Librarian, poet and author Carol Smallwood came to my attention over the years when she emailed calls for essays to consider for anthologies she was editing. I was very pleased to learn about these anthologies and very pleased when she accepted my essays for inclusion in Poetry: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing by Successful Women Poets and Women Writing on Family.

I know more about Carol and her writing now. Her recent book of poems, In Hubble’s Shadow, is from Shanti Arts as is her recent collection of short essays, Interweavings: Creative Nonfiction. Both of these books are currently under consideration by the 2018 Michigan Notable Book Committee of the Library of Michigan.

I am grateful to Carol and to Shanti Arts for their permission to reprint work from these two books, poems from In Hubble’s Shadow and essays from Interweavings. You will see that Carol’s writing is part philosophical, part the stored knowledge of a well-read librarian and certainly, the melded words of a dedicated poet and author. Her accessible yet metaphysical leanings offer readers much that is tasty to chew on.

It Rained Today

making me remember one of its
elements hydrogen, was the first
to form after the Big Bang

I heaerd the rain, saw and felt it
but didn’t taste it; its scent must
come from what it touches, the
memories equally unique.

It’s good we don’t know that
much about rain.

 

An Old Roommate

Recently, I got an e-mail from a college roommate about her only grandson, a teenager, who was found dead in his room. Things blurred, so I glanced above the titles of books, imagining the words marching in columns inside the unabridged dictionary, the cool black and white rows of sentences logical, sure, trustworthy, steady. I remembered the philosophy book she gave me after she’d finished the class because I liked it more than my own. Yes, it was still there on another shelf, one of those books you don’t see after seeing it so often; her small, precise handwriting outlined exam questions (eight possibilities); the underlined text sprinkled with asterisks. My handwriting with arrows placed philosophy in the middle of religion and science. The quote under the half title by William James, the preface about students needing to know the underlying values upon which Western civilization survives. The black cloth cover was frayed, but the 1958 book had such a solid feel with 486 pages of reason and enough suggested readings at the end to last both our lifetimes. Inside, on sheets of shiny paper that copiers once used was a summary of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and a bookmark I made from flowered wallpaper glued back to back.

I remember her on the way to church on Sundays: her heels, short mouton jacket, green dress that went so well with her blonde hair. She was a pretty girl and was going steady with a popular boy who worked in one of the dorm cafeterias. She was some kind of Protestant. I went to the Catholic church a few times the first year of college, but hearing the familiar Latin only increased the flood of questions I was fighting about religion, and I’d return to the dorm exhausted, returning to Plato’s dialogues, believing I’d find answers if I tried hard enough. I envied her sense of dress and social ease, her being a city girl, a girl who had dated a lot more than I had. She was majoring in special education and was interested in people, and I told her things I had never told anyone else as we talked about what being married must be like. Her voice had the little girl quality of Jackie Kennedy, which was even more pronounced when we talked abut our mothers who were no longer living.

We shopped at J. L. Hudson with our firstborn children in strollers. I met her husband, an engineer, and envied her housekeeping: her bathroom literally sparkled, and her living room pillows and curtains were out of Good Housekeeping or Ladies’ Home Journal. We kept in touch over the years with Christmas cards.

I didn’t know much about her grandson and didn’t ask if he died from suicide or a drug overdose, not wanting to know the answers I suppose. I just sent my sympathy and only managed the sad but true advice about time helping to heal. Her husband had died quite a few years before, and I wondered if she still went to church in heels and envied her if she did. I moved her book to the shelf above to remind me to keep in touch, wishing she had a couple of daughters to help her now. And I wondered if she still had that mouton jacket with the standup collar that I admired; it suited her so.

 

It is Hard to Accept

white is really all colors,
blood appears blue in veins

That matter can be solid,
liquid, or gas—and when

temperature is high enough
molecules fly apart

That child and wife abuse
thrives under the cover
of religion

But biology explains:
we really see upside down

 

Midwestern Spring

After your name and occupation, the next point of identification is where you’re from, and if you are from the same area as the person you’re talking to, there’s a bond that goes back to tribal times.

Because of its geographical location, the Midwest has also been called Flyover Country, The Heartland, and North Central States. Viewed from space, the Great Lakes make it easy to locate. Garrison Keillor paints fellow Midwesterners as self-reliant, unassuming, stoic and close to the land.

As a Midwesterner, I’d always assumed our winters were cold because the earth was the furthest from the sun in its annual elliptical orbit, but it’s actually because the tilt of the axis at this time of year makes for less direct sun.

Spring is the season that brings Midwesterners the most anticipation: the brown to green, the burst of delicate pink and white blossoms on fruit trees, the low swooping of nesting birds—all a welcome confirmation that we made it through. Even dandelions delight our eyes, scattered replicas of the Sun. The first grass mowing is a celebration. New leaves come out to cover bare limbs and change the pattern of shade. You open your car windows when driving past lilacs. My first ritual of spring is to watch the snow pile near the garage, the one created by the plow truck, get smaller and smaller until all that remains is gravel that was pushed aside by the plow and I recall that glaciers carried boulders great distances at they shaped the Midwest and left behind the Great Lakes.

The first green is a hint of weeds in plowed fields after the first slow rain. I stare at the green, familiar and yet a stranger, trying to be reassured that soon grass and leaves will come. There’s a shade of green that only comes in early spring that I try to absorb. Each spring I hope to see the first crocus pushing up through the snow, remembering to bend over to see their brave venture and smile. I try to imagine what’s happening underground as the days of sun get longer. It is time to plant.

Every spring big black ants come to my kitchen. A scout or two come first and then a bunch show up on my counter until I discourage them with a squirt of vinegar and water. They move with jerks, very black and healthy, and I notice that some are bigger than others. Somehow they remind of a convention of punctuation marks, colons especially. They leave like they arrive, and I wonder where they come from and where they go.

If you live on a dirt road, the mud dares you to keep your car clean. When the air conditioner turns on for the first time, you dread the arrival of your next electric bill, but the crowds of daffodils and lilacs make you forget.

  

Arriving at the Aha Moment

Multi-tasking and mobile technology—such efforts to save time and get more work done don’t leave us much time to mull things over. Writers need time to daydream. A good place to start would be driving without talking on the phone. I’ve gotten many good ideas while washing dishes by hand and have read that others have too. Poetry especially needs this brooding time to catch illusive images on the wing.

I do not understand how mulling works, but I know enough to respect its complexities and be open to it. For years the color of spring grass after a long rain, the brilliance of the emerald, made me want to capture it in words. Finally, this spring a poem came easily and was accepted for publication the first time I sent it out. The triolet seems like it came from someone else when I read the printed issue I received. For years I struggled to express that overwhelming connection with the mystery of renewal but eventually the time was right.

The more acquainted I become with writing, the more I am convinced that it isn’t the actual time sent writing that matters, but all the rest of the time when we are seemingly unconnected with it. When we read with envy that a particular writer produced work in an amazingly short time, it is because they have thought about and mulled it over long before a word was actually written. The Old Man and the Sea was composed in a short time because Hemingway was ready for it, had lived with it; it was ripe and every word didn’t need to be fought for, changed, and revised. I remember being amazed years ago with how short a time it took for him to write it, but I understand it better now. The very mysterious creative writing process reminds me of black holes made in space when stars die that scientists cannot explain: equations crumble in efforts to understand them.

It was hard to imagine how writers wrote without word processors until seeing the handwritten manuscript of Nobel Prize winner John Galsworthy; the first page of The Patrician had only a change here and there. Galsworthy related getting “the germ” of the book from a young politician’s face he saw at a dinner-party: “It intrigued me profoundly, set me to sorting old impressions, and ruminating….”* The book was published three years later.

When words into place as if they are being dictated, as they did in Galsworthy’s case, chances are it involved ruminating. The Patrician was published when Galsworthy was forty-four, after several novels, short stories, and plays. His handwriting marched on with few crossed out words and new ones written abut them n a pen flowing with various amounts of ink. My suspicions were confirmed when I read his preface to Villa Rubein and Other Stories: “I never saw, in the flesh, either De Maupassant or Tchekhov—those masters of such different methods entirely devoid of didacticism—but their work leaves on me a strangely potent sense of personality. Such subtle intermingling of seer with thing seen is the outcome only of long and intricate brooding, a process not too favored by modern life, yet without which we achieve little but a fluent chaos of clever insignificant impressions, a kind of glorified journalism, holding much the same relation to the deeply-impregnated work of Turgenev, Hardy and Conrad, as a film bears to a play.”**

Brooding is also used to describe the sitting on eggs to keep them warm to hatch. Snatches of conversation, an image, a quotation, diary entry, an expression of someone’s face, or a setting can all be tucked away until they are ready to hatch into a poem, short story, essay, novel, article, or play. We are hatchers of multiple ideas, keeping them going like jugglers until one cannot be ignored, then appears full grown like Athena.

Sometimes these incubating bits appear to have no connection and will not come together. Many are not yet ready to be used, so it’s wise to just let them sit and grow. Seemingly contradictory, opposite ideas often spark the best work. The most interesting characters are those with conflicts that tear them apart and in the process let us see ourselves. As readers we enjoy piecing clues together in a mystery. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories present an atmosphere as thick as London fog in which we eagerly enjoy glimpses of English life when the empire played a large part in British life. There is the fascinating pull between staid Watson and moody Holms, and I still envy Irene Adler in A Scandal in Bohemia for being esteemed by Holmes as “the woman.” Certain lines have become famous, such as the dog not doing anything in the night and Holmes noting: “That was the curious incident.” Doyle’s readers can only rejoice that his slow early medical practice was such that it allowed him to mull stories into being.

The image of Native American dream catchers used to assure good dreams to those who slept under them. They are usually located where light reaches them in the morning so that bad dreams caught in the webbing are destroyed. Consider the volcano eruption in Iceland not long ago that happened under a glacier, causing melted water to accumulate until it finally broke from under the glacier. Doris Lessing, who was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, once observed: “I usually spend a very long time thinking about it. Sometimes years. You know when you are able to write it. The work goes in before you start, really. You can have variations of the pattern, but the whole book must be there.” Lessing was the oldest person to ever receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

It is reassuring that no matter what we write, it makes us better writers: our work is not wasted even if tossed out. Make it a habit to jot down dreams as soon as you awake, as they can be the raw material of a lifetime.

Writers are very fortunate that writing is always possible no matter the time of the day, how old we are, where we live, or how much money we have. Some writers don’t even need a room of their own. I had one writing professor who wrote against a background of the loudest music possible while drinking strong coffee in a busy campus restaurant.

The more swings you take the greater your chances of hitting the ball. In other words, try different types of writing. Each genre will hone our writing skills in a different way, keep you from falling into a rut, and make you more aware of different aspects of those magical, illusive things called words.

Some writing may depend on your stage in life; only now have I had the courage to write poetry. Poetry had always been too mysterious, an unreachable niche, until I asked myself what I had to lose by trying.

Quotations provide inspiration as well as give that special touch to your writing and conversation. Copying them in your own hand or typing them is an excellent way to appreciate and acquire the unique taste of master stylists. Start your own collection and use them often. Have them on hand when you need them. The more they become a part of you, the more likely you will use them naturally.

Anaïs Nin observed, “It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.” Eggs take time to hatch; brooding is a process that can’t be hurried, and fortunately, we can do several eggs at a time.

Another tip regarding time is to put your work aside for a while before sending it out for publication, no matter how hard it is to wait. Seeing it with fresh eyes one month or even a year later and ding revision that you will then see is needed, will quite possibly determine its acceptance or rejection.

______

* James Gindin, John Galsworthy’s Life and Art: An Alien’s Fortress (Springer, 1987), 271

** John Glasworthy, Villa Rubein and Other Stories, (Scribner, 1926)

 

Pushed Up Lids

One watches yellow onions closely as one ages
to see small tips emerge, turn spring green:
sprouts striving toward the light in stages
echo things you couldn’t have predicted or foreseen.

To see small tips emerge, turn spring green—
pushed up lids in refrigerators are a welcome sight
echo things you couldn’t have predicted or foreseen:
sprouts growing in the cold showing such fight.

Pushed up lids in refrigerators are a welcome sight:
green life deserves to go back in the ground,
sprouts growing in the cold showing such fight
shouldn’t be chopped down.

Green life deserves to go back in the ground
sprouts striving toward the light in stages
shouldn’t be chopped down:
one watches yellow onions closely as one ages.