My Articles:
Grandma’s House
I never really had grandparents. My mother’s mother and my father’s father died when my parents were still children. I only met my paternal grandmother once and my maternal grandfather passed when I was toddler.
Luckily, my children have a different life. They have three sets of grandparents: Nonna and Grandpa Elroy; Grammie and Grampie; and Grandma and Grandpa Tampa (because they live in Tampa).
This Christmas we are staying with Grandma and Grandpa Tampa. In fact, my husband’s entire family is here to celebrate the holidays. That’s two grandparents, four grown children, their spouses, and ten grandchildren.
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Litquake! Make My Knees Shake!
Litquake, San Francisco’s Literary Festival, kicks off tonight — nine days, 850 authors, 150 Bay Area locations. There are readings in bars, bookstores, boats, and one barbershop! Writing Mamas member Janine Kovac gives us the behind-the-scenes peek at the excitement and amazing amount of planning that goes into this “Woodstock” of the writing world.
I think I have stage fright.
I am so nervous.
I’m not reading (all authors—except for those in LitCrawl—who read in the Festival have had books published within the last two years.) But as a member of the executive committee, I’ll speak at a handful of events to say things such as “Welcome to Litquake!”
This is my first year on the committee. Most of the committee members are published authors or editors of literary magazines. Some are publicists, others are booksellers and publishers. Me, I write my mommy blog and watch my kids. Most of the books I read are written in rhyme (“A comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush.”) Most of my public speaking happens at the park playground: “GET DOWN FROM THERE RIGHT NOW!” Continue… »
Marriage is Work
A friend of mine celebrates her first wedding anniversary next week and has noticed that the universe has conspired against her. Total strangers tap her on the shoulder to say, “Remember, marriage is work.” Billboards, bus advertisements, email spam from moveon.org—everyone is telling her how hard marriage is. And that the work gets tripled once you add kids to the equation.
“Is it true?” she asked me, since I have been married seven years. Seven years! That’s as long as an Old Testament famine.
Yes, Laurie, it is true. Marriage is work. But here’s the trick: the implication of “marriage is work” (reads like a Marxist manifesto) is that if marriage is work, then the opposite of all this work is sipping mojitos in Tahiti, and reading the latest Oprah book club selection. I would argue that, yes, marriage requires a lot of effort, but there’s also great payoff. To me the polar opposite of being married is being comatose. A coma requires very little effort. I believe there’s also very little reward.
Put another way: a marriage is a garden. We can probably all agree that weeding a garden is hard work. But while one gardener notices how hot it is, how much her knees hurt, how many weeds there are, and what a thankless job it is—gripe, moan, whine—another gardener might notice how nice it is to be in the fresh air. That the feel of dirt in her fists is a sensual experience. That the garden is beautiful after it’s been weeded. Maybe she’s just proud to even have a garden.
You get the point.
(I must admit with all this gardening talk, that I haven’t weeded since 1981, back when I still had cooperative kneecaps. The metaphor is more real to me than the actual act of gardening.) Continue… »
Cracked Open
I had my piece “workshopped” today. That means that yesterday, the other 12 people in my group read the first two chapters of my book. (13, if you count the facilitator who, in our case was Leslie Daniels, an agent-turned-author). Then today they talked about it. I brought bagels for the group, which proved to be a nice distraction; I found I was so preoccupied about the presentation of the bagels, I forgot to be nervous about the group’s feedback.
Different moderators do different things. On Tuesday Dagoberto Gilb guided the discussion by introducing themes and asking questions. Yesterday Jason Roberts spent the first half hour talking about craft. Today we did a “whip,” as it is called, where we go around the room and each person discusses the piece. The moderator goes last. Usually the author gets a chance to speak at the end, but Leslie Daniels preferred that the author remain silent. Her rationale is that it is practically impossible for the author to respond without sounding like she is reacting. The author does not have to defend herself.
However, in the middle of the discussion for my piece, I had to interrupt. Because I was bawling and I wanted people to understand why. Continue… »
The Mark of a Writer’s Nose
We begin this week with a series from our Writing Mamas members “in the field.” About a half dozen Writing Mamas are ensconced at the Community of Writers in Squaw Valley for the week. Squaw is a highly rated invite-only retreat. Our members have offered us a peek behind-the-scenes of an exclusive writer’s workshop.
Our first journal entry comes from member, Janine Kovac.
This week I am at Squaw, and I can’t help noticing how every writer here has a lot of cartilage between his nostril and the tip of his (or her) nose. I keep looking at the undersides of people’s noses and thinking, how large this nasal piece of real estate is. I mean, there’s so much skin, you gotta remember to put sunscreen there. It’s kind of wondrous, that cartilage. Continue… »
The Finer Points of Face Painting
For July 4th I took my preschooler and her friend to Jack London Square for some corn dogs and face painting.
The face-painting booth was manned by about five middle school girls. Paintbrushes, baby wipes and medallions of oily makeup were scattered around the table. In the middle was a box for gratuities.
“What would you like?” one of the tweens asked my daughter Chiara.
“I want a princess,” she answered. It’s an easy face to make― it’s sparkly pink eye shadow, sparkly pink cheeks and sparkly lips. All done!
“I don’t think I can paint a princess on your cheek,” the tween said, clearly not understanding the nuances of face-painting four-year-olds. “How about if I just paint some sparkly pink fireworks?” Continue… »
My Husband Has a Crush on a Bald Frenchman
I’m not a jealous person by nature but sometimes at night when it’s time to go to bed, instead of following me into the boudoir, my husband, hypnotized by the glow of his laptop will murmur, “I’ll be there in a minute.”
And then I start to seethe.
He’s not coming to snuggle with me under the sheets because he’d rather watch videos on Youtube. Specifically, clips of French Algerian soccer star Zinedane Zidane. Most likely, my husband is watching the “best of” video of “Zizou” (as the superstar is known to his fans), a montage of the best career shots edited down to seven minutes against the backdrop of Coldplay’s “I Will Fix You.”
My husband loves watching Zidane zigzag across the field past other world-class soccer players. If I’m in the room, I get dragged to the computer.
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A Mom of Preemies Learns to Practice Patience
Michael & Wagner
My twins were born at just 25 weeks, 3 days’ gestation—15 weeks before their due date. Michael George weighed in at 1 lb, 12 ounces and his younger brother, Wagner Lee, weighed 1 lb, 9 ounces. Both were just over a foot long, the size of kittens, not babies. They were in the NICU for three months. Today, they are almost fifteen months old and weigh over twenty-five pounds.
Being a NICU parent is like parenting on steroids. Parents “on the outside” can live their entire parenting careers deluding themselves that they have some semblance of control over their children. But the truth is, children go and grow at their own rate. The most we can do as parents is guide their progress. We can’t control when our children crawl or read or get married. All we can do is facilitate crawling or reading or fostering healthy relationships and the worst we can do is hamper their progress.
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From California to Congo: A Mom on a Mission to Enact Change
Writing Mama Janine Kovac interviews fellow member Mindy Urhlaub in a profound and heart-rending piece.
“In the countryside, the air is very clean [but] the air outside my Goma hotel constantly smells acrid—like a cook fire. It makes your eyes feel like beef jerky.”
Mindy Uhrlaub, a Writing Mamas member is writing a novel about Congo, one of the most ravaged places on Earth. She writes about the devastation of a land, the oppression of a people, and the corruption within a country. It is a place where malaria is deadly instead of treatable, and where women are raped and mutilated and then ostracized for the crimes they’ve suffered. She writes about teen-aged mothers and the sick children who play in the dirt at their feet. She writes about the brave women who school the young mothers, feed the children and risk their lives by caring for their kin.
She isn’t writing a novel by choice; she writes a novel because anything but a fictionalized account of quotidian life in Congo will put the lives of these women in danger. Her research began 10 years ago after reading the book, King Léopold’s Ghost. What began as a passing interest has spawned two identities that feed off of each other: Mindy the writer who is inspired by activism in Congo and Mindy the activist who uses writing as her medium for change. Continue… »
Top 10 Considerations for a Preschooler Party
Last month I hosted a no-frills party for my daughter’s 4th birthday. The party went smoothly enough, but I was surprised at my lack of foresight in some key areas. Here are my Top 10 nuggets of After-the-Fact Wisdom:
1. Get a noise ordinance permit.
For every party guest, the decibel level increases by a factor of two. One more kid and we would have been louder than a 70s Deep Purple concert. If you invite more than two children, consider earplugs.
2. Sometimes four-year-olds act like little kids.
When I came into the babies’ room and shouted, “Everybody get out of the crib. NOW!” my daughter responded, “We heard you tell us not to jump in the crib but we misunderstood.”
