Category Archives: Inspiration

The Lost Umbrellas

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Martha Varzaly
Guest Author

It was pouring raining when I came home from school, and neither Truman, my pug/cairn, nor I cared to walk.  It was still raining in the morning, but Truman’s urgent bark sounds like “Up!”  I’m not sure where he learned that sound but it surely wakes me up.  This time I knew that going out was essential.

Truman with Martha’s Umbrella

I pulled on yesterday’s dirty clothes and reached for the flowered umbrella that wasn’t in the umbrella stand.  It wasn’t in the hall closet.  It wasn’t in the garage.  Nor was it in the car.  How can one lose a wet umbrella in a condo?  Surely other umbrellas were in the back of the hall closet . . . the big black one that can cover three people, another flowered one that I bought in Target during a thunderstorm, a red one that I’ve had for years, and a sky blue one that collapses. All the while Truman demanded that we go naked in the rain   By the time we’d chased the water down the street gutters, waited for Truman to sniff every bush and peed on most of them.  Eventually we meandered home, and I dried him off before he shook the water on the carpet.  Exchanging my soaking clothes and grabbing a cup of hot coffee helped my mood.

Losing umbrellas is not the only lost thing in my life. My life seems confused like my condo . . . junk mail has spilled from the file cabinet to floor.  One day, I’ll write an article about the unwanted stuff that fills my mail box.  The clock over my desk needs a battery.  I got it off the wall, but haven’t gotten the kitchen stool so I can put it back nor can I find a battery. I must have at least half-dozen pairs of cheap reading glasses, yet there’s never a pair to be found when I’m in a hurry. There are always dishes in the sink; although, I’m sure I cleaned the kitchen last night.

It’s even worse.  I can never remember whom I have told someone something.  It may be just a joke or something important.  My children give me that look that says, “Mom, you’ve told me that already.”  Isolation and silence seems the best since I can’t upset others by repetition. I help shuttle the grandchildren to and from all sorts of activities, and my daughter sends me a weekly calendar.  For her calendar, I am grateful.  Otherwise I never know where and when I am supposed to be.

A year ago when I went to the doctor looking for a solution to my losing memory, I saw my primary care physician and a neurologist.  I took all their tests and nothing showed up – or at least nothing bad showed up.  There was no indication of memory lost, but I couldn’t remember things. Last semester I had trouble remembering my students’ name. Now walking into classroom is frightening.  The doctors will most likely blame my confusion because my husband died this spring.

But this year, I’ve done my homework. I will fight to awaken my brain and find those umbrellas!

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About Martha Varzaly: “I teach Composition at Johnson County Community College, am a prose editor for Kansas City Voices, and have recently found a new voice for me – writing with a chuckle about serious things such as cataract surgery, encounter with a skunk, and memory loss. I wrote as stringer for the Lynchburg News in Virginia (and I got paid by the inch) when I was 16; and 50 years later, I’m having a ball. Just call me ‘Grandma Martha.'”

Good Ole Boy

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I love family stories. I love being reminded that only a generation ago, our parents might not have been able to go to school. I love my new home in the South where people tell me stories at the Harris Teeter meat counter about how it was to butcher “back home,” and students in my writing workshop at the senior center tell me about priming tobacco.

Tony R. Lindsay’s parents were from rural farm families in the Great Smoky Mountains. His mother, one of thirteen children, was motherless from the age of nine. On occasion, her father would ride off to look for another wife and might be gone for ten days, sometimes leaving the children with nothing but potatoes to eat. She left home when she was twelve to live with her sister in Knoxville, and became a seamstress in a sweatshop at fourteen.

His mother never went to school. His father, one of ten children, got as far as the eighth grade. Twice, actually. His coach asked him to stay in school so he could play basketball an extra year. But the nearest high school was too far away for his family to consider sending him.

Tony grew up in Knoxville, but spent summers and as many weekends as he could in the Gatlinburg area, particularly in Cades Cove, a sheltered mountain valley that was settled in the late 1700s. His was a church-going family—twice on Sunday, Wednesday night prayer meetings, Thursday choir practice, Friday night socials.

He graduated from the University of Tennessee and, before retiring, managed several factories in various parts of the country. He began writing about eight years ago when he read a quote on his older daughter’s bulletin board at the school where she teaches gifted students: “If you want to be remembered after you die, you must do something worth writing about or write something worth reading.”

“I figured it was too late for me to do something worth writing about, but maybe I could write something worth reading,” Tony says. So he went to critique groups and workshops, took copious notes, wrote and rewrote his stories about rural people, mountain people. He wrote about Homer Guthry and Elwood Hatmaker, young boys exploring the Cove; about Lefty Goins, proprietor of a roadhouse and brewer of moonshine; about Bluford Nodding, “a dim-witted, towering sequoia of a man,” who was never seen without his Bible. Collected now in Tattletale Roadhouse and Social Club, his stories are often seasoned by a salty religion and peppered with analogies like those his father used. “Hawkshaw smells like a wet turtle climbing out of a privy,” being one of the milder ones.

When not writing, Tony tools around in a 1966 pickup and likes to boast “that his wife and TV both work.”

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Go to www.secondwindpublishing.com for information about Tony’s book.

Tell Me More

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If I had to choose one book for my desert island writing retreat, it would be Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write. Fear and laziness are sent packing when I read her words.

Brenda Ueland

“Everybody Is Talented, Original, and Has Something Important To Say,” she announces right off as the headliner title of Chapter One. She goes on to say how this originality, talent, and truth comes out when each of us pays careful attention to the world around us and writes from that unique perspective.

Brenda Ueland was born in Minneapolis in 1891 in a home overlooking Lake Calhoun. She returned to Minneapolis after a sojourn in New York where she worked as a journalist and was part of the Greenwich Village bohemian crowd (John Reed, Louise Bryant, Eugene O’Neill).  She continued her work as a writer, editor, and teacher of writing. I remember seeing her feeding the geese around Lake Harriet, another Minneapolis city lake. She was a swimmer and an avid walker, sometimes walking nine miles a day. She died at age 93, in 1985.

About her classes at the Minneapolis YWCA, she writes in the preface to the second edition: “I think I was a splendid teacher, and so did they.”  Her words capture her spirit and honesty. She is captivated by the unique lives of her students. She listens and encourages them to keep writing.  “The only good teachers are those who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny, whose attitude is: ‘Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out.’ ”

I remember a Vietnam vet in one of my classes many years ago. He stopped by my office to ask if I would read a poem he had written. “I carried this around with me all during the war,” he said. He took out his billfold and unfolded a single sheet of paper that had been folded and re-folded so many times it almost fluttered away in the air.

He read this poem that compressed all his feelings, everything about the war and loss, into a few lines. Then he folded and re-folded it and put it back in his billfold. The poem contained all his anguish, pain, love. We talked about his poem, and I told him how amazing it was. “Now write more,” I said. “Tell me as much as you can remember.” His poem contained more than any one poem could contain. It was breaking at its seams for all the power it held in its folds.

Sometimes this happens to us as writers.

We write one story, one poem, one essay, and then carry it around with us.  We take it to every writer’s group or class we join. Maybe we change or add a few words here and there.  What would happen if we said to ourselves, Yes, I wrote that. Good. Now I’m going to write more? Imagine someone who wants to hear it all. Sure, we can go back and revise, but don’t get stuck in that one place.  Keep pushing out, taking risks, Write about the day you are living in. Tell me how the fish darted away when you swam in the lake with your eight-year-old granddaughter. Tell me about your friend who is dying. Tell me about what it’s like to go bald or to let your hair go silver. I want to know.

I started off this entry talking about a desert island. Sometimes I do feel as if I’m stranded on such an island of my own making. I question how I got there and why I ever wanted to write anyway.  Brenda Ueland finds inspiration from many great writers, artists, and composers (Blake, Chekhov, Van Gogh, Mozart) as she makes her case: we are not alone. And if we look around, it isn’t a desert island—more an oasis.

One of the reasons Carol and I are creating this website and writing blogs together is because we believe we writers need each other.

Carol and I could never have done the anthology alone. When one of us would be ready to throw in the towel, the other would be all happy and up beat. When one was busy, the other one took up the slack. We have done all this through writing. We have only seen each other in person twice: once when we met in Russia and once when we met in North Carolina. Carol’s blogs inspire me; she inspires me. I hope together, with other writers (Brenda Ueland, Susan Surman, Molly Peacock, Shirley Deane), our students, and other creative people (Mrs. Delany, Ruth Hodges, Lenore Latimer), we can create an oasis.  We can say to at least one other person, “Tell me more.”

(In my next blog, I’ll talk about what we do after we’ve written pages and pages. Where does all that writing go? But first we have to write!)

 

 

 

 

 

Molly Peacock, Mrs. Delany, and My Mother

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At a recent conference for writers over 50 at the Loft Literary Center here in Minneapolis, I had the great pleasure of hearing Toronto poet and writer, Molly Peacock speak eloquently about Mary Delany (1700-1788), whose life is the focus of Ms. Peacock’s recent book, The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72. After losing her husband of 23 years, Mrs. Delany picked up a pair of scissors and, at age 72, in “a mesmerized state induced by close observation,” created a new art form, mixed-media collage, depicting botanically correct cut flowers.  Over the next decade, she dyed and colored her own papers to create these intricate flowers, now housed in the British Museum and referred to as the Botanica Delanica.

During her talk, Ms. Peacock explored the theme of late-life creativity. “Our life’s work is never finished,” she said. “[Mrs. Delany’s] life shows us that some things just take living long enough to do.”

Molly Peacock

My mother, Ruth Hodges who died on June 23, 2012, at age 95, was also a mixed-media artist, who in the last years of her life created amazing abstractions of paper, paint, and even charcoal powder. The week before she died, she was carefully painting the ocean in a huge mural to be hung during Aloha Week at Trinity Grove, the nursing home in Wilmington, N. C., where she had lived the last four months of her life. She was as interested and involved and as engaged in the careful application of blue-green paint as she was when she created her wonderful paintings in her fifties and sixties—and seventies and eighties.  The application of paint to paper was a joy. Just as for us writers, the application of words to paper gives pleasure.Ruth Hodges

Ruth kept painting, just as Lenore Latimer in Carol’s blog never stopped dancing.

We can gain inspiration from the creativity of others who continue with their art to the end of their lives. Why should we stop? As long as the work we are doing gives us pleasure and engages our senses and our minds, why not continue?

Perhaps, like Mrs. Deleny and my mother, we will discover what it is we have been wanting, or destined, to create, to write, in these later years because truly “some things just take living long enough to do.”

Dance, Dance down the Mountain: Lenore Latimer

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This blog is intended to be about writers over 50, but I’m already diverging. When I asked Vicky if I could write about an amazing dancer over 50, she reminded me that the essay, “When Last on the Mountain,” from which we took the name of our anthology, ends with, “One day I will write my last downhill run, not on snow, but on paper. Not today. No. I dance, stop, dance, stop, dance, dance, dance down the mountain.”

So Lenore Latimer, a marvelous dancer, choreographer, and teacher, is my subject today. She is also an aunt of one of my daughters-in-law, but we might not have bonded as we did on a rainy New York street corner, if I had not discovered at that moment that she had danced with the José Limón company. I said, “Doris Humphrey,” and we became friends.

During my research for Clues to American Dance, I had the opportunity to watch Doris Humphrey’s dance concepts of fall and recovery being taught. I fell in love with the excitement of that method immediately. Although Humphrey and Martha Graham had been classmates, Graham had the greater sense of publicity and promotion, and Limón’s is the only major company based on the Humphrey concepts.

Talking with Lenore this week was like taking a walk through dance history. She had been sent to dancing school when she was 7 years old because she was pigeon-toed. “I’ve followed pigeons, and they don’t walk that way,” she said. After five years, Lenore’s teacher told her she’d never be a dancer, that she didn’t have the body for dance. Absolutely crushed, she cried and cried. When her younger sister was sent to another dance teacher, Lenore was to accompany her to and from classes. That teacher had been taught by Mary Wigman, the German dancer who is considered the pioneer of expressionist dance, and Lenore found herself arriving earlier and staying later, and finally asked if she could begin classes again.

She has not stopped dancing since. She majored in dance at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. During her second year there, she saw the Limón company on tour, and called her father to say that she wanted to transfer to Juilliard, where Limón taught. She didn’t know that she couldn’t “transfer,” or that she would have to audition to be accepted at Juilliard; she packed up and moved to New York.

She was admitted. She spent four years at Juilliard, studying choreography with Doris Humphrey, and with Louis Horst, one of the first to create choreography as a distinct discipline; dance with Limón, of course, and two years of ballet with Antony Tudor, the great English choreographer. “I should have taken ballet earlier. He tore me to shreds. I left every class bloody and raw. But,” she added, characteristically, “he was always happy to sit next to me at lunch.”

Limón invited Lenore to join his company as soon as she graduated, and she toured with him from 1959-69. In 1960, the State Department sponsored their tour of every country in South America and, in 1963, a tour of the Far East. She also danced in Anna Sokolow’s company, with the American Dance Theater at Lincoln Center, and many others. In 1979, she formed her own company, Latitudes.

“But in 1983, two of my male dancers and two of my male lighting people died. That was a horrible year. It seemed that every time the phone rang, I heard that someone else had died of AIDS. So I closed the company.”

Over her career, Lenore has choreographed 27 dances. She has taught dance for 50 years. Since 1979, she has been teaching and choreographing at Bard College, where I’ve been fortunate enough to see two of her dances, both amazingly creative and filled with energy and humor.Told at the age of seven that she’d never be a dancer, Lenore has been dancing up and down the mountain for over 70 years.