And if you haven’t read Bird by Bird, it’s fantastic. I dare say “essential” for writers, but Lamott is so good, anyone can benefit from her insights on life.

The Question:  Did you have a night out with friends or a loved one that rocked your world? Who was there? What was the highlight of the night?

There were probably a few nights, now melded in memory, from my last residency at Pacific in June.  There was the uncontrollable laughter–the kind that you’re almost concerned about whether or not you’ll be able to take another breath, but the thought of losing consciousness owing to oxygen shortage makes everything even funnier… the kind that makes your obliques hurt more than they have from abdominal crunches.

When I laugh that hard tears stream down my cheeks.

There was that time when Aaron raised his hand, and we just lost it.  There were homemade brownies.  There was red wine in real wine glasses thanks to Eric.  There was that all night conversation…  To say that that night, or nights, rocked my world, would be vastly understated.

Pictured here with my fiction writing friends, Jason Sandefur and Alissa Nielsen.

The Question: What book – fiction or non – touched you? Where were you when you read it? Have you bought and given away multiple copies?

I’m re-reading Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love right now and it’s pretty much altering the way I perceive everything — again.  Of course there is the famous quote that is always a good reminder…

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

But there are so many other, equally potent gems scattered throughout the pages.  My copy is already filled with underlines from the first go-around, but I’m finding new ideas on almost every page that somehow resonate with me in a way that is both novel and familiar.

Want to play along? Check out the list here and blog about your favorites for ’09 all through December:
http://www.gwenbell.com/blog/2009/11/30/the-best-of-2009-blog-challenge.html

God and the G-Spot

He didn’t want to believe. He wanted to know.

~ Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s wife, on why he didn’t believe in God

I want to know too. Belief and disbelief

are a pair of tourists standing on swollen feet

in the Prado–I don’t like it.

I do.–before the Picasso.

Or the tattoo artist with a silver stud

in her full red executive lips,

who, as she inked in the indigo blue, said,

I think the G-spot’s one of those myths

men use to make us feel inferior.

God, the G-spot, falling in love. The earth round

and spinning, the galaxies speeding

in the glib flow of the Hubble expansion.

I’m an East Coast Jew. We all have our opinions.

But it was in the cabin at La Selva Beach

where I gave her the thirty tiny red glass hearts

I’d taken back from my husband when I left.

He’d never believed in them. She, though, scooped

them up like water, let them drip through her fingers

like someone who has so much she can afford to waste.

That’s the day she reached inside me

for something I didn’t think I had.

And like pulling a fat shining trout from the river

she pulled the river out of me. That’s

the way I want to know God.

Red Lilies

by Richard Speakes

For Joan Didion

We tame with explanations any red, provide

meanings into which we dive, the human

foxhole where the mind finds protection.

It’s fabulous out there, and one clump

of red lilies beside the house could be

the bullet that rips through the body of

all those connotations, our symbols,

the stories that make sense of our world.

Red Riding Hood and Christ’s wounds, mother’s

blood,

and the color the sun must be as one’s death

gives sunset its purpose, its passion at closure.

And then, rising, the moon punctuates the sentence

one’s life made, its last word that somehow rhymes

with all the words preceding, love and work

and sex.  One’s death is by nature that moment,

all the meanings folded into the bundle

one carries, tied to a stick of bone,

as one goes forth into eternity.

That exquisite nonsense is the world

the mind makes from the world it didn’t,

with words that are themselves blossoms

of the invisible, the world as we see it.

As a side note, it’s interesting to think that I read this, and loved it, long before I knew of Richard Speakes and Joan Didion.  I was in high school at the time, fancying myself a writer, and here I am today, fifteen years later, having gotten cozy with Didion’s writing last semester, and still loving that poem.

The tea house theme for gmail depicts another view, on the opposite side his pagoda.  Sometimes he is picking flowers in his courtyard or as of five minutes ago, he is cooking dinner inside.  Why does this little guy’s activity intrigue me?  Perhaps it is simply another form of procrastination, one more thing to check out before getting down to the business of writing.

“To write,” he said, “is to enter into a moral relationship with oneself and with the community.”  Having the ability to write down what you mean, and a stranger being able to comprehend it, truly, “you are in the landscape of miracles.”

Barry shared a beautiful word, the Japanese kotodama, which means the soul or spirit of a word, the spiritual interior of a word itself.  He reminded us that we must write with a bow of respect to the material and to the reader.

She reminded us that our service must be to the story first, to the craft, not to our personal experience.  We are to “shine the light of why onto the what of the essay.”  The “what” in nonfiction is always false tension; the actual tension lies in the “why,” the emotional arc of the story.