Want to find the creative creature inside of you?

 

Fredericksburg, Texas

Seems too bad, but I have to say right off the bat that this post is for women only. My apologies to the man who read my blog. Its because I want to tell the ladies who read this blog about a retreat coming up next month—really sooner than you think—and it’s for women only.

On September 25-27, in Fredericksburg, Texas, my good friends Jeanne Guy and Stephanie Raffelock will host a retreat designed to help women answer the question, “Who were you before the world told you who you are?” It’s all about creative strength, courage, and wisdom. Sessions will provide writing prompts, time for personal reflection, and other times for listening to some wise women. In between, you can get to know the other ladies at the retreat and have some truly important conversations on what it means to be a woman in 2023. Even the movie, Barbie, may be relevant.

I know and respect the women who are leading this retreat. Jeanne Guy, an award-winning author, has led many successful retreats, helping women bring out undiscovered energy and creativity in themselves. With an irreverent sense of humor, she may laugh you into self-discovery. One of her big delights in life these days? Officiating at weddings. Texas is about to lose her as she prepares to move to Whidbey Island, so this may be your last chance to share some time with her.

And Stephanie Raffelock has a spiritual side that makes me envious. She is in touch with what goes on in her mind and body in a way that is duplicated by few if any women I know. She is the editor of Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis, a collection of pandemic writings, and the author of  A Delightful Little Book on Aging and her signature work, Creatrix Rising: Unlocking the Power of Midlife Women. But Stephanie isn’t all ethereal spirituality—she gardens, she walks her dog daily, she cooks, and she loves to shop at Central Market. Someone all of us can relate to.

The retreat is sponsored by Story Circle Network, an international organization founded by celebrated author Susan Wittig Albert in 1997 to encourage women to tell their stories and personal histories. Albert, who once wrote Nancy Drew mysteries under a publishing house name and is now best known for the China Bayles herbal mysteries, recognized that women were often hesitant to share their stores umbrella, they are encouraged to create memoir, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama. SCN offers online writing classes, an awards program, book reviews, and several publications including a journal and a blog. The organization even offers writing trips abroad, led by the outstanding Len Leatherwood. To learn more about SCN, go to About Story Circle — Who We Are, Our History, Our Board of Directors.

I have belonged to the Story Circle Network for several years and have been so glad to connect with women who share my love of writing. It’s like finding a home. But it’s not all about me. I have relished not only the friendship of the women I’ve met but the stories they share.

Nobody needs an excuse to go to Fredericksburg, but it you did, the retreat is the perfect one. There will be time left for long walks and exploration of the historic town. With a deep German history, Fredericksburg offers wineries, excellent food, lots of good beer, and fascinating shops. It is the home of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz of World War II fame, and a museum there honors his accomplishments. If you haven’t been before, you’ll want to check out the Sunday houses, small structures where farm families rested after coming into town for church. Who knows, you might learn a few words of the distinctive mix of German and English still spoken by some residents.

A retreat, some time spent in a colorful historical Texas town, and an introduction to an organization that wants you to tell your story. What more could you need? Read more about the retreat here: storycircle.org/2023-retreat/

And tell Jeanne and Stephanie I sent you.

A cookbook, a funny luncheon, and a doggie spa day

 

I was thrilled today to get copies of Kitchen Table Stories II, a publication of Story Network Circle. It’s a compilation of recipes contributed by various SCN members, each with the backstory of the recipe. And it’s those stories that distinguish this book.

Many of the stores recall childhood memories, grandmothers who cooked treasured recipes from other lands, mothers who invented frugal dishes, and mothers who didn’t cook at all. As Gretchen Staebler writes, “We pass on what we know. From one generation to the other, we want to share the best of what we knew growing up.”

The collection is remarkable for its cultural diversity—pierogi from a childhood in Chicago’s Polish community; mamaliga—Romanian polenta; latkes for Hannukah; Hungarian baked cauliflower; arroz frijole negro—and the memory of sorting beans; a Piranha dinner from Peru—and instructions for careful handling of the flesh-eating fish; miners’ pasties from Pennsylvania; a special barbecue sauce from a joint in Muskegon; sanguinaccio or Italian chocolate pudding; even the much-maligned beef (dried) on toast is tempting when it’s a childhood memory. The stories made me laugh and cry. Gretchen Staebler remembers eating Boston baked beans while sitting on the living room floor. Did her mother really let them do that? She doesn’t want to know the truth. You can hear Erin Philbin laugh about sloppy Joe with “salad” in it—not known for her cooking skills (her husband usually did the cooking), she had added chopped celery and her young son said indignantly, “Why did you put salad in it? We don’t like salad.” I wanted to comment, question, talk back as I read.

Hats off to Susan Schoch who edited and Sherry Wachter who designed. And guess who wrote the Foreword? Yep, yours truly. You got just an excerpt of my foreword in the above paragraphs. Some of my family are getting this for Christmas—shhh! Don’t tell them.

Kitchen Table Stories II is available from Amazon.

Yesterday I had lunch with an old friend, really the brother of an old friend who is now gone. He is living alone in a high-rise retirement community, and Jean and I were his guests at lunch. Alex, troubled by pretty severe hearing and vision challenges, had his sense of humor about him, and we laughed so loud I was afraid the few others in the almost-empty dining room would stare at us. It seems there has been a mystery car parked in Alex’s slot for some time and repeated calls to the administration have not been successful. Alex’s daughter uses the spot when she comes to visit. So yesterday, he confided he was quite sure there was a body in the car. I told him he was encroaching on my territory as a mystery writer. Today, he emailed that the car had been towed, but there was no word about the body, and he was now convinced that it was a cover-up for a cryptocurrency mining operation in the parking garage (he was not serious about any of this). I am threatening to get him a dictation device so he can write his mystery by dictation. I thought the addition of the cryptocurrency was genius.

Sophie had a spa day today. Nathan, the groomer we all think is so great, came t the house at three (right in the middle of my nap time!). I think Sophie is psychic—about ten minutes before he got here, she began to bark occasionally, the bark that says “Someone is here.” I asked Nathan if he’d been parked on the street for ten minutes or so, but he said not. I have no idea how Sophie knew he was on his way, but she did. And tonight she is fluffy and clean, her coat as soft as a baby blanket. With a thick layer of leaves on the patio, it won’t take long for her to get dirt and twigs and leaves in that soft, clean fur. But I do believe dogs have psychic powers beyond our understanding.

Looking forward to a nice weekend, with company for supper Saturday and Sunday. Last night, Jordan made rice bowls with black beans (which I just read have great health benefits), chicken, and fresh vegetables. Tonight I made what looked like a huge pot of white bean chicken chili—the three of us ate it, with maybe enough left over for one serving.

Oops. In my zeal to make crab bites late at night, I just nudged a container of cherry tomatoes off the counter. As you can imagine, they rolled everywhere and my only option was to sweep them up, which rendered them inedible and headed for the garbage. I think it’s time for me to get out of the kitchen! And maybe off to bed.

Living on Covid Time

For nineteen years, Story Circle Network, an international online organization that encourages women to write about their experiences, has published an anthology, Real Women Write, choosing a different theme each year. For the 2020 anthology, the choice of theme was clear; the book is subtitled Living on Covid Time. It contains 80 pieces of poetry and prose, written by 52 women. I got my copy in the mail yesterday.

In her foreword, Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press, suggests that for writers the time of isolation imposed by the virus may be a rich and focused period or one so filled with anxiety that writing proves impossible. Whereas authors usually write in retrospect, this past year has required many of us to write as we live through a worldwide, terrifying experience with no sure idea of the final outcome. Writers are capturing the present moment, recording history. As an aside, let me add that for novelists, this has meant a choice: do you allude to the pandemic in a novel or assume people are too tired of hearing about it and set the action just pre-pandemic (I chose the latter for my current work-in-progress). For memoirists and many nonfiction writers, there is no choice: you come to grips with the disease.

The stories and poetry in this collection “showcase a range of reaction,” including “grappling with illness, fear and death, with heartbreak and isolation, with the coexistence of ugliness and beauty.” Reading, Warner points out, is one way we listen, and writing is one way we start a conversation with vulnerability. She believes, and I do too, that we have an opportunity to come out of this more courageous, more honest, more productive.

In the final brief essay in the book, Susan Wittig Albert uses a hardy antique rose to make just that point. The leaves of the rose, on her side deck, turned brown, something that had never happened in 25 years. She realized she had taken it for granted and neglected it during a blistering hot and dry summer. But then came Hurricane Beta, with cooler temperatures, even if only a smidgen of rain for the Hill Country. Susan saw that as a lesson from nature, teaching us that the world is resilient but also vulnerable. She concludes that we will go forward. The world will never go back to what it was before the Pandemic, but we can move it forward with hard work and deep breaths, taking more responsibility, paying more attention.

Reading these selections is like listening to a chorus: Lynn Goodwin describes a physically painful episode during which she is convinced she has the virus (it was not); Jeanne Guy offers a prayer to be free of fear and not to have to go to the grocery store—apples and oranges, you think? Not on Covid time. Linda Hoye uses a trip to the grocery store to illustrate just how different life has become in lockdown—and how small things can grate on our nerves. Linda Wisniewski describes sewing masks while watching, for 111 consecutive days, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings and the reassurance she found in his constancy.

Yes, I have a short piece in the collection, a piece that made me face honestly some of my lifelong anxiety. It’s called “The Temptation of Quarantine.” At different times in my adult life, but more as I aged, some ordinary activities raised my anxiety to an almost paralytic level. Things other women did without thinking could cause me great agony. Suddenly one day, in quarantine, I realized that I was perfectly content. I didn’t have to step down that curb and fear losing my balance, drive on the highway, take self-service elevators, or a thousand other little things. I could stay home to write, read, and cook. While others gnashed their teeth over boredom and freedom and the like, I was a happy camper, more relaxed than ever.

The other day my oldest daughter said when I have had both shots, she wants to come to Fort Worth so that she, Jordan, and I can go to Neiman Marcus for lunch. I hesitated—I haven’t been to a restaurant since March 12 last year, and now, vaccinated or not, I’m not sure I want to go. But I will. As the saying goes, I’ll put on my big girl panties and go with my daughters—and enjoy it. But getting back into life beyond my cottage and yard is going to take some doing.

Real Women Write is a good book. You’ll see yourself, and you may come to understand others. It’s available through Amazon.

Writing a book by committee

Story Circle Network, an international online organization designed to encourage women to tell their stories, has a small work-in-progress group, so small that those of us who participate regularly feel part of a close-knit circle. We laugh, celebrate, weep, and wail together, mostly about writing but health, vacations, and other matters creep in.

And we have our schedule—Mondays we post our writing plans for the week Wednesdays we check on what everyone’s reading, and Friday is devoted to brazen brags. This morning I posted I wanted to work on the novel I just started, but I don’t really have a plot. I know it opens with a polite and unknown intruder, and I know there’s a wedding, but other than that I don’t have a clue.

They were off and running, with suggestions like Murderous Matrimony (I really liked that). I explained since it will be the fifth Blue Plate Mystery, it needs to follow the pattern of the previous four—Murder at…..so I got Murder at the Altar, and, for distance weddings, Murder at the Cow Palace (Lubbock) and Murder at the Dude Ranch (Kerrville). For the latter, a friend suggested an uninvited guest turns up dead at the wedding. She suggested three villains—the roping champion who wrapped his bull whip around the victim’s neck as he struggled drunkenly back to his cabin, the crooning cowboy everyone had a crush on, and the lesbian couple who were outraged by the victim’s MAGA hat. Well, there went serious work for the day! There’s a glimmer of a useful idea there, but more about that later.

It reminded me of 1986 when the Fort Worth Star-Telegram commissioned me to write a Texas novel to be serialized during sesquicentennial celebrations. I had never written an adult novel at the time, and I stammered, suggested others, etc. But Larry Swindell, book editor, kept saying he liked the idea of Judy Alter. It would not, he assured me, be a novel written by committee. And it wasn’t.

So Far from Paradise took a large leaf from some study I’d been doing of the Waggoner family, with the rags to riches story of the founder of the dynasty. In retrospect, it was probably historically accurate (I sure hope) but hopelessly sentimental, with the wastrel son (shades of Horseman, Pass By?), the daughter who moved to the city, etc.

I don’t remember how long it ran, but I do remember the newspaper’s art department came up with some neat illustrations for it, illustrations I wish I had today. I don’t think, after many computer changes, I even have a copy of the manuscript, though the whole thing may be in my archive at the Southwest Writers Collection in San Marcos.

Reaction was great. One woman called to tell me her grandfather lived in Paradise (it’s actually a small town northwest of Fort Worth) and, she drawled, “They must have known each other.” Several other people seemed to have trouble with the line between history and fiction and their remarks (which I wish I could remember) indicated they took this as gospel.

Hmmm. I wonder if Charles Dickens had similar problems when his work was serialized?