Lifescapes

                                                                                                                                                         














There are so many new things to see here. It's all still a mass of images. Oh, I don't mean that I can't see. Yes, of course I can. Rocks, massive rocks. Pine trees on the mountain, salt cedar and willow and sycamore along Manuelitas Creek, grasses and sages and wildflowers in the meadow, all very beautiful. But to see, really see, the landforms and the textures and colors, and the birds and mammals and insects, all the community of this land, of each different habitat, I need to learn more. And learning takes time, and close, daily acquaintance, just as it takes a long time to know a friend in all her various changing moods and seasons, to know her history and her wants and wishes. It's taken me twenty years to learn just a little bit about MeadowKnoll, and about the Hill Country. A summer month in the Sangres, a month in the winter--it's only long enough to tantalize me with possibilities.

I've been a little out of focus, doing different things, none of them at top speed. Working on the last chapter of Landscapes (the memoir), helping Bill with his log restoration project, reading (Nancy Pickard's The Virgin of Small Plains), knitting (another tam), quilting (a table runner and some chair back hangers). Not quite lazy, but switching back and forth when I feel like it, which I can't do when I'm working flat-out on a writing project. For me, that's what makes this a "vacation." Yesterday I led a memoir workshop for seven of the women who live in this little community--fun and interesting, as memoir workshops always are. Sharing stories brings us closer and reminds us of how alike we really are, under the skin. I have the feeling that I know each of them much better than I would if we'd encountered one another at an over-drinks get-together. Thanks to Ann for hosting us, and to Editha for making sandwiches.

Reading note. Still--in a way--no one sees a flower--really--to see a flower takes time--like to have a friend takes time.--Georgia O'Keefe

Ahhh.....

Our house, and the valley (a large ranch, filled with grazing cattle) and beyond, to the north, the pine-covered wilderness of the southern Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The Labs, the heeler, and I arrived on Tuesday night--an eleven-hour drive, but the dogs are good travelers and traveling companions--to join Bill and the cat, who came out last week. So the whole pack is reunited, to the heeler's relief. When someone (a person, an animal) is temporarily absent, he feels the urgent need to find him and herd him home.

I've spent the rest of the week writing, happily working on the memoir I began when I was last here, in December and January. I'm ready to start the final chapter, but not quite ready, actually--still have some thinking to do. I was uneasy about the way the book seemed to fall into two separate pieces (there are two settings, Meadow Knoll and Lebh Shomea), but the voice is the same in both parts and I've added some story "connectors" that help to bridge the gap. The pieces seem to hold together fairly well--but maybe that's just because I've been living with it for a while. I'll leave it as it is and let the editor (Theresa May) tell me what she thinks. (She's not shy about giving her opinion!) The book will also appear in the Southwest Writers Collection, I understand.

Nice news, very nice news. Bleeding Hearts was named as one of the two finalists in the "contemporary fiction" category of the 2007 Willa Literary Awards. These awards are given yearly by Women Writing the West. China and I are thrilled (she says to tell you that she's never thought of herself as a "literary" figure, but if WWW thinks so, it must be true). The other finalist in the category, Susan Cummins Miller, is one of the contributors to What Wildness is This. And Pat Mora, a finalist in the poetry competition, is also a contributor. Congratulations, Susan and Pat! And to the Willa committee, many thanks for this recognition.

I'm leading a small memoir workshop for some local women on Monday. Once that's done, the rest of the time here (maybe through the first week of September) is mine, to spend writing and reading and playing. I've got a quilt project to start, so today I think I'll get out the sewing machine and set up the quilting table. And I've brought books, books, lots of good books, even some fiction (which I seem to be reading less of, these days) to get me into the mood for the next China.

Reading note. A poem by Rumi, in my own reworking:

Your mysteries will never get any clearer
if you keep asking the same questions.
You won't find the answers
as long as you insist on looking
in far, strange places.

Be patient, my dear friend.
When your eyes and your heart
have at last,
at long last learned to be quiet,
perhaps you will find
that your mysteries
have solved
themselves.

Blue Daze

                                                                                                                                                          














The latest tam. There are a couple of unintentional little ziggy-zaggies in Blue Daze, but otherwise I like it. I added a little duplicate stitching in pink (it's really coral, but the blue tones it down), which sets off the top. I've already started the next tam (I'm telling you, these things are addictive!), using a tubular cast-on that is picky as all heck but gives the ribbing a very smooth, polished edge. Another virtue of the tubular cast-on: you can thread in some elastic if your ribbing is too loose (which mine almost always is, after a little while). There are several online tutorials for this--google it and you'll find them. I'd do it for you, but I'm also packing this afternoon, as well as blogging.

Tomorrow is the Great Getaway Day. The three dogs and I are driving out to NM to join Bill, who is already out there with the cat. Yes, we do have too many animals, which you count in the cows, sheep, and geese (who are not going along on this trip). But we can't figure out which of them we could possibly live without. Actually, I could. I could do without those particular ganders, who are particularly nasty during testosterone season. The funny thing is that what we have (through no fault of our own) is a pair of ganders, one of whom pretends to be a goose during the months of January-April. We do not inquire too deeply into this arrangement, you understand. We just observe.

Anyway, tomorrow morning bright and early (dark and early, probably), I'm outta here, heading west, with enough yarn for a couple more tams, and some quilt fabric, and a big box of books. Oh, and three dogs. Can't forget the dogs. They would be very unhappy.

Reading note. Maybe we need different places for different phases of our lives. Maybe cherished places remain alive inside us even if we have to move on--our attachment to the earth not thinned, but widened. Still, I worry over the pile of fragments in my past, the running of one place into another. Wherever I am is cluttered with the memory of dozens of other landscapes.--Deborah Tall, From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place

Getting the word out

With The Tale of Briar Bank off my desk and onto my editor's and The Tale of Hawthorn House due out in another month, it's time to turn my attention from writing the Cottage Tales to getting the word out. Peggy Moody and I finished the new website a couple of weeks ago, with some really nice Beatrix-y art work done by Peggy Turchette, who does the covers and the maps for the books.

There's no tour for this book--two tours a year is just too much. So I'm doing a kind of minimalist thing. Bookwoman in Austin is hosting a Beatrix Potter teaparty on September 26 (if you're in the area, come on by and have some carrot cupcakes).

The big thing I'm doing for the book, though, is something I can do from home: a blog tour, which is a new experience for me. Julia Buckley just posted our interview on her blog, Mysterious Musings--she'll publish that again for the tour. (Thanks, Julia!) I got in contact with another reader, who had earlier put up a really cute post about the books, and I'll be stopping by her blog on the tour. I'm making a list of other blog possibilities for the publicist who is helping me with the project.

And then of course there will be the regular eletters and that sort of thing. I'm encouraged by the first review, from Publisher's Weekly. You can read it on the the book's Amazon site. Oh, and while I'm thinking about it, I want to say a big thanks to the readers who go to the trouble of posting thoughtful reviews on the Amazon site. That takes time and effort, and I'm grateful.

A couple more days, more household chores (finally got around to all that piled-up laundry!) and then the dogs and I are off to join Bill in New Mexico. He went out yesterday, with the cat. It was the first long-distance trip for Shadow Kitty, and I'm glad to report that she made it in fine style. She's discovered the loft in our house out there, where she will be safe from two-thirds of our dog pack. (Lady and Zach, the Labs won't go up the open stairs--chickens! Toro, the heeler, just closes his eyes and takes them by leaps and bounds.)

Oh, and my granddaughter just saw her first bear, in her very own front yard, through her very own front window. Becky is autistic, so her excited exclamation "Look! A bear!" was as significant an event as the bear itself. Way to go, Becky. Tell us all about it, but do stay safe. The wild world is wonderful, but sometimes the creatures we share it with have claws. And teeth.

Reading note, for Becky. It does not do to leave a live dragon [or a bear] out of your calculations, if you live near him.--J.R.R. Tolkein, The Hobbit

UPDATE.
I'm adding this note because Pam (see her comment below) just wrote to offer her blog as a possible stop on the tour, and I thought some of the rest of you might be interested. I'm looking for blogs that would be a good fit for the Cottage Tales and allow me to do something different, to go beyond the usual author interviews (which are nice, but I'm sure you don't want to read two weeks' worth of the same thing!). Pam has a nature blog, which would be a comfortable fit for a post about Beatrix's life-long interest in nature. Also, Pam's blog has some pretty good traffic, which makes it attractive from a publicity point of view. I imagine I'll be bringing some traffic, but the idea here is to connect with the readers who already connect with a particular blog. And the expectation for a tour is that at least some of the new readers will go with  me to other blogs, and we'll all benefit from the sharing.

What other kinds of blogs am I looking for? Maybe a children's illustrator blog, an art blog, a miniaturist's blog, a cookery blog (there are recipes in the books, you know), a garden blog (Beatrix had a lovely garden), a kidlit blog, a reading-for-families blog, and so on. Get the idea? If you're interested, send an off-blog email to me at china at tstar dot net and we'll see what we can cook up together.

Finished!

The Tale of Briar Bank is finished and has flown off to New York, via dragon courier. No, just kidding. (You didn't really believe that, did you?) I sent an e-copy via email for the production gang and a print manuscript via snails to my editor. She likes to read books she can hold in her hands and mark up with a pen, the old-fashioned way. When she's read it, it goes to England to be read by an editor at Frederick Warne, Beatrix Potter's copyright holder. Then back here to the copyeditor, then back to me, then back to the copyeditor, then back to me as "first-pass" pages, then to the printer and the binder, and finally (in September 2008) to you, so you can find all the errors the copyeditor and I have cleverly hidden just for you. In the meantime, as a librarian friend of mine said once, you'll have to contain your soul in patience. While you're waiting, The Tale of Hawthorn House (Book 4) will be out this September (having gone the same route last year). And if you haven't read the third book, The Tale of Cuckoo Brow Wood, now's the time.

I took a day for a felting project, a day for reading (Robert Pyle's Sky Time in Gray's River), and now I'm back at work--this time on the memoir that I set aside late last winter. I don't like what I felted (a mustard-colored scarf), but even when felt doesn't turn out the way you imagined, it still turns out. I mean, there's the felt itself, which can be turned into something else. The process went like this.

First I carded the fiber, which is a blend of dyed merino. This is a laminated felt, so the fiber is felted on both sides of the laminating fabric, which in this case is a scarf-sized piece of dyed cheesecloth--you can see it in the second photo. In the third, I've laid out the fiber on bubblewrap and placed the cheesecloth on top of it. Another layer of fiber goes on top of that. The result is the scarf in the fourth photo, which turned out about the right size and weight (cozy on a cold winter's night in Alasak). Below that is a closeup--the felted fabric is rather more interesting than the scarf, which encourages me to think that maybe I can use it as part of the vest that's lurking in a dark corner of my mind.

The memoir looks better than I remembered--the first half of it, anyway. It's lovely to get back to it and actually enjoy reading what I wrote, which is not always the case. But like the felted fabric, writing can be recycled--recycled endlessly, actually. So even if I didn't like it, all is not lost. More later about that.

Before you go, please take a look at a couple of other pages. My son Michael wrote a nice piece for the Junea Empire about back-roads traveling, including photos of the grandkids. Encourage him so he'll keep on writing. And Linda Peterson wrote about her cat, Grace Blanket, on our Wildness blog. Her post reminds us that we don't need to make a trip to the wilderness to reach the deepest, truest heart of the wild. Thank you, Linda.

Reading note, from Linda's post: I’ve known wildness, defining it, when I came to define it at all, as something remarkable and exotic, something “out there” attainable only in rare, dramatic moments.   But here in the quiet of my living room with a domestic cat, I felt my own wild nature at its deepest in the space we created around us.