Today is National Live Creative Day

 

A day, so the article I read this morning said, to set aside to dream, discover, or invent. But by the time I left my desk and computer for a nap, about two-thirty, I realized I hadn’t been very creative. And that set me to thinking about my daily routine.p

Each morning, with a cup of hot tea at hand, I check my emails. Sometimes that takes quite a while—I have two accounts, one I’ve had for almost forty years (through TCU) and a new one that I try to keep for writing organizations. I belong to two groups that I get daily communications from, both organizational and members’ voices, and both use the relatively new network, io groups. TCU does not like the security certificate that io has and therefore won’t talk to them. I missed a lot of emails before I figured that out, and my son Jamie opened a gmail account for me. I get between ten and twenty emails each morning on each, and some require answers right then, others involve me in reading—including a few political posts.

Maybe my favorite is Wake Up to Politics, which Gabe Fleisher started when he was nine. He’s now a sophomore in D.C., studying I believe at George Mason University. Over the years he has acquired good journalism credentials, so he’s on top of what’s happening, and he presents a fairly balanced view. If your politics tend in the direction of mine, look it up and consider subscribing.

Sometimes emails lead me to articles I’m interested in. This morning it was a longish piece in The New Yorker, cited by Andy Borowitz, about Derrick Bell, whose thinking on racism spawned the critical race theory that is so misunderstood by so many. As a young lawyer Bell was with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He went on to be the first tenured Black law professor at Harvard but eventually left that school, over a matter of principle that involved faculty hiring and people of color,  to be a visiting law professor at NYU. The lengthy article traced the development of Bell’s thinking to the point that he decided what most of us saw as advances in demolishing racism really set us back and hardened attitudes. It’s complicated stuff, hard for me with a non-legal mind and education, to understand. But my thought was that if all those idiots who yell about take CRT out of our schools would try to understand what it is, they’d be surprised at how it supports them. The difference, as I see it, being that they don’t want history taught, and he did. But the absurdity of thinking a theory I can’t understand is taught in kindergarten made me giggle and reminded me of the elementary school teacher who said, “If I can get them to read, write, and do basic math, I’m happy.” Who needs CRT is grade school or even high school?

After email, I read the msn news briefs, mostly because they are the ones that flash across my screen. I used to move on to Facebook, but that really is a time killer—the morning had dwindled down to a few minutes by the time I tried to get creative. But even without Facebook, and maybe because of the Derrick Bell article, it was almost noon today before I settled down to my own work.

Often evenings are kind of lazy for me—that’s the time for Facebook and reading whatever is currently on my reading list. Not so tonight, maybe because I had creativity on my mind. But I was almost relieved when our weekly neighborhood happy hour cancelled and the Burtons’ schedule dictated we would not have family dinner. I can stay in my nightshirt and read some more Dorothy Johnson letters.

What about you? Creative today? There are lots of ways to live a creative life, and I probably should branch out to more of them.

Random December memories…

Longtime special friends Martha and Dick Andersen, who know well my affinity for all things Scottish, sent me a Scottish Santa tree ornament this week. To my delight, it is by folk artist Jim Shore. More than a few years ago Shore’s Christmas figures—Santa, angels, snowmen—were the rage in Texas, or maybe I just thought that because I had a friend who carried his work in her gift shop. My great splurge one year was to buy a Saint Nicholas figure. A year or two later I looked for a tree ornament for a friend who collects angels but could not find a single Jim Shore angel ornament. I assumed his popularity had peaked and waned, so I was surprised to get this wonderful figure.

A web search showed me how wrong I was. Shore has gone from a regional artist with a few subjects to a one-man industry, with a craft studio, a superstore, an affiliation with Amazon, and contracts with Disney, Peanuts, Coca Cola and other name brands. His Heartwood Creek brand is now internationally known. But he still relies on themes and patterns from folk art—quilting, rosemaling (stylized painting on wood, a Scandinavian artform), and tole painting.

It’s a Jim Shore Christmas at my cottage. Want to see more of his work? Here’s a link: https://jimshore.com/pages/shop-by-type

I had a second nostalgia trip this morning when a friend confessed to one of those incongruities that can creep into fiction—she had mentioned the Golden Gate Bridge (I think that was the bridge) in a story set several years before the bridge was built. That triggered a memory of the Dorothy Johnson short story, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,”—I have a vague memory that Johnson had a Congressman witness an Old West gunfight and then head for the airport. It was corrected before publication, but the memory is rattling around in my head.  One mention led to another, and it turned out another friend is a huge fan of the film version of that story  but knew nothing about Johnson’s other work. Now she’s reading one of the short story collections.

Dorothy died in 1984, and her work, once widely heralded and filmed, is now pretty much unknown. Her most famous short stories, in addition to Liberty Valance, are “The Hanging Tree,” “A Man Called Horse,” and “Lost Sister,” her take on the sad story of Cynthia Ann Parker’s return from Indian captivity to white society. Western author Jack Schaefer wrote a classic introduction to her stories, describing the “singing sentence” at the end which causes readers to gasp with surprise and delight.

I was privileged to know Dorothy. Met her at Western Writers of America meetings and developed a correspondence with her. After her death, I gave my thick Dorothy Johnson file to Sue Hart of the University of Montana, who did a documentary on Dorothy’s work. My folder included not only letters but research notes for two introductions to short story volumes and the text of a monograph.

So this morning, Dorothy came galloping back into my memory, half falling off her horse as she did on her letterhead photo. A pleasant trip into the past. I wish I’d written that book about her. The memories are fuzzy now, the people who knew her well all gone.

Christmas is a time for making new memories and treasuring the old. Tomorrow night my entire family will be gathered under one roof. Lots of memories to be made. I am like a kid waiting for Santa, fidgety with anticipation.

Courting the muse

Name dropping, which won’t mean much to any but us older folk: I was privileged for a few years to count as a friend the late Dorothy Johnson (A Man Called Horse, The Hanging Tree, and a lot of classic western short stories). She told me when her muse talked to her she was on fire and wrote furiously; when her muse was silent, she might as well give up and scrub floors (I don’t think she put it that way).

My muse was silent today. I’m sure she, like me, is distracted by Thursday’s surgery. I wrote a bit of the scene that I thought was coming next, but it didn’t flow and seemed wooden. I wrote the woman who edits for me and told her I relied on her to tell me when my writing was junk. She wrote back that she didn’t think I ever wrote junk—reassuring.

I gave up and read the novel I was deep into—Cleo Coyle’s Dead Cold Brew, one of the coffeehouse series. I’ve read every book in the series and feel that the characters are old friends—one advantage of writing (and reading) a series. The books seem to grow more complicated as the series goes on, and I was really wrapped up in this one though I did thank protagonist Claire Cosi became a bit too much of a superhero in the final episode (I won’t spoil it for you). Still if I could write like that….

I’m ready to dig into a new book—so my project for the evening is to study Amazon’s offering of mysteries.

A friend described on Facebook tonight an encounter in a WalMart where she started out grumpy and ended blown away by several acts of kindness that reassured her about our world. The way she described it, the encounter became one of those times when she was totally present in the moment. Such times are rare and to be treasured.

Two of my grown kids arrive tomorrow (the third will be here Thursday and of course Jordan is already here). Maybe I’ll have such an epiphany with my family together.

Sweet dreams.