Julie Unplugged

Literary Grannies and Creative Block - How to Move Through The Creative Door Marked "Ouch"

My Literary Grannies Remind Me to Write about Whatever Shows Up

Leave it to my friends, the poets from the beat movement, to distillize my thoughts in so few words.

This time it was Charles Bukowski who wrote the words that picked me up and out of my funk - at least getting my pencil to move when I thought it was stuck in frozen mod podge. Perhaps we ought to name him an Honorary Literary Granny. I can see him scoff (and smile) at that thought.

Here's what happened earlier:

I realized something disturbing today as I sat down to write, to brainstorm, to let whatever was meant to fall on the page to fall on the page.

 

It was like knocking over a glass of chocolate milk, the first words in my writing stumble went every which way. I wrote these words: 

 Just this afternoon I was speaking to

my dear friend about writing styles,

comparing one genius writer to another.

 

The first genius writer was able but

the second genius writer was more

deeply and profoundly able.

 

The second writer didn’t turn when the

doors marked “ouch” opened.

 The first writer held tight to the banister, afraid to see what happened when he pushed himself into the darkness.

The second writer relished the darkness and poked about it with glee, no matter how hot the fire got or how tempting it felt to turn around before he got to his destination.

That was when I realized how much I have in common with the first writer, the timid one. How much I have in common with the one who doesn't leap, the one who doesn't complete his open heart surgery with words.

He stops, takes the pulse, gets a diagnosis, does all the pre-surgical work but when it comes time for the surgery he goes to sleep under the anesthesia yet never has the surgery.

Let me personalize that.

Perhaps you are like me and need to personalize it, too.

I realized how much I have in common with the first writer, the timid one. I am the one who doesn't leap, the one who doesn't complete her open heart surgery with words.

I stop, take the pulse, get a diagnosis, do all the pre-surgical work but when it comes time for the surgery I fall asleep via the anesthesia but I never actually have the surgery.

This is especially painful to me, personally, when I realize my mission lately of bringing as many Literary Grannies back into the minds of people who either forgot them or never knew them at all. I rant and shake my fist, but I have all along been denying my space in a literary lineage.

I must confess I am not as good with giving my creative projects the wings they deserve. Instead, many of them sit, unread, unfelt, undigested by the very people who may be serve the most from my projects’ existence.

Ouch.

It hurts to confess that, yet I know I must face it.

The door marked “Ouch” is open. I am facing it.

This week I will face the "door marked ouch" and continue to face it and write more about it here, publicly, in hopes knowing you are out there holding me accountable for continuing and completing this project, the better I will do at showing up.

That helps me to smile, knowing a long trail of writers leading up to me are encouraging me and hopefully a long trail of writers behind me are encouraging me, too.

As Charles Bukowski said, “writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all”

I'll be back tomorrow - if not sooner - 

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© 2013

 

The Befores and Afters Will Have to Wait... Its time for Us to Begin It Now

Tuesday June 11, 2013: The Blog Dare from Bloggy Moms today was simple. It just said:

Taking steps to fix it.

I don’t think Tiffany and the gals at BloggyMoms and the Blog Dare meant to make me hang my head in shame as I read today’s prompt.

I had just looked at my table and said, “Sheeesh, I must fix this!” and then I promptly walked away.

I have a lot of “stuff” in progress. Art projects, sewing projects, DIY projects and stuff for making said projects tend to dominate more than they should space in my house. I started to organize the garage so I could move some of it out there and then Christmas came and believe it or not – I know some of you do – it has been since the New Year that I worked on my garage.

I remember all the time mavens who talk about “baby steps” and “eating the elephant one bite at a time” and you know, tips for this and that and the other you know but you've never actually done? Or maybe you started but you never continued?

Between what I know and the not-meaning-to-guilt-trip me blog post, I will devote myself, dedicate myself to giving thirty minutes a day in my garage as well as at my various table top work stations. I will make space for my “in process stuff” that doesn’t encroach upon the rest of my family.

I tell you what.

I’ll even start right now and report back in thirty minutes.

Ready? Set? I am now taking steps to fix it!

Approximately 30 Minutes Later:

Well, friends. I did a couple significant things.

I cleared a path to work from in my garage.

You see, I have put boxes along the walls of the garage. In those boxes are other works and materials and things like Christmas Decorations. I like having a place for all this stuff and I like having a way to get there. One of the other adults in my home is not a neat sorter who uses boxes or shelves.

Instead, things get thrown anywhere, my things get broken and normally I get too frustrated to begin again.

Today, in a matter of moments, I took steps to fix it.

I am on my way.

Plus I now have a load of laundry in the wash and an extra coat of sweat on my brow. It is June in Bakersfield, the extra perspiration can’t be helped.

I will purposefully NOT overdo. I will go back tomorrow and do more.

For now, I am content in what I have accomplished so far as I will be satisfied tomorrow when I do only thirty minutes more. I have a feeling the more consistent I am, the faster this task will be completed.

Do you have any tasks like this that have been nudging you forward, saying “One step at a time. One step at a time.”?

So, what’s stopping you.

Set a timer for thirty minutes and go begin it now.

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Creativity: Stacked Up in Expectation, Discovery & Synchronicity

I know I look innocent here, but underneath that sweet exterior is an actress plotting....

My Daddy called me “Sarah Bernhardt” when I was at the stage between toddler and pre-schooler.

 

He called me the name of the famous actress because I put on quite a production as my mother was leaving the house to go to church or perhaps any activity that got her away from caring for so many children simultaneously. She had five of us in seven years, after all. She deserved a couple hours in church as her big “Woo hoo!” of the week.

I would carry on as if I was being fed to the lions as Mom, thankfully, eased her way out the door.

Daddy would note that I would watch the station wagon - a turquoise country squire, naturally - eased its way up Hawthorne Avenue and as soon as it was out of sight, my tears would stop and I would find some other way to entertain myself.

All was peachy until Mommy returned home when I reportedly would do a similar act, only this time it was “Mommy has saved the world, she has returned! She didn’t leave me forever! I am saved from two-year-old martyrdom!

Sometimes I wonder if a part of me somehow knew my future as a creative soul: writer, actor, mixed media artist, activist, Mommy… did I know how much emotions – and performance – would impact my life?

Sarah Bernhardt Image layered with a commentary about Gilbert and Sullivans "Iolanthe"

Today I have wobbled between exhaustion and creativity. It is similar to that time of first trimester. I’m not expecting a child, I am in the midst of “being pregnant” with creativity.  I’m coming up with things and starting to mix this and that so when I was looking through my images and some of my favorite photos of Sarah Bernhardt chose to show up and then when a commentary on Gilbert and Sullivan from an old music book literally got into my hands when I wasn’t paying attention, I responded.

 

I made what I call a “first stage layering” with a painted page and a photo.

I can’t take my eyes away from it.

I discovered an interesting fact of intersection in 1882 between this play, “Iolanthe” and Sarah Bernhardt. Look at what happened on December 11:

Boston's Bijou Theatre, 1st American playhouse lit exclusively by electricity,

1st performance, Gilbert & Sullivan's "Iolanthe"

Victorien Sardous "Fedora," with Sarah Bernhardt, premieres in Paris

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Word Play Your Way Into Your Writing Flow: Green, Yellow, Blue.....

Word Play Your Way Into the Writing Flow: Don't Push Your Words, Play with Your Words!

There are days I sit down to write and I just don’t feel “it” or anything closely resembling an “it”. When I first sat down to write this, for example, I was thinking of sharing about how seeking quotes and photo editing oftentimes leads me to breakthrough. Instead, I wrote this “Sometimes I write haiku lines, chunks of five-seven-five” and the extraordinary happened.

I lost all relationship to time and space even as construction trucks were jammering down my street, pulling up asphalt, laying new asphalt, honking their horns incessantly.

I wrote:

Five seven five chunks

Greet the blank page, blinking

Time to wake up, please!

 

Light blue paperclips

Lavender push pins stand by –

Hold it together….

 

Lost candleholder

Stands without its candlestick

Do you hear crying?

= = =

Resting saltshaker

Not sure why its on my desk

Reclining in blue….

 I simply sat here at my desk and moved my pencil, using whatever words fell into my mind while observing what is here, around me.

I gave up on the quote search and truth be told, I didn’t feel like searching for quotes, so instead I scooped up a syllable salad and ran with it, after I had found and quickly forgotten Brenda Euland’s quote: “The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering. ”

As I wrote and wrote and wrote, I truly didn’t want to stop collecting sounds and form, I just wanted to keep the gentle inhale and exhale of haiku to keep me going.

Red polka dot skirt

Swishing, twirling, kissing legs

1950’s style

Alas, I have words to capture and hold on the page for a lifetime or more.

Graze the word pastures

Nibble at the leaves of grass

Whitman’s soul watches

 

Looking back at these collections of haiku I realize I was following Ms. Euland’s directive all along: Puttering with syllables, happily dawdling writing. Now my smile has replaced the frustration and the natural contentment of my writer self has taken the reins again.

Join me, here, right now –

Throw your words on the canvas:

Blue, Yellow, Green….

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I Love My Mommy: Driving Inspiration & Dreams, No Matter What Age

Mommy loves Classical: I love my Mom, I love vintage books, I love combining it all...

She created awesome paper dolls and the girls loved it, especially Emma. My daughters are twenty-one and almost sixteen and they still talk about Nana’s paper dolls.

In October, Nana came to visit and she stumbled into my fascination with art created using book pages. She became my ironing assistant, flattening all the pages after I painted or dyed them. I fell in love with the smell of hot paper and Mom sort of understood why I enjoy tearing up books and creating stuff with them.

“This keeps the books alive, Mom. If I didn’t do this, where would this book be? It would be gathering dust on a shelf or in a box in an attic or worse, in a landfill.”

She was hesitant at first, but toward the end of her visit, she agreed to try to understand.

I also learned during that visit at one time she had career aspirations to be an illustrator. I knew she was talented with drawing and creating things like paper dolls and a favorite memory was sitting alongside her while she sketched some houses for one of her Junior League events, but somehow it never dawned on me she would have wanted to take her art and create a career from it.

Now when I go to book sales, looking for content, I look for illustrations that remind me of Mom’s paperdolls, which usually look like little girls from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

This week I took a couple 1950’s books and made an instant homage to my Mom and her one-time dream.

The little girl (complete with shadow, which I love) was in a California Reading Text book called Magic Windows, published in 1957. The background is from a textbook titled Harmony which was published in the early 1940’s. I painted the squares and then combined the two.

I love how it turned out.

I can’t stop looking at it.

Every time I glance at it I remember my Mom’s dream and am grateful to have that inspiration to continue to follow my dreams, no matter my age.

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Literary Granny Julia Ward Howe: I'm Not Exactly Her Namesake AND I'll Claim Her

It would be very obvious to say I was named for my Aunt Julie, but that is not exactly directly the truth. She was actually named Juliet and my parents almost didn’t name me Julie for fear I would get teased because of the character Julie Jordan in the musical Carousel.  I didn’t get teased as a child, but when I was younger I regularly got sung to by teachers with the opening line of the song.

Historically and literarily speaking, most Julies were Julia or Juliette or Juliet I suppose.

I am glad to claim Julia Ward Howe as a Julie in my literary lineage.

She was known mostly for her song, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, but besides this

Literary Granny Julia Ward Howe

accomplishment she was a poet, abolitionist, and activist. She also wrote plays and creative non-fiction, including a work about Margaret Fuller, another woman I claim in my literary lineage.

The story of Battle Hymn of the Republic goes like this: Mrs. Howe was visiting, along with the Secretary of War for the Union, some of the army camps. The soldiers were busily singing “John Brown’s Body” and that tune must have entered into her poet’s mind because she was awakened with the first stanza of the famous poem written and complete in her mind.

By the time dawn arrived, the entire poem had been written by candlelightand started its life as a song sung to the tune of John Brown’s Body.

Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the coming of the lord,
He is trampling out the vintage
where the grapes of wrath are stored,
He hath loosed his fateful lightning
of His terrible swift sword,
His truth is marching on

Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah
Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on

I have seen Him in the watch fires
of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar
in the evening dews and damps,
I can read his righteous sentence
in the dim and daring lamps,
His day is marching on

Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah
Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on

I have read a fiery Gospel
writ in burnished rows of steel,
"As ye deal with My contemners
so with you My grace shall deal,"
Let the Hero born of woman
crush the serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on

Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah
Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on

He has sounded forth the trumpet
that shall never call retreat,
He is sitting out the hearts of men
before His judgment seat,
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him!
Be jubilant, my feet,
Our God is marching on

Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah
Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on


The following stanzas are presented
as sung by The Mormon Tabernacle Choir in 1960

In the beauty of the lilies
Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom
that transfigures you and me,
As He died to make men holy
let us live to make men free,
His truth is marching on

Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah
Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on

He is coming like the glory
of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty
He is honor to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool
and the soul of wrong His slave,
Our God is marching on

Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah
Glory! Glory ! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on

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© 2013

Which Granny - Writer is on Your Literary Family Tree? Perhaps a World Changer Such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman?

 

Who is on your literary family tree?

This leaf of one family tree is courtesy of Happy Via on Flickr  via Creative Commons License

Are you interested in genealogy?  Do you have a family tree constructed?

Naturally this makes me want to make a literary family tree.

Perhaps now, I will.

Who would I count in my direct line?

I would certainly memoirists, poets, activists and letter writers.

I would count Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writer of the paradigm shifting The Yellow Wallpaper among other things. She was also mother to a Katharine.

I would count Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Diarist, Novelist, early Aviator, Poet and Mother who lived through a lot of her very public life in a very veiled fashion. Her words are absolutely beautiful and she was perpetually standing up for women having the space to write, not unlike another in my direct line: Virginia Woolf.

Somewhere out there is Laura Ingalls Wilder, a childhood favorite and well known Granny, and also Margaret Fuller, whose home I visited not long ago. A couple other Massachusetts literary Aunties: Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson come to mind.

There are many and as this month of Family Roots and Lineage via BlogHer.com continues, I am sure I will uncover and reclaim more.

A Portrait of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the early 1890's: Is she a member of YOUR Literary Granny Family Tree?

Today, though, I want to recollect Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She is not a stranger to longtime followers of my blog.

She lived in Pasadena during a heat wave in early Summer, 1890. She sat at her desk on the morning of June 6 and started writing what was to become The Yellow Wallpaper, a novella which changed the way women were treated for Post Partum Depression. Gilman willingly entered her own psyche in what some refer to as a “thinly veiled autobiography.”

I have heard other stories about this: that Gilman was attempting to write an Edgar Allen Poe style tale, primarily to attract a decent sum of money so she could support her family. She wrote for money, after all, since she didn’t make much trying to get the plays she had written produced.

She hadn’t written in her diary for three years when she began writing again just five months prior to this warm June morning.

She was due to give a lecture on “Human Nature” at the Pasadena Nationalist club in just a week. She was intrigued by ghost stories and even read several in a group she attended. It was an optimistic time.

Her first draft of The Yellow Wallpaper was completed before the end of the day on June 7 and a draft, ready to be submitted for publication, was ready to be sent on August 24, 1890, less than ten weeks later.

I doubt she knew when she invested those two days how much her story would impact so many women and for so long. Her diary is filled with entries about teaching drawing classes and lecturing, not “changing the world with my fiction”.

In the course of living and mothering and creating and being a friend and creative collaborator, the future world changing happened without much thought. She wanted to write a story.

She wrote a story.

The world changing would continue to come later, even though she suffered from bouts of depression and lots of criticism and condemnation. It was rejected several times before it was published in January 1892.

For the next two days I will be remembering her and dedicating much of my daily work to her.

What a fabulous thought: sharing my writing family tree with Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Perhaps she is on your literary family tree, too?

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The First & Another First & Yes, Another First - Emma Goes to College Day 3

Bloggy Moms Blog Dare prompt is…. “The first time....”

Here is what I wrote:

Last Thursday I sat back in this very same chair completely relieved the school year was over. “Hooray! Time for a break!” or something similar was the thought most present in my mind. I took the requisite last day of

That's Emma in the fancy shades on the right with two of her friends.

school photos, happy high fived my kids and mentally did the back stroke as I saw a horizon of lazy hazy days of Summer in front of me.

You would think after more than twenty years of Mommying I would know better than that but sometimes even veterans like me flounder.

This week, my fifteen-year-old just finishing her sophomore year in high school started taking Summer Biology course at our local college. She aced the prep tests, showing she was ready for transfer level courses and off the went on Monday to her new adventure.

She did great, seriously – much better than I could hope both academically and socially as well.

The only issue was this: both of us have been a bundle of nerves about it and apparently neither of us is talking about it for fear of upsetting the other.

We opted to have her go to one of the satellite campuses for several reasons: she could get into the required course without having to have the insecurity of being on a waiting list and our dear friend, Cameron, teaches on the same campus.  This made me feel more secure because if Emma needed anything, he would be close by so she could get help.

I don’t know what might happen in a college class that might require she need help, but for whatever reason, it made me feel better. She rode with him on her first day, I drove her there the second day because she had a doctor’s appointment and on this, the third day, she decided to take the public bus for the first time.

We walked toward the bus stop and she said, “I am just a nervous wreck.”

I responded in as chipper a voice I could muster, “Well, honey, you’ve been through a lot of firsts this week. We just keep stacking one first after another. This is today’s first. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

We stood by the bus stop, waiting, and Emma didn’t look so sure about this activity she volunteered to do rather than go in early and ride with Cameron. There were quite a few people, most of whom were older or younger or not speaking English. Normally this makes for a fun adventure but today, when Emma was feeling woozy to begin with and I added a handful of change for the three-dollar bus fare and I should have recognized this might now be as easy as I originally thought.

This wasn’t an ordinary city bus which she has taken in the past, this was an “out in the hinterlands” bus which goes to the outlying, primarily farm communities in our southern central valley. She was in the minority in every way as she stepped onto that bus with her backpack, bling-touched sunglasses and lacey top.

She seemed to be taking it all in stride until her older sister caught this tweet:

 So not only was this one first experience, it was two. Her first bus ride to college and her first throwing up episode on a bus.

Looking back in her twitterfeed, before this she also tweeted:

 The next barrier was to be sure she and Cameron found each other once her bus arrived in Delano AND get her to campus on time. The timing looked like it couldn’t be sweeter but somehow, even that was rocky.

The good news is, they did connect – after phone calls between both Katherine and Emma and Mommy and Emma and Mommy and Cameron and Cameron and Emma. I texted her with a hint of fear thirty minutes to class. “Did you make it ok?”

She texted back within moments: “Yep, and I was only five minutes late!”

With that, I took some time to take a restful shower and prepare for my first, blissfully stress free moment of the da and another first - and I spent it,  here with you: my writing date! Thanks for being here with me.

Oh, by the way, you look especially lovely!

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© 2013

 

Lessons from the Theatre: Past, Present & Future - Being with What Is Now

Lessons from the Theatre: Being with What Is Now

I can immerse myself in it still, as if it was happening in the here and now rather in the then and there.

 My friend, Kevan, strutting across the stage in a cameo appearance in a late night show I was appeared in was it nearly five or six years ago? The show was called True Tales 2. He was wearing chaps and only chaps. It was October. He died the following Spring but on that late evening in October, we didn’t know he was sick.

I laughed as he came through, but I never looked at him. Call it my puritanical roots, but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t lift my head to watch him. He always left right after his brief appearance so we never got to giggle about it in the moment, it was just a “here and gone” thing.

Last Summer it was my melanoma diagnosis, surgery and scarring that kept me from the stage. I just wasn’t comfortable anymore and worse than the scar on my face, perhaps, was the scar on my heart. Like anything else, theatre had lost its luster for me. I didn’t think it was possible, but I had tired of it. I grieved this loss like any other: I got angry, I got sad, I got resigned, I gave up.

The last thing I was expecting while I was traveling in the Berkshires recently was a text message asking if I would be interested in taking a role someone else had left. I didn’t think about it, really, I just said yes. The day before I had

My "Family" from The Nerd: Two Tims and Me = The Walgrave Family

thought  to myself, “I miss theatre. I can’t believe it, I miss theatre!”

 

Three weeks later I was on stage again, three weeks later, I am off stage again.

I wouldn’t call myself sad per se, but I am not sure how exactly to describe what I am feeling.

Perhaps it is the bubbling up of gratitude: the awareness I wanted this, I did this, I enjoyed this, I tried my best at this.

Perhaps it is satisfaction of a job well done: applause and laughter from the audience, kudos from the creative team, pure delight at becoming another kooky character.

I have often given lip service to one of my favorite thoughts, “You never know when it will be the last time at your stage,” perhaps remembering Kevan’s nightly prance I never truly saw. I didn’t actually know this feeling personally, though.

Now I do know it.

After Strike: The Stage Goes Back to Neutral, Waiting for the Next Production

Every time I am out there I know it and remember it.

 

It isn’t a melancholy experience, it is more the grateful, satisfied, courageous experience of doing something purely for the love and letting myself go, fully, knowing this very well may be the final bow.

This reality the gift of melanoma gave me will undoubtedly be a bell whose ring I hear over and over again.

I’m surprised to say I am beginning to enjoy its tone.

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© 2013

Mixed Media: Broken + Layered + Past + Present + Future

I’m not sure when I discovered how fun it was to layer photos, especially photos taken years apart with content that looks completely unrelated.

Last week I posted my image that combines an image from a cemetery very close to the birthplace of W.E.B. DuBois overlaid with a screen window from the hospital building at Weedpatch, the setting for John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

This week, I did a photo transfer of a layered photo: a self portrait of me, crying, from my soul-grief series from 2007. The layered photo is me, writing, in 2012 at the Mountain View cemetery in Oakland, California, on the steps of a mausoleum there. Somehow these two photos painted a picture for me the two separate photos didn’t say on their own.

Broken: Mixed Media on Wood Board by Julie Jordan Scott

 

I had a painted piece of salvaged scrap wood that begged to be used in art, so I painted a layer of black, white and gray acrylic paint. I transferred the photo collage directly onto the wood. I appreciate the slight tear in one section. The imperfections spoke out, reminding me of the perfection of imperfection and brokenness.

I bought some dishes at a thrift store with the sole intention of breaking them and using them as another dimension of this piece, another monument to brokenness, literally. I used the mirror I broke as a reflection of the brokenness in everyone. Each person in the world shares a sense of brokenness which we rarely recognize in one another.

I know I often think I am the only one who is broken, everyone else has it perfectly together, right?                                           

This post is a check in for Creative Every Day with Leah Piken Kolidas

There is more, too, which the piece is speaking to me. Perhaps I’ll write more about it here.

I’m so grateful you are reading. I look forward to reading your comments & hope to return the visit to you very soon.

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© 2013