“The View from Here” at Literary Mama!

Hello, dear Hatchery readers!

My short piece on the ups and downs of being a writing parent, “The View from Here,” is up on Literary Mamma’s “After Page One” series … and you can read it here!

In other news,

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Sehnsuchtsstudio

A friend of mine posted a picture from VCCA and it made me long to be back there.  VCCA stands for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  It’s an artists colony in the middle of Virginia at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains and is one of the more magical places I have ever been to.

The evening light across the fields at VCCA.

The first time I went was about this time of year and I wrote about it in an essay I called “Flight” but which The Millions retitled “A Hybrid, Trapped” — they published it earlier this month and

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Home alone, wild times

Today, for the first time in a long time, I have the house to myself.  The twins are off with their father, visiting their grandparents and running around their yard, picking daffodils and petting the pink lawn flamingos that are just the right height.  I am at my desk wondering what to do next.  I skipped my morning shower (I can take it this afternoon without being ambushed by an impromptu anatomy lesson), I drank my first pot of tea, I ate gingersnaps for breakfast and a plate of buttery fried potatoes for lunch.  I finished my book review for the upcoming inaugural print issue of Equals.  I read some of Andrew McCarthy’s book The Longest Way Home.

Wild times.

I cooked on one of the front burners and no one reached for the flames.  I got something out of the hall closet and left the door open but

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Toot toot!

I haven’t been posting as much here as I usually do, but that’s because I’ve been writing writing writing — and my hard work has been paying off!

Here’s a little happy horn tooting:

I’ve had work accepted at r.kv.r.y quarterly.

r.kv.r.y “Friends and Family” issue.

And I’ve had work accepted at Stealing Time: A Literary Magazine for Parents.  (You can read my review of their very first Genesis issue here.)

Stealing Time “Genesis” cover.

AND I’ve had work accepted at

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Asking the Bibliomancy Oracle

So I asked the Bibliomancy Oracle what to do about my writing career — pursue essay, biography, teaching, what?  And it replied:

Gotta find a way around those young cats.

This is from the poem “OL’ MAN STRENGTH” by Derrick Weston Brown.  You can (scroll down and) read the whole poem here.

A little research revealed that

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Head colds, meerkats and living in the present

Since the twins were born — nearly 22 months ago — I’ve been living in the present.  I can’t fret too much about what the future holds when each day is crammed with so many challenges and triumphs — both theirs as growing homo sapiens and mine as a mother and a writer.  Many of my friends have praised this living-in-the-present, some even calling it a spiritual practice.  That’s all been very nice — until I got sacked by a terrible head cold.

It’s “just” a cold, but a stubborn and lingering one.  And

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“Fluttering at the Margins”

At last!  My piece, “Fluttering at the Margins,” is up on HER KIND, A BLOG POWERED BY VIDA: WOMEN IN LITERARY ARTS.  It’s about twins and bats and writing and parenting and biography and Facebook and becoming an essayist and the extinction of the dinosaurs.

It’s the piece I read at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts last month:

Me reading at VCCA. Costarring: CHEEZ-ITS!  (Photo by Mary Akers.)

Click here to

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Following through on “autumn plans”

Late this summer I wrote a post about autumn plans.  Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell made what they called “autumn plans” and I was smitten by the idea.  Woolf writes:

I always think of those curious long autumn walks with which we ended a summer holiday, talking of what we were going to do – ‘autumn plans’ we called them.  They always had reference to painting and writing and how to arrange social life and domestic life better … They were always connected with autumn, leaves falling, the country getting pale and wintry, our minds excited at the prospect of lights and streets and a new season of activity beginning – October the dawn of the year.

Virginia and Vanessa, when they were still the Stephen sisters.

I always felt like fall was the real start of the new year and for many years it was — the start of the school year — first as a student and then as a teacher.  But now I am neither (neither was Woolf) and autumn plans seem even more important.

I never made a formal list of my autumn plans, but I have done some things that fit the category — things that have been amazingly helpful.

The main thing was

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Re-entry: a post-residency post

My last post was about being on a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  But I’ve been home for a week now and it’s time to get back into my usual routine.

Back to “old clothes and porridge.” And dishes you have to wash yourself …

Time at an artists’ colony is so fluid.  And your surroundings there are so stable.  If you put a cup down on your desk it will stay there until you pick it up.  (Although when you take a dirty plate to the kitchen and put it down, the next day it will appear clean in a new stack!)

But now time is regimented by the twins’ demands.  Up, play, eat, play, walk, eat, nap, eat, play, walk, play, eat, play, walk, play, eat, bed.  It sounds so simple in a list of one-syllable words.  (See “Morning as a 14-month-old twin” for how busy all this actually is!)  And now if you put something down and it’s within reach of tiny hands, who knows where — or when — it might next appear?

I haven’t written much this first week back — I’ve reverted to something like survival mode.  On my list of things to do each day instead of “revise X” or “submit to Y” I see

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A residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts

This past week I’ve been at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a colony for writers, artists and composers.  What an amazing experience!  Ten days — 240 glorious hours — to write, think, read and daydream.

Writing patio behind the Studio Barn. Smells like rosemary.

But now that I’m sitting down to write about it, I hesitate.  Not because it’s some big secret, but because not a lot happens on a residency — nothing external, anyway.  There was a meteor shower.  Someone carved some pumpkins.  A poet tipped me off to a nearby roadside barbeque stand and I ate a really intense pulled pork sandwich.  A filmmaker played classical guitar in the evenings.  One artist showed work from her loom, another intricate sculptures made from sticks, another collage, another prints, another huge paper drawings on a wall.  One of the horses tipped over his water trough.  The resident groundhog ate a bunch of greens and then ran away in ripples like a shaken fur rug.

Most of the things that “happen” on a residency are

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