Drought, flood, drought, flood

I sent work out during all of 2005 and got nothing in return for my efforts. No love, no ink, no shred of interest, and rejection after rejection after rejection. A year's worth of it. Hard to imagine going a year with next to nothing in the way of positive strokes, but it's the writer's life I'm afraid. Needless to say, I was getting bummed and wondering if I should just quit trying to get published in journals. The whole lit journal publishing racket leaves SO MUCH to be desired.

Then, on Saturday, I opened my email to a lovely acceptance from Xavier Review for the short story that is essentially the first chapter of my novel. This acceptance was especially sweet because Xavier Review publishes work about the southern US and Caribbean, and wants work that explores racial themes. Perfect fit! Yay, life is good.

Then, the mail arrived. In the stack was a letter from Primavera accepting another story of mine that was first submitted in 2004! (In 2005 they requested a revision to the ending, which I did, and they have now agreed to publish it in 2007. A long way off, one might think, but in this crazy publishing business I've learned that it really isn't so far away.) This is another excellent fit, as Primavera is a journal that showcases work by and about women and the story is about two very different women who come together and the assumptions that each makes about the other. The editors were wonderful and really considered and discussed the work before deciding to publish it.

My faith in the system has been restored. Although, in a perfect world, I would have preferred to space my acceptances out just a bit more--two in one day may be more excitement than this poor fragile writer can handle, and it mostly left me shaking my head in disbelief. But I've decided to stockpile the excited feelings--store them away so that I will have a stash of fortitude to get me through the possibility of another long acceptanceless year.

Green-glowing pigs

Am I the only one that finds this horrible??

Glowing, green pigs

Generous Crows?

Clickety

EVEN ANIMALS ARE CELEBRATING THE SEASON OF SHARING

BREWSTER, NY -- (December 22, 2005) -- Why would a full-grown raven, living in a flight cage at Green Chimneys' Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, voluntarily feed his own food ration to a group of wild black vultures through the wires of his enclosure? That's the question perplexing staff and students at Green Chimneys.

I couldn't believe my eyes, said farm psychologist Dr. Suz Brooks. I was watching the raven pluck little pieces of meat we had just fed him, walk over to the wire of his enclosure and push the food toward the waiting vultures on the outside. The vultures gobbled up the morsels, as the raven kept getting more.

For many years, it was thought that concepts such as sharing, altruism and generosity were strictly human traits, and subject of animal emotions still is hotly debated among scientists. Yet, the work of ethologists like Jane Goodall, Mark Bekoff and others interested in the study of animals continues to reveal amazing abilities some species have to demonstrate complex behaviors indicating a much higher level of emotional and intellectual functioning.

Based on the science, ravens and crows are known to be extremely intelligent, said Michael Kaufmann, Green Chimneys' Farm and Wildlife director. But we really don't know why our raven has decided that feeding his food to the vultures outside his cage is something he wants to do. We need to be careful not to jump to conclusions based on human emotions when we are looking at explanations of animal behavior. But then again, sometimes things really are what they appear to be. Regardless why the raven is doing this, the students at Green Chimneys are seeing firsthand that even a bird can share his food, and wouldn't it be amazing if that were exactly the reason why the raven is doing it?

"Green Chimneys is dedicated to the preservation and rehabilitation of wildlife, said Paul Kupchok, founder of wildlife programs at Green Chimneys. The one thing we must remember is that wild animals belong in the wild and no matter how intelligent they are, they do not make good pets.

Green Chimneys restores possibilities and creates futures for children with emotional, behavioral, social and learning challenges. The organization operates a residential treatment center for children, a special education school, a farm, and a variety of programs in New York and Connecticut.

Happy New Year!

I'm looking forward to 2006, actually. I have this gut feeling that's it's going to be a good year.

Of course, that could be the crazy optimism that I feel after having finally completed my novel. It's a sort of insanity, this euphoria at being done. I liken it to the new mother who holds her little wrinkled bundle of mewling pinkness and proclaims it to be the most beautiful baby ever.

Well, yes. And no. There's something magical about all that promise just waiting to be fulfilled that makes the blank slate of the newborn seem like perfection. In reality, it's more a combination of the thrill of creation, the innocent helplessness of the infant, and our own egos being fed by replication that makes a baby seem like a culmination of all our hopes and dreams.

Which is how I feel about my novel now. But babies grow up. And books get published. I'm sure my feelings will change as time passes. And it will be painful to see my paper baby sent out into the world, facing the judgments and opinions of others, but the alternative isn't an option, so out it goes. Today. To my first tier of agents. Wish me luck. :)

Intelligent Design

Judge in Pennsylvania rules that biology teachers need not instruct students in "intelligent design." Here.

Coral reef ecosystems...

...are declining in U.S. waters.

NOW salutes Rosa Parks

A lovely (brief) tribute can be read here.

Please help stop this.

Dogs used as shark bait. A petition link can be found here. Click on "signez la petition en ligne" and you will be given an English option. Thank you.

Mommy Mania

Here is an excerpt from an article titled Mommy Madness(full piece here) which is itself excerpted from her book Perfect Madness about mothers driving themselves crazy trying to be supermoms:

"Women today mother in the excessive, control-freakish way that they do in part because they are psychologically conditioned to do so. But they also do it because, to a large extent, they have to. Because they are unsupported, because their children are not taken care of, in any meaningful way, by society at large. Because there is right now no widespread feeling of social responsibility—for children, for families, for anyone, really—and so they must take everything onto themselves. And because they can't, humanly, take everything onto themselves, they simply go nuts.

I see this all the time. It never seems to stop. So that, as I write this, I have an image fresh in my mind: the face of a friend, the mother of a first-grader, who I ran into one morning right before Christmas.

She was in the midst of organizing a class party. This meant shopping. Color-coordinating paper goods. Piecework, pre-gluing of arts-and-crafts projects. Uniformity of felt textures. Of buttons and beads. There were the phone calls, too. From other parents. With criticism and "constructive" comments that had her up at night, playing over conversations in her mind. "I can't take it anymore," she said to me. "I hate everyone and everything. I am going insane."

I looked at her face, saw her eyes fill with tears, and in that instant saw the faces of dozens of women I'd met—and, of course, I saw myself.

And I was reminded of the words of a French doctor I'd once seen. I'd come to him about headaches. They were violent. They were constant. And they would prove, over the next few years, to be chronic. He wrote me a prescription for a painkiller. But he looked skeptical as to whether it would really do me much good. "If you keep banging your head against the wall," he said, "you're going to have headaches."

I have thought of these words so many times since then. I have seen so many mothers banging their heads against a wall. And treating their pain—the chronic headache of their lives—with sleeping pills and antidepressants and anxiety meds and a more and more potent, more and more vicious self-and-other-attacking form of anxious perfectionism.

And I hope that somehow we will all find a way to stop. Because we are not doing ourselves any good. We are not doing our children—particularly our daughters—any good. We're not doing our marriages any good. And we're doing nothing at all for our society.

We are simply beating ourselves black and blue. So let's take a breather. Throw out the schedules, turn off the cell phone, cancel the tutors (fire the OT!). Let's spend some real quality time with our families, just talking, hanging out, not doing anything for once. And let ourselves be."

From PERFECT MADNESS by Judith Warner. To be published by Riverhead books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. © 2005 by Judith Warner.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

This book rocks! Not an extra word in it, and yet every word is essential. The characters are rendered with absolute clarity and sympathy. It's intensely moving without being sentimental, and it makes you think. What could be better?

Navy experiments risk the lives of marine mammals

The US Navy is experimenting with massive shock waves that will be used to destroy incoming torpedos. While this may be a great idea for protecting submariners, the Navy--yet again--fails to consider the effect of massive shock waves to marine mammals who rely on sonar. The testing alone could cause massive strandings of disoriented whales and dolphins. The military needs to put the health of the planet on a par with protecting troops and winning wars. If we win every war but destroy the environment in the process, what's the gain?

Tobacco Road

An awesome essay by Myfanwy Collins that can be read at the AGNI website.

Orphaned bear cubs stick together

Read the story here.

Publishing and marketing your book

There's a great discussion on this over at the Emerging Writers Network website. You can access it here.

Three weeks

Well, my stipend check from Bread Loaf came yesterday. I wonder if they know I'd do it for free? Shh. Don't tell. Seriously, I love that place and it takes about three weeks for me to come down from the high of being there. And at about three weeks post-Bread Loaf I also begin to sorely miss my fellow writers and staff members. We had such an amazing staff this year. Here's a link to some of the pictures clickety

Bread Loaf!

Well, I am off in the morning to start my stint as Social Staff at Bread Loaf and I am very excited. Last year, I sent my grandmother a postcard from there as she always supported my writing. She was a journalism major in college, and attended school with Eric Severeid (I think that's right). Maybe I'll write her another one this year and just leave it in a hollow tree in the woods somewhere.

Home

I am home after nine days in the Adirondack High Peaks Wilderness Area. We spent three days backpacking in remote areas, where we met maybe ten people (and one huge black bear). The streams were beautiful and ice cold, the trees sang, and I worshiped at the altar of those huge boulders left behind when the ancient glaciers receded, huge, moss-covered boulders that only the Adirondacks can claim, wrapped by the encircling roots of trees that began their lives as seedlings way up high, not knowing that the real ground lay much farther below.

I love the mountains. They restore my soul.

At the summit of Whiteface Mountain (New York's 5th highest peak), sweaty and exultant, I found cell phone service and phoned to briefly check on my children (yes, I know, technology in nature and all of that horrible stuff, but we have five kids between us, one of whom is about to deliver a baby--we need to check-in occasionally). At that summit, on my first phone call out in days, I learned that my grandmother had died the day before. The news was not delivered gently, as family had been trying to reach me for a full day and my mother assumed I knew.

I didn't.

Mountain climbing and hiking require a certain amount of focus and attention to be done well. I am not sure how I managed to descend those 4,000 plus feet safely, wiping tears and snot and sweat on my bandanna every step of the way, but I did.

I lost a lot of salt that day.

My grandmother was 94. On August 28th, she would be 95, but on my last visit to her in July she told me she hoped she didn't live to see that birthday and some part of me knew then that she wouldn't. Still, it was hard. I loved that woman with a fierce, irrational, passionate love. She was cantankerous and outspoken and immovable. She was born in 1910, saw the end of WWI, WWII, and most of the 20th century. She lived in such places as India, Ethiopia, New Zealand and had friends all over the world. She took one of the first transatlantic flights ever, on a double-decker sleeper plane. She drove a VW bug across the African desert surrounded by extra jugs of petrol and water and floated the car across the Nile on a raft of sticks. She kept the home front going as a mother of two young children while my grandfather landed on Iwo Jima and wrote home to "My Beloved Minnow..." Minnow because she swam in Minnesota's frigid lakes year round, and was always the last to exit the water.

I will miss my grandmother more than I can articulate. I know there was a certain "rightness" to finding out about her death after I had scaled a massive mountain. I know that she lived a full life and didn't suffer and died on her own terms. I know all of that. But I still feel like that tree that started as a seedling on top of a rock, grew to a sapling and then found that there wasn't enough soil after all and so grabbed the rock with encircling roots trying desperately to hang on, to make it to the ground, to become a freestanding tree, a tree in its own right.

Crows

Here is an awesome short video of a crow using a tool--but not just using the tool, also shaping it to fit her use. Amazing.

Newborn dolphins go a month without sleep...

And so do their poor mothers.

Lions and tiger and bears

Okay. What gets me about the story below (where the lions saved the young girl from kidnappers and protected her until help arrived) is that the "experts" have to chime in and tell us that the lions probably mistook the child's cries for those of a lion cub. To which I say, bullshit. What lion mistakes a twelve-year-old human child for a cub? Adult lions have great eyesight, a superb sense of smell, excellent hearing... It's ludicrous. And anyway, if those lions really thought she was a cub they would have picked her up by the scruff of the neck and carried her off and nurtured her. They would not have stood guard over her. And if they were protecting her because they thought she was one of their own, they surely would not have just calmly walked back into the forest when more humans arrived. They would have continued to protect her. They would have fought the new humans off. Instead, they delivered her to safety and considered their job done.

Why are we humans always trying so hard to explain away the altruistic behavior of animals? We seem so absolutely convinced that humans are the only creatures capable of motives higher than obtaining food and sex (and some humans aren't).

It's specie-centrism and it's myopic thinking.

We need to bridge the gap that will let us acknowledge that animals are capable of love and of nurturing species that are not their own. How many thousands of pets have saved their owners? (I can just hear the rationalists: "If the house is burning down and the pet saves the owner, it is really just saving itself.") Not always. When I was a child, my dog got between me and an angry copperhead. She took the strike and almost died. (My dad and I dripped milk into her mouth from a turkey baster and walked her around the house all night until she was out of danger--it seemed like the least we could do.)

Sometimes an animal is alerting its human to danger so the human can take his magic opposable thumbs and fix the problem. When I was in my twenties, the pottery studio where I worked caught fire from a faulty kiln while the owner slept in a nearby trailer. Our studio cat (nicknamed "Dammit" because she always bumped into pots and dinged them when still wet or knocked them off to shatter on the floor when dry) alerted the owner, and he was more than 100 feet away in a trailer, plenty safe from the fire.

There are numerous accounts of dolphins rescuing drowning humans. At what benefit to the dolphin? None. The dolphin is not saving itself. It is saving a human. Another species. In fact, the dolphin puts itself in danger by assisting, yet its compassionate nature, its own understanding of the need to breathe air makes it save the human. What possible other reason could there be?

Understand me. I am not romanticizing animals and saying they are all altruistic and wonderful. Just as I would never say that all humans are altruistic and wonderful. But there are plenty of times when the only explanation for an animal's behavior is something like understanding. Something like compassion. Something like love.