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My Writing Tool Box

This weekend I had the opportunity to attend Local Authors & You, a fantastic event put on by the county library. I was lucky enough to present a workshop, and - despite the fact that I was kind of a nervous wreck - it was a lot of fun. I promised the kind people who had the patience to sit through my presentation that I would post some of my favorite writing books on my blog. And so, without further ado, my writing tool box:


If you need to figure out why your are compelled to do this crazy thing called writing and need some gentle encouragement (or psychoanalysis), read:

Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg

Art & Fear, by David Bayles & Ted Orland

If you need some good old fashioned technical direction, read:

Self-editing for Fiction Writers, by Renni Browne & Dave King

The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E.B. White

If you are looking for ways to build a novel, read:

Scene & Structure, by Jack M. Bickham

Hooked, by Les Edgerton

If you want some good advice on craft, read:

Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott

On Writing, by Stephen King

If you are looking for some writing prompts (or a good example of observational short essays), read:

Old Friend from Far Away, by Natalie Goldberg

642 Things to Write About, by the San Francisco Writers' Grotto

The Nice Thing About Strangers, by Paige M.J. Erickson

Neighborhood Watch

 

The Grim Reaper appears in our neighborhood the end of September. It is six feet tall, blank faced, and planted firmly in the flowerbed outside the orange rambler with the blue rocking chair on the porch. It is an omen; a sign; its outstretched arms beckoning for more macabre decorations to follow. And they do. By week’s end our neighborhood is dotted with headstones and pumpkins and cheap, Styrofoam ghouls. One yard boasts a skeleton, flat on its back on a gurney, an infant skeleton emerging from its pelvis.

There are accidental decorations, too. A black cat has met its fate on 7th East. A young married couple have giddily painted “It’s a Girl” in red lettering on their living room window. I pass the house the day after a rain storm, the careful letters running like blood, the happy news made unintentionally horrific.

Mid-week I haul my son down the street for a playdate. Our neighborhood is lousy with three-year-old boys, and it is something of a joy to watch them play, to witness the buoyancy that comes with innocence.  “You’re the only one without a baby,” my friend says as she pulls her infant daughter from her car seat. This observation is simultaneously painful and comforting. We talk about preschools and diets and grocery shopping. I am thankful for the beneficence of geography—that we women are not only neighbors, but friends.

On Friday the street a few blocks down from us is cordoned off by emergency vehicles. Police swarm the home of a retired couple—parents who have recently taken in their thirty-something son. Rumors fly about the son, and I gather slivered gossip that includes words like explosive devices and teenaged girls and abuse. The retired couple, by all accounts, are not to blame.  "Good people," my neighbor says of the parents. "At church every Sunday."

That night I can’t sleep. There are reports of stolen cars and egged houses on the neighborhood Facebook page. The wind howls outside my window. It seems the world itself is ill at ease; a world where adult children masquerade as clowns and take things that don't belong to them and seek the presidency. I think of my own babies, asleep in their beds, and try to console myself with the thought that most children grow up to be just people. I try to reassure myself that we are safe, here in our home; that the walls are solid, the foundation sure.

And then comes morning, calm and bright and blue. There is nothing like a brilliant autumn day. I am thankful for the mercy of the equinox, that the bitter is balanced by the sweet. 

A few days later, I drive past the house of the retired couple. The father is on a ladder, caught up in the arms of an apple tree. He reaches up and plucks an apple from a branch, and perhaps it is just wistful thinking on my part, but the motion seems exceptionally tender, as if he is sparing the fruit from its otherwise inevitable fall.

Best Friends Forever

We both moved onto the same neighborhood block the year before we started first grade, and before you knew it we were inseparable. I liked her because she was brave and a good listener and had lots of interesting things to say. When I had an untied shoelace at recess, she was the one who asked Mrs. Fisher to tie it for me, because I was too afraid to ask. I liked her because she was sophisticated and cosmopolitan: we listened to cassette tapes of the Beach Boys in her bedroom and she had an aunt that lived near La Jolla (the ‘j’ makes the “hah” sound).  She slept in the basement, and we had to pass her older brother’s room on our way down the hall. Sometimes, his door was ajar, and I could catch sight of posters bearing exotic cars and daring ski stunts and bikinied women.

Her family drove Saabs, spent Christmas in Hawaii, skied in Park City and had a boat and jet skis. We didn’t have cable, but they had a satellite dish the size of a minivan on a cement pad in their backyard. And on one auspicious day, they installed a miniature TV set in the kitchen. They had a Mount Olympus water dispenser and, after school, we would drink the sweet water and spread butter on Saltine crackers and watch episodes of Small Wonder and Full House.

She had beautiful hair. My sisters and I had our thin hair trimmed at Fantastic Sam’s, but she went to a stylist—a man I imagined as a Fabio-type character with linen pants and bare feet.

She knew, at my house, that my mom made popcorn with real butter and that my dad liked to sing. She was allowed to drink from the big cup of ice water that my mom kept filled on the kitchen counter—but not any other friends. We took piano lessons from the same teacher and made up a song about her incessant praise for the metronome. We both had a crush on Aaron Lingman and we both were in the same Primary class at church.

In the summer we’d watch Overboard and Grease and Better Off Dead. We ran lemonade stands together and rode our bikes around the lazy, suburban streets. We had sleepovers, lots and lots of sleepovers. We’d talk late into the night and, as we grew, the topics changed from Santa Claus and lost teeth and Barbie dolls to training bras and periods and boys. We’d talk and talk until one of us said “I’m going to fall asleep soon, but you keep talking until I do.”

She was the first of us to experience loss. Her maternal grandfather died, and she didn’t dare to go to his funeral service. It is the only time I remember seeing her with some of her bravery gone.

We read Anne of Green Gables and called ourselves bosom buddies. I pictured her as Diana, the dark-haired beauty, and myself as Anne, the awkward writer. We watched Beaches over and over and cycled through boxes of Kleenex. I pictured her as Bette Midler – although not as brassy – and myself as Barbara Hersey – just as quiet, but perhaps not so long-suffering. Other girls our age moved in and out of our neighborhood, but our alliance and loyalty were set. I’m certain we wore the “Best Friends” necklaces on more than one occasion – the cheap dollar store kind with chains as soft as sand and jagged broken edges.  But we never needed to: everyone knew that I was her best friend, and she was mine.

There were small resentments, too. She landed more babysitting jobs than I did. In sixth grade, we both served on Safety Patrol, but she was selected as captain.  At lunch, she started sitting with the girls who used words like “screw” and “condom” and “virgin” – dark, secret words that, at the time, I found terrifying. And then, there was always that hair of hers.

I moved the summer before we started junior high, and before you knew it, our lives started to separate. We went to different schools, had different friends, different interests. I suspect, if I had stayed on that same neighborhood block, our lives would have diverged anyway. But the distance gave us an excuse to drift apart; it allowed our friendship to adjust without any bitterness or hurt.

She invited me to go to Lake Powell with her family just weeks before we started high school. We were no longer best friends, but we had kept up well enough with the occasional phone call or visit. The night before we left, she and I climbed onto a giant red rock and laid down and gazed at the stars. It’s been over twenty years, but I still remember that night sky —the texture and illumination and sheer wonder of it. We were tanned and lean and on our way to adulthood— our knees tucked up and our hair splayed out around us like halos or supernovas. We talked and talked in that easy way we’d always had, mostly about starting high school and friends and boys we liked. I think we were both a little afraid of the mystery of adulthood that loomed large in front of us. But there was a certain security in the two of us, talking side by side, the universe of my childhood contained in the locket of her memory, and hers in mine.

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Hello, Cephalopod Coffeehouse participants!

This month I listened to Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain on Audible. I had heard a review of the novel on NPR when it was published back in 2012, and was interested in reading it but, for one reason or another, never got around to it.  Thankfully, I recently saw a preview for the movie adaptation, and decided to give it a go. I'm glad I did.

The novel takes place during one day: a Thanksgiving day Dallas Cowboys football game, where Billy Lynn and his other Bravo Squad mates have been invited to participate in the halftime show, where none other than Destiny's Child will be performing. The soldiers have received this rather auspicious invitation because they have been deemed heroes, thanks to an embedded Fox News crew's footage of a firefight against Iraqi insurgents, and is the concluding event in their "victory tour" before they are sent back to serve another tour in Iraq.

One of my favorite scenes of the book is when the members of the Bravo Squad are given footballs and are shown into the Cowboys locker room for autographs. The depiction of these soldiers, who have literally risked their lives, kowtowing to these professional athletes is poignantly ironic. Fountain details the enormous investment made into the athletes: the planning, organization, and infrastructure needed for each game; the superior care and attention given to the players' physical needs. He also illustrates the economically depressed backgrounds of the soldiers, contrasting them with the "patrons" of the Cowboys, who can spend $1000 on a logo monogrammed leather jacket.

This book contains mature language and topics and may not be suitable for all readers. However, if, as I believe, the greatest end of a book is to engender empathy, this book is well worth your time.

You Can Do Anything With an English Degree, and other Tall Tales

Anything feels like a dead end. I am twenty one years old, newly married, and am beginning to question my life choices. The career counselor is not helping.  “You can do anything with an English degree,” she says for the second time. I am a semester away from graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English. I have selected this rather audacious course of study because, in the classroom, William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s spring felt like more than words on paper. They felt like everything. But now, with the prospect of actually providing for myself before me, poetry is losing some of its relevance.  “What, specifically, can I do?” I ask. The counselor gives me a wan smile that looks like defeat.

So upon graduation I keep on with the job that I got to get me through college. It is somewhat underwhelming, this job, but it is better than nothing. It is, I tell myself, something. A steady paycheck. Benefits. A place to go from 9 to 5. Still,  I buy a spiral notebook from Albertsons with plans to write a novel. I start and stop and then stuff the notebook in my nightstand, overwhelmed by all the space within its pretty lined pages.

I am twenty four years old and hauling two stuffed suitcases onto the London Underground. My husband has come to study abroad and I am along for the ride. I put together my resume, my “CV” as the Brits call it, and send it out to several temp agencies. I am called in for an interview and receive an optimistic eyebrow raise when the recruiter notices I have an English degree. He might have something for me, he says, at a publishing house near the West End. I hit up the high street for a pinstripe jacket and meet a man in a slim, trim suit who seats me in front of a computer and tells me to “format the document.” I click aimlessly through the thing for the better part of the morning until the man returns to see how I’m getting on.  Not well, apparently, if his dour expression is any indication. “What, specifically, should I do?” I ask.  He gives me a crooked smile before asking me if I wouldn’t like to take an early lunch, go on and call it a day.

So instead I find work at a hospital, doing billing for patients with private health insurance. On the weekend I go to the octagonal-shaped library in West Kensington, the one that reminds me of some primitive, makeshift spaceship, and reserve an hour on the computer. I pull up Word and attempt to write. Nothing. The blank screen stares back at me like a void. I am a reader, not a writer, I tell myself, and check out a book for my hour-long commute.

I am twenty eight years old, a new mother, and renting an apartment in northwest Indiana. My husband is a newly minted attorney. The reality of being a lawyer’s wife is not squaring with the expectation I had when he began school. It is somewhat underwhelming to dwell in an apartment with carpeted kitchen, but it is better than nothing. It is, I tell myself, something. A beginning. A starting place. An almost home. But the money is tight and the apartment is cramped and the baby is beautiful but he cries and cries and sometimes, when I can't get him to settle down, I feel like I am losing my mind. "What, specifically, can I do?" I ask. He gives another epic wail before spitting up on my shoulder.

And then, one night, when the baby is sleeping and my husband is snoring, I wake and creep into the carpeted kitchen. I switch on the light, snag a pen from the junk drawer, and place a sheet of paper on the little round kitchen table. I have waited long enough. Overwhelming or not, there is space here, on this blank page. There is room here, I think. Room of my own. Maybe my career counselor was right. Because the page before me feels like more than something. It feels like an open road. An answer. A calling. It feels like anything.

This is happening!

On August 9th - two weeks from today - my young adult novel, Accidentally Me, releases for publication with Cedar Fort.

As part of the release, Cedar Fort has organized a blog tour. Check out this darling banner:

To launch the novel, I will be signing books at The King's English Bookshop on Tuesday, August 9th, at 7 PM. Please come celebrate with me!

Cover Reveal: On the Corner of Heartache & Love

On the Corner of Heartache & Love

Cover Reveal!

Coming September 2016!

About the Book

After three years, Maren Summers is elated to finally have her dream wedding to her dream man, Kevin Bryant. In her sights is the promotion to Weddings she’s worked so hard for at the newspaper. Happily ever after is within her grasp…

Until Kevin jilts her at the altar, elopes with another woman, and becomes her boss. Devastated by the twisted turn of events Maren moves in with her best friend and notices the not-so-homeless guy on the corner, Zane Whitfield. As his heart-wrenching tale unfolds—his vow to wait a year on the corner for his lost love—Maren sees his compassionate human-interest story as her ticket away from 

Kevin, weddings, and her heartache.

But as the New Year approaches, is Maren headed for heartache again when Zane's lost love returns or has time changed more than one heart?

About the Author

Lisa Swinton caught the romance buy early by way of fairy tales and hasn’t been able to cure it yet. She feeds her addiction with romance novels, films, and chocolate. A doctor’s wife and busy mom of two, she enjoys putting her musical theater degree to use at church and in community theater. She enjoys researching her family tree, painting her house, and baking. She loves to travel and all things Jane Austen. In her next life she’d like to be a professional organizer.

You can visit her at:

http://www.lisaswinton.blogspot.com

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorLisaSwinton

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00HXNXDCO

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7796962.Lisa_Swinton

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: Station Eleven - Not your teenager's dystopia

Hello, Cephalopod Coffeehouse participants!


This month I read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. For your viewing pleasure, the cover:

Um, wow. I heard about this book on NPR, and then, later, spotted it on my mother-in-law's coffee table. The book begins with an on-stage heart attack of a famous movie actor -- playing the role of King Lear, no less. On the heels of his death comes the demise of civilization: a highly contagious virus, the Georgian Flu, wipes out essentially 99.9% of the world's population in a matter of days.

The book is comprised of several narratives from several view point characters and the chronology bounces from pre-collapse to post-collapse and back again. The thread tying all of these characters together is the eponymous Station Eleven, a graphic novel created by Miranda, the actor's first wife.

Although billed as a science fiction dystopian novel, Station Eleven struck me as more of a poetic, philosophical treatise. I mean, the tough guys in this book are a band of musicians and thespians called the "Traveling Symphony." There is some interesting exploration of what is socially significant: if you had the chance to rebuild society, what would you keep from the past? What is worth passing on? What survives?

Although the jumps in point of view and chronology were somewhat distracting, I was engaged because the novel seemed to be building to some great revelatory conclusion. For me, the book ended without fulfilling its promises. Reading this book was like waiting at a train station, instead of taking a ride.

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: Fangirl --- Baby's got Voice!

Hello, Cephalopod Coffeehouse participants!

This month I read Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell. I picked it up at Costco, because I liked the cover:

Costco. Pretty Cover. Easy-peasy lemon squeezy, right?

Fangirl is about Cath, a college freshman whose world is out of whack. Her mother walked out on her family a long time ago (on September 11th - the September 11th), her twin sister Wren (Cath, Wren - get it?) wants space and declines to room together and takes up partying at the frat houses instead, her dad is living alone for this first time in years and struggling with depression. Cath is falling for her roommate Reagan's boyfriend Levi. And the fanfic Cath obsessively writes about Simon Snow (a Harry Potter-ish character/series), isn't cutting it as "original" in her Fiction Writing course.

Fangirl is heavy on dialogue. At times, it felt more like I was eavesdropping on the characters than reading about them. The pacing is slow and the book at times seemed to drag -- although this also made the book feel more real. There are also several long passages of Cath's fanfiction that frankly did not interest me.

But ultimately, I kept reading because of Rainbow Rowell's voice. She has a I-want-to-take-it-behind-the-bleachers-and-get-it-pregnant kind of voice.  Fangirl is a story about voice, too. It is about writing and the many different reasons why we write. It is about leaving the comfort of the stories of our childhood and having the courage to write a story of our own. And it has some fun lines about writing, like this one:



“Cath felt like she was swimming in words. Drowning in them, sometimes.”

Or this one:

“Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can’t quite keep up with gravity.”  

In conclusion, once again Costco came through for me. It always does.

Tuesday

The phone call comes just after 5 on Tuesday afternoon. My sister, who is 38 weeks pregnant, has lost her baby. The news is unbelievable. I was just with my sister, hours earlier, at the salon, both of us sitting side by side under the heater, our hair wrapped in foil. "You two are sitting the exact same way!" the stylist remarked. We had looked at each other and laughed, our crossed legs and folded arms mirror images, our sisterhood affirmed.

I leave my kids with my husband and head for my sister's house. I merge onto the congested freeway and head south.  It is an unbelievably beautiful autumn day. I lurch along, my mind congested with one thought. Questions will come later. Now I am stumped by this fiction masquerading as fact. My sister has lost her baby. It cannot be.

When I reach the point of the mountain, the traffic slows to a dead stop. Ahead, where a bluff breaks the monotony of blue sky,  a dozen or so daring souls are hang-gliding. It is a thing of fantasy, this scene, and I wonder at these colorful sails before me, neither flying or falling, but suspended mid-air.

The traffic picks up and I continue down the road, toward my sister and heartache and unspeakable pain. For a moment I am soothed by the sight of these floating creatures, neither angels or demons, but mere humans propped up by make-shift wings.

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: Wonder by R.J. Palacio

Hello, Cephalopod Coffeehouse participants. I join you by way of the superb Suze. I can't help imagining this gathering in an underwater garden, and hope I will be embraced by your many tentacled arms (or do I?)

This past month I read Wonder by R. J. Palacio. Wonder is a contemporary middle-grade novel about Auggie, a young boy with a severe facial deformity who enters middle school after years of being schooled at home. The book is told from several different perspectives, including Auggie, his sister, and some of the kids he meets at Beecher Prep.

For the record, I have not read many middle grade books since, um, I was maybe ten. But this book caught my interest, particularly because it earned a Beehive Book Award (an honor bestowed by the great state of Utah), and because I caught an interview with the author on NPR. The book is certainly worthy of the recognition it has received. The narrators struck me as sincere and genuine, and while the subject matter was heart-wrenching at times, Palacio balanced the story with a healthy dose of humor.

The dominant theme of the novel is that of kindness. In fact, Auggie's English teacher structures his class around a monthly "precept," the first of which is: "When given the choice between being right or being kind, choose kind." Summer, a pretty girl who genuinely befriends Auggie, personifies this precept throughout the story. She is the kind of character that made me hope I would react exactly like her if placed in a similar situation - and hopeful that I am teaching my own children to behave with kindness as well.

The most striking thing I heard in Palacio's interview on NPR was when she described the inspiration for the novel. She was at an ice cream parlor with her three-year old son, when she noticed a young girl with a severe facial deformity at the table next to them. Palacio said when her son noticed the girl, he started to cry. In her own words: 

"I hurriedly tried to push him away in the stroller, not for his sake but to avoid hurting the girl's feelings, and in my haste I caused my older son to spill the shakes, and, well, it was quite a scene—the opposite of what I had hoped for. But as I pushed my younger son’s stroller away I heard the little girls’ mom say, in as sweet and calm a voice as you can imagine: “Okay, guys, I think it’s time to go.” And that just got to me."

I guess knowing the back story and then reading the novel, I was struck by the way that fiction allows us, in a way, to revise and edit our own narratives. Palacio certainly did with Wonder. 

Memorial

The city cemetery on the corner of 90th South and 7th East is not exactly a serene resting spot. It is bordered by a 7-Eleven and a Domino's Pizza and two steady streams of noisy traffic. A Liberty Tax Service is not more than a hundred yards down the street, where, from January 1st to April 14th, a woman dressed in a Statue of Liberty costume stands outside the storefront, dealing passing motorists a double whammie. No, nothing in life is certain, except death and taxes.

Normally when we pass the cemetery my daughter points and exclaims, "That's where Frankenweenie's buried!" But today she is fast asleep, worn out from an afternoon at the children's museum. Even without her prompting, I notice the cemetery today. It is dotted with color - dozens and dozens of brightly wrapped mums decorating the lowly headstones. Despite its unfortunate location, the cemetery is suddenly bright and beautiful with the sentiment of remembrance.

At home I don gardening gloves and kneel at the flower bed in front of the garage. I dig a shallow hole and plant a fledgling Clematis into the earth, wrapping strands of the tender vine around a trellis. My paternal grandmother had a Clematis against the south side of her red brick house. I remember as a child being astonished at the creeping, climbing plant and its delicate flowers that looked like purple stars.

In the middle of the night, I am awakened by memories, memories vivid and textured. The thick, serrated red brick of my paternal grandparents' home. The sycamore in their front yard, with its shaggy, crumbling bark that we would peel away, revealing a smooth, dappled green. The bumpy ceiling in the front room that seemed to sparkle and reminded me of stalactite. The oval portrait hanging next to the front door, cloudy and in muted tones, of Mary Ione, my grandmother's mother.

Mary Ione died from influenza when Anna, my grandmother, was just a baby. When I was a child, each Memorial Day we joined my grandmother on a pilgrimage of sorts to visit her mother's grave. We piled into station wagons and pick-up trucks and drove south on I-15, the Wasatch Front to our left, the Oquirrh Mountains to our right. It was as if we were cradled in the palm of the Rock of Ages himself. We drove into the land we had claimed, past sagebrush and farmland, past towns named after our Book of Mormon prophets: Lehi, Nephi, Moroni. We would reach the little plot of earth where my grandmother's mother lay, my grandmother arranging us cousins around the humble headstone like flowers.

In the middle of the night, I am awakened by regret, regret tender and forgiving, but painful still. I regret that I always viewed my grandmother as Grandma and nothing more - as a woman who was soft and pillowy and doled out cookies and smiles. I regret that I never asked my grandmother what it was like to grow up without her mother, that I never asked her what it was like to raise ten children in a home with only two bathrooms, that I never asked what interests she had beyond her church and family. I regret that I never wondered if she ever visited her mother's grave in Moroni alone, and rested her smooth cheek against the cool gravestone, and whispered her hopes and heartache to the woman she loved but never knew.

In the middle of the night, I am comforted by the thought of the Clematis growing in my garden, its roots extending into the earth, grounding my memory of her.

Conversation # 21,294. Or: Forgetting who we were before we were us

 "Isn't it funny that we both like the exact same style of house? I mean, is that something we've decided together, or, like, did we both like houses like that before we met?"

 "I liked houses like that before we met."

 "You sure? I honestly can't remember. I mean, I think I did, but... we were so young, you know?"

"Yeah, I don't know. I mean, maybe? Maybe I influenced your opinion...."

"...or I influenced yours? Or it's just some kind of symbiotic thing?And what if, like, we had married other people? What then? Would we like an entirely different style of home?"

(A beat of comfortable silence.)

"I'm pretty sure I liked houses like that before we met. I think."

The long and short of it...

Since I fell pregnant with my son nearly two years ago (isn't that figure of speech just wild?), I have hardly written a thing. But, I have read. In fact, just the other night I finished reading this:

George Eliot's Middlemarch - a novel that has been on my TBR list for years, but didn't make it into my hands until I heard a rave review of it on NPR: the reviewer literally called Middlemarch "the best novel ever written."

I'm not certain if I concur with this assessment; but, after reading all 800 plus pages of Eliot's novel, I must say it was well worth my time. It was a novel that took a while to get into: there is quite a bit of exposition in the beginning chapters, as well as references to the political climate of the time (which I had to Google to understand). However, once I got into the story, I was fully absorbed into the lives of all the residents of Middlemarch - the kind of immersion that can only occur in a sprawling, lengthy novel.  Although some of the political and cultural references are outdated, Eliot's humor is still incredibly current. This is one of those novel's that you are better for having read - the kind you need to read with a highlighter in hand, so you won't lose all the gems enclosed. The main protagonist Dorothea is beautifully drawn; and she is granted such lovely lines of dialogue, such as: "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?"

Aside from Middlemarch, I have also read these:

 Until this past year, I have never, aside from compulsory reading for school, read a short story collection. If you haven't either, do yourself a favor and check one of the above books out. Short stories are so sophisticated, concise, surprising, and powerful. In fact, reading short stories was the thing that made me want to start writing again. After working on a short story for the past few months, I am nearly convinced that it takes more skill to write a short story than a novel. Unless, of course, that novel is Middlemarch.

What have you read lately?

Flight

On Tuesday night I dream of flying. Certainly I must have dreamt of flight before, but when I awake it feels like I've just been blessed with some great novelty. I seldom remember my dreams anymore, and when I do they are usually of a more banal, adult variety - dreams of trying to run uphill but not moving anywhere.

My daughter used to practice flying. She would fashion wings out of hangers, perch herself on the edge of my bed, and leap into the air. She also used to creep into my bedroom in the morning, her platinum blond hair ratted into an ethereal halo, and tell me her dreams. I would wake, bleary-eyed, and gaze in wonder at the little creature before me, reporting her nighttime visions like some ambassador from another realm.

She is five now. She is learning how to read and can operate the remote control all by herself. She can buckle her own seat-belt and, this coming fall, she will be in kindergarten. I can't remember the last time she practiced flying, or for that matter, the last time she told me her dreams. So last night when she tiptoes into my room and asks if she can lie by me, I readily concede. She snuggles into the bed beside me and quickly falls asleep. I am not dreaming, but I fervently hope that she is.

This is the Summer of Your Life

This is the summer of your life.

It is a season of discovery.

In the summer of you life, you find that you are now a wife, a mother, an aunt, a daughter-in-law, a chauffer, a cook, a janitor, a gardener, a financial planner, a hand to hold, a shoulder to cry on.

It is a season of getting lost.

In the summer of your life, you often don’t recognize the “you” from the Spring.

You used to be the kind of person who could leave the house on a moment’s notice.

You used to be the kind of person who didn’t know the lyrics to the Wonder Pets theme song.

You used to be the kind of person who shut the bathroom door when using the toilet.

In the summer of your life, you become overly fond of the term “personal time.”

You lose yourself in passionate discussions about grocery shopping, napping schedules, and dishwashing detergent.

You listen to talk radio and are an active member of the PTA.

You have the sneaking suspicion that you are becoming someone you know intimately. This person may or may not be your mother.

It is a season of wonder.

In the summer of your life, the rituals of childhood are rediscovered:  you tip your head back and watch the rain fall, you capture spiders and potato bugs in Mason jars, you race barefoot across a field of grass. You delight in the first snowfall and claps of thunder and howling wind. You have waffles for dinner and watch your son fill each square depression up to the brim with syrup, just as you did as a child. You read Goodnight Moon and Charlotte’s Web. The delicious words of Dr. Seuss spill out of your mouth like candy.

It is a season of indignity.

In the summer of your life, you spend September to March with silvery snot trails on the shoulder of your shirts.

You yell in the supermarket.

You drive a mini-van.

You may or may not wear pants that qualify as “mom jeans.”

While browsing the internet you see a story with the headline: How the Duggars Keep Their Marriage Alive. You turn your head to make sure know one’s watching, and then, your personal time confirmed, you read the story.

It is a season of repetition.

In the summer of your life, you wake one morning to shower, door open, of course, and your eyes stray to the bottle of Pantene in your hand. You wonder when the instructions on the back of a shampoo bottle became the motto for your life. Wash. Rinse. Repeat if desired. Your life is a series of tasks that are repeated, sometimes out of desire, but most often out of necessity.

Dishes are washed, counters are wiped down, bottoms are diapered, children are driven to and from school, carpets are vacuumed. Laundry becomes a dirty word.  Other dirty words may or may not be repeated.  You become adept at repeating orders. No exodus from the house is achieved without multiple calls to “Get on your socks and shoes.”

“No one listens to me,” you say plaintively.

This is also repeated.

It is a season of ritual.

In the summer of your life, you gain a reverence for the sacred art of mothering. You are equal partner with Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny. You are the memory-maker and the memory keeper. You are the heart of the home. You are the gardener, and you find the bulbs you planted in your youth spring forth and flower.

You dress your baby girl in the same white blessing dress you wore as an infant, and see the promise of other ordinances to follow: baptism, confirmation, sealing. You hear echoes of your mother, and her mother, as you make a pie crust, wrap a gift, tend to a sick child. Your bookshelf holds your Grandmother’s orange-spined Childcraft books. On a rainy afternoon, you pluck one from the shelf and read your children Winken, Blinken, and Nod, the cadence of the poem comfortingly familiar.

It is a season of activity.

In the summer of your life you are on the go. You shuttle kids to doctor’s appointments, soccer practices, and parent teacher conferences. A mother’s work is never done – including but not limited to the laundering of clothes.  

It is a season to ponder.

In the summer of your life there is time to ponder. You take up reading. You read while you nurse the baby. You read while your children play at the park. You read into the wee hours of the night.

From Somerset Maugham you read that when love and duty are combined, then you will enjoy a happiness that passes all understanding.

The shampoo was right: it is about desire.

You change the baby’s diaper with love.

You shovel the snow from the driveway with love.

You mop the kitchen floor with love.

From the New Testament you read that Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. You pause one evening while setting the dinner table, and listen to your children’s laughter as they play together in the front room, and keep the moment.

From the Doctrine and Covenants you read that Christ descended below all things, that he might be in all and through all things, the light of truth. You launder the clothes. You clean the bathroom. You attend to a sick child. In your own humble, meager way, you ascend.

It is a season of longing.

In the summer of your life, you long for the independence of Spring.

You long for uninterrupted sleep.

You long for the time when the prospect of wearing a swim suit did not invoke a mild panic attack.

You long to be the perfect homemaker, like Martha Stewart before she went to prison.

You long to realize the dreams you held in your youth: You long to write a book, travel the world, make a guest appearance on the Ellen show.

In the summer of your life, you long for the wisdom of Autumn. You long for the knowledge required to raise a child, to sustain a marriage.

In the summer of your life, you long for more personal time.

You long for less children. You long for more children. You see a promo for the Duggars’ reality show19 kids and counting. How do they do it? You ask yourself.

You lament the predictability of your life: Dishes, laundry, carpool.

You indulge a daydream and imagine yourself as the star of your own reality show.

At the first commercial break, you change the channel.

It is a season of contentment.

In the summer of your life, you are reconciled to the fact that you do not now, nor will you ever, look like Beyonce. You have accepted that your voice is high and your hair is fine. In many ways, the summer of your life is more modest than the future you imagined in your youth. There is no castle on the hill, no knight in shining armor. Just a home – 3 beds, 2 baths, a kitchen that is bright with sunshine in the afternoon.  On a cold winter’s night in the summer of your life, you find yourself snuggled together with your family - a puzzle of arms and legs of which you are a key piece. And you realize that it is enough, perhaps more than enough. You settle into the sofa and seize every happiness you can from this moment, this day, this season of your life.

Good (Bye) I.Q.

A recent exchange between me and my six-year old son:

Me: Henry, did you know that I am super, super smart?

Henry (looking somewhat perplexed): Yes. But you've forgotten a lot of things.

That just about sums it up, kiddo.

Knocking on Heaven's Door

It's a Tuesday evening and my husband and I are at The Paris Bistro on 15th Avenue to celebrate our twelfth wedding anniversary. We're seated on the patio, next to a trio of musicians called St. Boheme playing songs from the film Amelie. I glance at my husband across the table and muse on the clever way time has of appearing both short and long at once. I have been married forever, and yet it feels like just yesterday that we were dressed in white and ushered into the Celestial Room of the Salt Lake Temple while we waited for our guests to filter into the sealing room. It feels like just yesterday, and yet it couldn't have been, because I was just three weeks past 20 and he was only 22 and we were both slender and slight and terribly naive. Certainly, we were nervous about the vows we were about to make, but we experienced a hushed moment of peace as we sat side by side, taking in the splendor of a room echoing the promise of paradise.

The story of Adam and Eve has a certain resonance with me, although the symbolism was doubtless lost on me on my wedding day. It is a wonder to me that a story that has been played out countless times throughout history can, for me, feel intensely novel. Still, becoming one flesh is sometimes a painful process. "Committed" can have certain unpleasant connotations. As I look at my husband on the eve of our anniversary, my mind floods with memories of our marriage - some good, some bad. I catch hold of one image in particular, a Sunday morning from the year we spent in London. We were sitting at the table in our studio apartment, listening to REM's "Nightswimming" on the laptop, our first child swimming in my belly. I rested my bare feet on my husband's lap as I skimmed through the pages of the Guardian. Pale sunlight streamed through the open window. We were in the midst of a bustling metropolis, and yet, within the thin, tiny walls of our apartment, we might as well have been in our own world.

"Do you ever wonder," my husband asks, "what you would have done if, you know..."

His voice trails off, but I can fill in the blank easily enough. Do I ever wonder what my life would have been like if we hadn't married that hot August day twelve years ago? Yes, I have wondered, and the answer comes easily enough.

"I'd work at a publishing house in New York," I say. "Or maybe L.A., Sydney."

"I'd sell flip-flops on the beach in Hawaii." My husband's answer is not surprising. We've discussed this before. After twelve years, we've discussed a lot of things.

We fall silent, listening to the otherworldly sound of the accordion. The musician has thick, black-rimmed glasses, a full beard, and a thin white shirt unbuttoned to his mid-chest. He is not your typical Utahn. I, however, am. There is nothing unexpected about the life I've chosen. Marriage. Motherhood. Mortgage. Minivan. There is nothing glamorous or astonishing about my life --- a fact I have to admit I've resented at times.

"Are you sorry?" My husband asks, seemingly reading my mind.

I think about all that I've experienced the past twelve years. I think about that English morning, unremarkable except for its immediate, enviable intimacy. No, mine is not the road less traveled by. But I have promises to keep, promises I made at twenty years old, when I was hardly more than a child. Promises that, if kept, may somehow, miraculously, lead me to heaven's door.

"No."

My husband graces me with a familiar smile, and we retreat into our own private Eden.

Memoirs of a Bad Dog

Saturday I made a trip to my mailbox and was thrilled to find the following item inside:

I first met Curtis Moser at the 2011 LDStorymakers Writing Conference. I was lucky to be assigned to the same Boot Camp group as he was. Right from the bat, I could tell that this guy knew a thing or two about writing. After the first participant read her first chapter for the group, we went around the table and each took a stab at offering some constructive criticism. Each of us offered some rather weak comments, but when we finally got to Curtis he whipped out a page of carefully written notes he had made during the reading. Each of us at that table were blessed with the feedback we received from Mr. Moser.

During that conference, Curtis also won the First Chapter Contest for the General Fiction category. Which, after having read the chapter in Boot Camp the previous day, was really no big surprise. After the conference, Curtis and I exchanged manuscripts and I was able to read the rest of the story.  Memoirs is the tale of Bogart, a Bassett Hound who finds himself in some deep doggy-do when he causes the death of his owner's father. That's right. You heard me. The protagonist in this story is a dog. But Curtis pulls it off beautifully, and after I completed the story I realized the genius of it. By exploring big themes like love, redemption, and morality through the eyes of a dog, Curtis manages to bypass being overly didactic and infuses the story with a healthy dose of humor.

Which brings me back to my mailbox. And, of course, you. Because Curtis has decided to self-publish this wonderful story. And, for a limited time, he is giving away electronic copies of the book. So do yourself a favor and visit his website for more details....