LONDON CALLING Jolly Good

Pulteney Bridge over the River Avon, Bath, England

(photo by Mindful Writer, 200

21 June 2008

LONDON CALLING

JOLLY GOOD

At Minerva Graphics, which is just off Old Bond Street in Bath, England, I bought a sketch journal and a folio. An elderly couple were watching me as I fumbled with my umbrella and my backpack, fishing for pounds in the pocket. When I spoke, they nodded in recognition, as if to say, “I knew she was an American.”

The couple asked me where I was from.

“New Mexico,” I replied.

“How do you like this weather?” the woman asked. “A pity,” she said, answering her own question by way of apologizing in that way the British have of taking their national welcoming committee responsibilities seriously. She said “pity” like it had two t’s.

“I love it,” I said.

There was rain in my hair and a dampness soaking through my raincoat. My umbrella glistened.

“In New Mexico, all we get is warm and sunny. Or hot and sunny. Sometimes we get hot and sunny and windy. Or warm and sunny and windy.”

Her husband trained a steady gaze on me. I detected a slight turn of a smile.

The woman waited for me to indicate I was joking.

“Really,” I said. “It’s so rare that it rains in the desert that when you get a day like this, it’s refreshing. A joy.”

Turning to the man, I said. “We have 330 days of sunshine a year. We wish for days like this.”

The woman fluttered a forced smile. The man stood like whittled wood. I was aware of being a curiosity.

Finally, the woman said, “I guess when you live with one, you yearn for the other.” She spoke more certainly now, having located the solid ground of politeness. “We’re always thinking about what we have too much of.”

“It’s really wonderful,” I said. I noticed the rose in the man’s cheeks, which hung long from his cheekbones. His eyes were blue and watery. He was starting to look like a teacup. “I plan to enjoy it as much as I can.”

“You do that,” said the woman, cheered now. “Have a jolly good day.”

I’ve always wanted to hear someone say that.

 

LONDON CALLING Henge of Stone

Moonrise at Stonehenge

(public domain photo)

18 June 2008

LONDON CALLING

STONES THAT SPEAK

The stones speak to me. I knew they would. It’s in my line. I’m Celtic, and I was born on Winter Solstice, the day they mark at Stonehenge as the sun sets, when the winter sun sets in the sky, the shortest day of the year. On this day, our group from Spalding University has stopped at Stonehenge, just a few days shy of Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year. A man sits at the Summer Solstice stone with a tripod and a camera, lining up a shot.

I have come here to England to write, to be with writers who are committed and inspired and who will share with me as we carve out our life’s work. We are at the midpoint of our trip, and yet I’m still waiting for my muse to arrive.

At Stonehenge, the otherly navigation that has marked this trip snaps into alignment. I know my muse, its wicked ways of arriving and departing, its silly jokes that I’ve heard a million times. Memories of my father are the trumpet call. When he knocks on my heart, I know there will be tears and ink spilled. He knocked yesterday, when everything was a supreme struggle. Though London had become familiar landscape after five days, yesterday all land markers of the conventional kind confounded me.

Next to me on the bus leaving London for Stonehenge this afternoon was a writer in full flush of her muse. She scribbled on the back of paper after paper. “Quick, get me the laptop,” she said, like an emergency room surgeon, to her boyfriend. This was the writer who was three years in love, writing poetry with him that they read aloud to the group of writers; I am four months in love, webbed in a primordial love-state of poetry, a dance of love and fertility, seeds and songs and words whispered. I sit between the writer’s lover and the writer’s muse. Her muse had arrived; mine was less than hours away. Like the Jackson Browne song, “Fountain of Sorrow,” I think, I’m one or two years and couple of changes behind her.

This how my muse comes, meeting me at the windswept Salisbury Plain where ancient Britons held ceremonies for births and deaths. I am attuned to my muse in a time, earth, bluestone way, as were the ancients who heard something in the way the bluestones of Welsh shore spoke to them from 250 miles away. I am attuned to my lover, who is 5,000 miles away, back in New Mexico.

I stand at the Winter Solstice stone, opposite from the photographer who prepares for the longest day. Archaelogists believe that someone standing at the entrance to the enclosure of trilithon stones facing the center could watch the setting sun on Winter Solstice, the light dropping rapidly through the narrow gap between the 40-ton sarsens. Like a Celtic ceremonial dancer, I’m near the membrane between earth and imagination. The muse invites me into the circle as the wind whips my auburn hair in ribbons above my head. To what place did the builders of the henge of stone want us to come? I cross over.

 

LONDON CALLING The Mad King

Globe Theatre, London, England

(Photo by Mindful Writer, 200

14 June 2008

LONDON CALLING

THE MAD KING

“When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”
– King Lear

At lunch, the Texan tells us that she walked her little white dog through the streets of London and because of the smog, now he’s a little gray dog. The Texan is not really a Texan but a New Yorker. That’s where she lives now. Her dog is a Maltese terrier, not a bichon frise, like my little white dog, who’s often a little brown dog because she lives in New Mexico, which is where I live now but not where I’m from.

Only some of this day is making sense, because it’s my second day in London, and I’m still jet-lagged, trying to tell my stomach that it’s lunchtime, not sleepy time. Those of us who have arrived in London for the Spalding University MFA in creative writing program are having a gala luncheon on the first floor, which is really the second floor. That’s how they do it in London. What Americans call the first floor is the ground floor. After that is when the Brits start counting floors. We are at The Peasant, a gastro pub in Finbury, which seemed like it was just around the block from our hotel, but it wasn’t. To tell you the truth, I don’t know where we are. I am armed with a Tube map and an Oyster card, but the buses are another story entirely.

The Texan who’s a New Yorker now announces that many of the streets will close tomorrow because President George W. Bush is coming to visit The Queen, who really is a queen meeting the man who is not really a president. He seems to have taken the lame duck jokes as a serious charge and have abdicated any leadership responsibilities during the subprime meltdown and energy crisis. Or maybe he’s just been afraid to come out in public and we’ll find him naked and wandering the heath, which is to say that several of us are going to see “King Lear” tonight at the Globe Theatre and I can’t help see a few parallels.

Our program coordinator confirms that the arrival of our fearless leader will affect us, announcing the names of Tube stations that will be closed tomorrow, right at rush hour. Names like Russell Square, Green Park and Leicester Square mean nothing at this point, but they surely will over the next few days as we navigate our way to Picadilly Circus, which isn’t a circus, and Westminster Abbey, which isn’t a church but a national peculiar. A clipboard gets passed around for us to sign up for a taxicab.

* * *

To get to the Globe Theatre, the best way is to take the Tube to Blackfriars Pub. When my companion and I emerge onto the street, we see there’s a pub wedged onto a street corner, and just above the sign, written in Old English, is a statue of a squat black friar. I think he’s smiling. He’s sort of a hood ornament for the building. He doesn’t seem to mind. He seems sort of merry.

This black friar has a link with the history of our destination. The Blackfriars priory nearby had a hall that in 1596 was used as an indoor theater. When the lease expired, it was decided that a theater would be built. Members of the acting company were offered the opportunity to buy shares in the new building, which became the Globe Theatre in 1599. One of those actors who owned the place was William Shakespeare.

The Globe Theatre where we’re going isn’t the real Globe Theatre where Shakespeare’s plays were staged in the late 16th century but a replicated theater that was built authentically to the time. Authentically means there are two thick columns that block some views, the seats are wooden and some people stand at stage’s edge. In that time, a flag would go up in the street announcing that a play was starting. For one pence, you got to stand. For two pence, you got a seat on a wooden bench. For three pence, you got a cushion. The flyer that circulated through the streets to announce the play had M. William Shak-fpeare at the top. It says, “HIS True Chronicle Hiftorie of the life and death of King L E A R and his three Daughters/ With the vnforunate life of Edgar, fonne and heire to the Earle of GlosFter, and his fullen and afflumed humor of Tom of Bedlam:”

It is with afflumed humor that we find our way across the Blackfriars bridge to the Southwark area of London. On the river walk that leads to the Tate Museum of Modern Art and the Globe Theatre, my companion and I strike up a conversation with two Brits who are enjoying cups of beer in the street. We do this mostly because we don’t quite know where we are going. I ask if the bridge above us is the Millennium Bridge, but it’s the train bridge, painted cherry red and apple green, like something out of Thomas the Tank Engine that might lead us to the Isle of Sodor, if only that was where we were going.

Farther on is the Millennium Bridge, which was supposed to be a bridge of wonder, a cutting edge suspension bridge design that featured a four-meter aluminum deck and stainless steel balustrades. It was supposed to have a shallow profile, supported by eight highly tensioned cables on each side of the deck, with two river supports. It was supposed to open in 2000, but I read later that it had such a sway to it that elderly people were clinging to the handrails and people were getting seasick while crossing it. After two long, embarrassing days for the architects, it was closed and re-engineered, re-opening in 2002.

I tell our new Brit friends I’m from New Mexico, and the eyebrows go up because they only hear “Mexico.” But this is all cleared up rather nicely, and the gent says he’s been the United States, and oh yes, he certainly knows where New Mexico is. I ask him if he knows where Santa Fe is, and he says, “Oh, that’s near the water, right?” with a smirk. “It’s in the Appalachians, right?” A wink. The lights switch on the Millennium Bridge. It looks like a silver bullet train captured mid-streak.

Farther on the river walk, we see the Globe. The replicated theater is a 20-sided polygon 100 feet in diameter, authentic to the dimensions of the original. The facade is plastered with a white lime wash, authentic to the time, with Tudor-style squares and triangles marked off with green oak timbers. The roof is made of water reed thatch and is open to the sky. When we walk in, a small band of dancers and musicians is clustered at front-center, playing a Celtic tune. It is twilight.

During the play, in another authentic 16th century moment, a woman faints, thudding to the ground. The actors don’t miss a beat. The play proceeds on until one of Lear’s daughter gouges out the eyes of the Earl of Gloucester at center stage, sitting atop him like she’s doing a lap dance. She tosses the bloody globe to the ground. With that, the first act is done.

One of my companions asks, feeling a sense of finality with that scene and not remembering her Shakespeare clearly, “It’s not over yet, is it?” I don’t remember it clearly, either, but I remember this much: “Cordelia comes back. And it’s not over until everyone’s dead.”

“Howl, howl, howl, howl,” rants the incapacitated King Lear as he’s lost in the heath with a fool and a beggar in the final act. “Had I your tongues and eyes/I’d used them so that heaven’s vault should crack/She’s gone forever.” The program points out the plays rich linguistic range, full of mad babblings, gaudy rhetoric and courtly viciousness – an ocean of language. “Pray you, undo this button,” King Lear pleads as he wishes for death. And then everyone is dead, the stage of fools littered before us. After the final bows, the company returns to the stage, performing a haunting Celtic dance. They are like ghosts emerging from the mists of madness. We leave the 16th century not by the way we came, but on foot, riding the gleam of the Millennium Bridge.

 

LONDON CALLING It’s a Rush

LONDON CALLING

13 June 2008

IT’S A RUSH

A word to the wise: Don’t do London on jet lag. The first time we step out onto Pentonville Road, it’s a rush. My heart beats faster. Double-decker buses and chunky cars fly through the street at the speed of lightning. It’s a 220-volt experience. I’m on 110 volts and only three hours of sleep on the plane.

Walking along the street, I feel like I’m slipping on the muddy banks of an electric rushing river. “Is there a speed limit?” I say to my fellow London trekkers as we set out for Oyster cards and the King’s Cross Station. We are heading to Kensington Palace. I crane my neck to look for a speed limit sign, but I need to be alert. Look right, look left, look right, I remind myself.

The first Tube experience is a rush. I emerge with that elevated feeling you have after a roller coaster. You think, “I felt my heart on the verge of dropping out of my chest. That was fun. I was near death. Let’s do it again.”

At the bus stop, the double-decker buses are tipsy, and it feels like they might crush you. Aboard, I ride the second level, right at the front, where I feel I’m about to be tossed out the window like something belched from a Monty Python pipeworks. People stand on the curb inches away from the buses, which rush to their stops behind other buses. Pedestrians dart out behind a bus just as my bus pulls up, six inches and six seconds away. Navigating London requires delicate timing and a hardy constitution. Not advisable on three hours of broken sleep with The Clash’s ”London Calling” pounding in your headphones.

It’s our first day, and I still can’t remember how to spell Pentonville. Pannington, Pennington, Paddington, Pattonville. Too many “p”s and “n”s. But this will be the home of the Spalding University MFA in creative writing program that I’m taking for these five days in London, the Jurys Inn in Islington. It will take me two days and one good’s night’s sleep to learn this.

The Tube is kind of like a giant hose that has been turned on full blast. You’re the train, and you’re blocking the way of a monstrous, gushing snake of water, and he’s kind of mad. Mad in the British sense of the word, as in more than addled, kind of insane. Each time we stop, it’s more like we got geysered up from the underground and spill and splash into the street. I think I’ve found the Chamber of Secrets.

Harrod’s of London

(Photo by Mindful Writer, 200

With my two companions, I walked all the way to Harrod’s of London, only to find out they are giving the whole building a facelift. It’s a bit like coming to visit the Queen and finding her in her bathrobe. While the little touchup is going on, they have draped a curtain over the entire building with a photo image of the building so that from a distance, it looks like the real building. A little powder, a little lipstick and a stiff upper lip, and we’ll all carry on.

Inside, though, did not disappoint. We walked into the hall of a thousand prisms — the chic handbag department, where white crystal chandeliers hung over glass cases of Gucci handbags and watches. Next was the velvety Corridor of the Perfumes, where we managed to walk through without getting hydroblasted with spicy florals and musky patchoulis. That led to the hall of the Egyptian tomb, where the escalators uncoiled like Cleopatra’s snake through a smoky marbled chamber chiseled with hieroglyphics. Here, I kinda got that What-Stays-in-Vegas feeling.

The day includes our own version of a sightseeing tour – Picadilly Circus, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, Scotland Yard, Trafalgar Square. And then it is done. The tube spews us out near home, and we catch our breath and walk the rest of the way home.

 

LONDON CALLING Look Right! Look Left!

13 June 2008

LONDON CALLING I
A blog from a writer in London

LOOK RIGHT! LOOK LEFT!

Going through the passport check at London-Gatwick, I chose the wrong line. I queued up with the European and other United Kingdom passports, and I felt very deserted by the Louisville group. Those of us with the Spalding University MFA in creative writing program were all wearing thoroughbred pins. How could they all have vanished? I told myself not to worry. I’d surely see them at baggage reclaim, as it is called.

The Brits sure have a way of saying it properly. All these years I’ve called it the baggage claim, but if you think about it, in the most technical sense of the word, you can’t call it claiming if you’ve owned it before. If it’s yours, and you let it go, then it’s baggage reclaim. I think these words make it not only a more accurate experience, but a happier one. Reclaim is an act of welcoming, a reunion, rather than an act of acquisition.

So it is that I have arrived this morning in London to reclaim a dream: To be a writer of a great work.

All these years, I’ve been going after it – an act of conquering. But perhaps it’s a matter of letting happen what must happen. As writer Anne Lamott (“Blue Shoe,” “Traveling Mercies,” “Operating Instructions”) prays each day before she writes, “God, help me get out of the way today so that what needs to be written can be written.”

* * *

Our bus takes us in to London from London-Gatwick, which apparently is somewhere near Iceland, because it takes us half the morning and into the afternoon to chunnel our way through the traffic in the small squares and parks and cities that lead into London proper. One rotary is arranged in such an intricate patchwork of turns, stoplights and pedestrian crossings that it has red rectangles marked off to inform bus drivers of a fine zone. At each crossing, pedestrians come to the words “Look Right” or “Look Left” painted in the street.

How helpful the British are! It turns out these signs are painted on the streets everywhere. This is not just because addled-headed Americans were stepping out into the street and getting smashed like wily coyotes. No, it’s because sometimes the streets are one-way streets, and so sometimes you have to look left. Still, I learn after a day of walking through the streets near Kensington Square, Picadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square and Soho that this feature is going to come in handy. In Ireland, 27 years ago, I nearly got smashed by a green double-decker bus because I was looking left. Someone pulled me back from the curb just in time.

It takes a while to reorient yourself to looking right before you step into the street. I’ve been doing it a whole other way for most of my life. The first few moments as the bus left the airport, streaming along the left side of the freeway, I had the sensation that I was turning the clock back, like the first of the five Tibetan rites. It’s like rewiring the circuitry in your brain.

But that is exactly what I’m here for. I’m here to get a graduate degree, a master of fine arts in creative writing, with a concentration in narrative nonfiction and fiction. We kick it off with a brief residency in London and Bath, England, and then for nine months, we exchange packets. I have to send in writing. I have deadlines. Someone is going to make me write these great works.

It’s taken a lot of rewiring to get here. That’s why I spin counter-clockwise during my Tibetans. I want to turn back the clock. I want to unlearn, as Gloria Steinem says. “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood,” she says. It’s never too late to reclaim a dream.

But it requires untangling a lot of old ways of thinking about things. For instance: Carolyn the dance-all-night girl (though this is how I met my soul friend Bill. We were supposed to go play pool or blackjack or some other game my father taught me, and instead, we’ve been loyal friends and colleagues for the better part of two decades); Carolyn the soulful-poet (wearing black, carrying a notebook and a tortured romantic heart); Carolyn the flirt (dressed to the nines); Carolyn the shy girl (please choose me); Carolyn the daughter of a man who inspired her, quoting Shakespeare at the dinner table (“Out, out brief candle; life’s but a walking shadow”); Carolyn the daughter of a man who’s the ghost of Literary Past.

My father, he haunts me, he guides me. Last year, I told his ghost it was time for me to go it alone. We struggled, he and I, like Jacob wrestling with the angel. I will never walk the same again. And it is good. I know my destination now. Last night, from the plane I noticed the lights of the East Coast cities looked like dendrites, clusters of lights with long tendrils that stretch deep. We were leaving that behind. It’s a clean, empty slate. Time to look right.

 

Hello world!

Unwritten: The Salon for Writers started out with a group of writers with one rock-solid intention: To support each other in birthing books, essays and stories that had been important to them for a long time. We are all published writers with vast experience, but we have a pile of mid-life responsibilities that limit our time and attention. We had honed our craft for years, been good soldiers and met our deadlines, but we each believed we had much more to say — a unique story that we wanted to tell in our own singular way.

The other factor we had in common was that we were each sure it was time. It was time to get our voices out there. This was our moment.

Finding your voice is a lifelong process for a writer. Annie Proulx did not start writing until she was 58. Tillie Olsen (”I Stand Here Ironing”) was silent for many years.

Each of us is near to that point — we can feel it — but we believed by gathering as a writing community blog, we could get there faster. We write together to help each other keep the faith.

Many of us believe we have an unwritten book that we have heard in our hearts for years. Not all of us complete that book. Creative writing professor Ron Carlson says the writers who succeed are the writers who stay in the room.

This is our room. Share in our process as what was once unwritten becomes written. Welcome to our salon.

MindfulWriter