Sea Sew

I've felt twelve kinds of love for Lisa Hannigan's music since hearing her with Demian Rice years back. Her new solo album Sea Sew is love, lovely.



She gave a great interview about her creative process and the album on NPR that you can read here. The liner notes include a photo of all of the song lyrics that she herself stitched on linen. She explains her song writing by saying:

"It's that moment where you see the turn of somebody's elbow or a book peeking out of someone's bag on the train," Hannigan says. "And — I do this anyway — I sort of construct a person behind it, invariably positive. And I think that song is about that moment, where you're sort of full of hope about someone you really have no idea about."

I love that. That's the beginning of every story that has already been going on without you. You just want to jump in. I feel that way when writing or taking photographs, too.


By the way, the pub where this is filmed, Dick Mack's Pub, is in Dingle which is in County Kerry, Ireland. I have never been to this pub, but I have been to Kerry and it is beautiful. Here's a few images of the pub (from a traveler on flickr) that make me a little thirsty for a pint.
Cheers.

The Ever-Rising Tide

In reading about the writing process for Away We Go, I learned that the married screenwriters of the film {Dave Eggers & Vendela Vida) don't have internet at home.


Dave Eggers was quoted in this interview as saying, "For us, to be able to concentrate, we don't have internet at home, for example, because we had to put a levee up against that ever-rising tide. That's the way for us to control our intake. There's a lot of media really affected by all these changes, but what's funny is that the book world has kind of stayed constant. Sales are about what they always were, we've found."

Wow. I admire their discipline and it must be working based on their success and quality of their work. And it's not like he's a ludite or something. He hosts a website himself.

While we are not good candidates to give up the internet, there is a larger message I can take from his point about how important it is to limit media consumption when you are trying to create. Everything I produce creatively as a photographer or writer or attorney is certainly affected by all of the media changes. For the most part, it has been a good thing. I am accustomed to creating with the short hand convenience of hyperlinking so that the reader can easily hear the song, see the film clip, read the case I am referencing, etc. But this sensory supplement does make it more difficult for me to make things quiet. Sometimes I wonder as a writer if it is lazy to just show the thing, whatever it is, rather than find a creative way to describe it.

Over the past couple of years, I have tried to quiet the house and streamline. I canceled the home phone, redirected email addresses to one in-box, cut off cable, canceled TiVo, unsubscribed to most newsletters and junk mailers, and yet, it still feels like a constant barrage of information: texts, emails, mail, voice mails, updates.

I will work on how to do more, just after I check my email.

Swirling In My Heart Today

I watched this TED speech from Elizabeth Gilbert and different things about it keep tumbling around in my mind like fluffy clothes in the dryer.

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My guy bought the new Andrew Bird album Nobel Beast -we are fans- but this album is really something. I love the interview that aired about it this week on NPR's All Things Considered. He speaks about his creative process in such an interesting way. He can experience synesthesia -seeing color in sounds etc.,-I am convinced he's a genius.

The super haunting/inspiring part about it to me was in the interview, when talks about the inspiration behind his first song on the album, Oh No. He said it was inspired by an upset child sitting behind him on an airplane.

"He just kept saying quietly, 'ohhh nooo. ohhhh nooo.'
He was going home and his mom kept saying, 'we're just going home, honey. It's fine.'
And it wasn't this nails on a chalkboard sound, it was actually a really beautiful kind of mourning sound and I was actually kind of envious of this kid.
I guess everyone's feeling that on the airplane, but it would be total anarchy if we all were as expressive as the average 4-year-old."

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We sat at a table this morning at Doodles {my new favorite brunch spot} next to a young guy eating alone, reading the paper. Each time our girl would try to tilt her chair back, he would almost jump up to catch her. We were right there, talked to her about being careful, repositioned her chair and so on, but I felt bad for this guy who was just trying to have breakfast and not worry, but you could tell he couldn't help it. {It reminded me of how I felt going to the beach on my day off when I was lifeguarding at a waterpark. I was constantly scanning and seeing hazards.} He finally told us that he's a pediatric nurse at the children's hospital and it was just habit. He said, "I don't mind even screaming kids. Screaming kids means they are breathing and that they are okay."
It was hard not to hug him.

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We iced them together. Yellow cake + chocolate icing = happiness.

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I picked up this bamboo salad bowl at a local shop, Lucia's, but they sell them online here.

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That's me, I'm told.

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Only 2 more days until M. Ward's album Hold Time is released. If you follow the link, you can preview some of the songs. I've been trying to get my hands on the album's first song called For Beginners for months.

Things I Wish I Had Written

Adding to my long list of Things I Wish I Had Written...

...this enchanting story in yesterday's New York Times about a boy in a restaurant. It is just lovely.

...and this beautiful dedication from Marion Rust's book Prodigal Daughters.

She writes,

"I hope someday you [her children] take this one off the shelf and have a look. Your faces are on every page.

My father, Ted Rust, listened to me as though I were a grown-up when I was five and played duets with me before I was eight. From him, I learned to converse, as well as the pleasure of working alone at something one loves.

My brother, Daniel, flew off the bicycle jump he'd built in front of our house, both wheels high in the sky, to show me that words weren't everything.

My mother, Rainy, introduced me to the following: how to make a six-inch blackberry pie, the fine sand of Rose Hill, Ontario, and the ocean-ground gravel of Cronkite, California; cassoulet and potatoes with cauliflower; mouse houses; Bob Marley after work; swimming slowly; dancing after dinner; reading all night; endurance. Gratitude that deepens with every day. This book is for my dream come true, my mom."

I just adore every thoughtful detail filled with the best memories.

Holidays about gratitude and thanks should all begin this way, thinking of everyone you love at their best on their most sunkissed day.

This I Believe About Grief

This essay, The Give and Take of Grief, by Michael Newland featured this week on This I Believe is so powerful, I had to steady myself against a wall when I heard it.

With phrases like, "He looked at me, like a dolphin surfacing to look at a fisherman, and then re-submerged when the team took him away to stabilize him," you just have to sit down to listen.

If you can, click the speaker once you are on that page so that you can hear the author read it himself.

Pen Pals

My new post for Skirt!

Poets among us

I've been posting a lot about music lately. I think it's because music is helping carry me through the day, keeping me in my chair in my office (which my daughter calls a castle) doing what I'm supposed to be doing while my flowers are blooming and my daughter is going down a slide in the sun across town.

On my lunch break, when the breeze is just strong enough to lift my hair off of my collar, it's really REALLY difficult to walk back into the building when I'd much rather turn around and bust my daughter and husband out of their routines and head south. I started sailing as a 4-year-old. Wind was always something that picked me up and carried me somewhere. Now, it's just a reminder of all that stands still.

Jason Mraz has this beautiful phrase in You & I Both when he sings,
"See I'm all about them words
Over numbers, unencumbered numbered words
Hundreds of pages, pages, pages forwards
More words then I had ever heard and I feel so alive"

I love those lyrics. I love words. I need words like other people need sleep.

I turn to music, often, because it's a way to have poetry in the day while doing something else you have to do. Ingrid Michaelson's music is, in my mind, great poetry and has me thinking about so many things.

She writes in her so-beautiful-i-can't-listen-to-it-without-crying song, Breakable:

Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?
Just a cage of rib bones and other various parts.
So it's fairly simple to cut right through the mess,
And to stop the muscle that makes us confess.

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys.

You fasten my seatbelt because it is the law.
In your two ton death trap I finally saw.
A piece of love in your face that bathed me in regret.
Then you drove me to places I'll never forget.

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys.

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls-
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls-
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys.

I have listened to this song so many times and it always surprises me about how many different images come to me each time.

Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?

I think about it all the time Ingrid. I think about how breakable we all are in a literal sense when I look over medical records and accident reports and photographs of injuries, coroner reports and witness statements about losses. Splintered wood. Singed property. Shattered lives. Unrecoverable damages. Everyone's losses. The purpose of torts (which is a word for broken) is to put people back together again, as best as possible, to the way they were before the break. But it never ever can. It's like trying to reconstruct a wave before it breaks at the shoreline. The lawsuit is almost never about the cracking bones. It's about the sense of broken spirit. Of feeling disrespected. That the frame you have built up for yourself has been shattered.

When I drive to work, past certain intersections which I know are prone to accidents, I see the names of former clients on street signs. I hear their words. There's a stretch of highway in a rural area that curves. I spent months reconstructing the events before the impact. It has been several years, but I can still drive past the scene, no longer blackened with tire marks and burned grass and pinpoint every detail. It "resumes play" like a DVD exactly where I left off and the words from each witness in the chain who treated the driver whisper out of the blades of grass.

And then there's how breakable all of us are, boys and girls, men and women on the inside. I catch a lot of shit for being too sensitive. I don't really know how else to be. I sense someone else's vulnerability and I don't know how to pretend that I don't see it.

I cleaned out my basement last night. I have many of my grandmother's things that no one wanted when she died. Mostly scraps of fabric and newspaper clippings. In the boxes, there are 1 inch squares that I recognize as pieces that later became my curtains, her dress, my dollhouse bedspread, her table cloth, a quilt she made for my future child. Looking through the box of small parts of her, I find it so so so so so so hard to let go of a single scrap. She has died all over again and I am left in pieces trying to make something of them: these scraps of her past and my future.

My daughter, who is named for a poet, asked me what I do at work.* That's just it. I try to put pieces together that were never meant to be put together and make something we can all live with until something else tears at the seams. I am so thankful for music to hold on to while I try.

Here's Ingrid singing Breakable:



**To hell with Bee Movie telling my child that her mommy is a blood sucking mosquito. I'm sure Jerry Seinfeld is glad to have his attorney keep his wife out of copyright infringement trouble. I could rant about that for 6 pages, but this is not a ranting blog.

Snow Water

Yesterday's snowflake reminded me of a Michael Longley poem called Snow Water. In the poem Longley, a "fastidious brewer of tea, a tea Connoiseur as well as a poet, " asks the reader to bring him the gift of snow water to make his tea on his 60th birthday.

You can listen to him read it here. I love the quietness of the poem, like the gorgeous camera work in Snow Falling on Cedars of melting water droplets from leaves and pine needles.

We heard Longley read this poem in Sligo on his 64th birthday. The next day he gave an interview and talked about how his writing is changing as he ages:

"...I'm interested in getting simpler. I think that's the real challenge: to be polite and graceful and simple. The drift is towards being less and less “artistic” and simpler, and rising to, you know, the directness of the late self-portraits of Rembrandt or the last string quartets of Beethoven. I don't mean to say they aren't complex, in their conception and execution, but the effect is direct and simple."

This poem is great too about a family retreat home. "Home is a hollow between the waves..." is my favorite part.

Dear Reader

When I started this blog about 1 year ago on my 30th birthday, I was keeping a promise to myself to write more and trying to break the sometimes isolating experience of being a parent. I wanted to find and share creative endeavors that can get lost to sleep deprivation.

This year, inspired by the painting-a-day painters, I will be posting more frequently and daily when possible. As WH Auden once said, "I write so that I know what I think." That is certainly true for me. But beyond that, I hope that this year, Teaworthy continues to be a place worthy of your time and relevant to your experience.

In December, my daughter and I spent an afternoon in Chicago's Shedd Aquarium. I was so moved by all of the parents there, like me, juggling children, snacks, cameras, coats and strollers. We all helped each other by holding doors, picking up a dropped blankie, and navigating strollers into elevators.

It was just one of those times in my short tenure as a parent when I looked around and felt like I had everything in common with everyone there. We all were there just trying to have a good day with our kids, make something magical for them, and a memory for us to have long after they have outgrown needing wipes for sticky hands.

Part of me wanted to be a family photographer for each person there: for the parent who can't see how they look carrying their sleepy toddler on their shoulder, facing a wall of blue water with waves of light passing over their faces each time the sea turtle swam past. I wanted to write it down for them, for me, for all of us, or film it at least. There's an Indigo Girls song about those moments though when you can't. "Don't write it down. Don't take a picture. Remember this in your heart. " I think about that a lot.

A few days ago, I saw John Grisham on Charlie Rose and he said that when he writes, he doesn't think about the critics. He thinks about the fan who buys his book the day it comes out. He wants his readers to be so absorbed with the novel that they, "stay up late and call in sick to work" just so they can keep reading.

I write here in this place with you and days like that at the aquarium in mind: the universality of human experience. I hope this is a place you stop in with your coffee or tea where you can read something that makes you feel that we are all in this together.

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And speaking of Audience, I get such a kick out of Nick Hornby and love what he wrote here about his readers. Enjoy:

From Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree, October 2003, p. 21-22:

"If you write books -or a certain kind of book, anyway- you can't resist a scan round the hotel swimming pool when you go on holiday. You just can't help yourself, despite the odds: you need to know, straight off, whether anyone is reading one of yours.

You imagine spending your days transfixed and humbled, as a beautiful and intelligent young man or woman, almost certainly a future best friend, maybe even spouse, weeps and guffaws through three hundred pages of your brilliant prose, too absorbed even to go for a swim, or take a sip of Evian.

I was cured of this particular fantasy a couple of years ago, when I spent a week watching a woman on the other side of the pool reading my first novel, High Fidelity. Unfortunately, however, I was on holiday with my sister and brother-in-law, and my brother-in-law provided a gleeful and frankly unfraternal running commentary,
'Look! Her lips are moving.'
'Ha! She's fallen asleep! Again!'
'I talked to her at the bar last night. Not a bright woman. I'm afraid.'
At one point, alarmingly, she dropped the book and ran off.
'She's gone to put out her eyes!" my brother-in-law yelled triumphantly.'"

Date Night Discoveries

I found the coolest, inspiring stationary from this neat company




and discovered a new-to-me writer, Tessa Hadley. I am really enjoying her book Sunstroke & Other Stories, but she has written several books getting attention including The Master Bedroom reviewed here . A quick search led me to this great interview with her about mothers who write.

A few quotes from that interview worth mentioning:

How old were your children when you started to write?

"Even when they were very young, writing was such a wonderful thing it kept me alive. Some aspects of motherhood -- especially very young babyhood -- can be so difficult, but I found if I could have three hours a day to step into this other world, it kept me going and I could enjoy my children. In that way, writing helped me be a better mother because I could escape for three hours and then go back to other things with real pleasure. With my second child, I had a "child minder" which felt very greedy, but that was my time. I couldn't justify it, but it was crucial."

From a practical standpoint, how has being a mother affected your writing?

"The topics I write about are hugely affected by motherhood. Since my life from age twenty-three through my thirties was completely taken up by motherhood, all of my ingenuity and interest have been focused on that. It's the challenge of trying to capture in writing the essence of women juggling home and work, women with babies, sexuality and young mothers, the division of labor -- that's been my story, and that's what I know about."

Any other thoughts on how being a mother has influenced you as a writer?

Click here for ordering information.

"A.S. Byatt has talked about women developing later as writers, and how maturity and motherhood are sort of a backwards route to writing. That was true for me. Although I look back now and know I was not that happy with writing in secret and being rejected by publishers, I'm glad I had that time. It was almost as if I needed a period of privacy and solitude to develop. It was a plus and a minus, but I wouldn't exchange being at home for those years." Tessa Hadley





And I packed my new finds home in this cracker jack:



Envirosax-
This bag rolls up like an umbrella cover into the size of travel Kleenex, perfect for your purse, to have any time you purchase anything. We have been using larger green bags for groceries, but this works for everything else, comes in great patterns and retails for about $7 bucks.

Pages For You

I begin each year with new music, blank pages, and more stories in my head than I can get on a page.

I've noticed my daughter always starts drawing on a completely blank sheet. If there is even one stray mark on a page when she finds it, she turns the page: clean, fresh paper for her little fingers to transform. Both of her grandmothers are painters and I'm always interested to watch her put colors together. No two drawings are the same.

My husband said of someone the other day, "he just needs to be given permission to be someone different than who he has been in the past." Damn. He's so so right.

We all need that.

Permission to change. To heal. To be better or just different. To find pages without stray marks. To decide which colors to use and where the center will be.

Happy New Journal. New Journey. New Year.