How to Stay Married for 54 Years

Jim McGarrah is our blogger today:

My mother may have been the first American practitioner of feng shui.  Before this ancient Chinese philosophy of bringing harmony to the home by moving furniture and other objects to create a balance – sort of an external chi thing – became popular among the trendy, New Age, upper-class, my mother was moving things around our home to restore balance and harmony. During the 1950’s when I was still in grade school, my father had the habit of coming home drunk from the Elk’s Club after a hard night of playing Gin Rummy with his old drinking buddies. If this happened once or twice a month, my mother, being a docile sort, might have let it slide. But, after cooking several meals that got cold on the stove in one week, she refused to go gentle into that good night. It became her habit to wait until around 11PM for my father’s return. That time was his line in the sand. Once it was past, I could hear the surreptitious scraping of chair legs across the living room floor as she rearranged the furniture and created a different obstacle course each night. When Dad stumbled in at whatever time he stumbled in, I always awoke to a distinct pattern of sounds – thump “shit” crack “damn” crunchjinglebangrattle “holy sweet jesus joseph and mary mother of god” and after several nights of bruised shins and stubbed toes and cracked knuckles, my father was home every evening for supper till I graduated high school. Our home had its balance back.

This is a story created about an event that really happened in my childhood and one that will appear in a new book I’m working on right now. After years of writing both poetry and nonfiction, I’ve come to believe that the term, “storyteller,” best fits what I do. Well, it also makes me seem more charming than I really am to women in bars sometimes. That can be useful if you’re a short fat old guy. Sometimes I tell stories about things that really happened in my life, sometimes I write narrative poems about things that really happened but with a healthy dose of invention added to the tale, and sometimes I make things up using my imagination. The point is that no matter what approach I take to the material at hand, I’m always relying on the tools of the storyteller to construct an interesting narrative. If I do it well, the story will also take me to a place in which I know something I didn’t before the telling began. This is how you begin to know you are becoming a writer, when you quit using your writing skills simply to express and begin using those skills to discover.

Of all creatures on the planet, only humans organize their societies and record their cultural histories with myths, legends, yarns, anecdotes, accounts, tales – all forms of narrative. Before words existed, people told stories with cave paintings. If we could travel back in the shadowy realm before these paintings, we would find a community of nomads huddled close to a campfire making gestures and grunts that described the day’s events. The epic of Gilgamesh is the first known written story. 4,000 years before Edgar Allen Poe, the Egyptians wrote short fiction narratives of a type. In some Native American tribes every question asked is answered with a tale of some kind. This is the way we entertain ourselves, pass on wisdom, and sacred philosophies.

One of the most fascinating aspects of memoir writing, which is a very popular and useful form of story-telling, nests in the idea that everyone has a story to tell. I’ve heard complaints from pretentious literary critics that most of our stories aren’t worth recording and I find that statement almost as useless as the critics who believe it. The very fact that you don’t have to be famous or important to the world is an advantage because it allows you to start with a universal bond between yourself and an audience. Your record of life will be similar to a lot of other people. It becomes interesting to a reader for that reason and it remains interesting because of the way you tell it and what you discover in the process. This is why I've already written three and am working on a fourth.

Not only that, but reading memoirs is as good a way to expand your knowledge of the world and your understanding of what it mean to be human as writing them. With that said, I hope you will consider two things. First, consider writing down some stories of your own. Secondly, buy my new book soon to be released from Blue Heron Book Works called Off Track, Or How I Dropped Out of College and Came To Be a Horse Trainer in the 1970's While All My Friends Were Still Doing Drugs. It's a story and it really happened. So, it's also a memoir and I believe you will really like it. Meanwhile, I'll keep working on that new one so you can figure out how my mother and father managed to stay married for fifty-four years.

Songs of Ourselves

We are getting some splendid submissions for the anthology "Songs of Ourselves".  If you keep a journal, write letters or blog, check out the submission quidelines below.  July 15 is the deadline.

Blue Heron Book Works loves stories and we are dedicated to the idea that everyone’s individual story—not just those who live in the glare of the celebrity spotlight—is essential to the bigger story of who are.  

It’s not politically correct to assign characteristics to nationalities, and in fact most Americans wouldn’t consider being American a nationality, claiming that we all come from somewhere else.  And yet, after even one generation here—often sooner—the thing that we all have in common, the thing that makes us American, asserts itself and that is this:  we look at everything with a child-like sense of the new.  Nothing has associations that can’t be reworked or reimagined.  That’s what Americans do:  we reinvent ourselves constantly, create ourselves from scratch because all of us are starting over in some way.  It’s this looking at a situation for what it is without the judgement of generations that make us the most creative people on the planet. 

This quintessential American point of view is captured beautifully in journals and blogs, letters, in unedited and unreflective short bursts of observation and it is what we are celebrating in Songs of Ourselves.

If you have between 10-20 journal entries, blogs, or letters each shorter than 300 words, we would love to hear from you for possible inclusion in this anthology.  If your submission is chosen, we will need non-exclusive rights to what you submit and we will pay you a share of the 50% profits earned from on-line and bookstore sales which will be split among the contributors. We will also send you a print version of the book when it is published. 

The deadline for submissions is July 15.

Please send us your submission via email to editor@blueheronbookworks.com  There is no need to send anything else at this time.

Take a Yoga Break with Fanny Barry

Artist, yogini, engineer and Blue Heron Book Works author, Fanny Barry, publishes a yoga audio session every month.  Listen here and watch for her book later this year, Escape from Paradise....or how she left the frozen north and came to found a yoga studio in one of the primo places in the world--Tulum, Mexico.

I Get a Kick Out of You

Today's blog post is by Paul Heller, author of the #1 Kindle Best Seller, Last Call, his account of taking care of his mother during her descent into dementia.  This essay originally aired on WDIY, Lehigh Valley NPR affiliate.

The most profound change in my life was my mother’s death at age 93. If you’ve heard The Police Song Mother, you have an accurate picture of my relationship with her. My mother Judy had Alzheimer’s, and for the last five years of her descent into darkness I took care of her with hired help at home. Several times the effort almost broke me. I was hospitalized twice with pneumonia. But in the end, being in close-quarters with my lifelong nemesis liberated me.

Calling one’s mother a nemesis. That’s harsh. But it was during these grueling five years that I came to understand both of us.

Judy’s bad luck with loved ones pre-wrote our script. Her first husband died when she was eighteen. She married my father at thirty-five, had a miscarriage at thirty-eight, and on the day I was born her beloved father passed away. Then my father died suddenly when I was seven. Reading her mind from this distance I hear her saying: Build a walled fortress. With a crocodile filled moat. NO MORE LOSSES.

So Judy had her reasons. But for me, my childhood was a black hole of suffocation.

Remember how Mary’s Little Lamb followed her to school one day? When I was old enough to walk to school with friends, Judy would follow, ducking into doorways when a friend spotted her. Mocking on my friends’ parts. Fist fights to settle what was seen.

For my eighth birthday she gave me a right-handed baseball mitt. I’m left-handed, but actuarial tables said that lefties die five years before righties. She was determined that I become right-handed to give us five more years together.

She cried when I learned to swim. Panicked when I learned to drive.

All this is funny to me now, but back then I had no idea who I was…what I wanted. Never mind. Judy would take care of everything. There was a right girl for me. Just like her. The right clothes for me. She’d pick out. An apartment for me. In her building. A job for me. President, undoubtedly. Single, of course. With her in my cabinet.  

Judy wanted certainty. I wanted to breathe. You know how adolescents are impossible? Multiply by fifty. That was me. To the peers she summoned as witnesses we were a car wreck. I was driving.

I wasn’t at home when Judy finally died. I was dawdling outside a drugstore where I’d gone to pick up her morphine prescription. When I returned to my house, a cousin who’d come to say good-bye to her told me she’d died a few minutes earlier.

Was I was happy? Yes. I felt giddy with exhaustion but free. But after a few weeks of elation and sleep I realized that nothing had changed because I hadn’t changed. The armor I’d worn since adolescence was who I was. I saw that I had a choice. I could go on nursing the anger and defiance I was so practiced at or I could get on with the task of trying to be myself, something I’d had no practice at at all.

It hasn’t been easy. There are days when I have to fight the urge to call it quits, to say: “it’s too late, what’s the use.” But each skirmish I win brings a welcome moment of understanding and forgiveness.

Last month I was walking through a mall when a Frank Sinatra song piped into the air. It was I Get a Kick Out Of You--one of Judy’s favorites--something she sang to me when I was little. I had a flashback that carried me past the bad things, always the first things that came to mind when I thought about her, to the gifts she gave me despite our life-long quarrel. Education at the best schools, exposure to the world, a love of beauty. A head start few are offered. And with each passing month it gets easier to say: Thank you for all the good things, Judy. Thank you, Judy… Happy Trails.”

A Fourth of July-Type Interview with Jim McGarrah

Besides being one of our favorite writers, Jim McGarrah IS Blue Heron Book Works' favorite vet.  Here is a great interview with him on Vet Net.  Happy Fourth of July.  And don't shoot your fingers off lighting those firecrackers.

Chicago Writer Vincent Francone on WGN RADIO TONIGHT

All you insomniacs out there:  Vincent Francone will be talking shop, i.e writing, lit and his favorite cocktail, tonight on WGN RADIO 720 in Chicago at 2:15 AM to 3:00....that's when the cool people meet in case you're wondering.  Listen live or on the web here.  I'm pretty sure he's going to talk about his new book, LIKE A DOG.

Vince Francone Reveals his Writing Process

Now it can be told...

My Writing Process

Recently I sat in on a class and observed a colleague ask her students to describe their writing processes.  I decided to play along and write a few sentences detailing mine, though I didn’t share them with the class.  Instead, I’ll share them here:

1.   I have an idea.  

2.   I think (too long) about the idea, usually while riding the train home. 

3.   I forget the best parts of the idea and means of execution during the walk from the train station to my apartment. 

4.   If I am lucky, I remember some of the idea after walking the dog and fixing a drink and maybe some food. 

5.   I scribble some nonsense. 

6.   Eventually, I turn the nonsense into actual sentences and paragraphs. 

7.   I get lazy and defensive during the editing stage. 

8.   I succumb to doubts and fears and remain inactive for days. 

9.   Alcohol.

10. I suspend my ego and take editorial advice seriously. 

11. I regain my ego and combat the advice. 

12. I temper my ego and make the edits that make sense. 

13.  I rediscover that I am genius. 

14.  I am humbled by the lack of recognition of my genius. 

15.  I collect enough rejection slips to rebuild a rainforest. 

16.  I decide to stop writing altogether. 

17.  I write a blog post. 

http://zombiedante.blogspot.com/2015/06/my-writing-process.html