I sit down to write with my favorite felt-tip pen in a notebook, in cursive script. That’s how almost all of my writing – good and bad – begins. A few years ago I regularly attended a writing group: we sat, we wrote, we read. No editing, just an outpouring of words and ideas onto the page, raw and deep, if we let ourselves go.

I recently read that schools are abandoning the instruction of cursive writing. I imagine people not being able to write in cursive, and that picture disturbs me. I know handwriting is inefficient, but I would argue that for many reasons it serves a valuable function.

Loving the way the pen moves across paper, I choose smooth sheets for writing and find that the words flow most easily and from the deepest places when I write by hand rather than type. The kinesthetic experience of cursive writing seems to allow me deeper access to my own mind.

In journalism school in the late 1970s, I was taught to keep typing (on an actual typewriter!) when I made a mistake. Corrections were made in the copyediting process. The typesetters recomposed everything in the production process anyway, so it really didn’t matter if we typed perfectly. Writing without pausing to correct typos or grammatical mistakes became a valuable part of my process, even when I’m not keyboarding.

The legibility of my handwriting has suffered lately, as a result of more typing than writing. Not so, my mother’s handwriting: as I was going through papers last week, I came across a recipe she’d written out for me. Written in classic cursive, her perfect letterforms, loops and crosses, with uniform slant, heights and tails, are governed by invisible rules on the page.

My handwriting, by comparison, is messy and uneven, like I’m always in a hurry. (I am.) My hand can barely keep up with the pace of my thoughts, so I’m usually rushing to get it all down before an idea or train of thought goes away.

My mother’s handwriting, while nearly perfect, is still distinguishable as hers. The steadfastness of her writing says something about her personality, not in a “handwriting analysis” sort of way, but about the rhythm and speed of her life.

Handwriting, too, is a “gateway skill” to drawing. If we lose the ability to hold a pencil and make sweeping, curving symbols – even our signature – what will become of our ability to describe objects with line?

I once met an artist in Durango who incorporated her correspondence and journal entries – written in perfect Catholic school Palmer method script – into her artwork. I still have the letters she wrote me, written in that exquisite looping style. Content barely even mattered; I delighted in the gorgeous line of her thoughts.

On the other hand, my husband prints nearly everything. He says it’s because cursive was awkward for him to learn, and that now he prefers the neatness of a printed word. The only thing he writes in cursive script is his signature.

If students aren’t taught cursive, will their signatures – evidentiary of personality – be completely replaced by electronic signatures, or an eyeball scan or some such nonsense?

I often take a notebook out into the woods to write in the clear air. How silly would it feel to have my laptop in the woods? What happens if the battery gets low and I’m not ready to stop writing? In thirty years, will we have lost the ability to record our thoughts without an electronic device?

This week, I spent some time reading back over the journal entries I made a month ago, while in Oregon visiting Wendy. She lives down a country road in a log cabin outside of Eugene. There’s no wireless signal, and cell phones don’t work until you get down the hill a bit. Looking back at those pages reminds me of what it felt like to be in that moist place in the late fall, sleeping late, waking to foggy skies and luxuriating in the damp air and muffled sounds. I wrote, “On days like this you can’t tell where the sun is, so you’d better know where your own light/center is.” I doubt that an electronic version of that could so effectively help me re-experience those feelings.

David lives in West Oakland, just across from the BART station. The night of November 2, he was one of 92 people arrested in protests in downtown Oakland, California.

When he called the next night, he said, “Mom, I just wanted to let you know I’m okay.” Clueless, I wondered aloud, “Why wouldn’t you be alright?” I was kind of glad not to have known that he’d spent the night in an Oakland jail. His dad and I are proud of his commitment to his ideals, understanding of his desire to be in the thick of it, and at the same time concerned for his safety.

Over Thanksgiving weekend at Mom and Dad’s house, we had cereal and politics for breakfast. The television is on and the newspapers are front and center every morning. The Tucson newspaper reported that – in spite of her lack of compassion for actual Arizona residents – Governor Jan Brewer has a 42% approval rating in the state. I’m surprised at that number; even my relatively conservative parents think she’s a nutcase. In his Sunday morning column, David Fitzsimmons, the cartoonist for the paper, called Brewer “Sarah Palin with split ends,” a nod to her penchant for personal celebrity over all else.

Like Brewer, ultra-conservatives on the national front have gotten results with extreme stances and rhetoric: when the more left-leaning members of the U.S. Congress budget super committee agreed to concessions during an attempt at budget reconciliation, the right-leaning members moved farther to the right.

Driving by the Occupy Tucson encampment (appropriately enough on Congress Street), I saw young and old alike, holding signs indicating their frustration with the status quo, where they don’t feel heard or seen. These folks are not holding out for entitlements; instead they seek opportunity and justice.

The Occupiers in city centers suffer derision, insults, discomfort and even physical violence, all for the sake of making a statement. Like those who lean to the far right, rather than retreating they’re yelling louder, taking a stand, and refusing to be made invisible.

Radicalism thrives when people don’t feel heard.

Government is founded on ideals, and yet compromise and balance are requisite from day to day. Sometimes we get it wrong, but with continued discourse, we have a chance to get it right in the long run.

We’re certain we have all the answers. But can we listen without judgment? Can we change our minds when faced with new information, or is that too academic for most of us? If we allow the process to be hijacked by extremists from either side, are we simply rewarding bad behavior?

When the process breaks down, we ask, “who is to blame?” But the real question is, “who suffers?”

A few days ago, David sent me a narrative about his arrest, and asked me if I’d read it and make suggestions. He has written a powerful story about his experience of the Oakland General Strike, the peaceful example he tried to set that night, and what he witnessed before and after he was arrested. In the introduction he writes:

“Someone who I was locked in the cell with said, ‘It feels really good to be arrested when you know you are right.’ It’s true. Being arrested for some petty reason that was…a bad decision on your part is shameful, but when you are locked up for standing for an ideal…being arrested becomes a badge of honor….”

David also wrote about why he led others in the group to sit peacefully, cross-legged, in front of the police line:

“[FALA, where he attended high school]…places a great value on leadership….What I have taken from that is that no matter how small an action…being the first to take a hard path makes it easier for others to follow.”

As they sat facing the police, David pulled the protective bandana off his face, and urged his companions to do the same, to “show the officers we’re human, just like they are.”

Compassion and compromise have gone missing from the current political discourse. The middle ground is messy and full of quicksand, and few are willing to risk it; it seems safer to stand on the shores of extremism, the only solid ground available.

A dream:

I’m in the middle of an open field. In the distance is a swarm of bees, flying thirty feet off the ground, a humming, pulsing river of insects. In the middle of the field is an old swingset. I’m hanging off it, like I did when I was ten years old, upside down with my knees locked over the bar. A few bees land on me, but don’t sting me. I drop to the ground, and try to cover my hands and neck. A blanket is nearby; I unfold it and throw it over me to keep the bees off. I yell for help, but no one hears me.

When I was ten or eleven, I was in love with books. My favorite spot was halfway up a tree on the edge of the common area of our subdivision in suburban St. Louis. From that perch, I read and watched as groups of kids played below. I had the idea that reading in a tree made me more mysterious and interesting than reading in my house. I longed to be mysterious and interesting.

To the best of my recollection, at that age my literary tastes were underdeveloped; I was reading biographies, schlock fiction, and a few classics, sometimes reading the same books over and over. Later I aspired to read every Agatha Christie murder mystery in our local library. I couldn’t get enough of all those Victorian parlors and sherry and titled gentry.

But James Thurber’s short stories, which I also read during that stage, have left a vivid impression with me after all these years. My Life and Hard Times I read probably a hundred times. “The Night the Bed Fell,” is a classic, slapstick tale of minor drama, misunderstandings, and physical comedy. I delighted in Thurber’s stories of odd relatives, anxious household visitors, quirky servants, and especially in the illustrations he made to go along with them. Thurber observed it all with wit and a keen sense of irony. He used a half page – a half page! – to describe two of his aunts’ phobias about burglars, how one piled shoes outside her bedroom door to lob at intruders every night, and the other stacked her valuables outside her door with a note, telling him that this was all she had, and pleading for mercy with the chloroform.

He acknowledged the absurdity of it all, but his stories also conveyed his fondness for and indulgence of eccentric behavior.

At least that’s what I see now. Back then, I was in it for the stories. Thurber’s family was supremely, deliciously weird. And he had no compunctions about revealing all their weirdness in rambling, conversational prose.

Tony and I have been talking about the way effective radio commentaries are sliced to the thinnest possible cross-section of the writing, everything but the most cogent details excised. The preciousness of airtime forces a paring down.

In contrast, Thurber was luxurious in his dalliance with details and asides. Rereading those books, I’m struck by the storytelling quality of the language, the parenthetical remarks, the background paragraphs and all those commas. We don’t often have time anymore for asides or seemingly extraneous details, but they do add immensely to the character of the writing.

Language and storytelling matter deeply. Through them, history and connections are made, trust is built and lost, memories captured, meaning divined and codified. We humans like a multilayered experience and thrive on complex interactions.

On page 53 of Laura Kelly’s new book, _Dispatches from the Republic of Otherness_, resides my new favorite sentence. On the page it reads like a line of poetry:

The list of no goes on and on.

Those spare eight words, twenty-two letters, smack me on the back of the head with meaning far beyond their context in her story. Kelly takes care to place each word to serve the overall meaning, and then uses “no” and “on” to show us how those two little words can define each other.

Careful writing takes time. And how far do we go with editing? Depends on who the audience is and how they’ll experience it. I most often vote for brevity. But then there’s the pleasure of taking a long hot soak, staying in a story until you’re good and ready to climb out. Clarity and meaning come through either way, but if no one gets the message when you yell for help, we’re all lost.

What do you see when you turn out the light?

When I was younger, I thought this was a nonsense line, but as an adult I suddenly realized that John and Paul used this line as shorthand to ask all the questions about what delights and motivates us, what fills us up, what empty places and sorrows there are in our lives. It’s key to self-knowledge, this question, to learn what art appeals to us, and how we developed those preferences. How do we ground abstract concepts in concrete expressions? Is it possible that visually important moments have more to do with blindness and history, than with vision and the immediate moment?

In February of 2004, I made a visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, timing my trip so I could see both the Diane Arbus photography exhibit, which was closing, and the Romare Bearden exhibit which opened that weekend.

For me, the Arbus show was all about personal filters, which she seemed to lack. She photographed whoever fascinated her at the moment – circus freaks, asylum inmates, and nudists – without any apparent distaste, discomfort, or sense of impropriety.

I shuffled through the high-ceilinged galleries, breathed recycled air, shared the show with all those other eyes. I longed to be rid of the crowd, wanting instead to witness the show in my own time, linger over some images and pass others over completely. I wanted to read through Arbus’s notebooks, find out what she was thinking about, and why she found certain images so compelling.

After three hours, I left the show visually and mentally spent. But the Romare Bearden show awaited.

Bearden created collage artworks from magazine photos, colored papers, and his own drawings, often portraying life in black America. When I entered the exhibit, the artworks felt instantly familiar, even though I hadn’t previously seen many of them or experienced the places they describe.

I often experience this visceral sense of recognition with collage artworks. Even though it uses humble materials, collage has startling power to illustrate the intangible. Bearden knew that collage allows the artist to create works that rise above the visual, and instead portray skewed aspects of the world.

My experience with collage is that it allows me to give important elements their due, excise the insignificant, re-create the world according to my own vision. I can use fragments to create a whole, solid, and honest picture of the world.

From beyond the grave, Bearden told me hopeful stories, universal truths about the world. Where Arbus’s world was dark and a bit twisted, his images refreshed my eyes and my spirit.

Abstraction packs in more impact per square inch by portraying both the visible and the invisible. The artist who goes farther afield offers the viewer an opportunity – almost an imperative – to look harder and longer to discover the veracity and meaning of the artwork, and in the process discover something true about herself.

Even realism, though, is an abstraction of sorts, as explained by René Magritte with his painting, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe.) A painting of an object is still a painting.

A friend sent me three of his latest poems some time back, and asked for a critique. In reading them, I had a “Salieri” moment, thinking “too many words.” They had crossed some line for me, filled in too many details. Effective lies – literary or visual – are grounded in truth, but not too specific. The goal I’ve set for myself is to ground abstract ideas in the senses, giving the viewer just enough clues to take him or her to some real-life experience.

The most influential artworks I’ve encountered hold my attention through my most powerful sense: memory. Memory takes me back to a previous time, to an edited version of my life, to sensations and experiences that have been fully encoded, that have stayed with me, that make me who I am. Memories, in large part, trigger the sensations I experience when the room goes dark. The artworks that speak to me of these things are the ones that touch a chord of memory. Like a childhood matching game, those are the artworks I seek. They appear gutsy and true, and reinforce my view of the world.

In the beginning, in 1998, we held Flagstaff Open Studios to make art more accessible to the general public and the art-making process less mysterious. People came to our studios, and we did it again the next year. Fourteen years later, we’re still making our art and telling our stories. I’ve missed a couple of years, once because I had a brutal bronchial infection and once because I went to see the Dalai Lama in Tucson. Good excuses, both.

Artists might have a few more creative bones than your average Joe-Sixpack; what sets us apart is that we exercise those bones more often. We’re kind of a hard-working bunch, to be honest. There’s a bumper sticker that says, “Real Musicians Have Day Jobs” and that could be true. But the real truth is that we come in all stripes: some artists have day jobs, some have trust funds, some have patrons. Some artists have great commercial success with their art.

There are, apparently, a lot of people who believe that Thomas Kinkade is a really great artist, and his commercial success is certainly a testament to that.

But does commercial success define great art? Not so much, maybe. Think of two overlapping circles, one containing “great artists” and the other containing “commercially successful artists”. There’s some overlap, but there are a lot of artists who live in one circle or the other, but not both. And who lives in which circle and the overlapping real estate depends on who’s defining “great art” and “commercial success.”

Ten years ago my work was selling at higher prices than the current market will bear. Those prices weren’t a function of increased worth, nor are the current prices indicative of a diminished inherent value. I’ve learned that the art market will bear what it will bear.

After a brutally difficult few years for galleries and artists, I’ve heard there are fewer and fewer actual collectors out there, but I’ve been fortunate to meet and work with some of the remaining ones. I’m always proud to have my art become part of a collection that seems based on a true affinity for the work.

Too often, art gets collected for reasons that have nothing to do with that connection. There’s a tendency among some to collect art that’s pretty and inoffensive, decorating their spaces with “trophy art” that asks nothing of the viewers’ intellects.

But I see my jobs as artist and writer as having less to do with the end product, and more to do with the ideas behind the product, an interpretation of my surroundings, and this is why I don’t do realism. I know there’s an audience out there who want to know what I feel, not just what I see.

Tonight I’m sitting in a downtown bar, eavesdropping on the conversation of a group of Harley enthusiasts from North Carolina as they talk about their hometown. Garrison Keillor they’re not, but I hear stories about how one of the local bad boys buys every judge in the county a country ham every Christmas. I hear who leaves his curtains open every night when he’s watching television, and who of the group nearly got thrown in jail at age 16 for speeding and how, after a stern talking-to by the judge, he straightened up and turned out okay.

The bartender explains that she only has pork and green chili burritos or vegetarian burritos left, and a bleach-blonde Harley babe goes for the veggie burrito. One of the guys launches into a Ronnie Milsap imitation as the jukebox starts up.

Truly, my job is so much like my original career path as a journalist: I read and process what I see around me, discover by observing and asking questions. Then I bring my own personality to bear on what I’ve learned; that’s where the art enters in.

I never thought I’d be an artist. My tribe was comprised of readers and writers, but also practical people who knew how to do things with their hands: build things and clean things, do the hard work of labor, driving, manufacturing and construction. They didn’t consider much of what their labors wrought. They were just focused on the process.

__________________

The 14th Annual Flagstaff Open Studios happens August 27 & 28, from 10 am to 5pm. Maps and brochures are available at culturalpartners.org

When the days turn steamy, there’s nothing better for sleep than the cool night air humming over you.

Before the rains started, my parents visited to escape the Tucson heat. We gave them our bedroom and slept outside on cots and sleeping pads. The night air was cool, almost cold, and I slept with my down bag zipped up and relished the chilled air that comes down off the mountain into our neighborhood. I awoke periodically and noted the constellations’ changing positions, the way the dipper pours out its contents over the course of the night.

It took until I was nearly forty before I discovered the delight of sleeping unprotected by walls or tent. Before that I never saw the sky directly overhead from my bedroll. Now I take any excuse to do it.

A few summers ago I slept out for nearly a month straight, intoxicated with the sounds and smells and the air, oh, the air. Meteor showers rained down through the Milky Way. Satellites scudded across the night sky.

Our old windows were replaced a few years ago with more energy-efficient ones. To my deep regret, the guy who measured and ordered the new windows flipped the opening of our bedroom window from right to left, so that I can no longer sleep with my nose to the open window. Now the window opens to my feet. Occasionally, I’ll rip the top sheet out of its tuck under the mattress, and sleep with my head at the foot of the bed, just to be able to smell the outside air.

At my grandparents’ house in Tipton, Indiana, I often slept on the front porch when we visited. Actually, it once was a porch, but had long ago been enclosed with knotty pine paneling and real windows. That room housed a jumble of reading material – car collector magazines, ancient novels with drab blue and green covers, abandoned children’s books ¬– plus trophies from car shows, and granddaddy’s hunting trophies, most notably the stuffed deer head that we put a red nose on every Christmas and called Rudolph.

Because the porch faced Green Street, the curtains were pulled shut at night, and waking in that space was often gloomy and a little muggy. Sheltering the porch was a huge spruce tree under which squirrels fed on ears of field corn stuck upright on nails pounded through the bottom of a board. I’d sit on that porch for hours every summer, watching the squirrels, reading those musty books, doing puzzles and daydreaming, as every ten-year-old must do.

My aunt Nina’s record player and collection of 45’s also lived there. That’s where I first heard Ray Charles sing “Hit the Road, Jack” which struck my impressionable self so much so that I walked around singing it aloud to my younger sisters most of that summer.

In the mid-eighties as newlyweds, Mike and I rented a four-bedroom farmhouse near Iowa City from Glenn and Marge Miller. (In the Kalona phone book in those days about half the population bore the surname Miller or Yoder.) In the summer of 1985, I was pregnant with our first child and spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get comfortable enough to sleep. Outside it was 95° and 95% humidity, and relief was not forthcoming, as it barely cooled down at night. The house did have an upstairs sleeping porch with a pull-down Murphy bed, but a mouse-ruined mattress spoiled its appeal.

We probably would have slept on the front porch if we could have, but alas, sleeping unprotected – by netting or pesticide ¬– in the midwest only leads to heartache in the form of mosquito bites that itch so much you want to leave your skin behind. Finally, in August, we installed an air conditioner in one bedroom, and dragged our mattress onto the floor. During one particularly miserable week, I barely left that air-conditioned room.

But this is Flagstaff, the original home of good sleeping weather. This morning I awoke to crows barking in the back yard and squirrels careening through the treetops like monkeys. The cloud cover softens the early morning light, making it feel earlier than it is, and my rousing was slow and dreamy. Empty-headed, I pull on clothes, let the dog out and make my tea. I sleepwalk to my desk.

Sweet dreams.

Far from the fires around Flagstaff, we’ve been in chilly Ogden this past weekend. It was green almost beyond belief, the only gaps in the lushness where snow still covers the mountainsides and peaks. The reservoirs are brimming, and the rivers are running at full tilt: falling over cliffs of quartzite and granite and crashing down mountainsides.

Wednesday, we hiked up Waterfall Canyon, just east of town. From the top of the canyon, snowmelt plunged down two hundred feet to where we were standing. A wind kicked up from the rush of water coated us with a fine cool mist. I missed a crossing over the creek on the way down, and had to wade across the cold stream to pick it up again. Frigid water ran through my boots, leaving the hem of my jeans soaked.

Our first two nights away from home, we camped on Cedar Mesa, just north of the San Juan River in southern Utah.

We hiked a rim trail to a giant rock formation, a fortress tower with just a spine of land connecting it to the main part of the mesa. About a third of the way up from the bottom of the canyon were terraces that looked like garden plots, carved into the flattest levels of the canyon. We spotted structures below on the canyon floor, and a tiny square window indicating a granary. A rocky sentinel with a smooth round head stood guard nearby, watching over the abandoned settlement.

After being forced to scramble along a steep ledge to stay on the trail, we were able to walk along the exposed ridge to visit ten rock rooms built into the cliff just below the top layer, some perfectly intact, others just barely crumbling. The tower afforded a clear view for miles in any direction, and a completely defensible location.

The place felt like a prayer: quiet, windswept and generations-old.

As we turned back, the profile of a 30-foot high boulder looked like the silhouette of a man’s face, ancient eyes upturned to the western sky.

After supper and clean-up, we played music around the campfire in the still of the night and resolved to hike again in the morning. We rose early, packed up camp, then descended into the canyon, clambering down rocky talus slopes, over rockfalls and boulders to the canyon floor. The sandy path took us through cottonwood groves, past reedy plants and pools of water. We listened to birdsong and watched lizards dart in front of us, and spied the ribbon of a snake scooting away at our approach.

In addition to the intact kivas we’d seen from the rim, there were others that had collapsed, a total of seven. All along the walls at the site were potsherds and tiny cobs of corn, picked utterly clean by small rodents and birds.

The kiva roofs were made of timbers thick as thighs, with charred ends, cut to length with fire not sawblades. Flat rocks were stacked atop the timbers to complete the roofs and fortify the structures. From the rim, rectangular holes in those roofs had looked like the eyes and mouths of kachinas. What we couldn’t see from the trail above was that the insides of the kivas had been made smooth with mud and were polished black with soot, just like the ruins we’d seen on the rim.

Like scouting a rapid, the higher view gave us an idea of what we might encounter. The rim hike to the fortress was for viewing mountain ranges, geologic features, and the way trees and rocks populate the land, letting us see a compelling and dramatic big picture.

But without those delicious details, the view felt empty and incomplete, like a grand gesture with no driving emotion.

From the rim, there were no charred beams, no fragments of pottery, no wet boots, no tiny ears of corn or darting lizards, no smell of water or sound of the wind rattling through the cottonwood leaves. By getting wet and dirty, we caught the particulars of the experience. The canyon hike was for going deep, getting to the heart of the place, sensing the intimate character of a human life one thousand years ago.

At the front window, the dogs stand with their tails in the air and a ridge of hair raised along their backs. They are on alert, poised to protect us from the dangers posed by blowing bits of paper and leaves, and whatever else might happen along on this windy day. They pace the floor. They follow me around the house and never quite settle into their usual mid-day naps.

I have no claim to experience with the harsh Flagstaff spring winds, really. In 1986, the first year we lived here, we rented a house east of town, near the old fire station on Townsend-Winona Road. But the house was set back from the road in the pinons and junipers, and we never felt the full force of those relentless Doney Park winds.

By the next spring, we had moved into town.

One night a few weeks ago I dreamt that our possessions were stacked out on the back patio. The wind was whipping our belongings up the hill behind our house, papers, clothing and furniture alike, defying gravity. The howling woke me up and I wondered what (or who) was trying to get in.

As disturbing as it can be, the wind carves out the spaces between us, and by doing so, defines us. It raises the hairs on our arms and helps us know where our edges are. The wind and water carve away at us like we’re sandstone, reducing us to our gorgeous essences, some of our mysteries laid bare, others around the next bend, just out of sight.

The wind moves us along, if our sails are poised to receive it.

Before my friend Conny died, she imagined herself as the wind and said we’d remember her when the wind blew. Standing in the cemetery on the day of her funeral, the gusts embraced us like parting hugs, blowing our scarves and hair around, blowing pine needles off the trees, and reminding us that she was there in spirit.

There’s no app for that.

Our back yard now is sheltered from the wind by a rocky ridge that offers some protection, even if it does shorten our daylight on winter afternoons. On chilly days, I can sit on the sheltered bench at the back of the house to catch the sun and watch the wind wafting filaments of spider web around. Far above me, the wind summons music from the tops of the trees and whispers the names of the living and the dead.

Is there a stream of ideas that blows through our world? Both Bob Dylan and Bill Monroe referred to it at various times in their careers. Monroe said something like this: “Those melodies are just floating around in the air. You just gotta reach up and grab ‘em.”

Further proof of the existence of the stream of ideas comes from an interview with Tom Waits, who “believes that if a song ‘really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.’”*

When the air is still, a benevolence hangs in the air. Windy days offer a different energy: dynamic, forceful, vitalizing as breath. Can I learn to embrace these qualities, rather than lock myself away from those agitating winds? I imagine those particles of ideas in the swirl of half and half that I pour into my freshly stirred mug of tea: a tempest of emotion and melody and color waiting to be courted by a lowly writer or artist.

Daily, I carry my seedlings – tomatoes, kale, basil, tomatillos, in case you were wondering – outside to gather the sun. Barely two inches high, they grow stockier and stronger with the buffeting, as do I. My afternoon walk through the neighborhood reminds me I’m due for a haircut: my bangs blow around my face, making me look and feel like a mad, wild creature.

Today the tempest wins.

*This comes from a fascinating interview with Tom Waits, Play It Like Your Hair’s On Fire, written by Elizabeth Gilbert (who also wrote Eat Pray Love), which appeared in the June 2002 issue of GQ magazine.

After the Viola Awards a few weeks ago, a bunch of us traipsed over to Uptown Billiards in search of closure and whiskey. Poet and owner of Uptown, James Jay had just won the Viola Award for Literature. Upon receiving the award he recited a beautiful poem (not even his own) that brought me to tears. Several of the acceptance speeches that night were eloquent, but his poised, elegant delivery captivated us.

James showed up at the bar just after we arrived. First thing, he started clearing tables and filling orders, wearing the rolled-up sleeves of his tuxedo shirt. Kudos aside, there was work to be done.

This is the way to be, I thought.

“Chop wood, carry water.” “After enlightenment, the laundry.” There are a million ways to say it, but the truth is that the daily work of making a life keeps us grounded in this world. Humble work keeps us humble.

Especially for those of us who spend much of our time doing creative work, this other kind of transitory, practical work matters. The uneven ebb and flow of time and creative undertakings can run away with us, leaving us breathless and tethered only by the barest thread, like a human kite.

I used to think that only open-ended studio time would allow me the luxury of a deep conversation with my materials. While at times the leap from creative inspiration to exhalation does seem to be hugely dependent on freedom, other times the structure of a deadline, arbitrary or not, can spark a giant creative bonfire.

Here’s a poem I wrote in half an hour, just before a potluck dinner party with a friend who was dying of cancer:

Hope Salad

She waits for a telegraph from spring,
pushes aside the wadding,
finds tiny leaves infused with the hardship of winter.

Plucks one leaf at a time,
only the willing are chosen.

Finds hope in the salad,

omens in the earth.

This is what hope tastes like to her:
sweet, generous, green.

These words instantly transport me back to that moment of tasting spinach that had overwintered in my garden, its leaves like meat. In contrast with the sorrow I was feeling, the thrill of the early spring bounty left me ecstatic. The poem presented itself in just a few minutes, completely whole, as if I had plucked it out of the ground like the salad I was composing.

Creative works can be rushed, but who’s to say that the result is as good? On the other hand, who’s to say the result would be better within a pliable time frame?

I place a piece of fabric (or three or ten), and consider whether those fragments take me toward or away from my aim for the piece. The time between decisions is often fruitful and filled with grace, but sometimes the empirical process doesn’t need much time. If my decision-making cycle collapses down on the process – into action/evaluation/action, instead of action/consideration/evaluation/action – the piece can come together in a more intuitive way. On other days, a molasses-like substance coats every surface in the studio, including my hands and brain.

I’ve tried to discover what constitutes the difference between “grace” days and “molasses” days. When everything comes easily, I think I know the secret. Other times, I feel I’ve lost my way entirely.

One million media-years ago, there was the “time to make the doughnuts” commercial on television: a chubby, mustached man arose from his bed in the dark early morning to bake so he would have the freshest doughnuts to offer his customers. His daily work was ordinary, but out of that routine supposedly arose the very best doughnuts. (I wouldn’t know, having not eaten a doughnut since approximately 1978.)

Accolades like the Viola Awards are lovely affirmations from our community, but the real substance of our lives resides in the work we do, whether we bake doughnuts or write sonnets. The humility that engenders everyday work carries us along toward tangible results: a well-tended garden or a stack of clean laundry, and simultaneously serves to buoy up our creative process.

Now back to work.

In Finding Flow, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi writes, “The quality of experience [is] a function of the relationship between challenges and skills. Optimal experience, or flow, occurs when both variables are high.” When you address big challenges with high skill levels, feats of creative genius are possible.

This is true for any field. Even within the rigid structure of mathematics – my husband is a mathematician, and he tells me this is true – there’s room for divergent thinking that leads to new discoveries and innovative ways to think about old problems.

Last week, I was scheduled to teach a workshop. Two of the four students were a mystery in terms of their creative experience. In preparation, I needed to remember what it was like not to be confident of my creative skills.

Though I have my doubts from day to day, in a general sense, I know that I have a relatively high capacity for creative action. I think this is true for many of us. But when the subject comes up in conversation, there are people who claim they’re not creative.

I muse about what separates the creatives from the self-described “non-creatives.” Some personal archeology was called for: why do I consider myself creative?

• In 1968 – probably before you were born – I won a red Thermos cooler in a coloring contest.

• In seventh grade figure drawing class (poses provided by fully clothed class members) the model sat with his back to me, but I still managed to draw a pretty good likeness of the back of his head.

• At my high school, we put on performances that were the equivalent of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland’s “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” if they’d been enrolled at a Department of Defense school in Europe in 1975.

• During that same period, the community theater director cast me in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. David Pomeroy was my song and dance partner even though he was shorter than me (a perennial problem throughout high school).

• I wrote restaurant reviews/travelogues for the high school paper that mostly involved me taking myself to various Chinese restaurants and visiting tourist destinations in the nearby Belgian city of Mons.

• At Ball State University, culture shocked and unsure of where I fit in, I immersed myself in music, taking singing lessons that focused on operatic technique (really awful idea), and performing in local coffee houses (only slightly more successful). My guitar and I learned a few songs from music pals and developed a playlist of tunes by Dylan, Goodman and the three J’s: Judy, Joan, and Joni.

In short, it’s not exactly a remarkable list of creative achievements.

“Excuse me, sir, but how do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Practice, practice, practice. Even though my efforts were not particularly impressive, I was practicing being creative from an early age.

My senior year at Ball State, I finally took a “real” art class, from ceramicist Marvin Reichle. One of the things that stayed with me from the class was his admonition to “Do it twenty-nine times.” Anyone who’s taken a class from me has heard me say this, probably twenty-nine times.

Reichle opened my eyes to the possibilities of visual art, but by that time I was sure it was too late to go down that path. I was a writer, had always been a writer, and would always be only a writer. In hindsight, thirty-odd years later, I realize it wasn’t too late. In fact, it was just the beginning; it was precisely the right time to start contemplating a creative life beyond the one I had initially thought possible.

Maybe our personal definition of “creative” is the most important criteria. Is a great cook creative? A scientist? An administrator? And what if your work defies categorization?

Here’s what I believe: high skill levels brought to bear on interesting problems get our creative juices flowing, regardless of whether our brains and our lives fit into neat little boxes of competency. Sometimes we’re good at or interested in multiple disciplines that don’t neatly overlap. I vote for celebrating those fabulously rich cross-disciplinary pollinations and the resulting discovery of new ways of thinking about the world.