jenswanndowney.com
  • Home
  • Bio
  • The Accidental Keyhand
  • Sword in the Stacks
  • (In)frequently Asked Questions
  • For Book Clubs, Librarians, Teachers, Parents & Other Thought Provokers
  • Appearances/Visits
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Children's Fiction Treasure Room
  • News and Events
  • Discussion Guide: The Accidental Keyhand

The Locked Bathroom

It's a funny thing about a blog that no one knows about yet. It's like a locked bathroom, a magic sanctuary, a junior high school journal. You can just sit in it, rummaging around in the old bellybutton for wayward lint, maybe sing off-key a little bit or stare off into space, and nobody's the wiser, the more grossed out, or irritated. Even after I hit the "Publish" button, I think I'm going to pretend I didn't.

Well, Hello There World

12/8/2015

0 Comments

 
Well, hello world!
Oh, my permanently flattened buttocks!
Look! A...a...sky...and coffee shops...and wait...are those my children???

Lo, these many months, I have been toiling in the Manuscriptorium, rinsing out my plot socks in the sink, chasing my characters under and over the furniture, looking to the ever-Yertle/Turtle-ing teetering stack of coffee mugs beside my computer for tips on creating story tension.

Though the computer never actually suffered a moldy coffee sludge dousing, I regret to say that the clicky slidey cursor thing did experience a nervous break-down under the creative strain, and had to be put to sleep. Nevertheless, approximately 11,571 minutes ago, I had the pleasure of typing the last word of the last sentence of The Ninja Librarians: Sword in the Stacks. Ahhhhhhh. Hey, and while I was away, this kicking cover for the book by illustrator Luke Pearson came into being. Thank you, Luke!

Picture
Advanced Reader Copies out in three months, out in bookstores in June!
0 Comments

Visit an Indie Bookstore on Saturday, November 29th, and Watch Authors Try Not to Ruin Everything While They Attempt to Help Out!

11/22/2014

1 Comment

 
Picture
Look at them! Delicious shelves stuffed full of those magical concentrations of story and wisdom and the connective heart-breaking hilarity that Snagglepusses at the heart of life's matter.

Yes! The books! The ookbays! The bop "o" "o" kop sops!--
whispering amongst themselves while they wait for you to pull them into your lives, so they can pull you into the rest of yours.

On November 29th, come visit Charlottesville's New Dominion Bookshop or another independent bookstore near you...Authors are using SMALL BUSINESS SATURDAY to help out independent bookstores as part of the INDIES FIRST CAMPAIGN http://www.bookweb.org/indiesfirst. I'm not sure where spear-headers Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer will be keeping the displays fresh, but Jen Swann Downey, author of THE NINJA LIBRARIANS: THE ACCIDENTAL KEYHAND will be at Charlottesville's New Dominion Bookshop on the Downtown Mall http://www.newdominionbookshop.com/ from 11am until 4pm.

Let me attempt to ring you up a fine mind-bending novel or two without breaking anything! I'll also be doing two twenty minute readings for kids up in the Mezzanine at 11:30 and 2pm. Kids 5 and up welcome. Go explore the treasure while I hold your offspring, if not captivated, then at least captive.

If you don't live near or in Charlottesville, check this link to see which authors are coming to an indie near you for Small Business Saturday: www.indiesfirst.com



1 Comment

Prelude to Five Hundred Words

10/5/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture







Maybe I should work on my character sketches
No I should just keep drafting.
It doesn't feel like anyone might call
I wish someone might call
Am I narcissist
What exactly is a narcissist
What would be the opposite of a narcissist
I wonder if I should run around the block
Why did I drink that coffee so late in the afternoon?
Should I make another cup of coffee?
Googling India's  Carvaka movement would be fun.
Are people still having parties?
It feels like forever since I got invited to a party.
If I washed those three pots, the dishes really would be all done.
What would it be like to never go on Twitter again.
Maybe I don't want things hard enough.
Do I want things hard enough?
Are you a better person if you want things or don't want things.
There's just nothing better than pastry cream.
I should work on my character sketches.
How long exactly would it take to make pastry cream?
To sketch pastry cream?
To sketch a character who loves but is allergic to pastry cream?
Wouldn't it be perfect if that was a perfect solution for something?
How did it get to be perfectly midnight.
It's perfectly midnight.
An invitation to 500 imperfect words.







0 Comments

Ten Feelings, Passions, People, Appreciations, Love-Affairs, Witnessings, and Wishes that inspired me to write THE NINJA LIBRARIANS

6/3/2014

1 Comment

 
Picture



This is how my MG novel
 THE NINJA LIBRARIANS
 begins:  
He-hem... 
(Oh, sorry. Not literally. Not with "He-hem". That was just me clearing my throat.) 
Here, let's try that again:
Twelve-year-old Dorothea Barnes was thoroughly un-chosen, not particularly deserving, bore no marks of destiny, lacked any sort of criminal genius, and could claim no supernatural realtions. Furthermore, she'd never been orphaned, kidnapped. left for dead in the wilderness, or bitten by anything more blood-thirsty than her little sister.

Don't even begin to entertain consoling thought of long flaxen curls or shiny tresses black as ravens' wings. Dorrie's plain brown hair could only be considered marvelous i its ability to twist itself into hopeless tangles. She was neither particularly tall or small, thick or thin, pale or dark. She had parents who loved her, friends enough, and never wanted for a meal. So why, you may wonder, tell a story about a girl like this at all?"


In the story, the answer is immediate and more or less to the point...
Because Dorrie counted a sword among her most precious belonging. Yes, it was only a fake one that couldn't be relied upon to cut all the way through a stick of butter, but Dorrie truly and deeply desired to use it. Not just to fend off anothger staged pirate attack at Mr. Louis P. Kornberger's Passaic Academy of Swordplay and Stage Combat but, when the right circumstances arose, to vanquish some measure of evil from the world.
But I thought...what's a blog for if not to elaborate (ela-blog-ate?) on stuff, 
so without further ado, because we've had quite enough of THAT....
my ten inspirations...
 1.  A desire to keep my family in winter coats, swim shirts, and butter. 
Which is to say, I needed to bring in money for the family.  Does that sound unromantic?  I think it's part of the satisfying  truth. I love to write. My husband is a mad gambler saint.  This explains why after he lost his job and we had just got our little organic donut business up and running, and I said, howzabout I write my dream kids' book now instead of getting a job even though we're living on credit cards, he said: "Go for it. I'm 100% behind you."  (Full disclosure: He stayed 100% behind me the entire, long, scrimping and pinching way. Also: we serve our butter in plain old sticks)
Picture
Picture

2. My love of libraries
With all my soul, I have loved libraries since I remember loving anything. As a kid, libraries seemed like magic palaces of possibility. The shelves seemed to hold rows and rows of moveable worlds, each one fronted by a door in the shape of a book cover. All you had to do was swing it open and walk inside. And voila! Imaginary people and situations and places and choices. Those childhood books made it clear that I had choices about what kind of person I wanted to be, how I could live, what might count as “normal” or “good”. Libraries have to rate as one of our most beautiful human inventions, especially public ones.

 

Picture
3. My love for Librarians - As a book-loving child, I regarded librarians with a strange kind of awe (and our local library as a sort of magical palace, stuffed with a dragon’s hoard worth of riches). Librarians were the keepers of all this treasure, and as such, mysterious and powerful custodians. There always seemed to be more to them than met the eye! Something secret and well-intended and unadvertised. Something underestimated, devoted, and heroic. My opinion didn’t change as an adult, as I began to understand that literacy, information and literature often occupied contested territory! It was easy and fun to imagine librarians – professional book protectors, literacy encouragers, and privacy champions -- as literal warriors, with swords as well as shortish pencils in their arsenals.
Picture
4.  A wish for a place where curious open-minded thinkers from history could hang out together. Maybe play tiddly-winks. 
In fact, the idea for the story began with a concrete vision of a group of people from many different times sitting around a table chatting in a very casual way. You know putting their boots or sandals up on the table, and making off-color jokes that everyone else got. There may have been belching and a parrot making a nuisance of itself. I found this appealing because its easy when we look back at history to see people as very flat and unreal, or not quite human, the sum total of their achievements as we know them – books, works of art, paintings, music, schools of thought, buildings, etc. The people around the imagined table scene seemed thrillingly exotic and absolutely roundly human at the same time.
Picture
Lorraine Hansberry
Picture
Aristotle
Picture
Thomas Paine
Picture
Hypatia
Picture
Chuang Tsu
Picture
5. To have an excuse to go to Renaissance Faires.
 I love that kids and adults dress up at these events. I love that the world is full of people who like to imagine themselves into the past.

6.  A remembered younger self’s anxiety and frustration about facing the world without a plan for battling the darker forces I sensed lurking in the nightly news. 
The story revolves around a kid, Dorrie, who stumbles upon the secret headquarters of a group of warrior lybrarians whose mission is to protect those whose words get them into trouble. It’s an uncomfortable time in Dorrie’s life when she’s losing her faith in her old vision about how she’s going to fight the world’s villains, and hasn’t yet conjured a new vision. I believe her conundrum came from my own memories of being a kid who in games of "pretend" played out opposing threatening social realities like war, violence, racism, totalitarianism, etc but as I got older struggled to find the the source-point of these miseries and real-world ways to oppose them. I wanted to write a series of stories that showed a kid navigating that change, and finding a path.
Picture
Picture
Picture
7.  The realization, at the advanced age of forty-something, that Cyrano de Bergerac was a real person, and ten times more brave than the character Rostand created in his great play of the same name. Stunningly effective duelist. Eventual pacifist. Fierce free-thinker. Science-fiction writer. Satirist. Loyal friend. He lived his life with a brave willingness to speak his mind. It most probably cost him his life. 

8.  To try in my own small way to give whichever kids would have me the kind of funny world-stretching reading adventures that I got to enjoy thanks to the work and imagination of innumerable wonderful authors I read as a kid. Authors like Madeline L'Engle, and Ursula Le Guin who gave the gift of new perspectives and  ideas to consider. Writers like Lloyd Alexander, C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Canfield  who transported me to other worlds and helped me figure out what counted as honor, courage, happiness, friendship, and a life well-lived. Writers like Roald Dahl, Astrid Lindgren, and Betty MacDonald who made me laugh, snicker, snortle, and grin, and see truths through their humor. 
Picture
Picture
Picture
9. A snippet of news playing with no sound on a post office television. There was a girl. She had long curling dark hair.  Her father had just been killed by a missile strike. She was just realizing this during the moment her face took up the screen, and then she was running running to what was left of his body. She should not have had to suffer such horror. I wanted to write a book about people who are doing something to oppose those dealing out violence.

10. My awe of how much real courage has been displayed by people throughout history in order to merely express themselves. 
People with everything to lose, and nothing to gain but another day of feeling honest, have put personal well-being, social acceptance, houses and homelands, and their very lives on the line in order to express beliefs and thoughts. Abolitionists, poets, scientists, critics of all sorts of power-wielding institutions - nations, established religions, corporations, etc. Their stories make me catch my breath, and long to do some small thing, any small thing to champion them. Telling some of their stories in THE NINJA LIBRARIANS series feels like a beginning.
Picture
Oscar Romero
1 Comment

Truth and Dare - What One Debut Author Really Thinks About Promoting Her Book.

3/30/2014

6 Comments

 
Last week, the family was in turmoil. There were mice. There were competing and strongly held opinions expressed about what ought to be done about said mice. A Dad who bought traps was emotionally crucified after not one but two mice died for his sins. The first because DAD successfully and intentionally set one of the traps to the door-slamming horror of the children-formerly-known-as-his; and the second because his WIFE, showing HER father how the trap worked and why we wouldn't be using them anymore, left it set on the counter and forgot about it and...well...blammo slammo and then both parents were monsters, both traps ended up in the garbage, the children retreated to the Switzerland of sleep, and I ended up constructing a no-kill mouse trap out of a wine bottle, a book of Emerson's essays, a biography of Madame de Pompadour, a hunk of cheese, an oil slick and a garbage can. If nothing else, the surviving mice were entertained!
Picture
And what does this mice saga have to do with the fact that THE NINJA LIBRARIANS will be going out into the world in two weeks? 

1. Neither Can Be Ignored  
Well, YOU can ignore them. Well, actually most people in the world could safely ignore them but if I turn a blind eye to the mice, I'll likely face wild mammalian multiplication, Hansa virus, and holes where the Swiss never intended them.  

If I ignore my own book release, I will ...well...I'm not actually sure what would happen, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't help the book find its first at-large readers. It also wouldn't make me very popular with my publisher's hard-working staff, or with the many book-loving people who have generously taken the time to read Advanced Reader Copies, write blogposts and reviews about THE NINJA LIBRARIANS, talk it up with friends, create beautiful trailers for the heck of it, and just generally share their enthusiasm for the book.

2. At First Blush, the Options  for Responding to the Situations Seemed Limited and Terrible
In the case of the mice, the initial choices seemed to be A. hosting a mushrooming mouse jamboree or B. snapping necks and taking names (Tattered Ear...we hardly knew ye).

In the case of the Book Release...

Oh, readers (are we alone?) because I must confess. (hey, I was raised Catholic. Be happy I'm not taking out your kneecaps with a ten pound thurible) As the calendar pages flew off the wall cinematically, hitting me in the face more often than not, and I finished making a torture chamber of the stalwart copyeditor's life with my final 500 changes, and the Advanced Reader Copies became available, and the beautiful cover materialized, I didn't see a choice looming in front of me as much as a hellish inevitability.  


The inevitability took the form of a zero gravity self-promotion thunderdome in which I would be consumed, defeated, and cheapened. It waved tentacles, it drooled, it let out ugly peals of fake laughter and faker puffs of bonhomie. It handed out flyers with instructions for how to bootlick and curry favor (I'm not proud!) and different flyers that explained how to do it all wrong anyway and...well, no need to get er...Hieronymus Bosch about the whole thing, but it SCARED me! The idea of trying to bring attention to the book 
Picture
felt tantamount to attempting to shove it down the world's throat. The act of bringing a book to someone's attention felt exactly the same as trying to hard sell it Glenngarry Glenn Ross style, and perilously close to trying to hard "sell" myself in the same bill of goods. I felt bewildered by the cloudy intersection between wanting to encourage the reading of my story for the value I hope it has, and the related need to sell books, to underwrite the possibility of writing and publishing the rest of the stories I want to tell. I wanted it to find its audience in some "pure" fashion. The way water finds its way across and under the earth through its own chosen crooked channels.

I started using my Twitter account a little (because that's what lapsed Catholics do when they're not swinging thuribles). I felt dirty if I retweeted something positive that someone had said about my book. I felt like a fool if I couldn't bring myself to do it.  In the midst of trying to get my head around the beginnings of my second book, the question constantly posed itself: How can I let people know about my book without being an overbearing, self-centered, irritating, honor=less fiend? Well, I'm paraphrasing a little.  

The truth was, that despite understanding the outrageous extent to which luck, privilege, the generosity of others, and smelling the right way on the right day,  mixed with my own efforts to result in THE NINJA LIBRARIANS getting published. I didn't want to have to sell it.

Picture
3. With a little help from friends, I ended up seeing another possibility.

In the case of our little Mus Musculus problem, my brother's room-mate (Hi Ioan!) showed me the clever non-lethal contraption pictured above, which besides not squishing little mouse heads has the added advantage of being impossible to forget about (Another friend warned us about the ease with which one can forget about variations of the "have a heart" trap, and the mouse slowly dying of dehydration inside)

In the matter of the promotion of the book...I had help from my friend, John Gibson who, if not sternly, then with loving force, helped me see the process of actively bringing my book to the attention of others in a different light. He said (in his habitually compelling uncapitalized way):

 "many are spooked by asking for themselves.years of fundraising taught me a useful distinction:
when you believe in a cause, asking for others to support it is a privilege-- for both parties.
think how good you feel when helping others-- they have given you that gift.
conversely-- asking for support for your work (not 'you'-- your work) is not asking them to help you profit, but for propagation of ideas you believe in. 
you wrote that book because you wanted it to exist. you believe there are readers out there who are you thirty years ago. asking for others to help spread the word improves the odds that somewhere some kid who needs 'ninja librarians' (needs-- not wants) will be connected with it.
to fail to support your work is to deprive that kid of what they need. 
modesty (true or false) and pride (true or false)-- two sides of the same coin, and obstacles.
but not obstacles between you and what you want; instead, between your potential reader and what they need.
ourselves: that which we are here to get the *f* over."

Thanks John, and thanks to all my friends and acquaintances, new and old, inside and outside of the publishing world, who are helping spread the word about THE NINJA LIBRARIANS.


Oh, and good news...we caught some mice!




6 Comments

Since a Lady in a Santa Beard Asked: A Thoroughly Boring Person's 2013 List of Top Ten Acts of Petty and Admittable Naughtiness

12/22/2013

4 Comments

 

1. Ate seven cartons of Kate Bennis' expensive soup that she left in the writing cottage. Replaced it. And then ate it all again.

2.. Invented a at least 212 reasons to go downtown when I didn't really need to for the sole purpose of buying great big hoggy milky cascades of Mudhouse coffee that I didn't even have the decency to carry away in a reusable vat.

3. Bought a bottle of shampoo. The kind with 43 ingredients printed on the label in a font so tiny that they might as well have been written in Sanskrit. The kind that will burn a hole in the planet down to the magma core if you pour it on the ground and give pebbles cancer. Why? Because I used some just like it in Johanna Lindholm's shower, and I wanted that silky softness to be mine, mine, mine.

4. On multiple occasions, I chose makes and models of bread and other foodstuffs that I knew no one in the family but me would like. Sometimes I barely liked them. But were they there when I was hungry? In all their Pyrrhic glory

5. Purposely positioned the garbage cans in the hopes that used remnants of garbage stickers might be interpreted as whole and virginal and newly boughten.

6. Took full advantage of my five year old's willingness to give long luxurious hair brushings for the price of a dollar which she never remembered to collect.

7. Told myself it was okay to read the part of my 17 year old's facebook page that he left up on my computer as long as I didn't do any scrolling.

8. Was un-neccessarily nasty to a telemarketer. Really. Like I did have a genuine limb of some conifer all up and in there. I think its gone.

9. Failed to anticipate, by say, longer than an hour, every single solitary birthday party, class, event, and appointment in my children's lives. Or in anyone else's.

10. Did a lot of other things, when I should have been...uh...doing other things.
4 Comments

Pitch Wars "Wish List" Updated

11/20/2013

2 Comments

 
Posted November 20th: To any blog visitors who are not writers wishing to become published writers, please disregard this post. I owe you a moment. To any blog visitors who are indeed such writers, and are looking for my Pitch Wars contest bio and List o' Wish, you'll find it on my home page. See you over there...

Updated November 29th: So because of a question posed by a potential mentee, I thought I'd better elaborate a bit on my Pitch Wars "wish list" (such as it is not). 

I did not include a detailed list of "types" or "styles" of stories that I would be particularly interested in, because I simply don't know myself that well. Especially the self which has yet to encounter your entirely unique story, told in your entirely unique way. Telling you I'd love to see a story about siamese mermaids or a set of kidneys with a heart of gold (or not) would feel arbitrary, and thus, in the end, not any more accurate than a list of all the things I didn't put on "The List" because I hadn't yet thought of them (I'm looking at you story about the eleven year old who gets a law degree and brokers a separation agreement for her parents). Anything might entrance me. Not everything will. And I haven't the foggiest conclusive notion as to why. 

Telling you I'd prefer submissions to be more well-written than not, and then reminding you of the tenets of well-written-ness seemed similarly non-constructive, since I'm assuming that you believe you've covered your bases there or you wouldn't be trying to submit to agents. So I didn't do that either.

Now writers as a species tend to possess at least a modest imagination, and mine just kicked out a vivid image of one of you shaking her fist and saying, "Well, tell us something already! How are we supposed to know whether it makes any salted sense on a cracker to submit to you?" And that fist-shaker would have a point. So what else can I tell you about me that would be true and useful?

1. I love to critique and edit stories. I do it for friends and writing acquaintances because it's a satisfying and vivifying pleasure to help an author dig and chisel and tear and stitch a story into its own true elegant form. For better or worse, I keep forgetting that Pitch Wars is a contest. I'm looking forward to bringing my best energy to working with an author in our own private collaborative effort to make one story better, just as others have taken the time to do for me. What happens after that, happens!

2. I love a narrator experienced as a subtle character. I just do. Why? I think it has something to do with some kind of contrapuntal energy. There is a way of telling a story in the first person that can make me feel claustrophobic. 

3. I would have a difficult time enjoying an entirely humorless story. Funny. Intelligent. Honest. My personal trifecta.

I know its not much, but may this be of some smidgeon of use. I wish you all the very best with your writing and submitting!  



2 Comments

Extra Extra. Need. All About It.

11/7/2013

10 Comments

 
Picture
"It'll be fun," I remember fake-enthusing to my three-year-old son after my electricity was turned off for the umpteenth time in my single mother days. "See, look at the pretty candles. It's like we're in olden times." 

We weren't. It wasn't. 

Our economic life got better when I married, but as our family grew, and my husband and I  embarked on our attempt to start an organic donut-making business - dubbed the LWP (Latest Wacky Plan) by my sister-in-law, "extra"  never became a thing we felt we had, our born in the middle-class, white, college-educated privilege notwithstanding.

But after a decade of wearing a groove in the earth sprinting between Peter and Paul and often showing up at one or the other's door with nothing but a pocket full of lint, something changed this year.

We experienced a small bump in our income as our boot-strapped business finally crossed the line out of eating up all the borrowed resources in sight into making a small profit. On top of that, I got paid a good chunk of my advance for my novel. 

So what have I done? Bought seven garments. New. From not a thrift shop. Arranged for piano lessons for my daughter. Didn't blink when my husband brought home the "free" broken will-cost-a-mint-to-fix hot-tub. In the grocery store, I've stopped tensely watching the amount displayed on the cash register as it rises with Everest steepness. For the moment anyway, I know I won't have to play last-minute Sophie's Choice between a can of beans and a package of hot dogs. 

And I've taken up a heretofore unthinkable new habit: Regularly purchasing $3.52 cafe au laits at one of those lovely coffee shops with the shiny machines, a "fair trade" coffee bean option, and music I never hate. Cupped in my hands, these coffees, besides smelling and tasting divine, feel distinctly and dangerously luxurious. As though, if the family wallet continued to fatten, they might lead to puma-hide toilet seat covers or Goddess help me, pea gravel, and most alarmingly, to a wandering away from my immediate knowledge of what it's like to live in even relative economic insecurity, and my at least proximal knowledge of what life is like for the huge number of people who --  multiple orders of magnitude worse off than I or mine have ever been --  struggle far too hard to obtain life's most basic necessities -- and, through no fault of their own, often can't procure them. 

Steaming and sprinkled with nutmeg - thank you, beautiful young barista - there's no telling how long my access to this coffee will last but for now the luxury daily insists upon potent questions which I can not ignore: 

1. Why do gold-plated bath-tub faucets and mouths full of missing teeth for lack of dental coverage still exist in the same Universe?

and

2. If you don't want to hoard wealth, and yet, not being saintly, also want to do right by and take care of your nearest and dearest, well then how much wealth is enough? At what balance point in your personal calculus, do you say: "Over and above this amount, any other income I earn, win, or hookly or crookly get, I will share, and spread out and invest in others?

Is it when you own a house (at least on paper), can pay all your basic bills easily, and can afford the organic pecans and a new package of underwear each year and a Stetson every five?
Is it when you have all the above going, plus $10,000 squirreled away in a Swiss bank account, plus a full set of matching bath towels, linens, and tupperware?
Is it when you can regularly buy coffee house coffees?

Up until now, because of our family's chronic indebtedness and lack of fungible flim-flam (plus the fact I only started drinking coffee a year ago) , the consideration of such questions has been a largely theoretical exercise, intellectual pillow-talk, akin to wondering how I would have behaved if I'd been a German during World War II - would I have gone against the Nazis? Rationalized a passive complicity? Become a dehumanizing dehumanized monster? I will never know and I don't want an opportunity to find out. Or maybe I already have had one. Iraq. Moving on.

The fact that the one llama I chipped in on for a family in Peru stands out in my memory in lonely technicolor splendor on an otherwise empty windswept philanthropic landscape, tells you how much sharing of my resources I've actually done up until now. A few dollars for local radio stations, donuts and truly minute amounts of cash for this cause and that hidden in the scrub, and that's about it.

But what if we keep doing better financially? Though no one in a convincing Mistress of the Universe up-do has guaranteed us anything, it feels for the first time at least possible that we could -- with the help and cooperation of a whole lot of people and circumstances, between the donuts and books, create "extra". If we are lucky enough to end up consistently generating/receiving such "extra", I fervently hope that I'll recognize it as such, and not let expanding appetite trick me into ever mistaking that "extra" as somehow newly "essential" to our "needs". I want to deeply remember just how "extra" coffee shop coffee feels at this moment, and if we prosper, allow the warm cup in my hands to be the constant bellwether that indicates "Enough".

Photo Slideshow: Poverty in Today's America
 Photo Slideshow: Poverty in Today's 
Click here for Photo SlideshowText
10 Comments

Dead People's Pajamas

10/18/2013

6 Comments

 
Picture
I'm certain I've worn some, and my preternaturally tall children have probably also worn their share. I can't help but think this. We buy a lot of clothes at Goodwill and other thrift stores. I know that plenty of young vital people get rid of pajamas because they're scratchy, or too tight in the waist, or when unwrapped on Christkwanzzakah morning inspire comments like "my God what made Aunt Violet think I'd want go to bed impersonating a container ship full of pineapples?", but some people have their pajamas got rid of for them. After they die. In pajamas printed all over with pineapples. 

I've had to face facts. Of the total number of pajama pieces hanging anonymously on the overcrowded rack next to the shelf full of half-used notebooks and half-burnt candles, some portion therof, have been died in, or at least dyinged-ed in. That nice pair of light cottony flower besprinkled bottoms with one end of the drawstring disappeared forever in the waistband? Even if they weren't on point for the final breath, there's still a good chance they were in the final rotation.

We'll take them.

And sleep and lounge in them. Because my husband and I want to both spend a lot of time with our kids, and get to buy lap-tops. Because I want to both be able to work on the books I'm writing and feed my kids organic milk. To make them taller. So they can fit in a wider array of more adult-size dead people's pajamas.

We're used to such "trade-offs". For seventeen years, our family's domestic economy has been entirely based in the "pre-owned" market. Cars, furniture, books, Santa gifts, appliances, computers, dishes, pets. If we could get our hands on some used doctor's appointments, we'd at least explore the notion. Our economy has been entirely based on the perpetual need to stretch each dollar like a tarpaulin over a sprawling pile of goods and services that never quite fits in its shade. 

And we have it easy. 

Compared to those living in the grinding poverty of the truly poor, we are rich. Besides making an additional $14,000 above the poverty threshold for a family of five in 2012 ($26,000), we have education, cultural privilege, and perhaps most subtly powerful in the end, the peace of mind, and risk calculation adjustment that comes with having connections to at least a few people with more economic security who wouldn't stand by idly if economic disaster struck us. None of us have ever yet wanted for food or any other essential. Clean water? Check. Roof? Check. A zillion books? Check. A lot of time to ourselves and on our terms? Check. Friends and family who would help (and have helped) us with babysitting and loans? Check. Dead people's pajamas? Check. Or don't check. No way to tell, really.


6 Comments

Pushing a Stroller to Crazytown

9/24/2013

5 Comments

 
--->
This also

all makes
perfect sense
on the inside.
Picture
Today, I became aware of the fact that I was walking across town pushing a jog stroller. Not in the "hey, whoa, who am I, recovering amnesiac sense - I mean, I wasn't surprised to see my hand on the stroller's handle. No, more in the coming out of the imaginary world of a book to stare blinking at the real world around you sense. 

Which, speaking of sense, made a lot of sense as a feeling, since I, just a moment before, in actuality, had indeed been reading a book while pushing the baby stroller. I'm sure some of you have done that, right? Hey, why not enjoy a chapter or two while hiking the 8.7 miles necessary to get the baby asleep.

Except there wasn't a baby in the stroller I was pushing down the well-traveled sidewalk. Not because, lost in a book, I'd left one sitting in the middle of an apple display at the grocery store, or on a ferris wheel, but because my colossal galoots formerly known as babies no longer fit in the stroller and I've commandeered it. I've taken to packing it with the stuff I need to write (a redwood tree's worth of index cards, a Staples' factory worth of notebooks, whatever seventeen reference books make the most sense that day, two pounds of cheese) and pushing it across town to the cottage where I ply my er...um...well, where I make my wild guesses about what word should follow another.

Now all this simultaneously pushing the baby-less stroller and reading the book would not be much to become aware of had I only been wearing shoes. I don't want to bore you with all the tedious details about why I've taken to kicking my shoes off whenever possible, but suffice it to say, I'm just as likely to walk out of the door barefoot as shod.

And did I mention the river-raft of a straw hat? It's a necessity when one is technically 57% Irish (don't ask), but one's skin somehow manages to be 100% People of the Bog. Come to think of it, the reason i may have suddenly become aware of myself, walking happily along, reading the book, pushing the non-baby-laden stroller, under my personal cabana, might have had everything to do with the fact that I had begun to mumble a bit of invented dialogue for the next book that had sprung up in my head. 

Today I became aware of the fact that I might be scaring people.

"Wait...come back! No need to cross over to the other side of the street. Really! I'm harmless! It's just a bad ankles and practical logic thing! Plus I write a little....."


5 Comments
<<Previous
Forward>>