About the Letters

About the Letters archive, for the first time since the 1990s, I've been able to open my old files that date back to the original Microsoft Works 1 days when I had an Apple IIc and real 5" floppy disks.

By chance, a friend, Piet Bess, gave me an old Mac hard drive, with Microsoft Works 4 on it—but more importantly, with a converter file.

Some of the files opened to blank docs, if at all. I have lost my letters to Michael Fulton, for example. Just a blank page. I'm devastated. He's now a rather famous engineer. Same with Don Merideth's letters. Maybe they'll resurface in someone's literary estate.

With the converter, Microsoft Works, 4 in OS 9, and Text Edit in OS X, I was able to save most of the files. But many files still open with a lot of garbled text and the alphabet carriage return embedded in them. Suffice to say, a lot of clean-up hours were invested.

I guess this massive missive effort was spurred on because Lion is due out soon—and if I don't rescue these files now with my old PPC iMac, I may not have an option when it fails—as I'm running OS 9 Classic and Tiger to bring these pieces into the 21st century a decade late.

As I was cleaning the letters up, it struck me that many of them stand alone as literary pieces, or fodder for a literary memoir—as they seem to be riddled with famous people—or people who later became famous. So, I've posted them, warts and all, for now. Don't know how much tinkering I'll do. I just wanted them all in one place where I could refer back to them. Mine them.

They're posted in no particular order, other than they span from circa 1988 to 2000—and are mostly squashed into the February 2007 slot for lack of a better home. I began the blog in January 2007, and so, can't post anything earlier than that.

Most notably the letters record the fall of the Soviet Union as I was there at the end.

Mea Culpea if I offend any the recipients of the epistlary process. That is not my intention. Summer Solstice, 2011.

The Bathtub is Falling

The bathtub is falling, the bathtub is falling!

We live in an old house, the cracks around the tub and wall have noticeably widened since the last two earthquakes. There's been a permeable odor of mold that I can't seem to locate or eradicate. I scrub the tub and shower curtain, spray the cracked grouting with a bleach solution and think perhaps it's the walls or the sub-flooring that is rotting.

I had an odd thought while showering. Perhaps it was a dream fragment. What if the heavy enamel iron tub just fell through the floor to the basement below while I was bathing? I couldn't walk out the basement as the crawlspace is too low, and the little trap door below the front porch is locked from the outside.

I'd be barefoot, naked and wet in a crawlspace where I normally wouldn't want to be fully clothed. Spiders, cobwebs, small rodent carcasses. Maybe even a cat or an opossom...like under Brooke's house...

Even if I could get to the outside of the house, then what? I'd be wet, buckass-naked (not a pretty sight at my age) nearly 55, gimpy-kneed and dirty, standing outside on my front porch, locked out of my house. Then what? Wait for the mailman to come? And run away screaming? Though my hair falls iin a thick mane to below my waist, I was never exactly Bottacelli's Venus on the half shell. And at the rate my hair grows, it'll be another half-century before it falls to my knees.

Or I could just stand in the fallen subterranean tub and scream or wait. But then who would hear me or who would hoist me up? I couldn't crawl out. I'd have to wait until this evening when Neil gets home. Throw me a rope. Naked, vulnerable, unkempt—sort of like the process of writing. And why was I thinking of all this with myself in the third person? She. Sidhe, as in otherworld barrow—what is beneath the surface.

Back to an audience of one hand clapping, from what I can tell, not even the mice are reading my blogs. So who is my audience? From what I can tell, according to the Technorati and Google spiders and webcrawlers, I'm the only one reading my own work. I got irritated when Technorati kept listing my blogs as unclaimed. Hey, it's mine—even if no one but the spiders are reading it.

Doesn't that defeat the purpose? Do I invite people to read my blogs? Or do I remain hidden in the crowd behind the hordes of some 3 million bloggers out there? No, make that nearly 4 million. The Technorati count was 3 million mid- August. Who is reading all this stuff anyway? Technorati spiders seem to only pick up the pages with typos and even after I revise and correct them, the offending pages stay up for all the world to see my imperfect art.

No one leaves any comments on my pages. I actually put a site visitor counter on my blog, but, as I suspected, I was the only one who was triggering the counter with all that obsessive editing. I took the counter off, disenheartened. After all, it's better not to know who isn't reading this. And so I end this one on a double negative. But at least it's progress.

Gratitude list

Gratitude, Gracias, or grassy-ass as Kirk would say. How do you say thank you for a year that was unkind? I’m thankful for my lust for food,  ot diminished by age. The black checker at Costco lit up and lifted himself out of his robotic stance when he saw my excitement over a chicken sandwich. He said have a nice day and meant it. 

I’m thankful for my curiosity, a trait, that what has lead me astray more than once. Curiosity to spend hours on Google Earth trying to find geologic anomalies and standing stones. I’m thankful for the fact that Neil let me go on wild hunts, whenever I got a buzz up the back of my neck, knowing I was closer yet to something ancient. The unnamed stones at Girdle Toll, an abandoned coal mine turned into a folly park. 

We thanked the stones on the solstice and dressed them with holly, roses and rosehips, and Glen Fiddich. I’m thankful for the fact that Neil put himself aside just for a moment and entered into the solstice rituals without trying to take over—the way he usually does. 

He so generously sluoshed the stones with whiskey at Cloch-na-Derrick, Rhyderick’s stone, a glacial erratic, divining the full moon on New Year’s night. 

I’m sad that I had so little time for art, or for writing. I didn’t write my New Year’s Eve list. I’m sad that I am entering a decade of poetic silence. I am thankful that I still can craft words and make puns the few metaphors make it to the page.

1/19/2007 Writers’ Group?

LITERRATA or Veritas and the art of Memoir

As I explore the region of bloggerdom I am confronted by a few truths. A few questions: Namely, who is my audience? Who am I writing for, and why? After numerous revisions and trying to make sure I've taken care of my audience (such as it is—an audience of one?) in my first real blog, my Sausalito memoir piece (not yet posted at Blogger as I'm jumping ship from the cyber chaos of Myspace, blog by blog), I found that my first blog had swelled to a whopping 2500 words, even after vicious pruning and revision.

I also realized that an essay of 2500 words was far too long for the art of blogging. A blog needs to be of necessary length, but what is it? Most blogs seem to be 500 words or less. A good art form.

The challenge: Can you tell a story in 500 words or less? Probably not—as I like to gab on, and I love specific, concrete details in writing—that's what sustains and slays me. Maybe 750 to 100 words is of necessary length. But does it have a beginning, middle and end or does it begin in medias res?

Blogging is a continuous, serial medium, that builds upon its own momentum, but like TV reruns, each piece should also stand on its own. Blogging also offers freedom in that it doesn't have to be a finished piece, a poem, polished to death. It can be process as well as product.

I began to see that as I wrote and revised my blog. that discrete stories buried within stories emerged. But when I lifted them out of context and created separate little blogeens—Juanita, Lloyd Bridges, Sinatra/Darrin— that they too needed revision....explanation, etc., in order to stand alone.

Then the journalist within took over. Research the facts, bring in background information to anchor the piece in time and place as well as to sustain its platform/stance. Does the timeline hold? Phew! I existed, therefore I am. Then I began to fear that with all this attempt at truth or veritas, that I was killing off the lively integrity of the original pieces. Authenticity of voice is important to me.

Why blog? Blogging offers a social distance so that I may view my writing objectively. It's bad enough that I'm dyslexic and think circuitiously, my narrative, a Celtic knot, so writing is a constant unwrapping of layers and tangents, like peeling an onion. Revision is hell. Seeing a blog published offers objectivity. How is it different than seeing your work privately published on your own desktop? Imagined audience. The pressure is on.

And then there's Authenticity: I nearly went crazy trying to authenticate my story within a story that I've since extracted from my first blog, about Lloyd Bridges because the actual events I cannot corroborate on the internet. But I do have my memories. But does it serve me or do I serve it in order to tell the story?

Which led me to ponder the concept of the art of memoir. In my modern Celtic Studies class at UC Berkekey (2002), Professor Melia had us read Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes." I hated it. I felt I was being manipulated but I couldn't quite put my finger on what was bothering me so....it wasn't the specific stories that disturbed me so much as the meta-language behind the stories.

He made us read every word on the cover...it was quite some time before we were able to pinpoint it. The significance of the word "Memoir." How we view ourselves within a given specific culture (Irish), against a larger culture ( Irish American), and finally, against pop culture (American). That's three mistresses to appease who are at odds with each other.

When was it written? Who is the audience? What is the slant? Point of view? What is truth?

Memoir: An account of the personal experiences of an author.

Is memoir based on fact or is it by very definition fiction posing as truth? Or is it a bit of both? As a poet and writer, I strive for truth. This is why the concept of writing novels is so alien to me, though I've certainly been encouraged to try my hand at stories. I seem to be stuck on telling the truth, no matter how imperfectly I might remember it, I continues to obsessively excavate, revise and rewrite until my head fairly hurts.

In some languages, the word poet either means liar or teller of absolute truth, In Irish and other Celtic languages, a filidhe (file), or poet, was considered to be a truth-sayer, if not a soothsayer, or seer. In the Germanic languages, especially the Scandinavian branches (and ultimately English), Poet or scop, means teller of tales (as in tall tales), or more specifically—liar, or truth-slayer. So if I write in English words with an Irish sensibility towards my art form, is it truth or lies? Yes to both. As in Memoir.

Ironic too, is the urge to write the memoir after age 50, when memory serves one less well than it once did. At 70, my aunt collapses the past into the nearest equivalent storyline. It is hard to separate her truncated timeline into sequential uniits. I am lucky in that I've been writing a daily journal since I was 30) with the exception of the past ten years—Death took a holiday) so I can go back and verify many older events. When I do, I am astounded to find my memory serves me quite well. My memory is like an elephant's. Scary.

Let's get back to point of view. It reminds me of the story of the three blind men feeling different parts of the elephant variously describing it as a rope, a tree, a wall, etc.

So much depends upon our perspective and life experience. I write the truth as I see it. I try to encompass the larger picture while remaining true to my vision. When it is at odds with others' view of truth, do I revise it or let it stand? Stet?

What if my truth is the truth? And if others' memory is flawed, then what? Or if they don't remember, does that negate my truth as if it never happened? Do I ameliorate it? Change the storyline to make it cohesive? Interesting dilemma. Luckily, I'm stubborn enough to believe in my truth and to tell it as it is, but ultimately it is still all memoir. I'll probably be constantly revising and editing these pieces until I weary of them—or until they abandon me.

Hopefully, in the process, I will learn something new, uncover a gem—the constantly evolving Lloyd Bridges piece is a case in point. When I began writing down the memoy, I had little to go on, an image or two. I wrote what I remembered and the more I wrote the more I remembeered. Fragments began to emerge and form a quilt. I discovered that I saw Lloyd Bridges in "Guys and Dolls" in Sacramento. Wow!

In my attempt to post a blog a day, I will be posting some old prose (mea culpea) as well as generating new prose to see how the old work stands up to time. To see it with a new eye, as in re: vision. The ultimate goal of this exercise it to create a body of work for my MFA thesis which is due sometime next year.

© 2007 Maureen Hurley
On Blogger since January 2007
However, I didn't begin actually blogging until August 20, 2007. My grandmother's birthday—because I had stories to tell.

FYI In case you haven't started blogging yourself yet, read Guy Kawasaki's The Art of Blogging. I wish I'd known about it when I started this mess. It was ultimately Guy's evangelism that got me to create this blog in 2007. Then I let it sit fallow (the proverbial blank page—I couldn't bring myself to sully the perfection of the cyberpage—until August 20, 2008. Talk about a dry period.)

Varied Bios of Character

Some bios for anthologies....

Maureen Hurley who lives near Fort Ross on the Russian River in Northern California, never dreamed she'd travel to Russia. “After the Coup” was written in California (after a 3-day/nite marathon with CNN ), and polished in Russia during October. She returned from her third trip in December just as the USSR ceased to exist. And yes, the legendary Russian empty shelves and lines are a long-standing clichés. She has work forthcoming in both countries including Chaminade Literary Review, First Leaves, Tin Ear, and Maverick. Having been called a ho-bag, she's learning to speak self-defensive Kentuckyin’ from her friend, poet Celia Woloch, who knows the streets of Louisville like the lines on her own palm.

After the Coup was written during the fall of the USSR. A child of the Cold War, Maureen Hurley has spent considerable time in the former USSR as a cultural worker—before, during, and after the climatic events which unfolded Aug. 21, 1991—coming to terms with, and sleeping with “the ememy”, she discovered the stories were the same on both sides.

Maureen Hurley lives in Forestville, near the redwoods along the Russian River, less than 50 miles as a crow flies from her native village, Forest Knolls, Marin County, where her family settled in 1909. She still painfully recalls the ex-moviestar-governor-cum-president claiming, “When you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all.” About the only thing she has in common with said ex-politician is a love of quarter horses; but prefers her ex-presidents drawn and quartered.

"Tocaloma Road," & "Sixth of August" came out of early memories—California poet Maureen Hurley remembers how the words Korean War reverbrated when her uncle said he was going away. She learned other names: a second cousin had worked on the Manhattan Project; her neighbor's ship was bombed on the Meikong Delta. When choosing poems for this anthology, she discovered it wasn't clear where WWII ended and Korea began—let alone Vietnam.

A child of the Cold War, N. California poet Maureen Hurley has lived in the former USSR—as a cultural worker—before, during, and after the 1991 coup. Coming to terms with, and sleeping with “the ememy”, she discovered the Cold War stories were the same on both sides. A relative of hers worked on a secret Cold War project, code name, Manhattan Project, and subsequently died of cancer.

The poem Horseflesh came intact from a dream Maureen Hurley had one full moonlit night while traveling with former partner John Oliver Simon in Baja, California Sur, Mexico. The ancestors referred to in the poem are his.

Maureen Hurley lives in Forestville, near the redwoods along the Russian River, in northern California. Her poems have appeared in Maverick Press’s Paisano, Culebra! and numerous journals and anthologies including Atomic Ghost, & Hermit Kingdom. Poetry awards include Negative Capability, Chester H. Jones, Kalliopea, National Writers’ Union, National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and two regional NEA fellowships. “Feeding the Minotaur” grapples with the unconscious dendritic history buried within her personal mythopoetics.

Widely published poet & artist, Maureen Hurley has won many grants, awards and fellowships; she is finishing up her MA in Creative Writing, and plans to upgrade to the MFA program at SFSU this fall. "Entprophy" was a visual found poem of longing for a relative stranger's past, came from an empty house she & a Dutch photographer stayed in while documenting AIDS stories one bleak winter. An artist in residence, she teaches kids poetry & art, and and caters on the weekends.

Dreadlines

My plan to write a blog a day has long since run afoul of my blond ambition when I discovered that the act of prose writing is much more time consuming than I expected.

On average, each blog is taking me several hours to write a first draft. It's so labor-intensive that my head hurts and I'm becoming an Advil junkie. Plus, I'm so far behind on my quota, that one of these days, I'm liable to meet myself both coming and going.

On top of that, I'm an endless (if dyslexic) revisionist, so each story is edited several times over. I can't see what needs to be revised, or where the spelling/punctuation errors are during the draft process. I have to publish it, then reread it several times over.

But by then I'm so sick of the piece, that I can't read it. Skimming it is pointless. The only thing to do is to leave it be. Stet. Back off. Read it again in a few days.

I repeat this process at least ten times before I'm satisfied, and even then, it's only a first final draft once removed. Well, maybe a second draft. But now I'm so tired of writing that I'm reduced to writing about writing. Or I've run out of time and steam.

Meanwhile, does it have a beginning, middle and end? Then there's the Ur, the root-reason why I'm writing this particular story in that particular style or manner. Most are arrived at by the haaphazard approach. Just begin writing anywhere, hope a storyline emerges.

What new connections arise out of the intense labor of writing? If it's already written in my head, what's the point of writing it? In the act of writing, I have to discover sometrhing new, or make new connections between a series of unrelated memories and events (Mouse Wars). Otherwise it's merely self-indulgent. Are writers as self-absorbed with their own words as actors are with themselves?

And the larger question begs, why am I writing it anyway? Who is reading it? More on that later.

Meanwhile, I've fallen even farther behind on my blog a day promise because I'm endlessly editing my old blogs. I envy those who can write effortlessly. I can write copiously but everything has to be unwrapped and repackaged. At least with poetry the unwrapping and reordering process is easy, or, easier than with prose. I'm like a driver trying to pick up the right reins on a Wells Fargo stagecoach with a runaway team.


FYI In case you haven't actually (gawdess forbid!) started blogging yourself yet, read Guy Kawasaki's very informative blog, How to Change the World in 120 Days on the Art of Blogging. I wish I'd known about it when I first started. It might have saved some hassle.

Vita

(It looks like this was last updated in 2010. The odd placement in 2007, was once at the beginning of my blog, before I discovered I could backdate it.)

MFA, English, Playwriting San Francisco State University (thesis due)
MA, English, Creative Writing, Plays, San Francisco State University, 2003
Attended U.C. Berkeley Celtic Studies, and Folklore 1999-2003
BA, Art Studio, Expressive Arts minor, Sonoma State University, 1977
AA, Art Studio, Painting & Ceramics, theater minor, College of Marin, 1975 (Continuing education: Adult Ed. certification classes at SFSU 2009—2010)
                                                                                          

TEACHING EXPERIENCE: Artist in Residence (AIR—poetry, art, performance) at Bay Area schools including: Monte Vista HS, Mt. Diablo HS, Dougherty HS, Amador Valley HS, Oakland School for the Arts, Oakland Military Institute, Deer Valley HS (Poetry Out Loud); Archway ES, Lakeview ES, Buri-Buri ES, Alexander Valley ES, Willard MS, Montera MS, Wornick Jewish Day School, Beach ES, ER Taylor 2009-10; Longfellow ES, El Dorado ES, Olinda ES Cleveland ES 2006-09; Complete list available on request. AIR (silk painter & storyteller—adults & kids) The Queen Mary Scottish Festival, Long Beach 2010, 2011; Ardenwood Tartan Day 2010, 2011, Ardenwood Celtic Festival, Fremont, CA 2006; SF Caledonian Club Highland Games  2004—present; awarded an Oakland Cultural Arts grant in 2009, and two (PBS) KQED/SPARK AIR grants (visual arts and silk [painting) at Cleveland Elementary School, Oakland (2006 and 2007); Teacher training facilitator, Sonoma County Arts Council, 2006; teacher training, KQED SPARK/ SF Arts Educators; and KQED/SPARK & Young Audiences. Mentor Artist, ArtStart, Santa Rosa, CA 2005. Memoirs group/oral history with senior citizens, Merrill Gardens/Westlake Country Inn, Fremont, CA: 2004—present Poetry, Unconservatory School of Music, readings in Cape Cod, MA, 2008; Sebastopol & Santa Rosa, CA, 2006, and Miami-Dade schools, FL, 2004, 2005; Storyteller &  AIR (silk painting) at the SF Caledonian Club Scottish Highland Games, 2004—present; AIR: Young Audiences of Northern CA 1998—present; Storyteller, Oakland  Public Library; 2004; Storyteller, Oakland Unified School District’s Family Reading Night, 2002—2005. California Museum of Art, Santa Rosa, 1992. Area Coordinator, California Poets in the Schools (CPITS), 1984—1997. Poet-teacher 1979—present. California  Museum of Art, Santa Rosa, 1992. (See attached schools list). Guest Artist in Residence: Hancock Park School, Los Angeles, 1992. Six California Arts Council (CAC) Artist in Residency grants, Mark West School, Santa Rosa, CA, 1983 - 86, 88 - 91. Also taught workshops at the Los Angeles County Museum, CA, School Number One, Cherkassy, Ukraine, USSR 1990. CAC Artist in Libraries grant, Napa State Hospital, Napa, CA, 1987. Taught institutionalized patients. Director, "Poetry Across Frontiers" heritage project, Rincon Valley School District, Santa Rosa, CA 1987 - 88. 1980 - 1997; Montana Arts Council grants, 1991—1995. Residencies & teacher in services in 50+ schools (pre-school to university level) in N. California and abroad, with a variety of populations including Bilingual, Learning Disabled, Gifted & Talented, incarcerated students; teachers; Adult Ed; Elderhostel. Classes and seminars taught include journalism, creative writing and visual arts workshops, California history, natural history, science and art, ancient civilizations, folklore, storytelling, etc.).

PRESENTER/LITERARY & VISUAL ARTS CONSULTANT: 1980—present: Clients include Poetry Out Loud coordinator, Alameda County; poet-coach: Alameda County, Contra Costa Co. (student placed 3^rd in state finals) 2010-present, ArtStart (Santa Rosa), KQED’s SPARK inservices SF Arts Education Commission; SF Art Educators Alliance, Cultural Arts Council of Sonoma County, Wells Fargo Center for the Arts, The Unconservatory School of Music, FL; Ardenwood 2006, 2010, 2011, Caledonian Club Scottish Highland Games 2004—present, Westlake/ Merrill Gardens Retirement Center, 2004-2006; U C Berkeley Celtic Colloquium Conferences, CA, 2001, 2003: Young Audiences of the Bay Area Talent Showcase, 2000—present; National Poetry Association; California  Confederation  of the Arts, CPITS; California Literature Project; California Arts Project; California Media Librarian's Association; California Association for the Gifted; California Art Educators Association; Rural Arts Services; Northern California County Offices of Education & many regional Arts Councils; Sonoma Gateways & Santa Clara Reading Councils; Pi Beta Lambda Society; Bahamas, & Napa College Poetry Conferences; Sonoma State University English, Art, & Education Depts., & Soviet schools.

Places where you can find my work online

Myspace: see pics: 4 albums (art & photos)
Elemental Portraits (12 poems) :
Small View (poem) :
Mary TallMountain (poem):
Mantra for the Mujadeen (prose) :
Raw at Creation (prose) :
My America (chapbook-anthology) :
Speak Memory (poem) :


Maureen Hurley is listed in Poets & Writers
CPITS
Maureen Hurley's student poems online at:
Young Audiences, Vince Cianci
Joshua Terry, Silence of the Heart
Glenn Ingersoll

Cybernalia

What stands between my self and my e-self is a blog, a bit of cyber-literatia, or maybe cyber-inventia—maybe dementia—something I've resisted. A gimped knee has me web bound, Resistance is futile. The time is present. No time like...

Like the Beat poet Bobby Kaufman, it's as if I took a ten-year vow of silence, but the trance was merely a purgatorial haven or hell of my own creation. Initially, I blamed the silence on a near-fatal car accident (no, my life did not flash before my eyes), or I blamed the silence on grad school. Someone said they quit writing poetry in grad school. It burns it right out of you. With my MFA thesis's seven-year grace period about to expire, I know that one all to well.

But it comes down to this: who am I writing to and what for? The what for is what haunts me. Nihilism raises its ugly head.

Everything is post 2001 now. My old voice has fled, a victim of the mujadeen or the al Queda. Tired of writing about lovers gone bad (BTDT, been there, done that, the tee shirt is a holy rag or more like a holy cow), I grew weary of the rhetoric that inevitably follows writing with a political stance, I turned inward and with a number two pencil eraser, began to erase the inner markings, the deliniations of the soul, that force which drives us to create, to send our prodigal names out there into the world. But even that imploded.

At first, I was physically exhausted from a near-fatal car accident in June of 1997. I hadn't counted on the post-traumatic stress lasting for so long. Or my brain to go south for an extended winter. But I found that a punctured lung weakens more than the breath —for breath, the source of inspiration, is the root of creativity. Not as in God has breathed into, In-spire as in spiritus, but not sanctus. I'm a recovered Catholic enrolled in a two-step program sacred and profane.

Then it was onto to grad school to waken my slothful brain. I was fulfilling a decade old dream. And then I took the deepening vow of poverty a la Dante's Inferno–a poet and a student replete with student loans. Which was followed by a rebuilding of a life, such as it was. A decade of reinvention of the self from Ground Zero has led me back to my first fragile love, art. Poetry has gone on holiday. All that's left are the unformed stories.

And so, couch-bound by a bum knee and stuck in time present, I began to surf. I surfed my name to see how I fared during that decade of near silence and I was surprised to see that I actually had a web presence, though I'd never actively sought one. In fact, I shunned it. All my co writers and classmates were deep into the publish or perish frenzy while I was happy listing in the doledrums. (Been there, done that. Even seeing my name in print no longer inspires or thrills the way it once did. In my 30s and 40s, I was driven by a dark ambition.)

Fooled into thinking I'd find the time later to do what I want—all those big, unnameable projects looming on the horizon—but the horizon is dressed in death's robes and the passage of time is akin to snake-wrestling with cobras. Spit in your eye. Leave you with a Homeric blindness and no story to tell. Life and relationships have a way of taking over. It comes down to who does the housework. Who does the dishes, or scrubs the toilet. Poor Sylvia Plath, I'm beginning to understand her dark fascination with the oven. Did Ted Hughes metamorphose into the sly fox of art and escape domestic responsibility in order to achieve a fragile immortality of words?

But even now, I am afraid to let my cybernalia loose into the world, This blogless blog is bogged down in its aimlessness. Shiftless. No point of view. No goal. Who will read it? And why? Get a job. Going to the bog. Full of shyte. Call it initiation. Baptism. Begin. Regardless. Or take the anywhere approach and see the music of what happens.

Poets Mike Tuggle and Sharon Doubiago each said to write the stories down, you're a storyteller, I said no to that, thinking my stories weren't worth much. But then I said no to poetry too and perversely, it said yes to me, then shamelessly ran off with a lover. I don't know where. I don't have a burning urge to file a missing poems report. But I have to finish my MFA theses. Write anything. See where it leads. Jilted prose redux is what promises to follow during these august daze.



© 2007 Maureen Hurley
NOTE BENE) This blog post was indeed written in August 2007, but I had so much revised and new material to upload there was a logjam so I reorganized the blogs as I had created this site in January and then forgot about it. There was all this perfectly good cyberspace going to waste and I found that I could move the files around by date. And so I did. Since most of it is older work being revised, it really isn't date specific. So I opted for the genre approach. It's still evolving but Feb-Mar is early memory stuff, April is poetry month, May is mostly USSR stuff, July is reserved for my many MFA plays and monologues... then it's sort of calendar specific. I imagine it will keep evolving and shifting until I find an organic order. Drive the Technorati spiders crazy I suppose.

Guy Kawasaki says to write a blog like it's a book, good advice but the physics of it are all wrong as people stumbling upon it are not going to begin at the beginning. They'll either join in by subject matter or by newest entry...no way to read a book. SO there's no chronological attempt. Merely thematic.



To see some of my art go to
Maureen Hurley at MySpace.

ART & SCIENCE: Color Mixing teaching notes

ART & SCIENCE
Introduction to Color Cycles
Using TEMPERA PAINTS with Young Students

This is a sample overview. Students should have a minimum of 5 sessions to be comfortable with painting. Day One: making geometric/organic shapes, using only two colors to see how many hues and tones you can get. Day Two: using three colors create overlapping layers (landscapes)l Day Three: a follow up on landscapes. Day Four could be partner painting using really big paper (18 x 22”). Day Five: portfolio & closure.

OBJECTIVE: To incorporate science and art. Choose a theme from the science standards: the elements (air, earth, fire, water), an environment (land, sea, sky), cycles (weather, day/night, seasons, etc.) Prepare by studying science lesson/ concept you wish to enhance with art. Create art using thumbnail drawings, tempera paints, and afterwards, have a complimenting session. Then brainstorm to show what concepts students have learned. This project spans about 2-3 one+ hour sessions.

PRE-PLANNING:: DAY TWO: Each student will create thumbnail drawings: For each student have white paper, pencil, or water-base black felt tip pens; and items to draw. They could be from magazine & calendar pictures of animals, plants, ecosystems, landscapes, etc.

I like to begin DAY ONE & TWO with landscapes composed of layers or organic triangles. I demonstrate nature’s dendritic triangles with calendar photos of landscapes: we count layers and look for triangles. Have students individually come up with drawing/painting ideas, using contour or solid (not sketchy) line (this could develop into another lesson on biological illustration).

Drawings of students late 1990s mid-2000s

Three drawings, Scotland, ca 2006

Loch Tummel

 

Loch reflection

Argyle Butte

I have no idea when these drawings were done, they were from old calendar photos, I've a vague memory of drawing them after I had returned from Scotland. But I could've drawn them much earlier. The scan date is 6/2006. I was teaching at Cleveland Elementary School in Oakland, and had to come up with lot of drawing ideas. This morphed into a pastel, and a painting exercise based on layers.

O Brave New World

Here we are, one month into the new year and Diana asks, Is time speeding up for you? Neil has always lived in the fast track of time, so it’s a rhetorical question at best. But new year, new world. Maybe our perception of time began to speed up when the continents opened, or were garroted, in most cases. A mere handful of Spaniards on that island. Jade beads and gold littered in their eyes, and all was lost. Arawak and Carrib Indians in their feathered cloaks kept their eyes on the birds of the sky while the Spaniards plundered the earth and sent all that New World cargo to resurrect the empty coffers of the Old World. Always broke. They broke continents. How anthropocentric. We referred to western civilization when we mean European civilization, not Chinese, not Mayan, or Arawak. A New Guinea islander once asked Jared Diamond: How come you white people got all the cargo and we got none? What’s wi' dat? It boils down to a slender golden shaft of wheat and the sheep grazing those hillsides before a thousand years of drought turned the land to a scriptural parchment of land and oil. Of all the animals of the world, only a handful or domesticatble and nearly all are from the Fertile Crescent which led to overabundant grain harvests and tillage, separating us from our brothers. It was an unequal harvest, an unequal advantage, creating unequal worlds. O brave new world that has such creatures in it. Caliban in his feathered cloak raising a human thighbone from that distant shore, gnashing his teeth on the rising sun, time speeding up.

1/27/2006 Writers' Group

Della Madeline Stannard Bedal obituary

Madeline Bedal was a student of mine at Merrill Gardens assisted living. We created a manuscript of her work where she dictated stories of her childhood to me. And October 2005, her brother Bill Stannard created a chapbook of her work. I had no idea her first name was Della—no wonder I could never find the obituary. (added 8/2023.) See also: Madeline Stannard Bedal Chapbook

DELLA MADELINE BEDAL A funeral service for Della Madeline Bedal, 92, of Fremont will be at Chapel of the Roses in Fremont. Viewing Friday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and services at 1 p.m. Pastor Tom Cory will officiate. She passed peacefully on November 29, 2006 in Fremont. She was born May 14, 1914 in Whitefish, Montana and had been a kindergarten teacher before she married and moved to San Jose. She was a devoted wife of 62 years, loving mother and grandmother and an inspiration to all who knew her. She loved to cook, sew and be around her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She is survived by her daughter, Edna Rodriggs of Fremont and daughter and son-in-law, Gloria and John Coyne of Lakeport. Brother and sister-in-law, William Albert and Donna Stannard of Fremont; sister-in-law and brother-in-law, Kay and Ken Hayes of Castro Valley; sister-in-law, Lila Smith of Sacramento and sister-in-law, Betty Bedal of Sacramento; 11 grandchildren, 23 great-grandchildren and 1 great-great-grandchild. Published by ANG Newspapers on Dec. 1, 2006. Legacy.com

FLIP A COIN

Well, it’s come to that
flip a coin when stasis sets in.
John the Ambiguous
was always one for a coin toss.
Have a kid, break up, get married, break up.
Whatever flummoxed him
was reduced to a 50/50 chance
so he didn't have to decide.
A good thing coins aren’t dice cubes.
It would increase the odds.
Otherwise we’d all be snake eyes.

10/17/06

PERSONA WORKSHOP MARGINALIA

PERSONA WORKSHOP
MARGINALIA After Jarrell

I had started to walk down the path
These are the roads you find yourself traveling
Homesick for anything, she asked me in her windswept voice
Occasions for the grief that left me seething at the sea
She heard a lot of it when she came home from the hospital
Help me! The pain in her bones paralyzed me
So I wrote these words in the margins

GENERATIVE WRITING

GENERATIVE WRITING
From Thoreau, TC Boyle. Oates, Wright, Merrill, etc.

We were observing
Replacing the old style cells
In which a window
Measuring 6 x 8 feet
More movement there
Perhaps I was not thinking coherently
In this state I was careless
Their faces showed consternation
I was confused, so I smiled

The color drained out of the treetops
It was like looking up at the emerging stats
But who was counting
For a long while she didn’t say anything
I don’t know what’s wrong with me
He foresaw every disaster so no was on his lips
Listen he said, speaking tot the sky
The spilled paint of stars
Softened his voice

I won’t give anyone another chance
It’s been a long dance with death
I realized that I’m possibly quite mad. 
I know he is.
The world is full of people 
separated from themselves by families
What was her favorite song., 
the name of the lover she took to the grave
I never adopt a person who doesn’t have 

In the case of numbers
It allowed me a substitution
The trouble with Mike was
We had become middle class
But our dog had not
They turned towards us as if praying
She believed he betrayed mongrel origins

We were all, in all places
A picture of Brazilia, 
a white mansion shining in the jungle
The music is powerful, blessed
In this fine white afternoon
Paying no attention\to our own little brick utopia
Sort & discard
The heavy-footed building
A lazy reach & sigh
These are the papers I need
It begins to thin in the air at dusk
The one, a poet, the other an action.

1o/15/2006

AT THE COUNTY FAIR

AT THE COUNTY FAIR
—for Sharon Doubiago

The carnival straddled a limnal boundary 
between civilization & endless fields of corn. 
A miracle in the bright dust and mirrored lake
deep summer bloomed in cotton candy colors.
For a moment she was screaming,
& laughing against a bright sky
as the Fairest Wheel lifted her
weightless against the burden
of her father’s darkness.

In a constant elegy of ascent & death,
the Fairest Wheel dizzied them up to the stars,
& plunged them in o the dwarfed laps of broken families.
For a moment, she forgot she lived 
the enchanted sleep of Snow White 
where in dreams she rode a carousel pony. 
Between her clenched teeth, not a rose, 
but a blanket emitted a high-pitched sound
as a bright bloom escaped from her gown.

As she loosened herself from the horizon, 
she was forever tumbling against a silken sky.
Her blonde hair, a temporary sun
eclipsed & eclipsing the retextured sunlight.

For a moment she forgot what she was
becoming, a black dahlia.
Dust & parched earth. You could taste it 
in the air, acrid like carbolic soap & sweat.
Soon the rains would come. 

—Maureen Hurley
Walker Creek Ranch, 10/15.2006

Worthless (catch of the day)

Worthless, less than, less loss. Loeser. Mary, the teacher I am working with, was married to a childhood neighbor. How many degrees of strangeness is that to be in her class in Oakland, where I let slip some geographical minutia. She startled like a deer caught in the headlights (we used to turn off the lights so the deer could cross the road… We grew fond of driving blind on moonlit nights.) She said Keith was my ex-husband. I didn't ask how long the X negated the husband part, but I could see there was a fair amount of angst involved. I could tell she thought him worthless. Truth be known Keith was younger than me, a friend of my brother's, and also a little weird. Apparently that turned into a whole lotta weird. Andrea, his genius sister is in a loony bin, and I think, what a colossal waste. What's the use of being a genius if there's no channel for it? What good are numbers to a physicist whose brain is biochemically addled? I know about that kind of life—we come from a long line of addlepated dysfunctional geniuses, and idiots to balance out the equation. Then, there's a rather large group of us with various real and imagined ailments so as to make several relatives hovering dangerously close to the worthless camp. Poor things, succumb to their worst nightmares – as if it was something that could be helped. Call it alcoholism, drug abuse, or being bipolar—the end result is a life rendered worthless because of the purgatorial anguish harbored within the mind. The night before last, I dreamt a nun was flyfishing off a skyscraper. I stood behind her, wondering what the catch of the day was. I opened my eyes wide, but  when I wasn't looking, small white lice had nestled in my eyelashes, obstructing the view.

10/13/06 Writers' Group

Love against all odds

I’m in love with my LePen. I have two in my writing folder because they often get tired and lay down right in the middle of a line. I am beyond fussy over my choice of pens. The LePens give up the ghost if you write too fast, after a worthless endeavor into aspects of worthlessness. And I really wanted to get away from the sacred profane paradigm and so I chose worthless. Go figure. 

Neil calls at sunset from the beach on Ventura Highway. He’s persevering alone against significant odds. His love of performing, of singing takes center stage, and so I packed him off this morning with a larder and with bedding. He'd forgot his head if it wasn’t attached. It is an odd love affair, if it is indeed love. I do question it often. When the gods of dailiness chew through us, and the continued affections of the beloved is a slippery slope of sand. For every step forward, you slide a half step backward and so on. 

I remember driving through Nevada with my uncle and grandmother, we were returning from a pilgrimage to Austin to Home Ranch where a familial love of land, against all odds, bloomed in the desert, and turned sage into oats and barley. We sat a while amongst the dead, the headstones of the Walshes that I’ve never known except through story. My grandmother was lost among the memories of flesh and blood. She was soon to join them, one foot nearer to the grave. She told stories of Wild Bill, Julia and the crazy twin who sewed imaginary cloth with imaginary thread and needle. Cloth and weft of memory. 

I struggled up that slippery slope of Sand Mountain, on the ancient shores of Lake Lahontan, shaped by the perfect geometry of sand and wind. With each step I was like Lawrence of Arabia scaling that heights, hiking towards the sun line, listening to the singing sand. My uncle and grandmother were the size of ants in the parking lot, but before I got to the top, they were beckoning me back. 

I had underestimated the slope and the height and the durability of that massive mountain of sand. I was so close to the summit I could almost reach it, but then I turned back against all odds, and headed back down. Each step I descended was an entire body length. It was the closest I would ever come to flying, flying down that dune, nearly weightless with each step—like being in love against all odds.

10/13/06 Writers' Group

CPITS 2006, AT THE COUNTY FAIR

REGENERATIVE WRITING —with Tobey Kaplan


AT THE COUNTY FAIR
—for Sharon Doubiago

The carnival straddled a limnal boundary
between civilization & endless fields of corn.
A miracle in the bright dust and mirrored lake
deep summer bloomed in cotton candy colors.
For a moment she was screaming,
& laughing against a bright sky
as the Fairest Wheel lifted her
weightless against the burden
of her father’s darkness.

In a constant elegy of ascent & death,
the Fairest Wheel dizzied them up to the stars,
& plunged them in o the dwarfed laps of broken families.
For a moment, she forgot she lived
the enchanted sleep of Snow White
where in dreams she rode a carousel pony.
Between her clenched teeth, not a rose,
but a blanket emitted a high-pitched sound
as a bright bloom escaped from her gown.

As she loosened herself from the horizon,
she was forever tumbling against a silken sky.
Her blonde hair, a temporary sun
eclipsed & eclipsing the retextured sunlight.

For a moment she forgot what she was
becoming, a black dahlia.
Dust & parched earth. You could taste it
in the air, acrid like carbolic soap & sweat.
Soon the rains would come.

—Maureen Hurley
Walker Creek Ranch, 10/15.2006

MAUREEN HURLEY who grew up in the wilds of West Marin, a watershed away from Walker Creek, was Area Coordinator for Sonoma County for a decade, at present, she’s learning her urban skills in on the shores of Lake Merrit in Oakland. Published in the 2006 CPITS statewide anthology


GENERATIVE WRITING
From Thoreau, TC Boyle. Oates, Wright, Merrill, etc.

We were observing
Replacing the old style cells
In which a window
Measuring 6 x 8 feet
More movement there
Perhaps I was not thinking coherently
In this state I was careless
Their faces showed consternation
I was confused, so I smiled

The color drained out of the treetops
It was like looking up at the emerging stats
But who was counting
For a long while she didn’t say anything
I don’t know what’s wrong with me
He foresaw every disaster so no was on his lips
Listen he said, speaking tot the sky
The spilled paint of stars
Softened his voice

I won’t give anyone another chance
It’s been a long dance with death
I realized that I’m possibly quite mad.
I know he is.
The world is full of people
separated from themselves by families
What was her favorite song.,
the name of the lover she took to the grave
I never adopt a person who doesn’t have

In the case of numbers
It allowed me a substitution
The trouble with Mike was
We had become middle class
But our dog had not
They turned towards us as if praying
She believed he betrayed mongrel origins

We were all, in all places
A picture of Brazilia,
a white mansion shining in the jungle
The music is powerful, blessed
In this fine white afternoon
Paying no attention\to our own little brick utopia
Sort & discard
The heavy-footed building
A lazy reach & sigh
These are the papers I need
It begins to thin in the air at dusk
The one, a poet, the other an action.


PERSONA WORKSHOP
MARGINALIA After Jarrell

I had started to walk down the path
These are the roads you find yourself traveling
Homesick for anything, she asked me in her windswept voice
Occasions for the grief that left me seething at the sea
She heard a lot of it when she came home from the hospital
Help me! The pain in her bones paralyzed me
So I wrote these words in the margins

One (a virtuosity of vices)

One, a vice of one? One needs a virtuosity of vices … A symphony… Virtue /vice – reminds me too much of biblical leanings. One is the loneliest number one… Oh, piss off ear candy! Get over it. Everybody's happy writing from the attribute of virtue/ vice—except me. I can't get to the next level. Begin again. Now, I'm caught up in word puns and silly rhymes, and God forbid: pop songs  (number one)– partially because I'm so stressed. One. To contemplate. I like one, I like its aloneness, the way it stands like a sacred stone. An "I am." I like the color and the sound of it – and synesthesia strikes again. One is silver-white, and casts a pale shadow of glacial ice, it rings like a silver bell, or like that melodic crash of ice crystals. The queen of Narnia is a one. Cate Blanchett is an ice maiden, cruel, ruthless, and alone in her sleigh is a One. Always winter. I yawn, my ears pop, finally after several days of pain. I can hear. One-eared, I was. No dulcet duet of sound. Singing in pitch was problematic when sound was a singular one. I had to rely on memory. Now I can hear every single thing. The sound of paper rustling, like an avalanche, the rough scratching of pens in unison, a scratch of pens, one in unison. One, I am one.

8/25/06 Writers' Group

Filial love

What we heard, was filos, as in philosophy, not love of children for their parents. As usual, I find it problematic writing from virtuous ashram-inspired prompts. I wish we had moved onto another exercise. Months of this, and as a writer, I hunger for the particular over the abstract, the profane over the sacred. Writing from abstraction, and is an anethma, even an enema. There, I’ve used an abstract word in a sentence. Try to describe abstract in concrete detail. Filial, finial, final. Earlier, we were talking about the kinky metier of cultures, the Japanese and British won, hands down. Lauren tells me about Japanese women dressing up as schoolgirls. I can’t fathom the concept of child porn or pedophiles. We were talking of Peter Greenway, Being Peter Greenway is not a movie I’d want to watch. Images, you can’t shake off, once you’ve seen them, there is no undo—like that scene in Reservoir Dogs where Christopher Walken pulls the pocketwatch out of his ass… This is censorable writing. I can’t read it to the group now. And I am so off-topic, it’s almost funny. I’m still lost in junk. Love. Love of children, for their parents, or vice versa? Back to the vice squad. Again. Bell. Out of time. Three minutes of contemplation that I don’t want to contemplate. My head hurts. I didn’t do my assignment. I’m off task and I am not interested in writing about filial love so I blew it off. Blow it off. Taboo, be a bad girl. Be ornery. Fuck the rules. Get it? Saved by the bell. Again. Shit. Five more minutes of this and I’m stuck in this boring superficial freewrite. Waste of time. My time. Time is what I make of it. I have only myself to blame. Role reversal. Teach kids. I love them. Sick of them. Same breath. When I was a child… The other day, a dog bit Neil when he was in the recording studio. Not his pretty face, but close. So much for the fidelity of Fido. The kids, what about them? Their love for the dog, Dexter, whose days are now numbered, the aching, moral dilemma. Put the dog down? Kids will howl and weep for the loss of their beloved playmate. But now the question is raised. Fido was an infidel. The parents’ love for their children, to protect them against danger, imagined, or otherwise. A deep bond. Man’s best friend, but this time, the dog loses.

8/25/06 Writers’ Group

The tango

The Argentinian tango. That dip and sway, and turn of heads away from each other, as if the presence of the other was too much to bear. The passion caught between the side steps of the tango, a rose between his teeth. I imagined dancing with Antonio Banderas, in tight, black pants, Matador style, embroidered as having step from the bull arena onto the dance floor. And me in ruffled silk petticoats slit up to hip level, pointing a leg skyward, then caught in the dip and sway. A fairytale romance, having ridden in after a long day on the Argentinian plain. The Pampas is in his blood. But with Argentina comes the dictators and the repression. Isabel Allende wrote how the tango was banned in Chile, an in Argentina too, because of the passion it aroused and unleashed in the populace. She said, couples danced the tango in the streets, in sheer defiance, because to dance was to keep alive the memory. A pathetic act, but in this way, they kept alive that memory, and hope that that tender flame of freedom, as light tended in the secret places for the darkness of the coming years. Meanwhile, here in America on the other end of the globe, we clumsily watch the dismantling of our freedom, of our country, thinking oh, it can’t happen here on the 20th anniversary of publishing 1984. But in the ear, and the rush of blood cells tintinnabulating. It begins with the lost strains of the tango.

No date Writers’ Group

The color of silence

Silence, so profound you can hear the angels dancing on pinhead, doing that old soft shoe. What you were expecting, Swan Lake? Yes, ballet more suits the dancing angels, than vaudeville, but my angels tended to be an irreverent lot, was it because the nuns told us we had to leave a space on the pew between us for our guardian angels? That I began to put together an odd tapestry of faith? I couldn’t imagine my guardian angel sitting there with nothing to do but twiddle his thumbs or wings, or whatever they do when they we were stuck in church, each isolated from the other by one body width. I was never sure how much space to leave on the pew on account of their wingspan and all. Then I got worried about the technical details, and I forgot why I was there. Sure, the nuns’ ploy worked, silence was golden, silence was maintained, but I began to see they were busy breaking God‘s rules just to keep us under a tight rein. When it came to maintaining orders, they were so busy making up white lies, they never suspected that the bottom was dropping out of my faith. Or at least my ability to believe. But, even at the age of four, I had a mind like a steel trap. If someone said something that tried my logic, I turned it over and over again and struggled with a dichotomy, having no place to put it, it made me a silent, contemplative child, distrustful of adults who told the most preposterous lies and expected me to believe them. Like the time my uncle took my nose and showed me his thumb. I knew it was his thumb, but he insisted it was my nose, so I felt it, and it was right where it always was. Then there was the time when the nun said God was crying because we were being so bad in church. That’s why it was raining. My mind was working on other possibilities and if God‘s tears were raining, then maybe he was just pissing on us for our stupidity. The erosion of faith. I wonder about Mary. And what about the fib where the world is flat? Where if you walk too far, you would fall off the end of the earth into the void? Is it visible or invisible? Would I fall into the void, though it looked to be made of substance? Then there’s the Soviet system of keep silence and don’t question, don’t rock the boat, don’t voice opinions. But the dichotomy comes when you can no longer keep silent for your own safety and well-being. When atrocities were being committed in our name, like now with the Iraqi war. Silence is the color of blood. The angels are having trouble finding room on the pinhead, there’s no dancing at all just the vulgar boatman shuffle. Poisonous silence descends. Be still in my beating heart. I found the sublime state of silence as I rode my horse on the back country fire trails. The empty bowl of faith was found in nature, not in the houses of God. Angels in the wind. Silence, a tremble of wings. Silence of early morning, the sound of sunlight, through a window pain, a tranquil, brief moment before the onslaught of the day.  

6/30/06 Writers’ Group

Write about the best time you’ve ever had

Best time… So many to choose from. Where to even begin? This is the throat clearing. There have been moments that are sublime, hard, earned ones, where, after a struggle I’ve been exalted—like the time the fog parted at the Sungate of Machu Picchu, the sacred city emerged, and later that day, after we had hoisted ourselves up the robust cable to the peak above the city, to the temple of the sun and moon. 

There were times we had to crawl through live rock passages carved by Inca hands. Passages where you had to stoop over and if you were the enemy, your head was smitten off as you stood there. The narrow passages were like keyholes, birth chambers or entrances to other worlds. And once you passed through that portal, you were irrevocably changed, you could never go back to who you were. 

Soon, we arrived at the temple, an alter of stone. Huaca del Sol, and as we gazed back on that sacred city time converged. When I was a child, I loved to read my grandmother‘s secret books on the bookshelf near her bed. I remember her reading Hiram Bingham‘s story of Machu Picchu. I used to gaze at the cover, it was a cheap pulp fiction pocketbook older than I was, with edges turned mahogany over time. 

At that moment, looking down at the city, time converged, but before we left for the Andes, my grandmother had already died. And I was heartsick, devastated, my world had fallen apart. She was my anchor, my foundation. The woman who raised me from childhood, because my mother was insane, not cut out for motherhood. 

When I was young, she left me and my young brother on the doorstep like foundlings. Better there than on a church step. This was how I discovered I had a brother. One hot summer morning, there he was, crying. She literally had dumped him and ran. I was so insanely jealous, because my grandmother spent all her time with the baby. I was four going on five but genetics linked us as surely as it did to my granny. 

At the temple of the sun, I cut a lock of hair with an old brass pocket knife of my grandfather’s, with its worn mother of pearl handle, and dull brass hasps where the pearl had broken off. It made a strange sawing sound as it severed a chunk of hair so close to my left ear, I was leaving a genetic marker on top of the dolman. 

Dolman, and old-world term for a new world marker of the spirit world. These were portals, markers to the underworld. Rocks raised as huacas, as alters on the ceiling of the world. Dolman in Ireland. Huaca here, but the same intent the world over and I was standing with a foot in two, maybe three worlds. The old world, and the southern world on the new continent. The new world south of the equator.

Standing on the equator that was another euphoric moment. Standing with the foot straddling two hemispheres was astounding, but was I traveling for myself or for my grandmother? Was I my grandmother‘s eyes, traveling to places I had never been, living the life she never had, because in her era it was never possible? 

She was caught up in the realm of the last vestiges of the Victorian Age where women were wives, and they had children. They didn’t vote, but she had her suffragette dreams to write and paint and live alone in a bee-loud glade. 

Wanting to please her, I lived the life she never had. I was seeing the world, I was bearing witness to the wonders of the world. But she was dead, gone, past, and only with the spirit realm was she bearing witness to what I saw with these mortal eyes. 

I placed the thick strands of my hair, tinted with fire, so like her own hair as to be nearly indistinguishable on the stone altar, placing white crystal rocks gleaned from our lower field in Forest Knolls, after heavy rainfall when the gopherholes became conduits for the rain runoff, leaving white quartz treasures in the small alluvial fans that framed each hole. Small quartz teeth of the mountain to hold down my hair in this strange land.

6/26/06 Writers’ Group

Waiting for Grace

We are waiting, waiting with, waiting for... Prepositions aside, we are always a juxtaposition. Just suppose.  I’m waiting, something I’m not very good at. Not a happy camper. So I learn to be a modified bag lady for the infrequent doctor visits, I hate the waiting room. True Godot. Where is Estragon when you need him? 

There are so many forms of waiting, we hardly notice, we are so programmed. Patient sheep. I usually bring a snack, some water, a novel, a notepad, receipts, handcream. Anything to keep me entertained. Not a purse, mind you. All the purse-like vitals go into my front pocket. A purse is a big target.

The deal I had made with myself in order to be an artist in residence was to carry the absolute minimum. Be at the ready because danger, though always present, was never clear. I travel through so many dicey neighborhoods. Hunter's Point is the absolute worst, not a good place for white folks to aimlessly wander. 

My second cousin, Pat D'Arcy, a redhead who lived in the dicy hood, gained serious street cred and respect when he pulled out a chainsaw to cut up some cardboard boxes. They gave him a wide berth after that. 

I drove a rickety old truck named Blue Lazarus, the back filled with art supplies. I had no cell phone, no way to contact the outside world if things went south. But the deal was I could walk into the school with whatever I had in my pockets. My backpack was merely a decoy. The goods were always on me. 

Always carry your money close. Something I picked up in South America. Keep your valuables in your front pockets because the razoristas were true artists and they could slice a back pocket open in seconds and you couldn’t feel a thing. No blood. Backpacks were an easy target. We wore our daypacks in front like kangaroos pouches. There’s always a lot of waiting around when you travel, in transito, todo el Mundo. 

One time we were traveling from the Petén jungle of Tikál enroute to El Salvador, but the US invaded Honduras. Tegucigalpa. And there we were, stuck in transito, call it purgatory, and everyone was on the move, with nowhere to go. Nothing like a little US sanctioned banana republic war to spice things up. We waited a very long time in the Guatemalan airport greasing the palms of airline clerks with morditas to get a seat on the plane to anywhere. We weren't choosy. 

Guatemala City was already uneasy, seething with hostility—and twice now, grace waited with us. Once, outside Atitlán, the guerrillas were disappearing tourists and the Guatemalan Army was pulling people off buses and shooting them. They pulled over the bus in front, and the one behind, but not our bus. We walked with grace. We were allowed to travel onward. In the Petén Jungle the Guatemalan Army stopping us again but we were allowed to continue onward. We were waiting with grace there too. 

At the airport luck followed us a third time. We bore witness to first, and second-hand stories of the ones who were not so lucky. The man who gave us a lift out of the Petén Jungle after our taxi man abandoned us 40 km from civilization. He was searching for a sister who is a nurse. We never found out if she was one of the lucky ones or like us, or one of the disappeared. 

The journey goes ever forward and we will never wait we never waited for Grace. We kept moving on, Grace was within us. But for years I couldn’t stop dreaming of snipers in the jungle waiting for us. We were walking charmed life 

6/16 2006 Writers' Group

Power shopping

Well, you said mundane and I was already spooked by the temptation of the sacred so I picked the most mundane, if not least important part of my day. Being at Costco with only 20 minutes to spare, to shop for staples, and to return the furry bagels, all green in their penicillin splendor. I blindly grabbed a handful of receipts this morning in the dark, hoping one of them was last week's Costco receipt. 

In the parking lot, after I tanked up—why does Neil let the tank go dry, then randomly reset the trip odometer, and never records the results, let alone, fill the tank? So at 6 AM, as we sped down the freeway we didn't know how much gas was left in the tank because my gas gauge doesn’t work. The meter lies somewhere near the 1/3 tank mark leaving us guessing as to how much gas is actually in the tank. 

I can’t stand the suspense, we are running late and Shell is open, but I don’t like Shell's politics in South Africa. They helped invent apartheid. But we only buy 1 gallon to assuage the gods. I still don’t buy grapes out of respect to the César Chavez strike way back in the 1970s, but when it comes to wine I’m suddenly myopic. I don’t see past the rim of my wine glass. 

It made me think of other gas stations where I hunt for the best deals online before the gas gas goes up another $.10. But I digress, so I'm in Costco slaloming around the leisurely paced shoppers who have all the time in the world. One woman yells to her mother: Coming through! as I careened around the corner, and I thanked them. I say I’m power shopping. Don’t worry I don’t drive like this. But wait, I do! I ram it down the aisles, snagging snacks enroute to the counter. In and out in 20 minutes, a world record. I broke my own personal best. 

But the woman in front of me was in suspended animation time. She slowly picked up each item contemplating it as if it were a rare jewel, taking it up to the conveyor belt, leaving no room for me whatsoever. So, when her head was turned, I shoved her stuff closer together, slicing my thumb on a plastic package of tomatoes. There, I’ve even given blood to the god of power shopping. I will race to the school and Neil will be 45 minutes late. I will sit in the sun hot sun in the parking lot and take a deep breath. Breathe.

6/3/06 Writers' Group