Nothing ventured, nothing gained; Or, heaping high the plate and hoping for the best

NaNoWriMo 2011 starts in just over 12 days. While it is true I completely flamed out in 2010 and never wrote beyond week two (I blame the moving), and it is also true that my participation in Camp NaNoWriMo this past August was largely an imaginary endeavor, the third truth is that I for sure will not write anything if I don't sign up at all. At this point I would rather take the hit to my pride and admit I didn't finish my 50,000 words than not attempt it at all.

So, put the coffee on and warm up the laptop. I'll be doing NaNoWriMo again this year.

(And put some beer in the fridge, too, okay?)

Vitality - work and collaboration

Tonight I enjoyed a double privilege: being interviewed about my work, and seeing someone I'd only know socially be engaged in her own work with skill, enjoyment, and vitality. For the first part, we are now just under a month away from the premiere of the opera Chris and I have been working on. We are so lucky that the opera is not only going to have a two-performance premiere in the town the opera takes place in, but we will also have a three-performance run in the Twin Cities. For a new American opera, this is incredible, and we are thrilled.

I know this sounds terribly geeky, but I take real pleasure in watching someone work, when that person really enjoys her, or his, work, and especially when I know the person, but not at all in a professional capacity. The woman who interviewed us, and who will be putting together a 30-minute radio program about the opera complete with clips from rehearsals, is someone I know through a friend and have seen at a handful of social occasions. It was fun to see her at work, to see that side of her - especially because she clearly enjoys and is good at what she does.

The opera project has, from the beginning, been a collaboration between Chris and I, between our composer-librettist team and the producer, and now expanding to include the singers, the instrumentalists, the production team. And now expanding again to include another creative person. I can't wait to see how she puts together the things we said with the other interviews she conducted and the songs - how she, in essence, orchestrates her program.

Collaboration can be hard work. Chris and I are lucky in that we already collaborate on so much in building our lives together, and so when we come to a project like the opera, we know how each other works. We know we can trust each other. We know what each others best work looks and sounds like. We have this now built in - instead of having to build it from scratch while the project is ongoing (I've done that - it can be painful and frustrating when it doesn't come easily or when the partners are mismatched). And, when collaboration works - in any field, the arts, business, a family - it energizes every part of the project. This is also what I find exciting about that happens in the classroom, when things are really working.

One Art

I am sitting in a motel room in WI, Cora asleep in the bed, Chris at a concert, the room filling up with darkness as the world beyond the open window fills with evening birdsong and highway thrum, and I am thinking about that Elizabeth Bishop poem "One Art" and in particular, these lines:

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I think I am thinking about these lines because earlier this evening we were all down
in the motel pool and at the end I was sitting and waiting for Chris to coax Cora out of the
water and my mind wandered to memories of our backyard pool when I was in high school,
 and I was thinking that having that pool was one of the very best things about high school,
as I see it now. I loved being in that pool, lying on hot cement next to it after being in the
water for a long time, the feeling of the heat soaking into a wet suit. I would read stretched
out on the diving board. My brothers and I played games there - made up games of baseball
while sitting perched on boogie boards.

And I was thinking about places, bodies of water, I've left behind - that pool, the ocean,
a beloved lake, and soon a river, and those lines popped into my head. I am finding there is
something about a motel room, a cool evening, birdsong, a highway, and a sleeping child that
all conspire to make it very easy to think about loss. That is the art in Bishop's poem, after all,
the art of losing.

Sick again! No fair!

After finally beating the mammoth illness of post-Thanksgiving through days before Christmas, I thought I was free and clear. Surely teaching without a voice for a week brought me some good health karma? (Incidentally, several students mentioned that the two things they would remember most from my class was when I got sick and lost my voice, and when my daughter was sick and came to class with me. Uh huh. Totally what I was hoping for.) But, alas, no. Here I am sick again, completely exhausted by standing up for 45 minutes while Cora ran circles around me lost in a free-association miasma of Wonder Pets, fairy tales, and ballet. Or, I was lost, she knew exactly what she was talking about.

I'm not as good at being sick as I used to be. I can't really read much. I'm not up for knitting. Don't even think about writing. I watched the Golden Globes last night, mesmerized by sparkly dresses and edgy hair-dos, but I really can't tell you much about the winners.

But, just before I got sick, I'd started reading Sara Paretsky's book Writing in an Age of Silence. It's been a while since I read one of her mysteries, but on one of my nomadic searches for inspiration at the library, this book caught my eye. It is part memoir, part historic look at Chicago in the 60s and now, and part meditation on writing. Early on, in the introduction, she says:

"[This] book deals with the dominant question of my own life, the effort to find a voice, the effort to help others on the margins find a voice, the effort to understand and come to terms with questions of power and powerlessness."

This sentence just snapped her other books into an entirely new light for me and made me eager to go back and reread some of them. It also led me to ponder (something I have time for when I am sick, but not much ability to hold onto a chain of thought) what I would say is the dominant question of *my* own life, and how is it (if it is) reflected in my writing. I haven't a lot of insights on this right now, but I am finding it interesting to think about. Once I have a better idea, I'll come back to this topic.

***
I know - it has been awhile for pictures. I will download and post some soon!

At which point our heroine is forced to admit that she is indeed insane.

I'm thinking about it.