My latest heroes

I've been riveted to the television recently for Operatunity Oz (which, for those non-Australians reading this, is "Idol Meets Opera", only much, much more interesting and less...well, there is much less pandering to the schadenfreude of the masses hanging out for the judges' insults and bullying). The show has captured my intense interest largely because it is about the same things that much of my writing is about: the miraculous transformations that happen when people acknowledge the power they carry within them.

I'm fascinated by the human gift to wield almost unimaginable power -- to inspire, to accomplish, to fight evil, to enable and ennoble themselves and the people around them. Whenever someone stands before the multitudes in astonishment at their own sudden blaze of strength and courage and skill, that is a holy moment.

Sure, "it's just opera". But an artist's job is not just to experience these holy moments, but to beckon to everyone else to come along. "I have found power within me. Can you? Let's go, let's find out!"

Phooey -- "Salad of Success" was rejected.

Well, I thought it was really funny and perhaps even a bit poignant. But apparently my 10-minute play "The Salad of Success" was not what the judges wanted. Ah, well. There were over a thousand plays submitted, and only a few hundred short-listed (of which fewer than 100, apparently, will eventually be performed). So I suppose I shouldn't take it as a signal of my incompetence as a writer.

If anyone out there is interested in producing a short-short play, perhaps as part of a night of short plays, I'm happy to talk....

The end of an era for me

The project I've been part of at the coal-mining company for a year and a half has just been shelved. They brought me in to edit a document "for three days", and, well, one thing led to another, and one week led to another. And then one month led to another.

When I started on the project team, I had just come off an extremely stressful job, which I had left in an extremely painful fashion. (No, I wasn't fired.) I winced at the thought of workplaces. But we needed the income, so when the editing gig loomed out of a thick fog of improbability, I took it. Imagine my surprise! A cheerful and supportive boss, clear direction, friendly and collaborative co-workers! Paradise! Paradise! It was like working on the bridge of the Enterprise. I sat at a computer and edited, and learned heaps about coal mining, and was happy.

But the decision to move the project to the next phase never happened. It was officially shelved on Friday. So we're all moving on.

There may still be more work for me on other projects at the coal-mining company. But I will always treasure the months I spent on a team that really worked. It can happen. And it really is magic when it does.

My daughter will turn 11 tomorrow!

Yes, there are all the obvious, trite things to say about how it seems like only yesterday she was a scrawny, fiercely perplexed little thing who emerged with a gotta-figure-this-out-NOW scowl (inherited from her father).

But I'm also thinking about the mystery of personality continuity. I look at Margaret now, tall, articulate, strong. I remember the seconds-old baby, who was none of those things. And it's the same person. Just as I am the same person I remember being at 24, and 11, and 5, and 3, and all the way back as far as I can glimpse. However I may have changed in various respects, there is a core in there that is still the tiny girl crouching happily in the rain under a brand-new birthday umbrella. It was red, and had clear-plastic circular windows in it, like portholes. How wonderful that it rained the day I got it!

Pareidolia

It's my new word. Wikipedia says, "Pareidolia, first used in 1994 by Steven Goldstein, describes a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable." It gives examples of seeing the face of the Man in the Moon or pictures in clouds, or hearing messages in rock lyrics played backwards. I suppose constellations would be another example.

When I first read Foucault's Pendulum (by the intimidatingly brilliant Umberto Eco), I immediately saw the theme to be the human compulsion to seek order in what are essentially random events. (Although it occurs to me at this moment that seeing such a theme in the book could, itself, be an example of pareidolia.) Ever since, I've been seeing pareidolia everywhere I look; among the most nefarious has been the absolute certainty of the presence of weapons of mass distruction in Iraq.

As I write, I often find myself making pareidolia work to my advantage: being essentially clueless about what happens next in a story, I'll sometimes introduce a new element, more or less at random. Lo! It turns out that this is the precise thing I needed to move the story along!

Pareidolia is clearly a two-edged sword. Or just looks like one.

The best name for anything ever

Here it is. Universal Daydream Furniture. Absolutely the best name there has ever been for anything ever. The story is slowly taking shape in my subconscious; maybe it will emerge at Clarion.

Where do you get your ideas?

I'm yearning for Siberia. It's immense. It's clean. It's beautiful. The squirrels have little pointy ears. And, in October at least, it hasn't gotten that cold yet (although I do remember an October snowfall when I was there).

The people (at least the ones I knew there) are kind and generous with their time when friends come to visit. One of my most treasured memories is being sung "Happy Birthday" -- in heavily accented English -- on my 29th birthday in a warm, bright, crowded Siberian living room. This was back in Soviet days; maybe things are different now.

Siberia was a strange mix of intense interest and interaction -- everyone's business was always everyone else's business -- and the frightening isolation. Even the biggest Siberian city, Novosibirsk, was not much more than a smudge in the endless forests.

I was thinking of Siberia when I started the story that eventually became my Clarion South pick-me-please story. I was remembering walking and walking amid endless forests as the sun went down. And I thought, There could be people who walk for a living. What would it be like to be one of those people? What kind of land would be good for walking? What kind of food? What kind of road? What would a walker think is important enough to live and die for?

And that, friend reader, is one example of where writers' ideas come from.

Loess

Loess is extraordinarily fine soil, formed (usually) from the grinding power of glaciers, and wind-borne and deposited to amazing depths in areas such as the American mid-west and the steppes of central Asia. It makes a horrifically sticky and slippery mud, and the grit penetrates every door frame and window sill. It gets in everywhere. Everywhere.

Each individual grain is pretty much imperceptible. But over enough time, it builds and builds and builds until you have steppes and prairies.

Most of the time that I hear about geological processes, they seem to be at such a scale as to defy reality. But loess deposition is very obvious, very much a part of life in those areas where it goes on. For example: if you're driving in Siberia in the rain, you have to get out periodically and scrape the sludge off the headlights. Everything is either dusty or dirty, all the time. It's one of the reasons Russians leave their shoes at the door.

I'm feeling like there's some very profound analogy I'm skidding around the edge of here, but I think it would come out way too trite and shallow if I tried to articulate it right now. So I'll let my subconscious grow grey under a film of loess until it decides what use to make of this idea.

On the Clarion Trail

My new writing buddies and I have started chatting via a Yahoo group that the Clarion organizers have kindly set up for us. Interesting things:

1. I am by no means the only American -- and not even the only expat American -- in the group.
   
   
2. Most people who have introduced themselves so far have written WAY more fiction than I have (although I may have the edge in non-fiction, and perhaps in scripts).
   
   
3. So far everyone's been uniformly positive and eager to be supportive of the rest of us. I have, on the whole, found this to be true of writers in general (barring one rather unpleasant experience at a playwriting workshop, where I made the mistake of saying that the scene they were about to read was part of a play that had already been accepted for production; suddenly it was in several people's interest to prove that was mere luck).
   
   
4. Everyone seems to have different emphases in their work. I'm a maniac for plot (ripping yarns, in other words); others are fascinated by characterization, or by expressing meaningful themes. What a thing of power is writing!