Shifting ephemera
14 March 2011 11:56 AM Categories: Animal/vegetable/mineral
My freaky dreams: Like the one where I'm walking on a rocky creek shoreline in bare feet and come across a series of very bloody, very fresh footprints. I step carefully, my eyes scanning the rocks for broken glass. I'm paralyzed with fear, of what might happen to me, of what has happened to the other person.
Or the one where my husband, son, and I are in a small rowboat on this oceanic street in Emeryville, caught between a fear of sharks and a fear of place. The bridge behind us is from another one of my dreams, where I'm in a small souvenir shop in Chesapeake City. In the back of the shop is a door that leads to a spindly ladder that takes you to that bridge. Maybe that bridge can lead us home, or at least back to Chesapeake City, down the ladder, into the shop, into a past life.
Or the one where I'm riding on a train with my high school class (all of us middle-aged now), talking to a man I haven’t spoken with since 7th grade, about the recklessness of Reagan, his foolish use of weaponry. I’m topless, I move my knees closer to the man's. I wake up.
Author Richard Price: I love author Richard Price. Not just because of his well-drawn characters or his true-to-life dialog, but for the way he talks about research and writing. I also like the fact that, for a while at least, he was so unsure of his own words that he read them over the phone to his editor: I used to be a lot worse. My editor before this, John Sterling, I read all of Clockers and Freedomland over the phone. Everyday he would have to listen for forty minutes. It’s not like he had anything else to do, just run a publishing company. This guy is on the phone, listening to this oral reading. (2003 interview with Richard Price on Identity Theory) But reading Clockers -- a book about the crack cocaine trade in a fictional New Jersey town, on which The Wire was partially based -- before bedtime is a bad idea, no matter how compellingly written it is.
I've been gathering interviews, reading and listening, taking it all in, but haven't been able to distill it into a post. If you haven't read him, do. I'd start with Samaritan or maybe Freedomland. He's painful to read, but so real.
Blogging the things that scare me: This will be the basis of my next blog, facing down the fears and writing about them. They run the gamut from driving a car to taking a yoga class to interviewing someone to writing crap to being needy. I'm trying to think of a clever blog title, too. Stay tuned -- the blog will probably go live next month.
Furniture rearrangement: I've been changing my back room lair into a family space -- moving the TV and stereo in. Soon we'll take apart the bed back there and put in a sleeper couch, the one that's currently in the living room, and we'll have a slightly more grownup couch out front. My writing desk (pictured above) is now in the living room, in the light, in a more open space.
Why I should go to PTA meetings: For the writing material they could provide, the adult drama that underpins school life, the hidden relationships, the broken psyches, the flow of emotion underneath the dry surface.
And now off I go, to do something that scares me: contact total strangers to talk about stuff I barely know about.
Image: My desk in its new spot.
Edited to give the fiction its own post, later today or tomorrow.
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