The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": April 2011

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Happy Easter!

Mom's version of rebirth and renewal ~

Teenage version ~

Holidays always seem to sneak up on me. I think it's my resistance to the stores' insistence on mingling bunnies and marshmallow peeps alongside the Valentines cards. My brain screams, That's not real! Not yet!

It's kind of how I trick myself by setting the kitchen clock ahead ten minutes so I'm not late in the morning, then I pour another cup of coffee thinking I have way more time than I do.

Easter is late this year, and that's my favorite way to celebrate it. When it comes in the dull middle of March, it seems so...well, like it's in the dull middle of something.

Right now, here, the buds are coming out on the trees and we're leaving the heat off during the day. I've even got the kids outside helping to clean up the yard and doing the garden thing.

We're clearly not a yard-obsessed family (seeing as we found a rubber tire in the brush-clogged part of our yard we just started cleaning out), but there is something about working together to clear out brush and branches that makes you think about concepts like renewal. I've always thought we should make resolutions at Easter instead of New Year's when there is still so much chocolate left over.

So, in keeping with the spirit of rebirth, my Easter resolution is to streamline my life. In May, I am going to be working only three days a week so I can write more. It's official. I realized that as much as I like teaching, I like writing more. And the half day I have to write is constantly being consumed with orthodontia appointments or laundry or visits to the vet. I keep writing in small slivers and when that happens, not a whole lot gets completed.

I can't wait.

And I can't be the only one who thinks this way. Have you made any spring resolutions?

Friday, April 8, 2011

Time

I remember studying that picture in my elementary school library instead of watching the film on the Dewey Decimal system. I also remember feeling sort of scared by it, but only in the way you can be scared in an elementary school library which is not too terribly scared.

I think it was the mysticism of the painting that alarmed me. On the whole, there is not too much mysticism in American schools, even though I was taught by returning Vietnam vets and hippies (the real kind who had lived, or at least had visited, Haight Ashbury and met Jerry Garcia, or at least had attended one of his concerts)

It was an interesting time to be a child because none of our once-upon-a-time hippie teachers agreed with anything the Vietnam vets thought and vice versa. And we could tell who they were because the VietNam vets all dressed like hippies and the previous hippies wore conservative clothing to indicate they had now changed and decided to devote their lives to working with children. Both groups told us a pretty sanitized version of what they had learned by their experiences.

We loved when they talked about their former lives.We used to steer them toward the topic and ask them questions.

It wasn't that we understood most of what they said; what we did understand was that it was really, really easy to get these young, devoted, highly sincere teachers to move and stay off the topic of say, the Dewey Decimal system. Or the exports of Guatemala. I became especially interested in learning about Vietnamese village life at the onset of math sessions.

But this is a post about time, not about Anne Spollen's politically divided elementary school experience. The above ramble actually sort of underscores what I haven't said yet...

Time is actually a concept that I grapple with every day. I don't think I am one of those people who is "good" with time in the sense that I am efficient. I do put on the wash and start dinner and help with homework all at the same time. I'll even return phone calls then and go through the bills. And I do it all really quickly, really efficiently.

Then I take the dog out and spent twenty minutes wondering if I should put a few trellises of roses over the spot where the neighbor's hideous plastic and vinyl fence meets my property line. Or forsythia? Wait, I can't stand forsythia; they look like skeletons most of the year.

Could I put a fence up over that fence? Does that require a survey? How about vines? Yeah, vines.Only they would go everywhere. Or have thorns. On the ground that the kids and the dog would get tangled up in. So yeah, roses. Wait, I love wisteria. Is that a good name for a character? Wisteria Howard. Maybe. But how many rose bushes or wisteria vines? And so on....

I feel like I can focus in bouts, but most of the time my brain is, well, more like a tumble of vines than say a straight growing tree organized into brances. I don't know if that's good or bad for writing or how writers' brains work in general. Writers all seem so different to me.

I've tried this before, but I am going to try and create a specific period of time to write and only write. Since I have times when I work, when I sleep, when I spend time with the kids, I need to build in some part of each day to write. I think it would help focus.

How do you structure your day? Do you have a specific time of day to write? Is it built in? Is it flexible?

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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