. Spinning .

Today I am playing hooky from the frameshop.

Thanks to an awesome effort by Neha of Wanderlust, there is a Writers’ Festival going on today and tomorrow at our Community College. Some of the speakers include David Pesci, author of Amistad, Victoria Zackheim, author of The Bone Weaver, Ernest Dorling, author of Murder: A Family Affair, Colin McEnroe, author of My Father’s Footprints and others; writers and teachers from our own college such as John Timmons, Steve Ersinghaus, Patrice Hamilton and Robert Brown, as well as others such as Jesse Abbott who will present on poetry, publication, hypertext, journalism and other topics of interest.

It should be an engrossing and productive two days.

Though not in the frameshop, I guess.

I love to pick other writers’ brains, and weblogs are the perfect places to offer easy access. At The Word Foundry, in Fun With Dialogue, Joe Faust graciously shares a terrific point about show and tell (or show versus tell, rather) in writing dialogue. Bringing in the element of word use and accent of characters, he reviews a book he is reading and offers examples of good dialogue that gives readers a full image of a character without needless description. He also points out what not to do in writing conversation, and his experience adds to the valuable lesson we can learn by example.

I think there is a black hole in time between elation and depression and that is where one must not remain for long. It is a tiredness that halts the mind and searching for ideas is useless. Happiness writes with humor, melancholia writes with knowing pain and joy both, but as missed or longed for and so relates to past or future, very seldom living in a current state of mind.

But between them is just a blank sheet of white, the black hole of writers, and that is so much harder to face.

Silence, just silence; a quiet so deep it touches and wraps one within it and covers one’s ears. Felt as sharply as heard, the skin taut as an eardrum trembling to listen, poised to protect what’s inside. Good moods don’t survive long in country like this. The quiet is calling the quiet within, and the two overcome what is real.

Can’t take too much more of the rain. It is washing away my coating of wax, exposing my grain to warping and staining its carefully tended veneer. Nothing but wet things to think about, their stillness is sadness to me. Two days, maybe three for survival, no more. Longer perhaps, for the body.

We all need to strip down and dance for the sun.

Floating blossom in Salwar Kameez of plum gossamer, dancing on the breeze that blows off deserts, over seas and foreign lands. Tinkling bracelets like bells ringing faraway in time, delicate and divine amid the tolling sounds of a society who no longer knows to stop and listen. Half here, half there and half again flying in between the netherworld of old and new and yet the halves will always join to form a perfect whole. Daughter of the flower but a bud awakened in a world of heat and sparkling sands, but blooms within its reaching beams of light to live in white jeaned innocence external while internally the heart is far away and not transplanted. And once upon a time and even now the sloe-eyes glow against white gossamer, and she dances like the blossom of her youth, and the bindi, like a stained glass window, lights the way.

I was brought back to the Narratives Writers meeting by this phrase from Reflections in D Minor regarding all-time worst songs:

“This will probably sound sort of strange but I often don’t pay any attention to the lyrics and sometimes I can actually hear and understand the lyrics without thinking about their meaning at all.”

One of our esteemed professors who teaches art and new media at the college is also luckily a member of our group. Now I don’t quite recall who started the “read your own poem first” rule at this meeting, but for Professor Timmons, it gave him a different perspective as a musician to hear them read in the manner the authors had intended them to be read–sounding out the intonations and inflections, pauses, drama, etc. had him listening in a way that many of us were overlooking. He also admitted to not listening to lyrics of tunes but instead focusing on the musical background to get what he needs from a piece. He was indeed listening to poetry being read, and listening for a musical quality within it for its mood and rhythm.

Kinda neat to have another perspective, and even though poetry readings are common, I did not realize that the audience hears it in different ways as well as taking any message within under interpretation.

For some of us, the world is only getting bigger and bigger.

At our Narratives meeting last night, we workshopped three poems by different members of the group, and so many interesting views and viewpoints were brought up that continued in my mind well past adjournment.

In studying not only poetry but all forms of literature, as well as (and maybe even more relative to) visual arts, it is urged to interpret as a reader/viewer. Obviously, this is a good thing (sorry Martha, you lost your rights to this phrase!). No interpretation then, is incorrect. No wrong answers. It is whatever you feel or want it to be. This theory also seems to apply more and more to more and more of daily living as well. Is this just an expansion of the “it’s all about me” generation? Must everything be construed and evaluated as it applies to “me” rather than appreciation of the art and its creator first and foremost? Or even, only?

But my concern here is the arts. Somehow, I still feel my first priority is to understand what the artist or writer is saying. What does he mean, what did HE feel, what does he want us to feel—if he cares at all. I suppose it depends first on whether the piece has been constructed by the soul or the mind, and what was its purpose or goal. Who was he trying to please or engage, who was his audience, or was it a reflection of his thoughts that he intended to reveal just to help others understand him, please the readers, or a manner of getting it out of his head to bring him relief of sorts.

Does audience approval, even if for totally different reasons, bring satisfaction to its creator always? In the past, I know I have wanted to scream “that’s not what I meant, you fool!” and while it is not only rude to do so, is it as well a misinterpretation of another nature, one whereby what is taken as either ignorance or criticism of clarification skill is rather a compliment on ability to evoke thoughts and personal relativity and appreciation?

One poem brought tears within the room. It touched emotions in its readers. But who were they crying for; the author’s feelings or their own, and does it even matter?

On Pomegranates and Paper, dear Loretta has found her “voice” in writing, and I am absolutely green with envy, even as I fall back onto clichés to express it.

To be honest, I am excited and inspired by revelations such as this, and it is one of the reasons that weblogs are so successful in both individual and camaraderie aspects.

After a very informative and exciting meeting of our writing group last night, I awoke this morning with the remnant of a dream that happened some time during my sleep. I recall a flash of a dictionary page and in bold type a word I had used in one of my poems that had listed as its third or fourth definition, “racial epithet.” I don’t remember what the word was, or even if it was something I had actually written, but it brought to mind how progress changes word meanings. Innocent words may take on disparaging slang meanings over time, and as younger generations understand them, they also look to the use by older generations as stereotypical, denigrating, or intolerant without realizing that the intention is not such.

I suppose this is one of the reasons why I am bothered by political correctness, aside from its value as a paintbrush effect; a new generation telling an older one that a word means something other than what they are used to. Of course the solution is simple, for the older folks, realize that the word has changed and stop using it; for the young, realize that the word has changed and no harm was meant.

But one of the phrases that I am nostalgically reluctant to accept is “Once upon a time.” These words hold such magic when we are young; a story, an adventure to another time and place, and we listen in awe to anything that starts out with this opening line.

But as we age, “once upon a time” takes on a more intimate nostalgia of the past—our own. No longer an invitation to ride a magic carpet or slay dragons, but a narrative of past glory or pain, or a litany of what could have been. The future is no longer open to us with “once upon a time” but is a past that is over and done.