After doing a reading from my essay at the Boulder Writers Workshop in Boulder, Colorado last Saturday, BWW member, Karen Douglass, messaged me to say that the work was "way beyond Southern" and had a universal message.
I’ve been in Denver for almost three weeks now, and one thing I’ve been struck by (compared to Memphis) is the different voice the homeless seem to have here. Living in midtown Memphis for almost 24 years has offered me many opportunities to serve the homeless, including the ones who have knocked on our doors over the years. And when you walk around downtown Memphis, the dozens of homeless people ramble around, waiting in lines for shelters and soup kitchens to open, begging for alms, aimlessly, for the most part.
So, the first day I walked around downtown Denver, I was approached by a fairly nicely dressed man who introduced himself and began to tell me his story. An ex-Marine down on his luck, etc. Another day another nicely dressed man walked along beside me in Larimer Square, surrounded by chic restaurants, bars and shops, and clearly articulated his plight.
I know that these people could be lying and making a lot of money pan-handling, but that’s not my problem—that’s between them and God. I always give a little something to anyone who asks, because no one really knows how hard their life is, and a little grace and compassion can go a long way.
One day last week I was walking on the 16th Street pedestrian mall, when I noticed a man holding some newspapers in his hands—with the front page face out—so everyone could see he was selling them. I approached and asked what the paper was.
“It’s the Voice,” he said, quietly.
I bought one ($2) and took it with me to a nearby Starbucks. When I opened the paper up, I found a profile of Steve Sloboda, one of The Voice’s street vendors, inside. His story of caregiving for his dying mother, working to get his commercial truck driver’s license, and now working four days a week delivering food to local Denver grocery stores while continuing to be a vendor for The Voice is inspiring. (That's Steve, in the photo above.)
The issue of The Voice I purchased also had a great story about an exhibit at MoMa (Museum of Modern Art) I can’t wait to see when I got to New York in a few weeks
: “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream.” A group of the nation’s best architects, urban planners, ecologists, engineers and landscape designers were asked to come up with ideas for reimagining the way towns might look in the future. When my daughter was in graduate school in architecture at the University of Tennessee, I remember her sharing similar ideas with me… and specifically ideas for eliminating homelessness in the U.S.
As I look out from my 21st-floor condo balcony at this beautiful city with the gorgeous mountains in the background, I’m so thankful for my “home away from home” as well as my lovely home back in Memphis, and I admire folks like Steve Slobota who are working hard to find a home of their own. Kudos to The Voice and others who are helping them.
I'd love to hear about what's happening in your city to help the homeless, or your visions on a larger scale if you have them. Please leave a comment here or on my link on Facebook.
"Every man needs aesthetic ghosts in order to live. I have pursued them, sought them, hunted them down. I have experienced many forms of anxiety, many forms of hell. I have known fear and terrible solitude, the false friendship of tranquilizers and drugs, the prison of depression and mental homes. I emerged from all that one day, dazzled but sober. … I did not choose this fatal lineage, yet it is what allowed me to rise up in the heaven of artistic creation, frequent what Rimbaud called “the makers of fire,” find myself, and understand that the most important encounter in life is the encounter with one’s self."
Those are the words of Yves Saint Laurent, the iconic fashion designer whose collection I toured yesterday at the Denver Art Museum. The exhibit took my breath away—its beauty is unparalleled in the world of high fashion, although Saint Laurent said "it’s not about fashion, but about style." I get that. But it saddened me to learn of the darkness that dominated most of his life. The older I get, the more I understand that creating art doesn’t necessarily bring happiness, but for some people it’s just what we have to do.
Two years after I drafted the first chapter of my novel, Cherry Bomb, I’m excited to say that this morning I put my 56,587-word manuscript in the mail to a freelance editor in Oxford, Mississippi to get some expert help polishing the words I’ve labored over so intensely. Here’s a summary of the journey so far:
March of 2010: Made the decision to write a novel, and blogged about in “A Novel Idea” at the Southern Authors’ Blog, A Good Blog is Hard to Find.”
Spring of 2010: Submitted early chapters to my fellow writers in the Yoknapatawpha Writers Group (which began in 2007) and received good feedback.
May of 2010: Asked for input from readers in my post, “A Call for Names,” at the Southern Author’s Blog, A Good Blog is Hard to Find, and named the protagonist “Mare.”
June of 2010: Revised those chapters as I continued to draft more, and submitted early chapters to the Yoknapatawpha (YOK) Summer Writer’s Workshop in Oxford, Mississippi. With input from workshop participants and faculty, I added a prologue and continued writing.
November of 2010: Spent a month working on the novel in Seagrove Beach, Florida, with a detour to Oxford, where I co-hosted the 2010 Oxford Creative Nonfiction Conference with Neil White and Kathy Rhodes.
May of 2011: Entered the prologue and first two chapters in the Novel Excerpt division of the Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Competition in New Orleans, and made the short list! (One of the faculty members at the YOK Summer Writers Workshop, Neal Walsh, won that competition.)
June of 2011: Submitted another chapter to the YOK Writers Workshop in Oxford. Continued to revise with help from the feedback I received there. Gave a reading (the prologue and part of chapter one) at Page & Palette Books in Fairhope, Alabama, during the first Fairhope Writers’ Colony Retreat, hosted by Sonny Brewer. Got feed back from Fairhope writers—Sonny Brewer, Suzanne Hudson and Joe Formichella.
September of 2011: DETOUR... took some time to host the 2011 Memphis Creative Nonfiction Writing Workshop, where I met literary agent and intellectual rights attorney, John D. Mason, who gave me good advice on fictionalizing historical figures.
November of 2011: Another month of writing at Seagrove Beach… where I almost finished the novel.
(DETOUR: Sold our house in December, 2011, and packed and moved in January, 2012.)
April of 2012: FINISHED the first draft and umpteenth revision, added an epilogue, more revisions, and mailed the manuscript to my freelance editor TODAY.
So, you might be asking, “what’s with all the detours to be involved with Creative Nonfiction if you’re writing a novel?
Glad you asked. I’ve been writing seriously since 2006, and my ten published pieces are all essays—Creative Nonfiction. At first I thought I was writing those essays just to build a “platform”—to have something to show to agents when I started looking for representation for a book. But then I fell in love with the genre, so I know more essays are forthcoming.
I also penned two full-length memoirs between 2007 and 2010, before I decided to try to write a novel. I just couldn’t make peace with the idea of going public with some of the stuff in those memoirs, but maybe one day I’ll feel differently.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the recap of Cherry Bomb’s journey so far. Stay tuned…. lots more work to go before she makes it out of the starting gate!
I met Robert Leleux in January of 2010 at the 2010 Pulpwood Queens’ Girlfriend Weekend in Jefferson, Texas. Along with the Pulpwood Queens’ fearless leader, Kathy Patrick, Robert was MC for the weekend, filled with dozens of amazing authors and several hundred members of Pulpwood Queens book clubs nationwide. I was struck by Robert’s warm and compassion when I met him, as well as his humor and joy. And now I understand more about what’s behind this “Beautiful Boy.”
The Living End: A Memoir of Forgetting and Forgiving is Robert’s latest book, and it’s even more powerful than his first. Or maybe it struck me that way because the subject matter hit so
close to home—it’s about the broken relationship between his mother and his grandmother, and how Alzheimer’s (his grandmother’s) healed the breach. If you read my blog regularly, you know that this is also true in my relationship with my 84-year-old mother, who also has Alzheimer’s. And yes, I’ve written a dozen or more essays about Mother’s decline (one of them, “The Glasses,” is published in Volume 2, Issue 2 of the Southern Women’s Review) but after reading Robert’s exquisite memoir, I realize he has said everything I want to say, and he has said it brilliantly.
It doesn’t hurt that his mother and grandmother are a bit more, well, colorful, than mine. When Robert hadn’t seen his grandmother for ten years due to her abandonment of his mother, he called her (JoAnn) in a time of crisis, and here’s what she said:
“Well, hasn’t your life just gone from quail eggs on toast to shit on a shovel?”
That’s just a sneak preview of how colorful JoAnn is. And Robert’s mother? When he describes the dissolution of his family life, he said:
“This dissolution included Mother taking to drink. (We’re Irish.) And it also included Mother shaving her head, and then Krazy Gluing plastic hair to her bald scalp.”
And she’s not the one with Alzheimer’s!
Later in the book, when Robert convinced his mother to meet with his grandmother for the first time in almost forty years, he describes their initial meeting this way:
“It was as though her light was refracted through Alzheimer’s, blazing through the cracks of her infirmity. That night, JoAnn might have forgotten the information of her life, her biographical data, but she seemed to remember who she was. From her thronelike chair, she aimed all her star quality, all her twinkling, undulating charm, directly at my mother. She beamed and petted and doted upon her daughter, my mother, who seemed flustered and ruffled, thrown off balance by her mother’s courtship.”
I remember clearly the turning point with my own mother in this regard. I was visiting her in the nursing home a couple of years ago and she kept complimenting everything about me—my hair, my clothes, everything I did. She kept telling everyone around us at the nursing home, “This is my daughter. Isn’t she beautiful? She’s the best daughter in the world!” Coming from someone who only told me I was fat or my hair was wrong for most of my life, this was at first a bit off-putting. But once I got used to it, it was redemptive. She even complimented the coloring book pages we did together on one of my visits!
Robert describes this same phenomenon as he talks about his grandmother and mother’s relationship later in the progression of his grandmother’s Alzheimer’s:
“Now that my grandmother had, in a sense, disappeared, she was fully present to my mother for perhaps the first time in their relationship. Now that she was all but unreachable, she was finally available."
I won’t give away the store by continuing to quote all my favorite parts of the memoir (which is really just about every page) but I will share Robert’s explanation of the title:
“I’ve always been a person to whom ‘forgive and forget’ has seemed absurdly unworkable…. since witnessing my grandmother’s Alzheimer’s, I’ve begun to wonder whether a small reversal wouldn’t better suit humanity. Maybe it would be more practical if forgetting preceded forgiving. Maybe happiness would be more easily achieved if we all made a practice of forgetting.”
A practice of forgetting. I’m going to work on that in my own relationships with people when I have a hard time forgiving. And if I follow in my mother grandmother's footsteps and end up with Alzheimer's one day, I hope that I will at least by then be able to forget the things I haven't been able to forgive!
The famous graffiti artist, Banksy, is known for many things, but my favorite theme of his is his "Girl With the Red Heart Balloon." There's a good explanation about the Girl With the Red Heart Balloon here. The way the girl's feet (and sometimes lower body and legs) disappear at the bottom of the drawing was part of the inspiration for some of Mare's graffiti hits in my novel-in-progress, Cherry Bomb:
Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankle (1959) also in paperback, which I read about ten years ago and want to read again
Today is Good Friday for Western Christians, who are coming to the end of their Holy Week commemorations and preparing to celebrate Easter this Sunday. And here in the West, everyone from churches to grocery stores are gearing up for this sacred tradition. I was saddened by a grocery store ad I’ve seen several times this week, though, which says that Easter is “all about the ham.” No mention of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ at all.
2011 are here: “The Tinderbox.” That’s my husband holding the palm branches, and Father Troy Mashburn, our pastor, holding the Gospel Book, at the end of the procession for Palm Sunday, also known as The Entrance of our Lord into Jerusalem. 
So, I’m in Denver for a month, and reading the touristy magazines in my condo and talking with my Denver kids about what the city has to offer has made me want to create my own personal “Denver Bucket List” so I won’t miss anything I’d really like to see and do while I’m here. I’ve already done a couple of things on the list, but I’ll include them here anyway, because that’s how I am with lists. Yep, I’m one of those people who makes “to-do” lists and puts things I’ve already done on the list with a satisfying check mark beside each of them as I approach my day or week or month. I do love check marks, and it makes me feel like I’ve got a jump on the day.
of downtown Denver, including the 16th Street Mall, just a block from my condo. There’s a free shuttle that runs the length of 16th Street, which is a mile long, so if I get to one end and I’m too tired to walk back, that’s always an option. One area I want to visit along the mall is called Writer Square.
Beth and I plan to go there tomorrow.
nly here to be with family… and finish my novel. On a future visit maybe I’ll get to watch Peyton play for the Broncos! When I got here on Sunday, my son and daughter-in-law gave me a blue Broncos T-shirt with Manning's name and number on it! It seems fitting, since I was in school with Archie at Ole Miss back in the day, and then Peyton played at UT where two of my kids went to school, and now he's in Denver with both of them. Go, Broncos!
Yesterday I had an exciting time going through security at the Memphis airport. Not sure why I was chosen to be the star, but here’s what happened.
After I took off my shoes and took my computer out of its bag and loaded everything onto the conveyor belt, I walked over in front of the screening machine and a security agent said, “Ma’am, would you feel comfortable removing your hat?”
“Oh, of course! I forgot I was wearing it.” So I put the hat in a bin and sent it through the machine and walked back in front of the screening machine.
Same security agent said, “Ma’am, would you be comfortable removing your jewelry?”
“Well, I wore all leather and pearls today, nothing will set the machine off, so I don’t see why I need to remove it all.”
Security agent looked at the other agent and they both nodded.
“Okay, ma’am, then you’ll have to have the full body pat down.”
Whatever. I stood in the machine with both hands above my head like a criminal, then stepped through the other side where a (female) security agent patted me down… all over my arms, legs, hips, and between my breasts. Nothing really offensive, and hey, I’m happy to help keep terrorists off my plane. But then another agent nodded at this one and said, “Be sure and swab her hands.”
“Swab my hands?” I asked, a bit miffed at this point.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What’s that for?”
“To check for chemicals on your hands.”
“Why?”
“Because you required the pat down.”
I noticed the woman in front of me had a pat-down, too, but they skipped the hand swab on her.
I guess I must have looked special enough to get the star treatment.
As a Delta Priority Gold Member, I was first on the list for an upgrade to First Class on the flight to Denver, but all the First Class seats were taken. So, the stewardess approached me before take-off and told me I would receive a free cocktail during the flight.
“Oh, thank you!” The star treatment continued… and later in the flight a different stewardess showed up at my seat with a second complimentary gin and tonic, although I hadn’t asked for it.
Maybe that was my reward for being such a good girl back in security.
Gotta’ love Delta.
