"Odysseus in Woodside" Honorable Mention from Writing Tomorrow magazine.

As I have already posted on Facebook, I thought it would be fitting to include this happy bit of news on my blog.  Writing Tomorrow magazine has announced the results of its First Annual Short Story Award.  The winners will appear in the October 2013 issue. And I am pleased to say that a short story I wrote, "Odysseus in Woodside," has won Honorable Mention, and will be among the next issue's contents.

I invite you to check out the current issue as well as the upcoming one.

The judge was Robert Voedisch. His work has appeared in The Greensboro Review, NorthAmerican Review, Five Chapters, and Paper Darts, to name a few.

This is the April 2013 issue (click here).

This is the February 2013 issue (click here).

"Miss Wimbish" now appearing in Uncharted Frontier EZine #10.

Uncharted Frontier EZine Issue #10 May 2013 is out, and in it is a short story by yours truly: "Miss Wimbish."  The magazine has some very interesting poetry and prose, and captivating photography.  I invite you check it out and enjoy.

The Arctic is a long, unbroken bow of time.

[When I began to read Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, I really had no idea what to expect; I thought it was going to be in the same vein as John McPhee or Pico Iyer, authors whom I admire greatly, both for their brilliant mastery of earth science and anthropology.  I thought perhaps there would be a reminiscence of Gaston Bachelard, or perhaps Henri Michaux,  by virtue of the subtitle "Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape."  But what I have discovered about this book is more than beautifully written paragraphs of scientific insight, more than its pages of geologic mystery and fascinating biological and evolutionary narrative.  This book captures my spirit as much as it does my intellect.  I am glad to have had it recommended to me, and am equally glad to recommend it to you.  This is my second post on the subject; there will be more.  Below are excerpts from Chapter 5, Migration: The Corridors of Breath.  --M.]

Time pools in the stillness here and then dissipates.  The country is emptied of movement.  The coming and going of the animals during the short summer gives the Arctic a unique rhythmic shape.... 

Time here like light is a passing animal..., hovers above the tundra like the rough-legged hawk, or collapses althgother like a bird keeled over with a heart attack, leaving the stillness we call death.

No wild frenzy of feeding distinguishes the short summer.  But for the sudden movements of charging wolves and bolting caribou, ...the Arctic is a long, unbroken bow of time.  

To lie on your back somewhere on the light-drowned tundra of an Ellesmere Island valley is to feel that the ice ages might have ended but a few days ago.  

  

How very far from Mesopotamia we have come.

We list the butterflies...we delineate the life history of the ground squirrel...we name everything...then we fold the charts and the catalogs, as if we were done with a competent description.

But the land is not a painting....

Lying flat on your back on Ellesmere Island on rolling tundra without animals, without human trace, you can feel the silence stretching all the way to Asia. 

 

You can sit for a long time with the history of man like a stone in your hand.  The stillness, the pure light, encourage it.

--Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

Advice from Muriel Spark, circa 1988

Muriel Spark, 1960

"...So I passed him some very good advice, that if you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat.  Alone with a cat in the room where you work, I explained, the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk-lamp.  The light from a lamp, I explained, gives a cat great satisfaction.  The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding.  And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost.  You need not watch the cat all the time."

and...

Muriel Spark, shortly before her death in 2010

"'You are writing a letter to a friend,' was the sort of thing I used to say.  'And this is a dear and close friend, real--or better--invented in your mind like a fixation. Write privately, not publicly; without fear or timidity, right to the end of the letter, as if it was never going to be published, so that your true friend will read it over and over, and then want more enchanting letters from you.  Now, you are not writing about the relationship between your friend and yourself; you take that for granted.  You are only confiding an experience that you think only he would enjoy reading. What you have to say will come out more spontaneously and honestly than if you are thinking of numerous readers.'"

[Excerpted from A Far Cry From Kensington, by Muriel Spark. New Directions, 2000.]
 

Living at moral peace with the universe. "Arctic Dreams" by Barry Lopez. This is a fascinating work.

© 2013 Christine Clifton-Thornton

"At the heart of this narrative, then, are three themes: The influence of the arctic landscape on the human imagination. How a desire to put a landscape to use shapes our evaluation of it.  And confronted by an unknown landscape, what happens to our sense of wealth.

"What does it mean to grow rich?  Is it to have red-blooded adventures and to make a fortune, which is what brought the whalers and other entrepreneurs north?  Or is it, rather, to have a good family life and to be imbued with a far-reaching and intimate knowledge of one's homeland, which is what the Tununirmiut told the whalers at Pond's Bay wealth was?  Is it to retain a capacity for awe and astonishment in our lives, to continue to hunger after what is genuine and worthy?  Is it to live at moral peace with the universe?

"...It is possible to imagine afresh the way to a lasting security of the soul and heart, and toward an accommodation in the flow of time we call history....  That dream is the dream of great and common people alike."   [from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, pp. 13-14]

"A Yup'ik hunter on St. Lawrence Island once told me that what traditional Eskimos fear most about us is the extent of our power to alter the land, the scale of that power, and the fact that we can easily effect some of these changes electronically, from a distant city.  

 

"Eskimos, who sometimes see themselves as still not quite separate from the animal world, regard us as a kind of people whose separation may have become too complete.  They call us, with a mixture of incredulity and apprehension, "the people who change nature.""  [from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, p. 39]

The poor read to know that they are not condemned.

Without a doubt, I'm becoming a big fan of Joe Queenan.  This is from his memoir:

Even in his worst moments, my father never resembled the simpletons who masquerade as blue-collar heroes on television; in the darkest of times he never talked like Archie Bunker, the malignant sow dreamed up by West Coast millionaires as a mechanism for sneering at people who have to work for a living. 

Unlike TV’s prefab proletariat, self-congratulatory buffoons all, my father could tell you why Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, why Richard III killed the little princes, why Hannibal dragged his elephants over the Alps, and why one should think twice before venturing out onto the English moors at night.  Hemmed in by ignorant men, he was not himself ignorant.

He was...the best the working class had to offer.  He was ceaselessly in the process of educating himself, not because he thought it might advance his career--he had no career--but because reading was a way to escape to a better world.  ...While some people, to borrow an insight from C.S. Lewis, read to know they are not alone, the poor read to know that they are not condemned.  ...Books are a guiding light out of the underworld, a secret passageway, an escape hatch.  To the affluent, books are ornaments.  To the poor, books are siege weapons.

Joe Queenan. Closing Time, New York: Viking Press, 2009, pp. 14-15.

"Using a gouache of humor, science, and compassion, he'd set forth the foundations of our friendship." [from pages 124-125 of the book.]

[From pages 124-125 of the book]

I had arrived on campus that summer's end quite full of myself.  Not only was I the first child in my family to go to a university without the intention of committing a crime, but the first child out of all 40 cousins on either side of our family to have reached the age of 18 and still have no intentions to marry. 

It made me a "know-it-all."  However, in less than an hour, which was all that it took to get to know each other, Owen had exposed in me what I'd already believed about most of my fellow students: How much smarter I was than they; what an individual I was; and how bright, how very bright I was going to be.  Question followed question from his streetwise and quick mind, as he gleaned from me my family history and what I was doing in Peoria; in that Socratic order was his meaning.

Harry Stack Sullivan

Abraham Maslow

 Before he'd ever taken a single course in psychology, before he'd ever read Maslow, Horney, Perls, and Sullivan, he'd forged for himself a technique of observing and understanding, at high speed, who and what he was currently dealing with, either in confrontations or in conversations. He might have had time yet to come into contact with the sons and daughters of Freud and Jung, but he nevertheless knew how a man thought and what he feared.

Frederick "Fritz" Perls

 

Karen Horney

He'd told me who I was, for what it was worth: Those revelations were as enigmatic in their origins as they were concrete in their disclosure.  He'd told me who he was, leaving enough unsaid to maintain his privacy and his mystique.  And wielding a paintbrush with all the vision of recorded history, as if by the hand of a Renaissance master, he'd placed a canvas before me.  Using a gouache of humor, science, and compassion, he'd set forth the foundations of our friendship. 

Some quotations from Maslow, Horney, Perls, and Sullivan:

"Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self-esteem. If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge." [Perls]

"When the satisfaction or the security of another person becomes as significant to one as one's own satisfaction or security, then the state of love exists. Under no other circumstances is a state of love present, regardless of the popular usage of the term." [Sullivan]

[2 from Horney]: "Life itself still remains a very effective therapist."    "Concern should drive us into action, not into a depression."

[2 from Maslow]:  “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”   “The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.”