WAITING

Last year I gave my cousin, a close friend and advisor, a golden next with three glass eggs. I felt like one of the many things we both had in common was that we were waiting for a grandchild. She is waiting for her first and I am waiting for our second, a granddaughter who will arrive in March, just two months ahead of her grandson. So this fall I put the image at the left into print. It is called WAITING, for while it is our children and their spouses waiting to see what this new nest will hold, we are waiting as well. We can't quite picture the changes that this new arrival will bring to our lives and to theirs. It is a time of anticipation and my tendency is to focus so much on the next big event I forget to look at all of the things unfolding around me.

So as I wind up a year of new experiences that have hatched for me, I am mostly grateful for all the things that happened while I was waiting for what I thought would be big roadmarks in my life. Some of those eggs have been sitting in my nest for a long time...so long that I thought they would never hatch. A visiting professorship at Hollins University, art shows in Homer and Anchorage Alaska, joining a gallery in Sebastopol, finishing manuscripts and my new book, PAINTING THE SKY, and more study of cave paintings. But the egg that has finally hatched is something more personal. The realization that this year is a year of becoming stronger with other people. Giving credence to my own direction. In the meantime my children and my grandson are the most signigicant stories in my year.

This year reminds me of some of the books that I started to write and a great book for writers that my son gave my called The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo. It says to start writing and write till the subject becomes the background, the story beneath the intitial zing that got your started writing the story or poem in the firs place. The initial subject that your are writing about needs to be written about until it becomes background for the true essence of the story....the egg that is waiting to hatch.

So while we look at eggs in a nest with a great sense of wonder, or an idea for a story, or a list of what we think will be our next great accomplishment or adventure, we need to remember that they are only shells that hold something deeper inside, something that is waiting to fly free when it is time. Our job is to write, to create, to live our surface story of acheivements until we find out that something more than we were imagining on the surface has come to life.

If life were a novel we would find out that while we were living above the plot line with all of our actions, something deeper and more meaningful was developing below the plot line with all of our characters.

For those of you that are writers, or people who are waiting to see where the next idea or event is going, give yourself a gift this year. Here are some suggestions. THE TRIGGERING TOWN by Richard Hugo, ON WRITING by Stephen King, WRITING FROM THE INSIDE OUT by Dennis Palumbo, THE SPYING HEART by Katherine Paterson. I am taking them off the shelf to reread them as my Christmas gift.

A COZY HOLIDAY TEA AND WHACKY CAKE

This afternoon I attended the Gateway Council Holiday Tea with my friend Marsha Arnold. It is the first of a series of holiday events and receptions that combine people who share a passion for the arts and for reading. There are many who form the backbone of the local reading council.... Carla, Marie, Paula, and others who have spent their entire lives not only raising families, but also fulfilling their passion for teaching, either in the classroom or by running our community and school libraries . They match children with good books, which means not only knowing children well, but also knowing the vast variety of books available.
I stay connected to our local reading council not only because we share a similar interest, but because it connects me with people who constantly give themselves to creating the next generation. These people are the ones who create the people who will run our future.
So what about Whacky Cake? The refreshments at the Holiday Tea were made from recipes in a book called Taste of Literacy...a collection of recipes by authors around the state. Marie made my Whacky Cake. Barbara Winslow would be proud. She is the writer of DANCE ON A SEALSKIN, a book I illustrated, that recaptures some of our dancing experiences in Alaska. Barbara always did things the easiest way, and this cake is all made in the baking pan. Only one dish to wash when you are done.....and it's chocolate!
So this afternoon I got to combine one more thing with my love for reading and the arts....food and memories of living in Alaska. When it was Christmas several (sometimes 15) teaching families gathered together in one school on the Yukon or Kuskokwim Rivers in Alaska for Christmas. We did not have time to go to our homes in the lower 48 and join our 'real' families for Christmas, so we formed our own. We flew in, snowmachined in, and divided up the cooking. We layed out palettes for the children to sleep on in one of the classsrooms and the mom's slept with them on the floors. My kids remember bouncing from lap to lap with all of our teaching friends, going to the village activities, and playing in the snow.
Christmastime is often a time for nostalgia and for remembering old friends who are still friends, and this afternoon I was reminded that part of Christmas in Alaska was Whacky Cake..... there was always Whacky Cake.
So, if your are out there Barb, we are having Whacky (Crazy) Cake for Christmas here this year.
We will dump the following ingredients into a 13x9 baking pan and stir till all the lumps are gone (sounds like what life does to all of us)
2 cups suger
3 cups flour
1t salt
1/2 c cocoa...as in Hersheys Dark
2t soda
2t vinegar
2t vanilla
2/3 c salad oil
2 c water

Bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 min

I laughed when I read the last line...good cake for company if you are out of eggs. We were always out of eggs in the village!

MAGICAL CONNECTIONS

Years ago I created a book that felt like magic for the whole time I worked on it. It is called PIECES OF CHRISTMAS and was a gift to me from Holt. They let me work on a surreal idea....a set of poems set inside a snow globe with the premise that Santa calls the North Wind to recycle the letters he's answered...."he calls the North Wind to swirl them around, and pieces of Christmas come falling down ". Each piece of Christmas is a stamp torn from an envelope, with a poem. The image on the left is part of the spread for the following poem:

On Pennsylvania Avenue
Possums pray for me and you-
Please bless this world and bless this town
and those whose lives are upside down.

At the end of the book you find yourself watching Santa fall asleep after delivering his gifts. The stamps are part of the quilt he is sleeping under and the pieces of Christmas...the fragments of letters my own children wrote that Santa sent back to me...are now part of the snow in the globe. My editors knew it was a long shot but believed in dreams. The book monetarily has not done as well as my others, but I think there is something more important about it. Those who like it, love it in the way we are thrilled when we feel those unexpected connections, forming in our brains. Universal studios used a spread from the book in a movie and the director bought the picture. I think he knows how to make those magical connections as well. As an artist and a writer, those are the connections I hope for.

If you were a possum, or a person like me you would find yourself thinking that we have turned our values upside down in the last ten years and are only now trying to right ourselves. The one thing we can hang on to is our mind's ability to make connections that are new and exciting, whether they explain our real world that we deal with or the imaginary world that we are trying to form.

I take care of my grandson, Jack, one day a week. It is a day of sitting on the "apple porch" where we eat our apples off the tree (I'll be buying those soon), getting eggs from Donna's chickens and cooking them for lunch and making magical connections. Yesterday he watched my dog, Blue, chase vultures in the sky. I ask him if Blue could catch the vultures. He is almost two and he told me "Blue need wings to catch birds." He didn't tell me Blue couldn't catch birds, just told me the next step. He astounded me. His mind is building those magical connections that tell a story. Last night as the moon came up, we sat on the porch before we took him home, and Jack said, "Blue catch the moon". When I looked at him, he said, "Blue need wings to fly to catch the moon". Then he grinned and said, "Teasing Grandma." I looked at him in wonder as I realized he is already learning how to craft a story that makes him happy.

That night, while having dinner with my daughter and her husband, they told me he could tell a joke. They said, "Jack, can you tell a joke?" His response was "JOKE!" and the laughter of a standup comedian. While my husband says I'm the one telling this story, he has to admit those first magical connections are being formed in our grandson's young mind.

And for those of us being asked to underestimate the connections that young children can make while reading books, or being read to, I have to say, we need to counter that with the fact that our main job is to form new magical connections in their minds.

THE COLOR OF AIR

The image at the left is called Sonoma County Evening. It is imaginary, and yet it looks like most of the fall evenings in Sonoma County. After standing outdoors and painting many sketches of an area outside of Penngrove, I put my memories of those evenings painting into one picture. It is what I love about being able to create your own memory on paper.

The air in Sonoma County is always full of color. There are crystals of fog that collect the sunlight and crystals of condensation that paint the sky in the evening as the moisture in the fall rises from the ground. The sky becomes a canvas that is the beginning of the story of that time and that place. In some places a yellow sky means smog, in others, it means a sunset, but the color of the air around us always tells a story. And in a painting, smog and fog can both be beautiful. And the color of the air affects the colors of everything between us and the objects in the distance that we gaze at. I have had the same painting mentor for 5 years and she always says, "don't do anymore to the forground till you get the sky in." A yellow sky goes in and all of the colors in the hills need some yellow in them. A sky of light value makes the foreground darker. A sky of warmth needs to sparkle off of the objects in the picture.

In writing I think the sky becomes the setting, the culture, the time and the place. All of these things sit comfortably in the background so that the story itself stands out. In the foreground we avoid telling a story that doesn't match the background. In the painting above, I could not put smoke rising from the chimney. But even though that is a lovely thought, this is a warm evening, late in the summer and smoke from the chimneys would automatically place your eye on the buildings. Then I would have to add more detail to make that story make sense and pretty soon the peacefulness that I felt when I started the picture, the feeling of gazing at a sky full of color that paints the hills, would be lost.

How do I know? Because I have two drawers full of manuscripts that are overtold and need to be edited, two drawers of stories where the culture, the rhyme, the folklore template stood out as the main story and not as the underpainting and the background. They are pieces of work that I allowed to spin away from the story in order to keep a pet phrase or paragraph in tact. And for every painting like the one above, for every illustration in a book, I have ten that did not capture the essence of what I went after. But they did help me get to where I wanted to go.

So what is the color of air? Let me know what a yellow sky means to you, or a green sky, or a red sky. I'd like to know.

A SENSE OF DISTANCE

The picture I painted on the left called Spring on the Kenai Peninsula. It sits in front of me in my office to remind me of the grandeur of Alaska. It is also a vision of distance. I love places where you can see a great distance, have no idea of how you are going to get there, but still have a feeling that there is a path for you to take.
This weekend I went to a lovely retreat at Asilomar....15 writers, 15 talented and creative people still traveling to get to their distant goals. I don't think many of us knew why we said yes to the retreat. We didn't know everyone going, we thought we were going to work at this retreat, accomplish the next chapter, the next book, set of illustrations, or the next talk for a conference, but all of us dropped our goals for conversation. What an amazing gift we gave ourselves. Long awaited naps on the beach, conversations by the fireside on how to balance careers with our artistic souls, how to balance family and career, and how to honor that fact that some of us have a new direction we need to take. And, for me, how to honor who you really are when it takes you out of the mainstream.
For many, they said it was the first time they had talked at that level, and I realized I have been fortunate. I have been with a variety of peoples that hold who they really are above what the rest of the world would like for them to be. Some of these people come from Northern Alaskans who have had to step out of their comfort zone to use their gifts and to share them with others. Some are other artists who pursue their arts regardless of income. Some are like my husband, who is one of the best general contractors, but saves time for hunting, gardening meat-making and cooking. These are the people I want to be with...those who have seen something in the distance, a feeling of space, of opening up, and are willing to get off the beaten path to take that trip.
I go back to places of space, like Alaska, or the oceanside retreat at Asilomar, to feel small enough to travel through the open space of ideas with a knowledge that I am headed through a beautiful landscape on my journey.
So what is the next space that I am exploring? I thought it would be outer space, but it is cyberspace, of course. I am behind, if that matters, but have finally found that it is much like living in Alaska. The world is so vast, the communications so great, that it is a bit like my kids described landing is a mosh pit. Something will bouey you along on my journey. I hope there are a lot of strong, open hands out there to bouey me along on mine, especially as I land with all the baggage I carry!

WALKING THROUGH A STORY

I have often wondered why I tell stories. Are they lies like I used to tell to make my real world live up to the standards of the world I thought everyone else had? Growing up in the Catholic church, and being forever guilt ridden, I thought that might be the answer. But, lately, what I think it is, is a chance to expand my very small world into the "what if" world....a world full of possibilities. A chance to leave the competetive (well, now you know something about me) world of publishing where we try to write what will sell, in order to write the stories we are passionate about. We need to do that in order to get them out of our heads to make room for new stories.

The image on the left is called Seal Moon. I have an ivory pendant carved with a Moon's face and framed with silver. The moon and I are good friends, and you will often find me on the porch during the fuller phases of the moon till way too late at night...or not, depending on the month and the season. To me the moon calms things, makes our days slow down to night, and I need that. I miss her when she is gone, just like the seal who fell in love with her and climbed out onto the ice to become a the first man. He found out she left each day, so he lit a seal oil lamp inside of an ice hut so she could find her way back each night. But in my story Moon is curious as well. She wants to know what is under the hole in the ice. No matter how far away she may seem, she still wants to know what is grounded, under the ocean and bound to real life.

When I first drew this picture I didn't think there was a story, then I realized I wanted to take a journey...follow a path through my imagination to a place I love to go but am afraid will get criticized. I did not want anyone to think I took this story from any Alaskan groups I have worked with, but ignoring the influence of hearing Yup'ik stories is like ignoring my love for Rie Munoz's art. It is the place my imagination took flight.

I like creation stories, as you know from THERE WAS AN OLD MAN WHO PAINTED THE SKY, so I decided this would be where the first man came from. I like having the freedom to play with possibilities and my own folklore, and as a writer and artist, I feel fortunate at times to get a glimpse of my own landscape. It goes from my "real" life here to a life full of possibilities and without limitation.

Last night I officially joined The Sebastopol Gallery. a group of 12 Sonoma County fine artists. I am grateful that this is part of my path, as well as book illustration and writing. It gives me a chance to be part of 12 other fine artists who create with many different "ingredients"...fabric, silver, gold, clay. My own art has already gone through a small transformation after being part of 11 other artists. I can't give you any rational reason for joining, just that it was the next step on my own path through my own story, maybe like the Moon wanting to see what was beneath the ice. I can put stories on a wall as well as in a book. I can create my own folklore...or landscapes without trying to fit them into a book package when I need to. I am grateful to the group for voting me in last night. And I am grateful to publishers who still keep me illustrating stories that fit the book package.

Someone quite smart said we only need to see 200 feet ahead of us while we are driving. I know from walking at night at a slower pace that we only need to see about ten feet. So whether walking through a story, or through life, we only need to head the direction we want to go for a short distance and then our headlights will show us where to go next.

SUDOKU: One square at a time.

Every morning I wake up to coffee, the morning paper and the game of Sudoku. I never know how long it will take, and I may have to start over, but I play because it reminds me of life in general, and especially of a life in the arts.

Having a career in the arts is unpredictable at best, and like Sudoku, one move, one idea, one book or image may have you thinking that you have the answer to walking with success through the whole puzzle of life. Most of the time when I put that number into the puzzle, I am amazed that that is ALL I got ....one more number. Then I sit and wait again, esp. on Diabolical rounds, for the next number to surface. So what's the point?

I have learned that the game for me is something of a meditation, a chance to let go of time, to let go of a guaranteed win, and a reminder that sometimes the best thing you can do is put the game down and go do something else. When I come back, the next number is usually right in front of me. At that point, my husband has probably heard me say thank you...just to know I'm not stuck.

I have put Sudoku in my mind as a way to deal with the unknowns as I play my own creativity game. One day I draw birds in birch trees. Later I add a birdhouse. A few days or weeks later, I decide that this is connected to the fun I have of small people, so I put a woman standing in the doorway of the birdhouse. A story has started. I give her a tray or bowl of seed to feed the birds. I start a final picture in a hurry....typical of me. I put on the color, but when I'm done, it is not the right composition, and I have a different feeling towards her than I did when I started working with the image. She is that quiet part of me that likes stories of gathering seeds, feeding birds, and watching them come to eat. I think the woman in my picture needs to live in the house.

So today I'm starting over. I have a clean start, a larger piece of paper, and more space to play with. The picture on this blog is getting redone. And like Sudoku, when you have to erase and start over, you know what doesn't work, and usually the next time the puzzle comes together. So here is to starting over, to knowing that the first squares are filled in with this image, this story, and to not quite knowing how it will end up. And here is to being content and grateful for one square at a time, even if you don't know where it leads.