Posts Tagged: Karen Berry writer
New Poems Out
Gilded Weathervane, Fall 2025
Once again, I am blown away by the caliber of work and art in the latest issue of The Gilded Weathervane, a journal devoted to art that explores and celebrates rural living. My poem “Flyover Country” was in their inaugural issue.
Two issues later, two poems of mine are here; “Northern Darkness” and “After the Freeze.”
You can purchase a copy or subscribe here: The Gilded Weathervane
On Not Writing
Who is not writing? Me.
When a writer is not writing, it’s generally because she’s doing Other Things. I’ve been not writing. It’s awful. But yes, I’ve been doing other things.
- Taking a long weekend with Sue by the lake. Sue’s husband was out of town seeing his grandkids, so I motored up to see her. We spent the weekend thrifting, bingeing two series (The Essex Serpent, Department Q), eating good food and drinking good coffee, watching her work her fabric artistry, and enjoying the lake from her gorgeous deck. Sue and I had a blast. I also got to have lunch in person with Adrienne, who I haven’t seen in something like nine years. She’s as wonderful as ever.
- Having two weekends in Medford and Ashland to see plays at the Shakespeare Festival. My husband I and stayed in Medford, visited April and Lewis, and saw “Into the Woods”, “Jitney”, and “Quixote Nuevo”. Then, a month later, I went back and stayed with April and Lewis, and April and I went to see “Shane” and “Merry Wives of Windsor”. You will note that of all those five plays, only one is Shakespeare. I can’t account for it, but loved the shows I saw so much that I have no complaints.
- Helping my daughter and grandson move into their new apartment, which is wonderful for them, in part because my grandson is able to join a pack of apartment complex kids after school. My own kids did that until we moved here, to this house that sits in a child drought for some reason. He’s having a blast. I miss them both and see them oh, every day, more or less.
- Returning my guest room to guest room status so I can have people stay here.
- Settling in my office after about twenty years of wishing I could. If you come over to my house and I allow you to see this room (I might not), please have compassion for the introverted girl who moved constantly throughout her childhood and as a result, held onto every scrap of everything she ever owned, every book and bear and doodad and doll, and as she aged still kept these things and thought, “Someday I’ll put that in my office,” and after she stopped moving, she still accumulated things with the thought of putting them “in my office,” and whenever a shelf of doodads got too full, packed it away, to put “in my office.” What I mean is that there is a LOT of stuff in here, and I am as embarrassed by it as I am pleased with it. So be kind.
- Integrating into my home (and office!) the things I took from my sister’s apartment. I thought I was choosy and sparing. I guess I was, but it’s still an enormous amount of stuff to figure out. Right now I am attempting to restore a tiny beanbag kitten she had for her entire life, having gotten it wet, not realizing that in 1957 the beans were made of compressed sawdust instead of plastic, so I had to open a tiny seam and empty out clods of sixty-eight year-old wet sawdust, but I did it and now the dingy, tattered fabric shell of this kitten is soaking in a coffee cup by the sink. This is a tremendous waste of time and effort, but she had it her entire life, through all her moves and losses, and I can’t let it go.
- Watching “Too Much” and finding it moving and beautiful and hilarious.
- Handling enormous feelings of grief and loneliness for my brother and sister, triggered by all the items I have been unpacking and handling. My brother’s only finished novel (it’s in drafts, on paper) is by my desk (I finally get to read it), as are his ashes (I still need to deal with those). My nephew came over and went through the last of what my sister had stored in my garage and took it all away.
- Missing my parents. Mom would have turned 89 this year, so I am finally accepting that she wouldn’t be here even if the cancer hadn’t taken her 21 years ago. Dad would have so much to say about today’s America. I miss them both, and I miss my birth father, who would have had some piercing insights on what this is doing to farmers, especially those who raise soybeans. I miss them and need them and they are not here.
- Cleaning stuff. Sorting stuff. Planning trips with my husband. Seeing local friends.
- Laying down rugs for the first time in a minute. One in the dining room, one in the TV room. We watched my oldest daughter’s dog for a few days so she and her husband could get away for their anniversary, and they warned me that he might mark the rugs. I am proud to announce that he did NOT. What a fine little guy he is.
- Wondering when I’ll start writing again. I miss it.
Top 40 Blues – where is my station?
No more BELA105
So. A Portland radio station went off the air: BELA105. I’m irritated because they played women artists, and my longtime favorite station, KINKFM, never plays women anymore. KINK used to play women. That’s where I first heard Jonatha Brooke, Suzanne Santo of HONEYHONEY, Mindy Smith, Kasey Chambers-a host of Americana and indie artists. That’s where I first heard Lucinda Williams sing “Can’t Let Go.” And now it’s just bunch of angsty white guys.
Oh, they might throw in a little Billie Eilish now and then, but rarely.
I speak to the manager
I called KINK once and asked why they never play women. The program manager, who was DJing that afternoon, told me that their women artists get play on pop stations and then KINK can’t play them anymore. Well then, this happens all the time with male artists. Hozier? Teddy Swims? I can go on but those artists get plenty of Top 40 play and KINK still plays them.
Anyway.
BELA105 had a mix of current and older hits. Great radio music, lots of women’s voices, and maybe the worst sound bites of any station I’ve ever listened to. They ran with “Bella” as the personification of their listener, and she was into the gym, shopping, pumpkin-spice lattes (I do like those) and her job at NIKE. I think it was maybe Sheila Hamilton doing the voice work in this Cali-girl voice she uses. I found the whole Bella persona thing insulting and tone deaf, but I put up with it for the music.
So now I’m hunting around the dial for a third station. I still have KINK and Z100, but Z100 leans too heavily on John Jay and Rich, three people who talk all the time. I’m not much for excessive talking on the radio. I used to listen to Daria, Mitch and Ted, but Mitch migrated to KINK (he is absolutely wonderful as a DJ) and I don’t know where Daria and Ted went, and I don’t really care, because I do still have Mitch.
My point is, I am not that interested in listening to people talk on the radio.
I want music.
When my husband and I commuted together, back before the pandemic shutdown, he would have the radio tuned to the morning show on KINK, which was Mitch and Staci. He would turn down the radio whenever they played a song. When Mitch and Staci would start talking, he’d turn it back up. I was so confused. This is the exact opposite of what I do. I was baffled, but silent, as I do not talk much in the morning. That’s fine because my husband talks enough for the both of us.
But that was years ago. I no longer commute, but in the car, I want music. My husband always listens to sports talk radio. When I’m riding with him, he turns it off. I don’t even have to ask.
All this is dull to you non-Portlanders, I’m sure. But I do have a larger point (aside from the fact that I still listen to the radio in my car, like a dinosaur or something). I also have the jazz station and the classical station to listen to, but that is not car music. That is work-from-home music.
Car music is different. Car music makes you think and remember. Car music makes you want to work on your own fiction, instead of whatever you’ll be writing at the office that day. Most of all, it makes you sing along.
And you never know what you’ll be wanting to sing. It might be Earth, Wind and Fire. It might be Steve Earle. It might be Beyonce. I need ALL KINDS of music at my beck and call, because I am a musical omnivore and I want to devour it all.
My musical history
I come from a family of musical omnivores. I have never understood how you could choose one type of music, elevate it above all others, and declare this the one true music before which all others must submit. No one in my family did that, and we likewise extended that same tolerance to each other’s singular passions; my older brother’s jazz, my mother’s opera, my younger brother’s Johnny Cash. For me and sister, this was even true of our early taste for teen-idol pop, or bubblegum music.
It would be so easy to dismiss the Jackson 5 and “ABC.” Or the Osmonds’ “Puppy Love.” Sappy, poppy songs sung by boys whose voices hadn’t changed. But my sister and I loved these songs, which we tuned in on the tiny tinny transistor radios we found in our Christmas stockings in 1971. These boys sang in a register like our own, which added a special layer of enjoyment.
Jack Wild was not a gifted vocalist, but no one ever laughed at us or asked us to turn down his records. We played it loud and proud. When the Partridge Family came along, we devoured that first album, oblivious to the fact that David Cassidy wasn’t even singing on “I Think I Love You.” These were our songs, this was our music. We played it on the record player in our room, not the big stereo my dad shipped home while he was in Vietnam, but the avocado green record player with the square speakers.
Alongside these records, we played my parents’ albums by The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin. It wasn’t all bubblegum, just partly. But that sweet pop was important to us.
All told, I don’t think our bubblegum phase lasted all that long. When I was thirteen, we fell in love with Cat Stevens, and wore out Carole King’s ‘Tapestry’. The soundtrack to HR Pufnstuf was replaced by the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar. And then my older brother started bringing us home new music; Todd Rundgren, Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt. I bought my own Carly Simon records, even though I had trouble singing along with her. I have a head voice, and hers is all throat.
Today, that makes me…different.
My tastes matured right along with me, or perhaps my tastes enlarged along with the rest of me, but I still love all of it. I have no guilty pleasures. I’ll still belt out “Different.”
Disco? Love it. Retro funk? Blast it. 80s boy bands? Pump up the volume. I want it that way.
My early love of bubble gum has left me with a lifelong taste for Top 40 music, which I listen to in the car. I don’t apologize for it, despite the lip-curling disdain, the open contempt with which most of my peers speak of radio hits. I want to hear Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan just as much as any girl does.
Which brings me to my theory, of course. For the most part:
Who (mostly) listens to bubblegum?
Who (mostly) listens to Top 40?
Who (mostly) listens to KPop?
Why does society routinely take a big, gleeful dump on whatever girls like?
My conclusion
It is culturally demanded that whatever inspires happiness and excitement in girls and young women will be sneered at and dismissed. And women participate in it. We announce our graduation from girl to woman through rejection of whatever previously thrilled us. We are serious now. We can’t like the bubblegum. We have to grow up and set aside our childish things.
Maybe that’s what BELA105 was trying to defend with their snotty sound bites that championed a woman’s right to her pop music, aligning it with shopping, workouts, seasonal Starbucks and the like.
Well, pay attention, women. If you like it, it must be dismissed from the airwaves. In fact, what’s at 105 now? Sports talk radio. My husband’s station. I know he’s not personally responsible for this, but I’ve made it a point to forgive him anyway, because I have a big heart and all that.
A big heart, and no Top 40.
New story up!
Thin Skin
I’m pleased and proud to have a short story, “Wet Rain,” up at Thin Skin Literary Journal.
You can read it here.
Enjoy!
Posted on Dad’s 83rd birthday, an old post about his 65th birthday
ON OLD POST (from a defunct blog) (can I make this any more clear)
I found an old blog post from August, 2007, about a day when the family traveled to the coast to celebrate my dad’s 65th birthday in Astoria. Eighteen years ago! The baby in this post turned 18 this spring. I’m reposting it because I loved this day, and I miss my dad on his 83rd birthday, and I miss a couple of other people who are in this post. But not T. T is right here. T and I are MARRIED now.
Old blog post begins NOW
Yesterday was the day my family converged on Astoria to celebrate my dad’s 65th birthday. The theme was ”You’d better retire,” which of course my dad retired many years ago, so that was, like, a joke. Brother Steve drove down on Friday, and Younger Brother, Sis-In-Law, and their Baby came down yesterday AM. I drove over with T, my sister, and Oldest, because my other two had to work.
This is the first time I’ve seen my dad’s new digs. I love his home, which is very near the Goonies house, if any of you remember the movie or know the Oregon coast. So his view is spectacular, especially from the second floor. The house was built in 1885, and has fabulously slanting wooden floors, crooked eaves and 11-foot ceilings. I admire the amount of entry and walkway space, something that seems sadly lacking in homes built from the fifities on. Dad’s house is not large (though it was, I’m sure, in 1885) and it is all about the transitions, it has an entry and hallways and alcoves, and it has a narrow but looooong front porch that looks over the shipyard and mountains.
Dad cooked a porkroast on the grill and Younger Brother grilled steaks. We brought baked beans and seven-layer bars, and there were store-bought salads and some great bread for sopping up the juice from these mammoth steaks. The steak was so very good that I just wanted a private corner to be alone with it. And there was the ugliest bakery cake I’d ever seen, and presents, and I think Dad really had a great time.
The highlight was of course my lovely little niece. She’s grown up so much since I last saw her (at age two weeks) and she’s lost her funny little monkey face and she’s so very pretty. I kept saying that over and over again as she’d smile and kick and reach and grizz and fuss and flex and roll and do so many miraculous baby things, I’d say, ”She’s so pretty. She’s so darling. She’s so cute.” and wriggle with it. But at some point, Oldest and I realized that we were just praising her looks, so we launched into a murmured description of her other qualities that went something like this:
She also has a beautiful and intact self-esteem.
She’s athletic and capable and interested in team sports.
She’ll have many hobbies and interests, some of them to do with math and science.
She’ll never be paid less than a man for equal work.
She clearly thinks too well of herself to ever settle for less than the best a man can offer.
And so on. Sis-in-law was laughing so hard.
The way the day worked was, the baby would be awake, so we would all look at her, make conversation with her, exclaim over her, listen to her (she makes the most adorable coos and growls), hold her and take photos of her. Then she’d sleep or nurse, so then we’d all talk to each other. Then her little brown eyes would pop back into view and we’d start again with the baby adoration.
We followed the progress of a long-awaited full diaper with much speculation and encouragement. ”Sounds like she’s really going to town, now, listen to that little grunting.” ”Yup, I think she’s getting serious for sure.” ”Definitely going to happen.” ”Oh you bet.”
She had a cool folding crib/playpen/changing table thing that was extremely handy because while she was in it, we could group around her and all have a really good view of her actions. She would lie on her back in it and kick her feet and try to reach for toys that we would hold out, which is really cute right now because her hands come slowly together right at the length of her reach. Her fingers make a small ”O” and if the toy isn’t grasped by this slow and careful motion (like a claw machine), she sometimes gets distracted by her hands. ”Hey, look at these, these are cool, too.” She seems to have inherited the prehensile toes of her aunts. She immediately forgets anything that falls out of her sight, so peek-a-boo is currently out of the question, though I imagine she’ll be absolutely brilliant at it.
At one point, my sister, Sis in law, Oldest and I had been standing there watching her try to reach for the dinosour and the rattle and commenting on the perfection of her chubby little feet and the adorable shapes her mouth makes and my younger brother said, ”You know, I think if I ever wanted to make a woman trap, I’d put a little baby in the middle of it.”
There really were other people in the room, and Sherman the Great Dane, and Dad’s dogs, and the eating and the seeing of the house and all, but yeah. Then there was That Baby. And oh, did we enjoy seeing her.
My sister was sober and calm. She says she’s trying this new thing, a brand new thing in her life, which is, she just doesn’t lie. She’s not promising she won’t lie ever again. My sister learned to lie at a very early age and she’s done it her whole life to feel safe and occasionally powerful, so it’s not like she can surrender it forever. It was her coping and survival mechanism long before she discovered eating disorders, drugs, cutting herself, boys, shoplifting, compulsive shopping, drinking, or Munchausen’s and Munchausen’s by proxy. But the last time she entered rehab, she decided to give not lying a try and it’s been going all right so she’s continuing with it.
It makes her so much less tiring to be around. For reasons I don’t understand, her lying always made me tired, so tired that I’d want to lie down and sleep in the middle of a crowded room. It’s so nice not to have to listen to it. As a result, I really enjoyed her company. I really, really, really enjoyed her company the whole day. She rode behind me on the way up and on the way down, and we talked and talked and talked. It’s the best time I can remember having with my sister in 20 years.
I was tired when we got home, and for reasons to do with a lost house key, my ex-husband was here watching the game and keeping the dogs company when we got home. We talked with him for a bit, and then he left, and T went home, and Oldest and I fell into bed.
I’m in a good mood today.
The Old Blog Post is NOW Over
So that was the old blog post. My sister relapsed after this. It was a bad one. It took a few years for her to be in a place where we could be close again. But she got there. It’s hard that my older brother and sister and my dad are all gone. But it’s beautiful to read a day when they were all with me, and the ocean was shining, and we were celebrating.
My Fatal Flaw
Picture, if you will, me at age nineteen.
I am in the honors program at the University of Montana, which means that instead of having my Western Civ section taught by a graduate student, I am lucky enough to take the section taught by the actual professor, the articulate man who gives the lectures in the large hall. The one with the eyebrows.
We have turned in our first papers on the pantheon of the Classical Greeks. This is before copiers, so I have dutifully typed my paper on a “master” and run off copies on the mimeograph machine with its fragrant purple ink.
I have given a copy to each member of my class as well as the professor. We have all done this, we have all taken time to read each other’s papers and make notes. We are the honors students. We over-achieve.
I’m also overly confident, which I shouldn’t be.
We were supposed to write a paper about whether or not the average Greeks believed in the existence of actual gods up there on Mount Olympus. As a generalizer, one who takes large swathes of information and finds ways to knit together the disparate, I have chosen a stupid thesis.
I should have said, yes they did, or no they just thought these were cool stories. Instead, I cobbled together some overly inclusive idea about making sense of the world, and have ended up with an undefined and indefensible thesis.
This is not why the professor takes me to task, though.
That comes later.
First, he tells the class to look at my paper. Then he announces, “I’d like to point out to you all the most extraordinary part of this paper. In every single instance where there is an ‘ie’ or ‘ei’ combination, this writer has written the word incorrectly.”
I erupt in flames of shame and burn to a crisp on the spot.
I know the rule. I knew it then. It’s never made any sense to me. I look at “ie” and “ei” combinations and am struck stupid. I have attempted to remedy my confusion by repeating “i before e except after c, or when sounding as a as in neighbor and weigh”, but then we have neither, seize, forfeit, height, codeine, protein, caffeine, weird, and heifer.
Is my confusion understandable? I think so. Forty-six years later, I’m still bad at it.
AI and ChatGPT and Catfishing and Me
AI
So I am trying not to be all weird about AI. I mean, I’m trying, but in general I am failing. As an example, the illustration I chose for this post is AI generated, and I feel weird about it. And this isn’t even my first time using an AI image. For my post about what I find funny, I went to Pixabay.com, looking for a unicorn illustration. All of them were made with AI. This shouldn’t have surprised me. What was I looking for as an alternative? A photo of an actual unicorn? Such a thing does not exist, right?
So I accepted that a unicorn illustration would either be AI generated, or an illustration made with computer programs that make such things. I looked for the latter and only found the former. I finally settled on a clearly artificial and hammy looking illustration of a baby unicorn (one assumes the horns grow in after they are born) and there you go. Yes, it’s AI.
I do remember when people used to draw and paint unicorns, though. And robots.
ChatGPT
Two friends of mine interact with ChatGPT on the regular. One uses it for artistic ideas, the other used it for decorating ideas. At least, that’s the extent of what I know they use it for. But then the decorating friend sent me a professional bio that was clearly generated by AI and asked me what I thought.
I hated it. It was a big pitch full of vague attributes that sounded good until I tried to parse out actual meaning from the claims. For one thing, it said she could not only define markets, but redirect them. Now, seriously. That is a specific skillset used in marketing! She does not work in marketing! Or does she? Or did it decide she did? Do I really know what my friend does for her clients? Do I know my friend better than a chatbot does?
Then she asked ChatGPT what it thought of her personally, based on their conversations. Now, parts of this made perfect sense, I mean some parts really described her and what she does for her clients. It also said some strange stuff like: You create containers that hold complexity without collapsing. I think that means she creates a safe and structured space for client growth, but that’s one of many phrases that had me scratching my head.
The “deeper” she took things with the bot, the weirder it got. Basically, by the end of the descriptions, “Shall we go deeper?”, my friend was a psychic goddess who recreates everything around her with devotion to order and beauty.
In reply, I sent her a link to this Medium piece. PLEASE go read it. It is screen shots of a writer’s conversation with ChatGPT and it ends with a chilling apology from a chatbot that sounds more and more like HAL in “2001.”
https://amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-ex-machina
Also, to be clear, she regards AI with curiosity and skepticism. She didn’t buy in or become deluded or anything. She’s a professional exploring a new tool. She sees the weirdness as well as the possibility.
Catfishing and another type of Chat
I also read an excellent article in the NYT about ChatGPT fueling mental illness, including dissociative behaviors that look like delusions to me. I thought of Catfish, the show and the verb. That show profiled people who were deliberately misled by catfisher, but it also showed one memorable man who knew he was being catfished. His catfisher had revealed her true self to him on a video call, but he was so attached to his initial illusion that he rejected reality and continued on with his self-delusion.
This took me back to my old chat room days, when bored men and women would construct enormous romantic projections about some other bored man or woman who was typing at them. There were a few obvious cases of outright fraud, including a chatter who pretended to be the writer Jon Krakauer. “Jonk” had a gaggle of fans, mostly female, who believed he was suffering from cancer and their chat was his lifeline during treatment.
One chatter who claimed to be a TV writer asked for little besides attention. I did not find him funny or interesting so I ignored him (he played too many .WAV files), but I was online friends with a woman who was absolutely obsessed with him. I mean, she was in love. She was part of a group of women who traded long, witty reply-to-all emails (I was part of this group, too). And even though she carefully hid her identity from everyone, she came out from behind the screen and met her crush, the TV writer.
They met at a racetrack (the kind where you make bets on animals) in California. She described her careful, breathless preparations, her outfit, her brimming excitement. She also described the furtive, shabby, quiet alcoholic he turned out to be. She spared no detail in her email, including brutal self-mockery for being foolish. Lesson learned, a good laugh had by all, and that was it.
IN SPITE OF THIS.
Within two weeks, she had re-embraced the delusion, and was mooning over him again. Years later, someone found out that the “TV writer” was just some guy, a total fraud. Nothing he said about himself was true, which surprised his online friends. It didn’t surprise me.
My point
Do I have one? I’m not speaking from personal experience. I mean, I was never catfished, nor did I send money to a fake writer who had cancer of the instant message and needed a special laptop, or the like. The online people I met in person were essentially the people I expected, with a few surprises (you can’t see anyone’s teeth in a chatroom, let’s just say). But no one ever put anything over on me.
If I have a point, it’s that human beings are prone to delusions. We have cults, for one thing. Televangelists fleecing people with crypto. The grand scam of this presidency. And now everyone can catfish themselves with the echo chamber that is a chatbot.
So be careful out there, folks. Know when you’re talking to weirdoes, and know that sometimes, the weirdo you are talking to is yourself, filtered through a chatbot and echoing back what it thinks you want to hear. Again, if you haven’t, I would ask you to go read this piece all the way to the end, because the end is…shocking:
https://amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-ex-machina
Some random thoughts while sick with Covid.
I have it again. So why don’t I read?
I have a stack of unread books by my bed that violates OSHA safety standards, and Covid. Again. You’d think I’d use this enforced sick/downtime to read, but my brain prefers television when I’m sick. I watched the entire season of Fallout yesterday, which is campy and gory and absorbing and gorgeous, despite the grossness. I have no idea what I’ll watch today.
I managed to expose my entire family on Thursday. So far, two are down with Covid. The two finished the exposure job by hosting a family BBQ yesterday (from which I stayed home, being sick) (and then tested myself) (and then you can imagine the rest).
I’m alone in my house.
The three other people who live here have scattered to avoid contagion. The backyard bunnies are my only companions right now. There are two, I think, though you really can’t be sure, because General Woundwort might be making then eat in shifts or whatever. They come out in the mornings and nibble away. They seem young to me because their movements are skittish and herky jerky. But they are rabbits. Aren’t rabbits always fearful and quick to scatter?
I’m alone, but cared for, as my husband brings necessary things to the front porch, as a good husband does. I breathlessly await my Paxlovid, sweet nectar of the Gods, bring on the bad mouth taste because it will make me stop barking like a seal and running like a faucet.
I know there are people out there who have never had Covid. I wonder what that would be like. I also wonder if they have it and just don’t test. When I was talking to the clinic today, the woman helping me told me that she worked in what was previously the Covid clinic. In 2020, they would get 6,000 calls per day. What a nightmare, and yet here we are, life as usual, carrying on. Just, Covid is part of it now and probably always will be.
Social Security
It finally kicked in, folks. I am officially a retiree. This means I received the propaganda email from the Social Security Administration telling me that the “Big Beautiful Bill” had eliminated taxes on my social security. Except it didn’t. So if you got that email and said “Whoo Hoo!” your celebration was premature. Especially if that’s your primary source of income. You can read about that here: Nope.
I also learned that in a canny and cunning move, the Republicans have set the huge cuts to Medicaid and rural hospitals out after the midterms. So. The many people who aren’t paying attention–and this is all so exhausting that I don’t blame anyone for not paying attention–will only get the bad news about their health care coverage AFTER they can vote out the people who made it happen. Tricky, tricky. I bet FOX news isn’t covering that part.
We have to keep paying attention to the right things.
But in this thicket of bad news, how do we sort through the distractions to find those right things? I mean, sure, it’s horrible that the government is building concentration camps in the USA again, but then there’s the assault on freedom of speech through presidential lawsuits intended to keep us ill-informed. Trump and Elon had their big messy public break-up, but the gutting of various key agencies is the real news, yes? Not the social media insults traded by the two largest egos in the Western world.
How do you choose what to read about, to care about, to despair over? I’d like to say this is death by a thousand paper cuts but in truth these are more like sledgehammer blows, aren’t they? With this full-on assault on America, which hits matter most?
The Paxlovid has arrived. I’m going to go watch something mindless on TV, and wait for the miracle of recovery while sucking on butter mints, the only thing that really cuts that taste.
Art Imitates Life. Kind of.
Sources of inspiration
One of the most baffling questions a writer is asked is, “Where do you get your ideas?” We are talking about inspiration, of course, which often boils down to imitation.
I was at a writer’s salon a couple of months ago. A very enthusiastic new member listened to me read a work in progress, a really short piece about a woman lying on the cement floor of her basement, hiding from her husband but in actuality hiding from this world we are living in.
We bring shorter, messier pieces to this salon. Nothing is very polished, unless it’s one of those rare poems or stories that flies through fingertips to keyboard and needs no revision. So I read this weird little piece about this young woman deciding whether or not to ever get up off the floor and face the world. When I was done, the enthusiastic new member asked, “Where on earth did you get that idea?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I think I babbled something about how the room/basement in question featured in a novel I’d written before (Gentry spends a lot of time in that room in book two) and for some reason I wanted to write about that room again. Which sounds strange but I think if we tracked back our inspirations we would mostly find strange things, yes?
As an example, I wrote a beautiful poem (that I can’t link to because it’s in a print journal ) inspired by a pdf about the types of grasses most commonly found in South Dakota. I was looking for names for my “real” job, from which I am retired, but as part of it I named products. I always scoured the internet searching for interesting ideas and found this pdf about grasses, and that inspired “Flyover Country.”
So I tried to explain to this man that this strange little room in the basement of a house (where I have never lived) in Oklahoma City (where I have never even visited) just wanted to be written about. Which invests the room with an animate agency that it certainly doesn’t possess, but I associate the weird little room with despair. I was feeling despair over the state of the world (still am btw), and this odd little story is what came out.
I think he thought I was crazy.
Anyway…
Some parts of my life do inspire my fiction, especially where my second divorce is concerned. I process through writing (if you read this blog, you know that) and I poured much of my own pain and grief into The Iris Files. I was completely broken by, not the divorce itself, but the long, desperate, painful years before the divorce, when I was presented with lists of ways I could improve everything about myself in order to avoid breaking up the family.
I think Iris said it best:
In retrospect, I think that the demands for change were simply a kindness on Hart’s part, a last chance, because he thought that after fourteen years, he owed me that. He was extending to me, as a matter of courtesy, the opportunity to become the woman he desired, in an attempt to save himself the trouble of a divorce and the expense of child support.
I was unable to accomplish the transformation.
Like Iris, I failed. I was unable to be anyone besides myself. Part of it was my own angry stubborn nature (go me!) and part of it was how widely the list varied from month-to-month. The list of changes I needed to make was extensive and inconsistent, based on whoever caught my ex-husband’s eye at the time. His eye was seemingly caught easily and often.
One of his suggestions was helicopter skiing (that’s in Iris). I should somehow become the kind of woman who wanted to helicopter ski. Cut my hair short, wear small pearl earrings, and crisp pleated khaki shorts. Get my nose fixed. Get a facelift (I was thirty). Take up tennis. Dye my hair blonde. Wear more jewelry.
Being treated as a remodeling project is demoralizing and dehumanizing. He often demanded that I go back to work full time. At what, I wondered? He suggested driving the city bus, delivering mail, or working for UPS. “You won’t be happy until you see me in a uniform, will you,” I said. “You think you’re too good for those jobs,” he answered in an accusing tone. “I do,” I replied.
This dragged along for years. If I’m honest, it was a constant in the marriage. It just got more constant, more brutal, more cold during those last years. He told me I should want to change to make him happy. “If you loved me, you’d want to change for me.” I said, “If you loved me, you wouldn’t ask.”
I finally said, “Why don’t you go find someone you like, instead of trying to change me?” Eventually, he did. It was awful. It was also a relief.
Lessons learned
How many novels can one unhappy marriage inspire? Way more than two. It’s tricky talking about your marriages, past and present, in a public forum. It’s much easier to hide it in your fiction. The thing is, healthy relationship patterns make for happy lives and boring novels.
I am reminded of a long-ago member of my long-time book group, who would always complain that whatever characters we were reading made bad choices. She would tut-tut away about it, as if we were in group therapy for the character as opposed to discussing a novel.
Finally, I said, “If every one in a novel made healthy choices, we would have no story, no plot, no conflict. Novels would be didactic, like Victorian children’s books about good manners.” She blinked at me for a moment, considering. I’m not sure she understood, and anyway, she’s long gone.
I have procrastinated enough.
I wrote this blog post because I haven’t posted in a bit. Retirement is very, very busy for me. It’s almost grueling, and I’m not sure how I ever found time to work full-time. But what I’m supposed to be doing right now is writing a cover letter for agent queries for a finished novel that has nothing to do with my divorces or that odd little room in Gentry’s basement.
I haven’t queried an agent in twenty years, but I remember how horrible the process is and I would do anything to avoid it. Still, it must be done.
Wish me luck on this agent thing.
RealDoll Haiku is live!
So pleased.
That’s right, the RealDoll Haiku are live. Read them here: The Offing
Also, my ego really enjoys being at the top of the banner.
