mytopography {my topography}

A Handmade Writer e-Course GIVEAWAY* UPDATED!

March 3rd, 2010 § 10

I am so excited about this giveaway!

Amy Spencer is the wildly talented and creative force behind the blog, Bring Yourself and the author of The Crafter Culture Handbook and DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture. Her first novel, London Clay, is due to be published in 2011.

Amy is also an experienced workshop leader and crafter, and she’s teaching an e-course called the Handmade Writer.

Here’s a little sneak peak at the course:
“The Handmade Writer e-course will help you gather together material from every source imaginable. You will learn about the craft of writing and how to sew these fragments together to build your own pieces of creative writing. This e-course has been inspired by the strength of craft communities as well as the impulse to transform everyday finds into something amazing.”

The best part? She’s giving away a spot to one of you.

This is a chance for you to make the leap, claim creative space for yourself in your life and take your writing a bit more seriously (even if you don’t think of yourself writer!)

Read the whole course description here.
It begins Monday 12th April 2010

* Givewaway rules:
This giveaway is tiny bit different in that Amy offered this giveaway to me as a way to give you all a gentle, encouraging, nudge to go support A Field Guide To Now… so here’s how it will work:

* To enter, make pledge there… and leave a comment here.
* Comments can be just one word (say hello!) and pledges can be just 1$.
* The winner will be chosen at random by Sprout.
* Comments will be closed Saturday, March 6th at 5mEST.

The winner will be announced Saturday evening.

The winner (chosen randomly by SPROUT, who snatched at itty bitty snippets of paper with your names on them) is: Sonrie! Please email me & I’ll put you in touch with the incredibly talented Amy.

hello, Monday

March 2nd, 2010 § 6

Beneath the covers when the day first sets in, I’m not quite here, not quite anywhere else either. Hello, Monday. It’s already 6:03 and the night was a slapdash mess of wake ups. The teeth, they keep coming. Arched back wailing at 3:27a.m. for ten stagger-around-the-room minutes, searching for Tylenol, and then again at 5:06, too early and too late for more or better sleep.

I lie awake, face in the pillows, the thudding of my heart reverberates in my head. My breath moves my ribs up and down, up and down, but I am not here, not all of me, not yet.

Under the weight and softness of my stomach my wrist bones, carpals and metacarpals, are crumpled like soft bits of clay and as I flex my fingers, pins-and-needles set in.

Somehow our boys, both of them, are already in bed between us.

This morning I can feel the way I’m sort of pushing around at the outline of myself with my mind. Hello, day. Hello, memory. Hello, this life of mine. I feel myself begin, reluctantly to inhabit my vertebrae, lungs, buttocks, thighs; in the nick of time I roll out of the way. Bean’s at it already: making a pirate ship out of the covers. Sprout, miraculously stays asleep (of course, now after a night of it) and he is perfect, perfect, perfect here beside me. Rosy, tousled. His hair smells sweet like only him.

The day comes fast then: wooden slats of window shades pulled up; snowmelt; shower steam; the fragrant bar of French lemon soap slipping from my still slack-fingered grip; coffee. The boys are both underfoot (vacation until Wednesday) which gives new meaning to the phrase “work from home,” which is what I try valiantly to do, meeting four deadlines, non-stop screen time, CS4, phone calls, 37 emails, everything interrupted by the repetitive cacophony of BOY.

The day is gray, and the is light translucent and dull, but I like the way the thermometer climbs to 38 before 11am, and how on the south facing fields I can see bare patches where the grass pokes up. I’ve been looking at the trees for signs every day now: the buds are swelling with the secret lives of leaves that wait for chlorophyll, for sun.

Inside, the boys and I are barefoot, and I look at them and feel the fragile container of my ribs nearly snap open with the thunk-thunk-thunking of my little hammer dulcimer heart. Bean with his thin arms and messy hair and growing-in-crooked teeth and ski-jump nose, and Sprout, who has been trying to run from the minute he learned to walk and whose gait looks a wee bit like a cross between a high stepping horse and Frankenstein. Some days I hardly have words. I have two sons. I don’t think this wonder ever goes away.

And so without stopping it’s night already. We visit friends after work and arrive home late. The sink is crowded; the cat wants fresh water; the refrigerator needs to be cleaned. Instead I let the boys stay up another minute. Bean and I eat toast with cloudberry jam.  Sprout carries pot lids around the room. Nonstop, there went Monday.

How was your day?

PS–I have a super-duper exciting giveaway for tomorrow, that I can’t wait to share!

PPS–Did you see? I made some pretty Field Guide To Now blog buttons. Please grab one, if you’d like & spread the word. 30% funding tonight is awesome. Who want’s to be the one to push it to 3K? Just $35 away…THANK YOU Tahereh! What a great way to start TUESDAY.

This is the work I am learning to do

February 26th, 2010 § 21

Hello friends!

Where have you all scuttled off too this month? I miss you around here… I’ve been changing things up… have you noticed? It’s still a work in progress. (I crashed my entire theme twice. I wish I understood CSS.)

Something about having the kickstarter widget broadcast in the sidebar was really throwing off my mojo the past couple of days. I started to hate seeing the amount of funding flatline… and it has been interesting to listen to my own inner dialogue turn doubtful, even as I’ve gotten the most exciting new (!) and incredible support because of it so far. (Can’t tell yet….not for a while.)

I am discovering that art and risk become something else entirely once a dollar sign is attached. It’s made me take myself seriously as a writer and artist in a hundred ways I never saw coming…and for a long, long time I never took art and writing seriously (although they were the things that made my heart sing) because my father—who was an enormous influence in my life when he was alive—pushed me towards a ‘worthy’ profession. While he appreciated art in a sort of distant and abstract way, he implied often that to pursue it would be self-absorbed and indulgent, compared with pursuing a career in the service of others—as a teacher.

So I became a teacher.

To this day, one of my greatest regrets is that I listened to him when he told me that interning at Ms. would be a frivolous waste of my time. I still wonder how my career would have been different had I taken that internship that I’d been offered.

So it’s been a long time coming for me to believe that my words and art can be a career. And this way, this project has been an incredibly tender and scary and exciting process of self discovery.

I have been breathing, eating, sleeping and dreaming ideas and words. And I’ve been thinking about the community on the web, and what makes it, and about how if we could meet, we’d look each other in the eyes and laugh and share delight and there would be no question in your mind that you’d put ten bucks behind me. But here, in this almost imaginary place, filled with a vast, unfathomable amount of information and creativity, I am small.

So.

There it is.

In the middle of the night I wake up wondering what failing at this might look like. I watch the snow falling outside the window and wonder if it was foolhardy to leap without a parachute, holding only the strings of handful of helium balloon hopes. Then I wake up in the morning and I can feel excitement zinging in my veins. This is what I want. This creative, terrifying journey. This work.

+++

Every winter I wait for a time when I can no longer remember the way the world looked before white, and then I know that spring is near. I wait until I feel myself falling into the faulty labyrinth of memory. Like a mime, I like to put my hands up against the pretend container of the present and see how well it holds me. And today it happened.

Today I can’t remember leaves. I look at the gray birch out my window, the one that is tall and leaning with the rot gnawing at a burl where a limb was torn away in a summer thunderstorm, and I cannot see it green with shimmering leaves. Logically, I can remember it, but I cannot really see it in my minds eye any longer. This is the beginning of spring fever. This is when snow is wet and heavy and slides off the roof hard and fast in sudden melting avalanches. This is when, invisible mighty things start happening in the earth.

Sap will flow. The birds know. Soon they will start building nest with mud and sticks.

+++

I’ll be posting about the project once a week from here on out…and over on the kickstarter site maybe more often. (I don’t want this blog to become all about this project all the time.)

Please know that your gentle words of support are just as valid and and inspiring and helpful as a pledge. I get that times are hard, and there are other, bigger things (Haiti, for one).

And I am curious tonight: have you ever ventured out on a limb for something that you wanted or believed in? What was it? How did it turn out?

Sometimes it’ts like this

February 25th, 2010 § 4

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Nearly two feet of snow tonight, and the plow truck is in the shop (timing is everything.)

Shoveling snow in the gathering dark, the fat flakes melted on my cheeks, still hot from crying.

Sometimes it’s like this, and today it was (although tonight we’re better.)

It felt good to throw my body into the rhythm of pitching wet snow, after arguing (sometimes we’re in direct competition for the same things: time, mostly.)

And I have begun to be aware of how everything is always close, always just under the skin of the moment. Starts. Finishes. Hurts. Exhaustion. Glee. Laughter. Eggs cracked in a skillet. Post-it notes rumpled and forgotten. Self sabotage. Determination. Making it through the day.

The snow, tossed to the side of the path was aqua blue beneath each nook and chink, where the chunks would fall and align, making shapes, silhouettes of other-worldly castles in the dark. Today it was like this. Some tears. Some self doubt. Some frustration. And snow. (It’s still falling.)

When things get messy, what do they look like for you?

The way we dance

February 23rd, 2010 § 6

Little Sprout:

We danced today, you and I.

You wound your way between my knees, around my swivel chair, across my studio floor scattering things about, mouthing everything, drooling, laughing. And I, well, I was busy dreaming; stringing words together, watching sunlight, reading things and feeling hopeful. I was also trying to get just about a hundred things done. Eighty nine still wait, but so? We danced.

You unwound spools of thread and uncased CDs and pulled the contents of every low opening drawer onto the floor: mostly paper, some postcards, a pile of forgotten wallpaper from when we first staked a claim here, in this house. I watched. I reached for you. I picked you up. We twirled. You laughed.

I watched the havoc gathering on my floor and let it gather. I made paragraphs, and sought after things; I discovered, replied, and tried to cover my ears so that the simultaneous voices of optimism and fear would drown each other out. All day I kept going after the things that beg for words and time.

So much is happening right now, and it feels like the moment a crow lifts dark and sudden from a quiet branch, and all around it the air is filled with the sudden, invisible eddies of movement. That is what the moments are like right now. Like flight. Or perhaps the moments just before, when the bird is neither on the branch, or off it, but in motion, lifting off.

We saw a crow like this, later, running. We startled it from a pine; its feathers black and glossy in the sun. You wore a red fleece snowsuit, and hugged a raggedy stuffed moose in the stroller. I ran hard, feeling resistance from thighs that skied all yesterday afternoon. I almost quit a dozen times. The road was mud and slush, and you weigh no small amount, but instead I began to tell you how things go.

In panted breaths I told you how there is always this resistance; how there is always a whispered voice that taunts give up, and you might just fail. And how the only answer is so what?

So I ran until I could feel my heart thunking hard in my chest, and my hands were numb and my cheeks flushed bright red with cold and exertion, and I finished.

By then you were asleep, your head tilting, slack against your shoulder. I carried you inside, and in the sudden warmth you woke, eyes still dreamy, and looked about—smiling ever so slightly when your gaze landed on my face. And so we danced. I held you close, breathing in the fragrance of your warm, rumpled hair. You pressed your cheek against my shoulder, and pulled your knees up and tucked close as though your body still remembers when you grew below my heart, tucked just so.

And so the day went by. Things happened, things got done, your brother came home from his grandparents, the sun set, and dishes accumulated in the sink. And in between we shared the succulent sections of a ruby grapefruit.

You liked each wobbly gem colored morsel, the bitter skin removed, and mushed them in your little hands before sticking them into your mouth. I learned about clipping paths on Illustrator. You pushed a ball around the floor. And today, like every other day, we danced.

You are one year old. I love you so.

birthday boy!

February 20th, 2010 § 11

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Right now a year ago, Sprout was 18 minutes old.
(A love letter to follow.)

In case things ever seem too serene:

February 19th, 2010 § 6

Last night, post workout, DH and I were both in the pre-dinner hunger coma stage of things, trying to pull together tacos, while Bean was insisting on coloring and baking the Shrinki-Dinks (aren’t they toxic or something?) he received in the mail from an aunt for his birthday, and Sprout was walking in circles (yes he’s WALKING!!) wailing pathetically. He’s cutting a new tooth, just in time for his birthday and he’s a snot river and his usually happy-go-lucky personality has been somewhat diluted as a result.

So anyway, you can picture the scene right? Well. Then picture this: Me pouring Sprout a sippy cup of milk and in the split second (everything happens in those split seconds!) I turned to reach for the top, he reached up to his high chair tray and grabbed the full cup and proceeded to gasp and gulp and sob–but not tip the cup upright again–as he poured the entire contents onto his shocked little face. (I’m not used to him walking yet–and didn’t even know he could REACH his high chair tray. Oh dear.)

I just stood there not sure if I should begin wailing myself, or laugh (I chose the latter.) He had milk in his ears, people. In his eyelashes, down his shirt. You’d think it had been an entire gallon–the way the floor was covered.

So anyway, I know I sometimes get kind of serious and poetic here and I wanted to make sure no one’s getting any ideas that it’s totally zen and serene here all the time. Because it is so not. (As I write, Sprout has pulled a basket of toys onto his head. NOTE TO SELF: Stop putting things on shelves to get them out of his reach!)

And also: please, please go take a peak at A Field Guide To Now and back this project! I get between 5-10,000 unique visits here a month–which means if you, brilliant, awesome readers would each go and back $1 the funding goal would be reached. It’s all-or-nothing funding–which is a cool concept, but totally nerve-wracking at this point as I watch the number of days count down. (I want this more than anything.)

+++
PS: it’s Sprout’s birthday tomorrow. Can you believe that? A ONE year old. Sigh…

More than this

February 18th, 2010 § 6

Today I am thinking about how some people say that we are only in this body; only the ligaments and bones that comply with gravity and beg for sleep; that we belong only to a body that thirsts and swells and lunges with awkward elbows towards the things it wants.

As if this could be enough; as if it is. As if these alveoli that hold our breath are all of it. As if the way when you look out at the landscape in the morning after it has snowed again and everything is a tableau of white on white and wince, it is only reflex and not a gypsy longing for the time when buds will swell fat with spring.

As if white on white and skin and breath are really all of it.

I’m thinking about this because last night after falling asleep, Sprout woke up just after midnight and fussed (which is unusual) and after he was quiet again, I kept feeling strangely tugged back to the present tense, yet not entirely. I couldn’t sleep, and yet I couldn’t fully feel awake. I could feel myself falling asleep over and over literally—and the falling suddenly terrified me and I’d lurch to consciousness again, heart suddenly thundering, my mind a herky-jerky montage of images and words.

Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever found yourself dislocated just beyond yourself, not awake entirely, but not deeply asleep either? This is what I know: that to fall asleep means to loosen your hold on this life. It means to slip, to disengage, to become permeable and huge: a thing of memory; a thing of dreams; a thing that exists beyond this body; a thing not in this bedroom or beyond it, but somewhere else entirely where time doesn’t follow itself like a dog chancing its tail, hour after hour.

Do you have a better answer?

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The world is white this morning: the sky, the trees, the ground. The pair of crows in the dying maple are cinder stark. The contrast is so abrupt, I almost want to cry. This is what waking up tired feels like now: I am overcome by everything. By the sooty feathers of crows as they lift, circle, fly of cawing. By the way everything starts up again each morning. The washing machine is on the spin cycle. The woodstove is hot with embers. Sprout is fussing in his crib, just frequently enough to let me know he is still awake, between longer stretches of quiet where I forget for a moment where I am, who I am, and feel the way tiredness lifts me outside myself again and then yanks me back, as though today my arms and legs are really the finely wrought pieces of a elaborate marionette doll with someone unskilled and abrupt pulling at the strings.

This is the way the day begins. This is the first day I have to myself in the cycle of the week. The first three are crowded now with work and meeting deadlines, and I always feel a little in shambles by Thursday, here, but not entirely, somehow trailing myself.

5 years.

February 17th, 2010 § 10

Liam's birthday

Five years ago tonight I’d just given birth, and I had no idea, no idea at all, how my life would be changed by the tiny baby with his big eyes looking up at me from a nest of warm cotton cloths on my chest.

All day I kept thinking about it his birth: how I labored for 2 hours; how I was walking through hard contractions on the back deck when the sun rose; how I remember seeing the way the buds on the lilac tree were fat, and how the air smelled like the beginning of spring; how I transferred to the hospital after about 18 hours leaving behind all expectations about home birth or what his birth would be like at all. When I recall either of my son’s births, my memory slips into this place that exists somehow out of body; beyond the periphery of pain or thought; to where things are blurred and thundering with the pulse of the moment, but somehow are dislocated, out of time. And so I blinked, and here he is. Five.

This boy with his sandy blond hair and huge green eyes and his thousand questions every single moment of every single day is 5. It’s such a heady, stupefying, astounding thing to have a kid and watch him grow up–and writing that I can see how it comes across as the most pathetic of cliches. But really: to watch your child grow up marks time’s passing in this utterly absolute way. Five years looks like this.

He’s intense, this boy I have. He didn’t sleep through the night for the first three years of his life. He’s allergic to dust and pollen and grass, and tugs on his shirts and pokes his brother. He is a knower. A thinker. A goofball. (Poop jokes are suddenly hysterical. WHY do boys find bathroom humor so funny? Why?)

He draws pictures of houses and vehicles and robots with wiring intact for doorbells and forklifts and motors. He plans how he’ll build things in his head. He talks about math without knowing abstractly that he is. The way numbers relate makes sense intuitively to him. He’s non-stop and funny and annoying. He is particular and bright and determined. He doesn’t like the spotlight, the center of attention, but he loves to shine and be the best.

A birthday questionnaire:
Favorite color: green, pink, blue
Food: pizza pasta and roll-ups (burritos) from school. I also like granola. Write that please.
Favorite fruits: mangoes, and only on occasion I like ants on a log.
Dessert: ice cream, peanut butter cookies, chocolate cake, pie and all good stuff.
Toy: my Plasma car, my desk, my scissors
What you want to be when you grow up: I want to be an astronaut and an airplane driver and I want to build robots that actually work and I want to tell people how to get the titanic up from the bottom of the ocean and I want to be a computer maker. That’s it. Sprout will be the same as me.
Favorite thing about Daddy is: that he does stuff with me on my circuit board
Favorite thing about Mommy: that we can snuggle and you let me draw on your phone sometimes
Favorite thing about your brother: he’s a jelly tub.
Favorite animal: seal and octopus; NOT dogs. I also like fish and sharks.
Favorite time of day: Morning, afternoon, and night. Night is my not good time.
Favorite candy: licorice and chocolate. Ice cream bars. Popsicles.
Favorite clothing: I don’t know. I really like my red shirt with a pocket up top and my overalls and my goose tag (lapel pin of a loon.)
Favorite games: Circuit board. Sledding. Soccer outside.
Favorite music: violin and guitar.
Stuff you don’t like: The bottoms of asparagus. Taking naps. Tomato. I like broccoli now.
What do you wonder about: I wonder about being in college
What makes you sad: I’m only sad when I’m hurt.

Today on the way home from school we stopped for a raspberry danish and when he took his first bite the yummy raspberry jelly was a surprise and he said, “Oh mommy, when I bit into this I was just so delighted!”

My boy, through and through. I love him so.

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He’s also one of the reasons I’m going for this.

Love & LAUNCH!

February 15th, 2010 § 15

I did it. Days of mapping out details and collecting information and editing video clips (whoa, no small thing!) and finally, here it is. A Field Guide To Now.

It kind of feels like giving birth. A lot like it in fact: the risk, the unknown, the realization that it’s all beyond my control even though I’m going to give it every single thing I’ve got.

It’s the first time I’ve ever taken a leap like this. Plunged with a fluttering heart towards a dream.

Please support this.*

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And also: I have two birthday boys this week! Bean’s birthday is the 16th and Sprouts four days after. This is the week that has changed my life, twice, momentously. It felt so utterly right to launch this project today. (Still. I’m nervous.)

xoxo!

*Things are tenuous financially, and this would make a huge difference. Please Share this project with everyone you know.

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