Sandra Gail Lambert

Point of View and Kevin Connolly

All sorts of things can give my writing life a boost -  a good conversation with a poet friend, my mother's lungs improving, an acceptance (more about that later), or a little dust storm swirl of synchronicity.

Last week, I was rambling on to a friend about my next chapter (another form of procrastinating) and how I wanted the main character to use skateboard mobility and what would that be like in the historical era of the chapter.  She said that if there were wheelchairs then the character would use one. 

I took a breath and went on a rant about how that wasn't true, that using a wheelchair was sometimes a choice made to make other people more comfortable, to be more at their eye level, how using a skateboard, or scooching, or setting up your home all at floor level could be the better choice. 

The very next day, on the New Pages blog, I found a link to Kevin Connolly's photography. That is his image at the top of this post.  He takes photos, from skateboard level, of people staring at him.  The photos are wonderful, his experiences are often mine (I, too, have had people stuff money in my gaping-open backpack.), but what surprised me was how his art excited me about writing.

His images add yet another layer to the meaning of "point of view."  We write from a particular angle that, along with everything else, includes our physical experience of the world.  And, as his photos show so well, this writing, this point of view, hopefully, reflects against the reader in a way that offers a more complex picture of their own lives. 

This has given me a renewed, still not quite all figured out, understanding of what my job is as a writer.   

Ahead of deadline

This morning, at six, I tapped the send button and it was done.  My chapter for the Below Sea Level workshop is submitted. 

And now I can't make any changes until after the workshop critique in June.  Of course, in these past few hours, I've had at least three, what seem to me, brilliant insights about the chapter. 

My compromise is to retrieve the folder from the bottom drawer where I've hidden it from myself, but I don't open it.  I write my "insights" on slips of paper and tuck them inside.  Then I shut the drawer.

I think it would be best if I move on.  1919 and the Spanish flu are calling me.  But first I'll go admire the blooms on my ash magnolia.   

Books I've read

Essentially, all blogging is self-centered, but my hope is to stop just before a reader rolls their eyes and says "sheesh, why did she think anyone would want to know that?" 

So, it's risky, but, in the side column,I've added a list of books I've read this year.  I think it's the Internet equivalent of perusing people's bookshelves and nightstands when you visit their homes. Ya'll do that, right? 

Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

Okay, I'm writing this novel.  I study writing.  I go to workshops.  There are rules - cut the back story, stick to the arc (the holy arc), don't wander all over the place, put it all in scene and dialog, don't push the reader too far.

In the Monsters of Templeton, Lauren Groff breaks rules - successfully.  She shifts from third person to first person plural to an exchange of letters from the 1800's to the thoughts of a lake monster to oh so much more.  I am especially fond of the "family tree" graphs that keep changing as the main character discovers more and more about her ancestors.

Right now, I'm giggling all over again just thinking about how much fun it was to read this book. I mean, a neat freak house ghost in a literary novel - how cool is that?   

 

20th Annual Lambda Literary Awards

First Person Queer, in which I have an essay, is nominated for a "Lammie."   Seventeen years ago, when I was one of the Lammie judges and writing was an early twinkle in my pen, I never imagined.

The anthology is also a finalist for the Forward Book of the Year - an award celebrating "some of the best work from today's independent press community.

I'm not going to rant again (for right now) about the importance of independent publishers and bookstores, but check out these award sites to see what might not ever be written/printed/sold if we don't support, by which I mean spend money on, independent press books.   

Lay lady lay?

It's one a.m. and it's possible that I've finished a revised draft of yet another chapter of the new book.  I mean, I still have to recheck all the lay, lain, laid, lie stuff, and is it drug or dragged, and were there really persimmons in Florida ten thousand years ago, but mostly, yes, I have a shinier version than I did two days ago. 

And I revised my resume for a residency I'm applying to for the fall.  And I wrote an essay about memory. And now I'm writing this post.

I did eat breakfast, but all I remember since are four boiled shrimp and three radishes and a chocolate chip cookie. I've worn my mu-mu all day, and today's bath is still waiting.  Okay, I'm turning off the computer and going to bed.

P.S. A pie update.  I chose apple.  It was delicious. 

Monsters of Templeton

Yesterday, at Goerings Bookstore, I felt that sense of being in "writer home." Lauren Goff, author of The Monsters of Templeton, read to us and answered questions and told us about the two and a half failed novels and four drafts of this one that happened before it "happened."  This woman knows how to hunker down.  She also knows how to make an audience feel part of something.

Here's where it would be great to say I went home and wrote.  However, instead, I took another piece of Lauren's advice - she believes in the importance of naps. 

The Ice Cave by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

The subtitle is "A Woman's Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic."  Now, I haven't been more than four hundred miles from my home in over a decade, and my last plane flight was in the early nineties, but, nevertheless, Lucy Jane Bledsoe and I are fellow travelers.

Whether it's her listening for the breath of seals in the Antarctic or me, five miles from home, listening for the spring growling of alligators, we are both "greedy in my desire for this wilderness, this beauty, this ease between me and other species."

She also does so well what I try to do in my writing.  It's hard to explain.  It's about the reader, the audience for my work.  Sometimes, when I read a piece by, for instance, a disabled person, they clearly are writing to an able-bodied audience.  I am left out, discarded, as their reader. 

When I write about my life, being disabled or being a lesbian should just be.  I don't want to write those parts to anyone.  I don't want to be explaining anything.   

When Lucy Jane Bledsoe writes about her life, lesbians are not discarded.     

Pies, pies, pies

It's done!  The draft is done.  Not done, done, but done enough to send off to readers.  One copy went to an excellent critiquer and another to my main cheerleader.

Every writer needs a cheerleader.  Mine says every word I write is brilliant, and she bakes me a pie for each chapter.  I can't decide.  Apple is my favorite, but I'm thinking that blueberries are almost in season.

The chapter files are put away, and the submission folder is on my lap.  These days, I'm getting those good-writing-but-this-piece-not-quite-right-for-us-please-send-more rejections.  It's time to "send more."

Ohhh.  I forgot about key lime.