Mingle Magazine

I've been meaning to post some especially lovely news here, my friends.  This month I have the tremendous pleasure of sharing the pages of Mingle Magazine with several of the incredible women who attended Finding Stillness 2015.   We wrote a collaborative feature about the time we spent together, taking photographs, going on hikes, sharing meals, and just finding time for our creative selves at Kim Klassen's The Studio in Rivers, Manitoba.  If you've read my blog post about it, you know what a transformative week it was for me, so to get to work with my photographer friends on this piece for Mingle was pure joy.  I was especially excited that I got to spend a lot of time with Diana Foster to edit the text and gather the photos for the piece.  She is a consummate professional, but she's also sweet and smart and down to earth, and I felt so lucky that we worked on this project together.

I hope you are well, and that every single day finds you doing something you love--even if only for half an hour, but hopefully for longer.  I am finishing up a semester with my writing students over the next couple of weeks, which is bittersweet for me, because this has been an especially productive and exciting semester.  Watching my students' work grow and develop is always rewarding, but this time around has been especially magical.  I feel privileged to witness and be a small part of their creative journeys.  Besides teaching, I've got several photo and writing projects in the works, which I'll keep sharing with you, of course.  And I'm just getting back out into the garden, so there will be photos galore coming soon of new plantings and spring beauties as they begin to emerge.  

More soon from the Maine coast, chickadees! xo Gigi  

"Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable." ~Mary Oliver

If This Isn't Nice, I Don't Know What Is

Hello, lovelies!  Spring has finally arrived here.  Yes, it's freezing cold at night still, but days are sunshiny, tulips are finding their way up into the world, and the forsythia are about to burst open.  All this loveliness calls for bright and cheerful recipes to welcome in the change of seasons.

And so, I share with you two recipes I made for Easter.  The first is a Donna Hay recipe for a lemon ricotta cheesecake that you can find here. It's extremely creamy with a shortbread crust.  Yes, it is even more delicious than it looks.

The second recipe comes from Martha Stewart.  It is fast, easy, looks like a million bucks, and tastes incredible.  Seriously.  I will make this one again and again.  You can find it here.  This was a big hit at Easter.  This version uses gruyere cheese and asparagus, but I could imagine making this with other veggie and cheese combinations: asiago and long ribbons of zucchini come to mind immediately.

I have so much I want to share with you.  I've got loads going on with my writing, have been gardening every spare minute, and am excited that it's National Poetry Month.  I'm also doing a tremendous amount of editing, tutoring, and book coaching for clients, so I can't blog as much as I'd like at the moment, but I'm going to try to carve out as much time as possible to share all my favorite aspects of this beautiful time of year.  I'm itching to grab my camera and get back to doing some real photography again as well.  

Right now, I have so many risky things going on in my creative life that I feel constantly on the brink--and not always in a good way.  I need balance, thus I remind myself often of this quote from Kurt Vonnegut: "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"

I hope you are thriving and creating and loving your days.  xo Gigi

P.S. The raspberry coconut ice cream from the last post was delicious! A little icy since it's not made in an ice cream maker, but very yummy.

Writing Life

Though it hasn't been obvious here on the blog lately, I am first and foremost a writer.  In fact, I have been writing more over the last year than ever before in my life.  Regular readers of The Magpie's Fancy might be puzzled by this statement, as there has been little evidence of any real writing activity here during that same period.  The cupboards have been bare.  Not a can of beans or a box of saltines for you to nibble on as you wait for me to get my act together and bake some cookies or whip up a proper pudding.

I promise that will happen soon.  Once we are in the new house at the end of August, you won't be able to get rid of me!

In the meantime, one half of my brain is thinking gardens and French doors and room colors and bead board, even as the other half writes and writes and writes.  What I am writing is still top secret for now, but I can tell you that its presence has taken up so much of my existence that there has been little room for much else, including blogging.  That is a good thing, though, for as a beloved professor once told me, "Write every day, even when you don't feel like it, even when you have no time, even when it gets in the way of the rest of your life."  She was right, and I do.

Even as I type this, I recognize how slightly crazy and selfish it sounds, but I don't care.  A writer writes.  A writer also reads--maybe even more than she writes.  And this writer takes very long walks.  Walking helps me write.  So does washing the dishes by hand.  So does daydreaming--not worrying or obsessing, but real daydreaming of the sort that allows for surprises and possibilities.

I hope some of my writing students--both past and present--see this post, because I often give them this advice about the writing life, and I want them to know that I don't take it lightly.  The writing life is uncompromising, demanding, and difficult.  It also brings moments of great joy among the soap suds and reveries.  For me it comes down to this: discipline leads to discovery.  It is that simple, and I wouldn't want any other life.

The Magpie's Pen

Okay, my friends, it's up and running!

From now on, The Magpie's Pen will be the new home of Freewrite Fridays . . .

. . . and much, much more,

all designed to keep your pen moving 

and your fingers typing.

I hope you'll fly on over there for a visit.

Try

Here are three pictures after the weekend storms; the whole island was wrapped in what my mother calls sea smoke.  It was truly beautiful in a Mists of Avalon sort of way.  Even for all that beauty, what I wish I could do is show you images of the Leonid meteor showers we watched last night from our deck.  At two a.m. there we were, wrapped in jackets and scarves and blankets, clutching mugs of chamomile tea and shouting at the sky as streaks of white, green, and gold flashed by.  I had to turn my back on Portland and on the lighthouses across the harbor so I could fix my gaze on the darkest parts of the sky, east of the island, where it's open ocean.

Yes, I wish I could show you gorgeous photos of comet particles falling from the heavens, but I have neither the camera nor the talent for capturing that particular kind of magic.  I do have words, and I am writing a poem, but that must wait, too.  I revise and revise and revise, for that is what I love best about my training as a poet: the process of revision.  Inspiration, that initial rush of writing, is the fun, sexy, and relatively easy part of writing.  I always tell my students (and they groan--oh, do they groan) that the real work, the real craft comes through re-vision, through re-seeing the poem as a whole and as its parts, each line, whether endstopped or enjambed, each metaphor, each slant rhyme.

What poetry students eventually find, the serious ones at least, is a kind of joy in that work as the poem reveals itself anew with each revision.  The process becomes one of discovery and revelation.  Writing well is like reading well, and I think that both are like living well, although it is easier, of course, for me to write and read well than to live well.  I am working at it.  What does Samuel Beckett say?  "Try.  Fail.  No matter.  Try again.  Fail better."  What I wish for tonight is a willingness and an ability to try again.  I wish to see the world around me clearly--people, their fears and joys, and to accept them for who they are.  I also wish to be a little braver.  My whole life feels on the brink of changes, some good, many hard, but nearly all tinged with risk, so I need to pack some courage in my rucksack.  I think of the Leonids; they blaze and burn out, rushing off into their own oblivion no matter what I do down here on earth, a fact which I find oddly comforting.  Archibald MacLeish wrote in "Ars Poetica" that "a poem must not mean but be."  I often think the same of life.

Here is a moment.  We are alive.  We are.    

Princesses, Secrets, Poems, and Pirates

Once upon a time in a city distant as the mountains and near as the moon and real as the setting sun, there lived a woman who read many, many children's books.  She spent much of each day talking about the stories she found inside their pages and wishing she had enough hours to read all the books that had even been written about runaway mice and fairy tale princesses and little boys who never grew up.

Illustration by Edmund Dulac

It's true.  I really do spend enormous amounts of time reading children's and young adult books.  I teach children's literature to college students who want to be teachers or psychologists or even mums and dads.  I teach other English courses, too, but children's literature is perhaps my favorite.  I wrote a post about it a few months back when I first started blogging because it is such a profound experience to watch people become reacquainted with childhood reading.  Many of my students stopped reading books outside of school once they reached middle-school age.  Revisiting a play like Peter Pan or a novel like Bridge to Terabithia or a book of poems like Where the Sidewalk Ends doesn't just bring back memories; for some students it reopens a door that was long ago locked, its key hidden away somewhere quite secret.  Maybe my job in that class is to be the robin who shows them the key.  Sometimes they find it, sometimes not, but the journey we take in that class is never, ever boring.

One of the first questions I ask at the beginning of the semester is, "What was your favorite book when you were a kid?"  I love the answers I hear, and I love thinking about this question myself.  For me, it depends on what part of my childhood I consider.  In the early years I loved all fairy tales and all 23 Beatrix Potter books, plus Charlotte's Web and Peter Pan, then Little House on the Prairie and The Secret Garden, and later, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Outsiders, and The Hobbit.  The list goes on and on.  Todd says he loved Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.  My good friend Jen loved The Lord of the Flies (she rules), and another friend loved The Wind in the Willows.

Key in all of this for me was that I was always read to when I was small, and later I was encouraged to read whatever I liked.  Books were everywhere in our house.  My bedroom was a chaos of books as well as notepads full of my own scribblings.  This was one of the greatest gifts my parents gave me--a world of imagination and problem-solving and mystery and grand adventure.  As a grownup, I cherish contemporary writers like Cornelia Funke, J.K. Rowling, Lois Lowry, and Philip Pullman for writing books that respect children and encourage them to dream of countless possible ever afters.

What books did you love as a kid and why?  I am dying to know.  Is there a favorite childhood book that you still love today? 

Two Thoughts

This morning, as I grade final portfolios for my poetry workshop, two thoughts from William Stafford keep coming to mind.  Both are from "The Door Called Poetry," a chapter in his amazing book You Must Revise Your Life:

"Sometimes it seems to me the best equipment for being a teacher of talking and writing and reading--of communication--would be a wonderful rubber face that would register every nuance; my role would not be that of approving or disapproving, but simply (and it's not simple) that of realizing, realizing everything, all those amazing, miraculous connections that language and the mind make with each other."

and this sparkling bit:

"If an alert student would look at a page of poetry and say it is fat or skinny, I would feel better than if the student said it was iambic hexameter."