Lifescapes

Amaryllis redux

This is our Christmas 2005 amaryllis (thanks, John & Gini), back for an encore performance. Looks like there will be three, maybe four blossoms on this bloom stalk--you can see blossom #2, behind this one. Last year, she put up two bloom stalks, with a total of 6 blossoms. You go, girl!

Worked yesterday on the memoir, and talked to my editor at UT Press, who is wonderfully encouraging. A conversation with her is a shot of pure adrenlin. I have a new idea for a way to incorporate journal entries into the book (gotta do something with this huge stack of journals I've been accumulating over the past 35 years!). Also, I've recast some of the material, aiming to hold some back for a possible later work. With memoir, there's always a question of what part of the story to tell, and how to shape it so that the part you choose has a beginning, a middle, and an end--even though life doesn't work that way. At least, ongoing life. When you're dead and the biographers get to you, that's a whole different story.

Also, garden work yesterday, cleaning up winter-killed plant debris. Bill noted what I'd done with approval, commenting that the garden is no longer a fire hazard. (Don't laugh. You should have seen it. And this is high fire-season here in Texas, with dead fuel on the ground, low humidity, and spring winds.) Remarked with pleasure: Indigo Spires breaking dormancy early; the fennel a cloud of lovely, feathery green leaves; enthusiastic daylilies surfacing; anemone blooming pure white in the grass; the roses (pruned to within an inch of their lives) breaking into leaf. What's remarkable in your garden?

Reading note. Is it spring yet? Spring travels north at about thirteen miles a day, which is 47.6 feet per minute, or about 1.23 inches per second. That sounds rather fast, and viewable. I start looking for subtle clues and signs in the snowscape. Weeping willow branches have already started to turn yellow, and the tops of distant trees look dusty pink from new buds. A few cardinals have arrived early to claim the best nesting sites before their rivals return, and I swear I heard the steely twang-and-kazoo of a red-winged blackbird.-- Diane Ackerman, Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden

Daffodils and Home Places

                                                                        

The first daffs are blooming along the edge of the woods, bright as buckets of spilled sunshine among the leaf litter that covers the ground. Spring is here, with a sweep of warm Gulf wind that has pulled the metal roofing loose from the barn. Bill is out there now, fastening it down. Another sign of spring: six cormorants, heading to our lake this morning, coasting along on a brisk tailwind. I hope they plan to hang around here for a while before they venture much farther north. Looks like it's COLD up there.

I'm re-reading Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place in preparation for working with it at LifeLines next month. A very good book that brings up all kinds of issues about the places we call "home." In an interview titled "The Politics of Place," Williams talks about the importance of staying home--or at least, staying in one place long enough to learn its seasons, its inhabitants, the names of things. Here's a paragraph (the longer interview is definitely worth reading)

I believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live among... The notion that we can extend our sense of community, our idea of community, to include all life forms — plants, animals, rocks, rivers and human beings — then I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home. Otherwise, who is there to chart the changes? If we are not home, if we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put ... if we don't know the names of things, if don't know pronghorn antelope, if we don't know blacktail jackrabbit, if we don't know sage, pinyon, juniper, then I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of true desolation.

Staying at home, learning a place well enough so that we can chart the changes--that's a significant, meaningful commitment. Among all the other things we must do to protect this earth and the places we love, that's right at the top.

And on a very happy note: Congratulations to Al Gore and the team that produced An Inconvenient Truth. It ought to be required viewing for every American (at least!).

Reading note: Knowledge in depth about one's home region will not strip away the gleaming surface that has been spread over the continent by mass culture and mass production, but such knowledge may reveal to us how thin that surface is, thin enough to see through, as thin as ice on a spring pond.--Scott Russell Sanders, Writing From the Center

Before and After

The days were clear and bright this week, the temperature was in the seventies, and I pruned roses, lots and lots of roses. This is before, a Ducher shrub rose that is my favorite of all the roses. (I bought it at the Antique Rose Emporium, which is why this link to their page. If you're in their neighborhood, west of Houston about 40 miles, you really have to drop in for a visit.) I won't take a photo of my hands and arms--I look as if I've been wrestling with wild cats. I wear a leather glove on my left hand (to grab with) and wield the clippers with my right hand (ungloved). I wear a long-sleeved shirt, too. But these guys are tough, thorny, fierce. It's part of their charm.

This is the Ducher after her trim. There may be too much background contrast for you to tell the difference, but believe me, there is a difference. I had to get really agressive this year, since last summer's rains resulted in quite a lot of fall growth. To make it worse, Bill whacked off some of the branches in September, because they liked to snag his shirt as he walked past. (Memo to self: next time, plant roses farther back from the path.) Ducher isn't as thorny as most of the antiques, but Bill was annoyed. (Not blaming, just saying.)

I've done about a dozen of these babies this week, and have about a half dozen to go, not counting the climbers. Do you think I have enough roses? (Can one ever have enough roses?) What we really, really need, though, is rain. Unless we get a couple of inches in the next three or four weeks, those December bluebonnet rosettes will not translate into April bluebonnet blooms. None predicted, unfortunately. The region-wide drought in now in its third year. We lucked out last September, and also again in January. But not nearly enough.

I worked on Landscapes (which may get a new title) this week, occasionally. I also gave a talk at the Westlake Library, went to the dentist (ugh), and bought a new laptop so I can blog on my book tour. (Maybe.)

But that's not the big news. The BIG NEWS is (drum roll): What Wildness is This is out at last! It looks absolutely beautiful. Unusual cover, French flaps, ragged right trim--and of course, what's inside it is just stunning. This book has been five years in the making, and some of us (not naming names) may have given up hope. But here it is at last, and I'm as proud of it as any new mama. I sent out 50 copies to contributors (that's what I did all week, besides pruning roses and working on the memoir) and still have about 50 more to go.

Also this week: Paula Yost and I did some more work on the program for the conference that will celebrate this book, June 8-9. You can see the fruits of our labor here. Now we're working on the field-writing sessions, which will take place the day before the conference--those events will be posted next week.

And now, more roses. I wonder where I left my clippers.

Reading note (from one of my favorite local gardeners): All gardens, even the most native and naturalistic, benefit from the hand of an artful pruner. In this season when the garden is poised for the green flood of springtime, remember that our gardens are co-creations, shared with Mother Earth. And like any good mother, she expects you to tidy up your room. Now, get clipping!--Tom Spencer, host of KLRU-TV's "Central Texas Gardener"

Home on the range

Meadow Knoll isn't a ranch, by any stretch of the imagination, but we do have cows and sheep, who do their very best to keep the grass mowed. They're on the job 24-7, with no requests for vacation time, extra benefits, or raises in pay.

The cow in front is Blossom, with her mama, Texas, behind. Texas is pure longhorn and nothing but, descended from that sturdy breed of cows the Spaniards brought to the New World in the 1500s. She's getting on in years and has retired from dedicated motherhood (a calf a year for some 15 years) to a pleasantly retired elderhood, with nothing to do but eat, sleep, and enjoy the out-of-doors. (Doesn't sound like a bad life, huh?) Blossom's daddy was French, a big Limousin bull--her horns probably won't be as long as her mama's, but they'll be respectable.

Blossom is three now, almost full size (at about 900 pounds) and old enough for boyfriends, but we're not going to go there. We have just enough good pasture for the animals we have--no need to stress the grass by adding another animal. Here, the girls are enjoying a little early-morning treat of corn, cow pellets, and sweet stuff (molasses and sorghum), served up in roasting pans, before they head off to work for the rest of the day.

This is the other part of my life, which happens when I'm not sitting in front of the computer, making books. It used to be a bigger part than it is now, back when we had chickens (for eggs and meat), a garden for vegetables (not just herbs and flowers), and geese, ducks, and peacocks for entertainment. Then the China series came along, and then Robin Paige and Beatrix, and we reluctantly reduced the size and complexity of our homesteading commitments. It's hard to find somebody to feed the chickens and coop them every night when you're on the road with a book. I miss them. Odd, how fond you can become of a flock of silly old hens and a rooster who greets the day, every day, with a boisterous dawn song.

I'm writing about this now, in the memoir I'm working on, Landscapes of Solitude, and remembering some of those homesteading days, and feeling especially sentimental. About chickens.

Reading note. Who are you, but what you can remember?--Isabel Allende

Finished!

No, it's not a tablecloth--but that was a good guess.

It's the wall quilt I've been working on since early January. It's still pin basted (you can see the pins), but the piecing and quilting are both done, and I am binding the edges. Should be finished with that tonight. Then I'll make some hanging tabs, and it will be ready for the wall. It went together pretty easily, in nine sections, then the sections went together. I was going to piece it on the machine, but some of the piecing was fiddly (those itsy blue triangles), so I ended up by doing the whole thing--piecing and quilting--by hand. That's meditative work, nice for an hour or two in the evening, before I go to bed. This quilt will hang at Coyote Lodge (the name of our New Mexico place), on the wall beneath Bluebonnet, our longhorn skull. I'll post a pic when it's up.

Also finished: NIGHTSHADE! It was nearly finished--down to the next-to-last chapter--before Christmas. When I got back from my writing retreat at Coyote, at the end of January, I went back through the book again, fast, because it was pretty clean, then wrote the last chapter, the "explanatory" chapter, where China unravels the mystery for her gal pals (in the spa, where they are giving Ruby a party to take her mind off her troubles). The book topped out at 90,000 words. I logged 70 days on the project. If I take out the 10 days I spent on revision (when I mostly subtracted words, rather than adding them!), it averages out to 1500 words a day. I'm basically happy with the book, although the nightshade family (the signature herb) was hard to work with and required more piecing and patching than I like to do, since it didn't fit as well as some of the other signature herbs I've used. (If you're seeing the analogy to the quilt story here, you're on the right track.) I printed it out this morning. It will go to New York, where it will sit on my editor's desk for a couple of months (it's not due until the end of March). I'll see it again at copy-edit, when I can make minor adjustments. Then again at first-pass pages. You'll see it in April, 2008. Whew.

Reading note: Everybody tells me that they would love to knit [insert here: quilt, write a book], but they don't have time.  I look at people's lives and I can see opportunity and time for knitting [quilting, writing] all over the place.  The time spent riding the bus each day?  That's a pair of socks over a month.  Waiting in line?  Mittens.  Watching TV?  Buckets of wasted time that could be an exquisite lace shawl.  ~Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, At Knit's End:  Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much

Podcasting

Hey, look! It's a podcast!

This is something I've been wanting to do for a long time, and it's finally happening. I'm doing a series of ten podcasts over a ten-week period--that's the plan, anyway. Go here and click on "Susan's Podcasts." Each of these casts (they're about 12-13 minutes long) features one herb, with growing tips, recipes, crafting, lore, all that good stuff. The first one is on parsley. The second (scheduled for Feb. 20) is on rosemary. The remaining eight are scripted, but I haven't recorded them yet.

If this does well enough--that is, if enough people actually listen to/download it--I'd like to do a couple of short stories from the Unthymely Death collection, and maybe some of the entries (expanded) from China's Book of Days. We'll see what happens, and whether you like it or not.

Brightenings

Sometimes I need a little brightening. That's when it's good to go back through the garden photos, like going back into gardens of past summers, warm and bright, filled with hummingbirds and butterflies. This is October, a few years ago, when the lion's ear was extraordinarily pretty (that's it, orange and lush, in the foreground), and the leucantha was gorgiously lavender and the goldenrod was a glory. I can almost smell the garden, even from this distance, rich, hot, heavy with rosemary and sage. Oh, hurry, summer!

The LifeLines weekend is just a month away, and I've been thinking about the program--feeling very good and happy about it. We'll be reading and discussing a memoir this year, instead of just writing (although of course, we'll be writing quite a lot). I've chosen one of my very favorite memoirs, Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. I'm putting together a set of questions for people to think about as they read the book. We'll talk about it on Friday night when we get together, and then dip into it from time to time on Saturday and Sunday, as we write. It's an exceptional book, elegantly crafted and very rich, which asks us to think about how we are shaped (in good ways and bad) by the place we live. It will put an exciting frame around the weekend--give us lots to think and talk and write about. There are still a few places. Join us if you can.

And another, momentous brightening: the announcement of Drew Gilpin Faust's appointment to the Harvard presidency. This is a wonderful, wonderful moment for women, not just at Harvard but in every university, and to be very honest, I didn't think it was going to happen in my lifetime. Listen--hear that? It's the crash of breaking glass in every university in the county--the sound of the glass ceiling shattering. And behind that, the cheers of every woman faculty member and graduate student. (And lots of men, too.)

You know, when I was an undergraduate in the 60s, I never had a woman professor in my major, English (TAs yes, professors, no). When I was a graduate student, there were a few women in the English Department at Berkeley, but none in my field (medieval studies). When I was a new assistant professor at UT Austin, there were only three tenured women in a faculty of over 100. There were no role models. None. No one to show us the way. Trying to figure out how to manage family and teaching and research was enormously difficult, because we had to make it all up as we went along, and there was resistance, pushback, and obstruction every step of the way. Faust's appointment doesn't resolve the issues of gender bias in higher education, but by damn, it's going to make a difference. A HUGE difference!

All in all, come to think of it, a very bright day.

Reading Note: I have met brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.--Gloria Steinem

Pretty days

Pretty sunsets, too. We've had temps in the 70s the last couple of days--rain forecast for the weekend. I hope we get some. The daffodils along the woods are finally up (about two weeks late, due to the cold in January), and a little bit of rain would go a long way. The bluebonnets could use a good drenching, too. With rain, we'll have a lovely crop. Without it--well, let's just say that unless it rains, there's no point in your driving from Illinois to Texas just to see the bluebonnets. (The Fredericksburg Chamber of Commerce doesn't want me to say this, I'm sure.)

I got tagged a while back, by Helen Ginger. Usually, I skip these things, but this one was a good question. I'm supposed to tell you five things you might not know about me. So here they are.

• In my teens, I graduated from a very small Illinois high school. There were only 42 in our class.
• In my twenties, in college, I wanted to major in Geology. But my professors talked me out of it. They told me it was a "man's profession." They were probably right, but I shouldn't have let that stop me.
• In my thirties, I sailed small boats on San Francisco Bay. I loved to sail, and when I moved to Texas, I bought a Melges 20. It was a man's boat, demanded a lot of muscle. But I didn't let that stop me. (The link isn't to my boat, but mine looked just like that one. Fun to see it again, after all this time! Makes me wish I had that tiller in my hand.)
• In my forties, I lived in New Orleans, where I was dean of Newcomb College. I used to go fishing with one of the women faculty members who knew every bayou like the back of her hand. She knew lots of great New Orleans stories, too.
• In my early fifties, I started the China Bayles series. You see--there's hope for us golden oldies.

I'm going to pass the tag along to Karen McInnerney, mainly because I want to know more about her.

I'm writing again, and loving it. I've gone back to Nightshade, so I can get it finished and off to New York before I go back to the memoir project. I'm always afraid, when I come back to a book after a while, that I won't like it. But Nightshade seems to work. I'm having fun with it.

Oh, and next week, it'll be time to prune the roses!

Reading Note. The thing about writers that people don't realize is that a lot of what they do is play. You know, playing around with. That doesn't mean that it isn't serious or that it doesn't have a serious meaning or a serious intention. But it's still play.--Margaret Atwood

Robin Paige Series

Quite a few readers have written in the last couple of months, asking why Bill and I decided to discontinue the Robin Paige series. Here's an answer to that question--now, when people ask, I can just give them the permanent link to this post!

Bill and I started work on that series in 1992, right after the first China Bayles book came out. We'd been writing young adult books together since 1985, and both of us enjoyed the process of writing together. So we came up with several ideas for a co-authored series. After much energetic back-and-forth, considering various options, we decided to set the series in England in the late Victorian-early Edwardian period. There was so much going on at that time, politically, socially--and especially forensically. Fingerprint identification was just becoming available, and there was forensic photography, ballistics, toxicology, serology, and so on. So it was an ideal setting for an investigative series.

We also decided to use real people in the series. The second book, for instance, featured Beatrix Potter. The sixth, Jennie and Winston Churchill. The twelfth, Guiglielmo Marconi. This proved to be a very good idea, and really kept us interested in the series. Readers have liked it, too, for each book introduces them to a new segment of English society, to a new set of issues, and new points of view. But it also proved to be exceedingly difficult, for each book required not only the usual background research, but also specific biographical research about the person we chose as our "featured" character.

The series originally went as paperback original to Avon, but they were having troubles at the time (the mid-90s) and didn't do a very good job getting the books out there. We moved the series to Berkley, where it has been ever since, very happily. We've loved working with our editor, Natalee Rosenstein. The series went into hardcover with the seventh book. We've discontinued it with the twelfth--Lizard (originally in hardcover in 2006) will be out in paperback in July. When we started, we thought we might do ten books. The series went to twelve because we enjoyed the collaboration so much.

I say "discontinued," because it's always possible that something will come along that will make us change our minds. We left some plot threads hanging, just in case we want to pick it up again. But there's no "next book" in this series on our horizon. The reason: the research load is very heavy. It wasn't so much the background research in the period--that was entirely manageable. It was the biographical research on the individual characters and their world that made it difficult. For Marconi, for instance, we worked our way through all the available biographies, plus books about the telegraph, the wireless telegraph, and radio. And believe me, there's a LOT of stuff out there. Bill spent a couple of months on the research and we each put in three person-months on the writing. By the time all was said and done, we'd put a full year into the book.

Yes, we probably overdid it. We might have gotten by without doing so much. But we loved the learning (that's one of the reasons we're writers). Readers, too, have appreciated that level of specificity, and once we began creating these richly-detailed worlds, we really couldn't go back to a more general, non-specific kind of writing that so often passes for "historical" fiction. Readers would have been disappointed, and we wouldn't have enjoyed the work nearly as much.

That's it, gang. That's why we decided to discontinue the series. I'll continue the China Bayles books indefinitely (as long as you keep reading), and hope to do a short story collection and a cookbook in the series. There will be four more books (eight altogether) in the Beatrix Potter series, and maybe a junior biography. I'm working on a memoir project now, and have a novel in mind, to be written sometime in the next couple of years. Bill and I miss the Robin Paige collaboration, but now we have time for other things we want to do together, so it all balances out.

If you've been a reader of this series, thanks for your support. Please know that you belong to a relatively small and select group: there are many fewer readers of historical fiction (particularly the non-bodice-rippers), and they don't network the way readers of other mysteries or romances do. So it's harder for an author to reach you, or to develop an effective "marketing program." Also, as a group, you are demanding: you know your history and you want your history done right. Bill and I hope we managed to do that.

Ashe juniper in bloom

Holy smokes. Which is just what this male cedar tree  (Juniperus ashei) looks like when a breeze comes along, shakes these tiny reddish-colored male cones, and puffs cedar pollen into the air. The whole tree looks like it's smoking. But it's all part of the sex life of the Ashe juniper. All around this male tree, the female trees around are happily covered with tiny blue berry-like cones, just waiting for that pollen. There are some great closeups here. Luckily, neither Bill nor I are allergic to cedar pollen, but plenty of people are, and they can be plenty miserable along about now.

I've been forgetting to mention the writing conference that Paula Yost, Peggy Moody, and I have been working on. If you'll be in the Austin area in early June (the conference is June 7-9), and if you're interested in writing about place, you'll want to check this out. The workshop lineup will be available in a couple of weeks. I've been watching the proposals as they've been submitted, and they are absolutely terrific, so we're confident that this will be a wonderful conference. It's being held at the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University in San Marcos, to celebrate the publication of What Wildness is This, Story Circle's new anthology of women's writing about the Southwest. More later about this, so stay tuned.

Yesterday, I did a gig in Austin to launch The Tale of Cuckoo Brow Wood, out next week in paperback. Jo Virgil, the Barnes & Noble CRM, and I planned the event to coincide with the release of Miss Potter, the movie starring Rene Zellweger. But the movie's distributors have decided to delay wide release of the film until March. They're hoping that the film will do better when it isn't playing in the shadow of the Oscars. If you've been looking for this film locally and haven't found it, that's why. Also yesterday, a great lunch with Jo and Karen McInnerny, whose mystery, Dead and Berried, is just out. I'm one of Karen's biggest fans, and I was delighted when she gave me a copy of the new book!

My project today: podcasts. I'm working on a series of ten short podcasts on herbs. Two are done, eight more to go. Lots of fun to put together, especially since Becca Taylor is doing all the geeky stuff. All I have to do is write the script and read it, and Becca manages all the bells and whistles. Watch China's website for an announcement--or better yet, subscribe to All About Thyme, where you can read all about it.

Reading Notes. After ecstasy, the laundry.--Zen saying