There Is No Off-Season

new story: Blue

2012-01-16T00:45:00.000-08:00

You can read my story, Blue, in the latest issue of PANK Magazine.

It's interesting timing for this particular story to come out as I return today from my winter MFA residency. I wrote it last June during the summer residency at Pacific University in response to the craft talks by the fiction faculty: Kellie Wells on turning metaphor into reality; Jack Driscoll on loving your characters; Mary Helen Stefaniak on the power of "once"; David Long on meaningful sentences; and others. I did fall short—couldn't figure out how to employ Jess Walter's suggestion of the 2nd person narrative switch. Maybe next time.

Some additional backstory on the writing process is that the main character, Mayfair, comes from a piece I wrote years ago in a Writers@Work workshop with Phyllis Barber. Even though that particular story didn't came together at the time, Mayfair has remained with me.

The bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building occurred during a time when my personal life was in complete collapse. I recall picking up the newspaper in a hospital kitchen and being so struck by the enormity of loss and moved by the survivors' stories, including stories of some of the children who survived. That has also remained with me.

In her craft talk at the most recent MFA residency, Pam Houston said people always wanted to know if her stories were true. I have to think that's kind of a trick question for a writer. Everything I write is grounded in truth in some way. The truth could be a porcupine on the freeway that I nearly hit driving drunk and too fast on I-80 from Park City in the middle of the night after the W@W conference. Or the news story that made me weep when I could not access my feelings about ending up in yet another treatment center. Or the startling beauty of a robin's song, defiant in the darkness before a summer sunrise.

Or maybe they're all just stories.

Sherri

Water

Everything on the earth bristled, the bramble
pricked and the green thread
nibbled away, the petal fell, falling
until the only flower was the falling itself.
Water is another matter,
has no direction but its own bright grace,
runs through all imaginable colors,
takes limpid lessons
from stone,
and in those functionings plays out
the unrealized ambitions of the foam.

- by Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

new story: Chick

2012-01-02T16:20:00.000-08:00

My new story posted today on The Intentional Ducati #3: Chick.

The Intentional Ducati began as an awareness of the odd coincidence of recurrent elements during the Pinewood Table writing groups, the first being a Ducati motorcycle that appeared one night in two different stories.

Pinewood Table instructors Stevan Allred and Joanna Rose issued a challenge to write to some specific elements, and The Intentional Ducati was born.

This year's elements include:

i. A reference to Moby Dick.

ii. A paragraph made entirely of nouns.

iii. In consecutive order, sentences of 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 word(s). For example: "This will not be easy. Not easy at all. Difficult, in fact. Damned hard. Aaargh!"

iv. A 'Support Our Troops' magnetic ribbon, or a variation thereof.

v. A piece of taxidermy.

vi. A character who crosses a literal bridge.

vii. The same word used as both a noun and a verb in one sentence. For example: "She tore at the dress with her hands, almost ripping it away from the fence, but the rip hit a seam and wouldn't rip anymore."

To celebrate the launch of The Intentional Ducati #3, the Pinewood Table is hosting a reading at the Blackbird Wine Shop and Atomic Cheese, 7pm on Weds, January 4. See you there!

Sherri

from below

2011-12-14T00:02:00.000-08:00

Having had my share of migraines since I was a child, I've had lots of down time over the years, more lately, it seems, for various reasons. Being forced to pause the pace and fury of daily life is jarring, and I find myself anxious in the solitude of healing.

It's cold outside, below freezing, the firs and fenceline frosted white late into mid-morning. From my spot near the fireplace, I watch through the sliding glass door as sparrows and chickadees and the black-hooded juncoes hop and scratch in the seed spread on the porch. Swarms of gray bushtits flow like schools of fish over the suet feeder hung in the eaves. Mourning doves drop from the rooftop, sluggish in the cold. Even the winter sun seems chilled.

There is a slight breeze, a sigh, a breath of air. The fir tree shakes its needles, and the thin sunlight catches the spray of ice crystals. It is Oberon's fairyland. Tír na nÓg. The air fills with glints of color and turning light.

I think it's a trick of my eyes or the pain I harbor. But then a tendril of mist lifts from the wooden fence struck with sun, and another burst sparkles through the yard.

The darkness in me eases, and I am able to sleep for a bit. Outside my window, ice turns in the light and shines a field of stars over the birds.

Sherri

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.

Inversnaid

THIS darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

check

2011-11-25T15:05:00.001-08:00

Last homework assignment for the term - check.

Presenting session at Winter Wheat writing conference - check.

Finals - check.

Thanksgiving dinner - check.

Sigh of relief - ongoing.

I love this life.

~ Sherri

From up here the water is still blue, the grass green
and the wind that buoys me is 12 billion years old.

~ from "Bird's-Eye View," Jim Harrison, Songs of Unreason

Winter Wheat 2011

2011-10-22T16:54:00.000-07:00

The Mid-American Review Festival of Writing

November 17-19
On campus of Bowling Green State University
• Click to pre-register
• Click for full session schedule

Join me and some amazing writers and teachers for a celebration of writing. Kick-off Thursday evening with a reading by fiction writer and essayist Kyle Minor. Friday sessions begin at 1pm and 4pm, followed by a 7pm reading by poet Ann Townsend. Saturday sessions begin at 8am, and the conference closes out with a reading at 4pm by author Seth Fried.

My session is scheduled for Friday 2:30 - 3:45pm, and I'm very excited.

Sacred Objects: Detail the Fictional World with Real Stuff. Discover, name, and infuse your writing with objects that deepen character, become metaphor, and carry story.

Bowling Green State University boasts one of the oldest established Creative Writing programs in the country, offering a BFA and MFA degree, and has an outstanding record of graduate success in publication and career preparation.

See you there!

~ Sherri

what did you read?

2011-09-18T15:28:00.000-07:00

my childhood reading list

Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog

Blaze Finds the Trail by C.W. Anderson

Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson (Midland Book) by Raymond W. Thorp...

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson...

Over dinner the other night, my friend Liz was surprised I had not read the same books she had growing up. She also had some thoughtful observations about why she read what she did, something I hadn't considered.

What did I read? And what does that mean?

To be fair, I didn't read much before my family moved back to the states in 1973. Literally. 3rd grade is about the time I figured out, with my persistent grandmother's help, how to read. (Dyslexics Untie!)

So what if I got a late start. Once I got it, I read like one obsessed. Reading was an escape. A window to somewhere else—so many somewhere elses. It touched and comforted me.

I can recall the rough shag under the old baby grand piano in our house at Fairchild AFB where I read with my Snoopy pillow: Walter Farley, Jim Kjelgaard, Marguerite Henry, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. When we moved to California the next year, I read in the car through all of Oregon and into the Redwoods. At my Uncle Orson's in Merced, I read through my older cousins' stash of Boys' Life and MAD magazines. The first rental in Bakersfield was furnished with shelves of books: Hardy Boys, Bobbsey Twins, Happy Hollisters, Louis L'Amour westerns, fairytale collections, and a full set of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In retrospect, it seems I gravitated toward the lost, challenged, rebellious, or broken. Outlaws, outcasts, people marginalized or misjudged by circumstances outside of their control. Triumphs over great odds. Quests toward salvation, escape, or justice.

The summer in Bakersfield I was 10, and I read from my father's personal books—a grueling story about a medical resident (I thought it was entitled "The Resident" but cannot locate it), and the Hiroshima Diary by Dr. Michihiko Hachiya. That book moved me like no other, even as an adult, perhaps more so because of the years spent living in Japan. Combined with James Herriot's veterinarian series, I concluded that humans were generally more kind to animals than to each other, although barely so.

The summer before seventh grade, I was transitioning with pre-teenage angst to Tolkien, Asimov, Anne McCaffrey. And then to the Russian writers, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky. But my childhood foundation was already set.

I still love a good story with animals. Jim Harrison's dog-training heroine in Julip. Edgar Sawtelle's dogs. But it is the human conflict that informs my own writing. To reflect our struggle to connect. Bare our human foibles. Reveal our victories and our failings.

If we do not look, we cannot change.

sherri

What did you read?

"Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him."
~ Maya Angelou

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."
~ Benjamin Franklin

letting summer go

2011-09-13T21:59:00.000-07:00

The very best summers when I was a kid included banana Creamies on the farm. I did a lot of growing up on my Uncle John's dairy farm in Cache Valley, Utah. It was a good place to be a kid—feeding chickens and calves, cows and dogs, jumping from the haystacks, riding shotgun on the tractor.

Summer nights, the cool crept over the fields from the Bear River, smell of the slough, cut hay and silage. I lived to hang out with my cousins, all older than me, maybe even in high school. They were smart and funny and beautiful, and I wanted to grow up and be just like them. Evenings were never too late—milking chores started earlier than the sun—but farm nights seemed darker than other places, the sky a deep, black bowl with stars.

One time John Terry and Bart had firecrackers. It could have been the 4th of July. The girls pushed each other in the swings or lounged on the grass. Rockets zipped from the milk cans set on the driveway, and when those ran out, the boys filled the cans with Black Cats that rattled our eyeballs and sent the feral kittens streaking from our laps to the barn.

I'd give anything to spend one more morning in my aunt's kitchen helping her make bread. She could turn out half a dozen loaves quick as a stitch. She'd always burn the last loaf for my Uncle John and butter the blackened top just the way he liked it.

The nostalgic inkling to return "home" to the farm has conflicted me since before I had words, and a certain pang of loss accompanies the musing of what could have been a different life lived out there, although I've made enough peace with the past that regret doesn't dig into me these days. Not too much.

I do wish for that morning with my aunt. Her hands over mine, guiding me through the kneading. Press, fold, turn. Press, fold, turn. "Yup. Just like that."

Once more to hear my uncle call out from the tractor, "There's our Sher-bear."

The regret that remains is that I didn't realize sooner how it was all so precious.

sherri

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."
~ Yogi Berra

seasons changing

2011-09-06T22:21:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of months, I've been head down in some once-in-a-lifetime events and writing projects at the expense of this blog. It seems a small cost. I am grateful to hear from some of my readers that I have been missed. At the same time, I am grateful to have met some of you in person on my latest and greatest adventures to Utah.

The MFA school term at Pacific University has hit the halfway mark, summer has finally arrived in the Pacific Northwest—the local weathergirl announced a "heat wave" after two days in a row over 90 degrees—and we've all had more fun than humans are allowed during some raucous birthday parties.

Give me a minute to breathe in the sweet smell of vast, unplanned Saturday afternoons, and I promise, the blog is back.

Defy excessive celebration.

Sherri

notes from school

2011-06-29T23:15:00.000-07:00

Once again, the 10-day residency at Pacific University was amazing. I am filled to overflowing with new insight, awareness, friendships, and poem. Stimulated. Moved. Inspired.

The Wildish boys are alive and well and have quickly become a study of sentence. I think about how Raymond Carver worked so closely with John Gardner, words and sentences. In workshop at the residency, faculty David Long took one of my paragraphs and mapped it out, moved it around, made cuts and tweaks. Like magic.

My turn now.

This is going to be good.

Sherri

elowah falls

2011-05-25T23:28:00.000-07:00

Take a breath. The sound of traffic falls away somewhere behind us on the trail. That metal train noise is gone. It's just the rush of water now or wind—they are the same.

In the curl of new moss is a pair of Calypso orchids, one in fresh bloom and one fading to brown, its succulent petals deflated and wrinkled on the edges. The Calypso only grows at northern latitudes, undisturbed, concealed on the forest floor. Fairy slipper and Venus's slipper are its other names. Its lolling tongue is covered with purple leopard spots, a scoop into its baleen mouth, halo of pink.

False Solomon's Seal has feather-duster flowers with a rotting sweetness that makes me sneeze at the top of the rise. I hold my rain jacket and hands up to avoid the brush of shiny poison oak. It's not really oak, he says. It's something related to poison ivy.

A switchback trail takes us into the heart of the narrow canyon. White foam of the creek threads along the bottom, rocks and fallen trees bending the water this way and that. On the other side, clumps of sword ferns splay out from their own bull's-eye center. Moss covers everything—you can never get lost in the PacNW because moss always grows on the outside of the trees.

But it's the water we've come to see: Elowah Falls. From the top edge of the cliff, it lays down a gray mist over the falling water that takes us in, wets us head to foot, releases us into a wash of drops that almost makes a rainbow.

The bridge is slick. So are the logs over the creek, green with fine moss. There's water on my skin and clothes and in my eyes.

Touch the earth. I am a rock in the sun. He hollers to me from where he has climbed down to the streambed, but even his voice is the sound of water.

Sherri

hoopla

2011-05-04T23:03:00.000-07:00

Came back to much hoopla on Sunday after being out with the Mazamas at Smith Rock over the weekend. Prefer the rock.

My dad called last night while I was doing homework and watching Oklahoma beat Memphis to tie the series 1-1. Multi-tasking is the story of my life. Admitted to not having enough time to watch the playoffs last week. I told him I even took my homework camping. He just laughed and said there was this crazy guy in his medical school class who took his homework everywhere with him - lunch, work, church, even to football games.

"What happened to him?" I said.

"He graduated top in our class."

Oy. I am just hoping to meet deadline.

As part of my ongoing commitment to stay connected to my writing people in a tangible, face-to-face way, tonight I went to the First Wednesday Readings at the Blackbird Wine and Atomic Cheese Shop (4342 NE Fremont, Portland). Some of my favorite writers were there, some of them even reading.

Bruce Barrow read some flash fiction. Bruce and I worked across the Pinewood Table in workshop for awhile, and I always love his stories. He did not disappoint - loved each one tonight.

Scott Sparling read from his new novel "Wire to Wire" set to be released next month from Tin House. I originally met Scott also through the Pinewood Table, although we never sat in workshop together. I was honored to read with him last year at the Press Club. His new book has received some notable reviews, including one from my other friend, Laura Stanfill. It's such a small world.

Michele Longo Eder read from her memoir, "Salt in our Blood - the Memoir of a Fisherman's Wife." If you know me at all, you know how I love anything about crab fishing, so of course this was wonderful.

Elizabeth Austen read a few poems from her new collection, "Every Dress a Decision" from Blue Begonia Press. Her poems hit on the familiar and intimate in language clear enough to tell a story. Beautiful. I am looking forward to reading her book front-to-back.

Shout out to Steven Allred and Joanna Rose for having guided me at the Pinewood Table and connected me to other writers. It's good to have these friends who are writers - they make a difference in my life.

Sherri

sounds a full moon

2011-04-18T23:00:00.000-07:00

There was a full moon last night. At the peak of summer, it rises at the head of our street over a stand of tall firs where every year hawks nest. For now, it pushes up behind the neighbors' rooftops before clouds take it.

My youngest child once told me the moon was closer here in the Pacific Northwest than in other parts of the world. That's why it's so big, she said.

Its sound is as beautiful as its size: full moon. Reading poetry this week, and my favorite line is complete with sound:

The moon hung orange as any sun
Just before it faces evening,
Like a flaming breast in the sky
Calling my name, and I walked out

Under it and rubbed the moonlight
All over my face and hands the way
The old folks used to do with sunlight

~ from The Night Richard Pryor Met Mudbone by A. Van Jordan

Jordan knows how to use the sounds of words, make the mundane beautiful, sensual, forbidden.

Have you ever fallen
Into the vowels on a dark

Woman's lips as she blew
A simple phrase like Good Morning
To a man she's just met?

Nothing, maybe, to the naked ear,
But close your eyes and listen
To the dark sounds rounded

Off in the shadows of her mouth—
There lies the secret to end
All wars.

~ from Morena by A. Van Jordan

Cup your hands and press some moonlight to your face on a night like this. Breathe it in. You can do this here where the moon is so much closer.

Sherri

fine balance

2011-04-04T23:17:00.000-07:00

The tipping point either way is often something so unexpected that you don't notice until you've passed it. Yellow leaves. A shut door. The fine silk of a tulip.

There is light in the mornings now as I head to the office. Even though the progression is the same, the return of light in spring seems to happen more quickly than the winter spread of dark. Perhaps the sun simply draws our gaze.

But I flew too close once and am lucky to have made it back. If you believe in luck.

sherri

carrying grief on the first day of spring

2011-03-20T19:49:00.000-07:00

Spring is a time of emotional extremes from the history of my life, times of immense loss and great change, darkness of depths unimaginable and restorative light. Every subsequent year is different. And the same. It's not that I forget how it is the most difficult time of year for me, it's that every year I think, surely this one will be different. But then the dreams come, vivid as ever, and time removed feels like yesterday.

In times of sadness, I have learned to reach back and call on moments that lifted me before—private moments, sweet joys, prayers. The first time I had opportunity to pray in a sweat lodge, perhaps ten years ago, it was a warrior sweat. On the banks of the Columbia River in sacred space at Celilo, I entered the lodge with trepidation and the heavy weight of unresolved family issues. With nothing to compare it to, I could not gauge the intensity of the conditions; I only knew how it brought me to complete physical breaking.

At the 17th stone, I wept. The woman next to me unexpectedly touched my hand and whispered, "Put your face on the earth, your mother." And so I did, and a peace came to me such as I had never experienced. The pain I carried into the lodge lifted in a way of power and beauty and deep personal awareness I continue to carry.

So with sadness and deep regret, I honor the memories of children lost to me, the deaths of friends and loved ones, and sorrows of irreparable harm. Respect the sorrow; allow it to be what it is. Without a tangible place to direct my grieving, I wonder for the first time if I need to seek one out to allow for something different.

At the same time, with gratitude and an astounded sense of awe I embrace this moment, this year, these feelings, my place in this world. After too many "burning down the house" years, my life was not restored—it was begun anew.

Ah, spring. I seek to find its middle path.

sherri

"Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved. But it was not grief that Olanna felt, it was greater than grief. It was stranger than grief. She did not know where her sister was. She did not know."
~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

"The ranks of the stars move in progression, the sun and the moon shine in turn, the four seasons succeed each other in good order, the yin and yang go through their great transformations, and the wind and the rain pass over the whole land. All things obtain what is congenial to them and come to life, receive what is nourishing to them and come to completion. One does not see this process taking place, but sees only the results. Thus it is called godlike. All men understand that the process has reached completion, but none understands the formless forces that bring it about."
~ Xunzi (c. 296 -c. 236 B.C.)

tattered

2011-03-07T21:02:00.000-08:00

I feel a little tattered before spring. Not that winter's over, between downpour rain, sleet, corn snow and scattered sunshine (that's a real meteorologist's term here in the PacNW).

Gray is what it is, although that may be what I love most about the northwest skies—the million shades of gray. Add a million shades of green for the trees. Several thousand browns and blacks, and as it warms and spring pushes up through the dirt, all the rest of the Crayola palette for what blooms next: crocus, lupine, beargrass, pea, fringecup, fireweed, goat's beard, phlox, monkeyflower, larkspur, trillium, fern. Their names are music.

Next week the clocks return to regular time that makes the morning dark again for a while longer. The blessed season of introspection is nearly over for another year. It doesn't make me any less reminiscent—only warmer. In theory.

I could use a break about now. Perhaps some tea.

Sherri

April Rain Song

Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.

Langston Hughes

rinse. repeat.

2011-02-13T23:56:00.000-08:00

If it isn't already common knowledge, I'm a huge sports nerd. I don't mind admitting to it. What little television I watch generally involves a ball, puck, racetrack, birdie, or even a wicket—although I'm still trying to make heads or tails of that last one. Superbowl, World Series, World Cup, NBA Finals, Olympics, Stanley Cup—I'm watching. It also means I cry in movies of the same.

One of the other consequences is that I cannot answer any trivia questions about the latest reality show or be-the-next-greatest-singer-dancer-weightloser-topmodel-designer-cook-cakedecorator-nanny-housewife-makeover show. Somehow I don't feel like I missed out.

Back in high school after a workout on the track or gym, I would often run the seven miles to my house, the big yellow one out on Jameston Road. In the rhythm of pace, heartbeat, breath, the mind can go anywhere. Even touch nothingness. There's something deeply moving—intellectually, psychologically, even spiritually—about the drive that pushes through physical limits and beyond. Some of the dreams inspired in those moments are the same ones I carry with me now.

I recently heard Rachel Toor read a beautiful piece about her run from rim-to-rim-to-rim of the Grand Canyon shortly after the death of her mother. It was a physical challenge above and beyond and then perhaps the way to peace.

It's the aesthetics' pilgrimage, the personal "monomyth"—the hero's journey. It's why many of my heroes are thoughtful athletes.

Now that my knees are shot from years of activity and the shortcomings of my genetics, I access that place in different ways. Sustained practice has led to an awareness that has altered my thinking at a fundamental level. If I seek out these moments, they show themselves, coy as white-tailed deer by the river, beautiful as the mourning doves that come down from the roof like specters on hovering wings.

It's a powerful place, connected awareness, a state of mind that lifts me above my own pathetic preconceptions, fears and human foibles. Greater than us all. Call it god (or God), higher power, enlightenment, nothingness.

Crazy, you say? Touch nirvana with a jog around the block? I say, do whatever works. Figure out what that is, and then do it every day. Repeat. And if it stops working, find something else that does. It's that important.

Along the way, watch a good game of basketball now and then. Or cricket. That's what I would do.

Sherri

"Beauty is not wasting a day. Beauty is noticing life's little intricacies and taking time out of your busy day to really enjoy those little intricacies. Beauty is being real, being genuine, being pure with no facade—what you see is what you get. Beauty is expanding your mind, always seeking knowledge, not being content, always going after something and challenging yourself."
- Jake Plummer, retired QB of the Denver Broncos, speaking at the funeral of his friend, Pat Tillman. "What Was He Thinking," Sports Illustrated, Feb. 14, 2011.

more perspective

2011-01-30T15:04:00.000-08:00

Exactly 444 years before the day of my birth, Hernando Cortes set fire to the Aztec aviaries of the besieged city of Tenochtitlan. I did the math years ago when I first read "Crossing Open Ground" by Barry Lopez, struck by the horror of the event and by my birth date there on the page. I was instantly connected. Tied at an emotional level to something occurring almost half a century before my first breath.

No other animals seem to connect the dots the way humans do. For good or bad, we seek them out, find the links or make them up. They become the building blocks of our personal history, family stories, myth. Culture. Religion. Tradition. Philosophy. It's what makes us feel like we are a part of something. Gives us meaning, or in some cases, purpose.

How did that happen? What makes us seek validation of our own existence beyond this moment of breath and blood and heartbeat? What are we looking for? Would we even know if we found it?

One of my early college professors told me the wisest man would finish reading every book ever written and, if he learned anything, dismiss them all.

Perspective is a tricky thing. Turning everything up on its head when least expected. Calling into question old assumptions. Opening a surprise feeling from the words of a story.

But isn't that exactly what we're looking for?

Sherri

"Don't miss the conversation."
- Pam Houston, given as advice to new MFA students at orientation

a mark in the snow

2011-01-22T21:39:00.000-08:00

In the night, snow fell on the beach. I'd never seen snow on the beach before—the sand covered white, the ocean washing up dark against the edge of it.

A sidewalk stretched in both directions behind a low cement wall. I walked to the gap that opened to the beach and sat down on my feet. The sound of the waves was like the inside of a shell, and a little breeze made my ears burn with cold.

I pressed my hand into the thin layer of snow. The sand underneath was cold as metal. The snow melted and left the print of my hand. At once, I wanted to take it back, fearful for a moment of the way the shape of my hand and outstretched fingers marked the snow that spread all the way to the water, stuck through here and there with yellow grass and rocks perfectly placed it seemed. I hoped no one would walk on it, leave footprints. Except birds. A flock of thin-legged sanderlings ran choreographed at the water's edge, in and out with the curl of sea-foam.

I was halfway through the first residency of my MFA program, and my life would be changed forever because of it. But when is it not? So often it's the smallest moments that touch us, remind us of those dreams we've hoped and longed for, what's important, if only to us, those moments that change our perspective again and again.

Before he died, my friend Craig Shell used to tell me that's all there is—perspective. He used to say that all the time. "One minute, you see one thing. The next minute, it's a whole different story."

A different story. Like snow on the beach.

Sherri

"The joke of the world is less like a banana peel than a rake, the old rake in the grass, the one you step on, foot to forehead. It all comes together. In a twinkling. You have to admire the gag for its symmetry, accomplishing all with one right angle, the same right angle which accomplishes all philosophy. One step on the rake, and it's mind under matter once again. You wake up with a piece of tree in your head."
Holy the Firm, by Annie Dillard

just before

2010-12-29T23:44:00.000-08:00

Remember that can't-sleep anticipation of something really good coming? A childhood Christmas morning? Or the night before the first day of seventh grade? Or the entire day before the State track meet - such a big event that it was held at Ricks College?

I've not been disappointed.

Christmas morning, 1973, Fairchild AFB, Spokane, WA. Santa must have enjoyed the cookies because he left the Barbie Airplane made by Mattel United Airlines for yours truly. What more could an 8-year old girl want?!

Seventh grade began at Bountiful Junior H.S. with the only class I really wanted to take: Art. In a real art-classroom completely dedicated to making and learning art. I was in heaven. It almost made up for the completely lame excuse of a home-economics class later that same day in which I was instructed how to make a grilled cheese sandwich and a "milk-shake" made without a single scoop of ice-cream - a clear abomination in the household where I grew up. My father signed my class-withdrawal slip himself, and I believe I got to take shop instead. Total win-win.

And that track meet in Rexburg, ID. Spring 1981. I ran my best time in the qualifying heat of the 440-yard (no such thing as the 400m in the U.S. schools back in those days). My cousin Christine came over to the race and we got something to eat afterward, but I can't quite recall anything more - except for the feeling of pure elation that stuck with me for a long time. What put wings on my feet that day? Could have been the sunshine that broke through the rain clouds on that cold spring afternoon, or the way the air moved over the track. Or maybe just plain luck. I would never run a better race again.

Now smack in the middle of the holidays, it's one week from the start of my first residency in the MFA program at Pacific University, and I am all kinds of excited. Christmas-Barbie-airplane-7th-grade-state-track-meet excited.

Of course, it takes a leap of sorts. The push-off the block at the starting shot. The release of a held breath. A step through an arch to a new freedom.

It could be big.

Feels like a good thing.

Sherri

"As he swung through the air, trembling, he saw the blackness give way below, like a parting of clouds, to a deep patch of stars on the ground. It was the pond, he hoped, the hole in the woods reflecting the sky. He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars." - The Living, Annie Dillard

landing

2010-12-14T22:26:00.000-08:00

It's foggy in Longview most mornings this time of year. I turn north with the wind to my back, and a bunch of geese are hanging in the air over the local soccer fields. They are landing, feet down, necks arched forward, wings bent and still. Kites loosed of their strings, gliding into the wind.

Landing.

Geese mate for life and will stay together during all seasons. Swans, too. I knew that when I was a kid from reading about Louis and Serena, the eventual mated couple in E.B. White's "Trumpet of the Swan." In the end, content and drifting in a state of almost-sleep, Louis thinks "how lucky he was to inhabit such a beautiful earth, how lucky he had been to solve his problems with music." Humans would be so lucky to know their life-long mate from the clear trill of a trumpet.

Geese on the soccer fields, Longview, WA

My own mate is away tonight, working. But he left me cozy at home with a full winter supply of stove pellets and new windshield wipers for an uneventful drive to and from Longview.

Let the rains come. Let it be cold. And I shall be happy for my best friend to return.

I am content. Lucky.

Sherri

They don't know how long it takes
Waiting for a love like this
Every time we say goodbye
I wish we had one more kiss
I'll wait for you I promise you, I will

I'm lucky I'm in love with my best friend
Lucky to have been where I have been
Lucky to be coming home again
I'm lucky we're in love in every way
Lucky to have stayed where we have stayed
Lucky to be coming home someday

Jason Mraz, "Lucky"

a grateful heart

2010-11-27T21:18:00.000-08:00

Photo by Zachary Kaufman / The Columbian

Late this morning, I drove around the corner from the store, and suddenly it was all lights and sirens. A procession of motorcycles stretched all the way up the old highway, escorted by more than a dozen police cars. It was the bikers' annual Toy Run. Harleys, Hondas, all kinds of bullet bikes, old-school BMWs, a few homemade varieties, what could have been an Indian, one with a restored sidecar. The riders wore all types and sizes of leathers, rain slickers, scarves, military uniforms, hats, helmets, bandanas, fringe, Carhartts, boots. They rode in rows of two, headlights on.

These last few days have been a time of intentional awareness for the gifts of my life. An opportunity to be shored up with gratitude - enough to summon up some courage and reach toward what would seem impossible. Better than New Year's resolutions, these wishes are borne on the strength of a grateful heart.

Unpack. That "easy" move to the new house from just across the street was not exactly all that. At the very least, there are boxes of books and enough stacks of random "stuff" that I cannot park in the garage. Yet.
Write more, second-guess less. I am defeated most often by my own self-doubt. With some practice, perhaps I'll be able to turn down the volume on those gremlins.
The little black dress. Surely this is the year. C'mon. Otherwise my initial thoughts about the gym are correct - that it is just punishment for getting older.
Embrace the moment. Every one is a gift. It is often in the smallest of moments when the universe reveals itself to our limited human eye. Trying not to miss it.

Colts to the Superbowl. Because I'm a big, nerdy fan.
Two beautiful twin girls would knock at my door. Yes, our worlds are 25 years and a universe apart, but in so much beauty and wonder, there could be room enough for our own moment.
Health to my clan. Health enough for us to love our families, serve with compassion, and witness the daily miracles as they manifest.
Peace. That we might be a country not at war.

A sustainable, living houseplant. Released from the curse of the black thumb.

Sherri

"Life is like a cigarette, smoke it to the butt." ~ Harvie Krumpet

i am

2010-11-23T23:14:00.001-08:00

Morning Moon
Originally uploaded by cazjane97

There is ice in the yard and a skiff of snow. The hummingbird feeders are frozen and have to be brought in the house to thaw, the birds tick-ticking their displeasure in the cold. My meditation today is to be in the moment.

I am.

Cold tingles in my nose like a bee sting. My eyes water. The moon is full on the horizon ahead of the dawn.

Later, pink clouds bring the sun up, and I drive north on roads slick with ice along the dark shores of the Columbia River.

I am, I remind myself.

I think my time is not my own, but I am here by choice and grateful for it. Many paths open before me, await my step. If I have the courage.

My friend runs and slides his feet on the frozen street and falls - almost. He laughs.

I am, I laugh.

At home, it's warm and there's my family. The street outside is blue with snow and moonlight. Inside we talk. Eat. Share stories. Listen. Read.

I pour the tea. Cool it with a splash of milk.

I am.

And so I am.

Sherri

Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching. ~ Satchel Paige

any given day

2010-11-12T22:45:00.000-08:00

Talking with my darling husband earlier today about the frailty and resilience of the human spirit, and the conversation evolved into something about the thought process of solving geometry theorems. I know, it sounds crazy. And super-nerdy.

Given a traumatic event followed by variable chaos (self-made and/or otherwise), prove happiness.

Prove faith.

Prove peace.

Does it take a certain kind of philosophical introspection to surpass living at a level of survival? Why do some people experience life trauma and never recover, while others move through the same experiences seemingly unaffected? Or lifted to a higher plane of living as a direct result? Is the difference genetic? Spiritual? About willingness? Effort? Luck?

In retrospect, I would be a different person today if I had not passed through even the smallest darkness of my life. Definitely a different person for the light.

Given this day, prove awe.

Two hummingbirds sparred outside my window this afternoon. They flew in tight circles under the porch roof, grazing the tops of the BBQ grills at the edge of the deck, out into the yard and back again. One landed on the butterfly-bush against the fence while the other stopped at the feeder. They traded places briefly, and then resumed their chase. I only stood inside the window, a cup of hot tea in my hand.

Given any day, prove gratitude.

The universe is resplendent with wonder.

I thank whatever gods may be.

Sherri

If I have courage enough to open the next door, it is not darkness that spills out, but rather light that flows in.

20-ish years

2010-11-05T23:15:00.000-07:00

Pacific University mascot, Boxer

I am returning to school in January, accepted to the MFA in Writing program at Pacific University. Only 20 short/long years from my graduation from Weber State University and 28 years from my high school graduation.

I admit, school was not always my favorite, but it had its moments.

Things in School I Did Not Love:

Mr. Eborn's Government class - right after basketball practice and way too disruptive of my attempts to catch a morning nap
Home Economics - after one week, I got to take shop instead
School assemblies
Dissecting frogs in Biology class
Detention - not ever like the Breakfast Club at all
Driver's Ed with Mr. Collier: "How many horses were in that pasture we just passed?!" So not on the test....
School lunch
7am religion class (BYU) - who thought that was a good idea

Things in School that Did Not Suck:

The Shelley Russet

Basketball. Coach Jensen was the best, Stairway to Heaven was the song to play in the locker room to start a good game
Notes in class "Dear Bubbles.....Yours, Zero" (Yes, I was Zero)
Sound of Music, Camelot, Cinderella, Ten Little Indians, and Mr. Best's drama class (SHS)
The Shelley Russet
Summer school at Skyline H.S. in I.F., "21 Gun Salute" and everything by Queen and E.L.O.
Cutting class to go hang out at Tautphaus Park or ski Kelly's Canyon - depending on the season
Watching football reruns in Biology class
Lunch from Huntsman's Food Town: 1 bottle Mountain Dew, 1 Snickers
Track meets - Home or Away
Mr. Mortensen's Geometry, Trigonometry and Pre-Calc (SHS)
Mark Strand's writing class (UofU)
Dick Alston's economic history class (WSU)
Merlin Cheney's directed reading on Thomas Hardy (WSU)
Lee McKenzie (WSU) RIP

So excited for the next adventure. Having been a Shelley Russet, BYU Cougar, UofU Ute, and WSU Wildcat, I anticipate only the best as a Pacific University Boxer.

Sherri

reading for First Wednesday

2010-10-15T22:58:00.000-07:00

First Wednesday Readings* presents:

Sherri Hoffman and Mary Milstead
Wednesday, November 3
7 - 9pm

Blackbird Wine Shop & Atomic Cheese
4323 NE Fremont
www.blackbirdwine.com

Sherri will be reading from the middle of her new novel, The Wildish Boys.

Mary will be reading from her new novel that is not really about Bigfoot.

Also reading:
Jillian Starr
Christy A. Caballero

Very exciting! Look forward to seeing you there.

Sherri

*First Wednesday Readings is a series of readings, performances and wine-tasting held at Blackbird Wine Shop, 4323 NE Fremont, 7-9pm. This show is 21 and over.

the small-big line

2010-09-26T21:55:00.000-07:00

For context, I have spent several late nights/early mornings watching one of my most favorite movie actors, Clint Eastwood: The Outlaw Josey Wales; Unforgiven; Gran Torino; Pale Rider; The Good, The Bad and the Ugly; Fistful of Dollars. Small-big lines are those memorable, game-changers for which Clint is famous:

"Man's gotta know his limitations."

"Go ahead. Make my day."

"Right turn, Clyde."

"Get ready, little lady. Hell is coming to breakfast."

"Are you feelin' lucky, punk?"

"Sorry, Tuco."

It's the weight of the story, empowered by the plot, characters, and reader/viewer empathy. Some classics:

"What remains?" cried Ivanhoe; "Glory, maiden, glory!"
Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott

"Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"
Bartleby the Scrivner, Herman Melville

"The horror! The horror!"
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

"A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!"
Richard III, William Shakespeare

What's your favorite small-big line? Leave a comment or post it to my Facebook page - I'd love to know.

Sherri

p.s. This week is Banned-Book Week. September 25 - October 1. Support those amazing, thoughtful and unafraid authors; read something banned!

fast forward

2010-08-23T07:02:00.000-07:00

That idea that we are each in control of our own destiny is quite possibly a myth created by the same ivory-tower dreamer who wrote every Leave It To Beaver episode and Disney happy ending script. To quote one of my friends, Randy Allen: "It clogs my bullshit filter."

Oh, I'm a huge fan of happy endings. Don't get me wrong. And for all the whirlwind life-comes-at-you-fast events of the last month, I've got nothing to complain about.

My point is simply that control is an illusion. A grain of sand thinking it controls the incoming tides.

Last weekend, my family and I spent a few days with my parents and my baby brother and his family at a cabin on the Wenatchee River. "Cabin" being a relative term as it was a spacious vacation house with all the amenities: hot tub, gourmet kitchen, double-decks, BBQ grills. We canoed up and down the river, ate way too much food and blackberry pie, played tourist in the town of Leavenworth, scouted Lake Wenatchee, bought fresh peaches and beans from the local fruit stands.

One morning, a baby barn swallow must have crashed its first flight out of its nest. It fell onto the main deck where my daughters and nephew were all doing the morning chill session. My husband and I had taken the canoe across the river to look for the tracks of a mama bear and her cub reported in the area. We came back to my girls calling to me, "Help! Help! What do we do?" They were distraught that this small bird was huddled down on the deck.

My husband, always resourceful, cleared the way of deck furniture and miscellaneous child items from the deck so that the baby bird might at least run back towards the nest area. Which it promptly did and remained huddled against one of the stairs all day and all through the next night. The two parent birds continued to feed it, alternately pecking and chirping at it in some kind of bird-speak.

The next morning, the feedings continued. Then in an instant, not unlike any other instant before it, the baby bird flew away. The three barn swallows swooped out together over the river, and I lost track of them in the flurry of all the other swallows feeding on mosquitoes and mayflies over the water.

Controlled destiny? Sheer luck? I'm not a big believer in limited options, and I don't believe in luck (really), so I have to go with the life-happens theory.

The only catch is that sometimes it happens quickly. In the flash of a bird's wing.

Don't miss it.

Sherri

take a chance on me

2010-07-26T01:21:00.000-07:00

The brown moth on my front porch was about the size of my open palm. Close up, its patterns were luminescent browns, golds and reds. It flicked out a delicate, white antennae like a fine-toothed comb that followed the movement of my camera. Its body was covered in something like soft fur and seemed to shiver at one point. I snapped my photos quickly to catch it before it could fly away.

Nothing is exactly what you see. While there's something admirable about living without pretense, it's rarely not complicated. And always intriguing.

I have four sisters and two brothers, all younger than me. None of us are just alike, but there are some definite genetic markers. It's that nose, eye color, knock-knees or shape of our calves, curve of lips or high forehead, that resemblance to our mother, father, cousins, grandmother, great uncle, aunt.

But it's complex, beyond counting red-eyed flies and white-eyed flies. Throw in environment and upbringing. It's response to stress. Sleeping patterns. Thickness of vital arteries. Tendon flexibility. Favorite color. Propensity to tick. Tolerance to light and noise. Shoe size. Perhaps one despises cats or loves the rain. Has an amazing roll cast. Plays the piano by ear. Sketches portraits. Bakes perfect lemon meringue pie.

The great mystery is not so much the extent of potential—vast and varied, it seems—as it is what we do with it. All that we carry forward, genetic or developed, informs and supports what we do next. So what you see is just the beginning. I am more than my brown hair, hazel eyes, freckles over my nose and that little scar on my lip. Perhaps the unassuming ring on my finger may not appear sacred as it is for me. I may be quiet. Perhaps I laugh too loud. Perhaps I cry easily or not at all. There is story in every piece of me.

My collective story builds relationships, connects the dots, flexes perspectives and thought with a critical review, taps into my deepest fears and joys, draws beauty from the moment. From a brown moth.

I did not see the moth except for that single morning when the rain came down in a fine, summer mist like wet fog. By the time I checked the mail in the afternoon, the moth was gone. That's the other thing—it's all so fleeting.

Sherri

"You could be an astronaut if you wanted to, but you're not!"
~ Capt. Phil Harris

"I'm exactly what you see, honey; take a chance on me."
~ Bob Seger

at work

2010-07-18T16:49:00.000-07:00

Head down, I am in the middle of a rewrite, working out some issues with the structure of the novel. I shifted some pieces around about a month ago, and it changed up some real-life facts. The timeline shifts solved other issues, eliminated flashbacks and some "telling" to fill in the gaps - all important. Still feels like the right thing to do.

Last year about this time, I was struggling with POV, shifting verb tense and narration. Some big nuts and bolts to grapple with, and it felt overwhelming, but necessary. Solving for voice cleared the way for new variables to surface. Revealed the equation, so to speak. Solve for y; substitute, and solve for x.

The original novel timeline is mapped on a whiteboard over the desk in my home office. The most recent working timeline is a flexible set of post-its stuck to the top of my coffee table. I posted one version to my Facebook page the other day; this one is today's iteration. Note the bare space in the center. That's the transition to the start of 1976, still missing.

If I have learned anything, it's to trust the process. Keep writing forward. The missing post-its will appear; the stuck points will resolve. The human mind is an amazing place of relationships, connections and story.

The other thing I know is that for every decision I make, another writer out there will make the exact opposite one. I attended a fabulous session of the Tin House conference on Friday, disagreed completely with the presenter's evaluation of a Barry Lopez piece, and came away with some valuable perspective about my own plot structure. All hail diversity.

Today's morning trip to the grocery for toilet paper, milk and potato chips solved a piece of dialog. If I had a sign, I suspect I would have to wear it 24/7, taped to my forehead: Writer at Work.

Sherri

"I think," said Anna, playing with the glove she had taken off, "I think...if so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love."

~ Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

only love

2010-07-14T00:13:00.000-07:00

It is early summer, and my family loses one of its patriarchs. My friend loses a child. Another, her father.

The season is cool and unseasonably wet. In the midst of it, I spend several weeks with my 91-year old grandmother. She is frail, slow of step and hard of hearing, but with a quick wit and a girlish giggle. Her hair is a perfect coif so white it is silver.

Grandma tells me stories easily. I have only to ask a leading question and then sit back and listen. Her courtship and marriage to my grandfather. A miscarriage. The births of her children, three cesarean deliveries. The military years. The family Cadillac. Her house in China where they were stationed until the Americans were evacuated. How she was the only one to get off the ship in Japan, a young military wife with three small children, to wait for my grandfather. The estate in England. Her bridge club. The car crash that left deep purple scars on her knee. The other one that left her unharmed, belted into the flipped-over car. The beloved red cocker spaniel, stolen the night before they were transferred from Ohio. Texas rain. Hill Air Force Base.

She tells me how it was for her the night my grandfather died. She had become fatigued by his extended illness, and on that night, she slept alone in their king-size bed. She had been his wife for more than 70 years.

When we walk together, I support my grandma at her left elbow. In the grocery aisle. At the hairdresser. On Friday when we go to Ruth’s Diner with my aunt and mother. Grandma orders mac and cheese because it is soft for her new teeth. She eats most of her lunch and drinks two full glasses of raspberry tea. She is engaging and chatty. By the time we get back to the house, she is tired. I hug her goodbye.

"I love you, Grandma."

"I love you, too, dear."

Blue rainclouds hang low over the Wasatch Front on the morning I board my plane for home. The teenage boy next to me says he is from Kansas City. Missouri, not Kansas. His mother has told him to watch out the other side of the plane when we land in Oregon to see Mt. Hood. He's on his way to summer camp. The plane taxis down the runway for takeoff, and I am crying. Goodbye.

So many gone from me. My grandfather, his last days in the nursing home. Goodbye. My bright, beautiful, addicted cousin, last seen through the glass window of a jail cell. Goodbye. My friend, like a brother, died too young. Goodbye. My first two babies, given for adoption more than 25 years ago. Uncle John. Aunt Vernetta. All of my other grandparents and great grandparents.

Grief opens up a hollow space, fresh as dug earth and rich with the loam of loss that I will carry all my life. The plane turns at the end of the runway. Sunlight slips through the clouds to glitter in the rain, and I understand that only love could give rise to such sadness. Profound love.

The boy in the next seat fidgets and tries not to look at me. Our plane takes off, circles the valley, turns out across the Great Salt Lake. Goodbye.

I have nothing else, so I wipe my face with my jacket.

"Missouri, huh?" I say.

"Oh, yeah," the boy says. His eyes are blue. He looks relieved.

"Is all your family there?" I say. "In Missouri?"

Sherri

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

~ Thomas Hardy (1900)

the edge is okay

2010-06-28T10:28:00.000-07:00

So I'm at the gym yesterday on the recumbent bicycle, iPod blasting (thankfully) an Audioslave album over the piped-in techno-remix muzak, reading a book about quantum physics and Buddhism. One of my friends waved and then called me a "strange duck." I think I'm okay with that.

Mainstream has never been my gig. I always felt out of place growing up. Outside the group. Not at the cool kids' lunch table. Not quite the back-of-the-bus crowd. Flailing to find a place, I acted out in a lot of different directions to fit it, some more harmless than others.

If you can survive the cold and inevitable heartbreak, there are gifts to being on the edge. Perspective. Objectivity. Scope of vision. Variety of thought and experience. Deep friendships. Freedom. Love.

I've stood at the tops of the tallest buildings in Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Tokyo. Sheared sheep. Danced the Charleston. Sang Ave Maria on stage in a nun's habit, no less. Played the piano in a New York City penthouse. Rafted the Snake River. Stood on Mt. Fuji. Built a barn. Roofed a house. Barrel raced from Butte, Montana to Rigby, Idaho. Rock climbed. Loved a man with long, dark hair and eyes like blue ice. Skied heavenly powder and raucous moguls. Ran away. Milked cows and mucked stables. Looked down into the Grand Canyon. Stole food for my children. Witnessed a solar eclipse. Fished deep rivers. Played my guitar and sang nursery rhymes to children in a single-room schoolhouse in a Mexican village. Hiked over the Great Divide. Shot a rat in the kitchen of a house in Malibu. Laughed with my friends. Walked through rice paddies in Taiwan. Birthed babies. Saw whales. Rode a horse over a rattlesnake. Lived on the streets of big cities. Jumped waves in Lake Michigan where the sand squeaked under my shoes. Played the violin. Married my one true love in a meadow at the foot of a volcano. Camped in the rain. Sang until I thought my heart would burst with happiness. Shook hands with a President. Rode an elephant. Saw green sea turtles on a black sand beach. Flew over the English Channel in a WWII-era Russian bomber trainer. Stood in Hiroshima. Watched a river of lava flow into the sea. Drove many miles to see meteor showers. Bought cannoli at a deli near Times Square in the middle of the night. Lost children. Drove across the United States, coast to coast. Witnessed a thunderstorm rise over the Grand Tetons and sweep across Leigh Lake. Put my bare feet in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans from both sides. Wept.

Eyes open, I'm just happy to be here.

Sherri

"To live in an evolutionary spirit means to engage with full ambition and without any reserve in the structure of the present, and yet to let go and flow into a new structure when the right time has come."
— Dr. Erich Jantsch, astrophysicist

meditation on rain

2010-06-06T23:06:00.000-07:00

A gentle tapping on the leaves outside my bedroom window. Music in the drainpipe.

Grieving for a friend, my night had been restless. The rain soothed me to sleep in the early morning hours so that I awoke purposefully in the gray of dawn before the phone or any alarm clock.

In this life, I have spent many years in drier places. East in the high-mountain deserts of the Rocky Mountains where rain is scarce and water sources instead from snow-melt, there are massive clonal colonies of Quaking Aspens. Populus tremuloides. Quakies. The round, silver-green leaves shake at the slightest breeze, a soft patter. The sound of rain. I came to call them "raindrop trees." A dry rain. Same soothing sound.

My home in the Pacific Northwest is blessed with rain, glittering, wet drops to adorn each leaf and branch with brilliance. Rain is not exclusive; it touches all. White oak and cedar. Lupine, stonecrop, vine maple. Garden path. Weeping cherry. Black basalt with silver slick skin. Walnut shell.

Its whisper is deep water, ocean surf, waterfall, tide. River. Fog. Cloud. Heartbeat. Sweat and skin and blood. Water in and through me. Of me.

I am rain.

I am nothing.

Everything.

Sherri

"Human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another."
— Tom Robbins (Another Roadside Attraction)

solitude

2010-05-30T14:35:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I spent some time at the Oregon Extension in Lincoln, Oregon. It gave me some space to focus solely on my writing, specifically on the Wildish Boys novel. Funny how it was just a few weeks ago and it already feels like months. That brief moment of stillness came and went, quickly followed by the excitement of the reading at the Press Club, travel arrangements for my darling husband, and a flurry of graduation preparations for my daughter from the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics and my brother, a new PhD graduate from the University of Washington.

Lincoln is a place given to the study of spiritual matters and contemplative retreats. It is a place where men are hand-milling the wood for the building of the new chapel in the meadow across from the bunkhouse, near where I saw grazing deer.

My own spiritual center is nurtured in solitude. It glistened with the rainwater on the leaves of the fir tree in the morning. Spread out thick and rough with the bark of the Ponderosa pines. Paused with the attention of a black-tailed deer. Reflected in the gray-white clouds from the slick surface of the millpond, cut through with the vees of the swimming Canadian geese.

I can reach back and touch that quiet from Lincoln. It opens like the winter memory of cherry blossoms. As restorative as the recall of a child's birth. Sacred as love. I carry it with me, writing forward.

Grateful.

Sherri

Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

shout out!

2010-05-25T23:54:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone who came out to the reading at the Press Club. It was a really great experience for me, and I was honored to be included with my fellow writers, Joanna Rose and Scott Sparling. They both read pieces that were engaging, unique and full of real life.

Reading from the podium was a bit nerve-wracking. Had to keep pulling my breath from deep, like the monks taught in meditation. That seemed to work. Kept me from feeling like I was drowning. Had my game-face, my story-telling voice and my favorite boots. On.

Once I started, I didn't look up so that I wouldn't lose my place (that was the nightmare from the night before, along with the one where I turn the page and it's blank, and so is the next one, and the next...).

Keep pace. Keep breathing. Don't rush or your tongue twists up. Read my story.

It's a far cry from my 9-year old self. Dyslexic. Displaced, this time into a whole new country called the United States. With a severe lisp that landed me in special education for a few years. (You can still hear it, soft, but still there.)

It's even further from some dark places where I ended up in later years. Spiraled down and dragged along the bottom for far too long. Or perhaps just long enough.

The victory for me last night was just to be there. Bonus points for the positive response to the Wildish Boys.

A big shout out to the Mountain Writers Series. They continue to sponsor readings every third Wednesday of the month at the Press Club. Check their website for the list of events, including the upcoming conference: www.mountainwriters.org.

Another to the Pinewood Table Writing workshop. That's the fancy name for Stevan Allred and Joanna Rose, both amazing writers and poets, mentors and teachers. Both my friends.

I remain grateful. And amazed.

Sherri

"Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can."
- Annie Dillard

simmer

2010-05-17T12:13:00.000-07:00

Sometimes in the middle of the night, I wake up and realize the answer to a stuck point. It's the solution to some twist in the story, or blank spot in the plot or one of the characters.

It always feels odd, but I shouldn't be so surprised. It's happened that way for years. When I am doing heavy programming (in my alternate work-life), the midnight epiphany is sometimes the untangling of code or direction of structure. Graphic designs have come to me in the night, a vision of layout or branding.

Occasionally it is so amazing, I have gotten up out of bed and headed to the home office for immediate implementation. Other times, I write it down on some scrap of paper or bookmark. On the headboard, there is a collection of torn-out corners of notebooks, sticky-notes, and magazine pull-outs, each with some middle-of-the-night scribble. Even my cell phone has a set of digital night-notes.

Granted, it's not always the greatest of thoughts or the be-all-end-all answer. Some of my notes make absolutely no sense the next morning. Like this one:

"Anticipation is the 32nd Flavor."

No clue.

The process is what I latch onto. Like simmering a good sauce, distillation of the thought jumble. My brain turns it around and over while I grocery shop, drive to the kids' school and back and forth and back, cook dinner, water my garden. Sleep.

I become our own best fortune teller. Holding my questions forward, the answer manifests. Whether it is in the night, on the elliptical at the gym, or smack in the middle of some really horrific draft of writing.

It's a good day when I get to participate in the process. In those terms, I've certainly been gifted with a lot of good days. I remain grateful.

Sherri

not so big

2010-05-10T14:21:00.000-07:00

My extremely fabulous friend Mary Milstead spent time with me yesterday, on Mother's Day no less, to help me work on a chapter in my novel. We started out sitting on her front steps in the sun until it got far too bright and hot for May. Then we moved to the backyard, dubbed Little Italy for the fig tree and the big wooden table that was built by the neighbor, Mike Suri (of Suri Iron, and my daughter's metal sculpture mentor).

I am so grateful for Mary and the community of writers of which I find myself a part. I came here 15 years ago and at the time knew only one person in all the the Portland/Vancouver area, and he has since moved away (Love you, Max!). And yet I am blessed to be surrounded now by so many dear friends and colleagues, some of them talented writers, musicians and artists, many of them wonderful spouses or partners or parents, some with bevies of busy children, or skilled professionals completely willing to share their time and craft. There is a vibrant culture of cooperation and collective well-being in this area, and I am often overwhelmed with gratitude for having landed in this place when I did. I was so broken when I got here, and in large part, the community that embraced me has also helped heal me.

In a job interview last week, one of the questions was: how did you hear about this job? And why did you apply?

"Well, one of my friends, Jen Kilcoyne, a really amazing graphic designer, knew I was looking for work, since all of my friends knew I had been laid off, and she sent me an email forwarded to her from one of the businesses in the building where her office is located saying that another business that was doing really well and had recently moved to a new location had an open position. I met Jen some years ago through a programming friend, Eric Miller from Squishymedia, with whom I worked on a complex back-end-front-end website project, and he introduced me when I needed a designer to do a company rebrand. A year later, I worked with Jen on another really cool project where I worked with a super great team of programmers and designers (we should do Happy Hour again sometime, guys), after which I moved to another company when another friend called to say they had the perfect job for me, which it was until it wasn't, which left me unemployed, so I applied here because this looks like a great opportunity."

Or the short version:

"A friend forwarded me the job announcement, and since my previous contract was not renewed, I have been looking for a job just like this."

Tomorrow I meet with Joanna Rose, from The Pinewood Table Writers (I think the actual table that inspires the name is hers) to prepare for our reading at The Press Club. Then to the local university to check out their program. Then good coffee with one of my former supervisors to talk shop and compare life stories.

But first, I have an appointment with my trainer at the local gym, where she is still mad at me because my previous employer is responsible for the installation of the billboard near her apartment complex that features a mega, super-sized photo of her ex-boyfriend. With lights, so she can see it at night. Yup, that's it at the top. (sigh)

The world is not such a big place.

Sherri

reading at the Press Club

2010-05-07T11:03:00.000-07:00

Pinewood Table Writers are reading at The Press Club
Monday, May 24
7:30 - 9 pm

Joanna Rose, reading from her new novel, Ruby's Roadhouse.
Scott Sparling, reading from his new novel, Wire to Wire.
Sherri H. Hoffman, reading from her new novel, The Wildish Boys.

The Press Club
2621 Southeast Clinton Street
Portland, OR 97202

*Update: Hosted by the Mountain Writers Series. Suggested donation at the door: $5. Visit their website for more information, or download the event flyer (note: the flyer has a 7:00 pm start time, but the correct time is 7:30 pm)

Follow Scott on Twitter: @sparling
Follow the Press Club on Facebook
Follow the Mountain Writers at www.mountainwriters.org

Very exciting! Look forward to seeing you there.

Sherri

anticipation

2010-05-02T13:58:00.000-07:00

A pair of finches is working really hard to make a nest in the hanging bowl of jasmine on the front porch. They both flew out of there, incensed and squeaking, when I watered this morning. Is it the same pair that battled for that spot last year?

The robins are back, same as every year, to the nests in the arbor, and there's a red-cheeked flicker on top of the suet feeder, practicing his shrill scree for the annual mating performance from the chimney cap on our roof. The tulips are almost gone, but the columbine is up and the oak trees are filling in green and thick. In the garden, violets are everywhere. The first daisy is about to bloom.

It is an awkward juxtaposition of familiar cycles and my own unknown path. I am out of work but not without options. My daily schedule fills with writing and tasks, meetings with friends and people, job possibilities and networking. Time goes both fast and slow.

Another turning point, to be sure. Anticipation feels just like being in trouble. I stir the wet garden dirt with my fingers to hold me in this moment.

By this time next year, there may be finches in the planter again. There will be these same spring days of hard rain and sun breaks, columbine and daisies in the garden.

Perhaps exactly like today.

Sherri

"There's no normal life, Wyatt. There's just life."
- Virgil Earp (Sam Elliott), Tombstone, 1993.

smack

2010-04-16T23:18:00.000-07:00

I have re-written the last chapter three times in the last couple of weeks. Not well. Just re-written. Most of what I wrote today and yesterday is what I call "smack." 99.9% of it will be the pieces left on the floor after the final cut. It's the stuff generated during a spin-cycle. Writer's block. Call it what you will.

In theory, the act itself is supposed to be helpful, like working a muscle during the off-season. Writing my way off the fabled plateau that my trainer at the gym is also strategizing to break me out of. In light of her recent workout plan that has left me limping with sore hamstrings, perhaps I need some new interval writing workout. Some kind of power program that launches the chapter into the next level.

I feel a sudden need for some leg-warmers.

Sherri

sacred objects

2010-03-28T12:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I attended the launch party at St. Johns Booksellers for Dixon Ticonderoga, a new zine issued by Stevan Allred. At the party, some beautiful pieces were read, some fabulous haiku (the one by Harold Johnson was my favorite) and, of course, cake in the shape of a pencil. It was a personal journey for Stevan, and I respect and admire him for the courage it took to take this project through from creative thought to final launch.

Then I zoomed home from St. Johns, picked up my family, and we were privileged to attend the opening of the e-merge 2010 art exhibit at the Bullseye Gallery. Fellow writer and artist Greg Bell had a piece accepted into this prestigious show. All of the pieces were some kind of glass-work, of which I know nothing. My lack of knowledge of process allowed me to view each piece simply for its beauty, delicacy, and astounding visual impact. They were all stunning pieces. I was quite amazed by the iterations of form. Greg's piece was beautiful and, for me, evoked a thoughtful, timeless leap into what could be the origins of the universe.

Pretty heady stuff, the stimulation of words and art. I am moved by what opens up in response. We connect instinctively to those objects around us, even the most mundane items of our daily lives. It is why we buy souvenirs at the London Underground gift shop, keep the pens from the Hilton at the Walt Disney World Resort, save the photos of our last visit to the coast, and still have a cardboard box in the attic full of papers, trinkets and beer bottle caps from when we were in college.

I heard the term "sacred objects" from Stevan and Joanna Rose during a writing session at the Pinewood Table, but the theory is not new. Raymond Carver wrote about it in his essay "On Writing" (Fires, pg 15):

"It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power."

The secret, if that's what it could be called, is that the objects themselves are not what moves us; it is our own human context to which we respond. John Gardner wrote, "Fiction seeks out truth." (The Art of Fiction, pg 79) We respond to those great human truths that are the basis of all of human emotions as they filter down and are applied to our own experiences.

The glass Radio Flyer in the art exhibition touched my memory of the day I came home from the hospital with my second daughter and gifted my oldest, then two and a half years old, with her own red wagon to go along with her new baby sister. My emotional response was emphasized by the fact that both of these daughters stood with me at the gallery, grown now and in their early 20s, beautiful, unique, intelligent and creative. It was a sweeping feeling of joy and pride—deep emotions evoked by this single object of art.

John Gardner goes on (pg 80):

"Restating old truths and adapting them to the age, applying them in ways they were never before applied, stirring up emotion by the inherent power of narrative, visual image, or music, artists crack the door to the morally necessary future. The age-old idea of human dignity comes to apply even to the indigent, even to slaves, even to immigrants, now recently even to women."

(I laugh at this quote every time I read it because of the last phrase—but that is another tangent of thought.)

The objects that recur in my own writing are often simple—coffee cup, ring, candle, rolling pin—or those thrilling one-time discoveries of the unusual or unexpected that then become endowed with the power of the moment—rabbit's foot, found arrowhead, hand-tied marabou jig, or a single 9mm bullet scarred along the cap. What life-changing moments are attached to each of these sacred objects? To clarify the truths connected to those moments is the ongoing challenge.

I write forward with purpose, having worked through Gardner's exercise suggestions to the final one that is the last line of The Art of Fiction:

30. Write a fabulous story using anything you need.

Sherri

echoes

2010-03-22T00:13:00.000-07:00

Lately there is a recurrent theme in my private circles about childhood and those places we came from. Coincidentally, in this month's Smithsonian magazine, Joyce Carol Oates wrote a beautiful piece about her home: Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again.

I have made previous reference to my own childhood as nomadic; my father served in the USAF and moved us at least once every year of my life until I was 13 when we landed in southern Idaho. It proved to be the longest stretch of time in my life up to that point in which I lived in one area. I attended both Shelley Jr. and Shelley Sr. High School and graduated in 1983.

Those years were often inglorious for me, but to be fair, they were not without light. Dickens's two cities had nothing on Shelley, Idaho. In the midst of turmoil and what would prove to be far-reaching developments, I also had some solid and joyful moments.

Most of the goodness in my memories comes from the kindness of people in my life: friends, teachers, coaches, piano and guitar instructors, sheepherders and horse handlers. And from the wind-swept, sun-warmed, rolling landscape of the foothills of the Rockies. On a clear day, the pristine tips of the Grand Tetons might peek over the hills to the east. To the west, the snub-nose of a cinder cone was the marker by which I gauged the setting sun's seasonal movement along the horizon. I spent many evenings in the back of my parents' house perched on the top bale of the haystack or up on the metal roof of the horse barn, hoping for the sun to land right in the center of the scooped out crater.

In the best of my dreams now, peace manifests as one of the frequent rides on horseback down the long country roads or across the freshly turned up wheat or potato fields, my gold and white dog, Topper, loping alongside.

Those memories still move me. Continue to inspire. Inform a foundation that sustains my beliefs of family, faith and, perhaps more significantly, love. Much of the character development in my writing reaches back and taps into those times, those people and the dynamics that swirled around my life.

If one writes what one knows, it is inevitable that the extension of place should touch each story. People I know, places and unfortunate ghosts reflect in my characters: Sandra and Howdy, Thad, Maverick and Sebastian, Wilson Taylor, Jack Melvin, Vincent, and the Wildish boys. None of these would exist without the people whose paths my own has crossed and perhaps re-crossed, for better or worse.

I am better for it all.

Sherri

"I have sometimes sat alone here of an evening, listening, until I have made the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming by and by into our lives."
~ Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

3.14: pi day

2010-03-15T00:02:00.000-07:00

π = C/d

Pi is an equation I learned somewhere along the mathematical education path long before grumpy old Mr. Collier in 8th Grade pre-algebra. Long before Mr. Mortensen's geometry class at Shelley High School. Its formula is burned into my brain, but in the last 20-ish years that I can think of, I haven't had to use it for anything. At least not directly.

There's all kinds of theory proven and otherwise about right-side and left-side brain activities. Do math-minded people write better novels? Do musicians program better software systems? If I make an amazing huckleberry pie, am I also disposed to write beautiful poetry?

The text for my Art 202: Drawing class at Weber State University was "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain." The book remains one of my favorites to this day. Its theory is to engage the brain with a new perspective that opens up the ability to draw at a deeper state of creativity, even a subconscious level. I recommend it to every writer, poet, artist and math geek.

Because in the end, everything we do is all about perspective and the engagement of thought. Whether we are writing novels, designing bridges, practicing medicine or baking pies.

I baked two pies today. One blackberry and one huckleberry. In celebration of Pi Day.

3.14. Celebrate infinitely.

Sherri

writing rules

2010-03-07T14:22:00.000-08:00

Elmore Leonard compiled his writing experience and wrote a list of rules for writers. His 2001 article in the NY Times: WRITERS ON WRITING; Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle.

Inspired by Leonard's list, The Guardian recently collected writing rules from Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, AL Kennedy, Hilary Mantel, Michael Moorcock, Michael Morpurgo, Andrew Motion, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Philip Pullman, Ian Rankin, Will Self, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson: Ten rules for writing fiction.

I love these. I love how conflicted the lists are. I love "Hooptedoodle." While I can't speak at the celebrity-level success as these authors, I do write. Here's some things I know. Also conflicted.

1. Write every day. I would love to have a special, established, sacred time in which I get to write, but I don't. That is the nature of my current reality. So I write whenever and wherever I can. Even if it is a single line that shakes out of my head while I am going to work and I have to write it on the back of a grocery receipt while driving down the freeway, although not advised due to some of the traffic implications. My writing brain does not stop just because I have to buy a gallon of milk or do a load of laundry. Honor that.

2. Capture those brilliant epiphanies in the moment. No matter what it is. If I wake up in the middle of the night with some amazing turn of phrase, I make myself get up and write it down right then so that I can read it in the morning and usually discard it for the rubbish that it is. Otherwise, it is gone from my head by morning, and I am left with a nostalgic fragment of memory that I had The Perfect Line. The glory of those moments of brilliance is generally "hooptedoodle," but the regret of not writing them down is real, and the process is far more important - it keeps me engaged.

3. Muses are overrated. Vodka was my Muse for a very long time. Although my writing from those vodka-years was mostly drivel, it was necessary. In retrospect, I probably could have written loads of drivel without the vodka, but that is not my reality. After a ten-year dry spell without either vodka or writing, I discovered that writing doesn't need a muse as much as it needs a sustained, consistent, daily practice.

4. Discover what process works for you and then keep doing that. My brain works faster than my fingers and eyes. It always has. They have real names for this now: ADD, OCD, neurosis, etc. I lack a formal diagnosis. But more than 25 years ago, my math teacher sat me down in front of an Apple computer (DOS), instructed me to write, and turned off the screen. When I just need to get what is in my head out, I turn off the screen and type. Or close my eyes. The trick is two-fold: don't stop until it's all out; and for god's sake, keep your fingers on the home keys.

5. Get everything down at least once. I always write more than what ends out in a finished piece. Better to write it all, and then cut the crap. Some of the crap will end up in something else. Some of it, thankfully, will never surface again. It's all part of the process.

6. Every pre-conceived ending always changes. I just expect it now.

7. Read every day. Novels, biographies, non-fiction, articles, blogs, newspapers, magazines, billboards, websites, backs of cereal boxes. I need language in all forms if I ever expect to be able to write it.

8. The greatest source of authentic dialogue is real people. I hang out in coffee shops, markets, business meetings, parties, hallways, city streets - anywhere there are people talking to each other - and listen. Then I write it down. Word for word if I can. I have not found any better published source for teaching real dialogue.

9. All input has value. A renowned national poet laureate evaluated one of my early pieces (from the vodka-muse years) in a university class I was taking at the time, and his written comments included a suggestion that I choose a different art form. After the sting had worn off, I was able to find helpful direction in his comments. If I am unafraid to look at it, both the negative and the positive input, I always learn something. For the record, I took up drawing and am an adequate artist to this day.

10. You can't make up better stuff than real life. For all the hair-brained, elaborate, whimsical, imaginary stories that flit through my head, the best ones for me are about real life. My absolute favorite rejection letter came from an East coast magazine declining my story, "Doing Time in the Real World" that said, "...while the writing was genuine, the material itself seemed unbelievable." The story, later published online by the Noneuclidean Cafe, is based on my several years of employment in the child welfare system as an Outreach worker, and my own early poverty-stricken years as a college student living in a trailer court with two small babies. All the facts are real, even if they are not exactly mine or not factually in order. Among other things, I did find a fly wrapped up in a package of meat, and there was a horribly embarrassing scene at the grocery afterward. Once I did burn my bangs right off with a lighter. And I was miserably grateful for government cheese back in those early years. I don't actually think you can do better than reality when it comes to a good story.

So there they are. Not so much rules, as just my experience.

Sherri

we are not so big

2010-03-01T00:46:00.000-08:00

A man of great compassion and teaching called Sam Dunlap officiated the ceremony of my wedding more than twelve years ago. And while I cannot quote him exactly, as he offered up prayers to the Four Directions, he said of us humans, "We are so small and weak."

And we are.

12 January 2010. Léogâne, Haiti. Earthquake magnitude 7.0. Currently 230,000 confirmed dead.

27 February 2010. Off the coast near Concepcion, Chile. Earthquake magnitude 8.8 on the Richter scale. Damage is still being assessed.

28 February 2010. 7000 miles away from Chile, in Hilo Bay, Hawaii. The waters of the bay ebbed and flowed in 20-minute cycles to the depth change of about one meter. All the water in the entire bay.

Each of these events has been widely broadcast. Yesterday, I watched a live feed from Hilo on the internet. All Pacific islands were on tsunami alert, as far away as Japan and the Aleutian Islands. The wave did hit, but thankfully caused less damage than was expected.

For all our human accomplishments, the world in which we are but Guest is a big place. We tap into the very smallest fringe of its enormity when we launch rockets into space, erect towering skyscrapers, transmit the Olympic Games from Vancouver, B.C. Canada.

The earth below us shifts in what must be a relatively minute way in the greater Universe, and Haiti crumbles. Chile collapses. All the water in Hilo Bay rises and falls. Over and again.

In keeping with the rules of Universal Paradox, as small as we are, we remain a part of the greater whole. Understanding what that means is reached through the practice of compassion. Meditation. In the extension of service to others.

My wedding ceremony more than twelve years ago was held in a meadow at the foot of Mount Adams. Before our families, friends, and the Universe itself, my husband and I spoke vows of love and commitment to each other and to our children. To All that is Sacred and Greater than Us All.

Because it is an honor, and also a great responsibility, to have the opportunity to carry love with us on our journey through this big universe.

Sherri

"For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love."
~ Carl Sagan

touchstones

2010-02-21T11:57:00.000-08:00

In times of change, I reach back for those most familiar, my touchstones to old foundation.

Meus terra firma.

(*groan* my readers say. she's going to quote Joyce or Tolstoy or Yeats. some classic favorite she's mad about.)

Perhaps near the end. But here, near the beginning, I give honor to the name returned to me three times yesterday: Seth Godin. His blog rolls into my iGoogle every morning; he was referenced in a job application I completed; and his Facebook page sent me a notice. You can't ignore that.

Seth says:

"Your most vivid fears are almost certainly not the most important ones. We pay attention to the loud and the urgent. This can lead us to ignore the important and achievable paths open to us--because we're so busy defending against the overwhelmingly dangerous (but unlikely) outcomes instead." (Seth Godin's Blog, Feb. 21, 2010)

Life happens. Jobs change. People change or go away. Or come back. Medical procedures happen. Grief happens. I ride out the sorrow, fear, joy and hope, as tossed as the crab fishing boats on a stormy Bering Sea. I can only hope to be half as graceful as the mighty Hillstrands or the late Capt. Phil Harris.

Early this morning when the light was still pre-dawn out my window, the words of George Webber came to me, through unsettling dreams and foggy half-sleep:

from Chapter 47: Ecclesiasticus

". . .the essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning. The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix. The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and that everything must change. The growing man is Man-Alive, and his 'philosophy' must grow, must flow, with him." (You Can't Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe)

In this moment, the white and yellow daisies in a glass bowl on the table were given to me in love. I can hear my youngest child awake in the other room, and I'm fairly certain there is another cuppa tea in my very nearest future.

I remain grateful.

Sherri

this is called the Mystical Whole

2010-02-13T21:25:00.000-08:00

Reading the Teh Ching today, and the chapter suddenly sounded far more familiar than from my own studies:

from Chapter 56: "He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know."

Jackie Chan's voice spoke the words in my head. It took my brain a few minutes to do a data sort, seeking the recognition (visualize the Windows turning hourglass or Mac spinning rainbow).

From The Forbidden Kingdom (2008):

Jason Tripitikas: What do we do now?
Lu Yan: How good is your Gung fu?
Jason Tripitikas: [puzzled look]
Lu Yan: He who speaks, does not Know; He who Knows, does not speak. Surely you're masterful.

One of my favorite movies. How could anyone not adore the first and only movie (so far) starring both Jackie Chan and Jet Li? I've watched it more times than I can count. First at the HD theater, Cinetopia, and lately every time I'm channel surfing and it's on HBO.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to hear Taoism from a Chinese Immortal, Jackie's character, Lu Yan. Sometimes the dots don't come together too quickly for me. Probably means my learning is not complete.

No surprise there.

Sherri

real life is way too funny

2010-01-23T23:36:00.000-08:00

Here's my latest comedic bit*:

"The economy is still pretty rough where I live. Last night I was in my car, stopped at a red light, and I got rear-ended by a licensed massage therapist. She gave me her insurance info, her card, and phone number. And 10% off."

ba-da-boom.

True story - you can't make up stuff like that.

"An attorney standing on the corner witnessed the entire thing."

da-boom.

Thanks, folks. I'm here all week.

Sherri

*Inspired by my sister-in-law's husband, comedian Justin Worsham. He is a funny guy. Check out his website at www.justinworsham.com or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/justincomedy.

love equals

2010-01-08T23:47:00.000-08:00

My parents taught me and my siblings to play tennis mostly by demonstration. We would all go to the courts, and they would play. The four (or six) of us would spread out on the adjoining court and throw tennis balls at each other over the net. Flail our rackets around. Lay on the side in the grass. Push the babies fast in the stroller. I can't put a clear finger on how old I was. It just seems like a regular ritual during my childhood.

We got better. Relatively. Anything was better once we started making intentional contact, racket and ball. From the front.

Sometimes we made up our own scoring system, similar to ping pong. Or basketball. Both seemed more logical. What does "Love" equal? Really? I always thought that someone must have got it backwards, that it should be the culminating score of the winner.

The best games were later when I was in high school. Those were hard years. I was always in a lot of trouble it seemed. With my family. Teachers. Coaches. Sibs. But every so often, a couple of my friends - Linda, Barb or Brett - would rescue me from myself, even for the briefest moment. We would drive fast out of Shelley, west towards I-15 to a park on the east bank, inside curl of the Snake River. (Searle Park - was that its name? Or is that just what we called it?) To play tennis.

We were such rebels. Perhaps. Or maybe we were just a bunch of kids being kids. Those were good times. We played, scored Love-to-Win, argued line-checks and serving faults, form, rackets. Then sat around in the grass or leaned up on the car to talk about life. School. Parents. The Future. We might have smoked a cigarette. Or drank a Pepsi or a Mountain Dew from a glass bottle.

Given some genie-wish opportunity, I wouldn't re-live those angst-filled, chaotic years for any price. But I remain grateful for those softer memories of tennis. Family. And good friends.

Sherri

under my feet

2010-01-03T19:48:00.000-08:00

My mother was surprised this holiday season to get a greeting from an old friend with whom she had lost contact over the years, another military wife like herself from years ago when my father was serving in the USAF, and we were stationed in Japan. My mother called last night, excited to tell me about her found-friend.

Even though I was young, I remember many of those same places and people as my mother. Our perspectives are different, and often the only reason I remember certain families is because I remember their children, older or younger than me.

I have six brothers and sisters, but there were only four of us when we lived in Japan, one born there, so she was just a baby. Many of my memories are visual - the smooth wood floors of our home in Kokobunji with its sunroom and beautiful garden, the red girders of the Tokyo Tower and the gray water and enormous ships in Tokyo Bay, deep square baths tiled with little square tiles, the white and red bullet trains, Pocky sticks, markets and open-front stores, and the standard school uniforms of white shirts and dark skirts or shorts and knee-high socks. I loved school, and I loved cartoons. My heroes were the Samurai and the super-hero warriors prevalent in the local culture. I also loved the reassuring snow-white peak of Mt. Fuji that I could see from my bedroom window.

We were transferred around in Japan. We lived off-base, then on. I learned to ride a bicycle when we lived in the military housing with The Big Tree - a set of three two-story apartment buildings arranged in a horseshoe. In the center of the open yard grew a single, enormous tree, a pine or fir of some kind. All of us little girls and perhaps some of the boys were so impressed and enamored by the teenage Gunnell boys who could climb The Big Tree. Evenings we would sit out on the apartment stoop as it got dark to see if a game would start up of "No Bears Are Out Tonight" and to see how long we could stay out before our mother would insist we come in. My parents were connected to a tight-knit group of other military families in their church as well, and I remember it was a very nurturing and supportive community within the larger whole of the Japanese culture. I did not at first know what my father did for a living; I assumed that he was one of the armed military personnel like the security guards who saluted us in and out of the bases.

By the time we came back to the states, that community life was all I knew, and re-entering the U.S. was a culture shock in all its glory. My early context was completely different from that of my peers - of geography, language, social structure, TV characters and superheroes. I had grown up as a minority in a vivid, ancient culture of respect and ritual. Our beautiful and quiet nanny/housekeeper had assured me, "Buddha love you same as Jesus," and my sense of the world had been broadened by the miles of travel and the wonders we had seen: Hiroshima, Shinto shrines, peaceful gardens, small villages, the Cherry Blossom festival, Kyoto, fishermen throwing their nets in the ocean, rice paddies, the pink and blue fish kites of Boys' and Girls' Day. I loved the elaborate silks of the kimonos, the white swans in the moat around the dark stone walls of the Imperial Palace, and old stone and wooden pillars of the Buddhist temple. I had danced the Obon with my mother and sister to celebrate our ancestors and couldn't begin to find the words to explain to my new American schoolmates what that even meant.

To make my social integration more difficult, I had a severe lisp and, to my shame, was put in a special education class for language and reading. The little square flash-cards of vowels kept in my childhood scrapbook still evoke a twinge of pain, although it feels more like sorrow today.

My father served his final year at Fairchild AFB in Spokane, Wash. Afterwards, he moved us to Bakersfield, California. Then Tustin. Then Idaho, Utah, and back to Idaho. Along the way, I gained three more siblings, several dogs, a horse, a guitar, and a reinforced sense of nomadic detachment. Over the years, it would manifest regularly as a light flutter that would kick around inside my stomach, telling me it was time to move on. In 1984, my parents settled in Utah, and I continued to move, ungracefully, through my life and to different places and spaces until I landed in the Pacific Northwest in 1995.

So much happened that year, good and bad, change and more change. I moved nine times in the next 12 months. But the spiral of journey had turned inward, and I moved one final time and have since remained in the same place for ten years, content for the time being.

I remain grateful for those years during my formative childhood. They continue to influence my life for good today. Perhaps it is, finally, something else our Japanese nanny told me so many years ago when I was young and full of questions.

She said, "Answer under your feet."

Sherri

meant to delight

2009-12-29T21:24:00.000-08:00

After all the rush of the holidays - tree decorating, lights, family dinners and laughter, mountains of wrapping paper and boxes - today it snows. Beautiful snow softens all the sharp corners, covers the brown leaves, and turns the evening blue in that light that only snow holds at night.

I was given a gift card for Powell's Books by my father. He called before Christmas.

"What kind of gift cards can I get for you and Rick?"

"For Rick, REI. Easy," I said. "For me, you could get Macy's or something for me to get some new work clothes. Or Powell's."

He might have snorted. At the very least, it was a scoff. "Work clothes are not for Christmas."

In the Christmas card that accompanied the two gift cards, he wrote, "These gifts are meant to delight. Love, Mom and Dad"

A couple nights ago after another round of holiday hoopla, after it got quiet again in my little home, I ordered my books.

Holy the Firm
by Annie Dillard
(trade paper) USED

Behold the Many: a Novel
by Lois Ann Yamanaka
(hardcover) USED

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
by David Wroblewski
(trade paper) SALE

New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers: Tales of Parasites and People
by Robert S. Desowitz
(trade paper) USED

True Compass: A Memoir
by Edward M. Kennedy
(hardcover) USED

New Path To the Waterfall 1ST Edition
by Raymond Carver
(hardcover) USED

Love Medicine: a novel
by Louise Erdrich
(hardcover) USED

Order confirmed. Thank you for shopping at Powell's Books.

I am delighted.

Sherri

personal reflection at solstice

2009-12-26T00:28:00.000-08:00

With all the holiday preparations and celebrations going on, I have been a bit neglectful of my blog. Almost all of my writing energy has gone into the novel as of late. On one hand, it feels productive to have that body of work nearing completion. At the expense of everything else. Current submissions are down to almost nothing. Multiple small projects suspended in varying stages of draft. Two larger projects waiting in the wings for time and space. A drawer full of post-it notes with story lines, scenes and snippets of dialogue.

Don't get me wrong. I remain grateful for it all.

There was a time when I was not writing anything. Given up the dream. Lost all faith. For almost ten years, I wrote only business letters, marketing copy, or technical web instructions.

Ah, I lie. I did find a set of song lyrics that I wrote during that time - angry, hurt, and emotionally broken. My old friend Craig Shell once said that professional musicians often made their best money on lyrics like these. No money here. Mine never made it out of the yellow pad stashed in a box marked "Personal" along with legal papers from the divorce, old resumes, bus schedules, and random news clippings ranging from the Oklahoma City bombing, local crime stories, and the 1995 NBA playoff standings - probably more of a story there.

But I digress.

December 31, 2003. The end of a most trying year. My husband was working two states away and only able to come home every month or so. My children were in varying stages of crisis and teenage angst, flailing around to find their way in the world. One of my nephews was living with us as all of his parents were away. I was in the early stages of what turned out to be a deep cycle of depression. We lit a handful of fireworks that night to send out that old, bad, sad year. My nephew said, "If it doesn't get any worse, it will be a better year."

And then it was worse.

The strain and the pain of that next year pushed me to a point where I had to write again, if only for my own sanity. Which led me to meet Christy Krug. Who directed me to Stevan Allred and Joanna Rose. Who in turn connected me to many, many other very talented writers who continue to guide, support and inspire my ongoing writing practice.

For every anxious writing session, rejected draft, or sleepless hour in the middle of the night spent agonizing over some character detail, I equally celebrate the process. The act of writing has given voice to something deeper, powerful, intimate. Something previously lost. Call it faith or inspiration. Call it love or light. Whatever it is, it is restored to me, and in turn, has restored my being.

Over this next week, I am doing a final sweep to complete a first draft of the current novel for its first full review. 40 hours of work, at least. I am at the same time anxious and hopeful.

And grateful.

Sherri

About the photo: the analemma is the path of the sun throughout the year. The shape can be tracked by taking one picture per day, always at the same time, with a fixed camera.

where are you from?

2009-11-24T23:05:00.001-08:00

Seattle skyline
Originally uploaded by ricknsherri

Over the last year, I have visited the Seattle area a number of times to do some geographic research for the current novel in progress. It's a beautiful area - sky, water, city and trees.

During this last trip, my husband and I stayed right on Lake Union and went out exploring in all directions. South on the Alaskan Way viaduct to White Center and then west from Burien to the Puget Sound, Ed Munro Seahurst Park. Up Queen Anne Hill for a view at Kerry Park. North across the Fremont Bridge and into the Ballard area for breakfast at The Dish. Dinner at Ivar's Acres of Clams on the waterfront where a big bird flew up to the wharf, maybe a pelican or heron.

My husband spent part of his childhood in this area. He shared the traditional family outing trip with me - east to Issaquah and Boehm's Candies, where they still have exceptional chocolates, but no more Saint Bernards. We drank frosty mugs of their specialty at XXX Rootbeer and then went out to Snoqualmie Falls. The lodge, once with the same name as the falls, is now called Salish Lodge.

I have lived in the Pacific Northwest for almost 15 years now and realize I've gained something that was always missing throughout my nomadic childhood and youth. This place of trees and rain, shades of green and gray, convergence of rivers, Sound and sea has given me roots and a place to call home.

Sherri

More photos of this trip are posted on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hoffman-clan/sets/72157622641629017/

music is my muse

2009-10-25T13:00:00.000-07:00

At least one of them. For me, music comes from the same place as my writing. It evokes the same emotive response in a way that beautiful writing moves me. I would consider it the highest level of achievement to touch that place of music with my words.

Luciano Pavarotti embodied that place of words and music and bore its beauty to the world. He will be forever revered. This is his last public performance at the Opening Ceremony of the 2007 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. I am moved to tears each time I watch this performance.

I am forever indebted to my parents for bringing music into our home. My father recorded countless hours of classical music on reel-to-reel from the USAF base library where we were stationed in Tacoma before we went overseas. I grew up with Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Dvorak, Bach, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Beethoven - from the classics to the obscure. And my mother enforced the daily 30-minute piano practice that gifted me with a tactile connection to the music we heard every day. It was how I first heard the muse that inspired me to write at all.

Sherri

what's real - what's not

2009-10-10T23:52:00.000-07:00

Spending a lot of time lately fact checking. If you write a story into a real setting, I think you have a responsibility to make sure you get the real parts right.

Questions like did it really snow in Redmond Christmas 1981? Where would a brand new U.S. Marine go to boot camp if he enlisted in Seattle? And would said same new Marine be hot or cold on August 17, 1990 as he arrived on his new assignment? Or who won the Super Bowl in 1982? (I admit, that's a cheater one because I remember when it happened.)

Today I watched some classic NFL footage. Read stats from all kinds of places, online and that old traditional method: books. Spent some time talking to my USMC cousin in D.C. with some real-life experience in the Gulf War. Read some historical TIME magazine articles. Googled "Scud Bowl." Watched part of a George Clooney movie.

Over the last couple of months, my husband has had to field a whole lot of random questions. As if I was the 3-year old he needed to revisit: do the schools close in Tam O' Shanter if it snows? can you find me a 24-year old weather report? 25-year? what high school did those kids attend? when you were a kid, did you see a Steller's jays or just scrub jays? was there a fence around the golf course? what kind?

Confounded by so many notebooks of so many facts, I have been writing around and around the story today. Perhaps sleep will bring it all together into an intuitive informing of character for tomorrow.

Or perhaps I'll just have that dream, like my daughter, where I am really hungry and the refrigerator is full of only one thing: eggs. Cartons and cartons of eggs.

Analyze that.

(sigh)

Sherri

good, bad and ugly

2009-10-01T21:33:00.000-07:00

Wednesday is the longest day of the week, what with the writing workshop from 6:30-10 pm. It comes right after a full day of work, drive across state lines (not as far as you might think), peanut-butter sandwich and a triple-shot americano. Last night was especially difficult since I have this pain-like-fire in my back that is probably left over from Saturday when I slipped on spilled milk and fell in the grocery store, quite the moment of excitement in itself.

Personal visuals aside, workshopping has been a valuable experience for me. I gain so much from being able to participate in the shared experience of working with other writers to study and practice the craft of writing. I appreciate the practical nitty-gritty of language - the good, the bad AND the ugly. The collective experience of the group becomes a powerful, motivating and positive learning experience for me. Plus, there are times when I get to hear absolute moving, heart-breaking beauty, like last night with a piece from one of the writers, Mir.

17-ish years ago when I was actively writing and trying to get into an MFA program, I was in a weekly workshop with author and teacher François Camoin. I also did a conference workshop with author Phyllis Barber. Both were inspiring. It seemed like a bright beginning to a bright future.

My reality is that life fell apart shortly thereafter, not in any small part due to my own sustained shortcomings. I lost my family. Lost myself. Lost my faith. Everything I thought I knew about anything changed. And I stopped writing. I did not write a word for almost ten years.

New Year's Eve 2004, two women who had become my friends and mentors were killed by a drunk driver on Martin Luther King Boulevard as they drove home from a celebration powwow. Losing them seemed unbearable, beyond tragic, and I was without a way to grieve. I had lost so much, and while I had come back a great ways, I still could not seem to get my feet solidly under me. As if I had gone so far down that there was no coming back.

Desperate for some solace, I began to write in a plain college composition book. Journaling, perhaps, although it wasn't really a daily journal so much as it was an outpouring of words and pieces of language that spun through my thoughts day and night. The act of writing gave me the smallest pause in the chaos, a moment of peace. It gave me a voice when I did not think I had one left. Allowed me my grief and my joy.
Connected me to that which is greater than us all.

I reached out and joined a peer review group led by Christi Krug, Wildfire Writing. Christi is a kind and supportive writing coach and exactly what I needed at the time. She also pointed me in the direction of Stevan and Joanna and the current workshop group, Over the Pinewood Table, that has also resulted in what I would consider a number of life-long friendships.

I have gone in and out of workshops ever since. But more importantly, I continue to write. Daily. It probably just sounds sentimental to say that writing saved my life. I wonder. But so what if it has?

Sherri

read something banned

2009-09-28T20:54:00.000-07:00

This week is National Banned Books Week. What would we have missed if we bought into the fears, discrimination or human arrogance that caused books to be banned? Here's some of what I would have missed:

Ulysses by James Joyce. Read on a personal challenge by one of my college professors. It challenged everything I thought I knew about story and writing - probably the best thing that could happen to an aspiring writer.

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Amazing humor and insight into human character, suffering and survival.

Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman. The world would be a small, mean place without the Barbaric Yawp.

The Call of the Wild, Jack London. I was in 4th grade when I read this. Have wanted to visit Alaska ever since.

Black Beauty, Anna Sewell. "There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to other animals as well as humans, it is all a sham."

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley. Led to all kinds of rebel period reading, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Bronte. Horrifying.

Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau. Of all books to be banned in the U.S. Interesting.

William Shakespeare - depending on the source, many of W.S.'s plays have been banned for various reasons. Can you imagine studying literature without any bubble, bubble, toil and trouble? Or without evil Richard III? No Puck, Peaseblossom or Nick Bottom?

Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Imaginative source of most of the make-believe world of river-running and cave-exploring for me and my six siblings in the backyard tree-house and swimming pool of Bakersfield, Calif, summer of 1974.

Grimm's Fairy Tales. How would you not know that they threw the princess into the sea for being snobby.

The Little Mermaid. The non-banned version marries off a wide-eyed 15-year old to the first man she meets, while in the banned version, she shows some moral character and is turned to sea foam. Hmmmmm.

Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell. Broke my teenage heart.

The Story of Little Black Sambo. A Christmas gift from my grandmother. Of course tigers are the reason butter is yellow.

Grendel, John Gardner. Language, beautiful language.

The Lorax, Dr. Seuss. Funny, I always thought it was about taking care of our limited resources.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee. Was in 6th grade when I read this the first time. Made a solid impression on my wish to become a writer.

That's just a few. Here's some of the Top 100 Banned:
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (just finished this last week)
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
1984, George Orwell
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Native Son, Richard Wright
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawrence
Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence
Women in Love, DH Lawrence
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
A Separate Peace, John Knowles
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
Rabbit, Run, John Updike

Be a rebel. Read something banned. I am.

Sherri

horizontal and vertical

2009-09-26T18:49:00.000-07:00

I finished The Great Gatsby this morning. Overall, it was an enjoyable read, and I was touched by the tragic longing for that which is past. I can relate. No sense analyzing it, though, because I'm sure there is enough of that out there.

I did love the language. It is the combination of image and language that I find most appealing, carries more weight. Horizontal and vertical, terms from Stevan and Joanna. Scene plus introspection or assessment. My favorite pieces are like that. Here's some of my personal favorites:

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again. [p 184]

If that was true, he must have felt like he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. [p 169]

The track curved and now it was going away from the sun which, as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. [p 160]

And finally, one of my most favorite:

I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment, but he was already too far away and I could only remember, without resentment, that Daisy hadn't sent a message or a flower. Dimly I heard someone murmur, "Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on," and then the owl-eyed man said, "Amen to that," in a brave voice. [p 183]

Here's one from the Wildish Boys:

We walked together on the wide, cement sidewalk in the fading light, the street going on down the hill to the freeway ramp and Lake Washington. As far as you could see out past the unnatural squared off building tops of north Seattle, there was a fading pink above the Olympics, the reflection of light and water, and over Mercer Island, a glittering line of headlights cut through the black trees and the regular lives of other people that we could almost imagine were just like us.

Need a new book to read now. Suggestions?

Sherri

chocolates and bagels

2009-09-11T22:36:00.000-07:00

It has been over a year since I sat in workshop with Joanna Rose and Stevan Allred, so I thought I would be out of practice to start again. Instead it was a remembered comfort like visiting family (those ones who like you). Weds evening started a new session, and I was there with 11 other writers. It was all very exciting - the reading, the writing, the chocolates and bagels.

My breath still locks up in my chest when I start to read. Nerves. But by about page 5, I was fine. By the last page, I was already satisfied with my experience - even before the comments. The feedback was just gravy.

It's a good group. I am looking forward to next Weds. We'll see how well I'll be able to read, if at all, what with the emergency oral surgery I had on my jaw today (ice and Advil are my friends. But I digress...)

Launching into Chapter 5 and 6 this weekend to refine voice of the narrator, Jude Wildish.

Speaking of Wildish, I drove out of my neighborhood a couple weeks ago, and where there was a building the night before, there was nothing but a pile of rubble and some uprooted Redwood trees. It was shocking. Worst of all, gone was the big blue sign with a mountain tops and in big lettering: Wildish. I am crushed that the inspiration for my family name is gone. There is renewed construction on the lot, but for now, the Wildish family saga will have to go on without the sign.

Ah, well. Things change. Buildings go away. Screws fall out.

Sherri

distraction

2009-09-08T22:59:00.000-07:00

I have been known to almost miss the turning of a red light as I head down the road in front of my house, my attention drawn off by an interesting tree or a dog near the road. Or a chicken - there's chickens by the red barn up the street. It's just how my brain works, in a random, distractable way.

Mary Milstead is not any of those things. She is a wonderful writer and a dear friend. She has also been a long-standing reader of my work in progress and has given many thoughtful and constructive reviews, for which I remain grateful.

Last Wednesday, we met at one of our latest usual places - Coffeetime on NW 21st. Mary listened as I read both sets of my current revisions, each from a different point of narration.

Then, in a nutshell, she advised me to stop distracting myself and get on with my writing.

It seems my trees or chickens of late are of my own making, the questioning of my ability and perhaps a bump in self-confidence. Along the path of self-examination, there is a point where it becomes flailing. After gaining all the positive effects of re-evaluating the direction of my novel, I suppose I have done a bit of flailing.

But Mary was right, and it's time to move on. Outside of my over-analytical evaluation, my instincts tell me which direction to take this piece. There will always be different ways to approach each scene, options for character and narrator and description. But this is this character and this piece.

"Get back to work," she said. "And do what you do best."

Everyone needs a friend like Mary.

Sherri

stalled

2009-08-30T12:34:00.000-07:00

Until this spring, I commuted several hours every day to and from my day job. Over the years, the offices where I worked were in downtown Portland, then Gresham, Lake Oswego and finally, Tigard. The hours driving gave me time to think. Or music. "Reading" books on CD. Voices in my head - ha.

The thing about commuting is that the variable is outside of any participating driver's control. Timing can be predicted only in general terms, and anticipated heavy traffic days are sometimes, randomly, not. Or exponentially so. Planning is a veritable craps-shoot. I could map my hours, leave on time, use all my commuting tricks, and one stall on the bridge would add hours to my plan.

Such is my writing at the moment. Stalled out by one element. An unanticipated glitch in my thoughtful schedule. Granted, this particular element is key to the ultimate success of the story and warrants thoughtful review and selection. But, oh, how I wish I was not stuck here. It's the work-weary return drive at a full-stop on I-5 behind a raised bridge and a diesel truck dually accompanied by the bass-boom Honda Accord with tinted windows in the next lane and the open window blast of country music from the Ford truck behind you.

Here I sit. Sans country music.

The good news is that being stuck does not mean inaction. Not if you want to get anywhere. The re-write of Chapter 1 in first-person has been rejected. A second re-write is in process.

I know that when the traffic breaks free, it flows forward like before. As if the delay had never happened.

Someone honks. "Get ready."

Sherri

things i learned in conference

2009-08-13T22:36:00.000-07:00

The Willamette Writers Conference was a great experience for me. Lots of writers. Lots of writing theory and practical suggestions. First-time exposure to the art of pitching, a most amazing process to witness. I did not pitch anything myself - just trying to figure out how it works at this point. And I might need to work on my knuckle-ball.

I did get a one-on-one manuscript critique with an established writer. The first 20-pages of my novel in progress were submitted back in June, and at the conference, I had a meeting with author and editor Jill Kelly for the review. It was encouraging to get positive feedback. Also confirmed some of my instincts that I have been second-guessing up to now, although in retrospect, it would have been nice if I could have embraced some of those thoughts six months ago. Ah, well. What's that they say about water and a bridge?

The good news is I have a good, orderly direction to pursue as I move forward on the novel.

The bad news is my synopsis sucked. Ha. My first. Silver-lining is that there is "plenty" of room for improvement.

To quote my most favored (and frequent) rejection letter: Onward.

Sherri

black bird (reprint)

2009-08-07T21:26:00.001-07:00

Black Bird
by Sherri H. Hoffman

Those Mackey boys from up the road always teased Howdy. Called him Retard.

Sandra stepped down off the school bus, and before it had even pulled away with a puff of dust, the boys started throwing horse apples at the back of Howdy’s head. Howdy walked alone toward the wooded lane where Sandra knew he lived with his mother, although no one had seen her much since the flu outbreak back before Christmas. Howdy did all the shopping now, brought the brown chicken eggs to the grocery in his mother’s old wicker baskets. Ailing, he said when inquired after her health. His jeans hung low across his narrow hips, and his clean white t-shirt stretched across his broad, straight back, unflinching, even when the Mackey boys switched to small stones.

Stop it, you animals.

Sandra loves the Retard. Sandra loves the Retard.

Sandra called Howdy’s name, but he didn’t turn around. She had to run to catch up.

Howdy! What ya’ doing, Howdy? Can I walk with you?

Howdy slowed, bent forward, held a single finger up to his lips, then spread his hands low and wide. Sandra followed his crouch, holding her skirt down against her bare legs. Sunlight glinted off a filament of fishline stretching into the underbrush.

What is it? Who put this here?

His long, fine fingers lifted the line, held the tension, walked forward as if climbing the invisible thread. A scrabbling in the leaves, thump-thumping in the brush startled Sandra back a step.

Oh! Something’s there. Some animal. Howdy! It’s something!

The fishline looped around the bird’s yellow-stick leg. Its black wings were half-shrugged, half open, its yellow beak open and panting. Howdy called to the bird, soft clicks with his tongue. Sandra crouched closer, close enough to smell the musk of him, his hair, his skin warmed with sun. She leaned in, almost brushing up against the curve of his arm.

It’s beautiful, Howdy. A beautiful bird.

He wound the line around his fingers, cooing soft now. The bird’s yellow eyes were wide and still, its wings drooping. It flapped weakly and hop-hopped one more time. Howdy’s fine, long fingers cradled the bird, folded in the curve of wings, stroked the iridescent black feathers that shimmered like oil.

Howdy turned. His cheekbones were sharp ridges over the equally sharp jaw line, his full, red lips parted just so.

Let me touch it, Howdy. Pet the bird.

Howdy’s eyes were flat, black pools like tar. His right eyelid slanted lower, twitched. His hands held the bird out to her.

Sandra touched the shiny black of the bird’s feathered head. It sagged forward, its neck limp as grass, snapped. She sucked in her breath.

Howdy’s eyes narrowed. He smiled. A casual flick cast the dead black bird away into the bushes.

Sandra backed fast. Howdy’s hand caught her wrist, long bony fingers closing in a vise.

Howdy…

His full lips rounded, clicking soft with his tongue, and his other hand clamped hard over her mouth.

### End

Winner October 2007 Student Choice Award: Whidbey Writers (10/07)

Winner Editor's Choice Award: 2007 VERY Short Story and Narrative Prose Poem Contest, Lunch Hour Stories Magazine (3/08)

twitter poetry

2009-07-23T20:44:00.000-07:00

Here are the Twitters that came out of a whole lot of hours driving in a car full of sleeping children. It might be a new genre of poem.

Road trip

The lake below Multnomah Falls is still. Deer at the edge stand in their reflections.

There's brown pelicans in the Columbia on a sandbar near Biggs.

Rock sheep on the cliffs near Philippi.

And windmill farms outside of Arlington.

Just past the Bradock Slough and there are fields of Black Angus and a row of white bee boxes.

Lake Bob.

Horses spook near Cement Plant Rd. A palamino bucks. The running herd turns in the field like birds.

I think it was a deer in the sagebrush with its elegant neck and ears like cupped palms.

The Ontario OreIda plant belches rings of white steam. Wonderland Caterpillar of Potato. I'm just a girl, I answer.

Corn. Corn. Wheat. Corn. Potatoes.

Boise. We wave our hands out the window to my friend Justin Larson. Of course he sees us.

Utah.

Kristen says the sky is always the same dome but I think it reaches further down here. Down to the curve of the earth.

Four days later. The sun rises over Brigham City. Leaving Utah.

There's cows and sagebrush at Sweetzer Summit. And sun over the East hills.

Something you don't see at home: billboard of close-up dairy cow udders. Jerome, Idaho.

There are windmills at the 45th Parallel. Must be windy halfway between the North Pole and Equator.

The first time Becca saw the Columbia at Umatilla, she said, "That's not a river! It's a lake." Only the R's and L's were W's and she was 3.

Everything green.

Home.

Sherri

one bird at a time

2009-07-12T15:48:00.001-07:00

A couple years ago, Joanna Rose and Stevan Allred reviewed some of my stories and offered practical direction and some needed encouragement. Given my own evaluation, I discourage myself to the extreme. I told them, "I quit every day."

Joanna gave me advice from Anne Lamott's book Bird by Bird: write it "one bird at a time."

I am stuck in the third and final section of my novel, baffled by some plot movement and my inability to get what is in my head out on paper. This one has been going around and around for the past month. With my August deadline just ahead, frustration is my muse.

Outside the open window, three Mourning doves chase each other to and from the corners of the yard and up to the rooftop. A competitive threesome. For territory? Mating ritual? Play? The whirring mutter of their wings reminds me of old-school sci-fi alien spaceships. Earlier, a black-headed Junco fed seed from the patio to a peeping juvenile. And the brilliant yellow goldfinches have been all day on the thistle feeder, undisturbed even by the antics of the doves.

A light rain begins. Silver drops collect and hang from the branches of the rhododendron. I am content to make another loop through this chapter. One page. One raindrop. One bird at a time.

Sherri

heroes

2009-06-27T11:44:00.000-07:00

I have heroes. They are someone to grow up to be like. Someone who inspires uniqueness. Motivates growth. Presses on my resistance to change. Offers hope in my most private, pre-dawn moments of despair.

In my list, they should probably be separated into categories - fictional and real. The fluctuating distance between dreams and reality.

My fictional heroes are so most likely because of some aspect of their character that I admire, covet or am simply amazed by. And perhaps it is the reality of their character that makes them heroes.

"You know what you get for being a hero? Nothin'. You get shot at. You get a little pat on the back, blah, blah, blah, attaboy. You get divorced. Your wife can't remember your last name. Your kids don't want to talk to you. You get to eat a lot of meals by yourself. Trust me, kid, nobody wants to be that guy."
(John McClane - Live Free or Die Hard)

"Micro changes in air density, my ass."
(Ellen Ripley - Alien)

"He was paraphrasin' Nietsche, ya illiterate midget."
(Logan - Wolverine 35)

They become recognizable out of their creator's ability to carry forward the profound human essence, perhaps of someone nearby or influential: lover, grandfather, next-door neighbor.

"We're alike. I, too, believe that everyone should have a chance at a breathtaking piece of folly once in his life. I was twenty when they said a woman couldn't swim the Channel. You're twelve; you think a horse of yours can win the Grand National. Your dream has come early; but remember, Velvet, it will have to last you all the rest of your life."
(Mrs. Brown - National Velvet)

"Well, you can tell me now. I'm reasonably sober."
(Rick Blaine - Casablanca)

Once in a great while, I find real heroes, those living, breathing humans with heroic accomplishments or some monumental legacy of change or goodness. Or perhaps just people who have done something quite ordinary for whom I hold enduring respect and adoration.

"The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right."
(Dr. Paul Farmer)

I heard the Dalai Lama speak in Seattle at the Key Arena last spring. (see my earlier post)

Raymond Carver first inspired me to write at all.

"There isn't enough of anything
as long as we live. But at intervals
a sweetness appears and, given a chance
prevails."
(Raymond Carver - Ultramarine)

Flannery O'Connor prompted me to write the stories in my head no matter how quirky or bizarre. I discovered a recording of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and joy welled up in my chest at the sound of her voice. (Listen to it from this playlist)

"My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson’s blind housekeeper used when she poured tea–she put her finger inside the cup."
(Flannery O'Connor - Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction)

There's a much longer list, and I suppose there's always room for one more.

It's still early.

Sherri

i <3 ducks. really.

2009-06-24T20:42:00.000-07:00

Definitely that is the saddest duck. Ever.

When I was about 15, I took my little sibs to the zoo at Tautphaus Park in Idaho Falls, Idaho, where we stood on the bridge that spanned the pond and fed the ducks the bread from our sandwiches. It was spring and there were so many fluffy new ducklings.

Until the bread attracted the attention of the giant zoo-fed trout or carp that rose up to the surface and snagged a little duckling by its little duckling foot along with the bread and dragged it to the muddy bottom and ate it. I think that one of my little sisters may still be traumatized by the entire event, thirty years later. (Sorry, Amy)

I wrote a tragic duck story into "Road Dogs" that was published in Etchings Issue 4 - The Art of Conversation (3/08) by Ilura Press. Here's an excerpt:

‘Welcome to my family.’

‘Welcome to life. Your family doesn’t have a corner on dysfunction.’

‘Dysfunction would be a step up for my family. Did I ever tell you about the ducks?’

My mother rescued a batch of baby ducks off of the road by our old house. I was eight. Mama duck had been hit by a car, and a dozen ducklings were milling around on the road next to her body. My mother brought them home in a cardboard box and called Animal Control, who advised her to release them. So she did, into Crystal Creek at the end of our block, where they were promptly sucked into a drainage culvert, disappearing one at a time into the iron grate, aligned and orderly, like mechanical carnival ducks on a string pulling straight through the heart of the current.

‘My mother actually saved the last one. We took it home and named it Soup. In the night, Soup committed suicide. Body-slammed against the bars of the cage. Peter and I renamed him Compost.’

‘Nice,’ Vincent says.

‘The neighbour asks about the birdcage on the porch. I tell him, “We found these ducks.” And my Mom says, “No we didn’t.” Cuts me off. Like it never happened. Wouldn’t even acknowledge it. Ever.’

Vincent’s eyes narrow and he nods his head. ‘PTDD,’ he says. ‘Post Traumatic Duck Disorder.’

‘Psychosis. All-American family dysfunction’

‘My mom shot my dad with his own service revolver. You don’t hear me crying dysfunction.’

I roll my eyes. ‘I met your parents,’ I say. ‘They live in Tucson.’

Vincent and Lena are two of my very favorite characters, so I was thrilled to have their story put into print. (And I do love the Australian formatting by Ilura Press.)

And I do love ducks.

Sherri

chasing the eagle

2009-06-21T22:54:00.001-07:00

A bald eagle flew right over my car the other day while I was waiting at the light by my house. Chased by a crow. At least it appeared to be chased.

The eagle was flying at a pretty good clip, but at the same time, it didn't appear distressed at all. Could it simply have been going from A to B, and some over-amped crow had to throw in its final "and stay out" after the larger raptor's retreat? Exerting some birdie-machismo? Or perhaps pushed to go above and beyond to protect a nest, a territory, a mate?

The eagle could have definitely kicked some crow tail-feathers - it looked to be about three times the size of the smaller bird, equipped with talons and that great, hooked beak. The crow did not leave off its raucous pursuit even as far as I could see, and the car behind me honked, light turned green with me still sitting motionless in the lane.

I've been toe-to-toe with the bigger-badder before, scared spitless, knowing I was going to take an ass whupping. The adrenaline burst that kicks you in the stomach activates all kinds of reckless responses. It has to go somewhere, no matter how bad the odds.

But that's when it gets interesting - in that moment of unbalance.

It's Hannibal defeating the Romans. The Scottish rebels winning the Battle of Bannockburn. Joe Namath beating the 1969 Baltimore Colts in Superbowl III. Every Rocky movie. Han Solo and Chewbacca rushing the Imperial soldiers on the Death Star. We make our underdogs heroes and mythical legends. Chasing the eagle.

Not that it doesn't sometimes end badly. For every victory story, there's a defeat on the other side. But for today, I wonder how it worked out for that brave and/or reckless crow.

Sherri

synopsis

2009-06-16T20:52:00.000-07:00

syn·op·sis (sĭ-nŏp'sĭs)
n. pl. syn·op·ses (-sēz)
A brief outline or general view, as of a subject or written work; an abstract or a summary.

Synonyms:
condensation, epitome, abstract, abridgment, précis. See summary.

In what became an arduous process, the pieces were dumped out like so many collected marbles from a bag and sorted, examined, as it were, and assigned value and priority.

The plot was held up against Stevan's quintessential challenge: but what's the story about?

The characters floundered around in confusion, fell through some plot holes, threw inconsistencies back and forth between themselves in a quick game of Hot Box. And when it got too dark to see the ball, they went inside and sat around the table, drank Ovaltine or whiskey or Ovaltine with whiskey, and traded big fish stories. One of them knitted an afghan out of alpaca yarn.

The chapters were reordered. Renamed. Revised.

The title was removed. Or not.

First draft complete.

Round Two begins at the bell.

I love the writing life.
Sherri

random

2009-06-13T13:49:00.000-07:00

Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/

Weird and cool.

Sherri

chapter ones

2009-06-09T19:51:00.000-07:00

Writing has been focused on the first chapter most recently. And although I would love to report that it is going "smashingly," it has been a decidedly un-graceful process. Chapters 2-5 evolved the storyline so that the first chapter no longer included any of the right markers—the Wildish boys lived on the east side of Bellevue, then the west, then Factoria area; a pregnancy was in, out, then in; Pops was drunk, then...nope, still drunk. Not to mention the original premise of the boys' complicated genealogy.

Solution: return to the muse, sans super-massive black hole.

Chapter Ones.

Billy Bathgate (E.L. Doctorow)

He had to have planned it because when we drove on the dock the boat was there and the engine was running and you could see the water churning up phosphorescence in the river, which was the only light there was because there was no moon, nor electric light either in the shack where the dockmaster should have been sitting, nor on the boat itself, and certainly not from the car, yet everyone knew where everything was, and when the big Packard came down the ramp Mickey the driver braked it so that the wheels hardly rattled the boards, and when he pulled up alongside the gangway the doors were already open and they hustled Bo and the girl upside before they even made a shadow in all that darkness. And there was no resistance, I saw a movement of black bulk, that was all, and all I heard was maybe the sound someone makes who is frightened and has a hand not his own over his mouth, the doors slammed and the car was humming and gone and the boat was already opening up water between itself and the slip before a thin minute had passed. Nobody said not to so I jumped aboard and stood at the rail, frightened as you might expect, but a capable boy, he had said that himself, a a capable boy capable of learning, and I see now capable of adoring worshiping that rudeness of power of which he was a greater student than anybody, oh and that menace of him where it might all be over for anyone in his sight from one instant to the next, that was what it all turned on, it was why I was there, it was why I was thrilled to be judged so by him as a capable boy, the danger he was really a maniac.

Keys of the Kingdom (A.J. Cronin)

Late one afternoon in September 1938 old Father Francis Chisholm limped up the steep path from the church of St. Columba to his house upon the hill. He preferred this way, despite his infirmities, to the less arduous ascent of Mercat Wynd; and, having reached the narrow door of his walled-in-garden, he paused with a kind of naive triumph—recovering his breath, contemplating the view he had always loved.

Behold the Many (Louise Ann Yamanaka)

The valley is a woman lying on her back, legs spread wide, her geography wet by a constant rain. Waterfalls wash the days and nights of winter storms into the river that empties into the froth of the sea.

Another Roadside Attraction (Tom Robbins)

The magician's underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami. However significant that discovery may been—and there is the possibility that it could alter the destiny of each and every one of us—it is not the incident with which to begin this report.

The Wapshot Chronicle (John Cheever)

St. Botolphs was an old place, an old river town. It had been an inland port in the great days of the Massachusetts sailing fleets and now it was left with a factory that manufactured table silver and a few other small industries. The natives did not consider that it had diminished much in size or importance, but the long roster of the Civil War dead, bolted to the cannon on the green, was a reminder of how populous the village had been in the 1860s. St. Botolphs would never muster as many soldiers again. The green was shaded by a few great elms and loosely enclosed by a square of store fronts. The Cartwright Block, which made the western wall of the square, had along the front of its second story of row of lancet windows, as delicate and reproachful as the windows of a church. Behind these windows were the offices of the Eastern Star, Dr. Bulstrode the dentist, the telephone company and the insurance agent. The smells of these office—the smell of dental preparations, floor oil, spittoons and coal gas—mingled in the downstairs hallway like an aroma of the past. In a drilling autumn rain, in a world of much change, the green at St. Botolphs conveyed an impression of unusual permanence. On Independence Day in the morning, when the parade had begun to form, the place looked prosperous and festive.

You Can't Go Home Again (Thomas Wolfe)

It was an hour of twilight on a soft spring day toward the end of April in the year of Our Lord 1929, and George Webber leaned his elbows on the sill of his back window and looked out at what he could see of New York. His eye took in the towering mass of the new hospital at the end of the block, its upper floors set back in terraces, the soaring walls salmon colored in the evening light. This side of the hospital, and directly opposite, was the lower structure of the annex, where the nurses and the waitresses lived. In the rest of the block half a dozen old brick houses, squeezed together in a solid row, leaned wearily against each other and showed their backsides to him.

It's like returning to safe harbors. My heroes always restore my faith in the process.

The Wildish Boys (working title)

Church was not over, and we were walking home early. Ma had herded all of us boys out before Father Andrew began Confiteor after Sawyer called Lenny "stupid as Esau." Lenny said at least he had a birthright, and Sawyer punched him in the eye. Right there in the third row of pews.

"Onward," says every rejection letter I've ever received from Howard Junker, editor of Zyzzyva.

Sherri

for bigger trout

2009-05-25T09:50:00.000-07:00

Convergence: those unexpected "coincidences" that set you back on your heels in awe. Powell's Books seems to be a portal for convergence with their collections of new and used books. One of my recent visits for a gift resulted in a book on art that included in the pages some found artwork, a shopping list for acrylics and pencils, and a pressed cannabis leaf. Strong with the presence of the previous owner, it was the perfect gift for my artist friend.

Work on my novel is getting down to nuts and bolts, and I've had to reach out to libraries, photo galleries, books and even take a couple road trips in order to clarify the facts. It's not enough to write by experience if your facts are mis-aligned.

This week, the focus is fishing. My personal experiences are many and varied. I fished as a child with my father, then with my brothers, and now with my husband and my own children. Years ago, I was dumped by a boy I was dating after we went fishing together and I caught more fish than he did (3 - 0). And once I lost an enormous brook trout for my husband after he had played it in to the shore where I failed to net it before it flipped out into the waterway, gone forever—reasonable grounds for divorce, our friend Big Danny advised my husband.

The shortcomings of my memories are that they are attuned to the broad experience. In order to take the Wildish boys, my family of characters, fishing with their father, I needed a more accurate vision of the fish and the language of those who are the artists of their craft—the real fishermen.

Off to Powell's with a specific book title recommended by my youngest brother, Scott, who holds the esteem of being a real fisherman. Powell's has an entire section for fishing, and then sub-sections: fishing in the northwest, trout fishing, fly fishing, fly fishing for trout, and (my target) fly fishing for steelhead in the northwest. Advanced Fly Fishing for Steelhead by Deke Meyer. The author is a local expert and has written in particular about the steelhead on the Stillaguamish.

I browsed several books on trout, including Trout: an illustrated history by James Prosek. Inside the pages, a folded article "For Bigger Trout" by Tom McNally, Outdoor Life, May 1957. Of course, I bought the book.

In 1957, The Wildish boys' father, Abraham Leonard Wildish, was 21 years old. He was still living in Indiana with his family, never dreaming that his life would go to hell seven ways from Sunday over the next couple of years. Naive to the changes that would alter his life forever, he probably even read this particular article, his only aspiration to become the greatest of all fishermen.

Coincidence? I'm not a believer. But I believe in universal connection, the convergence of thought to reality, collective conscience, the repercussions of a lifted butterfly wing. Call it what you will.

Today's gift from Mr. McNally:

"As every fisherman who has chucked flies or dunked bait in a trout stream knows, big trout like big mouthfuls. Fishing records go on to prove that wherever large trout are caught on flies. . ."

Sherri

dreaming

2009-05-16T22:12:00.000-07:00

What do you dream at night? I have dreamed vividly since I was a child. Of people and places. Of family. Of loss. Some recurrent. Some nightmares. I have dreamed things that came true later - or perhaps were already true. Or perhaps just coincidence, if you believe in that.

Do you dream about flying? One of my children fell asleep in Anatomy class and dreamed of flying, and then falling, and woke abruptly when her head banged down on her school desk.

My favorite dream is of riding my horses as a young teen - it's almost like flying, clinging bareback to my favorite mare on a hot Idaho summer day, leaning forward over her rising withers as she lopes across a freshly ploughed field. It is my most restful dream and only comes to me in times of great need to be grounded or times of great joy.

Ten years ago, I kept dreaming about seeing a drowning baby and not being able to reach it in time. Interpretation aside, I would wake, terrified and shivering in a cold sweat. The baby was not mine, and the setting would be different every time - a mountain stream, an ocean beach, a clear lake. I was advised to step into the dream lucidly to save the child, change the dream, but it only heightened my terror to wake again and again, too late, all attempts failed.

Healing finally came for me from a group of women on their sacred ground, the ancient fishing grounds at Celilo where the Columbia River was once a large waterfall until the Bonneville dam covered it over and eliminated the traditional fishing rites of the local tribe. On this spot during an annual three-day gathering, the women were in ceremony, and I was given the opportunity to prepare and serve them food.

On the morning of the third day just before dawn, I dreamed again of the baby. Of rushing water. This time, I was able to reach out my arms and take the child to my breast, both of us saved in our embrace. Saved in a place where the falls had been drowned and through the practice of serving another. I have not dreamed it since.

Healing comes to me in the small moments of morning or the quiet of sunrise. The noise of a bird. The reflection of water up from the lake against the trunks of trees. And for all those broken pieces that make up my life, it seems an ongoing process.

Perhaps made easier by dreams of riding bareback under a wide Idaho sky.

Sherri

poem or prose?

2009-04-19T11:35:00.000-07:00

The annual Estacada Area Arts Commission Writers Night was once again an enjoyable event. Joanna Rose and Stevan Allred are two of my most favorite people who are coincidentally writers - and poets. I was a bit late (as usual) and missed some of the first readings by poet Melanie Green. Stevan read "Conflations of a Hard Headed Yankee." Joanna read a selection of her poems - a debut reading for her as she has only read her prose before. Steve Denniston read his story "Duck Fishing in Dufur." The readings were entertaining, truthful, and beautiful with language. I was reminded how grateful I am for the community of writers - and listeners.

Stevan relayed a story about the difference between poets and prose writers (inspired by a poem from Melanie about bats). Here's the short version:

A woman came into a group of poets and prose writers and said, "I just saw some bats at my house."

The poets said, "What did they look like?"

The prose writers said, "What happened?"

It provoked conversation. What's the difference? Does use of language determine form? What if prose engages poetic language? Does it matter? Why write at all?

Author Jeremy Adam Smith says that writing offers a different way to work through problems, a persuasive perspective, or a larger connection. Or maybe writers just like to read.

A poet near and dear to me says he writes to give voice to those feelings for which there are no single words. Poetry allows him the room to touch those deepest emotions. It is personal for him and needs only a private audience.

Raymond Carver said writers write to save lives (looking for the reference - I think it is from his introduction to Best American Short Stories).

Quantum mechanics proposes that perception is integral to the existence of the universe. (Read The Biocentric Universe in this month's Discover magazine). In a quantum nutshell: we observe so the universe exists.

Do the observations of our world in all our most human moments serve to do more than just record us?

A western tanager outside the kitchen window.

A fishhook in a drunken man's lip.

A spilled bottle of screws on a widower's workbench.

Bats.

Carver also wrote that the life we save is our own.

Sherri

awe

2009-03-08T20:27:00.000-07:00

I have seen some wondrous things in this life. The sharp white peak of Mt. Fuji. Tokyo Bay from high inside the red girders of Tokyo Tower. Hiroshima. Taiwanese rice paddies. California redwoods you can drive through. The black depths of Carlsbad Caverns. The Columbia River where it meets the sea. The red-mud Missouri river. Under a microscope: giardia (little men in hats), staphylococcus (clumps of grapes), and syphilis (spiraling corkscrews). The Tower of London. Brick Lane. The high arches of Winchester Cathedral. The Great Star of Africa. A white chalk horse on the cliffs near the Salisbury plains. Stonehenge. A real Monet (Chicago). A real Van Gogh (London). Lightning over the peaks of Mount Moran from the far side of Leigh Lake. Babies born. Solar eclipse. A hunting hawk strike. Breaching whales. Endless stars.

I have my father to thank for believing that his children were better off for seeing the world rather than sitting in a classroom every day. I thank my husband for continuing the adventure with me. But for the grandeur, I can only thank the universe itself.

In 1977, I turned 12 and my family hiked out of Driggs, Idaho, through Devil's Staircase up to Alaska Basin and then to the top of Hurricane Pass that looks over at the backside of the Grand Tetons. Our guide was an older gentleman named Fred Miller. Fred was born with two club feet. His mother was told he would never walk. According to Fred, she didn't accept the diagnosis and worked his feet straight every day until he walked. Fred hiked with two walking sticks, swinging one or the other forward with each step.

It was a 2- or 3-day hike, and we all carried packs - everything in and out. Fred could out-pace us all. And while I don't remember the details, I recall that he told us stories and named the trees, flowers, rocks and streams all along the way. He showed us watermelon snow, elephant heads, and purple iris. He memorialized the troop of girls who died around a great tree at the crest of a ridge, killed by the lightning strike that burned through the tree roots to reach them where they lay in the grass away from the tree.

Then one night after camp had been set up against the big, round boulders and dinner was done, Fred Miller sang. He sang with the red flicker of campfire on his face, the sharp white of stars overhead, and the black shape of the mountains all around.

When through the woods, and forest glades I wander,
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees.
When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur
And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.

He sang in joy. In worship of his God. In humility. In awe.

Even though I was young, pre-pubescent, struggling to understand without an understanding, I was moved to tears. His awe gifted me with something precious, something I have never forgotten.

Something I felt again this past week.

My husband took me to Hawaii, the place of his mother's birth. He grew up with her stories and more than a little bit of the local language. As a young man, he returned to the island to work on a construction project with his father, both of them carpenters, and lived in Hilo with his mother's people. So it was a return for him. A new experience for me.

Hawaii, the Big Island, is active with volcanic eruptions. We visited the Volcano House at Kilauea, saw the billowing white steam from the rift in the giant caldera, a volcanic haze spreading west across the island, punctuated by sharp, white bursts of steam vents and smaller eruptions. The larger driving/hiking loop was closed due to high levels of poisonous gases in the air. Several days later when we drove over the volcano and west to Punalu'u and Honaunau, we could smell the pungent sulphur even with all the car windows closed.

Late one afternoon, my husband drove us south from Hilo, down Hwy 130 through Pahoa towards the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Drove until the highway was stopped by an old lava flow that had taken everything around it - the highway, homes, outbuildings, forest. A one-lane makeshift road took us up and over the massive flow, and we followed it to another short stretch of paved road. Then over another flow, another narrow one-lane, and reached another abrupt end. This time, truly an end to the road.

A tower of steam rose up beyond the expanse of old lava. We had seen it from miles away, that place where the molten lava meets the sea.

We hiked then, followed a series of yellow paint stripes across the old lava flow, the hardened cake-batter ripples of pahoehoe and the crunchy sponge-like a'a. For all the people who had walked this way, there was no visible path worn into the rocks, only the yellow tags of paint to indicate we were going the right way. It was like walking on the surface of another planet, surreal and unfamiliar.

The sun set behind a haze of sulphur and volcanic matter, and the moon overhead was a thin crescent, Venus bright beneath it.

More than a mile away, the pillar of steam was immense, lit from below by the flux and flow of molten lava. As the night darkened, the reds, oranges, yellows and blues deepened. The flow pulsed and growled like a living organism, spit and surged, and sometimes flung brilliant flares up and over the edge of the old flow like primal fireworks.

Awe is inadequate a word for what rises up in your chest as you stand on a mound of hardened lava and watch the earth birth new land. Awe and immense joy for this world in which we live. For its beauty. For its astounding cycles of life, healing and regeneration. For the immense power greater than us all that pulses beneath our feet and lifts in the air we breathe.

To that which is greater than us all, I give thanks. I give honor. I gift my awe to the very universe I celebrate.

Aloha and mahalo nui loa.
Sherri

* A special thanks to the following photographers:

Ryan Backman for his beautiful photo of Hurricane Pass;
and Ben Levy for his amazing photo of Alaska Basin.

The rest of the photos are my own.

flooding memories

2009-01-12T05:36:00.000-08:00

There is flooding north and south of us, the Chehalis river over I-5, the Lewis in Woodland, Salmon and Johnson creeks both out of their banks. And the rain continues.

June 1976, my dad and I were at the church for some kind of event when he got a message that the Teton Dam had broken and flooded our new home in Rexburg, Idaho. My dad and I flew from Los Angeles to Idaho Falls in a single engine plane with one of my dad's pilot friends who sweet-talked air-traffic control into letting us land at the Idaho Falls airport and then through all the barricades into the flood zone. The images of the destruction remain clear: the scoured cement foundation of our house, all structure completely gone; green strawberry plants in a muddy border around the space that once was a porch and garden shed; the swollen bodies of cows rolled up against collapsed fence lines; deep swirls of black mud crossing and re-crossing the roads; small airplanes caught in trees and tipped up against the skewed shapes of buildings, miles away from the airport.

February 1996, the Columbia River bore ice and then melted into brown water the color of a cappuccino. At its peak, the Willamette breached the sea-wall to flood into downtown Portland. I was working for a band back then, Stain, and we had played a gig in Vancouver the Thursday night that the rivers crested. In the early morning hours after packing up our gear, we took a detour on our way home, parked at the end of the closed I-5 and walked up and over the Morrison Bridge. Trees the size of train-cars were stacked up against each other on the south footings of the bridge, their yellow insides bare and splintered. The water was red and brown and foam. But mostly I remember the sound of it, the deep roar of something primal. The sound of water moving the earth.

Perhaps it is the same sound that whispers in the rain outside my window tonight. The barest hint of inherent power. Evidence of that which is greater than us all in a single raindrop.

I remain awed and grateful.

Sherri

16 random facts - the shortest stories

2009-01-06T23:53:00.000-08:00

16. My favorite color is green, but when I was 11 my family moved into a house in Idaho Falls just off St. Claire and my room had purple-and-black-foil butterfly wallpaper and purple shag carpet and I thought it was the most beautiful room ever.

15. I have six piercings and five tattoos. None of the tattoos are butterflies.

14. All of the children I have birthed are girls. 100%.

13. My family lived off-base (USAF) in Taiwan during monsoon season when I was about 9. Our house was enormous with high ceilings and wood floors, and unfurnished except for our beds and maybe a dining room set. During one particular storm, my parents put wide, brown packing tape across all the windows to keep the glass from shattering into the house. When the storm had passed, my brothers and sisters and I peeled off all the tape and made "cool-ee" balls and had the mother-of-all tape-ball battles while skating through the house on roller skates. It was most epic.

12. My earliest memory is of fireflies (in Kentucky, I am told) and how I thought the riot police looked like big bugs in their helmets (in Ohio, I am also told). The next is of living in Texas and thinking that rattlesnakes could crawl up the outside of the doors in the night. I think I might have been four years old. I have been afraid of snakes ever since.

11. I got chickenpox at my first ever sleep-over birthday party.

10. Once I dropped a can of floor wax on my big toe and it got infected under the nail, so my father took me to his clinic on the military base (USAF) and sliced open my toe with a scalpel to drain it. 35-ish years later, there is still a faint silver scar.

9. My first kiss was from a boy in my 3rd grade class who then followed me home after school the next day and beat me up. I don't recall his name.

8. My first hero was Errol Flynn after I saw Robin Hood on Thanksgiving Day the year I was in the 4th grade in Bakersfield, California. My second hero was Speed Racer from the original cartoon series.

7. My first love was a girl named Stephanie. We were both in Mr. Everly's 5th grade class in Tustin, California.

6. I had a pet turtle that I regularly fed raw hamburger and lettuce. When he died, my mother wrapped him in tinfoil and we buried him next to the back porch stairs. As far as I can remember, I have had eight dogs, innumerable fish, two parakeets, a pair of mice, frogs, a salamander, and three cats. I currently have a pair of zebra finches named Jack and Delilah.

5. A palmist at a dinner party in a remodeled brothel in Butte, Montana once told me that I was a pathological smoker and would never be able to quit when I told her that I would wake up in the middle of every night and smoke a cigarette without getting out of bed. So I didn't quit; I just haven't smoked a cigarette for about seven years now.

4. The nastiest black eye I ever got was playing basketball with a bunch of guys where I took a head-butt to the brow that knocked me clean out. The very next day, I had to get a new driver's license and appear in court on a driving infraction. The judge took one look at me, reduced my $300 fine to $25 and waved me out of his courtroom. I got a replacement driver's license not long afterwards because whenever I had to show my ID at the grocery store, the checker would do a double-take at my picture and then glare at my husband.

3. I am the same age as the Super Bowl and have been a fan of the Indianapolis Colts since they were in Baltimore.

2. There is a newspaper photo of me in a 4th of July parade, riding my horse Lucky and wearing the only tall cowboy hat I have ever owned - black felt.

1. I know that I cry when I am full of joy but not always when I am sad, things can happen as quick as a single breath that can never be taken back, a broken heart feels like empty space and tastes like metal, and time does not heal all wounds.

Sherri

from the top of a rock

2009-01-03T12:51:00.000-08:00

A year ago, I spent my Christmas "bonus" on groceries and the 3-day New Year's holiday applying for work anywhere possible. This year, my objective is less frantic as I am happy in my current job and can actually enjoy the holiday with time off to visit family and appreciate a bit of space and time.

The "new" year seems arbitrary in a larger, universal timeline. But perhaps closing out a year and starting anew satisfies our human need to count and account for things. A time to climb up on a rock out in mid-stream and look back over our shoulder to mark progress, such as it is.

2008 has provided a number of publication opportunities and additional recognition for my short stories, for which I continue to be appreciative. My thanks to any and all readers who have taken the time to read my pieces. Writing is made that much more satisfying by its readers.

Publication has proven to be about the cumulative effects of long-term sustained efforts - to write, to edit, to submit. Even the smallest effort contributes to the greater, long-term outcome - that universal timeline that does not need or recognize a new year.

With more publications, the number of short stories in the coffer are fewer as more of my time has been spent working on the novel, its own timeline stretching to completion later this year. So I continue those late-night, early-morning writing sessions, too much coffee, handfuls of post-its jammed in my purse, scraps of paper and scribbles on the backs of receipts to tell the stories of the Wildish boys that push forward in my thoughts at the most inopportune moments of departmental staff meetings, workshop trainings or random conversations.

Here's to the new year.

Sherri

black bird is editor's choice

2008-12-15T18:51:00.000-08:00

My short-short Black Bird is released in print this month in the 2008 Very Short Story Anthology by Lunch Hour Stories. The anthology is a collection of the winners of their annual Very Short Story contest.

Black Bird was first awarded the Whidbey Writers Student Choice award in October 2007 and remains online in their Winner's Archives (10/07). This story was written especially for their Halloween contest that was going on at the time. Then in Spring 2008, Black Bird was awarded the Editor's Choice Award by Lunch Hour Stories.

You can purchase your copy of the 2008 Very Short Story Anthology online at www.lunchhourbooks.com. My copies arrived today, and I am thrilled to see it in print. My thanks to the editors for the recognition.

Sherri

songs of geese

2008-11-28T09:07:00.000-08:00

Migrating geese fly low over my house, their noise a jumbled clamor that belies the orchestrated flight. After a flash of sunlight and warm rain last week, the cold season has settled in with morning fog and frost on the rooftops. Yesterday there was winter rain, a soaking mist that chills you straight through.

It took at least five winters here in the Pacific Northwest to acclimate from the dry bluster of the high mountain desert. As a result of a military father and my own unsettled youth, I grew up without a geographic identity and did not expect to stay when I first landed in Portland, the city lights out the window of the plane that night reflecting off so much water I thought was surely the sea.

More than thirteen years and change that has occurred for me at a deep and fundamental level has also given me roots. Even as I have been blessed with abiding friendships from around the world and recent opportunity to travel to the beautiful UK and distant reaches of the North American continent, it is the myriad of grays in the skies of Washington that I mean when I say home.

I continue to write with gratitude for the experiences that contribute to my vision so that those odd, endearing details that make us so very human might reveal the order to our own cacophonous song.

Awareness is a gift from the universe. To translate it to words is an ongoing challenge.

Sherri

falling away at the edges

2008-11-07T18:43:00.001-08:00

Just in time for the holidays, my story Falling Away at the Edges is published in Duck & Herring Co. Pocket Field Guide Cold Weather edition. You can read it online or order your own copy of the Pocket Field Guide, complete with some warming recipes for the holiday season.

Some of my characters become particularly endeared to me by the time their story is complete. This is especially so with this story. It reaches back into my teenage years for time and setting, and while the family isn't exactly my own, it treads on the borders of the family chaos of growing up with 6 siblings.

The story itself was passed to me through the community grapevine of a most endearing group of real people with whom I cross paths regularly, if not daily - possibly the most irreverent and riotous group of people I have ever met. I owe much to those who have put out a hand to me in times of need, cried with me in times of pain, and in times of joy or sometimes just moments of hindsight, laughed with utmost abandon.

My life is richer for those people whose paths cross my own. Thanks.

Sherri

rain

2008-11-02T11:38:00.000-08:00

A cold rain knocks lingering autumn leaves to the ground, spatters up from the hard road, gathers on the windows. Kāhiko o ke akua - adornment of deity - in Hawaii. Bringer of life. Preserver of the land. Cleanser of evil spirits. World cultures dance, worship, revere and fear the rain.

More than 20 years ago, I lived in a metal-roofed single-wide trailer house in Layton, Utah, just outside the South Gate of Hill AFB immediately under the flight path of the southern runways and up against the rise of the Wasatch mountains. The years there were bittersweet, the joys and sorrows balanced in my memories, formative years of new awareness and self-discovery.

When I moved away to a suburban stretch west towards the Great Salt Lake, it took me awhile to identify what was missing among other things in the contained 2-story tract house with its double-paned windows, carpeted stairways and high trussed-roof: I could not hear the rain. It's deep patter, the audible measure of the storm, day or night, had become a comfort to me and a touchstone of peace.

Today I opened all the windows to listen to the rain, and a Red-shouldered hawk flew down from the roof to perch on top of the center bird-feeder and crow over the yard. Adorned with rain.

My very breath is my prayer of thanks and my awe.

Sherri

Lysis Complete

2008-10-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

My story Lysis Complete is published this week on 42opus in Fiction. My thanks to the editors of this lovely site.

This story is interesting to me because it comes out of some writing I did in what feels like another lifetime more than 14 years ago. I had been working with François Camoin at the University of Utah, and at his suggestion, signed up for a workshop with Phyllis Barber. Most of this story comes from pieces that I originally wrote for her in that workshop.

But perhaps most strange to me was the tangible rush of memories that opened up when I came across the draft of this story about a year ago. My life was in shambles at the time of Phyllis' workshop. I was in the throes of a failed marriage, in between jobs and had applied to the writing program at the university - surely if I could go back to school I could pull my life back together.

The workshop was in Park City. I couldn't afford to stay at the conference, so I was staying at my parents' home near the mouth of Emigration Canyon, driving up and back through the canyon each day.

One night I had imposed myself at some party, passed out in my '76 Camaro, and then, still drunk and shored up by a little pick-me-up, I headed down Parley's Canyon. It was early morning, cold and there was fog like there is in the mountains and little traffic - the occasional semi-truck heading East to Cheyenne.

I came fast around one of those sweeping bends through a bank of fog, and my headlights caught the most enormous porcupine I had ever seen, illuminated by fog and headlamp to appear completely white. It turned its head towards me. Then I flashed by, swerving hard into the far lane, banking back again to adjust and readjust for my panicked over-correction.

I didn't stop. I doubt I even slowed.

Some psychological theory somewhere will explain how memory imprints most clearly under duress. The burst of adrenaline that implodes at chest level and then drops to churn in your stomach also binds the detail of every silver tip of porcupine quill and the round, dark eye just above the curve of its face, childlike in the headlights.

I carry more than a few memories from those long, bad years, set, as they were, by duress heightened with adrenaline, fear and pain. Even now, with resolution for the greater burden of guilt and shame, the images remain unfaded, ethereal and vivid, with crisp edges and the faintest taste of regret at the back of your throat like bitter almonds.

Sherri

like music

2008-09-27T07:02:00.001-07:00

There are many theories about how to write. As a reader, I am most moved by works that connect me in an emotive way, the confluence of intellectual and emotional and shared human experience.

Music moves me at the same level. Or perhaps beyond as it surpasses language. It is emotive from a different direction. That being the ultimate challenge for a writer - to evoke connection in a holistic way. Breathe life into character and story, with subtlety and balance. Like music.

Sherri

City streets

2008-09-14T22:25:00.000-07:00

There's noise on the street. The two strangers in front of me at the Starbucks on the corner. The produce guy who brings me fresh cucumbers from the back, talking over the counter to the woman in the bakery. The gas man trading quips with his co-workers across the pumps. My husband's friends downstairs in the Cigar Room at Kells that feels like a real old-fashioned speakeasy. Everyone's talking about it. Election. Power. Abuse of power. Counting votes, opinions, days.

While I am amused by the daily stupid human quote that makes it to the internet and then, days later, the local news, I hope to stay out of the debate. Especially the one that breaks out in my living room between the brother-in-law, nephew, and step-son.

But I enjoy the buzz. The conversation. The flight of words. Sometimes it's exactly like the old soup-can phone, string pulled tight between our refrigerator-box houses. It's like eavesdropping on the collective.

And then in the stillness of a breath, a moment of silence for David Foster Wallace. Be at peace.

Sherri

Turning leaves

2008-09-07T19:50:00.000-07:00

Along the Sylvan Hill ridge, the alders bear the first speckled yellows and reds of autumn. Football season begins. The school zone lights flash and on the side of the road, there's the square flags of the crossing guard. Morning is more dark and sharp with the glint of something colder.

How did it happen so quickly this year? Where have I been?

Austin was so hot. Crater Lake was a bright, glimpse of unearthly blue. Takhlakh Lake and Rainier were a brief intake of breath and sun. Orlando was a string of conference-room days and theme-park nights, bright lights and fireworks. Was I gone so long?

Or perhaps it was just me. Flowing just under the surface, it has been a summer of grief, a thick, weighted loss that presses your head down, even some days so that you cannot see past your own feet or just barely into that small space ahead to watch for the jutted edge of sidewalk you know is coming so maybe you can keep from ending flat on your face with a bloodied lip and your front teeth knocked out.

I carved out space for it this time, gave it honor so as to allow its full course - lessons learned from old grief caught in stifled cracks of self-will and fear. But now, looking back, it was in Orlando when it began to lift.

Our midnight flight landed, and some hours later at the hotel, I swam with my daughters in an expansive, silent pool under a black sky lit by a vaguely familiar pattern of stars. The days were a flurry of schedules, new faces, lectures and PowerPoint presentations, but on the second night, we took off our shoes and I walked with my girls in the black curl of the Atlantic Ocean under the Cocoa Beach Pier, under christmas lights and a local rendition of Sublime.

We swam every night for relief from the humidity that made everything sticky damp. Hurricane Faye was incoming but not so close to be responsible for the evening lightning or that mid-afternoon downpour that moved the closing party indoors where we exchanged handshakes and hugs and then went to SeaWorld where the whales leaped and twisted in the damp air just the same, I expect, as in those sunlit commercials.

Strangers know they are sisters - my three daughters - even as they are distinctly different. As their mother, something unspoken and connective happens when I am with them. Something no less than awe rises in me to see from inside a lobby window as they walk across the courtyard and cross the bridge together. The swing of one's hair, the way this one moves her hand, the curve of the other's smile.

It was not anticipated, this change of course, not at least by me. Collectively, the smallest moments of joy throughout the summer have become entwined to keep me intact, and then unexpectedly, my daughters' presence bore me light. So that I might see the alder leaves.

Sherri

what stories?

2008-09-01T21:44:00.000-07:00

Per request:

Black bird, 2008 Very Short Story Anthology, by Lunch Hour Stories, Editor's Choice Award, Dec. 2008, www.lunchhourstories.com

Falling away at the edges, Duck & Herring Pocket Field Guide Cold Weather Edition, Nov. 2008, www.duckandherring.com

Lysis complete, 42opus, Oct. 8, 2008, www.42opus.com/

Doing time in the real world, The Noneuclidean Cafe, Volume 3, Issue 2 - Winter-Spring 2008, Apr. 2008, www.noneuclideancafe.com

With the surety of a revelation, Poeticdiversity, Apr. 2008, www.poeticdiversity.org

Road dogs, Etchings IV: the Art of Conversation, Mar. 2008, www.ilurapress.com

Thicker than water, Bewildering Stories Issue 273 and Bewildering Stories First Quarterly Review of 2008, Jan. 2008 and Apr. 2008, Editor's Choice Award, www.bewilderingstories.com

Black bird, Whidbey Island Students' Choice, November Student Choice Award, Nov. 2007, www.whidbeystudents.com

A burning thing, Dark Sky Magazine, Jul. 2007, www.darkskymagazine.com

Last resort, The Flask Review, Jul. 2007

Breathing

2008-08-10T17:35:00.000-07:00

Hummingbirds click-click outside my open window, and mourning doves flush to the roof at any lift of a tree branch or perhaps the suggestion of a cat.

I am breathing.

Too many projects flying in weighted trajectories that cross and inevitably intersect, flying just ahead of deadlines and higher demands. It is the nature of the work.

But today I am in between, glad for the shift of air, the mix of gray that is the sky and the company of a green parakeet who sits on my shoulder and speaks a mix of childish rhetoric and a sailor's blue streak.

Tomorrow is a new day. Tomorrow is still a day away.

Sherri

Ice and water

2008-07-27T12:43:00.000-07:00

Those who know me know that my favorite TV show is Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch. I am a dedicated fan, enthralled by the men who make their living pulling king and opilio crab out from the depths of the Bering Sea.

The fishermen are truly men above men. Courageous, confident, daring...vulnerable. To challenge an insurmountable sea bares wide their humanity and their fragility. It achieves that masterful dichotomy of heroic accomplishment against the purest demonstration of human frailty. As true to form as Greek mythology, Eastern legend or Western folklore. I watch each episode in sheer awe.

There are few facets of our world left upon which we human animals have not worn a careless track, even in some cases to defeat or extinction. We often rage against the very universe that supports us.

The Bering sea is not exempt of human mistreatment. But its freezing spray to encase ships, the monumental rise of waves, and the roll of sub-zero waters that sap a man's life in seconds are reminders that we are not the masters of this universe, merely some of its smallest members, and tender ones at that. That which is sacred remains the vast expanse of green sea, the Aleutian gray sky, the scream of gulls and the pink barnacled shells of crab.

And the thickening of ice in sheets that extend like solid ground until the fishermen can even step over the side of their ship and walk on the surface of the sea, miles away from any shore.

Sherri

Texas

2008-07-17T21:52:00.000-07:00

Flat land draws more of the sky closer to the ground. Austin is like that. The sky comes clear down until the sides fall away so that you can feel the curve of the earth under your feet as if the rest of the planet extends down from the capitol of Texas.

Trees grow in wide rolling hills here. Live oak, elm, maple and lacy willows in colors like crayons – spring green, mint julep, sea foam, emerald – and flowering trees in veils of purple pink ivory blossoms.

But it’s hot. And wet like breathing inside out, body fluid and organ warm, and flowing with a deep rhythm so that my own pulse flutters sparrow-fast and the jackdaws, flycatchers and mourning doves quicken into a single, held note.

Down from the capitol building, there are bats under the Congress Bridge. I watch them at dusk emerge in a cloud to feed against the fading sky. I am told it is the largest urban population of Mexican Free-tail bats and that these are the mothers, their offspring still tucked away in the man-made crevice of cement and steel that has become part of the regular migration path. Texas Capistrano’s swallows. I am down-river from the bridge, the crowd too much of a deterrent for me, but I am delighted at the flurry of erratic wings on the hunt.

And I wasn’t bitten by a mosquito even once.

Sherri

Birdsong

2008-06-28T11:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday in the early morning when I looked at my bedside clock for the millionth time since my husband was away and it wakes me to reach out to his side and find it empty, and it was 4 a.m. and that morning bird began its early song and I remember thinking that the birdsong would keep me awake longer but really that was the last conscious thought I had before my alarm went off at 6:30 and the day began in earnest.

It is still dark at 4 a.m. but not like winter dark. In the summer it is much more gradual, the light spread thin, a quiet refusal to retreat entirely. The bird begins its call.

It is a robin. An American robin, different from the European robin since it is related rather to a thrush than the little robins over the pond. Lang Elliott, an authority on birds (what would that be like - to be an authority on birds?), qualifies the dawn call of a robin as a "more animated, excited territorial declaration."

Some 5-ish years ago I worked a graveyard shift at a women's care facility while I was in between jobs. It was summer and I kept the wide windows on the west side of the front office thrown open all night since they were high enough to be inaccessible from the outside. The robin's song became my touchstone. It signaled the shift from one side to the other, the ramping upside to the quiet slide down into dawn. The pitch and timbre translated into a desperate stand against the vestiges of night. And a call to the sun.

It speaks to another time, years ago, a time of desperation and my last failed stand. I had lost everything. I couldn't sleep for the terrors that waited for me in my dreams and the weight of my grief and shame and of a nameless, bottomless, demoralizing despair. I paced. Tried to read. Listened to Eric Clapton, Bob Segar, Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana—Cobain newly dead. In the dark, pre-dawn, I would give up and stand outside with my back against the peeling red paint of the door to the sleeping quarters and smoke, lighting each new cigarette off the last, until the black shape of the Wasatch Front deepened, its topmost edge backlit gold to fire-white, the sky fading purple, violet, lilac to the spread of peach and pink and then, at last, the sun would break over the peak to another day. And then, at last, I would sleep.

I did not hear the robin before. But there were many sacred gifts I missed back then, back in those old bad days of old bad ways of ignorance and self-will and despair.

A restless night might lay on me still. And it is a comfort to hear the robin call up the sun.

Sherri

Voice

2008-06-12T08:04:00.001-07:00

This week, my novel found its voice. It has been more than a year of writing pages and pages of these boys, the Wildish boys. I have worked parts of it in and out of sessions at The Pinewood Table with Stevan Allred and Joanna Rose.

Most recently in a short summer session, I read a section that I knew was key but not working. Around the table with Stevan, Joanna, Hope, and Christi, the comments were as I expected - and more. High marks on character details, language and energy, but lots of confusion. Chaos. Anarchy, even.

Stevan wrote in his end notes, "I'm pretty lost."

But the conversation over the table was exactly what I needed. It prodded at the sensitive parts, revealed options, opened up language and potential. I went away last week with a new sense of direction and hope, infused with the energy and insights of my teachers, friends and peers.

Reading. Reading. I can hear it, that "thing" that I want, recognize it in my favorites. Stephen King's Stand By Me, William Kennedy's Ironweed and E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate. I spent some days with Billy, marking "vertical" and "horizontal" in the margins, line by line.

Taking up my story, this novel in progress, I cleared away everything to get to the part that held my heart, the core of the Wildish story. And then I wrote. Or re-wrote, as it were.

Last night, Julia Stoops read the last chapter of her new novel, and we celebrated. A brilliant achievement. A lovely, talented writer. I am honored to have been across the table from Julia as she breathed life into her novel.

Then I read my revision, a 2-page segment, across the Pinewood Table. And I heard it. Voice.

Bigger than character voice. Stevan called it stance. It is the voice of the story.

It changes everything. I am elated.

My deepest thanks to Stevan and Joanna and all those who have sat across the table from me so that I might hear and practice. And write.

Sherri

Baby orca in the Puget Sound

2008-06-05T22:08:00.000-07:00

There's a new baby, spotted on my own daughter's birthday. A new orca swimming in one of the returning pods in the Puget Sound. Most glorious!

Credit for the photos to Kelley Balcomb-Bartok at the Center for Whale Research. Please donate generously and frequently.

I have been on the Sound a number of times, but never seen orcas. Perhaps one day. For me, they embody an ancient spirit, of salt and wind, sunlight and the enfolding naissance of the sea. I am grateful for the very news of their return.

Sherri

Utah!

2008-05-27T22:43:00.000-07:00

There's a clear view of Mount Olympus out the back of my parents' home near Emigration Canyon above the Salt Lake valley. Ghosts inhabit my memories of Utah, and it is a Memorial Day weekend to honor them all. Honor to those who can be named: Michael, Robert, Francella, John, Pauly, Daisy, Grace, Dorothy, Craig, Mara, Linda, Art. Those who cannot be named have my prayers and my love.

Snow falls at my brother's house in Park City, and there is thunder and lightning at my sister's north along the Wasatch front. Back at home, there are tornado warnings and 3" of hail at Multnomah Falls in the Columbia Gorge. Rain across all things.

Through the Blue Mountains, a semi-truck jackknifes across the freeway ahead of us with the smell of burning rubber and brakes, and we turn off the engine and park in the lane until the emergency crews clear the road. Rain eases off, and all along the side of the roads, lupine, yarrow and wild daisies. True to their name, the mountains reflect the sky.

The Columbia River greets us over the flats beyond Pendleton and leads us the rest of the way. I love the skies and the rain and the thousand colors of gray as deep as the universe. I am not born in the Northwest, but it is my home. No matter where I roam.

Sherri

Doing Time in the Real World

2008-05-09T08:16:00.000-07:00

Doing Time in the Real World is published on The Noneuclidean Cafe.

This story has made the rounds. It was accepted at another publication provided the language was edited out. After a few days of thought and a whirling email debate with my writing compadres, I withdrew the story. Another story was accepted in its place, and I renewed the submission process for Doing Time where it was accepted by the Noneuclidean Cafe.

The Winter issue was originally slated to be released in January, but real life stepped in for editor James Swingle and the issue was delayed. My thanks and respect to James for walking through his life experiences and pulling us together for this exciting double Winter/Spring issue.

Doing Time is one of my favorite stories. It speaks to something that weighs on my heart, of people overlooked or forgotten. Of despair and survival.

Perhaps there is a greater statement about failed systems and the cost of what constitutes success in bigger circles. But in the end, it is a personal story. Change begins with awareness and is carried forward by individual compassion when one person reaches out to another. The connection then lifts us all, one hand reaching forward, one hand always reaching back.

But that is just my experience.

Sherri H. Hoffman

Wonky Weather

2008-04-20T20:02:00.000-07:00

April 20 and there is snow on my tulips and violets.

There hasn't been so much weird weather like this since the first year I was here - 1995. That year there was ice on the Columbia River, a windstorm to rival some 1950-ish record, and snow. Then a flood that ultimately breached the Portland seawall and flooded the train station and the international airport. The city was cut off by mudslides in the Gorge and both north- and south-bound I-5.

I remember calling my parents from my basement apartment during a power outage just to reassure them that all was well. All my friends told me it was "unusual." I suppose it was, but for all I knew, winter was one chaotic natural disaster after another.

Five years ago, we had an ice storm that shut us in the house for 5 days. No work, no school, no groceries. We could get out in our 4-wheel drive but not safely. The little birds trying to land on the feeder in the back yard were slipping right off. The heating bill that month was over $1000.

This year, we got the tornado in February, snow in March, and hard frosts and snow in April.

It just proves we pitiable humans are not in charge. Thank goodness.

Sherri

Writers Night

2008-04-13T20:20:00.000-07:00

Last night was the 6th Annual Writers Night at the Springwater Grange presented by The Estacada Area Arts Commission. Reading were my mentors, Stevan Allred and Joanna Rose, along with Jackie Shannon-Hollis, whom I adore as both peer and teacher.

I rode out to the grange with my friend Mary Milstead and her husband Nathan and baby Solomon, who were most engaging travel partners. We got to discuss all things llama, bbq, and grizzly bear and swap stories about when you first met the parents of your significant other, since my daughter was that very afternoon meeting the parents of the boyfriend. Solomon mostly listened.

The theme for the evening was The Elephant in the Room, an open look at those things we don't talk about in polite company, things like politics, race, religion, sex, and mental illness. Except that Mary, Nathan, Solomon and I had pretty much run the gambit on the drive, including how my darling muscular husband would be the Donner Party first-choice should his Mazama climbing class become stranded on their climb this weekend.

Keeping with the theme, Stevan tackled racism, Joanna religion, and Jackie mental illness. "Writers," said Stevan, "have the task of addressing these issues with grace and wit, so that the unspoken can be heard and discussed in a way that is intelligent instead of threatening."

Joanna opened with part of her novel in-progress, Ruby's Roadhouse. Jackie read her short story, Her Own Special Touch. And Stevan closed out the evening with the end of his story, As Men Will Do Unto The Least Among Us; he read the beginning last year, but there were so many requests to finish, he had to comply.

The stories were engaging and poignant and thoughtful. The language beautiful. Cecily Patterson showed up and we both laughed at Stevan's reference to atheists, although Cecily may have just been laughing at me.

I'm sure the party-after was no less than fabulous - I have been to one before, with oysters on the half-shell, an unlimited supply of wine and drink, and a troupe of belly-dancers. Stevan is admirably committed to throwing a good party.

Alas, it was a party we would miss this year. Solomon was well past his bedtime, and I had to pickup the teenagers from VSAA Spring Fling and get the scoop on the parent-meeting. Thanks to Nathan's keen ability to avoid deer, we made it home without incident.

I always love to experience to the greater community of writers. To hear those who are ahead of me, my mentors, read in their own voices, their own works. It was a night to remember.

Sherri H. Hoffman

Road trip!

2008-04-12T22:48:00.001-07:00

Yesterday Rick and I drove north to Seattle to hear His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama speak at the Seeds of Compassion conference. Thanks to Barry Anderson for the tickets (thanks Barry!!). Even from our seats in the rafters of the Key Arena, when His Holiness walked across the stage to start the session, I burst into tears. It was the first time I have ever seen him in person, and I was so moved by his presence and his joy.

The focus of the conference session was about raising compassionate children. The result of which, if we succeed, will bring about world peace. So says the Dalai Lama. He undid his own boots and then pulled his feet up to sit lotus-style in his chair during the session. Listened with intent as each of the panel presenters were introduced with all their pomp and resume.

When asked to speak, he outlined in simple terms the practice of daily compassion and its far-reaching consequences. Ending very matter-of-fact with, "That's all."

I am pressed to put words together at this point. It opened up an unexpected awareness, and I am better off for the experience. I wondered at those panelists who got to share their stories and ask a question of His Holiness. What would be my question?

Ever amazed
Sherri

Poeticdiversity

2008-04-03T22:04:00.000-07:00

Poeticdiversity: the litzine of Los Angeles has published my short-short "With the Surety of a Revelation" online in the April 2008 edition.

Marie Lecrivain, executive editor of poeticdiversity, quotes Wm Shakespeare:

"Once more, unto the breach, dear friends, once more. . ." - Henry V

April is National Poetry Month. Visit www.poeticdiversity.org and celebrate a poem.

Sherri

April

2008-04-01T22:06:00.000-07:00

Ah, the cruelest month. I have lived and died and lived again in Aprils past. I am a true April Fool.

This year, March went out with snow and a hard frost on the daffodils. April must be in like a lamb - if the lamb had pneumonia and spent most nights of late coughing its lungs up. My darling husband actually suggested we try out the new medical coverage. ha.

When I was in high school, I contracted some kind of infection around my heart. I'm sure my dad and all my other doctor-siblings and sibs-in-law could easily provide a medical latinate for its infectious identity. I only recall that it felt as if I was stabbed from inside with every breath. For the duration of the infection, I bedded down in the reading nook of the basement family room where I could sleep sitting up. Sleep and weep and read. Never able to do just one, I read Tolstoy and Tolkien, Asimov, Heinlein, James Joyce, George Orwell and Thomas Hardy. A plethora of human suffering. Plethora - I've heard Chris Berman use it successfully on ESPN. Goes with "Whoop!"

My point? Long gone under the haze of Advil and Dextromethorphan HBr extended release.

The beauty of some down days as April opens up in all its glory is that I have started a new book(s). John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, and Grace Paley. An April plethora.

Sherri

Thicker Than Water is Editors' Choice!

2008-03-31T11:26:00.000-07:00

Editor Don Webb notified me that Thicker Than Water has been selected as Editors' Choice for the Bewildering Stories First Quarterly Review of 2008 in the category Short Stories.

Don writes, "The Quarterly Reviews are 'the place to be' at Bewildering Stories. The Editors' Choices represent the recent best; they give newcomers a good place to start and veteran readers a way to catch up with anything they may have missed."

It is an honor to have this piece recognized. The Wildish boys live on in the novel-in-progress (working under the same title) that I am hoping to finish sometime this summer.

I see that Stevan Allred's The Painted Man was also selected in Serialized Works. Congratulations to Stevan!