‘73 Duster was a Troublesome Work of Art

My father helped me purchase my first car, a new 1973 Duster. It was a two-door coupe, a sporty but basic model, Crayola blue with Baby Moon hubcaps. I was a senior in high school, working part-time as a telephone solicitor, and planned to attend art school after graduation.

It was incredible to be able to pick a direction and fly as fast as I wanted. Driving my Duster, window down and radio high, was my usual respite from school, parental nagging, and stupid boyfriends. It was a faithful, accepting friend, and I treated it kindly. When I dinged the rear bumper in a parking lot, I used enamels to paint the dent with a maharishi tossing flowers that I copied from “The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics.” I adorned the embossed vinyl seats with orange and yellow flower-power stickers.

I remember trying to maneuver a narrow road in the rain at midnight, looking for a campsite in Mohican Park, Ohio. My girlfriends shrieked as I missed a downhill curve and slid nearly into the trees. We were amazed the car was unscathed and able to groan back onto the road, although Sandy spilled the bottle of sangria. When we got lost from navigating different out-of-town dance spots, my car was given credit for finding the way home. It became a designated driver of sorts.

My father remembers my Duster as being badly behaved. He called my Blue Baby a lemon. To begin with, it developed a brake problem about the time I took a carload of friends into the Allegheny Mountains. A feather touch on the pedals would jerk bodies and camping gear into the dashboard every time I braked. Several trips to the dealer were fruitless until one mechanic admitted the wrong power brakes had been installed.

Then the roof started to leak along the door seal. Shortly afterward, the vinyl headliner fell in. The car also had a troublesome ignition module.  It would short, the car would stall, ant the module had to be replaced. Apparently the short couldn’t be corrected. My dad became concerned about my safely, and we sold my beloved Duster for a Chevrolet Monza. It was like parting ways with a childhood friend, even though I only had the car for a year and a half.

I have not been able to develop a close relationship with another vehicle since. These days I drive a Pacifica. I treat it well enough, and it gets me where I want to go, but I’ve yet to be inspired to paint flowered gurus on the dent in the rear fender.

This essay first appeared in the Detroit Free Press

Uninspired? No club? Try this:

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. ~Jack London.

I don’t have a muse. If I waited for a muse to inspire me as a writer, I’d never get anything accomplished. To that end, I decided to try something new when I find myself banging my head against the computer screen in vain: I will go outside, whether it’s raining or snowing or pitch dark, run around the house once, then come back in and sit down. I figure the sheer stupidity of this exercise will spur me to get cracking.

Well, maybe not, but at least it makes more sense to me than “Tapping,” a technique from something called Emotional Freedom Techniques where the writer tells himself “Even though I can’t think of anything to write about now, I love and accept myself,” while tapping the top of his head, corner of his eye, outside the eye, under the eye, under the nose… and so on until something pops into his head. If he doesn’t like what he writes, he does it until he writes something he likes. That sounds too New Age for me. I’d rather use the club.

Otherwise, I use prompts and exercises, I read books or look at art as a springboard, or I immerse myself in something mundane that allows my mind to unwind, such as gardening, working out, or cleaning (never by watching television — it shuts down creativity for me).  I have a recumbent bicycle that I call my generator because I get some of my best ideas while riding it.

A few other favorite quotes on inspiration:

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up for work. ~Chuck Close

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. ~Erica Jong. I read this quote at least thirty years ago, and it’s stuck with me.

I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter. ~James Michener. It isn’t necessary to write well, but rather just to get writing. Once you have something in writing, you at have something to work with.

And this quote gives me hope when I fear what I’m writing is trash: Screwing up is a virtue. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea. ~artist Robert Rauschenberg

What helps you as an artist or writer? Do you have a set time of day when you sit down to work, whether or not you’re inspired? I’d love to know how you make the most of your creative time. And I’ll let you know if my new technique works.

A Twist of Noir

If you’ve ever wanted to try “The Writer’s Toolbox” by Jamie Cat Callan, I can offer proof that it really works. The prompts from the toolbox were used in a workshop I was in last summer at Stonecoast, and the resulting scene, which I thought was a throwaway, was reworked into a short-short noir piece that was published on “A Twist of Noir” online.

Typically, I have a really hard time writing in workshops. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I’m running up a brick wall while everyone else is madly scribbling away. For whatever reason, using the toolbox, I was able to dash off a fairly amusing scene, which remained in one of my many spiral-bound notebooks full of ideas and notes that I keep forever (and here’s a bit of trivia: Lyn Lifshin said she saves every draft of every poem she’s ever written in boxes she keeps in her basement on shelves that run floor to ceiling).

In this workshop, each of us blindly picked story elements from a pile of sticks, a stack of cards and a spinning wheel. Mine were:

The Protagonist: Joy from the rock band

Goal: To save Mother

Action: Learns to foresee the future

Obstacle: That idiot from corporate

I’m not new to crime or noir writing, though it isn’t my niche, but somehow, this draft seemed to steer in that direction on its own. Joy became Jodie from the rock band and she still wants to save Mother, and while on stage she has a vision of her mother in trouble, not with that idiot from corporate, but with a snake from the mob. You can read the story HERE.

So Callan’s “Writer’s Toolbox” comes highly recommended. Sometimes writers need to jump-start creative thinking, and often the best way is to step outside yourself into something wacky or absurd. What happens when you use these prompts is the analytical left brain (which tells us “this is stupid”) recedes to allow the free-wheeling right brain to link what seems disparate in a cohesive story.

Estate Sale!

The house was being gutted; people were carting out upholstered couches, chairs, rugs, tea carts, mirrors, chandeliers, cabinets, Steiffel lamps, crystal and china… but the most fascinating stuff was in two bedroom closets packed with vintage peignoir sets by Christian Dior, Barbizon, and other designers– sheer, lacy, ribboned and beaded– and at least a dozen, quilted, dressing gowns (too elegant to call bathrobes), the kind you might have seen a young Liz Taylor floating around in, with size 8-1/2, pink satin, high-heeled slippers.

The owner also had fashionable dresses, wool suits, jackets and cashmere sweaters (and a woeful half rack of men’s clothing), but nothing was as titillating as the lingerie, and it looked like new. Every silky thing (no flannel here) that this obviously well-to-do lady owned was up for grabs, and the women who came did indeed grab. Rifling through her intimate things felt somehow obscene, especially when someone held up a pair of sheer mauve panties and said “Oh my! Look at this!”

But it didn’t stop me from shopping furiously. I felt a sense of urgency; I set a unopened package of nylons down for a moment, and someone else picked it right up. My daughter found two gorgeous nightgowns at $3 each and a Dior bed jacket for $4. I nabbed two, long, sleeveless nightgowns–one was a dusky-lavender sheer chiffon with embroidered flowers on the gathered bust. It’s so elegant I can’t see myself actually sleeping in it. I usually wear t-shirts and drawstring pajama pants.

I tried to imagine who the owner was and what had happened to her. Judging from the length of her size 4 clothes, she was tall as well as slender. Interestingly, the pool in the backyard looked as if it had been used this summer, and there was also a tennis court. So much of what she owned was from my mother’s era, so I pictured her in her eighties, maybe a lonely widow withering away in a nursing home, or deceased, with no family members who were interested in her things.

Curiosity drew us back to the house the following day, and, much to our delight, everything was half price, and the mood was more relaxed. Tucked in the back of a walk-in closet, I discovered a vintage 70’s, double breasted, Etienne Aigner trench coat… for 3 bucks! Très cool! I also took home sweaters, a few fabulous silk blouses, more gowns, a Persian-style Karastan wool rug and a lovely rocking chair. My daughter bought a curvy dovetail dresser from the 50’s, with a mirror and matching bed table- with new paint and drawer pulls, it’ll fit in with her shabby chic decor. Someone else was asking to buy it as the estate agent was marking it sold for us. People were oohing and ahhing as my husband loaded it in the truck.

I learned from Gary’s Household Sales that the owner had been a buyer for the high-end store, Jacobson’s, and she and her husband had just moved into a retirement home. I was glad it wasn’t a foreclosure or death that resulted in the sale, and no longer felt so guilty about pawing through her life. In fact, I appreciate this lady’s fine taste, and whoever and wherever she is, I thank her for giving me the opportunity, of all things, to sleep in something luxurious, something I’d never indulge in otherwise. Maybe I’ll dream I’m a movie star tonight.

And I’d like her to know I feel a new short story coming on. I wish I could thank her for the inspiration.

Daydreaming is not for Dummies

There is scientific proof that daydreaming is not a sign of laziness or irresponsibility or lack of seriousness. University of British Columbia neuroscientists discovered in testing that when a person drifts into a daydream, there is high activity in regions of the brain dedicated to high-level thought and complex problem-solving.

Previously, scientists believed that only the “default network” of the brain, which is linked to easy routine mental activity, was in use when the mind wanders. In other words, when you’re in slacker mode, not much activity is going on in your brain. Turns out that isn’t so. Studies have shown that the part of the brain called the “executive network,” which deals with complex, high level thought processes, lit up in the MRI scans. Interestingly, the less a subject was aware that he or she was daydreaming, the more that both “default” and “executive” networks were activated.

This shows that our brains are active when we daydream, even more so than when we perform mundane tasks.

Researcher Kalina Christoff tells LiveScience.com that people are wrong to assume that when the mind wanders away, it’s “turned off.” On average, people spend about one third of their awake time in reverie. During that time, we may not be paying attention to the meeting, class or conversation at hand, but the mind may be taking that time to address more important questions.

Of course, those of us who are writers know that. We’re always mulling over that new plot twist, or how to get our character in more trouble than he already is.

New Anthology from Cleis Press

FRENZY - super short stories

My story “Take Note Please” appears in the new anthology titled FRENZY, 60 Stories of Sudden Sex, published by by Cleis Press and edited by Alison Tyler. “There’s something for everyone in this charming, romantic and sexy collection of sizzling hot, short-short stories.”

“What happens when desire trumps restraint, and a seemingly innocent glance triggers a red-hot, clothes-in-a-heap quickie? Short in length but long on arousal, the stories in this collection take place anywhere, anytime the mood strikes.” -Editor Alison Tyler

Purchase through Amazon or Cleis Press

From East to West – Bicoastal Verse

The Summer 2008 Graffiti issue of From East to West- Bicoastal Verse has one poem and seven pages of my art. The gorgeous full-color issue can be viewed online at here or purchased as a print copy or downloaded in its entirety for free in a PDF file from Lulu.

From East to West

Featured poets:
Helm Filipowitsch & David Moreau

“Graffiti” poets:
James Lineberger, Jim Knowles, Pris Campbell, Jim Deuchars, Gil Helmick, Courtney Campbell, Linda Sienkiewicz, & Ray Sweatman

Artists & photographers:
Don Schaeffer, Linda Sienkiewicz, Jacob Robinson & more

Editor PJ Nights did the amazing layout and design of the entire issue. It’s a clever, thought-provoking concept.