New Review of Spiral Ceiling for History Buffs

Hi readers and writers,

A new review appeared in Journal of the History of Biology in December, 2012 of my memoir, Breaking through the Spiral Ceiling.  If you are interested, download a pdf of the review by Kyle McLea, click here.

cheers,
Laura

Alphabetaphilia coming soon!

Dear readers and writers,

Last year in February, I ran Alphabetaphilia for the first time.  I asked people each day in February to come up with a list of five words beginning with the same letter (A for February 1, B for February 2, etc) and write a sentence using those words, putting it in the Comments section under the daily photo prompt.  It was fun to read all the rare and grandiose words people came up with, and the sentences were crazy.  So I want to do it again.  WARNING:  on this WP site, I have to moderate the comments, so there will be a small delay before your posting appears.  Do not panic and repost six times.  Or, if you do, I will try to post it only once.

At the end of the month, I will work with another writer friend to select a sentence using each letter and produce a chapbook of the 2013 Alphabetaphilia project.  Soon, you will be able to download last year's pdf from this site so you can see what it looks like.  You may let me use your real name or use a WP alias account and have that alias receive author credit for any of your sentences we select for the chapbook.  Questions?  Comments?  Get your alliteration motors running!

cheers,
Laura

Seeing Light in Richard Blanco's Inaugural Poem for Obama

Hi friends of reading and writing,

I have been thinking about seeing this week, even before hearing the poem Richard Blanco read for Obama's second presidential inauguration.  My weekly idea to chew over and live with is that we can only see through light, that we mainly learn to "see" aka understand by our visual sense, and that it can both convince us and mislead us.  We can see and understand something only because it's presented to our eyes, illuminated in light.  But also, we can use vision to fool others (think of magicians, for example, or people who try to make you think they're something they are not.)

So Blanco, following the light of a day from sunrise to the newest constellation awaiting our creative response in the evening, taps into these thoughts.  He shows us concrete objects like the shoes without which he could not have gone to school, traces the role of his parents' sacrifices in providing them, but gives all that in a fleeting glance aside from the whole flow of society.  We each see and understand things that are part of the river of society, and depend on light to let us intepret them.  I highly recommend this poem to you.  You can find it in Hector Tobar's LA Times piece.

cheers,
Laura

PS Photo from Creative Commons with thanks to photographer Till Credner.

Other times, other letters (in English)

Dear readers and writers,

I just read a fascinating description of letters that didn't make it into today's alphabet, here: http://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31904/12-letters-didnt-make-alphabet

The first one discussed explains something that has puzzled me for some time: the origin  of the "ye" in Ye Olde Pharmacy and similar cutesy names.  It's Thorn!  Thorn is shown above and it would have the sound "th" if it were still one of our letters.  The y in "ye" above is a thorn.  See, it all makes sense.  I love learning these origin stories, and if you do to, check out why the & is called an ampersand.  Very amusing story!

I remember the diphthong ones, since we got an encyclopaedia britannica rather than a television set when I was in third grade.  It had so many of these double vowel letters that I thought we should all use them regularly, and missed out on getting a few words right on spelling tests by insisting on including them.

Do you have a favorite on the list of left-out letters?  Any stories about these letters in your life?

cheers,
Laura

 

Something That Makes You Uncomfortable to Write

Hi friends of reading and writing,

Maria Popova, in her online magazine BrainPickings, has written about F. Scott Fitzgerald's correspondence with aspiring young writers this month.  He advises them that writing well is hard and may require you to invent a new form to fit the exigencies of your urgent message.  He also says that the stronger your technique is, after years of practice, you can write about anything.  But early on, while you're a writer-in-progress, you need the power of pain and bewilderment, anguish, misery to propel a story and make the reader sit on the edge of her chair.  So you have to use those things you'd rather not bring up, rather not delve into, definitely don't want to write about for public consumption.  Only those things carry the emotional weight you need.

My friend Gayle Brandeis suffered though a time of excruciating emotional turmoil in her life when her mother committed suicide soon after the birth of her child.  She wrote about it in ways that gave readers some sense of her feelings.  Why should something so specific, that almost certainly does not match what each reader is going through, have such power to attract and hold the reader?  I think it's the authenticity.  When the emotions are raw and powerful, the writer does not pretend or posture, but just tries her best to capture them. They come through and resonate with times each of us has experienced those types of emotions, whether or not they were elicited by the same events.

So don't hide away the secret events of your life.  Get them out of your brain's deep freeze, remember and re-experience the emotions, and write them into your work, whether it is fiction or non-fiction.

cheers,
Laura

Inspiration Invitation

Hi friends of reading and writing,

Writing something I'm proud of can be as elusive and mysterious as the flash of a firefly.  I know that some authors believe in BIC (butt in chair) and say go ahead and type gibberish if need be until good words come to you.  But that doesn't work for me.  I can go with the BIC part, sitting before the paper or the computer.  But then I need to have something worthwhile in mind to start typing.  I'm not saying I don't produce the kind of terrible first drafts that can never be shown to anyone.  I'm just saying, babbling without purpose, hoping that a thread of gold will appear in the monkey clickings, that's not for me.

I get frustrated by my inability to catch the moonbeam I'm after, yes.  But if there is no moonbeam, no tangled life, no torn letter, I couldn't care less about pounding the keys or scribbling.  Something has to be at stake.  I call it the inspiration invitation.  I need to sit down with the intention to think and write about a specific time, place, person, problem, waterfall, dead butterfly, melted chocolate bar, whatever.  The intention invites the inspiration.  It doesn't always come up to my desires and expectations.  The firefly dies without a flash often enough.  But knowing what I want to capture is the drive to put BIC to begin with, and for me, I can't get to inspiration without that invitation.  If you're frustrated trying to start writing, try looking for your invitation first.  Say to yourself, I must write about this.  Then write.

best,
Lorelei

New year, new blog site for West Coast Writers

Hi readers and writers,

This blog is a continuation of the West Coast Writers blog that has been running on Blogspot for some time.  I have a new Wordpress author website and this blog is one of its pages now, connecting parts of my electronic life that used to be separate entities, thanks to Glenda Ebersole at Site-Pro.

I hope all of my literary friends have a new year full of writing, of lovely family events, of bountiful sensory experiences, and of moments of mindfulness.

I'm participating in Fiona and Kaspalita's Small Stones exercise for January and encourage you to consider it too.  Each day in January, take five or ten minutes out and intensely experience the world around you, wherever you are.  Write a sentence or two about your experience, a small stone.  I'll be posting mine here from time to time, and also on their Writing Our Way Home website.

Happy New Year!

Lorelei (Laura Hoopes)