Peggy had us work on turns of phase (such as “Go to the broom closet and pick out a stick,”) that told something about a character or situation.
David had us read our work and promised to do something on point of view.
A good deal of Jeanne’s time was spent putting up Alaskan writer’s conferences (and some Outside.) These included:
The Midnight Sun Writer’s Conference
The Dead Writer’s Conference (October)
The Fairbanks Arts Association, which sponsors Readings, Writing in the Dark, and the Community Writers Group
Poetry at the Dredge
49 Writers
Alaska Writer’s Guild (Conference Sept 10-12)
Skagway Writers Symposium
Kachemak Bay Writers Conference
Wrangell Mountains Writing Workshop
and a magazines, Cirque.
She also suggested we check the Poets and Writers website.
Jeanne, please comment on good books on writing; I got only partial titles and authors.
Jeanne also gave us four letter poems to study for tomorrow (Homework).
“My dearest Conflict” and “My dearest Regret” by Oliver La Paz,
“to Rose” from Letters to Yesenin(?) by Jim Harrison.
“Letter to Kathy from Wisdom” by Richard Hugo.
“To Susan Gilbert Dickinson” (letter from Emily Dickensn)
Jennifer Brice talked to us about travel writing in the afternoon.
2010 class members
Back Row (standing): Marie Lundstrom, Althea Nelson, Ela Harrison Jordon, Julie Johnson, Taylor Wilson, James Sterling, Rob Childers, Monte Jordan, Steve Matzker, Crystal Warner, David Crause, Karen Kohout, Don Gray, Mike Welsh, and Jeanne Clark. Front row (sitting or kneeling): Peggy Shumaker, Sue Ann Bowling, Anita Stelcel, Molly Fischner, Kim Williams, Zoe Wildridge, Rhonda Harvey, Bonny Lynn Babb, Stacey Hale, and Mary Fenno.
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'Homecoming' Blog 
Sue Ann,
I am writing to tell you how impressed I am by your blog.
Your notes are so superior to mine. Such a great resource.
I thank you.
If I can make use of this space at the Festival’s close or after, I will definitely post some of my work.
Do you all know I believe Althea and I are the only ones from “Outside” as you say up here?
The Festival has put me in a different state in more ways than one.
Again. Thank you for all the effort you’ve put into this.
MARY JO
Sue Ann . . . Thank you for doing this blog. I haven’t been able to post except by typing the whole piece over here in the library. Last night (Wednesday, July 28), I was able to make a hard-wire connection to the Internet at my landlord’s home and was able to copy and paste and post 5 pieces–Why I Write, Sacred Places, Empty Nest, Death Valley Blind, and Horse Tale. I don’t think it’s likely I’ll have any more posts of my writing until I’m home in Anchorage–it depends on when I get things finished–or at least at a respectable stopping point. In any case, your effort at having a space for us to read one another’s work is commendable, and I appreciate it. ~ Marie
Death Valley Blind
by Marie Lundstrom
The camp fire had burned low, and we were sitting comfortably on rocks and sand. Death Valley was dark, with just enough light to avoid tripping over rocks.
The blind guy, Bobby, stood up and announced, “I need to shit. Where’s the toilet?”
“Down the path to the edge of the campground,” one of his buddies murmured.
Everyone sat, unwilling to break the mellow mood of campfire talk. Our two groups, four of us girls and half a dozen young men had met only that afternoon.
“I need to go,” Bobby said loudly. “Somebody’s got to take me.”
Nobody said anything. I wondered why Bobby’s buddies didn’t volunteer. Bobby stood waiting, leaning on one hip.
The silence was too heavy for me. “Okay, I’ll take you,” I said.I stood up and went around the other campers to take his arm. “I’m Lynn,” I told him. I could see the dark blob of the outhouse downhill from our camp spot.
“There’s a path. No big rocks,” I said as I steered him gently down hill.
I felt strange guiding a blind guy to a toilet. What would I do while he went?
We didn’t talk as we slowly walked. Bobby shuffled as if he wasn’t used to being led.
I couldn’t think of anything to say to a young man losing his vision. I remembered reading to a blind grad student when I was a senior in college eight years before. Toilet issues never came up then.
This guy was only 22 and going blind from some disease. He still had a little bit of peripheral vision, no good in this dark. In the afternoon, when we met, Bobby had been riding a motorcycle in circles, steering weirdly with his limited vision. The whole point of the trip for the guys was to give Bobby this camping outing as a sort of last gasp before the blindness really got him.
We got to the outhouse, and I put Bobby’s hand on the door. “There’s just one step up.”
“I’ll holler when I’m ready to go back,” he said.
“Okay. I’ll wait up the path a bit.” I turned and walked away as he opened the door and stepped up.
I sat on a hump of hard sand and wondered why I had taken on this uncomfortable task. It was just an ordinary event, a young man going to the toilet. But it seemed so personal, and I didn’t know Bobby at all. And yet, he clearly couldn’t make it to the toilet on his own. And his lamebrain buddies just sat and waited for somebody else to do it.
I sat and pondered. My butt itched with sand, and I wondered if I should go and pee when he got through so I’d be ready to get into my sleeping bag. The outhouse would probably stink. I just hoped I was sitting far enough away so the new-shit smell wouldn’t reach me.
“Hey, I’m through,” he hollered. “I think I used up all the toilet paper, though.” He opened the door and stepped down. “Where are you?”
Oh, no, I thought. Not all the toilet paper. Did we have any paper in our car?
“I’m coming.” The smell hit me as I reached for his arm, and I hoped he wouldn’t grab my hand with shitty fingers.
I guided him silently back up the hill. I still didn’t know what to say to a blind guy, and he clearly didn’t have anything to say to me. I led him to the place around the fire where he’d been sitting before our downhill trek. “Here’s where you were sitting,” I said, as I found another spot several seats away. I wondered again what it would be like to go blind when you’re young.
The next night we were all more comfortable after the two groups of us had driven around the valley marveling at flowers in March, tamarisk trees, and cactuses. We had stumbled over lava-like lumps in salt pans that looked blasted by nuclear bombs. Our evening camp picnic brought more casual talk. A partial moon made light shadows, and Bobby picked at his guitar.
“I want to climb on the dunes,” Bobby announced, putting down his guitar.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to do that,” one of his buddies said. “There might be snakes or scorpions.”
“I don’t care,” Bobby said. “I want to climb on the dunes and feel the sand under my bare feet.”
Half of us drove to the dunes, the rest stayed lolling around the camp fire with beer.
“Where’s that girl from last night? What was her name?” Bobby asked as he got out of the car.
I figured he meant me. “Here I am. I’m Lynn,” I said.
“Come on!” he said and reached out as if he expected a hand to be there. “Let’s go up and slide down!” I ran over and grabbed his hand.
“Now just get me to the dune, and I’ll take off my shoes and go up myself. I just want to feeeel that sand!”
I led him away from the road to the sandy edge, where we stopped to take off our shoes. The sand was fine, almost like powder snow.
Bobby took off up the sand hill, yelling and cavorting like a mad fool, “Yeeow, it’s great!”
We followed more carefully while we tried to shush his yells. “Hey, Bobby, we aren’t supposed to be here! Quiet down.”
“Let ‘em come and get me first. Yeeow! Wow!”
At the top of the dune, Bobby lost his balance and began to roll down the other side. One of his buddies stopped his roll, and all of us began laughing and taking crazy runs in the sand.
“Lynn! Come on, run with me! This is great!” Bobby hollered.
I grabbed his hand, and we ran and fell down, ran and fell down, laughing.
Sacred Places
by Marie Lundstrom
Sacred places have a holiness to them, an absence of evil, where I feel reverent, attuned, more than ordinary, uplifted, a recipient of the grace of the universe. I am not a believer in God, as Christians, Jews and Muslims appear to view him, as an old white guy with a beard sitting on a cloud making rules and passing judgment. I lean more toward the animistic view that there may be many gods, and if there is a chief god, it’s more a spirit of the universe, not a being, but a life force.
If there is any task for any kind of gods, it seems most likely it would be to watch over this and other worlds and try to mitigate the evils that humans impose on nature. It may be that there are other lives than this one for humans, animals, plants, and even earths. If true, I may find that out when I die.
Meanwhile, since I’m not yet dead, I can and do feel attuned to the universe, to a spirit of life, a holiness, in certain places and often, certain times. Those are my sacred places, sacred moments.
One sacred place and moment may be in my chair, a dark red leather recliner, with one cat, Bogie, on my lap, and the other cat, Xena, snuggled onto a towel on a small table next to the left arm of my chair. I may be petting Bogie with one hand and Xena with the other. I can look outside through my south-facing windows to big spruce trees intermingled with big birches. It may be raining or snowing, or sun may be pouring in. I’m not reading or watching a movie or eating or drinking wine or napping or talking on the telephone, any of which I may ordinarily do in that chair, or struggling to write a poem in a steno notebook. I am just sitting, leaning back with my feet up, two furry, purring friends next to me. The moment is golden, sacred.
Other times, when I’m in my quilting corner figuring out a design or stitching chains of pieces, I forget about my full cup of coffee, lunch, dinner, reading, watching a movie, calling people. I’m so focused on whatever quilt project I have going that I lose contact with ordinary things around me. I’d call that a sacred moment, maybe a lot of sacred moments. I don’t exactly think of my sewing machine and desk as an altar, but when I’m gone off into design and planning, it’s clearly commune-with-the-universe time.
For many years, the Wolfe Homestead, far back and up in Eagle River Valley, has been a sacred place. I’ve not been there in some time, but it still resonates with me as sacred in memory. Many wonderful hours, days, weeks I have spent there, alone and with friends. More than forty years ago, the ashes of my lover were scattered uphill from the cabin among the forget-me-nots next to a granite boulder.
I used to sing at different times in the Seattle Chorale, the San Francisco Bach Choir, and the Anchorage Community Chorus—soprano. One of the most exciting works to sing is the Verdi Requiem. Parts of that run shivers up and down my back. That’s when I feel no longer there on the risers but am off somewhere that is wholly music, like a different being made only of music. I’ve had similar feelings with the Britten War Requiem and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I’m almost afraid to mention that feeling, it’s so precious. Sacred moment, for sure.
Fifty years ago, I stood on a parapet of Hamlet’s castle, Elsinore, in Denmark. It was windy and dim; waters of that narrow path—Kattegat or Skagerrak—between Denmark and Sweden were roiled and dangerous. At that moment, I felt a connection with my Viking ancestry. I knew what it was like to sail in the longboats to explore, plunder, ravish, and rage as a berserker. It was a moment imprinted on my soul. Sacred.
In my growing up years, Hawk’s Peak, as I called it, was a sacred place. From early years, six or seven, every spring, usually in April and often with a dog, I hiked up the ridge above our old barn, down a shallow ravine, and up a higher ridge. Then I followed the ridge north to where it ended in a jutting headland. I would sit on one of the many jumbled granite rocks under a pine tree and look out over Fruitland Valley, noting each family’s farm, a sliver of the Columbia River ten miles to the west, the Huckleberry Mountains to the east, and straight north, the bald hills of cheat grass and rattlesnakes rising above our other farm land, the McGary Place. I did the hike every spring for many years, stopping for yellow Easter lilies, white potato flowers, or purple Love Darts, as my mom called them, along the way.
At the headland, there were nearly always circling hawks, hollering at me and whatever dog—Bingo, Jackie, Chief, Lady—came with me. Magic time. Sacred.
In grade school and high school, I did school work next to the big wood heater stove in our living room. I sat on a small brown round stool and worked on an orange table with sides that folded down or snapped up. Aunt Winnie and Uncle Art had given that table to me when I was three. I leaned back against the steel outer jacket of the heater stove; the inner stove, which held burning wood chunks, would have been too hot, but the outer shell was comfortable. That was my place. I loved school and learning, and whatever homework I had or books I was reading, there’s where I read and worked. In high school, I studied Latin for two years on my own, with just a monthly exam from the principal. I memorized sum esse fui futurus and amo amas amat on that stool, my back against that stove, with my books on that table. That was also where Dad and I had our chess tournaments during a couple of winters when I was nine and ten. We learned chess moves at the same time, although not strategies, so we were evenly matched. Whenever I was a game up, he pushed for another. When he was ahead, I wanted to play to beat him. When he wouldn’t play, I laid out solitaire. I still have that table, and I treasure it as one of the few artifacts remaining from my childhood. Sacred place, time, memory.
The earliest sacred space I remember was crawling behind the wood-burning kitchen stove. Not when the stove was going full blast while Mom was making breakfast or keeping the stove hot for the irons on ironing day or making bread or doughnuts. But when it was just toasty and comfortable, I’d crawl between the wood box and the side of the stove and then turn the corner so I could huddle between the back of the stove and the wall, making a sort of prayer to the universe that I was happy to be warm, fed, clothed, and cared for by my parents. We never talked about love in those years. But we didn’t really need to.
Marie –
– I love how you show the vastness of life in this piece, and how sacredness imbues all of that vastness. One small comment: I, like you, lean more toward an animistic, spirit/life-force kind of spirituality. However, I think that your characterization of Judaeo-Christian-Islamic belief is unfair to a large proportion of believers in those faiths. Yes, they believe in a ‘creator-God’ who is ‘in charge.’ And yes, they all three have fundamental sects that misinterpret, or interpret over-literally, the words of their scriptures. But many of their believers, both now and over millennia, are very deep and subtle thinkers, with a deep concern about human responsibility, sense of awe at the natural world, feeling of cosmic connectedness. All three of the religions have a significant mystical tradition that taps the whole irrational/ecstatic/ineffable aspect of the spiritual realm.
Like you, I sang in choirs for many years, and many of the most moving pieces that we sang were inspired by aspects of Christian faith, were words from Christian liturgy. Many of the greatest composers were devout. William Byrd wrote about how he meditated upon the words and allowed the music to come forth. Bruckner’s symphonic works often have a cathedral-quality of awe. I am unable to listen to Mozart’s Requiem without tears, especially at the Sanctus and Benedictus sections – praise to the lord of Sabbaths and blessed is he that cometh in the name of the lord – and yet the sacredness of the music transcends the specificity of the liturgy within which it is framed.
I think that a lot of art that comes out of those religious traditions similarly transcends that specificity – and many believers also acknowledge that transcendence, the ultimate unity of different paths to the divine.
with respect and reverence,
Ela
Ela,
You constantly amaze me. I am enchanted with the precision of your words and quite agree with your comments on the “sense of awe” and “feeling of awe at the connectedness” of the universe.
You are a person beyond your years, which is a good thing in experience in the world.
I am extremely happy you were in our class and chuckle at the self-awareness (again, on the mark) when you warned us of your penchant for frequent and persistent participation.
Best wishes,
Don
ASSIGNMENT: Voice or Persona /Develop a Character by the way they speak.
YA NEVER KNOW
.
People are full of surprises, like ya never know what’s inside the next peanut shell.
The blond bombshell glamour girl of our class is now fat and plain and spends most of her time e-mailing smaltzy nostalgia from the Fifties–Burma Shave signs, pictures of cats, ’57 Chevys–that sort of stuff.
The slightly geeky guy who was not a very good pitcher on the baseball team, (No control; No speed), now flies big jets for United. Who’d a thought?
.
Some are sorta predictable: the football jock now sells retirement plans; the bookish four-eyed scholar girl, now a grandmother of four, studies all the time to be a nun-priest while her hubby fly fishes the Sierras. Ya never know what’s inside that peanut shell.
.
Take Murdoch, he picks up the chatter just like when we played Little League ball fifty years ago. That’s a small town for ya: you still know a guy over fifty years later and you ain’t seen him since before Kennedy got shot and he talks to you like it was yesterday. And you ain’t really friend friends, I mean, like best friends or something, but you can still talk easy. Murdoch, he never shuts up. He keeps up with classmates even though he lives thirty miles away. Never knew Murdoch was such a people-kind of guy.
.
Trying again…
A Bad Trip
I squeezed out of the bus at what I hoped was the southeast corner of Phnom Penh and looked for the transit center from which vehicles left for villages on the coast, although I had no clear idea of what this would look like. It soon became apparent that the giant swap-meet-come-junkyard on the other side of the four-lane road, barely visible through the traffic, was it. Once I’d negotiated the crossing, waving away the moto chauffeurs who cried ‘lady, motor-cy,’ I allowed myself to be accosted by someone selling rides out of town.
I paid what seemed a reasonable fare, and hoped that my minimal Khmer was sending me where I was hoping to go. My ride was a two-door Toyota Tercel. The trunk was already full – it seemed I was a good match, with nothing but a small daypack and massing barely 90lbs. I clambered over the tipped-up driver’s seat to squeeze myself in with a family of four; a smoochy pair of newlyweds rode shotgun.
When we set off, I wondered whether the driver’s horn was rigged to his gas pedal – he drove the car, but he rode the horn, and it seemed that every other similarly-loaded vehicle in the dense procession was rigged the same way. It was a continuous blare.
Our trip was punctuated within ten minutes, when the traffic, which had been moving at a reasonable speed, slammed to a halt, and the hood of the car slammed open, cracking the windshield, and stayed open so that none of us could see anything ahead. Nobody said a word. The driver kept on driving, until I seriously thought he intended to drive clear to Kampot with the hood in the windshield like that, and was earnestly relieved when he relinquished his spot in the line of traffic, jumped out, slammed the hood back down, and took to the horn again.
Once out of the greater urban bottleneck, we lost the traffic and soon found dirt roads lined with rice paddies and pools of gray-brown water in which naked children swam. The driver scarcely seemed to slow as the road rutted increasingly.The car had no suspension anyway. I gritted my teeth at my aching tailbone and was relieved that the mother of the family smiled so reassuringly whenever I was slammed against her.
I wondered why banana and papaya plants were not ubiquitous as they were in Thailand, where they could be seen even on railroad sidings, and whether the absence of this profusion of potentially cheap food was an index of the deeper poverty that was palpable here.
Kampot was smaller than I’d anticipated, the roads all umber dirt. I was dropped by the dusty traffic circle at the south end of what appeared to be the main road. The other passengers were to be dropped to their doorsteps here and there in town. Suddenly, I was alone.
It was noon, searingly hot, no clouds in the sky yet but a taste of afternoon thunder in the air. Anybody with any sense was out of the heat – after the incessant, milling press of humanity in Phnom Penh it felt like a ghost town, although I would later learn that here too, if you sat quietly watching the river, someone would be pestering you within a minute.
I fished in my pack for food and a map, and ate the last of my eggfruit from the Psar oRusay – ‘the Russian Market’ in Phnom Penh – a huge multistory confusion of booths and vendors housed in what looked like a decrepit soccer stadium, while I tried to get my bearings. (At this point, the only name I had for ‘eggfruit’ was the Khmer – ‘sodaa’ that the vendor had taught me, although the crumbly, yolk-yellow, dry-sweet dense fruit matched everything I’d read about eggfruit. It had gotten squashed on the journey and was turning translucent, the dryness cloying. )
None of the streets were signed – not even in Khmer – so I wasn’t confident of my bearings when I went in search of the tourist information office, but I did find the place I was looking for, a little farther from the crossroads market than I’d expected. It seemed deserted, like everywhere else. I called out a ‘hello’ and studied the white poster board of tourist activities, peeling red letters on peeling whitewash. As I hesitated, there was a throaty roar. Four dogs rushed out from the building next door, and began biting my legs.