Riding and Writing

Everyone's writing about Katrina on the 10-year anniversary, and something in me wants to stick my head under pillows. The radio stories with the sounds of children crying in the shelters and people running or yelling at reporters for help put me back in the Lake Charles shelter, on the cement floor in the hall where we, in our red vests, were trying to get people's (former) addresses, something to identify them, some way to connect them with the thousands of people unconnected. I was there day 6, and over the last 10 years I've been sorting what I saw and smelled and heard in the space between Katrina and Rita.

It wasn't pretty.

One man pissed into a white bucket instead of walking to the bathroom, the bathrooms that weren't safe even though we, Red Cross volunteers, cleaned them, walked through them, tried to reduce the theft. I emptied his bucket a couple of times. In the women's bathroom at the coliseum where we had 4,000 "clients," women showered in pairs, one woman guarding the other's clothes, towel, and privacy, the other showering. There was no place to do laundry, no place to hang a towel to dry (and the temperature outside was 103 degrees, 90% humidity) so people threw away the towels.

On the first day of dispatch from Houston to Baton Rouge to Lake Charles, four of us volunteers drove together, and became family. We lived in a casino hotel (later destroyed by Rita) and drove together for our 6am to 6pm shift. We signed each other up for special assignments like family processing, which meant hearing the stories and writing them down and getting the paperwork for releasing money, the only money people had access to in a week. That's why 7 police cars with lights flashing greeted us when we arrived at the little Red Cross headquarters, where 700 people lined up outside from 4am, people hungry, thirsty, desperate to fill gas tanks and prescriptions and baby bottles. Some people with guns. We didn't put on our vests until we got in the back door. Then, we sat for 12 hours as people told us what happened. We listened. We wrote. We gave out as much money as we could.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vIEwxMuvee4/VeHtlLZIP2I/AAAAAAAAD60/f-eYdEd0k-M/s320/Katrina.Stephanie.Kate.jpgStephanie and me, 2 of the 4 volunteers who became family in Lake Charles

That process was shut down the next day. We didn't know why.

We were dispatched to the 3 cavernous floors of the coliseum in Lake Charles where families of 12 or more or fewer tried to create privacy, especially for their girl-children, by stacking boxes around the stacked mattresses. The mattresses were in 3 long rows, longer than the length of football fields. The 4 of us in red vests tried to look out for the most vulnerable: an elderly grandmother caring for a hyperactive toddler, an Italian mother and daughter who were tourists visiting New Orleans, a 10-year-old girl taken in by strangers who came up to me 3 days in a row to ask me to undo her combination lock (left-right-left). I don't know why.

The hardest was a young woman who had just given birth. She had family, brothers and sisters, an aunt. Everyone cooed and praised God for the miracle of her safety, the baby's safe delivery. The next week her drunk uncle killed her entire family in a car wreck a few miles from the shelter, and we tried to wrap her in support, separating her from the cavernous floor, bringing in counselors and social workers, all of us white, all of us with homes we could return to, all of us strangers. She left the room with her baby when we spoke softly the story, the accident, everyone gone. I know why.

On this anniversary, I love seeing the pictures of new "shotgun" houses on FB. What I still can't bear is the destruction inside the people I met. The people who used "baby" to punctuate their sentences, whose gold teeth filled their smiles, who slapped my back in thanks when I found them the morning paper or a cold bottle of water or a fresh towel. One woman called me "Smiley," and wrapped her arms around me whenever she saw me. What of them?

I was a witness, only, an interloper, definitely. I neither experienced the storms, nor the years of upheaval, the promises unkept and broken.

From the people who survived Katrina, I'm still learning.

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1) a renewed reverence for small towns...

"Everyone's safe here," a patron of a pub said, "especially here." Every small town has one haven for the people who count themselves as "other" whether by race, class, sexual orientation, whatever, and in Cape Charles, VA, that pub is the place. In small towns people take care of their own, and their own may be healthy and rich and disabled and poor and blind and drunk. Even transplants from out of town become family through humor or generosity or good deeds.

2) everyone has a story...

On the panel, "The Stories We Were Meant to Tell," at the Virginia Festival of the Book, we had an author writing an 8-part romance series she was self-publishing (at the age of 83, she had completed 4, and she was writing #5), a man writing about fertility from a man's perspective, my novel about bullying and loneliness, and a man writing about humans being a construction of God's consciousness. The room was packed.

3) every story has a reader...

See #2.

4) Virginia is for lovers...

That love is thick. It runs between families and strangers who have grown into family. In Cape Charles, I met a group of people who have become chosen family, and their love is fresh and deep. They have each other's backs. They care for each other in the biggest sense--by bringing groceries or calling the minister or turning type into large print. Whatever it takes.

5) memory is fickle...

One of my sisters and I remember our past in completely different ways. Over the weekend, she and I kept recounting the same event with different endings or beginnings. She remembers our childhood caretaker dying on the operating table, and I remember her dying alone in her apartment. Both are awful, and it's clear that our memories are shaped by our own interference. Our childhood friend and host in Cape Charles told us stories we hadn't heard, that we couldn't remember because we weren't old enough. To have a witness who is willing to help fill in the pieces is to feel the smooth fit of a completed puzzle, the soft, hilly texture, even though the pieces are not pretty. Still, I am so grateful because memory can be a dark glass.

Traveling helps me see the inside from the outside. I'm so grateful that I can travel and meet generous, gentle people. Thanks, Virginia.

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To the Man Riding a Bike on the Highway at Night

1.

Side-to-side your body rocks, each pedal-stroke

a hyphen faintly red—feather-steps in dark—

I barely see you ride beside the cars.

The only lights—headlights and starlight and

houselights from the Washington side—you shoulder

night on your ride out the Columbia Gorge.

Without bike lights, between each pulse of cars and

semi-trucks and trains, the darkness presses you—

like growing up in towns too dry to grow.

2.

Once a friend at daybreak rode this way. The sky—

a blue lid to cliff and river—she sped toward blue-green

distance, testing the body that tested her from birth.

Her laugh—the size of Beacon Rock—she lived a man most

of her life and a woman at her end. When a pickup struck,

her body turned to sack and bone, from flesh and force.

For her funeral the whole Gorge town turned out, forgave

the brother who tried to beat her into a boy—his apology

too late—and floated flowers down the Columbia.

3.

Rider, what perches in your soul and drives you

into dark, under dark, beside the water-silent dark?

Can my song guide you through the strangest Sea?

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Here is a letter that I wrote for the Oregon Humanities "Dear Stranger" effort. I missed the deadline, and I'm glad I did because this letter feels unformed. The theme of the series is "quandary," and the quandary was more than I could handle. Can you help me understand?

January 8, 2015

Dear Stranger,

In the western sky this morning, the moon hung oblong and papery like an empty bee’s nest. A star, higher and brighter, hung close to the moon, connected in a line that wasn’t there. The moon and star opened the night, the night turning paler as dawn rose on the other side of the horizon. The beauty of that opening spread in me like a swan dive into blue, blue water.

And the evening before yesterday the sunset turned the sky into a pink beach, the tide out, ripples of sand turning pink to purple. The wash of golden light over that beach made the world both fire and water.

I want to know how you bear such beauty?

Between that sunset and this moonset, three young men stormed a Parisian journal, gunned down cartoonists and writers, satirists who pushed readers to pry open the lid of belief and acceptance. A camera caught one of them walking up to a wounded policeman and shooting him point-blank, dead. Twelve people died altogether, and the three men walked away praising God.

I want to know how you bear such brutality?

In a Buddhist sense the sunset fades, the moon sets, and the terrorists are caught or not. Impermanence is the only order. Sometimes I wish I could be Buddhist and detach from hope and fear, but something cellular in me clings to permanence, to the ability to matter longer than a moment.

On a similar note, I can’t quite swallow that just as that moon was setting, the sun was rising, and beauty and brutality are a grand balancing act. A student in a class I was teaching on infectious diseases in Africa once suggested that plagues were a good thing because they helped control populations, and since humans were destroying the earth, plagues helped the earth survive. Conservation of energy or life, it seems to me, is too ruthless and offers little comfort.

And what of God? I’m not asking God to be only benevolent or bestow justice on one people. I’m not asking God to speak in one language or walk in one body or control humans or act rationally. It is magic, after all, that is so moving, so transcendent and divine, like moonsets.

What I’m asking is how can a body hold so much? How can one body hold the destruction of beauty, of free thinking as the Parisian terrorists want, the end of creativity, and at the same time, the inspiration of nature, of benevolence, and of kindness? How do you walk this duality? Is the answer always plurality, always paradox?

What I know is that I love you, Stranger, because you embody beauty and destruction, because you are both perfect and imperfect, which I believe is the essence of what I envision as God. What I cannot love is ruthlessness. I cannot get my arms around that.

With hope and fear,

-Kate

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Hi, my name is Kate, and I failed NaNoWriMo. ("Hello, Kate...") National Novel Writing month and the grassroots movement to inspire people to complete a novel in a month are crazy wonderful for two particular reasons: 1) there's no judgment (The idea is to complete the word count regardless of the words or sentences or plot or anything), and 2) the organization creates an incredibly supportive community. Really, no one fails ( but I still didn’t make the word count…).

During this novel-writing month, some bloggers are tackling questions about the reasons people try to write novels and the reasons people keep writing novels. Bob Clary, from Webucator, asked these questions:

What were your goals when you started writing?

Where I grew up, the things left unsaid were loud in our house. The people who talked were always older than I was, and they ate up all the air. Writing poetry was a quiet way for me to say the unsaid thing, the thing that needed air. I never wanted to write a novel. Other people in my family wrote novels, not me. When I realized I had a bigger story to tell, when the story burst the shell of my poetry, I sought prose, the type of prose that kept its poetic seed. I found Dangerous Writing inspired by Tom Spanbauer.

What are your goals now?

One novel has slipped into the world, Carry the Sky, published by Forest Avenue Press this year, and I'm working on a novel about the 1950s, Sylvia Plath, and McCarthyism, and the novel I started in NaNoWriMo two years ago about an all-girl African safari also in the 1950s.

What pays the bills now?

For twenty-five years I've had the privilege of teaching literature, creative writing, and composition at Clackamas Community College in Oregon. I still do.

Assuming writing doesn't pay the bills, what motivates you to keep writing?

Three things:

1) The stories are burning holes inside me.

2) I'm writing about issues and people and times I don't understand. The questions compel me, gnaw at me, keep me awake at night, and by writing about them, I hope to find other questions that disturb me less.

3) Community. I have two writing groups, one for poetry, and one for fiction, and those people encourage, cajole, berate, and badger while at the same time, adore, encourage, and support in ways I never thought I'd be able to bear.

And optionally, what advice would you give young authors hoping to make a career out of writing?

Find out what ravishes you, what sticks to your bones, what repels you. Start writing there. Write because your life depends on the questions you ask, the ways you make pieces of your life fit together. Get a day job so that you can be strong enough to write what has gone unsaid. As Maya Angelou once said, "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

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Last night Tom Petty’s voice on NPR surprised me. It was more dissonant and more tremulous than I expected from a rockstar releasing another collection after 30 continuous years of crazy popularity. He said things like people being able to recognize one of his songs after hearing just a few opening notes was somewhat terrifying. He said about each concert,

You just want to be as wonderful as everyone thinks you are and you know you're not (Laughing). So, something takes place where you reach down so deep and pulls from so far inside your soul that this music happens and you all reach the place you wanted to reach together - you and the audience. Then getting over that takes all night.

To listen to someone as accomplished who remains as vulnerable helps me feel less alone.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Tom Petty. I’m a poet standing at the edge of publishing my first novel. Because the book attempts to speak into the ear of the reader so closely that my lips practically touch, some people are responding very intimately. Some relatives have cried reading the opening pages because they know so much of the story is true (I really did teach and coach crew in a boarding school, and my best friend really did drown that year in a rowing accident), and they can’t stand the pain.

One of my sisters asked if the debilitating grief that the character, Taylor, the teacher and rowing coach, feels when she loses her best friend is true, and I said yes. My sister said softly, “Where was I?” Her tenderness thirty years after the death of my best friend does more than just heal me; it’s like replacing boards infected with dry rot and shoring up my house.

Publishing this novel is very different than publishing poetry. The way I’ve written this novel strips me bare. My poetry is confessional and intimate, but there’s something about storytelling that puts the reader directly into the action, into the ethical and emotional dilemmas that poetry doesn’t, especially since poetry isn’t necessarily narrative. To stand the pain and pleasure of the people reading my story, to stand my nakedness even under the veil of fiction, triggers my strong powers of denial. Some internal mechanism slaps up walls, a ceiling, reinforced floors, and I have a compartment for the pain of the story and my telling of it.

With that mechanism triggered, the story becomes so distant I can remove semicolons or add them, rewrite small sections, examine colors in the covers, leaf through the physical book, and not feel. And I come from a long line of numb-ers. Eating too much and drinking too much and working too hard are normal. It’s miraculous what survival mechanisms can do for a writer. The irony is that the story is all about feeling, all about the horrible consequences of going numb, and to publish it, I’ve gone numb again, to a degree. To another degree, I'm feeling terror.

Being present to what is happening in this process of making my story about bullying public, is one of the most difficult exercises in mindfulness I’ve experienced. What makes the publishing process real to me is the cover photo.

Photos are intractable. To have my photo on the cover of the book has, to me, been the most powerful proof that I wrote these words. The photo, not the familiarity of the words, not my name on the cover, not the labor of it, proves that I wrote it, and no internal mechanism can deny or stuff that fact in a compartment. Long ago to deal with my memories of abuse as a child, I made drawings of the rooms I crawled out of and the closets I hid in, the house that burnt down when I was five; they gave me a type of evidence that even I couldn’t deny. The cover photo in which I am reading from an advanced copy makes the novel real. It is the antidote to denial and distancing.http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-l2h7QejfKEQ/U-O17SheTzI/AAAAAAAADxA/p9Lk2pLWJ1o/s1600/Kate.reading.JeanR2.jpgcredit: Jean Rosenbaum

What an amazing thing it is when readers and writers reach “sofar inside your soul that this music happens and you all reach the place you wanted to reach together.” Maybe this is the dream of all artists. Thank God for people like Tom Petty who articulate this beautiful process: we want to connect. In art we reach into each other and sing.

“Tom Petty On Cheap Speakers And George Harrison.” All Things Considered. NPR. 04 Aug 2014. Web. 05 Aug 2014.

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M. Allen Cunningham, the instigator of this blog hop, is the brainchild behind Atelier26, a small-press publisher here in Portland, the author of two novels, The Green Age of Asher Witherow, which was chosen as a Book Sense pick in 2004, and Lost Son, a creative writing handbook, The Honorable Obscurity Handbook, and a collection of short stories, Date of Disappearance. The books Atelier26 publishes are elegant and daring. An upcoming release is a book of poems, entitled Gravity, from Elizabeth Rosner, whose novel, Speed of Light, showed me that a poet's sound and syntax can create compelling voices in fiction. Her characters tell a story that is heartbreaking, important, and gorgeous. Her book knocked me out, and when I woke up, I was filled with a belief that telling a story in two voices, with a lot of poetry, was possible. Thank you, M. Allen Cunningham, and Elizabeth Rosner.

How this blog hop works is that Mark highlights 3-5 authors, and gives us 7 questions which we are to answer about our novels by a certain deadline. On that day all 3-5 of us post our responses to those 7 questions on our own blogs, and then, we highlight 3-5 more authors, who then have a deadline to respond on their blogs to the same 7 questions. He said it's like a chain letter but much "less irksome."

Here are my responses about my forthcoming novel, Carry the Sky, to his 7 questions:

1. What is your character’s name? Is s/he fictional or a historic person?

The story in my novel is told in two voices, and late in the story, a third joins in. All the voices revolve around a central character, a thirteen-year-old boy, named Kyle, who is brilliant, quirky, and troubled. I did not give him a voice in order to accentuate his innocence and to highlight his impact on the other characters. No, the characters are not historical, and yes, they are based on spare parts of real people I have known and bits and pieces of imagination.

2. What should we know about him/her?

All of the characters are recovering from the loss of loved ones. All of the characters are troubled. Do you know any teenagers that aren’t troubled? Even the teachers, the two main speakers, are very young. Taylor Alta is 23, and Jack Song is 28. Everyone means well, even Carla, the senior, who acts impulsively.

3. When and where is the story set?

Welcome back to 1983. Remember the early 80s? “Oh no, Mr. Bill” and Coneheads and Christopher Cross’s song “Sailing,” and Reagan. The setting is a boarding school in Delaware, a place created by the Du Ponts for farm boys to learn the classics and to row. They actually dug a lake long enough for a rowing course. Remember Dead Poets Society? The film was shot at the same boarding school, but unlike the film version, the school was co-ed. I taught in that school for one year. Most people associate boarding schools with New England, and this setting is different because of the overt racism that gently pervades the mid-Atlantic.

4. What are the characters’ personal goals?

Truth is their personal goals get side-swiped (not that they knew their personal goals to begin with). All the characters carry around so much grief and longing that they can’t really make plans or goals. They want to survive, mostly, but they bumble around, hold on to each other for a moment, then lose both the physical and the emotional presence of others who might save them. Where they end up is finding their values. Jack Song articulates more firmly the responsibility he feels as a teacher, a parent for children entrusted to the school while they board, and Taylor Alta realizes that she has to find an environment in which she can live in balance, one that supports her as a lesbian, athlete, and scholar. The one who remains lost is Carla.

5. What is the main conflict? What messes up the characters’ lives?

The main conflict is power and chance. The three speakers are thrown together in the boarding-school world in which class and rank and heterosexuality rule. Their lives are messed up by violence and loss, and that’s before the school year begins.

6. What is this novel’s title, and can we read more about it?

Carry the Sky. You can read about it HERE. The title comes from images in the book and the sense of responsibility teachers feel.

7. When can we expect the book to be published?

Officially it’s due September 1, and I’m honored that Powell’s Books, the mothership of independent bookstores, will host the release party on Friday, Sept. 5th at 7:30pm.

http://www.karenschreck.com/portfolio/images/books/sing-for-me-cover.jpgHere are the two writers I get to tag. They will both respond on their blogs to the same 7 questions, by June 28. Presenting the lovely Karen Halvorsen Schreck and Trevor Dodge:

http://media.tumblr.com/9763e3632e3bd29cccc799a2efe1ad48/tumblr_inline_n4mertwvpG1s7foz0.pngKaren Halvorsen Schreck is a writer who can flex all kinds of muscles. Her latest novel, Sing for Me, is a daring and nuanced look at race, nationality, religion, and art. A young woman who grows up in a prescriptive household dares to follow her passion and sing jazz and ends up saving her family and others. You have to read it. Her previous novel, While He Was Away (2012), is already in its second printing. Her novel Dream Journal was a 2007 Young Adult BookSense Pick. She's also published an award-winning children’s book, Lucy’s Family Tree.Her short stories and articles have appeared in literary journals and magazines, and have received various awards, including a Pushcart Prize, an Illinois State Arts Council Grant, and in 2008, first prize awards for memoir and devotional magazine writing from the Evangelical Press Association. She lives outside of Chicago with her extraordinary photographer husband and their incredibly talented children.

Trevor Dodge writes all the time, teaches all the time, and creates opportunities for people to tell their stories in whatever medium best serves them. His latest collection, The Laws of Average, was just released. It's a collection of 60 flash fiction pieces. I can't wait to read his responses to the 7 questions. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Hobart, Gobshite Quarterly, Metazen, Western Humanities Review, Golden Handcuffs Review, Gargoyle, Notre Dame Review, Natural Bridge and Fiction International. He is the author of another collections of short fiction (Everyone I Know Lives On Roads), a novella (Yellow #10), and is a collaborator (with Lance Olsen) on the writing anti-textbook Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing. And he is an extraordinary friend.

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After attending the spring reading for Write Around Portland last night, and hearing the loss to the world of Maya Angelou yesterday, I resurrected an introduction I was honored to write a few years ago to one of Write Around's earlier anthologies:

Fall is wind and fog, leaf fall and freezing streets, a time when cold can kill, and shelter can beat food and clothing for importance. But for some of us, fall was our salvation; it gave us hours away from watchfulness, freed us from the hyper-vigilance of living in a home that was more dangerous on the inside than on the outside. It brought us pink erasers and picture books, and we could fly to the “second star to the right, and straight on till morning.” Even in Neverland some of us carried sorrow with our schoolbooks, concealed in bags on our backs, or in our bones. That sorrow, alongside the capacity for joy, sometimes came out in song or art or writing. Reading was a stillpoint in commotion.

It was Maya Angelou who saved my life. That sounds trite, but she did. In my high school theater the lights were dim, and a spotlight came on the curtain, stage right, and we heard her voice, that deep-river voice. She started from behind the curtain, “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” and her hand came out and became the mask. “It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.” And the poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar was nothing I was prepared for. It was blanket and best friend, blood and whistle. It was a toboggan that brought Mari Evans, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Frances E.W. Harper crashing into my life, hurtling me across a very cold plain. I wasn’t prepared to let go my loneliness, to slide into an understanding that laughter and song could win out over sorrow and fear, or at least, could be companions.

After reading everything Maya Angelou recited, I was no longer alone. After reading the work in this collection, prepare yourself to no longer be alone. Prepare to read the works of people who have found a stillpoint. The words they write are acts of generosity; they give their stories when stories may be all they have to give; those may be their unmasking. Prepare to recognize yourself as one of the people that Write Around Portland serves, a high school student whose “real never gave up on [him],” a lonely woman who came from a lonely woman, someone who tried over and over to tell herself, “Just don’t kill yourself slowly” and kept killing herself slowly.

Whatever you do, whatever you have to give, prepare. Prepare to be safe.

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I never knew there was so much to publishing a novel. Here's what I knew:

• You write the sucker.
  
• You get feedback, and you rewrite it.
  
• You get rejected, and the comments you get are conflicting, and you rewrite it again.
  
• You get friends to read it, sometimes out loud (which is a blessing), and you get more rejections when you submit it to contests and publishers, and you take off your leg or arm.
  
• Once in a blue moon, lightning strikes, and you mix metaphors when your book is accepted because you're literally ecstatic, out-of-your-body happy.
  
• And your editor/publisher (Laura, who is a saint) gives you feedback, and if you're lucky as I am to have an editor who really, really gets your characters and your intention, you dig in and take out and rewrite and tweak the sentences and dialogue.
  
• And we haven't even gotten to the copy-editing, yet...
  

What I didn't know was:

• putting the manuscript into a style other than MLA style that I have breathed for 25 years of teaching it is like diving under water
  
• how to punctuate a continuing sentence in dialogue after the attribution...
  
• Facebook would be key (and really fun and incredibly humbling and awe-inspiring)
  
• I'd have to buck up and ask people I revere for blurbs and other things (stay tuned)
  
• people I revere would be so gracious and say yes
  
• there are a thousand pieces to the cover, like blurbs and fonts and colors and shapes, and the team at Forest Avenue would send 25 emails back and forth in one day about "the" in the title
  
• other pages I had never thought about like the title page, whether or not to include a table of contents, acknowledgements, epigraph, the bio for the cover, bio for the last page, and more.
  
• creating a publicity slip
  
• sending out a publicity slip to a list of people I don't know and some I do
  
• ARC (Advanced Reader Copy)
  

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WcgrsXbvnEk/U2EO9dNsdDI/AAAAAAAADs0/KgdwgbJ10_4/s1600/IMG_1440.JPGAnd here's what's amazing: holding that ARC in your hand. Which I can do right now. Uhhhhhhh. Suddenly all these words, started when I woke up in a stinky bedroom that had been a closet in a place affectionately named "The Rat House" in Cannon Beach and scribbled in the dark on a yellow lined pad, have weight. They have a deep purple cover. They have a title that's different from the one I've used for years, and I like this one. It opens up my chest and makes me stand taller. And there's my name on it, like maybe I have something to do with all these words. And I wonder if I am that person.

While the process seems glacial, I can barely keep up with all there is to process because it's moving so fast. The ARC came on Monday. It's Wednesday, and my eyes are full of tears. I am so grateful.

Not to push the metaphor too far, but this process does feel like riding rollers on my bike. I pedal like mad on the downhill in order to get as much momentum as possible for the uphill. And in this picture, sometimes I glide. And at those times, I say, "Weeeee," a little like e.e.cummings in "in just-". "Weeeee" like we're all in this together....

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Last weekend I rode in The Dalles on 8-mile Road without incident. So, what is there to write about you might ask? Plenty.

Learning. Trying things you know you suck at. Remembering how to suspend your terrible self-critic.

Here are three ways I've tried lately, three ways that have worked:

1) Drawing with pencil every night before I go to bed, for at least, 100 drawings

Last summer a friend, Hannah, admitted her obsession with Lynda Barry (and what's not to be obsessed about when it comes to Lynda Barry?). Hannah had taught herself the art of Japanese ink drawing and showed me the gorgeous ritual of preparing the ink, using the stone and brushes and paper and patience to paint every night, to paint 100 demons. Besides the drawings that were fascinating, that Hannah let emerge, saying things like, "I thought I was going to draw X, but this looks more like Y," and letting Y happen, she would add an active verb. I watched her puzzle the verb out, add the action to the still life. Before me, I saw someone invent, expunge, articulate her demons, or ones that she imagined. Powerful stuff. And so, I took on drawing 100 touches, perhaps because I am not as brave as Hannah, or perhaps because I wanted to sleep without evoking demons.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2jClyt41VX0/UuABstEgzqI/AAAAAAAADpI/i_xC5H3BRbE/s1600/IMG_1270.jpgLast weekend I completed 100 touches, and I can safely say that I still suck at drawing. But what that experience did was to make me return to the pad every night despite the disdain I had for what I had drawn the night before. It made me see color and light and shadow in my life a completely different way. And every night when I drew something, I spent time breathing deeply, and my sleep was deeper, my dreams more colorful (not scary). I'm scared now, but I'm going to include my last drawing here, anyway.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1LzILvaYEtE/UuAEFXyOXmI/AAAAAAAADpU/hXAjYP8SMqw/s1600/new+bike.JPG2) Riding a bike that is better than I am.

On that bike ride last weekend, I rode my new Optima High Baron, which is a sleek, light, aerodynamic machine. The bike is way more advanced than I am. What I mean is that it responds to my balance, the road conditions, the wind much more quickly than I'm used to. The gears and brakes are different, my body is more reclined, and I have a neck rest because of my body position. If I don't learn how to relax my shoulders and neck while I ride, I will seriously strain my deltoids and shoulders. The lesson is something I learned in rowing with super elite rowers: when working the hardest, you have to relax on the recovery of the stroke, place your blade in the water exactly when all the others in the eight do, and boom! explode. The boat feels light, and you feel outside of your body, ecstatic. This bike can teach me many things.

3) Responding to a master

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-l2DdAXb6FHI/UuAHI4bjQxI/AAAAAAAADpg/2qJeuA3AjY8/s1600/Stafford.color.jpgAnd then there's William Stafford. We celebrate his birthday every year, but this year, his centennial, the whole state of Oregon is celebrating him. In listening to the celebration by poets at Clackamas, I heard the ways that his poems saved a boy who had wanted to run away from a foster home, how his poems had comforted many in their loneliness, how they had returned alienated people to nature. What I started doing in the mornings, for just 10-15 minutes each morning, is finding one of his poems, retyping it, and responding to it. So far the poems are awful, but that's okay. I'm writing. I can revise later. I'm starting the day with a poem. The day begins with the blessing of Stafford, and that's a good day.

And the world seems new. Try something you're not good at. Use a tool that is better than ones you have used before. Take risks.

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OK, so maybe I should have thought more about it: walking up the .8-mile gravel road with 800 feet elevation gain to then ride on the gravel to the intersection of State Road and Dry Creek, and then to head down the 6-mile hill to Mosier to do a ride which would eventually end in Hood River at a bagel shop to meet a friend for a mid-morning bagel... I didn't really think about the cold, 24 degrees, or the fog, or how the fog would freeze on the pavement, or how my new bike is so fast and before I know it, goes 40mph, and how wind adds to cold, and before I know it, I can't feel my feet or hands even though I'm trying to use the brakes and I unclip my shoes and almost drag them in front of me in case I slip on the icy pavement, in case I can keep myself from falling...

I'm not sure why I keep doing these things to myself. Isn't there a definition of madness I should be wary of...? I kept thinking that the uphills would warm me, that the sun would emerge from the hills and low clouds, that the famous Gorge winds would start up, even a little, and blow the fog away. At Rowena Crest lookout, I noticed my water in my Camelback was frozen. THAT meant cold. No one was there so no one wondered about this 6-foot crazy woman flapping and flailing her arms in a vain attempt to resurrect her fingers... I was too cold to text Cheryl.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-DnXi8yyTTts/UpkqzCJ0WEI/AAAAAAAADno/ZNnaklPCLjs/s320/2202569644_21f7afd2f4.jpgRowena Crest Loop in snow, not today

Down the hill I went to scramble to Mosier. Five or six deer stared at me when I stopped again to flail and use centripetal force to get blood to my hands. They stared. They didn't run. In the grocery store in Mosier the kind shopkeepers let me stand in the doorway and warm myself. The uphill to the twin tunnel trail helped warm me a bit, and I made it to Hood River and the bagel place. But there wasn't any hot water in the bathroom, Cheryl ordered me a bagel and hot coffee and hot water in a mug, and after 20 minutes I warmed up.

My fingers are swollen as I type this. And from where I sit, I can see Mt. Adams with a lenticular cloud on its top, and sometimes you just have to get out there, no matter how painful. Sometimes you have to start out without thinking of what's ahead or the dangers or the discomfort. Riding's like that sometimes.

So's writing. I don't know where it will take me or how it will freeze me or make me realize how cold I can be or how kind others can be. Those visceral sensations are part of the journey, part of the risk of throwing your body on the path. You might fail. You might get hurt. And you just might learn something about water and fog and ice and forgiveness.

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My mother hated roses, but she kept them. Red ones. In summer mugginess, she entered the cool garage through the side door, tugged on one green gardening glove, then the other, and with her shears, returned to the roses on their spindly stalks. With thorns the size of baby toes, every time she pruned, she pricked herself bloody. "Cut at the 5," she said to me on mornings I followed her, the leaf pattern changing down the stalk from 3 to 5. “That’s where they grow.”

My mother would have hated what I’ve published lately, but she would have read it. The poetry and prose I’m writing now feels like cutting roses at the 5-leaf stalks.

The poetry I’m honored to have published in Elohi Gadugi’s special issue on Home(less) try to make people and moments unforgettable. And the prose that I can’t believe is appearing in The Rumpus (All the Longing in the Body) uses a moment in a drive to Pendleton last fall to look at death and disability and love and moments that reveal loyalty and playfulness and devotion.

Lately I’m writing about things that cut us, that make us grow, that show us that the impulse to write comes from the complicated, loving messages we get, and we are obliged to write what even our mothers would hate but would love us for writing.

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This month in Mosier has put my bones back in. The rain on Sunday, the gentle knocking, is the loudest thing on our five acres in the hills overlooking the Gorge. Besides the hollow trill of Warblers. Yesterday I wrote in my journal and read while tending a burn pile to get rid of the "fuel," the stumps and windfall, that might feed a wildfire during the dry season. And I planted trees. The day before I rode my bike through hillsides covered with Balsam Arrowroot

and Lilacs and goats, and I startled deer, horses, a squirrel rolling in the sand, and a Gray Racer, slithering across the road. And I never felt alone. (Cheryl is away on a training gig.)

Writing can feel lonely sometimes, but for me, the solitude is the key ingredient, the quiet. When I carve out the time to focus on gears shifting on a bike, or word choice, like "mud clotted with rocks in root balls," not "mud clods and rocks stuck..." in a poem about the burn pile, the space opens in me for connection. That attention to the present allows creativity, gratitude, hope, pain, forgiveness to align like bones.

In that space to create over the past ten years, a story moved through me. At the pinewood table with Stevan Allred and Joanna Rose and so many other brave writers years ago, I walked into fiction. With many different people since then, I've connected those words, felt the healing process of writing about the trauma of my first year of teaching, a year in a boarding school in Delaware, that was so difficult it sent me running away from the East Coast, leaving everything behind.

Writing this novel with different groups of people, with readers who were kind and direct, like Hannah Tinti, Minton Sparks, Jackie Shannon-Hollis, Cecily Portman, sending it out to agents and publishers for their comments and rejection, reading it page-by-page to a group of dear friends last summer, rewriting it last fall, obeying Cheryl's commands to "go write," has taught me about endurance and faith and luck. Writing fiction for publication is a long-distance event. People make it possible. I'm the one who has to put in the miles, do the hills.

Forest Avenue Press, the brain child of Laura Stanfill, is going to publish that novel, Skin Drag. If ever there were a book written by a community, this is it. So many people helped to write it. While I may have sought solitude to connect words to the page, I was never lonely. And writing it helped me heal the utter loneliness of the real events buried in the fiction.

Thank you, writers, friends, readers, agents, publishers, Laura (you can read her press release here). Thanks for your faith. Skin Drag will be something for your hands to hold in September, 2014.

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"It's not the points, it's the poetry" spins in my head as I ride through Rowena, ride through The Dalles, and head up Sevenmile Hill Road, the back way. The line comes from Louder Than a Bomb, the video about the annual high school slam competition in Chicago. I've never heard/seen anything like those poets, those teachers, those metaphors. And at the end of the documentary, the team, that [spoiler alert] didn't continue in the competition due to .1 point, realizes that indeed, the poetry matters most of all. Their poetry is crazy loud, crazy good.

So often on a bike ride, my obsession with numbers, the miles traveled, the speed, the time, keep my eyes on my monitor. Today was one of those days when folly is a mirror. Today was the first big ride for me, and my route was ambitious. Over 2,000 ft elevation gain in the last 2 miles. I checked the wind, and I knew there would be plenty.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h0MWytT1p9w/URbmpIWE-EI/AAAAAAAADhk/vbPQPpwmhMA/s200/IMG_0300.jpgDidn't figure 17mph headwind, and gusts over 27mph. Didn't figure 38 degrees. The force of the wind was too much for my speed of 3.7mph up the steepest parts of the hill. Physics ruled, and my bike stopped. Around a switchback, on my one earbud I heard Destiny's Child sing, "I'm a survivor." It cheered me up, and I was gaining speed until I switched back, perpendicular to the wind, and the wind almost knocked me off the pavement. Without guard rails, the wind might have knocked me off the mountain. So, I walked and rode and cursed and made it to the summit.

What triumph I had today over numbers and numbness is folly compared with what the young people in the video accomplished every day. In their teenage years, they are better poets than I ever will be. Their metaphors punch. Their grasp of history and popular culture and their family layers their performances with truth; they turn truth into minor chords. The audience feels the truth in the chest.

Once I had the good fortune of interviewing David Wagoner, a poet-god whose poems turn birds into songs. We talked about the new medium of slam, and he acknowledge that slam poetry gave rise to underrepresented voices. But he feared that the poems were not lasting because of the reliance on sound alone. The interview was twenty years ago, and he hadn't heard:

Adam Gottleib,

Nova Venerable, Cody

Lamar Jorden, Shooter

Their poems have pitch perfect sound, depth, the staying power of words that cut, that open up holes in the listener. What I'm saying is that there are tests worth taking, on stage, on paper, on a bike. Writing has an edge, and the edge is what helps move experience, move culture, make judgments like Wagoner's moot. Louder than a Bomb is a movement.

Do we have the movement in Portland? We have Verselandia, in its second year. Want to hear what's raw and sweet and so loud it breaks? Let's all go, and then, we'll know to forget numbers, to look up at a summit, to honor poetry more than points.

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This morning, the sheen on the street is shiny gray, and the clouds are as thin as veils. What moves through me like those clouds is news of a friend with lymphoma. He's an athlete, a writer, someone who waits at the end of a reading and approaches you and says the thing you hoped someone would hear and say out loud.

In the Q & A portion of the Brave on the Page reading at Powell's in early January, someone asked if a writer should join a group. One audience member felt writing groups were a waist of time. Some are. Some break poems over their knees for the sheer pleasure of breaking. Some whitewash the pain out of stories. But then, there's the one or two that fit, like cashmere sweaters just the right size. They're hard to find. They're hard to create.

Here's a profile of one of the groups that tastes like sweet corn soup on a February day:

--the Dangerous Writers in Portland began with a few charismatic leaders, bent on bending rules, indoctrinating eager, vulnerable writers with a new vocabulary and new rules.

--the members were ferociously dedicated, meeting each week, and making sacrifices to be there (some folks spent so much time writing to make the weekly page count that they didn't eat enough, didn't meet daily obligations.)

--the responses in the group to writing were stars drawn over words doing their work, spicy and seductive, with discussion of the "bumps," so gently put and so honest that the writer felt powerful enough to gather feedback, to ignore feedback, and to keep rolling down the lane with feedback as a bumper.

--the group socialized outside of writing time, with invitations sent to everyone in the group.

--to change things up, there were annual parties and annual writing challenges.

--sporadically, news of publications and honors went out, with each person published willing to share his/her connections or queries or websites or process.

--people showed up, for each other, for readings and weddings and hospital visits.

--resources like agents and web skills and toboggans were shared.

--rules about how to write fiction (first person, personal, etc.) that the group started with changed as the group opened up and changed tables and grew, and the writing opened up and grew.

And what's grown is a community, one connected by email and Evite and fireworks in Estacada. We don't all write together around the same tables. We don't write the same things. We don't live in the same place. Even someone who has moved to San Francisco, who has just received news that he has lymphoma, can reach out and ask the dangerous writing community for book recommendations, can ask for laughter and for a 57-word flash fiction piece that includes a word from his chemo regimen. And he will get books and writing and love. It's that kind of group. It's that kind of love.

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Middle English retret, from Anglo-French retrait, from past participle of retraire to withdraw, from Latin retrahere, from re- + trahere to draw. First Known Use: 14th century.

1 a (1) : an act or process of withdrawing especially from what is difficult, dangerous, or disagreeable (2) : the process of receding from a position or state attained retreatof a glacier>

b (1) : the usually forced withdrawal of troops from an enemy or from an advanced position (2) : a signal for retreating

c (1) : a signal given by bugle at the beginning of a military flag-lowering ceremony (2) : a military flag-lowering ceremony

2: a place of privacy or safety : refuge

3: a period of group withdrawal for prayer, meditation, study, or instruction under a director

January was a l-o-n-g month, but there were moments of retreat. There is so much "treat" in retreat. What great pleasure. While the root is in "draw" as in "move away," I'd like to think of it as the artistic kind, to draw an image of what's core, what's in your heart. There's also the time and space to draw out creativity, to conjure the demons and the dreams. A retreat is whatever you need it to be. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-X2Wpl6Wd2Qg/UQwF-szaplI/AAAAAAAADgs/opS_DK3HSr4/s200/IMG_6951.JPGCecily & J in cool hats

One weekend Cecily Portman and Joanna Rose spent the weekend with me in Mosier. Good wine and cheese and cupcakes were as much part of the retreat as writing in the corner of the house we claimed, as walking in the crisp air, as spinning circles under the constellations, pointing and pretending to know their names.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7TVLuCPkDNY/UQ00QQYEftI/AAAAAAAADhU/Af6xD_ZTcOE/s200/IMG_6963.JPGLinda and me

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--QV9larkx3o/UQwJI-5o1dI/AAAAAAAADhE/B-sFZkP64jI/s200/IMG_0258.jpgAnd the next weekend I spent with Linda Vogt, my pal from CCC, the woundrous Journalism instructor emeritus. She's working on a mystery novel, which she's generously sharing with her pals. While the meals were not gourmet without Ms. Cecily and Ms. J around, we had enough coffee and chocolate to get us through. While we were there, we were totally withdrawn from the world, in a frozen fog, for day after day. We barely saw the Columbia River Valley, and didn't even hope to see the icicles of Mt. Adams and Hood. Rafi had a great time, too.

Whoever you are, I wish you the ability to find a retreat, a place to breathe, create, do whatever you need to do.

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New years bring stacks of resolutions, the climb toward light, taxes, reflections on civil rights, toppled resolutions, and more. Lucky for us in Oregon (and some others around the world) we celebrate social justice and equality and crystal imagery every year through William Stafford. January marks a migration. His poems are a flock landing every year. Or maybe I'm the one that gets to fly into his poems and feed seasonally.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jAlReDK5zVw/UPQ2AwFNW-I/AAAAAAAADf4/oJAJYF9FeHY/s1600/WStaffor.jpgIf you haven't been to a Stafford reading, you should go. What happens is that 3-4 people get up and read one of his and one of theirs, often in response to his, and then, the audience is invited to read one of his. Oh, the poems are gentle and accessible and poignant. What happens is that everyone in the room realizes he or she is a poet, he or she is gifted with the ability to set down in words some impression, some insight, some flash. Everyone is able and invited to write.

Here is a list of all the readings in the metro area. Click HERE.

I'd like to invite you to two of them in which I am involved:

Wednesday, January 16, 6 to 8pm

Clackamas Community College

19600 Molalla Ave.

Oregon City, OR 97040

Roger Rook Hall 220

and

Sunday, January 27th, 1:30 pm,

Molalla Public Library, 201 E. 5th St., Molalla, Oregon.

Hosted: by Larry Anderson and Kate Gray. Sponsored by the Molalla Writers Group.

Featuring: Larry Anderson, Brian Biggs, Maureen Cole, Kate Gray, Carol Hausholder, Steve Slemenda, and Esther Wood, who will read Stafford and Stafford-related poems followed by reader/audience discussion of his work, life, stories, anything else of pertinence. Guests are warmly invited to read their own work and/or related poems. Those not interested in reading poems may sit back and enjoy! The film, “Traveling in the Dark” will be shown, with a short discussion to follow.

Contact: Kate Gray.

Stafford invites everyone to write. I do, too.

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Being the first one to read in a line-up of powerful, kind writers means being the first to sit back down, being able to enjoy the rest of the evening after the adrenaline flushes. The reading last Monday night at Powell's was electric. The place was packed as you can see in the photo.

Laura Stanfill, editor of Brave on the Page and founder of Forest Avenue Press, is a force for writing in Portland. She is sweet-sweet, like the taste of a lilac blossom, and strong, like rivers. She brought 42 Oregon authors together in one anthology of interviews and "flash essays" about the craft of writing, and the books are print-on-demand through Powell's mini press, called the Espresso Book Machine, which prints a book while you wait. It's pretty cool.

You can see how many people (150+) came on a drippy Monday night. You can see the rapt attention. What you can't see is the love in the room. Laura's introductions for each of the writers set the tone. She called Gina Ochsner her literary hero. She described her devotion and relationship with each of us in such a tender way that a yellow brick road became our path to the podium. And each writer who spoke or read offered really specific and loving tips for writing.

One person who offers practical, winsome advice is Yuvi Zalkow. His video series on writing is painfully poignant. There are few voices in the world as compelling as his. Scott Sparling, whom Joanna Rose also hosted on the panel about writing, is a generous and kind craftsman. He spoke about not liking his characters, the challenge of crawling into personalities so unlike his own.

Two things I heard, in particular, are still rumbling inside me. Joanna Rose talked about the difference between fact and truth, which Kristy Athens illustrated by saying something about small towns, which I can't quite remember, like most of the population of Oregon lives in small towns, but truth is that small towns do not thrive. Fact is the writers spoke about the craft of writing; truth is the writers talked about how to live a writer's life, how to survive.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-h0DXj9_9nRI/UO29YZ22Y_I/AAAAAAAADc4/Q0c17DWXjbo/s320/226640_4764533645343_1002909966_n.jpgme, Robert Hill, Kristy Athens, Tom Bell, Gigi Little, Scott Sparling, and graphic novel in background, thanks to Julia Stoops for the photo

Another was the image Gina Ochsner created in her piece, "Cynicism," in the book. She described her son being pinned in a wrestling match, how the dominant wrestler became a blanket on top of her son, how the coach yelled, "Great position. Now look up, stand up, let him slide off you," something like that. What love from an incredible coach. What an incredible way to approach cynicism, approach the crushing weight of doubt.

Writing is such a lonely act, and people like Laura create community. Writers who are brave and speak about doubt and despair and triumph in real and specific terms grant us permission to risk in writing, to love in all its mess and mystery.

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Dear Rain,

It's not that I don't like spending so much time with you, the way you make the green so green we turn into hobbits, the way geese and sandhill cranes flood the sky, the way you make the Willamette River a shiny split in the city. You, my sweet, are a charmer I wouldn't live without.

It's just that the fourth rainiest year in Oregon history means shoes not drying between walks with my dogs, means not walking the dogs as often, means my bike shoes stiffen in the basement, not getting their air, their due. Call me lazy. Call me ungrateful.

Maybe we should slow things down a bit, visit with some other weather. I've heard the Midwest ask about you. Texas is a lovely place; they really appreciate a juicy drop or two. I'm not talking forever. I can share. How about a week or month?

Don't get me wrong. You make my heart puddle.

-Kate

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Yesterday the honor was all mine. I was lucky enough to read with Stevan Allred, Scott Sparling, Jackie Shannon Hollis, and Liz Scott at Backspace in Old Town, Portland. We were celebrating the publication of Brave on the Page, which is the brainchild of Laura Stanfill (she with tireless energy around writing and promoting all things writing).

What makes this group of writers and this anthology stand out is the intimacy of the writing. The issues taken up are raw, tender, and kind. There is a lot of love among us and between writer and reader. It's such a privilege to spend an afternoon with others dedicated to telling stories, to crafting sentences, to putting on the page what is difficult to face so that others may have an easier time facing them.

Thank you, Laura. Thank you, dangerous writers.

xxox-

-Kate

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by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold This morning when I went out into the sticky, thick light from the east on our front porch, I found a bag of fresh plums. They were left by a really sweet guy, whom I met through Craigslist. Who knew that selling my very first recumbent would become such a lovely experience?

For years I resisted selling my blue R40 Vision recumbent with underseat steering. The bike I called, "Joni Mitchell Blue," had taken me from my despair at never being able to row again to the joy of a whole new world of cycling. In the fall of 2005, I think, I walked into Coventry Cycle where younger and older men with aprons wielding tire irons and metric wrenches, looked up from bike stands and greasy chains, and escorted me through recumbents and trikes and collapsible bikes. They talked technical, which I loved, even if I didn't have a clue what they were saying. And I tried out a long-wheel base (wobbly) and a short-wheel base (too cool), and eventually bought Joni.

All fall and winter she took me through traffic and sleet and sloppy sidewalks. At lights I toppled over, not quite managing to get my foot up to the pedal in time or slipping off. At Hagg Lake in the dead of winter, I made figure-eights at the pullouts on tops of rollers as prizes for making it up the hills, and as practice for turning, which seemed like sure ways to buck myself off the little sportscar of a recumbent. With the handlebars under the seat, I wanted a seat belt to keep me on the bike. For the first four months of riding, I fell almost every time I rode. But I learned. And Joni got me where I needed to go (and back).

After riding Seattle-to-Portland the next summer and many events afterwards, I needed a bigger front wheel, needed to ride higher on the road. I moved to a Bacchetta with regular sized wheels. Her name is "Iris," big and yellow. Her picture is on this blog. But Joni has been my backup, my winter indoor trainer, and I haven't been able to let her go.

Until last weekend. One day on Craigslist, and a very sweet man responded whose third recumbent had been stolen, and he commuted every day on his recumbent, the exact same kind, even though the manufacturer has long gone out of business. He arrived, and we found our names were chosen for similar reasons: Gray, what is between black and white. That's his first name and my last name, both chosen.

When he took Joni for a spin, she looked like an extension of his body. She fit. They are a good pair. And I found her old pedals and left them on my porch last night for him. He exchanged plums for them, so sweet and so cold.

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Today was one of those magical rides, where what you plan and why you planned it work out. The forecast was for heat and wind, and so, I thought early and north-south, not east-west. Around 7am I had everything loaded (and dogs fed, walked, watered, and bribed in the cabin) in the car, and drove down 7-Mile Hill and on to 84 and off at Hood River, and began the climb up Rt. 35 toward Mt. Hood. The day was already hazy with the temperature already about 70 degrees, so unusual for Oregon. Through the repaving project, past the sign for Odell, I parked at a bakery, which I knew would be a welcome sight after the ride. From there I started uphill, and up and up, with views of Mt. Hood as rewards, I rode. At first the self-doubts were getting to me, but earbuds and peppy music helped me spin the wheels. The rough pavement lasted a few miles, but soon I was alongside the East Fork of Hood River, its glacier water sending waves of freezing air over me. I shivered. Then, the warm, dry shafts of the canyon swept over me. I sweat. No wind, mercifully. In 16 miles I was at the trailhead where Cheryl and Rafi and I had just hiked last week, a gorgeous short hike along the river to stunning falls.

The downhill was glorious. There is a speed around 33 mph where I find I can't keep up, and I have to coast. I was above 30mph much of the way, with views of the entire fruit valley and Mt. Adams, and suddenly, the downhill was over. There was a good slog of an uphill, and I found my very favorite sign in biking:

Few things are more rewarding.

Well, there was the chocolate-chip-peanut-butter cookie at the bakery, the rhubarb jam, and the marionberry empanada for later...

Do this ride.

-Kate

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Hi, my little potato bug,

Tomorrow you leave Spaulding, and despite Corinne’s beautiful smile and Brooke’s cajoling and Anne’s insistence on one more step or lunge or arm curl, you won’t look back. That’s the point, of course. I’m including a photo from the window you’ve had for the last 8 weeks.

-Kate

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Cousin Pam wrote to tell me to ask if little whimpers of pain were escaping my heart from Aunt Priscilla’s death (she’s quite a writer), and I said, yes, and some pains are paper cuts, somewhere between a whimper and a gut punch. For instance, last weekend at our cabin in Mosier, Oregon, when walking my dog early in the morning, I heard a sound I’d never heard before, getting louder coming toward me. It was a short burst, a lung-full, high, scared. Then, I saw deer bunch up when they saw me and were more afraid of me than they were of the thing chasing them. That sound. Just sometimes when I’m not sure where to go.

And the tears were for missing you and for the joy of getting to see you this weekend and for the joy of your seeing that garden that Penny and others have prepared and the tender way that John will hug you into the car and out of the car and into the wheelchair and through your garden and to your new spot. It’s all magic, a mix of strength and mischief and undeniable love.

-Kate

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Yesterday, we discovered the real cause of my sister's brain bleed. It wasn't a stroke. It wasn't an aneurism. It was AVM or cerebral arteriovenous malformation. (That's what the main character, Nate, on Six Feet Under had in case you saw that HBO show.) Now we know. Less than 1% of the population has this condition, and it may be the root cause of what we call "the family aneurism." It's congenital.

The following poem I started writing when my sister Kim was in the worst shape, that first week in Neuro ICU. I tried everything I could to get images out of my body, to find words to deal with the grief that was too huge to contain: wrote in a journal, prayed, wrote a blog, etc. In Boston I had no bicycle; that would have helped.

Coma

My sister is bulb, paper-shelled, cloven,

six inches under soil, prepped and turned.

My sister is cumulus, extravagant thermals,

wisps lifting eyelids, eyebrows, and lips.

My sister is earthworm, segmented,

soft plow, persistent and slick.

When nurses plunge suction down her breathing tube,

closed eyes cry, and bleating, she is lamb.

When doctors wake her, rake knuckles

across her sternum, she is volcano, shaking.

Like rhododendron after clearcut

Like marram grass on sand

Like bracken ferns after fire

my sister is prayer

How lucky we are that she is no longer in this state. And she remembers nothing. I'm learning how to hold this tremendous gift.

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