Category Archives: Writing

The Sunshine Award

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It’s my pleasure to report I was nominated for the Sunshine Award by Natalia Sarkissian, an amazing photographer and gifted writer. Please visit her beautiful blog, Postcards from Italy.

Thank you, Natalia! You are a dear to include me in this. :)

I am posting the rules below, as well as a list of the blogs I am nominating in return. I hope you will follow the links to see where they lead. And I will include my “required” answers to the ten questions in a subsequent post.

sunshine award, orange flower and blue sky

Award Rules
1) Include the Award’s Logo in a post or on your blog.
2) Answer 10 questions about yourself.
3) Nominate 10 other bloggers.
4) Link your nominees to this post and comment on their blogs, letting them know they have been nominated.
5) Share the love and link the person who nominated you.

My nominees are:

The Urge to Wander
http://theurgetowander.com/

Romance Novel
http://jmgromance.com/

Global Anni
http://globalanni.wordpress.com/

avantourists
http://avantourists.com/

The Wanderlust Gene
http://thewanderlustgene.wordpress.com/

And my big thanks again to Natalia Sarkissian and her beautiful blog, Postcards from Italy.

Exorcising Demons (7)

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It’s my seventh week, and still I’m afraid each time I won’t have anything “good” to write. I worry I won’t be able to enter in, that “having” to tie my post to Mexico will make it boring or contrived. I worry because I think I have already told you all my good stories about Mexico, my first whale, my magic walking loop in Guanajuato. What else? I have brainstormed lists of things I can write about, and still every week I’m afraid. And I don’t want to spend all year afraid. I want to break through this. Surely I can find things I want to say about a place that goes so deep in me, whose images swim through my days, wade through my sleeping dreams, whose people live inside me–vivid, dark skinned, brown eyes alert and present. I want to find my way in and stay there, watch my blog grow, be happy with what I touch, excited about what’s to come, each new waiting post a pleasure, another chance to write about what I love, what moves me, makes me feel, come alive. I want to banish the damn fear once and for all. (Does it ever work that way?)

Brian laughed at me when I told him. “I’m sorry, ” he said, still laughing his wonderful laugh. “I’m afraid you simply can’t feel that way.” He was teasing but not teasing. I know it defies logic, is ludicrous in light of my scribbled lists of topics. But each week I become tight, braced, hands out in front of me, warding off monsters. Nothing to say? Nothing worth reading? Nothing I can remember well enough? So make it up, I think. You told your readers you might write fiction. So, write fiction, then. Easier said. Maybe I’m really afraid I can’t do Mexico justice. How can I bring Ana to life, laughing in the living room on Aldama? Rodolfo, offering me a taste of his exquisite pipián, eager, watching my reaction? Iris, a wonderful sly smile on her face, bringing me my birthday dinner at Il Giardino? How can I let you know what they meant to me, alone in a strange country, my lifelines there? How can I explain why I almost never call them, how even now my heart breaks a little and my eyes fill? How they weren’t only my anchors, my buoys in a foreign land, but they seemed to love me so completely, took me just as I was, found joy in me?

patio at Las Flores Posada in Todos Santos, my writing notebook on the table

I wipe tears away with the back of my hand from where they pool above my upper lip. One stray one slides down my left cheek. The misters cool the pre-dusk air, and a hummingbird alights on one pointy tip of the big cactus, taking in their moist cloud. For now, my fears abate, chased off by this release, I think, and because I’ve touched these memories for myself, even if I am no more confident of presenting them to you. I breathe, and sigh, sip my water, listen to the evening chatter of the house sparrows in the hedge behind me, the pwitter of the mourning dove’s wings as he flutters to the ground from his perch atop the wooden fence in search of fallen thistle seeds. Maybe, I think, I only need to become present to do this without fear. And maybe that’s where I’m afraid of failing.

[Editor’s note: This photo shows my writing notebook and binoculars on the patio at Las Flores in Todos Santos, Baja California Sur.]

Some Sweet News

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First I want to say I have no plans to fall behind this year on my blog posts. I did drop the ball, missed my Sunday night deadline to post my sixth post in the sixth week. But I had a good excuse–my computer had trouble, and I literally couldn’t finish it. (Actually, I finished typing it up from my handwritten copy and then erased it when my mouse stopped working. So I typed it again, and then I wasn’t able to open my browser to post it. So. I am posting it shortly, and I have every intention of posting the seventh one this week as planned. ;-)

But what I wanted to share with you is some good news about my writing. I’ve been entering writing contests feverishly (!) since the beginning of last year. I have about five “polished” pieces I enter most often, three short stories and two short nonfiction pieces. So far, all but one of the nonfiction pieces has made it to the final rounds. A few weeks ago, I’d wondered whether or not I was being silly to keep entering contests, that perhaps my writing was not yet honed enough to win. A day or two later, I found out my short story, “Intended” (the one I thought surely may be too weird for most people in the world), had essentially tied for first place with three other finalists. It didn’t win, but one of the editors from the Writing Site, Tima Smith, told me “Intended” is “engaging, surprising and evocative.” She said my writing is “top-notch.” I was so excited and encouraged, happy the universe was whispering (or shouting?!) for me to continue entering my work.

And on Cinco de Mayo, a long, intense day with the full moon at the end of it–prayers for my commitment to writing to flourish, rattles shaking as I stood on a chair to see the rising full moon over the hedge–I checked my email to discover my short story, “Between My Ribs,” had won first place in the annual short story contest of the local Writers Guild. My first win! I hooted and hollered and was in big awe. I have told my friends and family, of course, but I wanted to let all of you know. You’ve been so encouraging of my writing here. I knew you would like to share my sweet news.

I feel honored and grateful and oh so glad. It feels a bit like a dream now, but a good one–coming true.

I Begin (1)

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Dusk nears on the second day of my spring holiday, my first in ten years of teaching. I sit on the patio and move my pen across the page of my notebook to begin my first post for this new year of mine, 54 at 54–All Things Mexico. The task I have set for myself terrifies me, but I push the pen across the page anyway. My mind has been wandering paths as steep and twisting as the narrow callejones of Guanajuato, playing out possible topics for my blog, trying them out in my head. Why didn’t I document my time there, take vivid notes, photograph everything I loved? My fear about the course I have set for myself here makes the question come out harsh, anguished. Why didn’t I take pictures of the horses on the cobblestone streets in Ajijic? I would run to the balcony when I heard one passing by below. Why didn’t I record the sound their hooves made dancing on stone? I don’t have any pictures of the Wednesday market or the cemetery or the grackles roosting in the trees at twilight in the plaza. Why, I wonder, didn’t I photograph every doorway, every windowsill, every wall spilling bougainvillea on the street? Why didn’t I photograph every face I came to love, and all the textures and colors that layered themselves inside me, that have me missing Mexico like a river running through my California days?

white wall with window and bougainvillea

Why didn’t I take more photographs, learn more words, record the stories and the history and the rumors that came my way? Is it because I was not yet a writer in the same way I am today? In part, I know that’s true. And I didn’t know one day I’d want to write a blog about this big love of mine. I was busy taking it all in, absorbing the way it felt inside me, this foreign country where I found such sweetness, such welcome, yet where I was still so much “the other,” my white americana self a sore thumb, standing out amidst the dark hair, the dark skin of the other people in the villages. I think in my usual way I paid more attention to emotions and interactions, to the nuances of finding my way in a culture so different from the one I grew up in. I didn’t document the details, not outer or inner, only let them pile up inside me. Now I am afraid I have set myself an impossible task, but it’s one I want very much to meet. And so, as the light wanes on my California evening, I take a deep breath and reach for trust. I will find ways to write about what I love. I have already begun. A bird I don’t know in the pine tree repeats one long sliding note. I take another breath, the pen loose now between my fingers, and I know dusk settles in Mexico in just this way.