48 days, day 11: standstill

{{ I am chronicling 48 days of writing before my July 31 travel. If you are chronicling your summer writing/days and would like to share, please link or comment so we can all cheer one another through. Strength to your sword arm! }}

I am stilled by the events in Charleston. Stilled. All the violent events of this past year -- years -- leading up to Charleston. All the hatred and violence. I thought I would say nothing publicly at first. Who am I to say anything? I write fiction about my deepest beliefs; that is enough.

But I couldn't stay silent, so I posted -- on my Facebook author page as well as my Facebook personal page --  links to other people's words about Charleston. Then I needed to include them in a blog post last week.

I also asked the folks assembling the Charleston Syllabus to include REVOLUTION, FREEDOM SUMMER, and THE AURORA COUNTY ALL-STARS, all books of mine with a civil rights theme running through them, along with my deepest beliefs, including that every human being is worthy of dignity and respect.

Now, I thought, now I shall get back to the work at hand. But what is the work at hand?

For now, since I am stilled, and quiet, and contemplating, I will link to Claudia Rankine's piece in the NYTimes: The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning. I met Claudia Rankine last November in NYC at the National Book Award events. She was also a finalist. She is beyond impressive, as is her work, and this piece in the Times leaves me absolutely breathless. It asks me for something. It will not leave me.

So I will leave you here today, with some words from Claudia Rankine that describe what I try to do when I am writing as well:

"There are billions of souls in the world and some of us are almost to be touching the depths of how it is and what it is to be human. On the surface we we exist but just beyond is existence. I write to articulate that felt experience... There are some of us who are constantly mending our hearts, I write into that mending, my writing is that mending...."

Peace.

xoxo Debbie

48 days, days 9 & 10: weekending

{{ I am chronicling 48 days of writing before my July 31 travel. If you are chronicling your summer writing/days and would like to share, please link or comment so we can all cheer one another through. Strength to your sword arm! }}

Art on the Beltline in Atlanta

Daniel Ballard teaching us about ecological landscaping, with examples along the Beltline.

Lunch afterwards at Krog Street Market. "We belong to a fashion club!" Truth.

Coming along, our own landscape.

Still trying to tame the slope on the side of the yard.

Water management in our yard.

 One of the things I enjoy most about my writing life now is making and having weekends to do something else. I'm still pulled to the writing, and so sometimes I do write, but I spend a lot of time on the weekend doing something else.

I've had so many jobs over the years that required weekend work, and certainly the past 15 years of being a road warrior have meant lots of weekend travel, speaking on a Saturday, flying home on a Sunday, or out on a Sunday in order to be in a school on Monday. I've been grateful for the work.

I am grateful a sabbatical summer, too. This weekend Jim and I took a class on ecological landscaping sponsored by Trees Atlanta, taught along the Atlanta Beltline by Daniel Ballard of Convivial Gardens. We're edging closer to our dream of a largely-edible landscape, where we manage the water flow and invite the birds and the bugs and the flowers, vegetables, trees, shrubs to co-habit our small space. 

We met daughter Hannah and son-in-law Richard, the newlyweds, at Krog Street Market afterwards for lunch at Yalla. Falafel all around. Jim went to Auburn, Alabama for a gig with the band, and I set to work organizing my office -- one of those tasks I've set for myself this summer. Made good headway. Cranked up the stereo and listened to the hits of the late sixties -- research for book 3. Yes! Made notes of possibilities.

Jim worked all day Sunday -- gigging all over Atlanta for Father's Day folks -- and I spent most of the day catching up with family. Cousin Carol and I are now watching and texting (she from Mississippi, me from ATL) Poldark on Sunday nights. We've had this Sunday night Masterpiece tradition for years now but the Sunday-night well has been rather dry of late. Poldark: steamy romance novels. Should I read the books? whoo!

And now it's Monday. Rachel has had time to cool, I've lived 1969-in-song for part of the weekend, and I slept in -- on a Monday! Better get with it. Let's make some work goals for the week ahead. Mine:

1. Finish my draft of Rachel.
2. Try a new beginning for book 3 of the '60s project.
3. Finish my office reclamation.
4. Plant anything else that I want planted this growing season (zinnias, I miss you...)
5. Weeding and mulching for exercise and because we need to. Watering, too.
6. Start a new picture book revision.

Yours?

48 days, day 8: step out, step back, regroup

 {{ I am chronicling 48 days of writing before my July 31 travel. If you are chronicling your summer writing/days and would like to share, please link or comment so we can all cheer one another through. Strength to your sword arm! }}

With Lisa Wise at Dancing Goats Coffee in Decatur, Georgia yesterday.

I didn't finish Rachel, and yet I did make progress. I'm okay with that.

Yesterday I was flattened. I watched Jon Stewart's response to the violence in Charleston. I read those nine names. Say their names. I thought about how I wrote FREEDOM SUMMER and REVOLUTION about a time fifty years in the past that we are still living through today and that we have to face and feel something about and do something about if we want it to change.

I don't know enough to orate, pontificate, opinion-toss, or wring my hands and heart in public on social media channels. But I have a voice and I will continue to use it in the best way I know how. I want to offer readers young and old a path to peace and social justice.

That's my work. Community, kindness, family, peace, kinship, connection. Friendship, heart, safety, belonging, stories. For young and old. Especially for children. I don't care how schmaltzy it sounds in print. These unglamorous work-horse words are the fundamentals of health and happiness and form the bedrock of what it means to be human and to care for one another.

Yesterday I met with Lisa Wise who is the executive director of the Initiative for Affordable Housing here in Atlanta. We talked shop and storytelling possibilities surrounding the Initiative's re:loom project. It felt good to talk about those work-horse words with Lisa, who is steeped in them every day. It's important to find fellow travelers on this unglamorous road. Do you know what I mean?

It rained late Thursday, a crashing, booming thunderclap of rain that washed away the side yard slope of newly planted grass. It wants to be a riverbed over there.

The over-eager thunderstorm chewing up my landscape combined with the recalcitrant bits of Rachel that refused to come together as I listened to the news coming out of Charleston... I gave up for the day and took a nap, and then I went to bed early. Friday I worked but felt like I was slogging through mud, then went to meet Lisa, which lifted my spirits.

I don't know. Sometimes you step out, or step back, and regroup.

That was Thursday (day 7)/Friday (day 8).

How are y'all doing? Can we talk about it?