Category: Uncategorized

To Each Their Own

Prompts this week are tying back to the Washington Writer’s Retreat, a five-year social engagement among a community of writers and artists. More than thirty scholars stayed in my home in Mount Rainier, Maryland, and we sat around my table often.

Creative practice became central to the experience. Its importance, what it is, and how it is done. The short answer is: uniquely. Of course, there are patterns that follow notable texts and teachers. The upclose view at the retreat included interesting deviations.

For example, a prolific historian was the model of stoic discipline. He stayed for six weeks. Each day, he got up, drank one cup of coffee, exercised, worked on his own projects in the morning, ate a modest lunch, and took afternoon phone calls.

His routine was deliberate and consistent. Importantly, it worked for him. He was on his eighth academic tome.

As host, I was witness to it all. From my perch, his routine was rigid and exhausting. I relished my daily opportunity to sleep in as needed and had happily tucked the necessities of each day around my own amusements. I loved it when guests left, not for the goodbyes but because flipping a room is the perfect time to listen to music, dance, and fuss the day away. It was a secret pleasure.

Months later, another academic stayed in that same room. She mostly toodled on her bike, exploring the city with her sister and niece. We all knew she had a massive book proposal to write. No matter, she filled an ice chest with luscious lunches, taking successive days in what appeared to be vacation mode.

Having a project and doing it was part of the invitation to stay at the retreat. A vacation in DC wasn’t precisely the point. I grew suspect. In the days before Airbnb, I was careful to bake integrity, trust, purpose, and focus into the decision to invite a guest. As a social exchange, building a reputation of productivity around the retreat was also important to me.

Then she came home one day, parked her bike, wrote the proposal, packed up, and drove off. The book was quickly greenlit and is now done. She’s doing field research on women’s health in Africa. Perhaps it was me who missed the point.

In reflection, the greater insight is apparent. Every person who stayed had their own way of working. Some sat with me in blissful chatter for hours over a simple soup. Others cocooned behind a closed door. Turns out one or two folks just needed a place to be. That was ok, too.

Stovetop Stories

I am not an expert cook, though I’ve learned a lot in kitchens. Like, how to make visitors feel welcome when all you have to share is spare.

Standing over my stovetop in late spring 2009, I wondered how a depression era woman might approach my problem. I’d been fired a third time for about the same reasons. It wasn’t me, and it was. At least as far as they were concerned.

The soup in front of me bore resemblance to my condition. Cobbled together from a career worth of leftovers. Nutritious but bland. Enough and not much. Over qualified, uninspired.

Shoulder width away in time, a certain cameraderie arose in my heart. Wise women whispered — the power of stew in a pot. How many families had one soup nourished? Whose hearts were healed by a dish handed over a threshold. How many gooses got cooked in those precedent (and prescient) kitchens.

Not the usual cozy metaphors. Baked tarts? More like changed hearts. Those nearby values fostered in the confines of an abode.

Humble courage developed in the days ahead. Intuitive stumbles. Rambles and gambles. Gambits when two or three bits fit. Slowly knitting parts into a whole, having moved the metaphor to my sitting room on the first floor.

Circles of unmatched chairs suited the odd fellows there. We all knew it was rare. Art is-is when other people are present. We-we circles out from that sacred center.

The Washington Writers Retreat was born in that kitchen collective. A convection to make creative liberty cost effective.

Social Tender

My father’s lifelong postcard collection lines one wall of our shared home office in Tempe, Arizona. Arranged in notebooks stationed on uniform wooden shelves acquired for exactly this purpose. Benignly neglected precisely the amount of time for them to become useful again.

This time to me.

He was a 5-year-old rabbling around a crowd of kids, playing street corner baseball in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Trading baseball cards at first, a social tender among the young guys whose parents had dragged them here from Kansas, or somewhere else. Soon it became postcards, a collectible literature of the places he’d already seen and was getting to know.

This peripatetic paper trail now right in front of me, with Mister 88 still chatting out parental wisdom and political philosophy from his comfy corner chair. As he would (and often does) say, “Well, what now?”

Also, is there any ice cream? Can I have a coke? Where is the remote?

He is still and very definitely human. I am, too. But to have these two angelic intelligences paired together again in pursuit of such folly as a lifetime of postcards. Who wouldn’t?

Over time, the postcard collection swelled far beyond the bounds of his family, professional, and worldly travels. He missed certain places and has filled in those spaces with small paper pallettes that carry not the weight of memory but of desire, curiosity, and vicarious adventure.

Social tender, a tencil term that ties me to my father’s early trades. He worked his way into new circles of friends, different family units, and collegial communities as his young life followed alongside his father’s faculty positions. Eventually, Dad’s profession would take him across political aisles and well beyond the boundaries of polite society once or twice.

What is key to me is the social materiality of his early exchanges. Before dimes, or even dollars, he had those postcards as a way of trading introductions, information, stories, and alliances (White Sox and KU basketball, for Dad). That social practice is the DNA of his professional reputation, leading to outcomes far greater than the substantial exchanges of public funding he accomplished.

I’ve thought to monetize Dad’s postcards outright to the marketplace. Piece out his shop at the end of its run. But what a shame to miss the more glorious values available in there. Traveling through it together, all the places we have and have not been. As a collection, it’s an elegant and relevant cultural relic, too.

Timely and timeless, neatly tucked into plastic pockets. A family wealth stacked and bound, ignored and found laying about eighty-some years later. What does this paternal past have to do with picture-perfect Phoenix today? Plenty. Some of these postcards tell that story, too.

Hanging around with Dad and his collection is like sitting next to a living time machine. His mind is so fluid now, we can easy skip from his childhood to his career. Life loops back on itself. Time is slower, and less orderly. He loves to meander through memories. I like to absorb those histories. In the meantime, we sort postcards, laying down stacks of size, subject, and sentiment that takeover the available tabletops.

He played cards with his father when he was young. So did I, and here we are again.