Monthly Archives: February 2012

Embracing My Inner Late Bloomer

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by Lisa Rivero

Photo by Sura Nualpradid

The older I get, the more I believe in late bloomers.

Last weekend my husband and I had supper with a couple of college students. The two of them were talking about someone who had already had a book published at their age. They shook their heads and lamented their comparative late starts, feeling behind the curve at age twenty.

I could only smile.

One of the marvelous aspects of being a writer, one that I never really appreciated until recently, is how little precocity plays a role and how much we have to look forward to with time. We writers are not like mathematicians or musicians, who must train hard and fast during the difficult years of puberty if they are ever going to make a real mark in the world. That’s not to say that young writers are not capable of giving us marvelous works of literature. As Malcolm Gladwell reminds us, T. S. Eliot wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when he was only twenty-three. But Gladwell also shows that even poetry, once thought to be a young man’s and woman’s genre, is anything but. Nearly half of the anthologized poems of Wallace Stevens, for example, were written after Stevens’ fiftieth birthday.

Such thoughts make themselves at home in my mind these days for a couple of reasons. First, our only child is now in college. No longer do I have the challenge of attention divided between trying to be a good parent and wanting to be a prolific and respected writer (my attention is still divided, but for different reasons). When our son was young, I was never good at compartmentalizing my life or making efficient use of naptime or afternoons when he was in activities. A good friend of mine would tell me that when her son, then a toddler, took a nap, she ran-not-walked to her desk and pounded out as many words as she could before he woke up. I would like to say I did the same. I usually fell asleep myself.

The second reason I am embracing my late bloomer is that, just this week, I received notice of the acceptance of my first short story in an online literary journal. My husband immediately took me out to dinner to celebrate. He knows how much this means to me.

I can’t say that I have a wealth of life experiences on which to draw or that I’m going to write a best-seller anytime soon. But somehow, without planning to, I have managed to collect a variety of writing “lives” that were simply not possible twenty or even ten years ago, from my beginning as a journalism major (which morphed into an English major and math minor) to writing cookbook reviews and food columns, education articles and parenting books, and, more recently, fiction. Over time, I’ve gotten better at navigating genres and forms and audiences. I feel more able now than ever to hear and recognize my own thoughts and words. I can, when I remember to, take the long view and bring myself back to the moment and what matters. And every day I get a little better at seeing—and being—myself as I am. The result is that I treat my writing with more compassion, more tolerance, and more encouragement.

This spring I will turn 48, and, in terms of both writing and life, I feel as though I’m just getting started. It’s a wonderful feeling. I wouldn’t expect my college students to understand, but I wouldn’t want to be twenty again for anything in the world.

Lisa Rivero grew up in rural South Dakota and now lives, writes, teaches, and indexes books in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her online home is http://lisarivero.com.

What in the February has been going on?

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My Legoland Birthday

 

Between the colds and the pining for the long green days of summer, things at home have run me round and twisted me away from blogging. Maybe I’m afraid of this new place, it’s wide open spaces and still hollow sounds. Maybe the sun through the window just isn’t bright enough, or the cat is too soft, or the tea too warm. Maybe a thousand little things, but a thousand little things are not putting letter by letter or word by word, so it is time to brush them aside, at least for a few moments every day, and continue with good intentions.

First: I read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern and it swept me away. It also gave me a crazy case of the jealousies and that just isn’t fair to anyone, so I’m over it.

Second: Judith van Praag got me started on Pinterest. But get this, she’s using it to write her novel. I never would have thought it because I tend to do these things in such a haphazard way, but this is exactly the way my brain works. I mean, in Scrivener there is the ability to import web pages for research which is great, but what if you want to see everything in front of you like a collage? Pinterest. So today I got started, and of course, completely immersed in images relating to my story. This is work. Really, I swear.

Third: Lisa Rivero wrote a fantastic blog post about Why You Have To Keep On Writing, Even When You’re Not. She says it best, but beware, at the end is a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on creativity and you owe it to yourself to watch. I’m thinking of one of you in particular, but maybe all of you too. And she mentions Tom Waits, who always wins with me.

Speaking of Lisa Rivero, she hosted me on her blog a little while back and I talk about my crazy daisy writing method. Please, we’d love it if you pop over and leave a note.

Fourth: I will put up a page explaining this more clearly, but I want to remind you that Fourth Monday is next week, February 27th. I am hosting a blog post by Lisa, a flash fiction piece by Jillian, some music, and hopefully more. If the more doesn’t happen on Monday, it will be following up and it will be worth the wait. Believe it.

Your turn: What have you been doing this February? Have you found the sun or has it never left? Do you pin-up at Pinterest or have an obsession with Tom Waits? If you were to go to a desert island and could only take one chocolate truffle, what flavor would it be?

 

It Was the Winter of Her Malcontent

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There were faces in the snow scratching at the windows. Wind-shapened men in tipped fedoras and blue-heeled women threatened the integrity of the ice strewn dance floor. Susana wanted out into it, but each time she belted her dress and wrapped her fur, the door banged against her hand, bruising her palms, leaving her pulp.

It would have been Susana counting the beat at the heart of the party. Circling men dragged to center all because of her legs. Hollywood, 1929.

Susana was more Jean Harlow, less Greta Garbo, with the martini laced bite of Dorothy Parker. On a good night in a hot place, she caught stares like fireflies in mason jars. Kept notes in pocket books. Wrote sonnets on the backs of neckties.

Thirty-six years and one drink too many slipped her from the wagon, landing her the role of a lifetime—crimes of passion, twenty-five to life, and the slick, oil taste of a pretty pink gun.

 

 

 

 

I Was Here

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Black Cross New Mexico 1929, Georgia O'Keeffe

She places a stone near the Penitente cross where fifty stones already lay. We’re all trying to feel sacred, she thinks, but it doesn’t come until the first sun scorches the adobe wall and breaks through the eyelet curtain. It’s alien light. The red of strawberry jam oozing down the wall.

A woman sleeps in the next bed, a white-blond artist from not so far. These beds are always taken up with artists and expectation.

Behind the adobe is Pueblo land protected by a common truce. Our heroine breaks in with two steps, a full bladder, and a heavy camera she does not know how to use. Fabric hangs in strips from piñon trees, orange and red, faded in the jam light. Taos mountain, dark and heavy, another sleeping woman, another bed.

The wild dog does not see her, its sharp nose pointed hard to the south where it runs, smearing shadow across the sage field. She heard coyotes in the night and hoped for useful dreams.

She’ll spend her week trying to get back here, to this sunrise, these prayer ties, the wild dog running. She will eat her weight in tempe and dolmas. Walk the Plaza looking for gifts with little money, where she finds instead a boy on a banana seat bike riding circles around her, an unlit cigar hanging from his lips.

***
Searching online this morning for the answers to the cross I remember walking to in Taos, NM, I found this photo by Kevin S. Moul. I’d like to walk into that photograph with a notebook and pen.