convertible right on the showroom floor.

A Mustang? Me? Mother of four, beleaguered owner of a decrepit mini-van? Did I dare?

In all fairness it did come in green in the hatchback model. But I felt the visibility was cut to some degree. And besides, coming off the trauma of Madame Guillotine-of-the-mini-van, I didn’t want any more lift gates. And I didn’t like not having a hidden trunk.

And let’s not forget power. The 5.0 had more than I would ever need. I wasn’t about to go drag racing. I would never have the opportunity to do 80 mph on the 405 Freeway. But I could go back to making left turns. Oh, the sheer joy of it!

And then there were the added perks. It came with a then-novel inflatable lumbar support, which was wonderful for my back (and still works to this day.) In addition, because it was a convertible and lacked a metal side post, the front seat belt came out from the floor, not from above and behind my left shoulder. This spared me the constant lower back-wrenching twisting maneuver other cars required to fasten the seat belt. What a relief! For that alone I would buy another convertible.

I test drove it – with my female salesperson, who understood perfectly my visual delight in the car. I had never driven a sports car – why would I?  I can barely follow baseball. But I loved the way it hugged the road, the tight steering, the utter responsiveness of the car.

My poor husband was tearing his hair out. “It’s a tin can. It won’t last two years. Don’t do this! It’s a waste of money!”

Oh, dear Reader, I delight in telling you I paid not the slightest heed. It was, after all, a reasonably priced car. And it wasn’t that we didn’t have the money at the time. He would have been happy to pay that and a bit more for a Japanese car. Something he deemed worthy. But I was just coming off seven years (yes, seven) of the Mini-Van-from-Hell, and before that the Demon-Diesel. I was not to be deterred.

But my derring-do went further. You see, the beautiful deep jewel green car came with gray velour seats and gray carpeting. Now, I have nothing against gray – for the right person. But it’s not on my color palette. I do not wear gray. There is not so much as a grey accessory in my house. Why would I want to spend endless hours on the freeway surrounded by a color with which I have no connection?

Of course I wouldn’t. So fresh off the showroom floor, I took the car for a makeover. I installed green leather seats, front and back. I had every bit of gray paneling that could be changed transformed to green. I had deep green carpeting installed wall-to-wall, front and back. I now truly had my green car.

My husband nearly had what used to be termed “the apoplexy.” He tore out what little hair he had left. “What the h— are you doing? You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear! You’re throwing good money after bad! What difference does the carpet color make? The Americans don’t know how to make cars!”

Well, dear Reader, apparently Ford did. Ask me how many Japanese cars my dear husband has had in the twenty-three years I’ve been driving my “tin can”? My car, by the way, still has the original green seats, green carpeting and the gleaming metallic green exterior.

It has driven countless car pool runs, stuffed piles of clothes and innumerable art and school supplies in its little trunk; has made pilgrimages to every mall in the City of Angels, not to mention doctors, Disneyland and summer day camp. The clever guys from my favorite junk shops have managed to secure many treasures in its small green environs – lamps from the 20’s, the 40’s desk on which I now write, night tables, a coffee table, a small book cabinet and a 50’s swivel desk chair.

And then eventually came the special blessing of needing car seats and boosters for grandchildren in the back seat. Two at a time fit perfectly and we have had lovely adventures – including our Friday outings to the bookstore and trips to the top of the mall parking lot to paint the sunset with the top down on a balmy summer night.

My lovely Mustang really didn’t start needing any repairs until it was about 15 years old, and since car years are not the same as human years, that’s really pretty good. It now needs some major repairs about every 18-24 months. My mechanic and I figure it amortizes out to less than $100 per month. Since I have no loan payments, this is a pretty good deal. He says he can keep it going as long I want and promises to tell me if it ever becomes unsafe.

Besides, what would I buy? I still can’t bring myself to buy German, even though, admittedly, car provenance is becoming harder to determine these days. The Japanese cars are still uncomfortable for me at my height. And besides that, every time I’m forced by circumstances to drive my husband’s highly rated Japanese car, I feel like I’m in a boat navigating choppy seas. I just don’t get it. Chrysler has two strikes with me. GM was out after one. And Ford Mustang hasn’t come out with a color I like in a while.

That said, my older grandchildren are getting tired of squeezing into the backseat of my little two-door car. They want me to buy an SUV like their moms. Sorry. Not going to happen.

My oldest granddaughter is lobbying hard for me to buy a Mini Cooper.

“It’s cute,” she tells me. “Little enough to fit in your garage.”

“True,” I tell her. “But it was bought by BMW. It’s German.”

“No,” she counters, “It’s British.”

Maybe.

“There’s a four-door version,” she says.

That there is.

“It comes in your green.”

That it does, a beautiful perfect teal blue-green. Her uncle on her father’s side has one and loves it. My mechanic doesn’t. He thinks it’s unreliable and says I should wait till Mustang comes out with a color I like. Interestingly, Consumer Reports rates the Mini Cooper at once high on customer satisfaction and low on reliability. Go figure.

She is undaunted. She wants to drive me to the Mini dealer herself so I can test drive it. Yes, you read that right. My oldest grandchild is 16. She has her driver’s license.

How on earth did that happen?

And what of my dear husband? What does he say about the prospect of my shopping for another car – after more than 23 years – by color? Of very likely changing the seat and carpet colors before I’ve driven the car three feet? Of holding out for exactly whatever bells and whistles – no more, no less – that my little heart desires? What does the darling man have to say about all of this?

I’ll tell you dear Reader: NOT…ONE…WORD…

Wise man.

Stay tuned.

The post My Automotive Adventures: When I first laid eyes on my Green Ford Mustang appeared first on Xianna Michaels.

My Automotive Adventures: My Long Road to Ford – Part 1

If you happened to be in the big parking lot behind the one remaining bookstore in my vicinity on any given sunny summer Friday afternoon, you might well see me helping several of my grandchildren in or out of my little car. And then you might well see a curious sight. Another car will pull up close by and stop. The driver – male – will roll down his window, tell me how much he likes my car and offer to buy it on the spot. Sometimes said male will ask me how much I want for it; sometimes I will be offered a specific dollar amount. I always smile and thank him and say, “No, I’m not selling it.” My grandchildren, having witnessed this scene numerous times, think it’s hilarious. Why would anyone want to buy Nana’s ancient car?

And you, dear Reader, might well ask what sort of car this is that garners such attention. Why, it’s a Mustang 5.0 convertible in a color they call deep jewel green, but that is actually teal – believe me, it’s my eye color; I know. It’s a 1991 and I’ve been driving it since I bought it new off the showroom floor twenty-three years ago. You might well ask why a redhead who gets migraines from the sun and who never, ever speeds would be driving a 5.0 convertible muscle car. Good question. And a story goes with it, a long one which has its genesis back in time, way back before 1991.

Our tale begins, you see in 1973. My husband and I had just moved to California from New York for his medical internship and my master’s degree program. We had little money and tried for a time to get by with the small stick shift Toyota Corona that my husband adored and that we had stuffed to the rafters to drive cross-country to get here. But this was Southern California we’re talking about – not exactly a densely packed urban center with superior public transportation. It was more like an endless sprawling suburb with buses that ran reliably – whenever they felt like it. We needed a second car desperately. My husband, ever resourceful, threw himself into a flurry of research.

He went to his second Bible, Consumer Reports, and concluded that our best option was the Dodge Dart. It was about their most highly rated economy car that year. I wasn’t thrilled with the white color they had on the lot, but it was, indeed, a great buy. And just the right size. A perfect starter car for me.

Well, not exactly. Not if you actually wanted the car to start. Most days. In your driveway. Or at school. Or at the market. Which it didn’t. Very often. For years. Some ignition problem, they said, but could somehow never fix. I got very friendly with the AAA guys. The dispatchers were nice, too.

Fast forward one child, another on the way, and the gas crisis in full swing. For those of you too young to remember, let me just recount. You had to block significant time on your calendar for the activity of getting gas. The lines (at least in LA) stretched around the corner and down the street, the wait between one and two hours. I would take my very pregnant self and my toddler daughter into the car at naptime, drive a few blocks till she fell asleep, then head for the gas line. She would have a nice long, air-conditioned nap and I would grade two classes worth of high school English essays before I got my turn at the pump.

But hark, halt! There was another line that had almost no wait. Was this some sort of VIP line? No. It was for the enlightened ones who had gone out and bought diesel engine cars. There was no line for diesel. General Motors began rolling them off the assembly line. Consumer Reports approved. We decided to be enlightened.

And there it was. A beautiful, coppery-brown Oldsmobile big enough for the two carseats I would soon need. Maybe a third if we were so blessed. A perfect family car. Well, not exactly. Not if you actually wanted the car to go. And keep going. Without stalling all over town. Which it did. A lot. GM said we had a lemon. But this was before the Lemon Law, so all the repairs – unsuccessful though they were – were on us. They never did manage to fix it nor did they seem to care. As an aside, they had outright refused to fix the bumper that was crooked right off the showroom floor. They claimed it didn’t keep the car from running. I kid you not.  The arrogance was mind-boggling. We vowed never to buy another GM car. We couldn’t have been the only ones. Ahem… could that be part of the reason why – oh never mind.

Fast forward to 1984. I am now the mother of four. My dear husband agrees it’s finally time to buy a new car. Chrysler has come out with an entirely new species, designed to replace the unwieldy station wagon, which I had never wanted. This new creature is called a … Mini-Van!!! Small on the outside, amazingly roomy on the inside. A seven-seater! All those car seats! I was the first one in our school parking lot to have one. It caused a sensation. “What was it?” people wondered, and came running to take a look inside. Amazing! A dream come true! Well, not exactly. More like a nightmare. Where to begin?

With the windows, I suppose. Sleek, tinted – something new and highly touted in those days. Until they smashed to smithereens. Over and over. But I get ahead of myself. Let me tell you about the sliding side door, the only way to enter the second and third rows of seats. There was only one on the passenger side. And it was big. And heavy. There was no convenient high tech little button to push to open or close it with safety mechanisms and a soft, sliding, swoosh-and-click sound. Oh, no. What there was an arm that would yank it open and slam it shut at the appropriate times, triple checking that there were no limbs in the way. So far, so good. Except that the requisite slamming maneuver was prone to causing the huge glass window on said door – or even on the opposite side – to shatter. Often. And I don’t mean the modern day create cracks-that-look-like-your-frosted-shower-door sort of shattering. I mean full-on smashing and spraying shards of glass all over your children, and into their backpacks and lunch bags. I kid you not.

There were no recalls in those days, but Chrysler fixed those windows with a smile. Every time. And never charged us a penny. They knew they had a problem; we weren’t the only ones with broken windows. So points for them. That puts them notches above GM in my book. But really? They couldn’t figure out they had this problem before they touted their new Mini-Van as the greatest thing since disposable diapers and sent it out into the world for its glass to go smashing into thousands of hapless backpacks? Really?

A final word about that sliding door. One day we arrived home and all piled out of the car. My arms were full of backpacks and half-empty over-ripe lunch bags, so my then eight-year-old daughter decided to step up and help by closing the door for me. And lo, the windows did not shatter. Instead, the entire huge sliding door came off. Into the arms of an eight-year-old. I…kid…you…not.

Then there was the matter of the lift-gate in back. There was no tidy little button to open or close that either. Remember, we’re talking Ancient Times here; you had to do it all by hand. There wasn’t even a pull-strap. At five feet tall I had to stand on tip-toes and really stretch and then yank to get that huge piece of metal down. My lower  back already had issues. This did not help. Perhaps in a misguided attempt to come to my aid, the lift gate began closing on its own – when it, not I, was ready. Or rather, it morphed into a latter-day Madame Guillotine, slamming down on whatever body part happened to be in its way. It narrowly missed my neck and bludgeoned my shoulders several times. I couldn’t let the kids anywhere near it. I eventually learned to hold onto it with one hand while maneuvering backpacks or shopping bags in and out with the other. I lived in terror of what might happen if someone forgot.

But that’s not all. There was also the matter of the power. Or lack thereof. It was underpowered to begin with at four cylinders, but it got worse with each passing year. It went from being adolescently lumbering to geriatrically stumbling in a very short time. By the fourth year it had so little oomph that I was afraid to make left turns if I could see an oncoming car anywhere in my visual field. My husband used to call me Eagle Eye. I could see very far. So I basically stopped making left turns.

And then one day, somehow, my oldest child turned sixteen and four days later was in possession of a driver’s license. In Southern California this milestone not only heralds the semi-emancipation of the teen but the parent as well.  There is now back-up, another driver in the family, someone who is absolutely thrilled to run errands and drive herself to school. So, like so many parents happily anticipating this milestone, we did what seemed the most sensible thing. We bought a safe, simple car with the intention (eventually fulfilled) of passing it from one child to the next on through all four.

And very soon thereafter I had an epiphany. Our oldest daughter could drive herself and next younger sister to high school. I could drive the two younger ones to the elementary school. We were done with car seats (for this generation at least). Many of our vacations involved plane trips back East to see family, and for the occasional road trip we could take two cars or rent something large. In other words, after seven long years I could finally junk the Chrysler Mini-Van. “Junk” being the operative word.

With absolute glee I set out to find a new car. And how, exactly, did I end up with a convertible muscle car? Well, for once I was determined that this car would be mine. Exactly what I wanted. Oh, it had to be safe, reliable, reasonably priced. I wasn’t in the market for a luxury car by any means. But I was determined to buy what I wanted, not what Consumer Reports recommended, not what my husband thought was good bang for the buck, not what made sense for a mother of four. Been there, done that.

I set my priorities: after safety, my first criterion, my one non-negotiable, was that the car had to be…green. The color of my eyes: But that’s a story for another time. Stay tuned.

The post My Automotive Adventures: My Long Road to Ford – Part 1 appeared first on Xianna Michaels.

My Grandmother Mindel, Otherwise Known as Minnie

September 7th is Grandparents Day. I’ve already written about my maternal grandmother, who got off the boat and literally kissed the ground (Echoes of Emma Lazarus, read it here). She managed to transmit to me her reverence for this country and what it stood for.

My paternal grandmother also had a story. In many ways it’s the story of the American Dream. Her name was Mindel. My oldest daughter is named for her, as is the heroine of my soon-to-be-released verse fairy tale, Mindel and The Misfit Dragons.

My grandmother Mindel came to America when she was nine-years-old and became known as Minnie. She was immediately put to work in a sweatshop because the family needed the pennies she could earn. So she had no formal education in this country. But she did learn what it meant to be an American.

The story is told in the family that she would walk on the streets of the Lower East Side with her older sister. Whenever she would hear a police siren, she would scream and run to hide under piles of garbage or old rags. Her sister would gently coax her out: “It’s okay, Minnie. You can come out now. This is America. The police won’t hurt us here. The police here are our friends.”

My grandmother would crawl out and eventually she learned. The streets might not be paved with gold in the fabled “Goldena Medina” that was now her home, but the police would not drag her away or burn her out of her house.

She would go on to marry a tailor and raise six children in extreme poverty during the Depression. My father used to say he had one toy growing up – a single roller skate. His brother had the other half of the pair. But somehow my grandparents always believed that life would be better for their children. Four of them, my father included, would fight overseas in World War II. My father – the baby – and his next youngest brother would go to college, as would all fourteen of Minnie’s grandchildren and her many, many great grandchildren. The American Dream was a gift that we all embraced.

I never knew my grandfathers and neither of my grandmothers was alive by the time I became a grandmother myself. But I think they all would be pleased that I try to convey to my own grandchildren what it means to be an American. Every time I read them a book about the Statue of Liberty or play patriotic songs at our 4th of July barbecues, I am remembering my grandparents. Every time I explain why I absolutely must vote on Election Day, or let them see me cry during the playing of “The Star Spangled Banner,” I am transmitting the lessons of my grandparents. They crossed an ocean in steerage so their descendants could live a life they could never have imagined.

Grandparents Day fills me with gratitude.

The post My Grandmother Mindel, Otherwise Known as Minnie appeared first on Xianna Michaels.

Machines Mindel and Me

I am not a Luddite. Truly, I am not. I appreciate the marvels – even miracles – that technology has wrought. I even avail myself of some of them. I can Google with the best of them (and even use the proper noun as a verb), I understand the value of a website, and I learned to text so I could communicate with my children. (My grandchildren, as it happens, are happy to actually speak with me, but I digress.)

So, yes, I appreciate technology, but I also believe in the Socratic adage, “know thyself.” And for some reason, machines and I have never quite gotten along. I learned from a young age to hand sew a beautiful hem – I still can – but the sewing machine, much to my mother’s consternation, utterly defeated me. I can hand wash fine linens, but my washing machines have tended to do things like shake, rattle and walk across the room. And please don’t even get me started on the microwave.

I came of age when computers were the size of entire buildings and everyone was enthralled with electric typewriters. I always had what was referred to as a “nice handwriting” and high school and college teachers accepted handwritten papers, but still I took several typewriting courses. To no avail. Keys got stuck, motors jammed, I could never think or create on a keyboard and I made so many mistakes per line that a paragraph could take hours to type. Corrections entailed either a wheel-like eraser with a brush attached, which necessitated blowing on the keys so as not to clog them too much with erasures, after which you had to re-type; or using some new-fangled erasure strips which, when positioned just so, could be typed over. Don’t ask.

So I happily completed college and most of graduate school by handing in quite legible, lengthy, handwritten papers. None of my professors objected. But the master’s thesis was another matter. There was an ironclad, department-wide rule that it had to be typed. I despaired but then I rallied. “Know thyself,” I thought, and since our linguistics department was small and friendly, the chairman knew me as well. I went to him and handed him two pieces of paper. I said, “Here is a sample of my typing. I can type about ten words per minute with seven mistakes. Here is a typical paragraph. And on this other paper is a sample of my hand printing. I can print thirty-five words a minute with no mistakes.

Then I threw myself on his mercy. “Can I please, please, please hand-letter my thesis?”

He looked at the two pages. “I can’t read your typing, “ he said, and laughed.  “Yes, please do handprint your thesis!”

And so I did, and never looked back. My fountain pen is and has always been an extension of my hand. And so I believe it is altogether fitting that my first verse fairytale, Mindel and The Misfit Dragons, is entirely handwritten.

The post Machines Mindel and Me appeared first on Xianna Michaels.

The Joy of Doodling

One of my grandsons, who’s in elementary school, was home sick for a few days and very bored. He loves to draw so I went to the bookstore to buy him some kind of How-to-Draw Monsters or Superheroes – type of book. What I found – in the kids’ section – were several step-by-step drawing books, the approaches of which were very structured (i.e. left-brained) and led to an impossible ideal they could never match. Even I, an adult pen & ink artist who works intuitively, couldn’t follow those instructions and even if I did, I would end up with some else’s drawing, not mine.  Then I thought from the point of view of a nine-year-old. He would either give up in frustration or conclude, “I can’t do this. I’ll never be an artist.” How many kids have had that experience, or something similar, and simply shut down a part of themselves without well meaning, loving adults in their lives ever being aware of it?

Instead I bought my grandson a book that encourages doodling. Each page has a title or question or suggestion, and a partial, very childlike drawing. The child fills in the rest. He makes it up. He draws whatever feels right. It’s a book full of joy meant to prompt joy. It provides beginnings, ideas, promptings, so there’s no terror of the blank page, but it does not provide impossible standards against which the child might measure him or herself. How liberating!

When I gave it to my grandson, he disappeared with it for over an hour. We had to cajole him to put it down and come have dinner.

The post The Joy of Doodling appeared first on Xianna Michaels.

The Midwest Book Review – Mindel and The Misfit Dragons”, an enduringly popular addition to your Fantasy/Fiction Collection

Mindel and The Misfit Dragons: A Magical Tale by An Ancient Hand is a magical, medieval verse fairy tale imaginatively told by Xianna Michaels. This is the story of a brave Jewish girl living in a castle where it is very hard to keep the Sabbath and where unknown villians are defacing sacred scrolls. In her quest to keep her family home, Mindel meets three dragons who are considered misfits by all, but whose very oddidites may save Castle Draconmere. Hand-lettered and lushly illustrated, this original, lyrical, entertaining tale will delight readers is specifically written for young readers age 8 to 12. Mindel and The Misfit Dragons will inspire readers of all ages all to ask whether misfits even exist, or if everyone has a special, much-needed place in the world. A solid entertainment with a meaningful social message deftly woven into a truly engaging story that is enhanced with the inclusion of 194 illustrated pages, Mindel and The Misfit Dragons is scheduled to be released in November 2014 and would prove to be an enduringly popular addition to both school and community library Fantasy Fiction collections.

 

The Midwest Book Review

Children’s Bookwatch: August 2014

James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief

Diane Donovan, Editor

Midwest Book Review

278 Orchard Drive, Oregon, WI 53575

The post The Midwest Book Review – Mindel and The Misfit Dragons”, an enduringly popular addition to your Fantasy/Fiction Collection appeared first on Xianna Michaels.