The Inspiration Series #5: Author Melinda Clayton

Melinda Clayton and I share a publisher, Vanilla Heart Publishing. She is an amazing talent: her two novels, Appalachian Justice and Return to Crutcher Mountain, were written while she was pursuing her doctoral degree.

Melinda has an Ed.D. in Special Education Administration, and is a licensed psychotherapist in the states of Florida and Colorado.  Her vast experience working in the field of mental health gives her a unique perspective on human behaviors, and she likes to explore this dynamic in her writing.  Melinda lives in central Florida with her husband, two children, and various cats.

Here is her take on creative inspiration:

Back in the 1980s, student life at the University of Memphis (then known as Memphis State University) centered on the huge courtyard in the center of campus. What I remember most about the courtyard are the people. Sprawled on steps and benches, sitting in the shade of massive trees, perched on the sides of concrete planters, people chatted, studied, listened to impromptu political speeches and philosophical debates…or did what I did: sat quietly and observed.

“People watching,” an article in the school paper called it, and I remember the feeling of belonging I had when reading the article. As long as I can remember, I’ve enjoyed taking a seat in the back corner and observing the world around me. I’m inspired by people. More accurately, I’m inspired by what motivates people to do the things they do. We’re a fascinating, multifaceted, complicated lot.

The boy I see walking to school every morning, the one who’s always smiling and snapping his fingers to an internal beat. The elderly gentleman pushing a baby stroller, the red-haired twin boys on the run, the middle-aged woman with earphones who enthusiastically aerobicizes her way around the block: these things make me wonder; they spark my imagination and inspire me.

In the 1950s, psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham came up with the Johari Window as a means of explaining the four basic forms of self.

Picture a window with four frames:

1. The first frame stands for what you and I both know about me (public knowledge).
2. The second frame stands for what you know about me, that I don’t know about myself (my blind spot).
3. The third frame stands for what I’m deliberately keeping hidden from you.
4. The fourth frame stands for what neither of us knows about me.

That second frame is what inspires (and fascinates) me the most. We all have a blind spot. It could be something as simple as a verbal or physical tic of which we’re not aware (but everyone else is), or something as complicated as our tendency to unconsciously sabotage relationships with those we love. When we aren’t conscious of our motivations––when we aren’t aware of our blind spot––we can run into trouble.

That’s a dynamic I love to explore in my writing. Carl Jung wrote: When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate. The characters in my novel-in-progress would have kept Jung busy for a very long time. Unconscious motivations, difficult choices, and unresolved conflicts: the human psyche at work. That’s inspiring.

 

You can find Melinda t http://authormelindaclayton.xanga.com.

NEXT WEEK: Author Debra Brenegan

On Missing My Characters

The past few days, I’ve been experiencing a terrible lethargy. I don’t seem to be able to get off the couch, and I’ve been sleeping almost around the clock. I’ve been blaming my medication, but this morning, I realized what the real problem is: I’m grieving.

That’s right: grieving. I no longer wake up in the morning and think, “I wonder what Otter and Sun Song and Wendy will do today?” I no longer bounce out of bed, eager to get to my computer and wake up my characters. Their story, The Storyteller’s Bracelet, is done; they’ve moved on to where they now belong—to my publisher, Vanilla Heart Publishing, where they are in the process of being edited and formatted and safely tucked between the covers of my book, which is set to be released June 23.

This was my goal, of course. Doesn’t every author want to finish their book, to say goodbye to their characters? To move on to another project, and create new characters?

I read a quote somewhere that said something along the lines of, “Children are the only thing we acquire during our lifetime with the sole intention of eventually letting them go.” But if you’re an author, that’s not true. We create characters. We write their stories, and when we finish, we set them free, send them out into the world.

And just like we miss our kids when they leave the nest, we miss our characters. I remember feeling these exact same emotions when I finished On the Choptank Shores. I saw Grace and Otto and Miriam everywhere. I longed to visit Virginia and reconnect with Elizabeth and James-Cyrus and Cora when I finished The Cabin. I especially grieved characters who died in my books. And guilty! How could I have sent such wonderful people—I mean, characters—to their deaths?

So I grieve for a while. But then, my publisher sends me a galley to look over. She sends me bookmarks to pass out, publicizing the new book. And slowly, the grief gives way to excitement, to an ecstasy, about the release of a new novel.

My beloved daughter Robin is moving out of the house in August to attend University of California—Irvine, where she’ll be a junior in their theatre program. I’m going to miss her terribly when she goes, as I miss her older brother, who lives in Chicago. It’s okay for me to miss my children when they are gone. It’s to be expected; I gave birth to them. They are a big part of me.

My beautiful Robin, at age 3 and at age 21

And for now—for a few more days, or weeks, or however long it takes—I’m going to allow myself to miss Otter and Sun Song and Wendy, because they, too, are a big part of me. My children may be the creation of my body, but the characters in my books are the creations of my mind. And while my children have an entire lifetime ahead of them, my characters’ story is finished, and I can’t wait to hold a copy of The Storyteller’s Bracelet in my hands when it is released in late June.

Of course, I have more characters in my mind who are itching to have their stories told. Clarissa in The Madame of Bodie, my latest work in progress, is highly indignant that I shoved her and her story aside to finish The Storyteller’s Bracelet. She’s been reproaching me from a corner of my mind for months now, and I know that, soon, I’m going to have to start listening to her, letting her story flow through my mind and out my fingertips and onto paper. (Okay, onto my computer, but that just doesn’t sound as prosaic.)

Clarissa’s home in The Madam of Bodie

I know I will soon fall in love with Clarissa and her cast of characters, and Otter and Sun Song and Wendy will take their permanent places between the covers of The Storyteller’s Bracelet. I won’t love them less because I’m not working with them each day. After all, they’re my children. I created them. They’ll always hold a special place in my heart.

Some Thoughts on Nature Writing

One of the things I’m best known for as a writer is my ability to transport people to wild and beautiful places through my words. Nature writing comes naturally to me, because all my life, I have spent every spare moment I can outdoors, usually barefoot, always with my eyes and ears wide open, taking in the sights and sounds of all that is wild around me. And there has always been something wild around me, even when I lived in urban areas. I just had to know where to look for it.

I’m not talking only about my nature essays in Observations of an Earth Mage. I’m also talking about describing the river in On the Choptank Shores and the mountain forests in The Cabin. I’m talking about describing the canyonlands of the desert southwest in my soon-to-be-released The Storyteller’s Bracelet.

It doesn’t matter if you consider yourself a nature writer or not. If you write, you write setting descriptions, and chances are, at some point in time or another, you’ll be writing about a rural setting, or a thunderstorm, or a sunset, or the night sky, which means you are a nature writer—at least, sometimes.

The most important thing you can do to enhance your nature writing skills is learn to be observant. Get up with the sun one morning. Pour yourself your morning coffee or tea, and go sit on your back deck, or front porch. Close your eyes. What do you hear? What do you smell? It’s important to close your eyes before doing this exercise because your senses will be enhanced if you don’t see what you’re hearing or smelling.

When I do this—and I do it almost every morning—I have to fight with the sound of airplanes overhead (I live right beneath the landing pattern for LAX airport) and traffic down on the 60 freeway in order to hear the song sparrows, the lesser goldfinches, and the fussy hummingbirds. This is a skill I learned several years ago: it is as important to learn what not to hear or see as what to hear and see. You have to learn to block out the noise in order to find nature.

How do I do this? Meditation, mostly. I close my eyes and focus my hearing on searching for one particular bird song—usually a song sparrow, because we have lots of them on our hill. Once I find the song sparrow’s sweet melody, I focus all my energy on that. I let all energy outside that focus go blurry so I hear the sparrow and only the sparrow. Once I’ve done this, I am able to let in the sweet melody of the lesser goldfinches, the fuss of the hummingbirds, and the confused warble of the tiny wrens that live in our oak trees.

Sunrise from my back deck.

Now that the birdsong has it’s place in my head, I open my eyes. What do I see? Once again, my focus is on nature, so I block out all that is of human design. I focus on the enormous scrub oak trees above and below my house. I scan the trees and brush for the birds I’ve been listening to, and watch as the hummingbirds battle one another for position at the hummer feeder. I scan the hill to see what is in bloom—potato bush with its intense purple blossoms, the California buckeye’s creamy white clusters of blooms, and the sunny yellow Scotch broom checker the hillside. Down below in the valley, jacaranda trees are blooming. Their soft lavender flowers make it look like there are purple clouds covering the valley. If my eyes happen to catch a house down below, I quickly shift my focus back to the oaks.

Once I’ve taken in what there is to see, I let my sense of smell take over—not hard when the California buckeye and Scotch broom are blooming, because the whole hillside smells like the inside of a perfume bottle. But there is more than the almost cloyingly sweet fragrance of the flower blossoms. Take a deep breath. Smell the Earth herself—does she smell slightly decayed, like wet leaves on the forest floor? Or sweet, like a mountain stream? Either is okay; there is no right or wrong way for the Earth to smell. The desert smells different than the ocean or the mountains.

It takes practice to learn to block out what is not nature, and undoubtedly, it’s more difficult to do this if you live in a city than in a more rural area. But if you practice this technique on a daily basis, and soon you’ll be writing those setting descriptions with an adept hand.

Inspiration Series: Author Patricia Damery

I met Patricia Damery after reading her marvelous novel, Snakes. I wrote a review of the book (read it here), but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to know the author behind the novel, so I asked if I could interview her (read our conversation here), to which she graciously agreed. We’ve been friends ever since, albeit virtual friends. Her protagonist in Snakes, Angela, was a woman I could identify with, for I went through many of the same trials as she. Patricia writes not only from the heart, but from the soul and spirit. Here is her take on what inspires her:

How Snakes Inspired Me to Write a Novel

Snakes, my first book-length project, was inspired 28 years ago by a huge, patterned serpent who appeared to me during a writing exercise in the very first meeting of my writing group, Thursday Night Writers. In the exercise we were to meet our inner critic and write a dialogue. I was shocked when this serpent appeared and even more so when she—for it was a she— said to me, “Just describe the patterns on my body.” That seemed easy enough, without too much ambition, for my inner critic was way too tied up in ambition.

The “patterns” were snake stories that I had heard growing up on a small farm in the Midwest, some of them my own experiences. They carried the energy of surprise, excitement and terror, and disgust that snakes often bring. My writing group loved the stories, reflecting what was lively and what needed to be developed; very much like the serpent of my vision, not critical, just encouraging me to describe what I saw.

The Midwestern farm where the author grew up, painted by her father.

We had among us a poet with quite a following, for these were the days in Sonoma County when poetry readings were attended like rock concerts. We did a reading in a local bookstore, riding in on her glory. The room was packed. I read my snake stories. It was like throwing a ball back and forth with the audience, my reading, their laughing, or gasping. This was inspiring too!—having an audience. I knew then I wanted to publish. Afterward several told me their own snake stories, which I also wrote down.

This is a novel! my writing group exclaimed. Yes, a plot was forming, one that wove the stories together. The challenges of my own life were inspiring me as well: my growing sons, the pain of separation from small farm life to diverse California, the ongoing snake dreams and experiences with which my psyche continued to be inundated. The Jungian analyst in me questioned: What are these stories really about? I read snake mythology, went to the herpetology department in the bowels of the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park of San Francisco, researching, searching for what was drawing me. Searching is inspiring.

Angela, my protagonist, became more and more real to me; she had a life of her own and this autonomy was also inspiring. I felt like a voyeur, what was she up to now?

The poet in Thursday Night Writers connected me with an agent who wanted to see Snakes immediately. This was the late 1980s and publishing was changing. Small houses were being bought up by larger ones, and this agent said the window of time to publish a novel was closing. She pushed. I wasn’t ready, but I let her read what I had.

Weaving together many snake stories, mythologies, and dreams into a coherent storyline with flashbacks is difficult and can easily lose the reader. The agent gave me very good feedback, however: not to worry about the standard formula for plot, but to realize this is a circular story, with its seasons, but as a circular story, all parts need to relate to the center.

This inspired me! So I set about rewriting, feeling for the elusive, unseen center. I read Christopher Alexander’s book, A Timeless Way of Building, during this time, and it gave me direction on how to proceed.

By the time I had rewritten Snakes, the agent was no longer representing novels. After a million rejections I found another agent who got more rejections. This is the non-inspirational part of writing! Snakes went on a shelf as my inspiration followed other paths: by the garbage I found on my daily walks (Goatsong, to be published Summer 2012). I entered a challenging certification program, presenting me with events I could never have thought up (inspiring Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation, 2010).

Then one day, several years later, my office mate found a living snake in our office mailbox! Once again, I was inspired by snakes—this time to get Snakes in the mail!—the rest is history!

Patricia Damery’s novel Snakes was published in 2011 by Fisher King Press, making her a happy person! She has published numerous articles, a handful of poems, as well as a controversial account of her analytic training and simultaneous entry into Biodynamic farming: Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation. Her second novel, Goatsong, is to be published in the summer of 2012. With Naomi Lowinsky she also co-edited an anthology, Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way, April 2012, stories of Jungian analysts’ and teachers’ inspirations for their life paths. She is a Jungian analyst and maintains two blogs: patriciadamery.com and harmsfarmlog.com.

NEXT WEEK: Author Melinda Clayton

On Finishing The Storyteller’s Bracelet

Friday, I finished writing my third novel, The Storyteller’s Bracelet. I’ve been saying for weeks, “Almost done; almost there.” Well, I arrived. The end. Finished.

Of course, reaching the end isn’t truly the end. I have some edits to make; I have to go back and do a self edit and spell check before sending it off to my real editor. But the story is done and will be at the Vanilla Heart Publishing offices before the first of June.

This is the book that almost wasn’t. During the time it has taken me to write it I got a divorce from my husband of 18 years; sold my home and moved to California without having any idea where I’d live and with a dog, two cats, a guinea pig, and a moody 17-year-old daughter in tow; met Scott and got married again, this time to my absolute soul mate; and have been hospitalized at least three times for gall bladder and liver surgery, knee replacement surgery, and  a shattered shoulder. I’ve suffered the loss of my beloved Chia dog and our little guinea pig, Doodle. I’ve adopted a Chihuahua and a kitten that fell out of what we call a kitten bush, although most people call it oleander.

Is it any wonder I got discouraged and nearly gave up on this book?

It’s not that I was sitting around doing nothing. During the past four years I wrote Observations of an Earth Mage, Smoky’s Writer’s Workshop Combo Set, and my Short Story Collection Vol. 1. But the novel? No way. I even told my publisher I was going to quit writing completely.

My publisher replied with a firm, “No, you aren’t. Take as much time as you need, but you will be back. I know you’ll be back. And VHP will be here when you return.”

Of course, she was right. What I needed was a break. What I needed was respite. What I needed was time alone with my new husband, Scott, time when I was at least mostly healthy, time to play with the other art forms that call me, time to spend getting to know my stepchildren, time to figure out who this new Smoky was—the Smoky who lived in a charming shack in the hills with her forever husband, the Smoky who was dealing with homesickness for the Midwest while falling in love with California, the Smoky who became the Earth Mage.

What exactly brought me back to the novel, I don’t know. I remember one day thinking, “I know what’s wrong with the plot!” and rushing to my computer and deleting half the book. That fixed the problem, for sure. But it also left a huge hole in the manuscript. I trusted my senses. I closed my eyes and allowed my mind to travel to that place in my head where words are born, and before I knew it, the novel was flowing from my fingertips. Kimberlee at Vanilla Heart asked for a synopsis; she got four pages. Now I truly knew where I was headed. Every day, I’d write a chapter or two for each paragraph of the synopsis, until Friday, when at last I reached The End. I couldn’t be happier with how this book turned out. It screams for a sequel. We’ll see.

Yesterday, to celebrate the completion of the book, we took a day trip, a picnic, up to Big Bear Lake in the San Gorgonio mountains. We took little Tufa, our Chihuahua puppy, who loved romping through the long grass at the edge of the lake, but was terrified of the water itself.

Smoky comforting a frightened little Tufa

The wallflower was in bloom. Wallflower smells something like a mix between lilac and citrus blossoms. Tufa has always loved to smell flowers.

Tufa sniffing wallflower

We hiked one of our favorite trails that edges the lake, then heads off into the cedar and pines and up to the Pacific Crest Trail. We didn’t hike that far; neither Scott nor I were dressed properly for that long a hike, plus we were feeling the altitude. It had been a long time since we’ve hiked at an altitude over 7,000 feet, and we were feeling it.

It felt good to relax. I could feel my blood pressure dropping, I swear I could. I nearly fell asleep in the car on the way home. Solar eclipse? Who cares. I was too tired, that’s for sure.

I planned to take some time off between books. My next project is finishing my WIP, The Madam of Bodie, a book set in the gold mining town of Bodie during the California Gold Rush. I was going to take off some time, finish some half-completed art projects, explore some new places with Scott, like maybe Death Valley National Park, or maybe even drive up to Northern California for a week or two.

But you know what? I woke up this morning with itchy fingers. They don’t know what to do with themselves, now that The Storyteller’s Bracelet is done. My fingers tell me they are grateful for the break I gave them yesterday. They thank me for dipping them in icy cold mountain lake water, and for embracing the rough bark of an ancient, wind-twisted cedar tree.

And now, today, they are telling me to get back to work. Novels don’t write themselves, you know.

Inspiration Series: Author Malcolm Campbell on The World of Wonder

Malcolm Campbell

Malcolm Campbell and I have been friends ever since I edited his first novel, Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire, for our publisher. In the ensuing years, we have discovered a shared intuition about the sacredness of our Mother the Earth. It is a frequent theme for both of us, although we write about it in vastly different ways.

An author of contemporary fantasy and magical realism novels, including Sarabande and The Sun Singer, Malcolm R. Campbell has been greatly changed by the voice of the wild in Florida’s Tate’s Hell Swamp and nearby Gulf coast, the Blue Ridge Parkway and Appalachian Trail, the 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado, and the stair-step valleys of Montana’s Glacier National Park.

It’s with great pleasure I present Malcolm and his views on what inspires him.

World of Wonder

“Walk gently here, brother to the grizzly bear and eagle, for the trails through this fragile ecosystem are trails through consciousness—the gem that catches the cascading light in the center of this crown of shining mountains.” – Malcolm R. Campbell in “Crown of the Continent,” Rosicrucian Digest, 1986

Mt. Wilbur in Glacier National Park’s Swiftcurrent Valley on a stormy afternoon. – Malcolm R Campbell photo

In the late 1980s, I wrote two articles about Glacier National Park and one about the Blue Ridge Parkway for a magazine’s “World of Wonder” series featuring natural and manmade wonders around the world. I’m addicted to wonder: my response to awe-inspiring places that epitomize the grace and grandeur of creation.

Like Thoreau, I believe that “in wildness is the preservation of the world,” whether a river runs through it, great trees and mountains seek the clouds above it, or a sea of grass covers it. Like the Huna mystic, I perceive our environment as sacred and conscious, and when I hear its voice manifesting as rain or wind or eagle (Píta), that voice becomes my primary inspiration as a writer.

The universe spoke, was speaking with Píta’s voice keeeee his vision clearing keeeee over a clarified world keeeee where he merged with his horizons. Lost in limitless light, he was an ocean of stars, a deep flowing tide of emotion, a flooding river of thought, wave after wave of energy, keeeee keeeee keeeee, heard the light coalesce and there the photons were named Mokakínsi, were named Grandmother, were named this person and that person, were named river, were named smoke rising, were named sun, were named cloud, were named lambs, were named autumn, were named God. – from Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey

Yosemite Valley, 1868, by Albert Bierstadt – Wikipedia photo

Place is always part of my stories, for place contributes to what happens within its boundaries and imparts wisdom and warning to every character who comes into its presence. Fantasy and magical realism are my favorite methods for expressing nature’s voice. I use them without apology in the same way painters such as Albert Bierstadt infused their scenes with light, suggesting a transcendence exceeding the limits of science and logic.

The wonderment we experience through our five senses, when combined with intuition, journeying, and visions, is in my perception numinous in and of itself like a great hymn sung by the soul of the world and persistently everywhere like “the force” in Star Wars. As some poets and singers cannot understand human interactions outside the world of the blues, I cannot fathom characters and stories outside the light of nature.

The raven pulled his attention away from the sagging mattress and lumpy pillow. It scrutinized him from a close fence post just outside the dirty window—an alert shadow superimposed over a lifeless scene of curing-out range grass and rocky hills. Watch what birds watch, Grandfather always said. For Pete’s sake, this raven’s dusty black eyes were stubbornly watching him. – from The Sun Singer

When I see a raven sitting on a fence post, it’s an important space-time event within an interconnected moment because both of our lives will soon diverge along one path or another path because we perceived each other. If I’m preoccupied with thoughts about the past or the future, I miss a great opportunity when I miss the raven.

Writing about Helen of Troy, Christopher Marlowe asked, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” I can understand the possibility, for the mutual gaze of raven and man can launch poems and wild places can launch novels and symphonies.

Nature is my constant and unquiet muse.

You can find Malcolm on the Web at http://www.malcolmrcampbell.com.

NEXT WEEK: Author Patricia Damery

The Turkey Killer

When I was a little girl of three, my family lived in an old two-story house across the street from our town’s only park. I remember the park had huge old oak trees, a merry-go-round, a slide, and some swings. I remember there were owls in the trees.

And I remember one night awakening to the sound of shattering glass and hearing something whizz past my ear. Some drunks were in the park, taking pot shots at the owls with pistols. The owls, to my knowledge, all survived. If I had been sitting up in my bed, or if the mattress had been just a few inches higher, I would not have, as the shattering glass was my bedroom window, pierced by one of these drunken maniac’s bullets. It lodged in the wall just inches above my head.

My mother rushed into my bedroom, grabbed me, and held me to her as if she’d never let go. I think it is my first memory—one of my only memories—of my mother crying.

I get my survivor attitude from my mom, for she did not have an easy life. Born in Pennsylvania ninety years ago, she grew up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the daughter of a Church of the Brethren pastor and his wife. Her oldest brother was twenty when she was born; she was the baby of the family. The family was dirt poor, as the church was two years behind in paying my grandpa’s salary. My mom had exactly two dresses: one made from a gunny sack that she wore to school every day, and one dress for church on Sunday.

Her mother, my grandmother, was a broken woman. She’d lost two children by the time Mom was born: my Aunt Esther to scarlet fever at the age of eighteen, my Uncle Mark to what was probably typhoid fever when he was only two. When Mom was eight, my Aunt Grace died at the age of sixteen from a morphine overdose given her at a hospital emergency room. Hard to imagine that not breaking a woman, losing three children.

One of my favorite stories about my mom’s childhood is the story of her and their neighbor’s cranky tom turkey. The turkey kept getting in my grandparents’ garden, and it was Mom’s job to keep him out. One night while they were eating supper, the turkey got in the garden for the umpteenth time that day. My mom was mad—it was almost time for dessert, and Grandma had pulled herself together enough to bake a pie, and she was afraid she’d miss out if she had to go chase the turkey out of the garden. She stomped out of the house, grabbed a golf-ball-sized rock, and hurled it at the turkey, shouting, “Get out of there, you dumb turkey!”

The turkey crumbled like a piece of day-old toast, deader than a doornail.

Terrified, she ran into the house and told my grandfather what had happened. He took her by the hand and walked her across the road to the neighbor’s farm house. “Mary threw a rock at your turkey to scare him out of the garden, but she hit it and killed it,” Grandpa said.

The neighbor burst out laughing. “The old buzzard probably deserved it,” he said, and he gave my mom’s hair a quick rumple. Mom said she’d never felt more scared in her life. She could not understand why all the grown-ups were laughing about her murdering a turkey.

But she’d been a good twenty feet from the garden when she threw that small rock at the turkey. And she was all of six years old.

In later years, that dead-on aim served her well when we’d play bocci ball. Everyone wanted Mom on their team, because she could roll or toss her ball within an inch or two of the target ball every single time.

The strange thing about this is, by the time we started playing bocci ball, Mom had lost most of her eyesight to macular degeneration. She had only peripheral vision. She couldn’t read a book, or play the piano, or drive anymore. But she was as deadly on the bocci ball field as she was that day more than seventy years earlier when she killed the neighbor’s turkey.

There will be a gazillion blogs on the Internet this weekend honoring mothers everywhere. You’ll read stories about how there’s nothing like a mother’s love; how mom instilled this blogger with a love of flowers, and that blogger with the talent for playing the cello, or sacrificed everything to put another blogger through college.

But that’s not the kind of blogger I am. What I want you to remember about my mother is this: never, ever piss her off. She may be ninety years old, but she can still probably out throw Cal Ripkin.

Photographer/Poet j.e.glaze on Inspiration

I’ve known John Glaze (j.e.glaze) four or five years now, and the man never ceases to amaze me with his talent. His photographic images take me back to an era when life was both simpler and, at the same time, more difficult. As a fiction writer, I can always imagine a story from his images. His poetry stirs me in that primordial spot in our souls we all share with ancient beings we call the Ancestors. One of the great privileges I’ve been offered as a writer was the opportunity to write the introduction to his poetry collection when it was published last year.

Here, then, is John Glaze’s take on inspiration:

Inspiration isn’t something I generally look for, although I have at times, during an extremely dry spell, lain in the dark on my bed and said to the darkness, “Inspire me.”  I’m not sure if I’m talking to entities, muses, the darkness, or to myself, really.  maybe all or none  of the above.  Sometimes it feels like I must have been speaking to the ceiling fan or the spider hanging in the corner.

The images of earth and sex inspire me.  Maybe because I see birth and death in both.  They are excellent metaphors for interchange, and life, and metamorphosis.

humus III

here, on your bed,
I lay myself upon you

with gentlest of full-
mouthed and searching kisses

’neath bower of night
sky and tree-form shadows

wet-scented, accept,
wrap your earthy legs around

pull me in the rest of the way,
this form of moon and night

I write out of my vision, or lack of.  Always, I want to go some place or form some idea that is new.  I rarely read a book twice.  I try not to stay in the same level of thinking for very long, because I know that wherever I am as far as ideas, or realization, or compassion, or whatever, it’s just the latest layer of the onion.  There are many layers left to go.  Numberless layers in all directions.

I suppose I’m inspired by words I’ve never used, or of which I’ve not heard.  I write them down in my journal, which I keep with me at all times.  Lines and ideas in books.  Ways in which someone says things which are totally new to me.  Bizarre metaphors.  Lines in movies.  Images in movies.  I like dark and gritty books and movies.  Southern gothic, etc.  The twist of a phrase.  “I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself.” D.H.Lawrence  lines like that are so simple, and they send me.  Hughes’ Moonlight Carmel.

Sparity.  I’m not so much inspired by sparity, but I like it when I see it.  Simple.  Uncluttered.  Earth tone.  Not direct, but hidden just under the surface.  Bukowski in overalls.  Things that make you wonder.

delve

look inside, there you are:

night,
wrapped in a blanket of
flesh

I present images and sounds, and the pauses between do the work.  Ideas are secondary.  situations and scenes, to which interpretation is left to the reader.

Space and darkness.  I don’t take photos of objects.  I capture the space in the scene.  I don’t take photos of light, but of the darkness around it.  Of course, you can’t have one without the other.  One is there because of the other.  One IS the other.  Darkness is part of the light, and space is part of the object.  Vice-versa.  It’s all one.  I walk at night.  It’s the best of both darkness and space because all the other sensory stimuli are greatly limited.

Abandoned houses stir something inside me.  All the people who lived there.  Not just houses, but homes.  Their energy is still around.

“Ugly beauty.”  That’s the kind of oxymoron I like.  A conundrum that fits.  Thelonious Monk wrote a song by that name, and it fits.  He kept a kind of rough catalogue of people’s musical mistakes, written down, and he used them as fodder for his songs.  He would sit down and play them and figure them out, and use them.  Now that is beautiful and inspiring.

Nature.  Nature inspires me.  I suppose because it’s honest.  Created objects aren’t always honest, it seems to me.  It depends.  I have a turtle shell on my wall that my daughter gave to me—a three-toed box turtle.  It’s just the carapace, brown, and smooth, and scarred.  You can see where a horse or steer stepped on it and injured it.  It’s beautiful and honest.  That inspires me.  And wind.  And the night.  Maybe because they aren’t so visual or tactile.  You can hear and feel the wind, but you can’t hold it or see it.  You can see the night coming on, and feel it’s coolness, but you can’t put it in a can on a shelf.  It’s transient and can’t be contained by people.  Maybe that’s it.  They’re like a bridge between what we call the physical and the other planes of existence, or whatever one might label it all.  There’s so much more right here that we can’t sense with our senses.

ornate box turtle

I.

there is a special place where
I stay, in the tall grass
near a stone.  I dig-in
and cover myself
with thin layers of loess.

there I hide.  there I sleep
beneath soil, shell, and spine,
sleeping in my secret shy wisdom,

hiding, knowing away in
this quiet corner of glade.

II.

when the moment stirs my quiet, I shed
soil, and slowly wander into the sun, skirt
the sun, travel by a stream,
bask in my zen.

Red ochre, iron oxide, rust, whatever you want to call it.  I have a friend who calls this one color “Badlands red.”  That;s about the finest color on earth.

I have a desire to sense beyond my senses.  That inspires me.  Everything else is old hat and boring.  In general.  No insult intended to those who like old hat.  I’d rather have an old one than a new one any day as long as it fits.

Oh, eyes and hands.  They are honest.  People may not always be so, but eyes and hands tell the tale.

That’s about it.

Oh, and love.  Compassion.  Plenty of that in nature, too.  I’m learning to capture it on film.

annie sullivan

garden not in
silence, for a
rose grows not in a
soundless world, but in an existence
where sound is not perceived

yet, it’s possible
that it might be perceived,
even conceived, though
merely unheard, and sight is
unseen

therefore,
haunt your roses

j.e.glaze writes from the plains of Oklahoma where the stark beauty has influenced his view of life.  He writes free verse poetry and takes photos of nature and abandoned farm houses.  He collects bird’s nests.  He has a lovely daughter, two dogs, and a cat.  He moves turtles off the road to provide them safe passage.   He has been included in Nature’s Gifts, Vanilla Heart Publishing’s 2010 Earth Day Anthology; and has published one book of poetry, A Year in the Life of Empty—poems. You can find him on WordPress at http://jeglaze.wordpress.com/.

Next Week: Author Malcolm R. Campbell

Inspiration Series: The Schedule

Thanks to all my readers who left so many positive comments both here and in my email about my piece on inspiration I posted last week. As I said at the end of the essay, my story kicks off a series of blog posts on inspiration written by a fabulous line-up of writers (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry), visual artists, photographers, and musicians.

Here’s what you have to look forward to each Wednesday during May and June:

May 9          John Glaze, photographer and poet

May 16        Malcolm R. Campbell, author

May 23        Patricia Damery, author

May 30        Melinda Clayton, author

June 6         Debra Brenegan, author

June 13       Scott Zeidel, musician (and no, the same last name is no coincidence)

June 20      Kathi Anderson, visual artist

June 27       Mara Lonner, visual artist

Of course, you’ll also being hearing from me during this time! Can’t shut me up that easily! But I do want to invite you all to be sure to stop by on Wednesdays from now through the end of June to learn what these talented people have to say about inspiration and where they find it.

Some Thoughts on Inspiration

I’m often asked what inspires me to write the things I write. On the surface, that’s an easy question to answer. I’m inspired by nature in all its beautiful and not so beautiful forms, and I’m inspired by injustice toward all living beings.

But it goes much deeper than that. When I say nature inspires me, I don’t mean in a Disneyesque way. In my books, you won’t find talking warthogs and lions becoming best friends as in The Lion King. Neither will my setting descriptions always have an Ansel Adams quality about them. I’m well aware of the raw power of nature, having experienced it firsthand when, In a Flash, I was struck by lightning, and a few years later, when my house flooded after a 17-inch rainfall. If I were writing about warthogs and lions, the lion would, in all likelihood, be chowing down on the pig.

Nor will you always find me writing about the obvious. I love writing about the grandeur of the Sierra Nevada and the seeming desolation of the Mohave. I’m giddy when I have an up-close and personal experience with a bear or a coyote that I can write about.

A lone coyote trots through the high desert in Joshua Tree National Park.

But it isn’t only the big things that draw my attention. I’m equally enthralled by the lives of worker bees or the struggles of tiny ants as they carry loads hundreds of times their weight on their backs. If anything, I garner more inspiration from the small, the less obvious, than I do from the large and grandiose, because the small have to struggle to be noticed.

Struggle. That’s the underlying inspiration in my writing about injustice, too. In On the Choptank Shores, Grace must struggle against the misogynistic, patriarchal religion of her childhood, a religion that forces her to be subservient, submissive, and something less than the intelligent, passionate woman she is. In The Cabin, Elizabeth and Malachi struggle to be free to love one another when one is a black runaway slave and the other a white woman living in a slave state. In my upcoming novel, The Storyteller’s Bracelet, Otter and Sun Song must struggle to remain true to themselves when forced to attend a government school intent on wiping out everything Indian about them and force them to become “white” in spirit if not in reality.

Yet, despite the seriousness of this underlying inspiration, my writing could never be classified as “heavy.” Back on the surface, where love of nature and hatred of injustice guide my fingers across the keyboard, what I write about is love. My books are historical romances, and in the case of The Cabin and The Storyteller’s Bracelet, they also have a hefty dose of magic thrown in, in the form of magical totems that allow my characters to slip through time warps.

Magic. Another underlying inspiration, for I believe in magic. I can’t say I believe in time warps, because I’ve never experienced one myself, but I can’t say I don’t believe they exist, either. And I most wholeheartedly believe in the magic that can be found in nature. “I believe there is magic in every bird’s egg laid, in ever flower that blooms, in the very act of creation,” one character says in The Storyteller’s Bracelet, and that pretty much sums up how I feel, too.

Naturally-formed Fairy Stone

I believe fairy stones, such an important part of The Cabin, are magic, because they are so perfectly formed in the shape of a cross. Tide pools are magic because they shelter such delightfully strange and exotic life forms. Lying on the grass in a park is magic, because if you close your eyes and allow yourself to become one with the grass, the ground, you will feel the earth rotating on its axis.

I believe magic causes one human being to fall in love with another. Why would Grace in On the Choptank Shores love a man more than twice her age if not for magic? Why would Elizabeth love Malachi in The Cabin? She was a white woman, he a runaway slave. Legally, they could never be together. Yet fall in love they do. Call it pheromones, call it lust, call it whatever you must, but I call it magic.

Pick up one of my novels or short stories. Read Observations of an Earth Mage, my collection of nature poems and essays. See if on the surface you don’t agree that nature and injustice are what inspire me to write.

But then, look deeper. Find the roots of my inspiration, for as surely as nature and injustice are the mossy carpet my stories rest upon, struggle and a sense of magic lurk beneath the surface. They are the roots, the support system that hold my stories up. They are what make my stories my stories. They give me my voice.

Smoky has invited a select group of talented authors, artists, and musicians to write guest posts on the subject of inspiration. Look for essays from authors Malcolm R. Campbell, Debra Brenegan, and Patricia Damery; visual artist Mara Lonner; classical guitarist Scott Zeidel, photographer John Glaze, and others, beginning in mid-May on Smoky Talks ….