The Written Picture

52 in 52 - It is finished

Right before Christmas I finished my quest to read 52 books in 52 weeks. I even went a little over... I'm finishing my 55th book today.

A lot of people have commented to me about this goal, asking how I was able to do it. But the truth is, a lot of people read way more than this. My brother read 52 books by the first week in August, and I don't want to think about how many books my dad reads. He constantly has a book in his hands.

But if you're still dying to know how I did it, here are a few tips:

• I read a lot in the evenings while everyone else watches TV
• I carry a book in the car (I don't get car sick)
• I read while my kids are at dance or tumbling
• I read most nights before bed

A friend's dad taught me that last one. He said he always reads 10-15 minutes in bed every night. Just doing that, you can get through quite a lot of books.

This year, I read the first two books in the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series, The Help, The Pretty Little Liars series, Jane Eyre (again), the first Harry Potter (again), Plato, Edith Wharton and lots of books on writing. I thought it would be fun to pick a favorite.

For a long time, I knew what it was going to be. I read Winter's Bone on February 1st during the worst blizzard I've ever seen. It seemed appropriate. The words were amazing:

With her eyes closed she could call them near, see those olden Dolly kin who had so many bones that broke, broke and mended, broke and mended wrong, so they limped through life on the bad-mend bones for year upon year until falling dead in a single evening from something that sounded wet in the lungs.

and

Lust slaking to dance tunes, standing hip bone to hip bone, the new hands moving over her rumples and furls and tender knobs, hands good as tongues in the dark corners of those whiskey moments.

I've never read a book like it. I've never read someone who can use words like Daniel Woodrell does in that book. After I read it, I immediately went back to the first 3 chapters and read them again. The words were just that amazing. It's dark reading though.

At the very end of the year, I found another book that tied with Winter's Bone, but for different reasons. And that was The Night Circus:

It is destroying me that I cannot ask you to dance,” Marco whispers as she passes by him in the ballroom, the deep green of his suit seeping across her gown like moss.

“Then you are far too easily destructible,” Celia murmurs softly...

It wasn't for the plot that I read and loved it, though that was good too. It was for a circus that comes only at night and always without warning. I fell in love with it as hard as I've fallen for Hogwarts and Manderly. I wanted it to exist and when the final page was turned, I felt this sort of bereft longing to go back. So late in the year, it tied with Winter's Bone for the best thing I'd read in 2011.

This year I don't have any big goals. I'd like to read some longer things and slow down and not worry about reaching a number, though I'm glad I did this. Right now I feel like reading The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen because for 20 years I've read amazing quotes from it. I'd like to read Middlemarch and some plays by Tennessee Williams and more poetry. I'd also like to start reading Agatha Christie - I've only read two books by her.

Anyway, those are my reading goals. What are yours?

Merry Christmas!

On one of the darkest nights,

came the brightest light.

...and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

Wishing you and yours a Merry Christmas!

Bon Hiver!

I hope you have

something warm to eat

someplace warm to sleep

and something to give you peace

on this the longest night of the year.

Happy Winter, friends!

Magnetic

I wanted a box of words as my souvenir. I know that sounds crazy. Words are free, you don't have to buy them. But these words, I wanted.

It was the end of summer and our last day in Colorado. The clouds dipped down over the mountains, blotting them out. It was drizzly and gray and it was our last chance to buy souvenirs.

I'm not big into shopping. Not grocery stores, not clothes, not flea markets, antique malls, thrift stores not anything where I walk into a store and plunk down money and take away yet one more item that I have to find room for at home. Sometimes I get frustrated. Isn't there anything to do besides shop? I'd rather feel the sun on my face or go on an adventure.

Except. This store.

Every year when we go to Colorado, I have to go into this store. And usually I leave with a big bag of stuff that I have to find room for at home.

They sell notecards and stationery and expensive glass dip pens and scented colored ink. They sell blank books and postcards and tubes of paint and markers and books on journaling and watercolor papers and fancy composition books and hot coffee and slices of pie.

And while other tourists are buying mugs and sweatshirts with "Colorado" and "Estes Park" and "Rocky Mountain High" written in swirly cursive letters over them, I am loading up a bag with notebooks and pens and tubes of paint.

Every year.

In the last 10 years, it's changed owners 3 times and still somehow stayed the same... though it's never been quite as good as it was with the original owners. Two years ago, it went up for sale again, and if I would've told my husband that I wanted to buy it, he would've quit his job immediately and moved there. We even picked up information on it.

Sometimes I wish we would have.

But it's fun to visit every year, to pick out vintage photos of Estes Park or old fashioned-style composition books and dream of being out on the trail with a little set of paints and a pen and the blank page.

This year, it was a box of words that caught my eye and I couldn't stop thinking about it.

It's a Magnetic Poetry kit. And here's the kicker: I already have the same kit at home - well, the same words. I bought one a long time ago and loved the little phrases that poured out of me. I'm no poet. But I love moving words - it's like taking a building and moving the bricks around. It's like taking something solid and turning into water. And I always feel like I write a little better after playing around with it.

But the difference with the new kit is that it comes with a metal box. You just open the lid and use it to build tiny crazy poems. You can carry it in your hands and lift the lid and secretly write about the world. I love that. That you can carry words in your hands.

With raindrops still stuck in my eyelashes, I stood in the store and picked up the kit and set it back down after I told myself it was more practical to get a kid's set and use it with Bud. Then I dropped it in the silent store and felt all eyes on me, so I picked it up and carried it around - a little box of words that could magically turn into phrases like: sucking the moon's honey or I cry for the day that isn't gone.

It was the book Poemcrazy that made me want to buy a magnetic poetry kit in the first place and make up little spells, little magic phrases, break open language and let it pour through my fingers.

I read it again two summers when I'd just discvered my phone's camera and an app called Vignette. I sat at the pool while my kids swam and sometimes I had to close the book because it made my chest feel like it was swelling open. I knew that even though the book was about words, about poetry, it was also about those little pictures I was making on my phone. Little tiny camera poems - a shadow cast on a sidewalk, a dead sign splintering next to a country road, the sparkles jumping off the water. They were poems even though they weren't written in words.

And here I was standing in the store holding a box of a thousand unwritten poems. I didn't want to let it go.

So I bought it. And even though I walked across the parking lot with raindrops still in my eyelashes feeling guilty, I was so happy carrying my little box of words. I didn't need it. I mean since I have the same words at home, the only thing I paid for was a metal box - which is really quite silly when you think about it. But is it sillier than milk? Or coffee? I could just as easily tell myself to be happy drinking only water.

Carrying that little box through the drizzle almost brought up a story in me. Almost. It's still gray like looking down into the murk of a Magic 8-Ball and not yet seeing the white of an answer. But I'm still moving words around. Waiting.

Pinning & Pining

I love Pinterest. I love collecting images and seeing them all together.

But what I love most is that who you are seems to rise up. For instance, I see that I am obsessed with:

• blanket forts
• cozy nooks
• messy hair
• polaroids
• typography
• toy cameras
• post-its, calendars, & journals
• travel
• layers - in books, art, clothes & stories

But what I love it for most is that sometimes it can get you un-stuck. And here's a secret for you writers, you can use it to inspire stories - setttings especially. Or photographs or art projects. As cheesy as it sounds, pinning all those pictures sort of makes you want to hurry up and be who you are.

It's not about getting new things. It's not about wishing you were something/someone else. It's a reflection of all the pretty things you already love. It's about appreciating all the beauty that's out there.

And as the poet says, "The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings." (Robert Louis Stevenson is the poet in this particular case.)

Still pining to get on Pinterest? Leave me a comment and I'll send you an invite. Want to see my boards? Find me here.

Feeling filmy

A couple of months ago, I put film into my camera. Real honest-to-goodness film. I haven't shot any kind of film since 2002. And I haven't shot on my old Pentax K-1000 for even longer. But I started to feel nostalgic.

The first photo I took was a leaf caught in one of our fake webs during Halloween.The sun was already low in the west, giving out all this soft, mellow light. And there was this yellow leaf stuck in a forever dance in the web. The light behind it made it glow.

My heart actually beat faster as I held my camera and waited for the moment where it would be just right. I suppose I could have started shooting and filled 36 frames with that one leaf. But I didn't want to. What if pictures were precious? What if they were limited and instead of greedily grabbing all the sweets in the dish, I just had that one?

So I waited as it shifted and moved, as it went sideways pushed by the dusty wind. And then it stilled for a moment and turned toward me again, and I snapped the picture, not knowing if I got it or not.

And then I waited to see if it turned out.

I was afraid I'd be too anxious. That's the biggest reason I put off returning to film - that I'd barely be able to stand it. That the wait would be uncomfortable. I know that sounds silly, but it's true. Who wants to feel anxious? It was funny to think of that little picture already in there, waiting. Like a baby bird waiting to hatch.

For me, going digital has been all about the end product. Did I get the shot? Did I get it? And trying to match what I'm thinking and seeing with what's on that little screen. And there's disappointment, always disappointment. The picture that felt good at the time doesn't seem right later on my computer screen. And I'm faced always with the thought that I failed. Better to let the pictures sit, let the water clear and the dust settle back down to the bottom. Then I have no memory, only a vague feeling that maybe something worked.

With that film waiting in my camera, I felt strangely content. Hopeful. Curious. All those little eggs lined up waiting to hatch. I went back and forth between thinking, I bet these will be great to These will be the worst pictures I've ever taken - gray and grainy and washed out.

But it almost didn't matter anymore. When I snap a picture with my digital camera or with my phone, I think, I got it, I can look at it later. And sometimes I do. Often I don't.

But the photo of the leaf caught in the web. I didn't know if I got it or not. But for the rest of the day after I snapped it, I held on to the memory of capturing it, like a thing of value locked away in a vault. There was a pleasure in just knowing it was there. That little dancing leaf was a small private fire I kept kindled.

And I realized that it wouldn't really matter if it turned out. Of course it would, but only a little. It would just be a picture.

The real thrill had been putting film into my old camera and feeling the turn of knobs and dials not electronic dots on a screen, but something solid and the clatter of the shutter and the winding film and spinning the camera in and out of focus so that it felt like a picture is not something you see with your eyes but something you make with your hands.

The real joy turned out to be the thrill of waiting and the surprise of what was waiting for me.

Goodbyes are hard

My uncle was here for 3 weeks from Jerusalem, Israel. The other day over coffee, he reminded me that technically, he is an in-law to my family. I always forget that... that he married in. My mom's sister's husband. But he's more than that.

So I said, "Yeah, but I don't know the difference. Yours was one of the first voices I ever heard. That's just as deep as blood."

Some people you just belong with and they turn into your family, whether it's by blood or by choice. And it's hard not to be with them, not to always have them around.

I know we're both heading to a place that holds no more goodbyes, no more tears.

Still.

Goodbyes are hard. And I'm feeling it today.