Sandra Gail Lambert

Planning for the Future

Here's something for all of us no-book-published-yet writers.  You know how we imagine being interviewed?  Don't deny it.  I, in the midst of a plot doldrum, will veer off into a full-blown, mouthing the words enactment of that glorious day when Diane Rhem and I are chatting on the radio.  She's asking me insightful questions (about this book that in real life I haven't written yet) and I'm answering them with a dazzling articulateness (so unlikely in real life).  Off-air she says wants to be my friend and shall we go for coffee.  Sigh. 

Hey, it could happen.  And here's a great training video.  It's Tayari Jones' TV interview about her just-released-in-paperback novel Silver Sparrow.  Now, this is how it's done - genuine, informative, and gracious.      

Bridges and Borders - Jane's Stories Press Foundation's Upcoming Anthology

Bridges and Borders is the Jane's fourth anthology.  (And I'll be included!)  It's almost ready to go, but they could use a last bit of cash.  Here's their Kickstarter site.  Donate because Jane's Stories has done so many years of worthy, much needed work to promote women's writing .  Donate because the sultry-voiced Glenda in the video below tells you to.  (Really, doesn't her voice make you want to purr.) And donate because you'll end up getting to read all these stories. 

Bacopa: A Literary Review - Another Reason to be Glad You Live in Gainesville

Were you at this weekend's unveiling of the latest Bacopa?  If not, you missed something quite grand.  Each year the Writers Alliance of Gainesville's Editorial Team produces Bacopa: A Literary Review, and it is fast gaining a reputation for excellence.  Last year's volume was well-reviewed in New Pages ("Strong first lines.  That's the enviable trait . . . ")  The 2012 issue is also beautifully produced and chock-full of talented writers.   

WAG has monthly meetings and this one was given over to a celebration of the newest issue.  The editors shared selections from an international array of authors and local contributors like Stephanie Seguin, Mary Bast, Bruce Hoch, Mary Bridgman, and Tad Karmazyn read to us.  We responded with the deserved celebratory applause.  

Afterwards I tried to go tell each and every one of the editors what a good job they'd done, but I missed a few.  So Denise Ahlberg, Jani Sherrard, Pranada Comtois, Gen Aris, Kaye Linden, Dorothy Staley, and Eldon Turner - thank you. 

Next month's WAG meeting (Sunday, June 24th, 2:30pm at the Millhopper Library), which is open to non-members, will present Sidney Wade - one of my favorite poets.    

The suitcases are out and waiting. Three weeks left to pack.

In case you were wondering, Beall's Outlet Store has a fine selection of writing mumus.  I just brought some home and all the chicken/head cut off pacing the house and scribbling lists in the kitchen, by the TV, at my bedside anxiety is gone.  I'm set.  I'm ready.  The mumus and that stack of yellow pads already in a suitcase - that's all I need.  

Well, I should probably also pack some jeans and shirts and refills for my pens and the transfer bar for the tub and that little pillow that fits into my lower back and bras since I may never relax enough to wander over for the communal breakfast in just a mu-mu.  And earrings.  And a power strip.  And printer ink.  And a flashlight because it's important to always have a flashlight, don't you think?  And there's more.  The list beside the computer is the longest. 

    

Post-acceptance

So, I thought, this is it.  After getting accepted to an artist's colony, one just doesn't write anything at all anymore.  Why hadn't someone warned me?  But, of course, with relief, there was a morning when I revised an essay rather than listen to another Tell Me More podcast while I played solitaire.  And a next morning when I worked on the first chapter of a novel.  And another day when I poked around on the essay some more.  It was like a train's slow chugging forward from a standstill.  But these last days have been all errands and social events.  For sure, this isn't an express train.  

And why all the train allusions?  Probably because right this moment five weeks from now, I'll be snuggling into my bunk bed in the Amtrak Superliner accessible bedroom.  It's the first leg of my journey north to Saratoga Springs.  And it is an express train. 

Cockles and Mussels, Alive, Alive-O!

She's not a pretty Molly Malone from Dublin like in the song my mother used to sing, but here's a photo of a real fish monger in London in the 1800's.  John Thompson used this then brand new technology to record the lives of chimney sweeps, merchant women, maids, travelers, and shoeshine boys. 

My mother was from London.  Her dad was from Wales, but her mum, she was a many-generation Londoner.  My great grandmother could be one of the kids in these photos.  Not could in the general sense, but actually be that little girl yearning for baubles.  It makes me want to write something.  I don't know what yet. 

   

Inspirational Quotes

"I hate to bludgeon you about the head and neck with a hammer forged in the volcanic fires of Mount Obvious, but the only way you can finish something is by not stopping.  That story isn’t going to unfuck itself" -- Sage and profanity-laden advice from Chuck Wendig.  Repeating the last sentence is an especially helpful way to get oneself out of bed. 

Yaddo! Happy Freakin' 60th Birthday to Me.

It was like being a senior in High School waiting for news about colleges.  I was at the mailbox, expecting the rejection like always these past four years, ready with my Plan B of putting together some sort of on-my-own writing retreat this summer, and I saw the envelope with Yaddo's return address.  "That is a big envelope," I thought.  I held it awhile.  It was big and it had heft.  I slit open the top and slid the papers out past the letterhead, date, my return address, and the salutation.  The phrase "pleased to invite you" came into view. 

So in June, a few days after my 60th birthday, I'll be heading to Saratoga Springs for a six week residency at Yaddo. (For my non-writer friends - this is a big deal.  Check out the list of alumni.) 

All of you writers with Yaddo experience, especially any of you who use wheelchairs, send advice my way.  And such big thanks to you alumni who provided references.  

Crime Fiction Read-Along

I've "internet known" Juliet Grames for many years, and she's always coming up with ways to form community around books and reading.  Her newest idea is a read-along crime fiction project.  I'm thrilled since the read-along she organized for Middlemarch was pretty much the most fun you can have in an online bookclub.  And now, as a senior editor at Soho Press, she's decided she needs to understand more about the origins of crime fiction and its modern influences.  She's inviting us all to spend a year with her doing just this.  Juliet has read fifty of the classic crime novels to prepare, and she'll choose ten of them for this project.   Here's a Books On the Night Stand podcast interview with her about it all. 

The first read is a short story - Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue."  The discussion will be on March 20th, but before that, also on the Soho Press Blog, Juliet will post some, probably juicy, backstory on the story.  

I'm sure we'll have a great discussion of what it is in mysteries that satisfies us as readers.  But also, for me, a writer who doesn't always have the strongest plots (Hah!  I'm being way kind to myself here.), I'm hoping to have some of the craft rub off and into my next novel.      

  

Another Essay - Done.

Well, not done, done.  It doesn't have a title, one paragraph transition is so problematic that I'm thinking perhaps the whole section about gagging has to come out, I use the word "perhaps" way too many times, some of the sentences are overwrought, and I'm thinking perhaps (g) the tone jerks around too much.  But it has a beginning, middle, and what I right now think is a perfect end.  I got to have that surge of joyful completion as I smacked out the letters of the final word. (Which was "that."  You had to be there.)   

Thoughts While Essay Writing This Morning

"Why am I writing about my arm hurting?  It doesn't fit in anywhere."  "Is it okay to swear in an essay?"  "This part has to go - it'll make readers cringe in embarrassment for me."  "It might not even be true."  "I'll write it and then plan on deleting."  "Boring and stupid, boring and stupid, boring and stupid."  This won't ever come together into anything, ever."  "Maybe I'll make tuna fish for lunch."  "Ohhhhhh, that's a nice little transition."  "And what if I flip these paragraphs?"  "And then this cringy part would slip right in here." "Damn."  "I should walk the dog now."             

I Love a Syllabus

I've spent the morning immersed and thrilled by lists of class descriptions.  This summer I turn sixty, and a friend told me this means I can audit University classes for free.  (She's got hers all picked out.)  I don't think they'll let me into any of the MFA workshops, but still there is undergraduate Fiction Writing.  And all those other classes that will only improve my writing - Surveys in American Women's Literature!  Asian-American Studies!  The Folktale!  A whole term studying Zora Neale Hurston!  Or Chaucer!  Caribbean Literature! 

I can't wait until the Fall list of courses is released ( in March).  I can't wait to be holding a syllabus.  Really, it's exciting the way they have everything itemized and scheduled class by class  And list required readings.  And suggested readings.  And order you to write papers.  As someone who teaches herself things, it's comforting to leave the driving to someone else.   

Tales of the New World by Sabina Murray

How do you have a collection of "page-turning" short stories chock-full of mystery, murder, and mayhem that are also deep explorations of philosophy, history, and politics?  Oh, and often the words come one after another in those smooth strands of enchantment reminiscent of a prose poem. 

Really, how did Sabina Murray do this in her Tales of the New World?  I'm re-reading sections to figure that out.  If you see the collection somewhere, just pick it up and turn to the Balboa story.  It's short.  You can read it through right there.  It will mess up your mind - in that good way.  

I always like to say how I heard about a book - its provenance, sort of.  On her Facebook status Susan Stinson just outright ordered us to read Tales of the New World.  I found that our fabulous library had a copy.  And that was that. Although I might go buy a copy so I'm able to loan it out myself.       

The History of My Van

In 1997, I bought a 1992, already w/c lift-equipped, van.  The man who owned it had died.  His mother sobbed when she handed the keys over.  His sister whispered that the first day he drove it, he came by her house and said "Get in, drunken road trip to the Keys."  And she did.  And off they went. 

And off I've gone.  Many years it's to the Everglades.   Natural disasters have interfered - Hurricane Wilma, my mother's illness, times when my equipment (manual wheelchair to scooter to power chair) hadn't yet caught up to what I needed.  But this year I took along a friend and I managed.  

We kayaked among orchids and crocodiles.  We took long walks past bushes covered in a snow of butterflies.  We (not really me, actually) pulled my chair through the sea wrack thrown up from the Florida Bay.  Rafts of shorebirds flew past us at eye level.  And I wrote.  I wrote with a thrilled satisfaction I've not had in a while. 

The van has 145,000 miles on it now which by my calculations is just a little older than me in my human mileage.  More road trips are in our future.  I can still smell rotting seaweed in the wheelchair's axles.  So, despite my lack of drinking, the best I can, I figure I've been doing right by the spirit of the van.      

   

Wake Up Without Losing the Dream

In this video, Henry Miller annoyingly talks over, corrects, and patronizes Anais Nin and she, annoyingly, lets him. Still, brilliant misogynist writers can inspire me. Miller instructs us on how to "wake up without losing the dream" in the most practical of terms (don't open your eyes all the way, stumble to your typewriter, etc.) but, for me, the phrase had different resonance.

I think that's because I'm heading off to the Everglades this week. Kayaking past mangroves trees that bear live young or over mats of periphyton where bacteria can photosynthisize or reaching up towards epiphytic cactus that wrap themselves around the branches of watery poison wood trees - it is a dream, a delicate one. Those same mangrove trees are diminished by rising waters and the sensitive periphyton is our first and best indicator of nutrient damage. "To wake up without losing the dream" seems to me a way we can travel through the natural world balancing joy and despair.

 

Horror in the Okefenokee

Here's another bit of my writing.  This one's a humorous (at least I hope it is) essay.

Horror in the Okefenokee

I'm sitting on a lump of cold flesh. Six hours of kayaking and a chilly day for South Georgia means the only reason I know my backside is there is because it always has been. Can you get frostbite on your butt? I decide you can't, but am planning an immediate precautionary hot shower as I paddle out of the swamp and up the canal to the marina. My wheelchair is still standing sentinel at the boat ramp.

I wedge the kayak between the uneven cinder blocks at the bottom of the ramp. Now all I have to do is roll out of the boat, scooch over the concrete, balance on all fours, raise onto my knees, and twist into the seat of my wheelchair. I prefer to do this with no one watching since sometimes people act funny when I crawl by. Besides, an observer always makes something go awry – like losing my shoes or trapping one breast under the seat on my way up. Either way, I'll do it. I let nothing interfere with a good day on the water.

Before I can start my roll over the side, a smartly uniformed ranger appears at the top of the ramp. He chats about the weather. He asks about my trip. How many alligators? Any otters? He lingers. Knees to chest, arms clasped around them to stop the shivering, I try to wait him out. In the middle of his story about the year it snowed, I abandon modesty and make my moves. More than once, I am butt-first in his direction.

Panting and finally sitting face forward in my chair, I smile at the ranger. His neck and face are sweaty and red. His expression is professionally bland, but I can see the horror underneath. Eyes averted, he mutters something and walks away, disappearing over the top of the ramp. This pisses me off. So what that I don't move the way he does. Why can't people just deal with, admire even, someone figuring out how to do whatever it is they want to do? Screw him.

It isn't until I am at my campsite, blood returning to my backside, that I feel something cold and bare. Have I mentioned that I don't use underwear kayaking? It gets wet. It bunches.

Squirming from side to side, I strip off the thread-worn, used only for kayaking pants. I hold them in front of me. Except for three frayed strips of material, the seat is gone. That last trip along the concrete was too much for it, and I had been left exposed. I picture my butt pointed at the ranger with the ragged remains of the pants stretched across it and looking not unlike a balding man's bad combover.

I was unfair in my assumptions about that ranger, and I'm going to have to apologize to him – but only mentally. Anything else will be too embarrassing for the both of us.

Originally published in Breath and Shadow.

My Last Read of the Year

"Everything is root and mud and twist."  This is how Janisse Ray describes the deep swamp in Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River.  This is a perfect description of a southern swamp, told with a perfect construction of a sentence, and it made me crawl out of my warm bed and go write. 

And tonight I'll read further into her tale of kayaking the length of a river, a river protected by Riverkeepers, her home river, a river, formed by the joining of the Ocmulgee and Oconee, that is the largest free-flowing, intact water system on the Atlantic coast. 

And this will be the last book I put on my "What I've Read - 2011" list.  Adding the 2012 heading, seeing it here on the side of the blog with nothing, as yet, underneath it, thinking about the books still in their final edits that might end up listed, the books waiting, well-worn, on library shelves - well, it's a Happy New Year for all.      

Kissimmee Prairie Preserve - as good as any of those writers retreats

I went camping and came home with a decent draft of a new short story and the mushy beginnings of an essay.  Not bad.  The morning seranades by meadowlarks and the wild turkeys that wandered through my campsite helped.  And let's not forget the loggerhead shrikes, the crested caracaras, the woodstorks, the bob whites, the insatiable butterflies, the snipes (yes, they are real), and the mama alligators that kept living their lives all around me.

And many thanks to the staff (paid and volunteer) of Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park who are devoted to the restoration of this ancient landscape. 

Oh, and check out my new wheelchair . 

Writing in the "Real Florida"

A good part of my writing has been done at one or the other of the state parks of Florida, but it's been awhile. So I'm thrilled that this year I've tuned up, cleaned out, and packed my 1992 Ford Econoline Club Wagon that has the back seats ripped out to fit in a platform bed with six inches of foam mattress topped by an egg-crate and that topped with a quilt and five pillows - my writing bower.

The old gal of a van and I are off to Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park. Here's a landscape that epitomizes the "Visit the Real Florida" motto of our State Park System.

Arts & Letters

Let me, a little writing mouse who keeps pushing those levers hoping for a pellet, tell you that intermittent reinforcement is powerful, exciting, and perhaps even addictive. My most recent pellet has arrived in the form of an acceptance from Arts & Letters.

This was my first ever not-just-sent-through-the-slush-pile-and-wait-four-months-to-hear-back submission. What happened was that I participated in a group reading at a conference (Jane's Stories Retreat), an editor from Arts & Letters heard me, she asked me to send her something, I did, and voila, eight days later it was accepted. Freaky, huh? And I have to thank Jane's Stories Press Foundation for all their support.

Anyway, I'm a happy rodent.