100 Books in 2012: Book 50 "Desert Priestess: A Memoir"

I had the opportunity to read this unique book this month, and it's got me yearning to travel to Nevada. In her memoir, Anne Key recounts the three years that she served as the chief priestess at the Temple of Goddess Spirituality. This temple is dedicated to the Egyptian deity Sekhmet, and it sits in truly liminal space.  Just outside of Las Vegas, bordered by a bombing range and a nuclear test facility, Key learned what Sekhmet's myths mean in the modern world.

Dealing with community, leading rituals, and caring for the temple were all an integral part of Key's experience.  She also learned from the land and the native peoples, enriching her sense of personal spirituality.  A myriad of difficulties cropped up, but Key worked through them with patience and a little help from the lion headed lady.

The idea of a thriving goddess temple in modern America seems incongruous, but at the same time, tantalizing.  Key's experience is unique and will appeal to those who crave spiritual memoir and tales of the divine feminine.

Make sure you drop by and support the other 100 Books Challenge participants.  We're halfway through the year: what does your summer reading list look like?

100 Books in 2012: Book 30 "Some Assembly Required"

I adore Anne Lamott, so when an online contest gave me the opportunity to win a copy of her newest book, I jumped at the chance. It was only after I finished reading that I realized the book was signed. So. Awesome.

In this memoir, Lamott chronicles the first year of her grandson's life. Her son, Sam, is a young father who rises to the challenge of parenthood with grace and determination. Lamott struggles, as many grandparents do, with finding herself parenting from the sidelines. Luckily, she has many beloved friends and family members around to remind her that she's not Jax's mother, but his grandmother: this is a different role entirely, and one that she comes to embrace as the book closes.

This is a beautiful story told with Lamott's distinctive voice. She interviews her son occasionally throughout the book, gleaning his impressions on parenting, but this memoir is still overwhelmingly Lamott's.

What are you reading this month? I swear, I haven't stopped reading: I've been skipping along through multiple books, and I'll probably have a deluge of reviews to post soon, so bear with me!

100 Books in 2012: Book 26 "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?"

When I was 18 and a wide-eyed college freshman, I read "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit." Since then, I have loved Jeanette Winterson's crisp, layered prose. I was thrilled when this memoir announced, and I flew through it yesterday.

Growing up in Northern England (the Manchester area) in the 1960s and the 1970s is just part of what shaped Winterson. The landscape, the culture, and the deep poverty of the area became a part of her, but so did her adoptive mother's evangelical beliefs and iron-fisted parenting style. This is a brutally honest story of lack of love, sexuality, religious fanaticism, and the people who stepped in to save pieces of Winterson along the way. Between literature and a few good souls, Winterson was able to leave her hometown, going on to attend Oxford and later to a career as a successful writer. But the scars of the past run deep, and at the end of the memoir, Winterson is still struggling with her identity as an adopted child.

The beauty of her language doesn't mask Winterson's pain: it shines a small light into the dark corners of her life. Once again, reading this author has forced me to dig deep within my own soul. I highly recommend this book to all women first, and to all lovers of memoir second.

Writing has a deep power: it helps us define ourselves, and it helps us expand our world. What books or authors have changed the way you think?

China

Imagine you have barely slept. The hostel where you decided to crash was really a restaurant with a few bedrooms, and the sounds of the all night kitchen crept through the paper thin walls.

There's no point of showering, because you are about to climb a mountain. Not that you are the outdoorsy type: in fact, this will be your first mountain. It's known as the most dangerous mountain in China, but you've been there just over a week, and have noticed the Chinese tendency to claim that everything is the "most" or "biggest" something.

So you go out and reach the foot of the mountain before dawn. Red fabric prayers litter the trees at the base of the cliff, and the old woman who sells you a map reminds you that this is the most dangerous mountain in the land. Despite yourself, a shiver runs through you.



There are shrines carved into the cliffs as you climb, for this is one of the Daoist holy mountains. You want so badly to explore these temples, but the incense that still burns on the mountain reminds you this is no ancient worship: these shrines are still devotional sites.



It's beautiful for the first two hours. But then, when the closest of the five peaks begins playing a game with you, appearing as if it is constantly over the next rise, your enthusiasm begins to flag. You are weary, your feet hurt, and you don't want to drink any water because the bathroom you just passed was nothing more than a building with four holes in the ground.


A meltdown can't be helped, but you manage to last from 5 a.m. until noon: then you sink to the ground in despair, having just passed the first point. It doesn't matter how badly you want to impress your traveling companion and psuedo crush: you can't move another step.



Imagine you did that, seven years ago. Some folks say that you regenerate your cells every seven years. Some people even use this to declare that you become a new person every seven years.

But you can still remember.

First Snowfall

Just wanted to post a picture of my enchanted walk yesterday. It's already melted, but my grinchy heart has been touched.

Feeling really good today. Worked on the fairy tale poetry chapbook (still a few poems short of being able to start submitting, but the goal is to be ready by January) and added a page to my slowly growing memoir.

Now it's time to meditate and turn off the computer monster.

Be enchanted this month.

What is too young?

In an effort to distract myself from my NANO WIP, I started outlining a memoir today...and started writing the first chapter.

But now I'm wondering...when are you old enough to write a memoir? I'm only twenty-six, but a piece of my still active ego argues that I've had some pretty unique experiences. I am also writing a genre memoir, focused on one aspect of my life (my quirky spirituality) rather than an all-encompassing tale. I feel like my experiences are ones that should be told and that might be something readers could connect with...

but really. Writing a memoir at twenty six? I realize that I haven't even begun to live yet!

But the memoir is slowly growing, the NANO WIP is excruciatingly slowly growing, and the Poem a Day challenge is flourishing. I'm really excited to see what I produce: all my poems so far have a fairy tale theme, and this is a lot of fun for me. It's different to write poetry based on a prompt with a narrative voice rather than spilling my guts onto the page in my usual self-absorbed poetic fashion.

I'm scattered, but it's a good kind of scattered. At least, that's what I'm going to pretend.

Memoiring

So I guess I'm in a memoir mindset right now. Maybe that's because another teacher at school asked me to be her "guest author" tomorrow to talk to her students before they try their hand at crafting a personal narrative. I'm flattered and a bit nervous, since I am still learning to see myself as a "real" writer.

In addition to that "speaking engagement" playing about in my mind, I also tripped down memory lane tonight when I sat down to write. I crafted something which raised a lot of raw emotion in me, and not at all a piece I want to share with these students--or anyone for that matter. I thought, when I sat down to write, that I had in mind a rather lofty and above it all memoir, stemming from a realization that I had in the car this afternoon regarding two of the boys I chased after in high school.

Instead, I wrote something that has me feeling a bit unbalanced. The fall always does interesting things to my heart memories. I am trying to ground myself in reality, here in my house with my husband on the other side of the writing room door: this is my world. I am so many physical and metaphorical miles away from the girl I once was, the girl who clawed to the surface tonight after my writing.

It leaves me wondering: when does a person obtain calm detachment regarding really tumultuous emotional memories? Perhaps, as I am starting to fear, the answer is never, and even as a writer, those memories must be approached gently and with extreme caution. But I want to write freely, of all my experiences, and I have never had much patience for things like tooth aches.

Memoirish

Well, another day, another little chunk of memoir writing. I started a rambly teaching memoir once I had enough distance from that awful first year, and every now and again (like today) I am possessed by a family story that needs telling, but there's no cohesion to these spits and spurts.

I am trying to embrace all writing as good writing, and to stop worrying about eventual publication. So today I wanted to write a story about my dad: leave it at that, no need to spin it into a book!

I'm so driven, so motivated, and now that my writing has resurfaced as a priority, it's really hard to write when I know it may go "nowhere". Writing for the sake of putting words on the page is soul writing, and I shouldn't devalue this work.

How do you allow time for genuine projects and soul writing without letting one take undue precedence?

Chores

Now that I have left modern society and regressed to a house (gasp) without a dishwasher, we have been getting into the ritual of nightly washing. While serving as high priestess to the lukewarm water tonight, I was reminded of two entangled things, both family stories.

First, I remember my mother telling me on more than one occasion how much she HATED drying dishes as a child, particularly when her older brother was on sink duty. She said he would wait for the adults to leave the room, then poor water over the nearly-dry dishes waiting for her in the drainer.

The second memory comes because of that story. I heard it, time and again, while I stood to the right of my mother, drying the dishes that she washed. She taught me to start with the cleaner, lighter washing first, rather than greasy pots and pans, so that the destruction of the sink water would occur at the last possible moment. She taught me to rinse in the hottest water my hands could bear, and to let the dishes sit in the drainer so the air could do some of my work. First standing on a chair, then standing on my own two legs, I both loathed and looked forward to dish time.

Mom and I would turn on the old kitchen radio, always tuned to an oldies station, and we would pass the time cleaning up after the family. I hated the chore, but loved that precious time with her. We've talked about many things over dripping dishes, both serious and silly, and I still pick up a towel and offer to help whenever my siblings aren't being put to work.

Can't sleep, might as well remember...

Anyone who speaks out against formulaic series fiction was never a child. I don’t think I can ever fully relate the deep and lasting influence the Stratmeyer syndicate had on my life. All I know is the first book I remember reading over and over and over again was the Hardy Boy’s mystery “The Case of the Melted Coins”. Nancy Drew followed shortly thereafter, and so much of my childhood I owe to the titian haired beauty who was always getting herself out of rather ghastly scrapes just in the nick of time. I was obsessed. I combed garage sales and thrift stores for copies of the “old” editions of the series, and one day I hit the jackpot, purchasing a box of five titles copyrighted in the thirties for only fifty cents. My ambition was to collect every single title shown on the back of the yellow bound hard covers: I spurned the 1980’s incarnation of Nancy, for various moral reasons (probably echoing the values of my mother) and sought instead the world where a live in housekeeper was utterly appropriate, the collegiate Ned was always around to take you driving in his rumble seat, and Bess and George were described as “plump” and “boyish” rather than “fat” and “butch”.

I inhabited the worlds of the old Nancy Drews so fully that even now, sitting here in the dark tip tap typing away when I really should be sleeping, I can recall in detail the plots of “The Mysterious Mannequin”, “The Clue of the Whistling Bagpipes”, and snatches of the rest, all mixed together in a big formulaic stew. I remember secret passageways and priceless artifacts, statues that whistled and a stained glass window that hid a tremendous secret. Both houses I lived in as a child were fantastic, mysterious playgrounds, and I was constantly looking for (and constantly disappointed for not finding) sliding panels, secret documents, and spy holes cut into the next room.

I remember an old, beautiful run down brick house on Sherwood road, just half a mile up from our depressingly normal home. It was covered in ivy, the glass had long been shattered in the window panes, and the whole place had such an air of desolation that I was certain it housed, depending on my mood, a dead body or an ancient treasure. We passed that house every time we headed to the doctor, or to visit my father at work, or to run errands, and every time we passed, I sat there in the car, making up grisly stories in my mind. I can still picture the house perfectly, and I wonder if it might one day be the setting for a story that I have not yet thought of.