More on Writing

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for the love of it, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for the money.
- Moliere

So, I was happily surprised yesterday to receive a $10 check in the mail as payment for a poem. It was accepted into Thema Literary Society's issue "A Perfect Cup of Coffee" for 2007. This is my first literary journal acceptance. I'm also excited because this brings my total literary earnings LTD (Life to Date) to $30.00.

It's even more ironic because two blogs ago I was wishing for a poetry acceptance (remember the ego boost I needed?). Now, I am wondering if making public wishes mean they will be granted. Were we all misled by believing wishes must be secrets?

Anyway, what I wish for now is help at work. An assistant. A smart person to help me with my workload. I have too much going on and not enough help and it's affecting my work-life balance. If only I could get my literary earnings up so I could quit my day job!

By the way, I also got a rejection today from a South Asian anthology, which is a downer. However, now that I've been keeping track of my submissions, I see there might be problems with the specific piece that I'm peddling. I need to work on that.

However, I'm taking work home these days so it's cutting into my writing time. I need to write so I don't have to work, but I can't write because I have to work.

The quote that drives me the most in my writing endeavors is this one:

There's nobody out there waiting for it, and nobody's going to scold you if you don't do it. - Lynne Sharon Schwartz

I know I am the only one waiting for it and I am the only one to scold myself.

DesiLit,Writers, Writing

So now that I've organized my writing efforts and put my project management skills to work, I'm getting my work published online. I've gotten rejections, but the acceptances outweight the effects of the rejections. Though I could use an acceptance of my poetry somewhere (just for an ego boost!)

Anyway, check out DesiLit's first online magazine for my review of Shashi Tharoor's Bookless in Baghdad. The DesiLit editors did an impressive job in selecting quality work for their magazine and I enjoyed reading the bios of the contributors, since each seem as fascinating as their work.

As for Tharoor, I had the opportunity to meet him last year and saw him speak on two different occasions, just months apart. I wanted to see him at another event, but feared he'd call me a stalker. Here's a picture from the SAJA writers conference last year. I had asked him to sign my "Mirrorwork" book while my cousin and friends took the pictures. (We turned from smart, confident women into giggling author groupies at this event, dribbling phrases like "I loved your book.") He had read a chapter from "Bookless in Baghdad" and it would not be released in the US for a few months. Fortunately, someone brought this book for us from India.

That was a great event with speakers like Anita Desai, Suketu Mehta and Jhumpa Lahiri. For me it was most powerful to see Jhumpa on stage. I admit - as an aspiring and passionate writer - I've been jealous of Jhumpa's success. Usually I think, what does she have that I don't? From what I know, our lives and upbringing are quite similar, except that she continued with her MFA and has a Pulitzer, while I took detours and ended up with an MS in Information Science. (Damn proud of that I am!)

That day, she had come to the event with her husband and children. Her husband was taking care of the little ones and while on stage, she would nervously glance at them. Her husband was taking the crying kids out of the auditorium. As soon as she was able to get off the stage, she raced out of the auditorium and they all left. That made me realize that at the end of the day, when you're done with your Pulitzer and author presentations, you are a mom with a crying baby. This is what is always on the forefront of who you are. In that light, everything looked so different about being a literary success.

I also got over my feelings of frustration, too. I always felt, she's taking my stories. That day she read an excerpt of an upcoming novel. I listened and realized these are her stories and mine are totally different. There's not just one queue for literary success. There are many and we're in parallel queues (and mine just happens to wrap around the block!)

By the way, I blogged about this event for DesiLit.

Neruda, Love & Us..

XVII (I do not love you...)

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Translated by Stephen Tapscott

~*~*~*~*~

I've always loved this poem in the context of my daughter - even before she was born. The last two lines came to mind the other day when I was reading a bedtime story. We're sitting on her bed, she's in my lap and we both have pj shorts. Her bare knees, my bare knees were touching. I wove my arms through hers and let my elbows angle into hers. I just felt my body and her body were so entwined. Ever since she was born, I had this weird sensation. If I'm holding her and I pat her on the back, I'm always surprised that I don't feel my hand through her body. I feel we're still part of each other.

Women Writers

I had this list saved, and wanted to share it. I got it from Chicago Public Library and I've starred my favorites. A bit tricky since I may have read the author's other works and not this particular one (e.g., Isabel Allende)

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women *
Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings *
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice *
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture
Boston Women's Health Book Collective Staff, Our Bodies, Ourselves
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre *
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights *
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape *
Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth *
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring *
Willa Cather, My Antonia *
Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie *
Kate Chopin, The Awakening *
Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson *
Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health
George Eliot (Mary Ann or Marian Evans), Middlemarch *
Fannie Farmer, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
Francis Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake
Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist
Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl *
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
Emma Goldman, Living My Life
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
Edith Hamilton, Mythology
Betty Lehan Harragan, Games Mother Never Taught You
Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God *
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life *
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior *
Elisabeth Kr-Ross, On Death and Dying
Frances Moore Lapp, Diet for a Small Planet
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird *
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party *
Beryl Markham, West with the Night
Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa
Golda Meir, My Life
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems
Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind *
Marianne Moore, Complete Poems of Marianne Moore
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon *
Lady Shikibu Murasaki, The Tale Genji
Anais Nin, The Early Diary of Anais Nin
Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories
Zoe Oldenbourg, The World Is Not Enough
Tillie Olsen, Silences
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels
Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar *
Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born
Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography
Sappho, Sappho: A New Translation *
May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein *
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin *
Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror
Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter
Alice Walker, The Color Purple *
Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome *
Phyllis Wheatley, The Collected Works of Phyllis Wheatley
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women*
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own *

ABCDLady Articles

Just wanted to share some news that I'll be contributing to the Parenting section of ABCD Lady. Here's my first article, "Making the Most of Summer with Your Kids."

If you have suggestions for future topics, please let me know. I'd like to continue this tone of being informative without being preachy and realistic without whining.

Alice Walker Poem

Because
you rubbed
my shoulder
last night
a poem
traveled down
my arm.

~*~

Living
this year
in
disaster:
How
is
it different?

~*~

No one
has
escaped
a blessing.

~*~

Every time
you
die
you live
differently.

~*~

You cannot
eat
money
and
if you could
it would
make
you
sick.

~*~

Removing
the
boulder
reveals
the
message
underneath.

~*~

Buddha
helps
us up
while
lying
down.

~*~*~*~~*~*~~*~*~*~~*~*~~*~*~*~~*~*~~*~*~*~~*~*~~*~*~*~~*~*~

I love Alice Walker's poetry for her simplicity and the beauty of her words and ideas. I have a few of her poetry books and they're like little treasures. The poem above is printed on multiple pages in her book "A Poem Traveled Down My Arm." So, it's as if there's a nugget of gold on each page - letting you marvel and relish the words and feelings.

Verdi Cries

Verdi Cries

-10,000 Maniacs "Blind Man's Zoo"

The man in 119 takes his tea all alone.
Mornings we all rise to wireless Verdi cries.
I'm hearing opera through the door.
The souls of men and women, impassioned all.
Their voices climb and fall; battle trumpets call.
I fill the bath and climb inside, singing.

He will not touch their pastry
but every day they bring him more.
Gold from the breakfast tray, I steal them all away
and then go and eat them on the shore.

I draw a jackal-headed woman in the sand,
sing of a lover's fate sealed by jealous hate
then wash my hand in the sea.
With just three days more I'd have just about learned the entire score to Aida.

Holidays must end as you know.
All is memory taken home with me:
the opera, the stolen tea, the sand drawing, the verging sea, all years ago.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

I loved the 10,000 Maniacs like anything back in the day, and this song is absolutely beautiful. I loved the simplicity of the music and the story in the lyrics. It's a short song, but it says so so much. There's a viola at the end of it, which is exquisite. I was writing earlier this morning, and this song just popped in my head. So, I wanted to share this.