What Themes Can You Never Forget?

Quick without putting alot of thought into it, list five, no make it three things that have stuck with you from your readings. Any readings. Readings from childhood or school or newspapers. Three things! What were they?

Now think about why they've stayed with you. What about them keeps coming back and making you feel something whenever you remember? Why aren't you writing things like that?

My three:

1. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.
2. Peggy Vincent's essay for Notre Dame Magazine about being part of a herd of deer
3. The Diary of Ann Frank -- I had nightmares for years about that. Actually almost anything Holocaust related -- especially Leon Uris's early books Exodus and Armageddon  

I'll admit that I had to think a little to get to the third one. And then when it clicked I realized that it was a topic I cannot turn away from. I began reading about it as a kid -- the Holocaust, I mean. The question that haunted me then, still gives me shivers. Until I read about the atrocities, I thought humans were innately good. I was a kid; I expected people to behave and be nice and love one another or at least be courteous. Then I read of people stripping other people naked, taking their possessions, humiliating them, starving them, and then lying to them as they marched them into gas chambers and killed them en masse. My German heritage scared me -- were some of my relatives responsible? Was it in the genes? I still can't explain why anyone does what they did. I guess mob mentality is probably as close an explanation as any.

What scares me is seeing that same mentality at work in large organizations, companies, and political parties. Just because someone tells you to do something, shouldn't you call upon your morals and ethics to help you decide whether you should follow those orders? Which is more important -- your morality or your paycheck? "It's part of the job." "We must make a profit." "You must please the boss or get lost."

And I would say it is also that same mindset that brings me again and again to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 or thereabouts. More than 150 workers (mostly women) died in that fire -- either from the flames and smoke or from the fall from the upper story windows as they chose to jump rather than be burned up. And I thought alot about this fire during the 9-11 incidents. What a choice to be left with. Die by fire or a 20-story fall.

It seems like REALLY bad news. People screwing up and costing the lives of MANY fellow humans sticks with me. But then, when I look at number two on my all time stick-in-the-brain stories -- it is pastoral. I think of that Debussy song "Afternoon of the Faun." I think of a human's need to be part of nature and how there is nothing more enthralling when something wild trusts you or accepts you. I'm thrilled when my cat wants to sit by me. And the time of the night -- a rather magical midnight (or wee hours of the morning) and the silence. The mist. The moment, not trapped in time, but set apart or removed from the normal life flow.

So I am drawn to atrocities, human cruelties, overcoming the worst, suviving -- maybe those all fit the two choices. And I'm drawn to those moments when a person is jerked out of their normal life and they experience something mystical and life changing and take note of an epiphany, never to be quite the same ever again. That moment of grace. I'm fixated on the 'worst of times and the best of times.'

Now why in the world am I not writing these stories?

I'm fascinated to know what your list tells you. -- Dawn

Birthing a book

The joy of bringing a new book into the world sets my blood swirling and my lips spreading into a big old grin. I love being privy to the back story, to the formation, to the creator's frustrations and triumphs when writing a book. I've been allowed to view this grand event several times and each time I get giddy with joy at their triumph. The fact that I may have contributed in some small way makes me content that I've not lived this life in vain.

Once again I've been watching a gifted writer put his words together into a new book. Today I read a piece he's compiling from his memoir to offer to literary magazines. He has the heart of a poet with a touch of bawdy humor here and there. My kind of writing.

And yet, the subject of his memoir, it could be so maudlin and oh woe is me or he could bluster his way through and say 'it ain't so tough.' But he does none of those things, he gives the reader total honesty. Sometimes more than perhaps you'd want because the subject does make us face our own mortality. The author was stricken with polio at the peak of his young life, as he was stepping from childhood sandals into adult dancing shoes. Well, he could say it better. But by the age of 20 he had spent time in an iron lung, gave up his hard fought, almost achieved independence, and became totally dependent, even more so than old Blanche Duboise, on the kindness of strangers. His memoir takes us into a world where he travels by wheelchair 'boob high' to the world. I think that should be his title, by the way.

He's been struggling with rewrites for the past few months. Next he will face marketing and book signings and all of the things in between that writers rarely think of when trying to get one book sold. I hope he sells tons of books, makes the best seller's list, and sits down to write several more books. He is a voice that will add greatly to those already shouting from the bookshelves.

Watch for the name: Gary Presley. He has several items available to read online, his website and his blog site and his offerings to the Internet Writing Workshop blog as well as their book review site. Here are a few urls to consider:

http://www.nd.edu/~ndmag/su2007/presley.html
http://www.nd.edu/~ndmag/su2004/presley.html
http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2002/03/07/eating_ants/index.html

Gary isn't my first encounter up close and personal with the pains of birthing a book. I worked for a year with Peggy Vincent as she labored over her memoir Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife. Another voice that needs to be heard. And her sense of humor. I snorted my way through that book. Spit coffee on my keyboard, laughed out loud and scared the cat. And then so poignant. A life well lived. But oh, the book she could write NOW about the life she's living AFTER Baby Catcher.

And Linda Swink, a dear friend, and lifelong member of Toastmaster's and the book "Speak With Power and Grace" that she wrote about public speaking. One of the best and most helpful books I've read on the subject. It would have been longer, but she allowed me to do a bit of editing for her. "She's currently finishing up a much needed reference on men who have had a military installation named in their honor, titled Lest We Forget: The Naming of Our Military Installations." It should be published in 2008. The heroes she uncovered in her research -- it is a litany of bravery that has for the most part been long forgotten. A must read even if you aren't into military history and research.

I've reviewed a number of books through the years for various venues from Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus to Crescent Blues E'magazine and Gumshoe Review. I like to think that my reviews may have contributed a bit to the authors successes. Well, there might have been a few that I might have been a bit detrimental.... But several quote my reviews on their websites and on the back cover of their books -- those help me feel, again, as if I'm contributing something good and worthwhile.

And maybe, just maybe, after having reached my Nanowrimo goal ahead of schedule, maybe someday I'll get to go through this process with my own book. Keep your fingers crossed.

I Feel the Need to Knit

A few days ago knitting fanatic Peggy Vincent emailed me about the above pictured cupcakes. On this delightful website, instructions are given to 'knit' marzipan -- excellent instructions, I might add. I'm not sure marzipan knitting will reap as wide an appeal as knitting now has, but it is worth checking out what creative people are doing.

Having spent several years as CEO of my own little cottage cake baking industry, I know a bit about novelty decorations and probably feel more sure of my leaf tip than I do of my number seven knitting needles. Inevitably I begin each knitting project in fear of a dropped stitch. But the need to knit is strong.

My theory: knitting and crisis go together. It brought women together during World War I and II. Whether of Allies or Axis countries, women knitted woolen squares to sew together into blankets for the soldiers. My mother, born in 1912, remembered making these squares as a child. With her mother and other women of the little Ohio community, they gathered in the church fellowship hall armed with needles and yarn. The Red Cross distributed the finished blankets to the wounded. When the recipient touched the hand-knit squares, he would recall loving hands of his own mothers, sisters and wives.

Eleanor Roosevelt could host a tea party and talk politics with her husband and his cronies. She manipulated four double-pointed needles and turned out sock after sock for soldiers fighting World War II. Her knitting spoke as loudly as her words.

I recall one pre-teen summer, waiting my turn to model my 4-H sewing project at the annual style show. I looked out from the stage to see someone’s mother placidly knitting a pink sweater. Knit and purl, knit and purl. Her eyes were watching the stage as her hands did something completely different. She appeared to be an island of control and peace in the lively audience. I wanted to leap from the stage and sit by her side and ask, "Will you teach me such confidence, please?"

A recent move from the Midwest to the South, sapped more than my confidence. With my brain already full of details for the sale of one house, purchase of another and the move from one to the other, the need to knit overwhelmed me. I couldn’t concentrate long enough to follow a pattern. I simply needed to knit.

With some wonderfully forgiving yarn that makes anything look special, I cast on stitches. Forty, fifty, it didn’t matter. Enough stitches to keep me happy. And I sat, knitting the stitches from one needle to the next while my brain whirled with thoughts of this new life ahead of me. No purl, no counting, no thought of what I was making. Just knit, knit, knit. When the end of the skein appeared, I cast off the stitches and gazed at the thing I had created.

My blue collar work ethic requires that everything be useful. So, one more look at the rectangle, admiration for the even stitches and then I knew. "It’s a cat’s blanket."

And, with that declaration, I reached for another skein of yarn. Four cats needed traveling blankets and my soul needed lots of knitting as I unraveled our home and knitted it together in a strange land.

Today, young women have discovered the edginess of knitting as well as the soothing feel of stitches sliding from one needle to the next. Speakers and lecturers, preachers and teachers tell of spotting people of all ages listening and knitting in time to the words’ rhythm. My son, a heavy metal musician, described girls at the concerts, heads bobbing and bodies gyrating while knitting, knitting, knitting to the bash and groan beat. Their knitting needles, as fat as nunchuks, wobble and click, turning yarn, thread and ribbon into something as edgy as the music.

Women of all ages and backgrounds -- and yes, men, too, pick up the needles and gather in knitting groups and classes. Peggy, who introduced me to the cupcakes, helped a master knitter teach a group of young women the basics of the craft. This group began with only five or six members but has grown to more than twenty. They share knitting and one other thing in common: cancer. While their hands create projects of yarn, they fight off cancer and visualize knitting their bodies back to good health. With each knit or purl they zap one more cancer cell, one more malignancy.

Knitting begins with needles and yarn, but with each stitch, something else seems to grow – determination, confidence, good health, solace, even a community. Maybe we can knit and purl a peaceful world.

I feel the need to knit.