Diane Thomas

Drawing the Line, the memoir by Santa Fe artist and poet Susan Gardner, has its formal book launch toward the end of this month at Collected Works, a top local independent bookstore. It is a book for that easy-to-reach shelf where it can be pulled down and visited time and again through the years. Each reading yields something new. It is, quite simply, the best self-examination of a life that I have read in a long time.

The book’s title is well chosen. In it, Gardner, an artist, poet and photographer living in Santa Fe, draws many lines.

Primary, of course, is the line of her life, which she lays out, in this age of dishy celebrity spews, with quiet dignity. Of equal importance are the lines that figure prominently in her art, which is deeply influenced by calligraphy and Japanese sumi-e painting.

Also to consider are the lines of her poetry. Gardner embeds a scattering of her poems throughout her memoir and echoes their spare, highly visual style in her prose. In this manner she creates yet more lines, both on the page and the implied lines she lays down for us to read between.

A product of her time, and of a philandering father and a volatile mother who hated children, she finds herself in the mid-1960s trapped in an abusive marriage in a foreign country with two small children, the painful memory of a third child dead of leukemia, and no means of supporting herself on her own.

She does not, however, dwell on her misfortunes. The domestic abuse, for example, comes through mostly in occasional references to bruises, in such phrases as “…our sexual tastes were not alike…,” and in the cold fact that she gave birth to a child with syphilis that she herself unknowingly had contracted from her husband.

Instead, Gardner turns her attention to the world around her. And a rich world it is. Her husband, whom she calls Edwin (names have been changed – Gardner has a great respect for privacy), was in the Foreign Service, which meant postings in Korea, Japan and Mexico City, plus other travels. Always, wherever they were, she was drawn to art and the artists who created it.

In Asia she not only learned Korean papermaking, calligraphy and sumi-e, but also tenets of Buddhism, including the concept of “pointing,” directing your focused attention to what is directly in front of you. This practice is evident in Drawing the Line, and among other things makes Gardner an astute travel guide, with a knack for the telling detail that reveals much more than might at first appear. Her description of the ritual at the Korean temple of Haein-sa, in which a Buddhist monk strikes the largest of the temple gongs at midnight is but one of countless such examples:

“At midnight, the largest gong, twenty feet tall and eight feet in diameter, is struck with a long, heavy log suspended with chains from a beam. The deep basso bell sends its vibration ahead of the sound itself. You can feel it on your skin before you hear it. The sound wave moves through the pine forest, unsettling the needles. They move a little and whisper as they brush against each other. Even the moonlight seems to tremble just a little.”

She is equally adept at subtly skewering cultural phenomena. The Foreign Service, for example, comes in for its deserved share of knocks. In the 1960s and beyond, wives were not allowed to take paying jobs. Instead, at night they entertained lavishly on 24-hour notice from their husbands, and during the day they mastered the intricacies of initialing and turning down the proper corners of their calling cards when paying required 15-minute visits to the senior wives. (The only way to sidestep this newbie ritual was to be pregnant. Gardner writes of meeting a Foreign Service wife with eight children – one for each new post.)

Through the years, she gradually gains confidence, in her art and her growing reputation as an artist, and in herself. When her two sons are nearly grown, she at last draws the line with Edwin and divorces him. Shortly thereafter, she meets the man she calls RD, a sculptor, architect and home remodeler, whom she marries six years later. Their life today she sees as rich in “[l]imerence, an overwhelming, intimate joy….”

Drawing the Line is a work to savor slowly, if you can – in places it’s a true page-turner. Gardner calls it, in a modestly placed subhead, “a passionate life,” and it is. It chronicles a remarkable passion for life, reflected in tranquility and imbued with the same vitality, restraint and dignity as a perfect line.

Gene Wright, a fellow writers' group member for more than a quarter-century [see previous blog on writers' groups], has written a wonderful novel that, unfortunately, doesn't "shop" well. This means it's thoughtful, accurate, evocative and absorbing without the shallow gimmicks, bells and whistles that most of today's agents, editors and publishers expect and wrongly think most readers want. Yes, I realize what I've implied -- that in the next several years the reading public will have been trained to want and expect no more than shallow fiction. You, dear blog reader, can do your part to buck this insidious trend by reading the following review and, on the strength of it, going to Amazon and downloading the "Moses Crossroads" e-book to your Kindle. It's a great read, you'll be glad you did. I hope you'll recommend it to your friends.

THE REVIEW
“Moses Crossroads” is, quite simply, a terrific work of literature. Author Gene Wright, a longtime resident of Alabama and the Southeast, takes on nothing less in his stunning debut novel than our moral obligations as members of society and as human beings – to ourselves, to our families and to our fellow man.

Set in the north Alabama hamlet of Moses Crossroads and beginning two decades after the Civil War, the novel examines much of the life of Charlie Carlton, son of Moses Carlton, who inherits the operation of his father’s farms and lands and general store. The South was populated by any number of the likes of Charlie Carlton in those days, solid men who built families and enterprises and had some influence in their communities. Few such men came to question the codes of behavior that prevailed in their day. Charlie does. His questing leads him through violence, tragedy and loss, but also to love, to moments of surpassing joy and to a new sense of himself and his responsibilities to those around him.

Wright’s feeling for the time and place of his story is dead on, however the book has nothing of the stuffy history lesson about it. Instead, it presents the complexities of the post-bellum South in profligate and entertaining brilliance. Much of the era is reflected through an extensive and engrossing cast of finely drawn supporting characters, including Eveline, Charlie’s wife and first love, whose intelligence and courage cannot be stifled by the trappings of her day; the black sharecropper Lucius Moon, whose talent and capabilities mask a sense of self that can be dangerous in his position; and the mysterious and menacing King Klux, a “Southern gentleman” whose twisted ideas of morality turn on hopes for a resurgence of the Klan.

The writing in “Moses Crossroads” combines elements of a true page-turner with echoes of Faulkner’s humor and lyricism and Hemingway’s clean, spare accuracy. Truly, it does. The last two chapters are nothing short of a literary triumph. Wright may not have written the Great American Novel his first time out, but in “Moses Crossroads” he has given us a strong contender for the Great American Southern Novel, for sure.

Full disclosure before we go any further: I REALLY LIKE critique groups for a number of reasons. 1)Their every-two-weeks-or-so meeting dates give me deadlines, which I had throughout my “writing for food” life and cannot now write without. 2)Getting multiple responses on my work gives me a good idea of what reads well, what doesn’t, and what may be subject to misinterpretation. 3)Group members have given me an untold number of comments and suggestions, both during development of THE YEAR THE MUSIC CHANGED and my current novel, which have taught me much and led me to new directions and tremendous improvements. And perhaps most importantly, 4)the critique groups I've been in have provided me with many good friends.

I’m in two groups now, one hosted by a library here in Santa Fe and the other a conference-call group that contains a couple of folks from my old group in Atlanta. My history with critique groups is long. My husband, Bill Osher, and I joined and then took over hosting a four-year-old group, then called the Midtown Writers Group, when its founder moved from Atlanta to New York. We hosted it for another twenty years before we moved to the mountains, and it’s still going strong with another host in a different location. I’m pretty sure it’s Atlanta’s oldest continuous critique group.

A critique group, AKA “writers group,” is where a bunch of folks who are writing get together and agree to read each other’s stuff, either out loud during the group or silently away from the group, and then comment on it. Some people, like me, thrive on them; others can be destroyed by them and shouldn’t join. Before you consider joining a critique group, you really need to have an idea which you are.

Some groups are better than others, too. If you’re thinking of joining one, my advice is to visit it once or twice before submitting your writing for critique, so you can see if you’ll feel comfortable with them. Do NOT, however, just keep coming, critiquing others’ work and never submitting any of your own. That’s being a lurker and is generally discouraged, particularly in groups that are operating at capacity.

Our group in Atlanta was known as a “really good” group. Meaning, we were all pretty good writers, pretty good critics, knew how to critique people without being either puffy or mean (yes, there are rules of psychology and etiquette), and knew how to “take” criticism without taking it personally. Most of the folks in our groups had written and/or edited professionally and thus been in situations where having their writing critiqued and critiquing others’ work was part of their job.

We also had a pretty good success rate during the years Bill and I hosted the group: Five of us had literary novels published (Thomas H. Cook, THE ORCHIDS; Marilyn Staats, LOOKING FOR ATLANTA; Joshilyn Jackson, GODS IN ALABAMA; Sarah Flannigan, SUDIE; Diane Thomas, THE YEAR THE MUSIC CHANGED) one had a mainstream romance published (Irene Jurczik, THE FRENCHMAN'S MISTRESS), one had several crime novels published (Fred Willard, DOWN ON PONCE and PRINCESS NAUGHTY AND THE VOODOO CADILLAC) and went on to become a screenwriter (which isn’t that easy in Atlanta), one had a general interest how-too book published (Bill Osher, THE BLUE-CHIP GRADUATE, A FOUR-YEAR COLLEGE PLAN FOR CAREER SUCCESS), several people had short stories published in literary magazines, one person (co-founder Linda Clopton) won a short story contest and got to read at a writers’ festival in Ireland, and one had a chapbook of her poems published (Ann Webster, A HISTORY OF NURSING). Three of us had agents, and one of us became one. The group's co-founder, Thomas H. Cook, continued to publish true crime and crime fiction and was nominated for the Edgar Award. And another of our number, Joshilyn Jackson, became a bona fide bestselling author. None of us self-published.

Why was our group good? I can think of several reasons:
1) Most of us had written professionally, at least at some point. (But not all of us. One of our best and most skilled writers was a contractor who had taken a night course in writing. Another was a plumber.) Some of us wrote regularly for local magazines or newspapers and had by-lines that were recognizable. Our first host was the book reviewer for ATLANTA magazine. All of this made finishing something and getting it published seem like it might be a doable thing.

2) We all pretty much knew how to critique and occasionally discussed how to do it: Start out mentioning what the writer did well, and there’s always something; then mention what you think needs improvement, don’t belabor it, offer suggestions if you wish, but make clear that’s all they are and what the writer does is up to him/her; and NEVER make fun of someone else’s work.

3) Bill was a psychologist used to facilitating groups, so our group moved along without too much extraneous conversation – although we did spend 20 or 30 minutes at the outset of each meeting catching up with one another.

4) This one is somewhat controversial and in some circumstances (groups sponsored by libraries or other public institutions) may be impossible to enforce: We didn’t let just anybody in. We made sure the people we admitted were producing writing on or very near the level of the group. To get into our Atlanta group, prospective members had to be invited by a member. Then they had to come once and observe, come a second time and participate in critique, and then if they made it that far they had to submit writing for our members to “pass” on and wait to be called and invited to fully participate, as sometimes the group was full. It was aDraconian system, and occasionally someone got hurt -- but it worked. We held the welfare of the group above the feelings of the individual who was applying. Any time we strayed from that, and there were a couple of instances, the group as a whole suffered for it.

If you decide you want to develop your work in a critique group, you should first try to find one where people are working at or just a bit above your present writing skill level. Then, the attitude you bring to it is very important. People afflicted with what one writer calls the “my precious words” syndrome tend to dismiss what others say about their work, never take advice or make changes, and don’t generally grow or fare well. People who are too fragile in their confidence in their work sometimes don’t fare well either. They tend to dither and rewrite to try to please everyone and eventually give up.

People who join too early in their work sometimes also have a problem, in that they’re not fully committed to that particular work or to writing in general as a regular habit. They sometimes end up reading mostly false starts to works that never get off the ground. However, using the group as a sounding board as to a work’s feasibility at the outset is not a bad idea. One should just, after one or two starts, choose to follow through on something – even if it’s only a short, short story or a piece of flash fiction.

I have a personal rule that I don’t start reading a novel in a group until I’ve written the first 70 pages. There’s a phenomenon known as the “70-page syndrome,” at which point many writers seem to lose interest in that particular work. I’m not sure why; maybe it’s the point of the first plot turn, when a whole set of different skills is called into use.

If you want to start a critique group, I think it’s a fine and wonderful thing to do. I’ve tried to mention things in this post that can guide you. I’ve known of groups that started after the end of writing classes or when two or three friends who wrote decided to get together and go over their stuff. Our Atlanta group started when two folks who lived in the same intown neighborhood ran into each other at a writers’ conference on the Georgia coast.

In my opinion, it takes at least three people to make a critique group and you probably need at least four because everyone isn’t going to be able to come every time. I think discussing more than five people’s writing in a session is too much to cover, so you may want to limit your membership to six or seven people. Some groups handle this by keeping their membership open and having some people present their work at the next meeting. Some groups have rules against lurkers, other groups allow them if they’re good critics. Telephone groups generally need to be smaller than in-person groups. Ours has varied from three to five people.

And a final note: I know lots of groups whose members bring edible goodies and some that serve wine, and this, too, can be a fine thing. However, an early dictum of co-founder and first host of our Atlanta group, Thomas H. Cook, was that we were there for the work and weren’t going to get “hung up on food” (having “goodie breaks” does take time). So nobody ever brought anything unless it was a sandwich for their own dinner, and the only drink anyone ever served was water. This aescetism somehow became a point of honor, even pride.

If you decide to join or start a group, I wish you great success. And please let me know what happens.

Meanwhile, Outsider Writer loves comments. You are encouraged to leave one and share the love.

Back in the good old days, I learned to write the old fashioned way: I wrote for food.

Which is to say that, sometime during my senior year of college, after perhaps too close a reading of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, I determined that what I most wanted was to be a dilettante. So I became a reporter, the best way I could see to be a dilettante for pay.

This was well before extended habitation with one’s parents became either socially viable or economically necessary. Back when women were expected to become June brides immediately after their high school or college graduations and men (and nascent spinsters who had flunked the altar timetable) were expected to get jobs and MOVE OUT. Failure to leave the nest invited speculation about one’s moral compass, sexual identity, or worse.

So I switched my major from English to Journalism, talked the parents into another six months of room and board, graduated, got a job as a reporter for what was then The Atlanta Constitution and is now the “C” in “the AJC” – I said these were the good old days – and moved into a cozy (miniscule) garage apartment (grotty) in what was then an acceptably seedy part of Atlanta (pre-gentrification Ansley Park – no, this is not a fairy tale).

My first day at work, I watched the paper’s lead investigative reporter stride into the city room at 5:30 p.m., plop down at his desk and pound out a six-page story in time for the six p.m. deadline. “How’d you do that?” I asked him, dazed, when he looked up. “Kid,” he answered, “you just sit down and type.” So, okay, I had a goal.

Reporting taught me a number of writerly skills I’m not sure one always learns at Iowa: How to walk into a situation and know where to look and what to look for – and how to start thinking, even then, about what words might describe what I saw; what questions to ask, of other people and myself; how to winnow down to the best words and images that told the story, and, one hoped, also entertained (best example that comes immediately to mind: the blond wig tacked up on the lost-and-found board at our city’s back then first day spa). In these pre-teeny-tiny-tape-recorder days, reporters carried steno notebooks and wrote in them what people said, which also gave me a good ear for how real people really talked.

Before long I was thinking/typing almost as fast as the investigative reporter. And a good thing, too – less than a year after getting hired as a reporter I was tapped to replace the paper’s entertainment editor, which meant I reviewed all the plays and movies (“film” was a pretentious word we didn’t use) that opened in our town and lunched with all the stars and starlets sent out to promote them. This was high cotton and I loved every moment. Not to mention that watching all those plays and movies (as many as 250 in a year) gave me a sense of plot and a natural feel for story arc, of which at that time I was totally unaware. And for theatrical openings, I learned how to take notes in the dark, start writing my review in my seat midway through the third act and phone it in by 10:45 to meet the paper’s 11 p.m. final-home-edition deadline. Eat that, investigative dweeb.

Somewhere in there, I spent two academic years getting an FMA from Columbia University in “Theatre and Film History and Criticism.” It was the beginning of good theatre in the hinterlands and I wanted my reviews to be accepted as useful and serious critiques. I returned to the paper from my leave of absence with a great grounding in theatre and film history (much of which, alas, I’ve since forgotten), as well as a stodgy academic writing style it took me six months to unlearn.

Grad school also gave me the urge to write longer, more thoughtful pieces, so I moved on to become a feature writer at Atlanta magazine, where I learned how to write articles beyond pure reportage, my first experience with points of view. After four years of magazine writing, I quit to freelance – and to “gentrify” (used here, truly a euphemism) my own small home in another then-seedy Atlanta neighborhood, Inman Park. I did a lot of advertising and pr writing during that time. It taught me the enjoyable and invaluable skill of manipulating people’s emotions, which I soon learned was highly regarded and which I regard highly still – it is the core attribute that hooks readers into plot.

During the final few years of my freelance career, I turned to designing and developing training manuals. My pride and joy was a 240-page manual for a national janitorial service that included a 40-page section on how to clean a toilet. (I swear I’m not making this stuff up.) From writing training manuals, I learned how to write VERY simply, when needed (“To turn on the machine, press the green ON button”). I also learned how to organize huge gobs of material into some sequence someone else could understand – which is actually as valuable in writing books as is manipulating readers’ emotions. I also learned I was capable of producing manuals of 200 or more pages, manuals the size of real books. And I learned the great secret about how to do that: “Just sit down and type.”

Only when my write-for-food career was finally over and I sat down to write my second novel, THE EYAR THE MUSIC CHANGED, did I realize how much I had learned from all this writing experience seemingly so totally unrelated to fiction writing. I wish I had known then. I think I might have paid a much closer, better attention to the “craft” aspects of what I was doing. Or maybe not. Who knows?

Next time, I’ll blog about the writers groups I’ve belonged to and what I learned there about how to write. Meanwhile . . .

Thanks for reading. And, as always, Outsider Writer loves comments. Share the love.

Dear reader, if you’ve been here before, you’ll notice the change in the blog title. Please ignore previous whiny blogs. This space has for some time been “finding its voice.” I awoke with a start last night from a break in my insomnia and realized the job was done. I know what I am:

I’m an “outsider writer.”

I owe the concept to north Georgia outsider artist Billy Roper, whom I interviewed a couple years ago for a column in a local paper.

I mentioned to Roper, in the course of the interview, that though my debut novel, THE YEAR THE MUSIC CHANGED, had been published by a small and well-regarded international literary press, I was having difficulty gaining acceptance as a literary writer (a) because I did not have a creative writing MFA and (b) because one of the book’s two major characters was Elvis Presley.

“Why, you’re on the outside just like me,” he said with a grin. “Only you’re an outsider WRITER.”

Outsider artists are generally defined as successful artists who have had no formal training. They often work with the naïve styles and subjects that we call “folk art” (like portraits of Elvis). Equally often, such self-taught artists can be visually sophisticated. Roper, for example, had just completed a stint as artist in residence at North Georgia College and State University.

Following these criteria, I am indeed and outsider writer. Although I majored in English as an undergraduate, I took no writing classes. Although I have an MFA, it’s in “Theatre and Film History and Criticism,” not creative writing. And although I have taken several courses in the creative writing MFA program at Georgia State University (including a novel-writing workshop led by Pam Durban and a poetry workshop led by David Bottoms, both highly regarded in their fields), I do not have a “creative writing” MFA.

No, sweet babies, I am a woman of a certain age and I learned to write the old-fashioned way:

By writing.

I have been self-supporting virtually all my adult life and, with the college exception of two Easter-season weekends selling dresses in a local department store, the only things anyone has ever paid me to do are write and edit. (More about that in future – I have a long list of potential blog posts.)

Nonetheless –

My first inkling there was some disconnect between my chosen late-life-career-change field of literary novelist and my well-received accomplishment (starred review in Library Journal, “the most satisfying novel I’ve read in many years” from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reviewer) came when the wife of a highly regarded academician in the small Florida community where I lived part time, came up to me at a gathering and said, with great enthusiasm, “I hear you’ve written a novel.”

I said yes, I had, and she said, “That’s lovely. Where do you teach?” (I was such an innocent all I could think was “Quel nonsequitur!”) I said I didn’t teach. She said, “Oh,” and turned and walked away.

Leaving me with an inexplicable chill, as if someone had stomped on my grave.

And with Hard Lesson #1: To be accepted as a literary writer, it’s become de rigueur that you flash a creative writing MFA.

Can anybody say “union card”? “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval”?

Some of my best friends are Creative Writing MFAs (until now anyway), but I’m not sure the present climate is an unmitigatedly good thing. (More about that later, too, you betcha.)

Well, dears, that’s about all the blog-spew I can muster today, making this post a tease. But there’s a reason: By my outline, I’ve got eight chapters and an epilogue to go on my current writing opus, IN THE CLEARING, or between 20 and 25 percent, and I’m most eager to close that gap and transition to the redrafting process. Which I infinitely prefer to that scary first draft, where you’ve got to keep plunging your hand down in the dark, cold, well of your mind, try to grab hold of whatever weird, slippery life form you find there, pull it up and stare at it and pray it doesn’t bite you.

BTW, if you Google “outsider writer,” you’ll get to something called the “Outsider Writers Collective.” They publish a magazine and define themselves as persons “who willingly participate in writing communities outside what would be considered mainstream. The independent and micro presses, the bloggers and the scribblers united by the source of their motivations: passion.” They sound like good folks, and I wish them well – although my definition of “outsider writer” differs significantly from theirs.

See you next time. And meanwhile please remember –

Outsider Writer loves attention. Post a comment and share the love.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m old. I’m pushing sixty-nine. If that’s a problem, then you’d best move on to someone younger's blog. (In case you’re wondering, my husband took my jacket photo for THE YEAR THE MUSIC CHANGED five years ago. He asked how I wanted to look and I said, “Half my age.” It took two rolls of film, but he did a bang-up job.)

Right now old age is not an issue for me. I’ve successfully managed to delete that memo without opening it.

Mostly.

My dirty little secret is I’ve not kept up with technology -- and there's the generation gap, not wrinkles or outdated phrases. And now it’s thrown me to the mat and grabbed me in a hammer lock. Or some such.

What happened is, my dear publisher, The Toby Press, shut down its literary fiction imprint late last fall and owner Matthew Miller struck a deal with Amazon Encore to keep our books in print on Kindle and in paperback.

Signing was voluntary. Did I want to? Or did I want to keep my rights and use them in marketing my next book, which is about three-quarters through? Would signing with Amazon, even though I’d been traditionally published, throw my book in with an avalanche of self-published fiction? And did I still need to be such a prissy snob on that score?

I decided I would ask around.

My askable acquaintances, those who wrote or knew something about the fast-changing publishing industry, ranged in age from 29 to pushing 80. As might be expected, the younger ones said, “Go for it,” the oldsters said “Hold on to what you’ve got.” The younger ones made the most impassioned arguments, however. “What’ll you have if you don’t sign the contract?” one earlythirtysomething business person argued. “You’ll have zilch – which is exactly what you’ve got right now.”

Good point. It gives Amazon Encore a year to publish MUSIC in Kindle and in paperback. Their acquisitions person handed me off to their production person, giving me his email and saying something should happen in the spring. I laid low and partied through the holidays. Then I emailed the production person, who sent back a gracious email saying stuff should start happening in a week or so. Sooner than I expected by at least a couple months. So much for my technological learning curve.

Because, and here's the old-person part, whenever MUSIC gets on Kindle, it will join several hundred thousand other books. MUSIC is a good book. Other and better literary judges than I have said so. It grabs you from the first sentence and doesn’t let go 'til the last line.

Great. But how to you get potential readers to that gripping first sentence? People in their teens, twenties, thirties, even forties have pretty good to excellent knowledge about how to do this. People in their late sixties? Well, not so much.

Case in point: I just finished reading an interview with Johnny Depp in Vanity Fair where Patti Smith asked him why his film The Libertine didn’t fair better at the box office. Depp said he had wanted to hire London graffiti artist Banksy to clandestinely emblazon buildings, bridges, etc., with stencil portraits of Depp's character and his signature line from the film: “You won’t like me.” Studio execs response to his suggestion? “Banksy who?”

Well, I can identify with them. I only heard of Banksy last week in the film "Exit Through the Gift Shop." I’ve got a Facebook page I don't know how to use. Don't even know how long it’s been since my last blog post. August? OMG. How disgusting is that?! I bought a book called Facebook Marketing for Dummies, but I haven’t read it. I keep thinking I’ll take a month off, or even one day every week, and learn this stuff. But it hasn't happened yet.

Thing is, I’m not only on the mat, the referee is holding my feet over a bucket of burning coals. I’ll do it all, I promise. Even finish my current novel. I’ll blog once a week,make a schedule, keep my Dayrunner up to date, delegate my housework ((?) To whom?), organize my errands, straighten up my office, set regular writing hours, get up an hour earlier. Well, maybe not that last one.

You can help. I’ve never downloaded music from the Internet, don’t own and Ipod, don't use my cell phone for anything but to make and return calls, and who knew Palm Pilots were obsolete, whateve they are? I'm a sinkhole of technological ignorance. If you have any thoughts how I can jump start myself up to technological speed sufficient to give my debut novel one more chance, please leave a comment and I’ll be your friend for life.

Meanwhile, I’ll blog again this time next week, or thereabouts. See ya soon.

Okay, time to quit whining about where I am not. Time to look at this place thing through a different lens, time to look at what I know about where I am.

I have just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's THE CROSSING, which is doubtless what set me on this line of thinking. McCarthy spent his formative years in the South, presumable immersed in Southern culture. His first writings are set there. Then he moved out here to the Santa Fe area. And straight off the bat, he began writing about this place as if he'd lived here all his life, as if he were FROM here, and ditto for all his antecedents back a hundred years or more. How did he do it? What did he need to know and how did he know he needed to know that? He knows Spanish. He knows Mexico, New Mexico and the borderlands between them in ways far deeper than academic. He OWNS them. If I reread the book and mark passages that show this, what will I learn?

I have lived here almost a year and a half now in the desert just south of Santa Fe. I have resisted every moment of it, letting memories of home play through my mind like a constant slide show, encouraging this so I won't forget anything about it. What will happen now if, just for a moment, I look at the flip side of this: What do I know now about New Mexico and Santa Fe?

1. I love how the night air is so much colder even in summer.

2. I mostly hate the wind but respect how it brings the cool air off the mountains.

3. I love hearing the coyotes and will stand at the window every time. They don't sound at all like I expected and nothing like the dog-like sounds we gave them in my childhood. They actually sound more like French police cars, children playing at being ghosts, cars breaking, and car alarms. And they sound that way all at once. I can't take them seriously. If I were alone in the desert they might scare me. But since I'm in my house they make me laugh.

4. I often feel the Hispanic and Mexican people here look at the rest of us the way Black people do back home, like someone who can never be expected to understand them and are therefore not worth spending much time on.

5. I think I can tell an aspen from a cottonwood and know I can recognize locust trees by their almond-shaped leaves. I can point to Russian olive trees and Russian sage and know they are invasive and should not be planted here, although they are pretty. I can tell a pinon from a ponderosa from a Douglas fir from a blue spruce, but most of that I knew already. I can point out chamisa when it blooms, asters, snakeweed, tumbleweed, goat burs. And juniper. Oh, yes, juniper.

6. I've heard that if you drink juniper-berry tea in winter the juniper pollen won't bother you in spring.

7. I know the sound that ravens make and can recognize a canyon towhee by sight. I know from hearing them that the calls of New Mexican white-wing doves are not quite like the calls of the white-wing doves I heard in Florida.

8. I know water won't penetrate caliche, but I'm not sure how "caliche" is spelled.

9. I can point out examples of Spanish Colonial architecture and tell the real adobe from the fake.

10. I finally have some sense of when it might actually rain. And I know what rain in the distance looks like -- it drifts out of a dark-bottomed cloud like ribbons or a curtain and sometimes evapaorates before it hits the ground.

11. I know that when snow melts there's mud and that the mud is very slippery.

12. I know who Kit Carson was and that he lived in Taos, but I don't know who most of Santa Fe's streets are named for.

13. I don't know anything about the history of Mexico, but I do know this should be addressed.

14. I think I can correctly identify all the mountain ranges I can see from where we live. They are the Sangre de Cristos, the Jemez, the Ortiz, the Sandias, the Manzanos (or some such) and something called "The Wave." There's also Tetilla Peak, which means "little tit." I wanted very much to know all this about the mountains from the outset and asked everyone I knew and looked on every map I found, but it's still taken me this long to find out. I asked one woman why this is so and she said, "You have to remember, everyone here came here from somewhere else." I didn't think that was sufficient explanation. I came here from someplace else, too.

15. I know what the Milky Way looks like. I wasn't ever too sure before.

What I know about this place looks like a great lot all lined up like this, but it's not nearly enough. Not enough to understand it, nor to render it any way but superficially on a page. My present novel and my next were both conceived in the Georgia mountains and are set there and cannot be moved, because of the role elements of geography play in the story. Perhaps before I start the second book I will try setting a short story out here where I live now. It will be interesting to see what happens.

It's like a country song -- you never love what you've got like you do when you've lost it. Or, more accurately and less country, you never know what you've got 'til i'ts gone.

I've mostly lived all my life in one place. Except for two years in New York, which I thought I'd love more than I did. Living up there, though, I realized that back home (aka north Georgia) I could tell the approximate temperature most any time simply by looking out the window. No matter that my room might be heated or air-conditioned, I could tell. I don't know how I could do this. It seemed to have something to do with the look of the air, the formations of the clouds, or maybe simply having lived through a number of seasons in one place.

In New York I always dressed too warmly or not warmly enough. Out here, it's the same. There's often as much as 30 degrees difference between low and high temps out here. But the most frustrating thig is the clouds. Back home they were just your normal clouds: white fluffy, big honking thunderclouds with anvil tops, occasional horse tails or mackeral scales. Out here the clouds have wild imaginations. They churn up like hailstorms or dip down like tornadoes. They dispense rain in ribbons. They start as small puffs with an innocent dark underside and then fan out across half the sky. Thunder rolls in the distance. At night lightning flashes like battle fire. You're sure it's going to rain buckets and hail basketballs or snow you in for a week and a half. Then most of the time, after rattling its sabers, the whole thing just packs up its kit bag of tricks and slinks away. Ha-ha, fooled you, or some such.

Plays havoc with outdoor activities. I try to sneak in my power walks between cloud shows. Strange. Back home, if you saw a raincloud on the horizon, it was by gosh gonna rain. In the mountains you could feel it coming, crossing one ridge, then the next, heading for you. Here, not so much. We don't have ridges.

Here, too, a little breeze can pressage winds that nearly knock you over. It can do this under perfectly clear skies. Back home, a wind like that meant somebody somewhere very near you was about to have a tornado. Wind there was some serious business. Here folks mostly shrug it off.

Even though out here, I gather, wind hijacks spring. Almost as many people out here travel in spring as travel in summer, to get away from the wind. We have the "windy season," approximately from something like mid-February or mid-March through mid-May. Then we get a little lull before the "monsoon season," supposedly mid-July through August. This year, though, the monsoon season camped on our doorstep the last week in June. I realized I'd forgotten what damp sheets and towels felt like. Or mosquitoes. Now I remember. And I know there are at least two things I am glad to leave behind.

See you next time.

Hi, y'all. Please kindly ignore my first blog. It didn't come to much. The reason is it took a lot longer to get my Web site up than I thought it would. But it's finally done. (Yay.) So. As of today I am officially a blogger.

I called the blog "Writing Place" because it might mean I'm writing about the concept of place -- or maybe not. I like that. Sort of open-ended. But I do think I'll end up writing about place a lot, in one way or another. Partly because I'm homesick, and partly because I never thought much about place until I had to leave mine.

The poet and writer Wendell Berry wrote in his poem "How to Write a Poem" that "There are no unsacred places, only sacred places and desecrated places." I like that a lot. It introduces the possibility that the totality of all places can ultimately be rendered sacred, that the places we have desecrated are never, necessarily, totally lost.

Where I live now, in a large suburban community eight miles south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is not now, I think, a sacred place. I do think perhaps it once was, but I know it is not sacred now at all to me. It's sort of a desert, full of juniper bushes, various kinds of scrubby grass, and dust. And also "Santa Fake Adobe" houses, roads, even a couple of commercial centers. I can't see beyond all this into what once must have been this land's sacredness. Mostly, though, it's not sacred to me because I don't know anythng about it. I've only lived here little more than a year. Most of the plants out here are mysteries and I can't begin to tell whether it's going to actually rain from looking at the clouds, even when it thunders.

In contrast, before I moved here I had lived near or in the North Georgia mountains since I was four years old. Living in them was my goal since I first laid eyes on the Appalachians when I was three years old. I finally got to live in them in 2002, but for various reasons could only live there half the year. Nonetheless, I knew them. I had made bouquets of their plants since I was a child growing up in nearby Atlanta, traced leaves from their trees in grammar school notebooks, read their weather reports in the Atlanta newspapers. My husband asked me once to name the city I'd like most to live in in the entire world. Without pausing to inhale, I answered "Asheville."

I didn't make it all the way to Asheville, but I did make it to the tag end of the Georgia Appalachians, to a community near a little town called Jasper. Then after seven years of living there I did the unthinkable: I chose to leave.

As I must leave today, because I'm trying to write a novel and promised myself I won't spend more than 30 minutes on this blog-indulgence business at one time. But I'll be back again and take up where I left off.

Meanwhile, as we say back home, "Take good care."

Diane

This is my first blog. I'm a writer who's lived all my life in the southern Appalachian mountains and recently moved to Santa Fe.

This has made me conscious of the importance of place and the meaning of a "sense of place," about which I will write more very soon.