Eastern Iowans' Portraits in DC Until July

I'm very excited to be heading to DC this week for the opening of "Portrait Of Maquoketa" at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. Artist Rose Frantzen painted 180 portraits of her local townspeople in Maquoketa that will be on display through early July.

I met Rose and her artist husband Charles Morris about a year ago and had the pleasure of working with them over the spring and summer on their book, Portrait of Maquoketa, which is being sold online and will be sold at the Smithsonian gift shop while the exhibit runs in DC.

After I conducted a number of interviews with Rose last spring, I wrote an introductory essay for the book and helped her write and edit short reflections about the people, their portraits and her artistic process.

Later in the summer, I listened to Chuck read his essay aloud, which relates biographical information about Rose, discusses some of her other works besides Portrait of Maquoketa, and periodically reveals snapshots of what it must be like to be part of such an amazing marriage of two talented artists. Chuck not only wrote this marvelous essay that ends the book; he also labored on the layout design book all summer long. Then, together with Rose in the late summer and early fall, he saw the book through the many steps involved in the printing process.

The opportunity to work with these remarkable people was handed to me out of the blue from the Freelancing Gods via friend Al T., who thought my husband Chuck would enjoy Rose and Chuck. That's how freelancing can work sometimes -- opportunities sometimes just seem to fall from the sky.

So I'm feeling very lucky today as we prepare to head to DC tomorrow to see the exhibit at the Smithsonian, honor Rose, and celebrate the 180 Maquoketans whose faces will grace the halls of the National Portrait Gallery for the next 7.5 months.

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Art and Writing Matter

At my writing group last night, one member – I’ll call her Julia – said she was recovering from the flu. Possibly the dreaded H1N1, we decided after hearing about her symptoms. On one day, when she became dehydrated and nearly delirious, she said she kept torturing herself with the thought that her writing was worthless, that she should be spending her time doing something to “help people” instead. “I still am feeling that way a little bit,” she confessed. “It won’t quite go away.”

I know so well this tricky turn of mind, this saboteur, this ambivalence toward creating art that arrives with sickness or other vulnerabilities – an uncertain income, a move to a new city. The rest of us rallied for her, trying to dispel her grey sky that wouldn’t clear. “It helps people to write something that is cathartic for them to read.” “When we’re creating, we’re more alive, and when we’re more alive, we’re more useful to the world.” “Besides, we don’t choose our art; it chooses us. We create because we must.”

Someone asked Julia, “Is the act of writing important to you?” Suddenly our friend’s face shifted from worried to peaceful, residually sick to the picture of health, dark cloud to beaming light. “Of course,” she said, smiling.

When I took Eric Maisel’s class on creativity coaching, he asked us to begin each day by writing “I matter and my writing matters.”

Art does matter. Writing does matter. Of course.

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Take a Break

“In the relentless busyness of modern life,” Wayne Muller writes in Sabbath: Finding Rest and Renewal in Our Daily Lives (Bantam, 2000), “we have lost the rhythm between work and rest.” He explores the concept of “Sabbath” and its rituals and references in Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism. Muller says the Sabbath is celebrated in various forms because it is in our nature to need a day a week to rest, celebrate, delight in, and savor our lives. During the rest of the week we may be driven by work, tasks, and worries, but once a week we’re supposed to chill out.

A true Sabbath, he argues, is a day of reflection and a day of no activities done out of obligation. Whether your Sabbath is spent alone or with friends or family or the larger community, the only goal should be rest and renewal.

Which is why when my friend Sheri prefers to stay home from church on Sunday mornings to garden, I think she is taking a particularly special form of the Sabbath. And why this morning when I hiked along the Coralville Reservoir, thinking about John Muir’s enthusiasm for nature as the greatest of all temples, I too was “obeying” the Sabbath…as I was later this afternoon while working on my novel, feeling the warm sun coming in my office window, enjoying the rush of a scene coming alive on the page.

If you’re a creator – an artist, writer, gardener, musician – and if you’re looking for an excuse to work on that creative project you’ve shelved for awhile, just remember that you owe yourself – and life itself – a Sabbath at least once a week. If on that day you are creating with joy and peace and delight, you’re honoring the Sabbath.

On the other hand, sometimes we need a break from everything. Doing nothing is an option, too.

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Canna-tastic

All summer long our canna plants have vigorously grown broad leaves of light green or variegated burgundy and forest green. Now, finally, the plants have brought forth their flowers, which are bright red, but so disproportionately small that they look a little silly perched on top of those magnificent plants.

When I work on my novel, my creative process feels like the growing canna plant-in-progress – complex, broad, and expansive. I show up at the computer a little afraid of the blank page on the screen, yet something happens if I make myself sit there, even if just for a half hour. Miraculously, sometimes characters interact, plot develops, and the research I’ve been doing magically finds its way into the material. Once in awhile I’m so pleasantly surprised that I dance around the room, like Geoffrey Rush neurotic writer’s character in The Banger Sisters. Remember that scene? He’s all by himself in a hotel room; his words are flowing after a long period of writer’s block, and he’s absolutely full of joy.

But sometimes the next day, when I look at what I produced, it seems disproportionately small in comparison to the feelings of discovery I experienced the day before. Which begs the old question: do people who create like to create because of the feelings of limitless possibility that accompanies the creative process – the variegated leaves pushing toward the heavens – or because of the products we produce – those shy red flowers that don’t quite convey the heightened experience we had while creating them?

Maybe if the flowers were as large as the feelings the creator experienced while making them, it would just be too much excitement for the reader/viewer/listener to bear all at once.

It doesn’t always happen, but I sure love that rush that sometimes accompanies the creative process. Guess I’ll keep making stuff. It’s canna-tastic.

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Iowa Writing Coach: Poem in Your Pocket Day

Everyone should live near a resident poet. My husband, sons, and I were lucky to have that privilege from 1990-1996, when we lived across the street from Robert Dana and his equally wonderful wife, Peg.

Originally from Massachusetts, Robert attended Drake University and the Iowa Writers Workshop after serving in the South Pacific at the end of World War II. He taught 40 years as Poet-in-Residence at Cornell College. I didn’t realize until recently that he was the founding editor of the revived North American Review, one of my favorite literary journals. He’s published many books of poetry and has also has served two terms as Poet Laureate of Iowa.

Here’s what I learned from Robert during the six years we lived in his vicinity: Gardening is serious business, as is good food. Neighbors are to be greeted enthusiastically – and maybe worked into a poem now and then. Cats make good fodder for poetry, too, and can shade a poem with humor, or lightness, or darkness, or all three. It is an honor to be invited to help proof a poet’s galleys while he reads them out loud, but you’ll be nervous as hell and will wonder if you’re doing it right. And…you don’t have to be religious to see the miracle in the everyday. In fact, too much looking for God can mean missing “air raw with rain” or “the dead blue crab in all its electric raiment.”

Cheers to Robert Dana on Poem in Your Pocket Day. When he read at Cornell College two nights ago, he told the audience that of all his lines of poetry, the last line in the following poem is his wife Peg’s favorite. I think it’s mine now, too.

“Chimes”

Mid-August. Evening. Rain falling.

Cold, bright silk where the street fronts the house.

Out back, it laves and slicks the parched leaves of the trees.
Ragged hang of summer’s end.

I lean against the doorway of the poem,
listening to old patter.

My cat, Zeke, lays himself out imperially.
Eleven pounds of grey smoke
with tufted ears and a curved plume of tail.

Now, a slight wind,
and The Emperor of Heaven’s chimes intone like distant bells,
his court musician’s 4000-year-old pentatonic scales
pealing in slow, clear ripples.

Occasionally, a chord.

Every day I live I live forever.

--From The Morning of the Red Admirals (Anhinga Press, 2004) by Robert Dana

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Creating and Mate-ing

I’ve always known that my husband Chuck and I are at our best when we’re doing something creative together. We especially enjoyed the creative project of raising our two sons together. Since they’ve grown up, however, Chuck and I have struggled to find another way to collaborate. He likes to cook but I would rather eat his delicacies than make them together. I like to draw; he appreciates visual art but doesn’t create it. We’re both writers but we work in very different genres.

After a few years of looking for the right avenue of co-expression, I think we may have found it: making podcasts for a blog we’re calling “foragers on the edge.” We’re just getting it up and running, but so far we’ve had great fun creating two short podcasts: one on our dance lessons at an Arthur Murray studio in the Quad Cities, and the other on a recent trip to the Quad City Botanical Center.

Here are some of the new things I’m learning and relearning from and about my mate of 33 years: 1) our peculiar qualities that can sometimes be considered flaws quickly turn into assets when we create together, such as his way of plunging ahead and my way of doing and re-doing until it feels closer to right; 2) there are some pretty cool (and free) services out there for creating podcasts, including Audacity (free audio editor and recorder) and Clickcaster (podcast storage site); and 3) damn, we have fun when we make things together!

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Talking Yourself into Creating

What do you do when an idea for a novel (or painting or other creative work) drops out of the sky, but after the first few flushes of loving the work, you stop believing that the work is valuable? What you do is you talk yourself into creating.

Here’s how my own talk-on-paper went this morning:

Why am I stalled after the fourth chapter of this novel? Well, first, there’s the nagging doubt that it will amount to anything. Then there’s the feeling that working on the novel is just a big excuse not to be doing the long list of things I should be doing, like prospecting for “real” writing work that pays the bills (like marketing publications).

And yet at the same time, when I think about my real desire in life, isn’t it to write books? And aren’t I lucky to have this idea for a book, the writing of which could mean joy and respite from a long cold winter – not to mention a tax deduction for dancing lessons AND a few trips to California, since both are needed for research?

At the very least, couldn’t this novel be a practice ground for future novels to come? I have one bad novel under my belt; why not two? Isn’t this idea for the novel actually a total gift?

As I talked to myself on paper, it became increasingly clear that with my drive to write the novel, I was being gifted with a classic “meaning adventure,” a phrase coined by Eric Maisel in The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person’s Path through Depression (New World Library, 2002). In this book, Maisel argues that creators tend to deal more often with existential questions about meaning because we are individualists who doubt traditional wisdom and insist on providing our own answers to questions of meaning. This quality, of course, leaves us vulnerable to meaning crises – even depression. However, because we are creative, we also have amazing opportunities for meaning adventures – such as I am experiencing by talking myself into continuing to work on the novel.

Sometimes you just have to remind yourself how lucky you are to be driven to create, and to have something in mind to create. Indeed, ideas for new projects are both a gift and an adventure.

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