It’s Hard Work Being So Fabulous

It’s Hard Work Being So Fabulous

It’s hard work being so fabulous. No, I mean it. It’s exhausting. I know that’s a whopper of a first line, and while I am being somewhat tongue in cheek, I’m serious. I’m a hard working animal – I effort – I muscle into everything. I mean to be a good friend, a good teacher, worker, mother, writer, athlete – you name it – I want to be good at it. Actually, I want to be better than good; I want to be the best; phenomenal, extraordinary, outta sight, a hard act to follow. If this were a scratch and sniff you could smell the sweat, you could hear the grunt, and you’d definitely feel the exhaustion. You might even be able to sniff out the sadness – something I’m only starting to recognize. I come by all of this honestly. When I was a kid I learned how to function whether I was feeling functional or not. Our father woke us early on weekend mornings insisting that we get up and get something done. I had no idea what needed to be done at 10-years-old, but it was on us to figure it out – to get busy doing something, less we appeared to be slacking. “Get going,” he would instruct, as he poked his head into our room. I learned how to buck up, to get out of bed, put one foot in front of the other and heave the hell ho. A favorite word in our family was “hustle,” which was the way you got things done. You also didn’t want to be accused of being...

I lead, they teach

I lead, they teach

This is the line that came to me last week during one of the Wild Writing classes I run.

I have three live, in person, flesh to flesh classes here in Northern California, and four that take place on a video platform, which allows women from across the country to join me at 8am on a weekday morning – all of us in little boxes on the screen just like The Brady Bunch. We can’t make actual eye contact, but we can see each other as we write and read aloud for an hour and a half each week. Given the possible coldness of technology and the occasional glitch where someone gets kicked off their server, it’s a pretty incredible way to do deep this work with people.

Burrs, rough edges & tangled mats of hair

Today’s blog post comes to you from an island of burrs, rough edges, tangled mats of hair, and seaweed clumps. Seriously, I wish I’d strung those words together myself, but I was just as glad to find them in a book called Writing Open the Mind, by Andy Couturier.   Like Andy, I am in the business of those burrs, those rough edges, tangled mats of hair and seaweed clumps. As a writer, I am interested in dark parts, those tucked away moments, not entirely pretty, sometimes hard to look at.   My mentor, Deena Metzger, says that poetry is beauty and ugliness side by side. I’m down with that kind of poetry, on the page and off – which means I’m also willing to live a more tangled, less perfect life where the pieces don’t always match and the burrs and rough edges show.   Driving around town the other day, I realized that I had been working something over in my mind for weeks without being conscious of it. I was trying to come up with some pithy statement about my marriage to offer my friends and family when I saw them at Thanksgiving the following week. “Aren’t you and Mark divorced?” I imagined them asking. “But you’re living together, right? What’s up with that?”   For weeks I’d been trying to come up with an assortment of answers that might satisfy the curious, and which would explain my colorful, paint outside the lines life. “Oh, you know us,” I’d laugh, “we’re shape shifters.” Or maybe something more serious, “Well, he needed a place to stay for a while and...

Hungry for the Sound of my own Music

This is one of my favorite blog posts from last year and the impetus for Opening The Creative Channel, my weekend workshop with Andrea Scher of Superhero Life.    Last year David Bowie put out a new record, which is a big deal in the music industry. The man is 67-years-old, a legend, a huge rock star. I’d heard an interview with a member of his band a few days before the record launched, and the interviewer asked, “What earlier record is this new one like?” I found myself hoping he’d say The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust or Hunky Dory – two of my favorite Bowie records from the 70’s. But this band member only said that it was the best record Bowie had ever made.   So when the album came out on iTunes, I checked it out, hoping to hear songs that would take me back to 1976 and tanning by the pool in Palm Springs with my friend Marcie. Those were some days. I was 16 years old, had long brown hair, and wore bikinis. Boys liked me and I loved music, a doorway into a rich place full of feelings that I couldn’t yet articulate, but which I knew promised me access to a deeper part of myself.   But when I listened to this new album, I didn’t hear anything resembling the Bowie I had loved. Instead I heard the crooning stuff he’s been putting out in the last few years – not my cup of tea.   Here’s the thing: I don’t know what Bowie was thinking when he put out the...

  Why We Tell Stories

Because when our children grow up we can no longer strap them into car seats, which means they’re free to roam the earth as they please, and which sometimes means they down 5 shots of vodka with their new college roommates even though they promised themselves that they’d take it slow on account of the altitude and all.   We tell stories because we struggle to find the words when the apple of our eye calls the next morning, voice craggy and full of rocks to let you know that no, she will not be helping you in your effort to find furniture for her room today because “Mama I’m very sorry but if I get up I’m going to throw up.”   We tell stories because we want to come down hard, we want to get all “You need to learn how to take care of yourself…bla bla bla, ” except that just as those words are charging out of your mouth you remember who you were when you were a college student in this very town 35 years ago.   The night you lay in your freshman bed so high you were certain the aliens were coming for you, how you closed your eyes and lay your arms by your side so you’d be ready to beam up in one piece.     The day you ate too many mushrooms and had to have your best friend Lisa walk the streets of Boulder with you for hours, reminding you what was good about your life because you had forgotten.     The Friday afternoon beer party where...