Revision Detours

The beginning

Directions were meant to be changed.

   One definition of a detour, from the OED on line:  A turning or deviation from the direct road; a roundabout or circuitous way, course, or proceeding. That's certainly the kind of trip described in Detours. 

"Detour" can also describe the revision process. Revision often means reaching the intended destination by an unexpected route. It means keeping the end in sight while allowing for change, serendipity, or that harsh-sounding alternative, deviation. As if there were a clearly marked path that must be followed without fail; deviation brings punishment (shades of Little Red Riding Hood). 

Go back!

Try again.

   Revision might be avoidance: skip the pothole, the puddle, the flagger ahead, the expected delay--a roundabout evasion that can be a time-saver, or just the opposite. 

Diverge, converge, diverge

   But destination is another of those fungible categories. To a point. Rewriting, reworking a piece can be a means to a different end. It can be a long and complicated route back to the beginning, trying to say what I thought I knew I was saying all along, or a circuitous route that leads somewhere else--a longcut, not a shortcut, to a place I didn't initially understand I needed to go. 

Are we there yet?

Go left. No, right. Go another way.

     As I've been collecting detour signs, I've noticed the designers of those alternate routes are revising as well. Maybe not quite making it up as they go along, but reconsidering, reusing. Stockpiling against future need. There are models everywhere of ways to write, ways to think. As the traffic engineers responsibly recycle last project's sign, I might joyfully find a place in this poem for the glowing line that wouldn't fit in the last. 

Summer possibilities

Past or future route?

Here, again, is one of my favorite detour signs, an evident work in progress: 

"Path" may have been "route"? Ahead or behind? This way or that?

Detours can be ordered from Burnside Review Press. 

Detours (and Signs)

Some signs are more directive than others

Ordinarily, I grumble as much as the next person at the prospect of road work and its concomitant delays. But not lately: in preparation for the release of my chapbook, Detours, by Burnside Review Press, I've been collecting detour signs. Pictures of signs--I haven't stolen any yet. I pick out those orange signs in the distance and think not, oh, dread but oh, goody. My family laughs at me, but they help me look; strangers ask questions and I tell them, "Working on a little art project," that little meant to keep my activities just within the bounds of normal. I've gathered quite a collection, and snapped more than a few blurry smears out of moving vehicles.

Detours began as a detour from what I was supposed to be writing: my dissertation. More than a temporary variant on a routine route, it was a return of sorts--I started out writing poems and stories, not literary criticism. It's a side route I've maintained, sometimes in parallel, sometimes intersecting, as I've continued to write scholarly prose (I did finish that dissertation).

One way--only?

I think of Detours as a kind of journey. Fragmented, interrupted, but circling back on itself from time to time, the fragments interconnected. I'm interested in collecting, in splashed images and unexpected lights, in words that sound different in different places, and places that look different in different words. Roads taken and not taken, by chance or by design. 

Detours can be ordered from Burnside Review Press.

Rain or shine

So, what is a chapbook?

My brother just asked. And before I fired off something snappy, I checked the hefty  Random House Dictionary of the English Language that I keep on the dictionary stand in my study. According to which, a chapbook is:

1. a small book or pamphlet of popular tales, ballads, etc., formerly hawked about by chapmen. 2. a small book or pamphlet, often of poetry.

A chapman, if you're wondering, is a  peddler.

Not too long ago (okay, probably longer than I think--I'm always losing track of this kind of thing) Poets and Writers ran a feature or two on DIY chapbooks of varying sorts. I was tempted, and I kept the magazine issues on the bottom shelf of that dictionary stand, but I haven't made one yet.

I might, though. In grade school, we had a Young Authors Fair when we all made books. Each kid wrote her stories or poems, illustrated as necessary, and then we made the covers, sewing the pages together (probably stapling, sometimes) and folding fabric or red-flocked wallpaper out of one of those heavy sample books over the cardboard. It was the best. I loved the whole event. All our books would be laid out on tables in the gym, and our parents would file through to ooh and aah. It felt totally real--we had made real books.

I kept making books long after grade school, though I haven't done much for a while. Still, I've been thinking about a bookbinding class. Just as art supplies lure me with their ranked rainbows in open boxes--just take one new colored pencil, or maybe two; just like candy--the bookbinding supplies on the next shelf sing out, You, too, could do this. Use your words this way.

I never developed much patience or skill with fabric crafts or wood. I couldn't build a dictionary stand like the one my grandfather made. But I do like paper. I like the juxtaposition of the handcrafted and the high-tech. Even as I type this on my snazzy laptop, I'm thinking about the gorgeous paper scraps I've been hoarding all these years, waiting for a project. Perhaps we can have both, at least for a while--the e-book and the pamphlet of handmade paper sewn with spider silk.

There won't be spider silk, but my chapbook, Detours, I'm happy to say, will soon be available from Burnside Review. More on that to follow--detour ahead!

Microclimates

Running in an unfamiliar neighborhood, I passed a house, back up against the park, with a banana and two palm trees in the yard. Three blocks later, two more palm trees. It was raining hard, but not cold--around 60 degrees, gray sky offsetting the heavy June greens. For a moment, I was somewhere tropical, on a beach, maybe, or just before a real storm. A couple more blocks and yet another palm had pride of place in a full-on Victorian Eden poised to lure susceptible travelers into a B&B. It was a small palm beside a huge house, three or four stories, gables and gingerbread and tastefully bright purples and blues, easily twice the size of any house nearby, defining its own private world on a street of modest homes--a world with a lily pond and a cast bronze heron and that out of place palm tree next to the dogwood (still in bloom).

Either I'd found a little-known local torrid zone, or palms don't grow only where I think they grow. Or gardeners are out at night with felt blankets and smudge pots and buckets of horticultural love. Making their own weather within the invisible borders of those garden rooms.

There were Frisbee golfers in the park that afternoon as well. I felt a little foolish out there, ready to explain to inquisitive passersby that I needed to run and this was when I had time to do it; oddly enough, no one asked. Not because they were all safe inside. I crossed paths with people hauling groceries in flimsy plastic bags and man on a tippy bicycle loaded down with returnable bottles and cans. I didn't ask them, either--they needed food/cash and this was when they could get it. They had the course all to themselves. 

Sometimes you just need to get out of the house. Sometimes it's all in what you notice. It wasn't an unusually rainy afternoon, not for this climate. The palms weren't the towering coconut palms of fantasy white sand beaches, but they weren't planted last week. But so what if they were there all along, if only I'd bothered to look? It's the looking a different way this time--whatever the reason--that can redefine a landscape.

It's raining again today. I'm inside, looking out, revising and reordering and plodding through mental weather. No soggy socks, no silent explanations to strangers on the street. My garden has no palm trees. Dogwood, rhododendron, vine maple, cedar, an aging Ponderosa pine. Weeds. But maybe it's warmer than it looks from here.

Anniversary Toast

On Friday, my husband and I will have been married 21 years. Last year, impatient (why wait for 25?) and feeling more than a little pleased with ourselves for having so well enjoyed our first two decades together, we threw a big party. This year, we'll probably take the kids to the coast. But I've already received a gift. My wonderful aunt, who saves things, sent me an early draft of my grandfather's wedding toast to us.

My grandfather was a great spinner of yarns and an enthusiastic, if idiosyncratic, typist. I've long had a prettied-up copy of his toast, on good quality paper and with all the spelling straightened. Now, though, I've come into possession of the writer's manuscript. I feel like an archivist, a keeper of jewels. Misspellings, uneven ink (this was a manual typewriter), a few handwritten corrections in blue ballpoint pen. The paper's thin, long folded, a little torn. Soft around the edges with age. Rereading it, I hear my grandfather's voice in my head, see him standing at the reception, a little stooped. I imagine him at his desk. Was he a two-finger typist? I don't know.

We were married on my grandparents' 56^th wedding anniversary. Graciously sharing "their" day, they also shared advice. When they were married in 1935, my grandfather was county agent in Bear Lake County, Idaho. His hard-won advice: Don't post a dead calf or expect a gooseberry pie on your honeymoon. The source of this wisdom? His ill-considered decision to perform a postmortem on some farmer's calf on the way to a dance, thinking he could do his work and keep on driving. Except the work meant packaging up the calf's organs and shipping them off, and the groom and his car were far too smelly for his bride to want to go dancing once that was all done. The pie-promised gooseberries in turn went up in smoke when my grandmother, unused to cooking on an electric range, turned the burner on high before accidentally locking herself out of the apartment.

We have followed Grandpa's advice to the letter. It has worked like a charm. 

Spring recitals, then and now

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When I took piano lessons as a kid, recitals were a big deal. Memorized piece, new dress, public auditorium or church endowed with a good piano. The city arts center where my first teacher held her recitals contrasted with the dark and smelly living room where she gave lessons. My highly-organized second teacher's home was immaculate; she held her recitals at a Methodist church. I remember planning the dresses (my mother often sewed them for me), being coached on how to bow and how to sit, the nervous stomach knots. The recital itself usually went well, though my last was a disaster. Even though I loved my music, even though I'd practiced conscientiously. The day it counted, it was one miserable mistake after another.

But I don't think that's why I stopped taking lessons. It might have been senior year, a natural end point. Maybe I just wanted to do something else. That final recital was planned as my little swan song from the get go. And while I remember messing up, and I remember the dread and the nerves before every performance, I don't remember recitals in general as an awful thing. It was fun to perform, to struggle and work and then to do something well. It was part of the deal. I don't think it occurred to me (or to my parents) that recital-free music lessons might be an option.

A couple of years ago, I started taking guitar lessons from the woman who teaches my daughter recorder. I'd been thinking about guitar lessons for years, but I had been waiting to accomplish a sufficient (if undefined) portion of my long-range to-do list, to have "enough time" to devote to a new activity. Then I decided I probably had as much time as I was ever going to have. And I was (still am) spending a good bit of that time getting my kids to and from recorder lessons, drum lessons, theater camp, choir practice, martial arts eastern and western. Why not develop a little of the latent potential my parents had spent so much time and money fostering during their own schlep shifts?

Besides, I already had the guitar. I've had it since we lived in Ecuador when I was twelve. I wanted to play like my dad. Far out at the end of the bus line, in a suburb of the city closest to our little town, my parents found a craftsman who made guitars. I remember going to watch him work on it; I probably remember the smell of sawdust in his workshop. But then I never learned to play. A few self-teaching attempts, a lot of good intentions, but we returned to the U.S. and I returned to piano. And then I went to college and graduate school and work and stopped taking music lessons at all. The guitar moved around with me but rarely left its case. Until I decided I'd put it off long enough.

It's useful, as a teacher, to be a beginner again, on the receiving end of instruction.  And in learning what I don't yet know, I see, too, what I do know--sometimes more a hindrance than a help. It's been years since I've thought about piano fingering. Even in my heyday, I was pretty cavalier about the fingering suggested in the book. But the numbers corresponding to each finger seem to have been permanently recorded in some no-longer-plastic part of my brain. It takes a conscious effort, nearly every time, to think of my pinky as 4, not 5. So it's good for my brain and helpful at work but mainly, it's been fun. I've enjoyed taking lessons, the encouragement and praise, the new shiny thing of a new piece to work on. I've enjoyed the practicing, getting just a bit better, and then better again (very slowly).

Where I live now, things tend to be very low key. It's the rare occasion that warrants a new dress. My son's drum recitals seem to spring up at the last moment. My own recitals tend to be readings, not recitations--script in hand, though I do practice in advance.

The teacher my daughter and I share doesn't even hold recitals. She calls them "get-togethers" out of deference to those students still traumatized by past recital nightmares. We don't have to memorize our pieces, we do a bunch of songs together, sing-along style--recorder, banjo, guitar, mandolin--and we get chocolate if we do well and also for any mistakes, a kind of grade yourself approach to just desserts. Weather permitting, she holds the get-together in her yard (bring a chair or a blanket and a snack to share).

This year, finally, the weather cooperated. I made plenty of mistakes, but I hit a lot of the notes. It was a lovely evening.

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